What I Learned at Cialdini's Persuasion Workshop

I’ve been a fan of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s work for some time having read his seminal book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (now autographed by the man himself!) and his new sequel, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade (also autographed!).

Now that I have become a 'man of means,' I've started indulging my desire to meet my intellectual heroes and learn from them in person if possible. In researching Cialdini with this in mind, I discovered and recently attended his Principles of Persuasion (POP) workshop in Tempe, Arizona.

The workshop was primarily led by Dr. Gregory Neidert who picked up the mantle and taught the persuasion science course at Arizona State University when Dr. Cialdini retired from teaching. He, too, is now retired and has moved on to consulting and running workshops for Cialdini’s firm. The POP workshop was two intensive days focused on exploring the six principles of persuasion from Influence. Dr. Cialdini gave an opening lecture the first day and then gave a talk about his new seventh principle (Unity aka the power of “we”) during lunch. He also graciously met us for a Q&A cocktail hour after the first day was complete, which is when he signed my books and posed with me for the picture above.

Everyone had questions, of course, mostly about their personal problems. I used my opportunity to see if I could resolve a Twitter mystery. Cartoonist and political commentator Scott Adams has been promoting the idea that Cialdini consulted for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and that this is the moment her persuasion game went from non-existent to equal-to-Trump during the campaign. He refers to Cialdini as the “Godzilla of persuasion,” or just “Godzilla.”

I wondered if Dr. Cialdini would confirm or deny?

Me: “I have one, off-the-record question for you, sir. Are you, in fact, Godzilla?”

Cialdini: (grinning widely) “I’m not sure if I should be flattered or offended by that nickname. Do I destroy cities?”

Me: “Well, I don’t think they mean you have it in for Japanese people or anything.”

He then turned to address another question. Oh well.

Although I didn't learn whether Cialdini is Godzilla,*  I did learn quite a bit from his workshop. Below are a few things that stuck with me.

1. Contrast is the ultimate persuasion amplifier. As mentioned, Dr. Cialdini has seven principles of persuasion in total. Contrast isn't one of them. That's because it is what he calls an "amplifier," something that super-charges a persuasion technique. Dr. Niedert went further, calling contrast "the dark matter that holds influence together." In all of our exercises using all of the principles, we learned to use contrast to improve our persuasive punch. The best example of this involves the legendary advertising executive Rosser Reeves.

Reeves was a Madison Avenue man during the 50s and 60s, the time period portrayed in the AMC hit show, Mad Men. In fact, he was used as "one model for the professional accomplishments of the series' protagonist, Donald Draper (played by Jon Hamm)," according to Wikipedia. When I first got into the infomercial business, I was obsessed with these Old Masters of advertising (as I call them). I paid about $80 to acquire Reeves' book, Reality In Advertising, when it was out of print. It was worth the price. I picked up several great insights from Reeves, including the timeless concept of the "unique selling proposition" (USP), a term he coined.

At the POP workshop, I heard the following apocryphal story about Reeves:

One beautiful spring afternoon, Rosser Reeves and a colleague were walking through Central Park to their office on Madison Avenue. They saw a man sitting in the park begging for money. He had a tin cup for donations with a handwritten cardboard sign that read: "I am blind." 

The man's cup contained very few coins. Reeves thought he knew why and told his colleague that he could dramatically increase the amount of money in the cup simply by adding four words to the sign. Naturally, his colleague was skeptical. 

Reeves went to the blind man and offered to help fix his sign. The man agreed. Reeves took a marker from his pocket, added four words to the sign and then retreated with his colleague to see what would happen. 

Within minutes, people were dropping one coin after another into the man’s cup.

What were the four words Reeves added to the sign? "It is spring and ..." 

After telling this story, Dr. Niedert explained that contrast is always available to us. It's just that sometimes it takes a skilled persuader to see it and call people's attention to it. The people in Central Park that day saw and enjoyed a beautiful spring day. They saw and ignored a blind man begging for change. Simply by connecting the two things and creating contrast, Reeves persuaded them to change their behavior.

2. There is a moment of power after no. I've been in a lot of hard negotiations with the toughest negotiators imaginable. (I live and work in New York, after all.) Yet I never saw this before Cialdini's workshop. It's absolutely true. Dr. Neidert counseled us to resist the normal human response to rejection; i.e., shrinking back. "If you retreat from the moment, you lose," he said. "If you retreat in the moment, you win." What he meant is that a skilled persuader always has a fallback position, a prepared 'ask' that also represents a desirable outcome. More important, that second request is much more likely to be granted because of the principle of reciprocity. This is the "moment of power." The person who told you "no" feels you've given them something and that they owe you something.

Of course, this can be used in a manipulative way where your "fallback" position was your actual position all along. Dr. Niedert was careful to add he was talking about a position that was "not intended" to be the real position all along. He also explained at length how ruses by unethical persuaders can easily backfire, destroying the credibility and trust that is required for any successful negotiation.

I agree with him in principle, but I have met some people that are immune to feelings of reciprocity. They will gladly take whatever you give them and feel no obligation to give back. In these negotiations, I have found it's smarter to go in with a meaningless concession at the ready. To be more precise: The concession is meant to be meaningful in some way to them but not very meaningful to us. We then explicitly leverage that concession to get what we ultimately want. Not particularly ethical, I know. But it's very effective when dealing with negotiators who lack any type of empathy.

3. A limited-number offer is more persuasive than a limited-time offer. This was of particular interest to me because the limited-time offer is much more common in my business (infomercials). The classic example is a clock ticking down from 10 minutes, which is supposed to be how much time the viewer has left to order. I can only think of one type of offer that mentions a specific, limited number of units as a tactic: offers for collectible coins. They'll say something like, "only 500 of these coins were ever minted." Every other time, we usually say something cliché and vague like, "supplies are limited." Thanks to Cialdini's workshop, I'll be pondering how to fix this in future direct-response commercials.

These are just three of the many fascinating and useful things I learned during my two-day immersion course in Godzilla-level persuasion. I'll be sure to post more about it here and on Twitter.

RELATED POSTS

• The Seven Principles of Persuasion
• Fear, Sex & Cuts
• Cialdini Explains Why Trump Won
• How to Persuade Like President Trump
• The Archive of Human Exploits

* Scott Adams says Dr. Cialdini has confirmed he consulted for HRC's campaign. He may be referring to this article from the Financial Times where the author got a somewhat firmer answer than I did.

The Seven Principles of Persuasion

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

In his seminal 1986 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini introduced six universal Principles of Persuasion:

1. Reciprocity. "Simply put, people are obliged to give back to others the form of a behavior, gift, or service that they have received first," Cialdini writes. He goes on to describe a series of experiments that explored what effect a little gift (e.g. mint) given with the bill had on a server's tip. One mint increased tips by 3%. Two mints increased tips by 14%. "But perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that if the waiter provides one mint, starts to walk away from the table, but pauses, turns back and says, 'For you nice people, here’s an extra mint,' tips go through the roof," Cialdini reveals. In that scenario, tips increased by 23%.

2. Scarcity. "Simply put, people want more of those things they can have less of," Cialdini writes. His prime example: Sales of flights on the Concorde spiked the day after British Airways announced it was discontinuing its twice daily London-New York route because it wasn't making money.

3. Authority. "This is the idea that people follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts," Cialdini explains. He describes an experiment where receptionists at a real-estate firm played up an agent's credentials before connecting the call. They'd say things such as, "Speak to Peter, our head of sales. He has over 20 years’ experience selling properties.” The result: A 20% increase in appointments and 15% increase in signed contracts.

4. Consistency. "People like to be consistent with the things they have previously said or done," Cialdini explains. He adds: "Consistency is activated by looking for, and asking for, small initial commitments that can be made." This can take many forms. A small but fascinating one is the effect of asking patients to fill out their own appointment cards (rather than having the staff do it). That simple act of stimulating consistency reduced missed appointments at a health center by 18%.

5. Liking. "People prefer to say yes to those that they like," Cialdini writes. Then he goes further and explains the three factors that cause us to like someone. "We like people who are similar to us, we like people who pay us compliments, and we like people who cooperate with us towards mutual goals." Simply discussing one thing they had in common before a negotiation led participants to a deal 90% of the time in one experiment, up from 55% when participants got straight to business.

6. Consensus. "Especially when they are uncertain, people will look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine their own," Cialdini explains. This is also known as "social proof theory," which Influence helped popularize. It was demonstrated in an experiment involving hotel towels. The aim was to get people to reuse them for both cost and environmental reasons. The experimenters tried various approaches, including those familiar to anyone who has stayed in a hotel (e.g. appeals to be "green"). The most effective? The message that "75% percent of people who have stayed in this room have reused their towel.” This increased reuse by 33%.

In his follow-up to Influence more than 30 years later, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, Dr. Cialdini added a seventh principle:

7. Unity. “It’s about the categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations," Cialdni explains. "Simply put, we is the shared me.” That is, the more we feel a person is one of “us,” the more likely we are to be influenced by them -- and before any active influencing actually begins. Cialdini adds this principle isn't new, rather it was "hiding beneath the surface" of his research data all along.

What to learn more? I highly recommend both of Dr. Cialdini's books:

• Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade 
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Fear, Sex & Cuts

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on The SciMark Report, my industry blog about direct-response (aka infomercial) advertising.

Robert Cialdini's latest book is Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Dr. Cialdini is the social psychologist who wrote the 1986 classic, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Dr. Cialdini's work should be familiar to any student of advertising techniques. For example, the idea of using testimonials as "social proof" came from his work.

In his book, I came across two compelling findings with direct relevance to the advertising industry.

1. Fear Makes Us Want to Fit in, Arousal to Stand Out
In the section of the book titled "Commanders of Attention," Dr. Cialdini examines how our reaction to threatening stimuli primes us to be influenced in a completely different way than our reaction to sexual stimuli:

[W]e realized that humans encountering threatening circumstances would have developed early on a strong tendency to be part of a group (where there is safety and strength in numbers) and to avoid being separate (where there is vulnerability to a predator or enemy). The opposite would be true, however, in a situation with sexual possibilities. There a person would want distance from the pack in order to be the prime recipient of romantic consideration. 

We also realized that these two contrary motivations, to fit in and to stand out, map perfectly onto a pair of longtime favorite commercial appeals. One, of the 'Don’t be left out' variety, urges us to join the many. The other, of the 'Be one of the few' sort, urges us to step away from the many. So, which would an advertiser be better advised to launch into the minds of prospects?

The answer: It depends. This is where it gets really interesting. Dr. Cialdini suggests that a new way to improve response may be to go deeper than demographics when considering ad placement — because certain types of content work with your main motivating message and certain types of content work against it.

[T]he popularity-based message would be the right one in any situation where audience members had been exposed to frightening stimuli—perhaps in the middle of watching a violent film on TV—because threat-focused people want to join the crowd. But sending that message in an ad to an audience watching a romantic film on TV would be a mistake, because amorously focused people want to step away from the crowd.

The same thinking applies to the content within a commercial, of course. Sex sells, but only in the right context. "Put people in a wary state of mind ... and, driven by a desire for safety, a popularity-based appeal will soar, whereas a distinctiveness-based appeal will sink," Cialdini writes. "But use it to put people in an amorous state of mind, and, driven by a consequent desire to stand out, the reverse will occur."

2. Cuts are Crucial, But Less is More
While studying mass media at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Dr. Cialdini met an expert in TV advertising. From her, he learned some of the techniques of what he calls "persuasion-oriented producers." In particular, he learned that:

[C]uts are crucial to persuasive success because they can be manipulated to bring into focus the feature of a message the persuader believes to be most convincing— by shifting the scene to that feature. That cut will instigate an orienting response to the winning feature in audience members’ brains before they even experience it [consciously].

A handful of top-shelf producers in my industry are masters of this technique. When you watch their commercials, you don't even realize that your attention is being directed. It feels like your eyes are simply focusing on something you wanted to see more closely. It just so happens that is the exact thing you need to see to be sold. Indeed, many times viewers (including myself) don't even notice there was a cut. It takes a careful review of the commercial to catch it.

Given the power of this technique, it's no surprise most major advertisers deploy it frequently. However, Dr. Cialdini writes that cuts must be used "judiciously to direct attention solely to the most important facets" of your material. Too bad most advertisers haven't learned that lesson.

Research confirms that ... TV advertisers have chosen instead to increase indiscriminately and dramatically the overall frequency of scene shifts within their ads by more than 50 percent over the years. Predictably, viewers end up confused as to the point of the ad and irritated by having their focus whipped around so often and so haphazardly. As a result, even though cut-heavy TV commercials draw more total attention, they produce significantly less memory for the ad’s persuasive claims and significantly less persuasion. It’s easy to understand why: viewers’ attention isn’t fixated on the ads’ best points but is scattered all over the material’s relevant and irrelevant attributes. For everyone concerned, it’s a case of death by a thousand cuts.

This is one of the crucial things amateur producers get wrong. I see it all the time. Quick cuts create confusion, and confusion is a sales killer.

Want to learn more? I highly recommend both of Dr. Cialdini's books:

• Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade 
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Cialdini Explains Why Trump Won

In a recent interview for the Financial Times' Alphachat, social psychologist Robert Cialdini explains, from a persuasion perspective, why Donald Trump won the election of 2016.

Below is the key section. I've underlined the things that jumped out at me.

Alphachat: Okay, we’re in the final segment of our conversation. I want to talk a little bit more about something you brought up a second ago, which is the role of persuasion in politics, this is obviously a topic of such interest right now. Not just in your two books, where you do mention in a few cases ways in which persuasion can work in politics, but also in the past I think you’ve been reported to have advised certain candidates, and you’ve usually demurred from talking about your specific role in these elections, so I won’t press you too much on that.  

Let me just ask you in general: What you have learned about persuasion from your participation in, and your study of, the political process?

Cialdini: What I’ve learned is that, like the business community, the political establishment is now embracing behavioral science in making their choices about how to present their candidates, how the candidate should make their cases, and so on.  

I just spoke about Trump, and so I can describe a strategy that President Obama used in both of his campaigns, which was to be sure that when there were reports of how much money they had received in donations (they are required to do that every month, every quarter), that campaign didn’t just describe the amount of money that they received, they also described the number of contributors, the number of people who donated to the campaign.

The message was, look at all of the people who have decided that this guy is a legitimate candidate. Obama started this, he started doing this. Trump doubled down on it when, at his events, he would instruct the television cameras to turn around and look at the size of the crowd. The multitude was the message. The fact that many people were there – or many people were contributing, in the case of the Obama campaign – that was legitimizing for someone who was not a familiar face.  

For Obama, he was coming from a background that had never been part of presidential politics before, and Trump was coming from outside of politics, so they needed to legitimize themselves. And the way to do that was to use what we call social proof, evidence that if a lot of other people are doing this, or believing this, it’s probably valid.  

Alphachat: Was that your idea, by the way? Was that something you advised?  

Cialdini: No, I observed it though. 

Alphachat: There is something else connecting the political landscape with Pre-suasion, which is the role of the media. There is a famous quote that you include in the book, that the media tells people what to think about though not necessarily what to think (I'm paraphrasing the quote). And that connects directly to your thinking on what it means to capture somebody’s attention. Which means that now, because the media’s hold on attention is also competing with the ability of candidates to directly appeal to people through social media and other things, the landscape has become a little bit more complicated.  

But it also means that candidates can more directly elevate the importance of topics that maybe in the past would not have gotten through the media filter. Do you largely agree with that?  

Cialdini: I do, and I think that competition now is causing media representatives to see as acceptable forms of information that they wouldn't have seen as acceptable to present before. Information that is sensationalizing, for example, but not yet determined to be accurate.  

Because it’s not an information war, it’s an attention war. But the consequence of getting people to pay attention is this is one we talked about earlier – they then get to see that particular focal concept, or that idea, as more important than before. That’s troubling. 

Alphachat: Can you share with us some of the other points you made in your recent speaking on Trump?  

Cialdini: Well, I think one of the things that helps explain his election to the presidency is it was a change election. That is, in the last 100 years, every time a given political party has held the White House for two terms, they are 80% more likely to lose the next election. So it was a change election. And Donald Trump was a change candidate, whereas Hillary Clinton was a continuity candidate. So she had a lot going against her just structurally in the type of election that it was, the psychology of that election.  

The other thing that the media was complicit in, though, was to rise to the bait every time that Donald Trump did something outrageous, or scandalous, or unheard of. And that caused Donald Trump to get attention.  

He was a master of being able to bring attention to himself, which led to the perception of his importance. If we’re paying attention to something, it becomes more important in our minds than it was previously, and what he needed to do was to have this perception of his importance (as a candidate) rise to prominence.  

The other thing that paying attention does is to cause us to presume that if we’re paying attention to something, [then] it has causal properties. That is, typically we pay attention to the causes in our environment, those things that produce change. It makes sense, environmentally, that we would want to spend our time focusing primarily on the things that are causal, that create change.  

Well, if he can get attention brought to him by the media, he becomes seen as a causal agent to a greater extent. And in a change election, that’s exactly who’s going to win.  

Alphachat: Yes, one of my questions is, though, doesn’t that reflect a certain amount of instinctive talent on his part that he was able to get that kind of complicity from the media, or from other people who were projecting his message to the base of voters that he was seeking?  

Cialdini: Right. It was that people were much too focused on the content of what he was saying compared to the fact that attention was being brought to him by this outrageous content, and the side effect of that attention was to make him seem important, and to make him seem a causal agent, which is exactly what a candidate wants, if there’s doubt about his or her role in the election.  

Alphachat: One last question on Trump. And this might take a bit of a wind up, so I’ll ask the question then I’ll give you a lot of room to answer it.  

One of your biggest admirers, the writer and cartoonist Scott Adams, spotted early on that Trump used a combination of persuasion tactics that were very impressive and that a lot of the other candidates just didn’t seem able to deploy.  

Here’s a few examples. One is that he speaks in very visual terms, so when he labelled some of the other candidates, his competitors, things like Crooked Hillary or Liddle Marco or Low Energy Jeb, these were all things that you could sort of imagine in visual, physical terms. And they tended to stick, they were what Adams called “linguistic kill shots."  

Another tactic was that he’s very repetitive, and in a previous podcast episode the journalist Joe Weisenthal brought up one of Trump’s speeches where he kept repeating that he was a leader, and things like “I like to lead,” “leading is what I do,” “people are led by me”… in such a way that a lot of pundits would read a transcript of the speech and think, this just looks ridiculous. But in fact most people who were listening to the speeches don’t process them that way. For them, that kind of repetition might work. Again, it just kind of sticks. They hear it a few times and then they keep the association [of Trump and leadership] in their minds.  

Another thing Trump did was what Adams calls pacing and leading, where he takes a very extreme position – for instance on immigration, as when he said he’s going to deport all undocumented people – so that later on he has credibility with his base of voters when he takes a more moderate position.  

And a final one – there’s dozens of these – but a final one is the idea of getting people to think past the sale. So when he says that he’s going to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and then his opponents say, “well that’s ridiculous, they’ll never pay for the wall,” essentially what’s happened is that they’ve granted one of the premises of what he said, which is that there’s going to be a wall in the first place. It’s a way of getting them there. There’s a lot more examples, but I guess my question is, both in general and specific terms, do you agree with this idea that Trump is a “master persuader,” as Scott Adams likes to say, that he has a unique skill set when it comes to persuading people, at least in the political context?  

Cialdini: I do, and I think it comes from a long history as a dealmaker, as a business person who has been successful, but also as an entertainer. And an entertainer on television, not somebody who writes or somebody who is a speaker or an orator or something like that. No, this guy is very visual.  

So in visual presentations it is the imagery, and in television especially those images are constantly sweeping past us. We don’t really get time to stop the frame and think about what was said there. We’re onto the next set of images, the next frame, and that stream of imagery is the sort of thing that allows people to make presentations based on appearances as opposed to the content of what they’re saying. And he was always very self assured, very confident, always dressed in the classic business person attire and so on, a lot of certainty associated with what he was saying. And so those impressions, I think, were the kinds of things that he had mastered, and that proved to be very effective in this particular kind of campaign – again, when people were looking for change, and wanted to be assured that this was somebody who was going to steer them in a good direction if that change was going to be afoot.  

Alphachat: We’re just about out of time, but I’ve got one last question. In one of his final interviews, on a podcast with David Axelrod before he left office, President Obama said this – I'm just going to read the quote and then ask for your reaction to it – the quote is: “We’ve got to figure out, how do we show people and communicate in a way that is visceral and makes an emotional connection as opposed to just the facts, because the facts are all in dispute these days.”  

Cialdini: So my comment on that would be the way to do it – if you believe that, and I see there is some validity to it – you do it with images.  

People don’t counter-argue stories. They don’t counter-argue imagery. They counter-argue statements, they counter-argue contentions or assertions or arguments. So if you want to be successful in a post-fact world, you do it by presenting accounts, narratives, stories and images and metaphors. Now, if you’re going to be ethical in that regard, you make sure that those accounts, stories, metaphors and so on reflect the facts. You still have to know the facts, but the idea that the facts are going to carry the day is naïve.  

Alphachat: This is a quick follow-on question – I said the last one was my last question, but this is, I promise, my last question, because I know we’ve got to go. What is an example of a potent metaphor that is ethical and fits the facts and that you believe could be persuasive [in the political context]?  

Cialdini: What I always prefer is to try to go to some example that has evidence to support it.  

There was a study done at Stanford University in which people were exposed to a news account of a rash of crime in their community. And half of them had the crime wave described as a “rampaging beast” that needed to be stopped. The other half had it described as a “rampaging virus” that needed to be stopped.  

Those people who saw the account described as a beast then came politically to support capture-and-cage approaches to crime – that is, increased police presence and prosecution and jailing of criminals, because that’s what you do for a beast.  

Those who saw the crime described as a virus came to support education programs and neighborhood enhancements and jobs programs, because what you do with a virus is you remove the conditions that produce it in the first place.  

So that’s the kind of way in which it’s possible – if indeed there is evidence that the way to reduce crime is by reducing the conditions that make it grow, then that’s the metaphor we should use – rather than that it is a rampaging beast, it’s virus-like, and that allows the story to be told in a way that comports with the facts.

Cialdini on Advice

If you have presented an idea to someone you should never ask for an opinion, but for advice.

"When you ask for an opinion, the person takes a half-step back — you’ve asked them to introspect and so there is a distancing. But if you say, 'what is your advice,' they take a step towards you and it triggers a co-operative mindset and they are more likely to support your idea."

 - Robert Cialdini

Exploit Explained: Similarity Attraction Effect

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

You've heard that "opposites attract," but social psychologists beg to differ. They say we are actually attracted to people who have traits, values and interests in common with us. This theory is called similarity attraction effect.

Vanessa Van Edwards from The Science of People advises:

When you first begin speaking with someone, make it your mission to find out what you have in common. This could be sports teams, favorite restaurants or people you know in common. Not only will this increase your likability, but it also gives you more to talk about!

This is in-line with the sixth of Cialdini's Principles of Persuasion  — liking. "People prefer to say yes to those that they like.” In one experiment, simply discussing a thing both sides had in common resulted in a successful negotiation 90% of the time. (Congress take note.)

Both Van Edwards and Cialdini advocate an ethical use of the similarity attraction effect, but there are less ethical uses employed by trained persuaders. One is intentional "mirroring" in which a person purposefully mimics the gestures, body position and even speech patterns of a target to increase liking. (This can also happen sub-consciously, but I am referring to the conscious selling technique.) We have all met the too-obvious salesman that probes us with annoying questions, desperate to create an artificial bond he hopes will make us more compliant. "Hey, you like baseball? You a Yankees fan? No, what about basketball? You a Knicks guy? I can get floor seats!" Etc.

Another tactic is known as the "Benjamin Franklin Effect," and it is counter-intuitive at first. Here's the story of how it got its name, via Farnham Street:

Having heard that he [a rival legislator] had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I [Franklin] wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.

Franklin summed up the effect this way: "He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged."

If you think about it, this particular persuasion trick is devilishly clever. The Trojan Horse is being in someone's debt because of a favor granted. Inside the horse is both flattery and convincing proof of your similarity.

Expanding the Reality Distortion Field (RDF)

What if most of the things we think are real are actually distorted by manipulators?

My experiences in the infomercial industry first made me think about this. Once I learned the psychological tricks used in direct selling, I realized they weren't restricted to the peddlers of TV products. I began seeing the techniques everywhere. Later, I read books such as Influence and Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini and found proof I wasn't crazy. Professor Cialdini has studied and cataloged these "weapons of influence," which he shows are widely used by "compliance practitioners" of all types.

"The historic focus in moral and political philosophy has been on coercive influence — specifically, if, when, and why it is permissible. Far less attention, however, has been paid to a subtler but perhaps more pervasive type of influence, namely manipulation," write Christian Coons and Michael Weber in Manipulation: Theory and Practice. "Manipulation manifests itself in many aspects of life: in advertising, politics, and in both professional and intimate relations."

In private conversations, I call this my "everything is a scam" theory. I sometimes excoriate my friends and family for becoming "marketing victims." Like Jabba losing it over his lieutenant being Jedi mind-tricked by Luke Skywalker, I want to yell: "You weak-minded fool!" Which leads me to my first point: What's more interesting than the ubiquity of attempts to manipulate is how often and thoroughly those attempts succeed.

People don't just fall victim to short-term mind tricks. They often end up completely mind-controlled to the point where their perception of reality is altered. An example would be anyone who identifies strongly as a member of a political party. Once someone (not in politics) starts talking about 'Republicans this' or 'Democrats that,' it becomes plain their mind is no longer their own. Of course, most of us are victims at some level when it comes to politics. More on this in a moment ...

Recently, I was reminded of a concept that, if expanded, could be used to identify and warn people about this human exploit. There aren't enough hard-core Star Wars geeks for "Jedi mind trick" to catch on, and people probably wouldn't take it seriously, anyway. But as it happens, sci-if has given us another term that is already in the mainstream: the "Reality Distortion Field" (RDF).

According to Wikipedia, the concept was borrowed from an episode of the original Star Trek series (The Menagerie), coined by a guy named Bud Tribble (coincidence?) and expanded by his colleague Andy Hertzfeld. The two executives worked under Steve Jobs at Apple and used the term to describe their leader's uncanny ability to get people "to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence."

Hertzfeld used the RDF term in a mostly positive way to laud Jobs' ability to "distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible." However, internally, the term was sometimes used as a lament. "In his presence, reality is malleable," Tribble once told a co-worker. "He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."

The co-worker added: "The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently."

Outside critics and chroniclers have been even harsher. "One way to look at Jobs’ life is that he was a liar and a con man with a gift for design," Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote in a blog post about the RDF. "According to [Walter] Isaacson’s reporting, Jobs had no love for truth ... [He] learned how to lie, cajole, manipulate, and charm until people believed whatever he wanted them to believe."

Adams is on to something. While positive emotions (liking/love, passion, confidence, compassion) are certainly potent field generators, negative emotions (hate, anger, fear, greed) seem likely to generate even more powerful fields.

Over time, the RDF has come to be associated with other charismatic figures in business (Elon Musk) and politics (Bill Clinton, Donald Trump). Writing for Tim Ferris's blog, Michael Ellsberg claims "Clinton is known for an RDF even stronger than Jobs ... Perhaps the strongest in the world."

It seems, then, that the RDF concept is specific to personalities. But I'd like to argue for an expanded definition. Going beyond individuals, it seems to me that groups generate RDFs as well. Just like larger objects in space generate stronger gravitational fields, it would follow that larger groups would tend to generate especially strong distortion fields due to peer pressure, groupthink, echo-chamber effects and other consequences of putting people with shared biases together in a bubble. As Adams has suggested elsewhere, these powerful fields would effectively warp reality around the group, creating shared hallucinations.

Returning to politics, this seems like a good way to explain the current state of affairs. There is reality, and then there is the distorted reality being generated around the groups that are in opposition to each other. The labels "Republican" and "Democrat" don't even begin to identify the many groups and RDFs involved. The fields overlap and also run into each other, creating further distortion in their wake. Most people are firmly caught within these fields and mind-controlled to the point where they can no longer perceive undistorted reality. What's even more frightening is the realization none of us can be entirely sure we're not caught in an RDF when thinking about politics.

A case in point: There once was a group of people who believed that President Barack Obama was not born in the US and that this secret, once exposed, would remove him from office. Although this distorted reality had the clear hallmarks of a hallucination — such deus ex machina plot devices only exist in fiction — many people were captivated by it (including the current president).

To my earlier point, when we consider all of the negative emotions around election losses this should not be surprising. When humans strongly wish something would happen to undo what has been done, we are primed for that wish to be "fulfilled" by manipulators. It doesn't take much, either. A lot of the work is done by our tendency toward confirmation bias and post-rationalization.

The RDF around this particular conspiracy group (so-called "birthers") was dispelled when President Obama proved he was born in Hawaii. Although that case should have taught us something, it hasn't. An even larger and stronger RDF has formed around a new conspiracy group that believes a deus ex machina, in the form of evidence of collusion with Russia, will remove President Donald Trump from office. The motivation of the mind manipulators is even clearer in this case, and yet the RDF persists.

Incontrovertible proof seems to be the only way to dispel an RDF — although time can weaken it. My perception is that fewer and fewer people believed the "birther" conspiracy as time went on because hard evidence did not emerge and counter-manipulators successfully branded it a racist/extremist belief. Then came the coup de grâce of hard counter-evidence. Something similar will no doubt happen with the Russia conspiracy as solid supporting evidence does not materialize and counter-manipulators make the idea sound more and more fringe.

Yet I wonder if increasing awareness of RDFs (i.e. my expanded definition of them) might also help, here and elsewhere. After all, telling someone "you may be caught in an RDF" sounds a lot better than: "You weak-minded fool!"

The 7 Deadly Sins are 7 Keys to Persuasion

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

Another way to describe human exploits is human weaknesses. Of these, vices are the most fundamental. Ancient Christian thinkers articulated seven major vices, the so-called "seven deadly sins." According to Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, they are:

1. Pride
2. Greed
3. Lust
4. Envy
5. Gluttony
6. Wrath
7. Sloth

It's unnecessary to discuss how trained persuaders use greed/envy to entice and lust (sex) to sell. However, the other vices are non-obvious from a persuasion perspective and warrant further consideration.

Pride. Flattery will get you everywhere. Flattery engenders "liking," the fifth of Dr. Cialdini's seven principles of persuasion. (It seems these things come in sets of seven.) Another aspect of pride involves the sense of ownership we have for our own ideas or possessions. A whole host of exploits derive from this, including confirmation bias (inability to recognize information that contradicts our beliefs), the endowment effect (overvaluing things merely because we own them) and so on.

Gluttony. 24-hour buffets. Endless shrimp. Bottomless bowls of pasta. Everyone is perpetually on a diet, and few believe overeating is acceptable, yet these gimmicks continue to win business in the restaurant industry. Ancient thinkers were less interested in what such behavior says about a person's stomach than what it says about his mind; i.e. his judgment. What might someone who is so focused on the basest of human needs be willing to give up to satisfy that need? The classic example is the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob, whose name means a pejorative for persuader (deceiver), convinced his famished brother Esau to give him his birthright in exchange for some bread and lentil stew. As far as we know, he didn't even have to offer Esau a "bottomless" bowl of said stew to do it.

Wrath. Selling to an angry customer. Negotiating with a furious partner. It may seem odd to think of fighting as persuasion, but consider this: A boxer or MMA striker can spend a considerable amount of time trying to convince his opponent to drop his guard or make some other ill-advised move, exposing him to attack. He feints and sets traps. Indeed, one of the more effective traps is intentionally angering his opponent, throwing him off mental balance and instigating errors. (This is same strategy behind "trash talking" in football, basketball and so on.) Re-framed this way, it's possible to see other ways a trained persuader might exploit this vice for gain. Anger is ultimately a weakness and no one operating out of weakness can withstand the steady strength of a calm opponent. Anger also leads to remorse and exhaustion, two emotional states that cause people to overcompensate in the opposite direction. Persuaders resilient enough to weather the storm will often find it easy to get their way when wrath has blown itself out.

Sloth. We tend to think of persuasion as getting someone to take an action, but getting people to choose inaction can be just as effective. This is strategy behind: a) negative-option selling, where a customer has to "opt out" to avoid getting charged for something; b) continuity schemes, where a customer has to cancel to avoid a monthly charge; and c) the default effect. This list is by no means comprehensive, either. People will also take action now to avoid having to take more action later. That idea is behind everything from selling washing machines to insurance plans, explains the success of mini-grocery stores in drugstores and much more. In other words, "convenience" is just another way of saying "slothful behavior."

Exploit Explained: Gell-Mann Amnesia

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

In his 2005 essay, “Why Speculate?” the late, great author Michael Crichton coined a human exploit he named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

As a former journalist, I can sympathize with the reporters. Journalists are seldom experts, or even very knowledgable, in the topics they are asked to write about. They rely on sources and work on tight deadlines. The result is oversimplification, misconception and, yes, downright errors. But apparently it doesn’t hurt their credibility in the end because of this curious human exploit called Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's a form of proximity amnesia, and you know it to be true. I experience it all the time. I have never read a news article that got it right when covering my industry. Yet I read articles about other industries all the time and fail to question the accuracy of what I'm reading. Journalists are really good at sounding like they know what they are talking about ... to people who are on the outside of the subject matter along with them.

This effect isn't limited to journalists and newspaper readers. It can occur any time there is an illusion of authority, which roots it in Cialdini’s third principle of persuasion. A personal anecdote will serve to make my point.

On a recent trip abroad to my wife’s home country, my mother-in-law kept telling me all these fascinating "facts" about her homeland. When I would relate these "facts" back to my wife, she would always get a skeptical look on her face and express extreme doubt in the veracity of the claim. After a while, I realized this mother-in-law was the same mother-in-law who regularly forwarded us Internet conspiracies and urban legends. Because of Gell-Mann Amnesia, I had forgotten her susceptibility to spreading myths and rumors the further I moved away from my area of expertise — and facts about her country were about as far away from my area as you could get.

How to Persuade Like President Trump

{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}

Are you still struggling to understand how Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election – or even the Republican primary, for that matter? Do you agree with many commentators that now-President Trump should stop tweeting because it can't possibly be good for him? Then you need to read Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter by Scott Adams. Immediately.

Adams, creator of the famous Dilbert comic and a certified hypnotist, says he got into political commentary when he noticed that one candidate had a unique set of skills that would allow him to mop the floor with his political opponents. As he explains in the book:

The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason. This view of the world imagines that some people have already achieved a fact-based type of enlightenment that is compatible with science and logic, and they are trying to help the rest of us see the world the “right” way. As far as I can tell, most people share that interpretation of the world. The only wrinkle with that worldview is that we all think we are the enlightened ones. And we assume the people who disagree with us just need better facts, and perhaps better brains, in order to agree with us. That filter on life makes most of us happy—because we see ourselves as the smart ones—and it does a good job of predicting the future, but only because confirmation bias (our tendency to interpret data as supporting our views) will make the future look any way we want it to look, within reason. 

What I saw with Trump’s candidacy for president is that the 'within reason' part of our understanding about reality was about to change, bigly. I knew that candidate 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. The public was about to transition from believing—with total certainty— 'the clown can’t win' to 'Hello, President Trump.' And in order to make that transition, they would have to rewrite every movie playing in their heads. To put it in simple terms, the only way Trump could win was if everything his critics understood about the true nature of reality was wrong.

Using this lens, which Adams calls "the persuasion filter," he was not only able to predict the outcome of the primary but also the outcome of the 2016 election. He did not stop there. To further demonstrate the usefulness of his filter, Adams also predicted the various stages of the opposition's response to Trump's first year in office. He knew they would lose their minds right after the election (because of cognitive dissonance) and start believing Trump was Hitler. When reality failed to support that view, he predicted they would move on to the idea that Trump was incompetent and unable to lead the country. When that failed the reality check, they would finally admit he was effective – at ruining the country, of course.

If you've been paying attention, you've seen all of these predictions come true.

That brings us to the biggest challenge of them all: Understanding Trump's use of Twitter. Even conservative commentators who support Trump's policy positions frequently lament his use of this social medium and beg him to stop the madness. They firmly believe his tweets are compulsive, undisciplined and undermine his objectives. You won't be surprised to learn that Adams disagrees. After reading Win Bigly, you'll see Trump's tweets in a whole new light and finally understand how they are critical to his persuasion game.

In summary, Adams makes the case for why Trump should be recognized as a "Master Persuader." Then he goes even further and breaks down Trump's technique, providing a series of 31 persuasion tips. Below are 10 of my favorites, which I include here because I intend to refer back to them often.

TEN POTUS-GRADE PERSUASION TIPS

1. Humans are hard-wired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone's cooperation in the future, do something for that person today. This is "reciprocity," Cialdini's first principle of persuasion.

2. 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. At a later date I'l do a separate post about this one called "the right amount of wrongness." It's fascinating ... and also horrifying to an OCD personality type like me.

3. 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. This is straight out of the pickup artist (PUA) playbook. Confidence is sexy, and it doesn't just attract potential mates.

4. If you want your audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both important and would give people a reason to think, That's not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them with whatever makes them happiest. As a writer, I've been thinking about this one a lot. I've never seen it anywhere, and it has never occurred to me before. Yet I immediately understood it to be true. Brilliant.

5. Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces other people to join you or be framed as the small thinkers. I'll be honest: I have lost debates to skilled persuaders who used this tactic. It's especially useful when debating people (like me) who tend to get lost in the details. Big-picture thinkers always win the crowd.

6. Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do to predictable rewards. Someday, I'll start a separate file for persuasion tricks that take advantage of the perverse aspects of our nature. This one will definitely be in the file. Excitement, even the logically undesirable types, beats boredom every time.

7. Visual persuasion is more powerful than non-visual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large. Adams demonstrates how President Trump is a master of this. I am studying his technique and will build on this tip further in a separate post at a later date.

8. Repetition is persuasive. Also, repetition is persuasive. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasive? When I was learning how to give persuasive presentations, one of the best pieces of advice I received was: "Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them." This wisdom has been attributed to Aristotle.

9. Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable. One of the first things they taught us in Journalism 101 was to write at an 8th-grade level. Why? Because that's the average reading level. I took the lesson to heart, and it has served me well. Indeed, it is one of the secrets of my success.

10. 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 because people are looking for a reason to move your way. As Adams mentions, this was proved using a fascinating study about copy machines. Giving any reason for cutting to the front of the copier line worked remarkably well, even when the reason was totally lame or made no sense.

To get the other 21 persuasion tips, you'll just have to read Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.

Media Bias by Quantity of Coverage

"My friend, the psychologist Robert Cialdini, explained how this works: media mostly creates bias not through quality of argument but by quantity of coverage, highlighting some events and burying others."

- Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather Group

The Archive of Human Exploits

Svengali

Welcome to my "Archive of Human Exploits." I have always been fascinated with the 'dark arts' of psychology – and defense against those dark arts. That interest intensified around the time I joined the infomercial industry, where practitioners are accused of employing hypnotic powers of persuasion. As infomercial producer John Miller once put it to me: "They claim we have Svengali-like powers." Rather than finding that idea disturbing, I found it fascinating.

The thinkers who have the most to do with my fascination are the Old Masters of advertising (Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, John Caples, Joseph Sugarman), Dr. Robert Cialdini, Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, and cartoonist turned political commentator Scott Adams.

This archive will be my way of keeping track of what I have learned and what I continue to learn. Check back often for new exploits and articles.

EXPLOITS (click to read)

• Anchoring
• Arousal
• Authority
• Clickbait
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Confirmation Bias
• Consensus
• Consistency
• Default Effect
• Desirability Bias
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
• Endowment Effect
• Fake Because
• Fear
• Gell-Mann Amnesia
• High-Ground Maneuver
• Inattentional Blindness
• Least Reinforcing Syndrome
• Left-Digit Bias
• Liking
• Loss Aversion
• MySide Bias
• Outrage
• Peacocking
• Preference Falsfication
• Reciprocity
• Scarcity
• Selection Bias
• Similarity Attraction Effect
• Social Proof
• Social Risk
• Spotlight Effect
• Survivorship Bias
• Unity
• Urgency
• Value Comparison

ARTICLES (click to read)

• The Best Book on Negotiation
• The Seven Principles of Persuasion
  
• How to Persuade Like President Trump
  
• The 7 Deadly Sins Are 7 Keys to Persuasion
  
• Clickbait: Dissecting the Need to Stay Informed
• Now That's a Barnum Move!
• Sex Sells, But Fear is Stronger
• Fear, Sex & Cuts

Who Took the Christ out of Christmas?

When you see "Xmas" instead of "Christmas," what do you think? Are you one of the many people who has been persuaded that this is an affront to Christianity started by a cabal of heathens? Maybe you've lamented how secular December 25th has become and then declared with zeal, "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas!"

There's just one problem: Heathens didn't take the Christ out of Christmas. In fact, the opposite is true. As Daven Hiskey writes for Today I Found Out:

It turns out 'Xmas' is not a non-religious version of 'Christmas.' The 'X' is actually indicating the Greek letter 'Chi,' which is short for the Greek [Christos], meaning 'Christ.' So 'Xmas' and 'Christmas' are equivalent in every way except their lettering.

Who started it? According to Hiskey, it was "a very popular practice, particularly with religious scribes" from a millennium ago. This makes sense since one of the earliest Christian symbols was an abbreviation/combination of the first two Greek letters of Christos known as the Chi Rho (shown below). Now you know!

So why do people believe the 'heathens' myth? There are several persuasive elements to the story we can explore.

First, it fits a narrative created by religious persuaders to stir the passions of God-fearing folks. In their view, unbelievers are not just your ordinary citizen next door, they're part of a secret conspiracy to undermine the religious foundations of our nation.

Not helping matters are all the high-profile actions of certain atheist organizations. The only time many Christians hear or think about those of no faith is when some group purporting to represent them is protesting nativities or suing to remove the Ten Commandments from public places. This forms a lasting impression that readily comes to mind when a myth like the above is shared. Thanks to behavioral economics (i.e. Kahneman & Tversky), we have a name for this phenomenon: the "availability heuristic." When examples in support of a myth’s premise spring readily to mind, we will tend to overweight those examples and fail to think about counter-examples. The mind thinks, "Heathens are just the sort of people to do that kind of thing because of that protest and that other lawsuit I remember reading about.”

Finally, there's the psychology of myth-spreading in general. Think about so-called "urban legends" and how many people you know believe them. There are several reasons, but the most basic is that they spread via people we know and trust. In other words, they utilize Cialdini's sixth principle of persuasion (consensus aka social proof).

Let's say you go to church on Sundays. If several of your fellow parishioners, perhaps even the pastor himself, have used "Xmas" to help sermonize about "keeping the Christ in Christmas," that's all the proof a lazy mind needs to conclude that Grinch-like heathens are trying to steal the very letters from "Christmas."