Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter

by Scott Adams

Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump’s style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world. Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.

Trump’s persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public’s ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn’t fit their mental model of living in a rational world.

Political pundits and writers covering Trump during the campaign generally did not have business experience, and I think that put them at a huge disadvantage in understanding the power of his methods. It wasn’t all about persuasion. He also used high-end business strategy all the way, and you wouldn’t recognize it as such if you had never spent time in that world.

Trump owned the election until the summer of 2016. That’s when Clinton’s persuasion game went weapons grade and it became a fair fight for the first time.

When Trump said he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise obeying the law, his critics saw it as the beginning of a Hitler-like roundup of the people who are “different” in some way. I saw it as a thoroughly impractical idea that served as a mental “anchor” to brand Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our porous borders and planned to do the most about them.

I was far from being a true believer about Trump’s policies. But unlike most of the world, I recognized his campaign promises as more persuasion than policy. I never took his policy positions too seriously except in a directional sense. And directionally, Trump wanted the same things the public wanted: strong national security, prosperity, affordable health care, personal freedom, and that sort of thing. Although Trump never said it directly, he branded himself as a flexible leader who would work out the details after election. And sure enough, we observed President Trump working out the details after election on immigration policy, health care, taxes, fighting ISIS, and more.

I assumed he would drift toward the acceptable middle once he was elected. And that’s what we saw. He backed off on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, waterboarding terrorists, killing the families of terrorists, and calling China a currency manipulator. He educated himself enough on climate change to decide that the Paris climate accord was a bad agreement no matter what anyone thought of the science.

where others saw Trump pushing outrageously impractical and even immoral policies, I saw him using standard negotiating tactics and hyperbole to make it easier to find the middle ground later. And he did. Like Trump, I grew up in New York State. That helped me understand his communication style. The provocative things Trump said during the campaign shocked much of the country. But to New Yorkers such as me, talking in a way that sounds unnecessarily provocative—as Trump often did during the campaign—is what New Yorkers call “talking.” My claim is that it is easier for a New Yorker to understand another New Yorker than it is for a Californian to understand a New Yorker.

If you watched the entire election cycle and concluded that Trump was nothing but a lucky clown, you missed one of the most important perceptual shifts in the history of humankind. I’ll fix that for you in this book.

Trump’s extraordinary skill at persuasion would trigger massive cognitive dissonance and plenty of confirmation bias. If

Cognitive Dissonance This is a mental condition in which people rationalize why their actions are inconsistent with their thoughts and beliefs. For example, if you think you are smart, but you notice yourself doing something that is clearly dumb, you might spontaneously hallucinate that there was actually a good reason for it. Or perhaps you believe you are an honest person, but you observe yourself doing something dishonest. Your brain will instantly generate a delusion to rationalize the discrepancy. This is a common phenomenon in all normal humans, but we generally believe it applies only to other people. Confirmation Bias This is the human tendency to see all evidence as supporting your beliefs, even if the evidence is nothing more than coincidence. This is another common phenomenon that we believe happens only to other people.

And I recognized that with Trump’s level of persuasion skill, he was bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight.

On August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog.

PERSUASION TIP 2 Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.

Capitalism is based on gift giving.

Humans are hardwired to reciprocate kindness.

PERSUASION TIP 3 Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique. Everyone knows that stores list prices at $9.99 because $10.00 sounds like too much. It still works.

Not sure I agree on this.

You might think you can resist persuasion techniques just by recognizing them in action. But knowing the technique won’t protect you as much as you might think.

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.

PERSUASION TIP 4 The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

I’ve said Trump is the best persuader I have ever seen in action. The wall is a perfect example. Consider how much discipline it took for him to avoid continually clarifying that his “wall” was really a patchwork of solutions that depend on the terrain.

PERSUASION TIP 5 An intentional “error” in the details of your message will attract criticism. The attention will make your message rise in importance—at least in people’s minds—simply because everyone is talking about it.

That stuff is intentional for sure. But for the smaller “errors” it is more that he doesn’t bother to correct himself. I use a similar technique with my blog when someone points out a typo. Sometimes I leave the typo because it makes you pause and reread the sentence a few times to figure out what the typo was supposed to mean. The “mistake” attracts your energy to my writing, and that’s what a writer wants. I want your focus.

If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts. And if they know they don’t have better facts, they change the subject. People are not easily switched from one political opinion to another. And facts are weak persuasion. So Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don’t want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does.

True story: Ten minutes ago I read a long list of Trump’s tweets that PolitiFact judged to be factually inaccurate. I can recall only a few of them. They all blended together in my mind, and none made much of an impression. I had no personal or emotional connection to any of them. They were just background noise.2

PERSUASION TIP 6 If you are not a Master Persuader running for president, find the sweet spot between apologizing too much, which signals a lack of confidence, and never apologizing for anything, which makes you look like a sociopath.

a small 2012 study by researcher Daniel Oppenheimer that found students had better recall when a font was harder to read.3 Oppenheimer explains the unexpected result by noting that people slow down and concentrate harder to compensate for the hard-to-read font.

Instead of making something bold face in an email, what if we make the font smaller.

Warning: Intentionally ignoring facts and logic in public is a dangerous strategy unless you are a Master Persuader with thick skin and an appetite for risk. Most of us don’t have the persuasion skills, risk profile, and moral flexibility to pull it off.

Famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (born 1724) held that the human mind creates the structure of human experience. He explained that our brains don’t have direct access to base reality—we have to settle for interpreting the input from our faulty senses. Kant uses a lot of words to say reality isn’t necessarily anything like the way we perceive it.

Cialdini’s two best-selling books, Influence (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016), are master classes in the irrational nature of human decision making.

Two of my favorite examples are quantum entanglement and the double-slit experiment.

This idea comes from the simple fact that we will someday be able to create software simulations that believe they are real creatures. And when we achieve that level of technical proficiency, we’re unlikely to stop with one simulation of that type. In the long run, you could expect far more simulated realities than the real one that started it all. So the math of it says we are far more likely to be a simulation than an original species.

Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.

The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.

If you have a situation that can be explained with one reasonable explanation, that reason might be close to reality. But having lots of different explanations is usually a clear tell for cognitive dissonance.

PERSUASION TIP 7 It is easy to fit completely different explanations to the observed facts. Don’t trust any interpretation of reality that isn’t able to predict.

If you don’t understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people’s opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn’t the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense.

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Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.

so long as it doesn’t stop us from procreating. Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality.

That’s because mass delusions are the norm for humanity, not the exception.

How can they believe they are reincarnated when you know that death means either heaven or hell? You and your neighbor can’t both be right. One of you (at least) is experiencing a little piece of a larger mass delusion. And the problem isn’t limited to your neighbors. Millions of people share the same mass delusions (according to you).

I won't agree to disagree...

Once you see how easily mass delusions start, and how confirmation bias can keep them fueled, you might start to recognize how often it is happening to you

You only need these two conditions: Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions Financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus In

That’s because I see the world as bristling with mass delusions. I don’t see mass delusions as rare.

compared with the average citizen, trained persuaders are less impressed by experts.

if an ordinary idiot doubts a scientific truth, the most likely explanation for that situation is that the idiot is wrong. But if a trained persuader calls BS on a scientific truth, pay attention.

Do you remember when citizen Trump once tweeted that climate change was a hoax for the benefit of China? It sounded crazy to most of the world. Then we learned that the centerpiece of politics around climate change—the Paris climate accord—was hugely expensive for the United States and almost entirely useless for lowering temperatures. (Experts agree on both points now.) The accord was a good deal for China, in the sense that it would impede its biggest business rival, the United States, while costing China nothing for years. You could say Trump was wrong to call climate change a hoax. But in the context of Trump’s normal hyperbole, it wasn’t as wrong as the public’s mass delusion believed it to be at...

In effect, the Trump supporters and the anti-Trumpers woke up in different movies. One movie is a disaster movie and the other is an inspirational story.

Like Man in the High Castle.

PERSUASION TIP 8 People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.

People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state.