Subtitle: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Listen Here
Interesting Links
Interesting People
Books Mentioned
The Myths of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky
Daily Rituals by Mason Curry
Extra Notes:
These are not that were cut at the editing floor, but they still hold value.
Satiscficing: Coined by Herbert Simon. A combination of satisfy and suffice. Or good enough.
One of the ways to channel others attention is background details. Whether it's the music like in our wine shops earlier, colors, or scents, choosing the correct combination will increase the influence success rate. Do you have a presentation, look color theory mood to select to set the right colors. Are you meeting someone for the first time, choose the fragrance . Have an online video call, choose the right background.
Trivia: Morpheus is the god of sleep and dream in Greek mythology.
Just as amino acids are the blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought
But at the same time, there are other dimensions of effective communication that can become the essential message. We learned via Marshall McLuhan that the medium can be the message; via the principle of social proof that the multitude can be the message; via the authority principle that the messenger can be the message; and now via the concept of unity that the merger (of self and other) can be the message.
The last attractor, the Different, takes us back to Pavlov's conditioning, which we also mentioned in the first episode. When Pavlov would try to replicate the experiment in front of others, the dog won't respond. His explanation was that whenever the dog gets a new stimulus, in this case by new people coming, it'll divert its attention from the food and breaking the conditioning chain.
The Tumors of Unethical Organizations: The point here was to show the hidden cost of being unethical in any organization. Usually, economic considerations and probability of getting caught are the main factors when it comes to deciding on doing unethical actions. However, there're 3 main tumors that grow as a result and their cost are extreme.
Poor employees performance
High turnover
Employee fraud and malfeasance
Episode Transcript
Episode Introduction
Hello and welcome to the TLDR Show, a podcast where I distill the knowledge of books just for you. I am your host Abdelrahman and I am very excited to have you with me. For today' episode, we come to the finale of our series on Human Nature. In last the episode, we covered Win Bigly and learnt some great persuasion tools. Today, we'll see how important is our attention when it comes for pre-suasion..
Without further a due, let us dive into our final book, Pre-Suasion, , subtitled A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert B. Caldini.
Introduction to Our Attention
[0:44] This book is a follow-up to Influence. There, we saw how the six principles work at the moment of influence. In Pre-Suasion, the best quote that describes it in my head is by Abraham Lincoln “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”.
Lucky for us, we don't need the four hours, we just need the moments before introducing our message to make sure that our audience are open and sympathetic to it. And this is the core of Pre-Suasion.
In the first few pages of the book, Dr. Caldini gives experiment examples of how people were willing to pay extra to buy chocolate when they wrote a high pair of digits from their social security number before buying, and vice versa. Another one was in a wine shop where the choice of music playing, German and French in this case, affected the likelihood of buying a wine of that origin.
The core idea here is that there are what the author refers to as Openers, which includes anchors and priming among other tools which we will go through today. These openers help in the presuading process by removing existing barriers.
I break down the book's ideas into 4 main sections , The Importance of Attention and How it Works, the power of association when using language and geography, the commanders of attention, and lastly we will talk about the 7th principle of influence. Let us start with the importance of attention and how it works.
The Importance of Attention
[2:05] The first key concept in this book is what is called "Privileged Moments". It describes how a person's choice in a situation isn't really done by the examining of information, but by what had been elevated in attention at the moment of the decision.
One of the tactics in diverting attention is questions. To be more specific, which words we use in them.
In an experiment, two scientists asked random passing individuals to provide them with their emails in order to get instructions on how to get a free sample of a new soft drink. In the first half, only 33% provided their emails. For the second half, the individuals were asked "Do you consider yourself to be somebody who is adventurous and likes to try new things?" before asking for the email. Almost all said yes, 97% to be accurate, and 75% gave their email addresses.
Now, why on earth would such a random question double the acceptance rate? There're two key points here.
The first one is why 70 out of 72 of random individuals considered themselves to be adventurous. The answer lies in what is called "positive test strategy". It is our tendency to look for the hits rather than the misses in such statements, which is similar to confirmation bias that we explored in the previous episode.
So, when we are asked biased questions such as "Are you unhappy?" or "Do you see yourself as a helpful person?", we are likely to look into our memories for what confirms that statement. These answers don't have long term effect, but they possess extreme power at the moment itself.
This power comes from the second key point, which is the second principle of influence, commitment and consistency. In that privileged moment, we could easily be complied into agreeing to a request, such as giving contact information. And since we just said we're adventurous and like to try new things, we want to be consist with our previous statement.
What makes privileged moments so valuable is attention. Controlling others attention in a certain direction have a huge impact on the effectiveness of presuasion.
On a side note, you can look on YouTube for "The Art of Misdirection" to see how flimsy is our attention. It's an amazing video, and I'll link to it in the show notes.
There's also a famous free online course on Coursera titled "Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects" with more than 70,000 ratings. One of its main ideas is how our working memory has 4 attention slots. We use them when processing new information or actively thinking, So, at any certain moment, we can keep 4 chunks of information in our minds. I'm pretty sure you know someone who claims to have mastered multitasking. For them, let me present to you a new term "Attentional Blink". It's when we can't register the newly highlighted information consciously when switching our focus between two or more tasks. So, even though they act as if they heard all of what you said, while they're working, trust me, they didn't.
Let us get back onto track. In Win Bigly, one of the persuasion tips that Scott Adams gives on shifting someone or a whole nation's attention is, and I quote, " An intentional error in your message will attract criticism. The attention will make your message rise in importance in people's minds".
Agenda Setting Theory
[5:22] Applying what Scott Adams says at a large scale, and we get Agenda Setting theory. It says that the media rarely produces change directly by providing evidence and critical analysis. However, they are extremely successful in diverting attention by covering specific topics, and this attention is what makes the selected topics more important in the minds of people.
In an ideal world, this shouldn't be an issue, since the media will present what's critical to the society. But, in reality, whether a topic is boring, complicated, friendly, controversial and other factors play a major role in deciding what topics to cover.
In the summer of 2000 in Germany after an incident where the news were discussing right-wing extremism, polls showed that the percentage of Germans who thought right-wing extremism as the most important issue spiked from zero to 35% and went back to zero when the stories stopped.
So, why do we think what we're paying attention to is important? Because, rationally, it's usually the most important. But, as seen by the previous example, it can be manipulated easily.
Professor Kahneman, author of "Thinking Fast and Slow" answered a question what would improve everyone's understanding of the world. His answer introduces what he called "the focusing illusion" and was summarized in his response essay which's titled "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it". I'll link to it in the show notes.
How Our Attention Works
[6:56] Now, let us see what happens in our mind when an opener is introduced. In our previous example of the wine shop, the choice of music played presuaded the customers into buying a specific type.
Let us go back to the idea of the 4 attention slots we mentioned earlier from "Learning How to Learn". When our attention is grabbed by the German music, it occupies a slot and the secondary associations of German names, wines, or anything that pops in our mind may occupy the other slots. And thus limiting the potential of exploring other options.
So, is it necessary to have a very strong connection between the opener and desirable action? The answer is yes and no.
The yes answer is, If possible, find a strongly associated concept with your request, so it becomes attention focus. If you want to promote Not littering on street, bringing the idea of recycling is good. If you want to ask for pay raise, tell stories about generosities and acts of kindness when talking to your manager before asking for raise.
The no answer is that sometimes it doesn't require a connection at all. In Influence, when we discussed the principle of liking and how it can be increased by using the power of association. Sponsoring events such as the Olympics and Football leagues will associate the positive feeling of these events with the sponsoring brand. Another way is putting celebrities in brands’ advertisement. This provides both social proof and liking to the brand. The funny thing, the association does not have to be logical, like having a sport celebrity endorsing soft drinks. It just has to be positive.
The Power of Associations: I Link, Therefore I Think
[8:34] In the second section, we will discuss the power of association and how it can affect our pre-suasion by seeing it through Language and geography.
For language, its role is more than just conveying our message. It is our first line of pre-suasion arsenal. As Joseph Conrad, the Polish-English writer and ones of the greatest authors said, "He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word".
The Language of Pre-Suasion
One of those ways used to persuade are metaphors. Using the correct metaphor can link your audience mind to the right visual and steer emotions within them.
Let us take an example. If you're discussing crime, and you can use two metaphors, wild beast or spreading virus, your choice will affect which solutions your audience would be more likely to accept. If crime was depicted as a wild beast, it will convey a certain image of a beast and how it must be caged. This visual image will pre-suade the audience into accepting more catch and cage solutions. On the other hand, if you go with the spreading virus metaphor, the visual will be different. It will be of the need to take control of the virus and removing unhealthy conditions. For the audience, they will be more open to accept solutions addressing the root problems that created crime.
On a side note, metaphors use visual persuasion and as we mentioned in Win Bigly, visual persuasion is the strongest form.
This power of language, and how we associate certain images with certain words, should make us avoid certain words when trying to persuade. Instead of using the word "used" when selling an item, use "Pre-owned". Instead of "cost" or "price", use "purchase" or "investment".
Beside choice of word, the ease of words and names have an effect as well. Easier names of companies and individuals will be perceived in a higher status, more memorable compared to difficult names. So, when choosing a name for a company or a product, make sure it's an easy one for your targeted customers.
The Geography of Persuasion
[10:19] Now, let us move to the second part, the geography of influence. If what we hear as words has an effect on us, we can expect that what we see and our physical surrounding to have similar effects.
Dr Cialdini mentions an example where while writing this book, he had two offices. One at the university, where his view was other academic blocks and surrounded by books and academic journals. His other office was at home, where the view of the neighborhood and people walking around, with magazines and newspaper on his desk.
The parts he wrote at the university office were written in dry academic language. This is despite the fact that he knows his audience for this book are the public, but the visual feedback and his geography influenced him.
The thing about geography is that it includes both external places and internal ones within us. Our memories and thoughts have their distinct places within us. And just like how our physical world can influence us, our internal world does the same. Let us see how it can influence our happiness.
As we grow older, both our physical and mental abilities are impaired. This limits our choice of activities that we can do and the food we can eat. On top of that, we get chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. The paradoxical part is that despite all of this, older people are usually happier. One possible reason is that they just don't have time for it, ln the literal sense. Their attention & focus are more on their happy memories, bright places and smiley faces compared to their younger self. And the ones who can't focus on these aspects of life, and dwell on the downsides, are usually the crumbiest.
In the book, the "The Myths of Happiness", the top three activities that can increase happiness are as follows:
Count blessing and gratitude at each morning and write them down. You can find online 5-minutes gratitude journal templates.
Choose to focus on the bright side of things, events and situations
Limit the time you spend on thinking on problems and negative thoughts.
And just like exercise, you need to put effort everyday till it becomes your habit.
If you want to be happy, focus on the good times. If you're going for an interview or an exam, focus your attention on the past successful experiences and hype yourself up. So, use this internal geography to pre-suade yourself and prime it.
If/When-Then Statements
[12:40] Another way that you can use in priming yourself is what's called "If/When-Then" statements. They are structured to help us be ready when a trigger happens to achieve a certain goal or leave a bad habit.
Let us see few examples. Remember our chocolate cake from the 1st episode. If you wanted to lose weight, you can make the following statement. "If later at night my friend brings me chocolate cake, then I'll make a cup of green tea". In case that you have a report you need to complete, you can write, If later after lunch, I have no meeting, I'll complete the report". If you are a procrastinator, like I am, your statement can be "When I am writing the script and get tempted to start watching Archer, I'll stand up, go wash my face, do some stretches and come back to work".
These kinds of statements work better that the traditional ones, like I'll complete my report today. The main reason is that they keep us on high alert to a certain time or condition. In a way, you prime and load your slingshot and the moment the target appears, you unleash it.
Commanders of Attention: The Attractors
[13:43] Now, with our current understanding of our attention, let's talk about the commanders of attention, the Attractors and the Magnetizers. The Attractors are features that attract attention by their nature. If the Attractors are like the cover design of a book, the Magnetizers are the glue that holds the reader to keep reading.
Let us start with the attractors. There're three, the Sexual, the Threatening and the Different.
The Sexual and The Threatening
The sexual and the threatening are familiar for most of us, since they come from our instinct to reproduce and to avoid harm. They are used in advertisements and social campaigns, from using models in ads to printing graphic pictures of cancer patients on cigarette packs. One of the key points for me was about how mentioning the dangerous consequences of let's say smoking followed by providing some actionable help in the form of steps, programs, support groups etc. is better than just conveying only the dangers.
The Different
The last attractor, the Different. We all have this tendency to get attracted to the different. In The Matrix Movie, there's a scene where a woman in red walks and distracts Neo's attention from what Morpheus was saying. If you're reading a letter, the bolded or differently colored words will attract your attention.
Another example of how the different thing will hijack our attention comes from an example in Predictably Irrational, but this time instead of using relativity as explanation, we will use the different.
Let us say you were offered two cars, a 4-wheel drive (Car A) or a new sport car (Car B). Both are excellent cars with similar prices, and you like both, but they are totally different. For a salesman who want to sell the 4-wheel drive, he will introduce a decoy. A third car to make the 4-wheel better. The 3rd option will be a car which lacks some features of the perfect 4-wheel (Car A-). The adding of a third option will attract our attention to the differences. Adding Car (-A), attracted us to different Car (A) which became focal in our attention and indirectly better than Car (B).
Commanders of Attention: The Magnetizers
[15:55] As for the magnetizers, there're 3 of them, the Self-Relevant, the Unfinished and the Mysterious.
Let us see how can we use them.
The Self-Relevant
The first magnetizer of attention is the self-relevant. Any message that is personalized for the recipient will grasp bigger attention than generalized one. Just remember the festivity season. Compare the messages that were addressed to you personally to the generic ones and god forbids, the forwarded messages.
Derek Sivers Most Successful Email
For you to grab your audience attention, use the word You and personalize your message to them. I'll link in the show notes to a blog article by Derek Sivers which is titled "The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote". It's a short email that is sent to customers after making a purchase from their store. Here's a small tease "Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day,". The key here is personalization, and as Derek says "It's often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you".
There's another way where focus on ourselves grabs our attention. It's called "next-in-line effect". It happens in a group setting when we have to present or share something and as a result our attention goes internally and lose focus on what the person before us is saying or presenting, and can even lose focus on the person after us since we can be analyzing what we just said.
Let me give you some practical advice here.
If you are leading a meeting where everyone has to update, be the last person to talk, so everyone's focus will be on what you are about to say. And for you not to fall in the effect yourself, maybe have someone summarize what everyone said.
If you're just a participant, there are two situations. If you have good points to present, sit across the person with the authority, so you become his center of attention. Also, don't present just before or after him, since he won't be focused.
If you didn't do you job perfectly and you want to escape, do the opposite. Sit next to him and present just before him. It might just increase your chances of survival.
The Unfinished
The Zeigarnik Effect
With saving your career out of the way, the second attention magnetizer, the Unfinished, which is based on what's called the Zeigarnik effect. This became my favorite name for a week. Two main takeaways from this effect. The first is that we will remember the details of unfinished tasks while we are committed to it. Maybe this is why we remember books details while we are reading them but forget them when we finish. At least now you have my podcast to go back to😛
The second takeaway from the Zeigarnik effect, is when we are interrupted or taken away before completing the task, we will have this nagging feeling and discomfort on wanting to return to finish it. This explains why one of the ways to help with insomnia is writing your tasks for tomorrow down to have them off your mind. It also shows the importance of why resolving problem with your partner and not letting them go unresolved.
A practical advice for all you writers out there that utilizes the Zeigarnik effect from the book "Daily Rituals" by Mason Currey. In the book, he talks about different famous individuals throughout history and their daily routines. Ernest Hemingway, the American Novelist and Literature Nobel Prize receiver use to do the following and I quote "You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again."
The Mysterious
For the last attention magnetizer, let us start with a quote by Albert Einstein, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.". A good built mystery will always grab the audience attention and keep them on their toes. We see this in movies where they start with the end of the movie, in novels, and in the annoying clickbait video titles. It's similar to the Zeigarnik effect, where instead of having an incomplete task, we have an incomplete question that we need answers to.
The Unity Principle of Persuasion
[20:13] For the last part, we will introduce the 7th principle of Influence, the principle of Unity.
The principle of unity works uniquely. When we see someone that we identify as part of our ethnic, racial, national or religious group, our attention focuses on the similarities and as we mentioned, the secondary concepts increase in importance. These shared identities change the context from "Oh, that person is like us" to "Oh, that person is of Us".
There're two categories of factors that produce this sense of unity. The first includes ways of being together, and the second includes ways of acting together.
Being Together
Being together can occur from two ways, kinship and place. For kinship, being of the same family, is the ultimate form of unity. But, we can still utilize its powers beyond the family ties between strangers. Bringing our audience attention to familial images and labels such as brothers, sisterhood, motherland or saying we are a family can enhance the sense of trust and togetherness.
The second way that can generate being together is place. Beyond home and family, we can also develop our sense of togetherness from our proximate surrounding and the people within it. You can see this with how people within the same city would feel proud to their neighborhoods, or people from different cities will have a special sense of belonging towards them.
Acting Together
For the second category that produces unity is acting together. We can see this in group marches, prayers or even when chanting in a football match. This harmony in doing activities leads to more liking and support within the group members.
Activities such as team building, orientation or induction programs are built around creating this sense of unity. In the book, there're 3 main engines that induce this sense of togetherness, which we can see in team building and orientation programs. The first is music which we mentioned before. Singing and dancing together harmonize us and break boundaries like no other. Just try and go to a karaoke and see how people act at the beginning and by the end of the session.
The second one is reciprocal exchange. If you ever saw videos that are titles "30 or x number of questions that lead to love", well, they are based on a New York Times article published in 2015 titled "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This". The idea is that two strangers will take turns asking each other questions and answering them. As the questions progressed, they will get more personal. This feeling of opening up and personal disclosure creates a sense of unity beyond mere reciprocation. We can see this in team building where the group members will share their interests to each other and then the moderator asks a member to talk about the rest of the group interests.
The last one is cocreation. Here, whether it's a physical product or a team project, the increased sense of involvement within the group members increases their unity.
So, use this knowledge to your benefit. Are you having conflict within your team, bring their attention to familial ideas. Leading a newly formed team, make sure your team building involved activities that cover being together.
Conclusion
[23:05] To warp things up, Dr. Cialdini wrote "who we are with respect to any choice, is where we are, attentionally in the moment before the choice"
The basic idea of pre-suasion is that by guiding attention strategically, it’s possible for a communicator to move recipients into agreement with a message before they experience it. The key is to focus them initially on concepts that are aligned associatively with the yet-to-be-encountered information.
Today we talked about how our attention is important and can be manipulated using privileged moments. The analogy for how they work was using our 4 attention slots. These slots cam get occupied by openers, the attractors or the magnetizers. We also saw how our choice of words and both our internal and external geography can pre-suade and prime us into a certain direction. And lastly our 7th weapon of influence, unity, gave us a much simpler but wider look at what really moves us, our sense of togetherness. So, make sure to use this knowledge to sharpen your influence axe.
Series Conclusion
[24:13] Now, this's the last episode of our first series talking about human nature. We started it with building the foundation for understanding our irrationality. We saw this irrationality in our automatic tape responses which are registered in system 1. Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and our current understanding of attention give us a deeper look at our inner nature.
We also learned how the persuasion filter and the 6 main principles of persuasion work by exploiting these automatic tapes.
Now, I'd love to hear from you, did you learn anything new? have you used any of it? Did you talk to your friends about any of the ideas? what do you think about the episodes' structure? Send me your thoughts on Twitter or Instagram at TldrShow.
For our next series, we'll be shifting gears a bit. And to use the mysterious and the zegarnik effect, I won't tell you the theme. But, it's very related to the journey of this podcast and how it became to be. So, stay tuned.
As always, Make sure to check the website at tldr-show.com for the show notes, episode transcript, links to social media, and the extra good stuff. Till next time, be curious, be critical.
Comments