Pre-suasion

By Rober Cialdini

The Frontloading of Attention

Pre-suasion = preparing the audience to be receptive of the message before they encounter it

What we present first changes the ay people experience what we present to them next.

- The effects of: large numbers, drawing lines length, hearing a French song

Pathos and Busemeter – quantum probability models to explain human judgments

Trust = one of the qualities that leads to compliance with requests, provided it has been planted
before the request is made.

Openers = frames, anchors, primes, mindsets, first impressions

The 6 psychological principles that are routinely deployed in prospering influence businesses:

1. Reciprocation
2. Liking
3. Social proof
4. Authority
5. Scarcity
6. Consistency

Pre-suasive opener ->> privileged moments

1. Privileged moments

The Positive Test Strategy – in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look
for hits rather than misses; for confirmation of the idea, rather than disconfirmation
*the factor that determines one’s choice is not the one that counsels most wisely, but the
one that has been elevated in attention mostly =>> focused attention
“There is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas”

*the illusion of multitasking meaning doing more things at once – it’s actually a rapid
alternation of focus

Erickson – “leaning in “experiment = people assign more significance to things they see
themselves choosing to move forward (ex: lowering voice)

*a biased form of questioning = single-chute questions – Are you happy?

2. The importance of attention…. Is importance

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is WHILE you are thinking about it” –
Kahneman
 Agenda-setting theory
*persuade by giving selected issues and facts better coverage than other issues and facts =>>
audiences devote greater attention to these to decide on a specific stance for an issue (ex:
media coverage)
Attention-shifting techniques:
- Seemingly dismissible information presented in the background captures a valuable kind of
attention, that allows for potent instances of influence (ex: background, display ads – also
has to do with the mere exposure effect)
- Benefits of focused attention: keep the focus UNITARY – do not compare to competitors

Satisfy satisficing suffice

Make it good make it gone

Make it good enough

3. What’s focal is causal

Consider-the-opposite technique  debiasing judgements

- What future events could make it go wrong?

- What happens if it does? What are the negative impacts?

The norm of social responsibility

- Example with offering people money to jump a queue

- We should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their needs
- Fiscal factors – because they are so visible, they are often less determining than they seem
- Social obligations + values + moral standards – because they are not readily observable, are
often MORE determining than they seem

- The interrogation
- You might be laying yourself open to tactics that have evolved over centuries to extract
incriminating statements from suspects, including blameless ones
- Position of the camera to equally show suspect and interrogator faces (move your chair) – fix
for what’s focal is causal effect
- Explanation for CEO’s causal position -> visually prominent, psychologically salient, and
assigned an unduly causal role in the course of events
4. Commanders of attention - The attractors
 There are features of information that draw attention simply by their nature:
Sexual stimuli and violent stimuli
 Higher chances of relationships breaking up if one partner is constantly checking
out other people
  Violence – dread risks: risky steps that people take to avoid harm from
something that is actually less risky : ex: 9/11 people switching to cars, London
bombing – people switching to bicycles
 Advertising presenting worst case scenarios of not using a product, instead of
focusing on the positive effects
 Sexual stimuli – used for a brand aiming to have consumers “Stand out”
 Violent stimuli – used for consumers to fit in for better chances of survival
=>> ad placed in the right context
Sexual: middle of romantic movie; violent: middle of violent movie
=>> the effectiveness of persuasive messages will be drastically affected by the
type of opener experienced immediately in advance.

 Pavlov’s dogs salivating = CLASSICAL CONDITIONING - THE ORIENTED

RESPONSE – senses, respiration, blood flow, skin moisture, heart rate (all bodily
adjustments
 The INVESTIGATORY REFLEX supersedes all other operations – same situations
when you go to a new room and forget why you went there
 “Cuts 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”
 “Rather than using cuts to direct attention to the most important facet, TV
advertisers have chosen to indiscriminately and dramatically increase the overall
frequency of scene shifts within ads by more than 50% in the last years” – which
ends up leaving the audience confused
 Distinctiveness shifts attention – Dream and Titan couch comparisons (one was
rated as better when it had a distinguishing factor in comparison with the rest)

5. Commanders of attention – The Magnetizrs

5.1 THE SELF
Use simple self-relevant cues (“you”) as openers
The next-in-line effect
5.2 THE UNFINISHED
While a task is in progress, a heightened level of cognitive focus must be reserved for it
The attention holding power that a lack of closure possesses – THE ZEIGERNIK EFFECT
5.3 THE MYSTERIOUS
a) Pose the mystery
b) Deepen the mystery
c) Hone in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative
explanations
d) Provide a clue to the proper explanation
e) Resolve the mystery
f) Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study
A. Einstein: “the most beautiful thing we can experience”, “the source of all true science and
art”
PROCESSES – the role of association
6. The primacy of associations
Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the
building blocks of thought.
- Use language that manages people’s mental associations with messages
- Linguistic devices:
o Verbs that draw attention to concrete features of a situation
o Adjectives that focus on traits
o Personal pronouns -> relationships
o Metaphors – frame a state of affairs
o Particular wording -> targeted thoughts (framing effect)
- Association based mental operations:
o Conditioning, categorisation, coordination, concept formation and object recognition
o Choice, learning, memory, inference, generalization, creativity, reading
comprehension, priming, attitude change
- Subtly exposing individuals to words that connote achievement (win, attain, succeed, master)
increases their performance on an assigned task and more than doubles their willingness to
keep working on it
- The right metaphor ex: insurance: “When you walk out, your insurance money walks in”
- Weight is metaphorically linked to seriousness, importance and effort
- Touching something warm -=> feeling warmer, closer to, more trusting of those around
- Niggardly = miserly, reluctant to spend
- Used car(wear and tear) = preowned (possession)
- Cost, price (loss) = purchase, investment (gain)
- Terminal vs gate
- Most damaging associations: untrustworthiness, lying, cheating
- Most favourable: the self
- Having something in common (birth date, name, birthplace) tends to make people more
cooperative with each other
- People prefer products with names that share letters of the alphabet from their own names
ex: Coca-Cola bottle naming
- The overvalued self isn’t always the personal self, but the social self
- Magazines in America = individual reader; in S Korea = linking to family or group
- The concept of “ease” – positive connection when we grasp something fluently, we not only
like that thing more, but believe it to be more valid and worthwhile ->> rhyme and poetry
example
o TO MAKE IT CLIMB, MAKE IT RHYME
- Greater liking for those with features easy to recognise, remember, or names easy to
pronounce
- Food detailed in difficult-to-process descriptions is seen as less tempting and difficult-to-read
claims are seen as less true.

7. Persuasive geographies
- Arranging physical environments persuasively to send us down selected associative pathways
towards desired ends.
- Internal self-persuasive geography
- The med student syndrome – concentration of attention on a specific region
 - “Lying in low level wait within each of us are units of experience that can be given sudden
standing and force if just divert our attention to them”
- Ex: cough, dizziness, nausea, headache
- Can also provide advantageous attitudes instead
- Increasing out joyfulness through self-influence
- The paradox of older people being happier – they decided they don’t have time to deal with
negativity
- How to foster happiness – Lyubomirsky
1. Count your gratitude at the start of every day. Write them down
2. Cultivate optimism by choosing to look on the bright side
3. Negate the negative by limiting time spent dwelling on problems
- Guiding preliminary attention = to move recipients into agreement to message even before
they experience it
- Features of inner geography can impact performance.
Ex: women trying tests in rooms with men + having to note their gender

8. The Mechanics of persuasion: causes, constraints and correctives

- mental activity firing up when Readied not when Ready
- Once an opener concept receives our attention, closely associated secondary concepts
become more accessible in consciousness. -> improves the chance of responding
Ex: showing nice image with couples people being more willing to help sense of
togetherness
How soon? Spontaneous
How far? Attention to first concept readies the 2nd for influence in proportion to the degree
of association between the two (ex: littering bill)
How manufacturable? No need for existing connection  can easily create new one ex:
advertising celebrity endorsements
- Just like Pavlov’s dogs, we can be susceptible to such strategically fashioned pairings and just
as clueless about our susceptibility
- An “if/when….then” plan
 What is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action
 The accessibility is influenced by the informational cues around us and our associations of
them

Recognising undesired influences can be enough to block them:

1. Reminders: good weather  posing a question can provide invaluable info to a recipient
2. Signs of stealthy persuasive intent  product placement  least likely choice

The optimisation of persuasion

 Reciprocation. Ex: free samples in stores
pre-suasion wise: need to give before receiving  can be quite risky
needs to be: MEANINGFUL + UNEXPECTED + CUSTOMISED
(ex: waitress chocolate, terrorist cookies)
 Liking: similarity, compliments
“people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”
  Social proof: “most popular”, “most of your fellow… already use it”
 Authority – trustworthiness
Weakness before strength - Pointing out flaws in promoted product/service
 Scarcity – our aversion to losing something of value increases the perceived value of
that something
 Consistency - Get someone to make a small step towards an idea or entity – activate
our desire for consistency in behaviour  take a larger step
Include a confirmation requirement in asking “So I’ll have you listed as coming,
okay?”

TIMING  Core motives model of social influence

1. Create a positive association
Reciprocity + liking
2. Reducing uncertainty – seeing a decision as wise
Social proof + authority
3. Motivating action
Consistency + scarcity

Moral licensing – a phenomenon that sometimes occurs when, after

reflecting on or performing a moral action such as helping, people feel
like they’ve earned the right to be selfish the next time they get the
chance (Monin and Miller)  counter to the commitment/consistency
effect

+ UNITY “That person is OF us” - shared identities

SELF – OTHER overlap – what brings it about?

a. Kinship
- Close genetic ties
- Employing keywords that associate with kinship: sisterhood, brothers, forefathers,
motherland, heritage
- Advise “as you would tell your family”

The merit of the arguments can be the message

The medium can be the message
The multitude can be the message
The messenger can be the message
The merger of self and other can be the message

b. Place
HOME Ex: Sugihara’s example – growing up in an inn where his parents were constantly
helping people  he helped out others in turn
LOCALITY ex: guard shooting no.11 instead of 10 who was from his home town
Ex: Andre Trocme’s story of petitioning friends and neighbours to help hide jews
The local dominance effect – people are highly susceptible to local voices (Zell and Alike,
2010)
REGION ex: story of the rabbi and the Japanese officials “We are Asian, just like you”
 ACTING TOGETHER In motoric, vocal or sensory ways, can be a substitute to being together
leads to LIKING (ex: experiment with white people watching blacks sipping water) and
SUPPORT (ex: walking in synchon)

Groups can promote unity, liking and subsequent supportive behaviour in a variety of
situations by first arranging for synchronous responding

What’s the general applicable mechanism that social entities could deploy to bring about
such synchrony to influence members towards group goals? MUSIC
o Shared musical engagement – children experiment

System engineering – two ways of assessing (one inhibits the other) = Kahnemann system 1
and 2
 Emotional “I feel this car it the right one for you”
Music included into this system “Anything too stupid to be spoken, is
sung” – Voltaire
“If you can’t make your case to an audience, sing it to them”
Ex: women’s weakness to musicians
 Rational “I think this car is the right one for you”

Music use in advertising  J Scott Armstrong

- Ask for advice, instead of opinions (brands)

o Co-creation feeling – THE IKEA EFFECT (something is perceived to have a higher value
if is produced by oneself)
o Feeling more linked to the brand

THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST UNETHICAL PRE-SUASION

- When you’re found, it will cost you much more than what you’ve earned through unethical
practices
- If believing you will not be found, have a look at the impact at organisational level
o Unethical climate  stressful climate  poor job performance
o Employee turnover
o Employee fraud and malfeasance (ex: in house unity effect)

HOW TO HAVE AN ENDURING EFECT

- Create lasting change by INSTALLING STRONG COMMITMENT

o Get personal commitments, usually in the form of altered behaviour
- Create lasting change by CUEING UP THE CUES
o Ex: bus cues – salespeople pitch

WHO WE ARE IN RESPECT TO ANY CHOICE, IS WHERE WE ARE, ATTENTIONALLY, IN THE MOMENT
BEFORE THE CHOICE.
A LIST OF PRE-SUASIVE TECHNIQUES

1. Seizing the right moment

1.1 paying attention to events rather than non-events “listen to what they didn’t say”
1.2 single-chute questions
1.3 inquire about targeted person, not targeted act (voter vs to vote)
1.4 elevate attention to intended focal point (ex: adventurous – energy drink)
1.5 making one concept prominent in consciousness supresses awareness of competing
concept (ex: meaning of words)
2. attention
2.1 the importance given to political issues is closely matched to the attention they recive in
the media  causes perceived importance
2.2 concentrated attention to a consumer item increases its judged worth by influencing
sectors of the brain that govern perceived value  focus on what to think about, not
what to think
2.3 backgrounds and banner ads
2.4 question about strongest product, without giving alternatives
2.5 more focus on how than on why (as individuals come closer to a matter)
3. focal  causal
3.1 louder voice, attention-grabbing clothing
3.2 income inequality  low trust
4. attractors
4.1 bad events are more impactful and memorable than good events
4.2 fear-arousing communication that contain action-step information
4.3 ads in the context of being separate/part of a group
4.4 plenty of cuts in advertising  draws more attention, however are less understood and
memorised – draw attention to a specific concept instead
4.5 move the product location throughout the ad
4.6 western societies – attention drawn to center and front of scene
eastern societies – attention drawn to background
5. magnetizers
5.1 for few months after birthdays, people are more likely to engage in healthy behaviours
5.2 set a range goal  feasible and challenging
5.3 first name inserted in a message with no shred of personal relevance  unlikely to work
5.4 persuasive impact is severely undermined if the influence agent is perceived as using
trickery
6. association
6.1 dirty money at farmer’s market
6.2 strong metaphors are persuasively compelling
6.3 connection between self and others (dates, birthplaces, first names, etc
 kinship, education level, values – have the strongest influences on behaviour
ex: 96% form submission when sender has same last name
6.4 rhyme as truth (MClone + Tofighbakhsh)
7. mechanics of pre-suasion
 7.1 chronically pre-fetched sources of info: social roles, cultural frames, self-identities,
personality orientation are not constantly enforced
 reminder of concept is necessary (ex: women taking math test)
7.2 correct judgments with correct questions (ex: good weather bias)
7.3 product placement – if done effectively, there is no negative attitude towards brands

obligation & gratitude  reciprocity (both lead to reciprocity)

sense of debt sense of appreciation

8. six roads to change

8.1 call from a new prospect : “I’ll connect you with our expert agent in your area of
interest”
8.2 argue against self-interest by divulging negative info about oneself/product/service
8.3 a piece of positive info that follows a negative piece of info it will be more effective
9. acting together
9.1 when directing attention to a piece of info, people do so with increased intensity if they
see that they are attending to it simultaneously with someone else. This will be the case
only if they have a “we” relationship with the other person.

10. Lasting change

10.1 In the case of personality-based influences, the cues have been placed in
consciousness by abiding elements such as genetic factors or life histories, which have
made the cues chronically more accessible
10.2 In the case of situationally based influences, the response-relevant cues are placed
into consciousness by recently encountered images, interactions, and events, which
make the cues temporarily more accessible