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by
Scott Adams
Read between
March 13 - March 13, 2021
That is classic deal making. You start with a big first demand and negotiate back to your side of the middle. When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was
Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.
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.
The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind. And when they were done criticizing Trump for the “error” of saying he would build one big solid “wall,” the critics had convinced themselves that border security was a higher priority than they had thought coming into the conversation. The
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.
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. And what about the facts and details? Not so important. Those can get worked out later. I don’t believe Trump purposely injects errors into his work except in the form of oversimplification and hyperbole, as in the wall example. 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.
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title. During the presidential campaign, it seemed that
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. If Trump had apologized for any of his factual “errors,” I would remember whatever alleged wrongness triggered the apology. That would stick in my mind. I assume that’s at least partly why he doesn’t do apologies. Apologizing would be a sign of weakness and invite continual demands for more apologies. In Trump’s specific case, apologies wouldn’t have helped his
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good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
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. Many of the after-the-fact explanations make perfect sense. But keep in mind that it is easy to fit a wide variety of explanations to the past. Trial lawyers do it every day. The prosecution and the defense present two different narratives to explain the observed facts, and both can sound convincing. The prosecution says the accused
PERSUASION TIP 8 People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.
PERSUASION TIP 9 Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe. I know you want me to teach you how to be a hypnotist. But you can’t learn it from a book. Some skills require a lot of in-person practice, and this is one of them. Part of the process of learning hypnosis involves building confidence in your skills until your subjects can sense it by your demeanor. That confidence is a key ingredient to making hypnosis work. You can build up to that confidence in a
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PERSUASION TIP 10 Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible. I found it easy to get volunteers for hypnosis by saying I was enrolled in a hypnosis class. I doubt I could have recruited volunteers so easily by saying I was reading a book about hypnosis. The class gave me some credibility with strangers, and a hypnotist in training needs a lot of strangers to practice on. One of the things we learned in class is that
Guess what people are thinking—at the very moment they think it—and call it out. If you are right, the subject bonds to you for being like-minded.
PERSUASION TIP 12 If you want the audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both unimportant and would give people a reason to think, That’s not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them in with whatever makes them happiest. For example, if you are familiar with my Dilbert comic strip, you might know that Dilbert has no last name. His boss has no name at all. You don’t know the name of Dilbert’s company or what industry it is in. You also don’t know its location. All of that omission is intentional. It is a trick I learned from hypnosis
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PERSUASION TIP 13 Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.
PERSUASION TIP 14 When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.
PERSUASION TIP 16 It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive. Imagine going into a negotiation against a business adversary who literally wrote the book on negotiating. In some cases, I assume Trump’s reputation as a skilled negotiator stiffened the resistance
PERSUASION TIP 17 People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong. Trump was confident and clear about his priorities. But he was famously unclear about his preferred policy details. That is good persuasion technique. It allowed supporters to see whatever they wanted to see. But the details never mattered as much as
PERSUASION TIP 18 Visual persuasion is more powerful than nonvisual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large.
PERSUASION TIP 19 In the context of persuasion, you don’t need a physical picture if you can make someone imagine the scene. Trump could have simply said he wanted better immigration control, but that would not have been good visual persuasion. Concepts without images are weak sauce. So instead, Trump sold us a mental image of a “big, beautiful wall.” He said “wall” so many times that we all started to picture it. Before
People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely. Mike Pence might someday have the same contrast problem. If Trump has a successful presidency, Pence has a good chance of being the next Republican candidate for president. That means Pence would need to choose for his running mate a more boring version of himself. And that future VP candidate would be two levels of charisma away from Trump. That’s too much of a gap. Had I known Mike Pence was a potential VP pick, I think I would have ranked him in
PERSUASION TIP 21 When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time. As I’ll describe in the next chapter, Trump got the advantage of persuasion by association when he crafted his campaign slogan to match Ronald Reagan’s. The persuasion works even if all it does is make the haters argue that you are not like Reagan at all. What matters is the mental association,
PERSUASION TIP 22 People automatically get used to minor annoyances over time.
PERSUASION TIP 23 What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.
PERSUASION TIP 24 If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.
PERSUASION TIP 25 If you are selling, ask your potential customer to buy. Direct requests are persuasive.
PERSUASION TIP 26 Repetition is persuasion. Also, repetition is persuasion. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasion?
PERSUASION TIP 27 Match the speaking style of your audience. Once they see you as one of their own, it will be easier to lead them.
PERSUASION TIP 28 Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones.
PERSUASION TIP 29 Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable.
PERSUASION TIP 30 “Strategic ambiguity” refers to a deliberate choice of words that allows people to read into your message whatever they want to hear. Or to put it another way, the message intentionally leaves out any part that would be objectionable to anyone. People fill in the gaps with their imagination, and their imagination can be more persuasive than anything you say.
PERSUASION TIP 31 If you are trying to get a decision from someone who is on the fence but leaning in your direction, try a “fake because” to give them “permission” to agree with you. The reason you offer doesn’t need to be a good one. Any “fake because” will work when people are looking for a reason to move your way.