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Scott Adams: Godzilla!!!

By Scott Adams
September 6th, 2016 @ 10:33am in #Trump #Clinton #pre-suasion #influence #robert cialdini

Read this short article** ( http://tinyurl.com/hvyujw9 ) then read this new book ( http://tinyurl.com/z26etkz ) by Robert Cialdini (the Godzilla of persuasion).

Seriously. Change your plans. Read this book. Thank me later.



http://blog.dilbert.com/post/150032856301/godzilla
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** Being that a subscription is required to read the article, I have posted it below for your convenience:


Persuasion tactics fit for a presidential campaign

Psychologist and business book author Robert Cialdini on how to sway people


Emphasising the dark side: Hillary Clinton © Getty

by: Lucy Kellaway
12 hours ago

At some point in the spring, when Bernie Sanders had lost any chance of winning the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton’s campaign suddenly started to perk up. According to Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and contrarian pundit, much of the improvement was due to one simple word: dark. Clinton’s team had made a point of using this word to describe Donald Trump’s speeches — thus inciting voters to engage in a little confirmation bias. Next time they saw him kiss a baby or do anything at all, they would think: how dark.

The man behind this strategy — at least on Mr Adams’ telling of the story — is Robert Cialdini, professor at Arizona State University and author of Influence, one of the best-selling books on behavioural psychology ever. This week he publishes Pre-Suasion, in which he argues that people spend too much time fretting about the message itself, and not enough about what goes on immediately before they deliver it.

So when I rang Mr Cialdini to ask if he was helping Mrs Clinton, what he did in the moment before he replied struck me as unusually important. This amounted to a longish pause, and an intake of breath. Very slowly he said: “It’s my policy not to speak about any campaign that’s ongoing. The emotions are too deep.”

So what about the 2012 Obama campaign, which he was also said to have helped on? “There were some brilliant strategies used of pre-suasion — whenever Obama took the stage, there were always faces behind him representing every demographic — the message was a lot of people think it’s like you.”

Was this staging his idea? “I don’t want people to see this as a Svengali intervention,” he says.

Yet the concept of pre-suasion is not very Svengali at all. George du Maurier’s great manipulator would surely feel contempt for anything so obvious. If you want to get someone to do something, it is self-evident that you need to get them in the right frame of mind first.

“It is common knowledge,” Mr Cialdini admits. “But It is not common practice. People don’t register that what they say first changes the experience of what they say next.”

One of few to deploy such a strategy is Warren Buffett, whose annual letters to shareholders are a case study in pre-suasion. “I’ve been getting his letters for 15 years, and I’ve noticed he’s learnt to do certain things.”

One trick is to start by mentioning something that went wrong, to get his audience on his side. “He tells us something designed to damp enthusiasm, so we believe the next things he says.”

Another brilliant piece of pre-suasion was in a recent letter in which he addressed the ticklishmatter of succession. Mr Buffett introduced the subject by saying: “I will tell you what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future.” By gratuitously dragging his family into it, he ensures that every reader would take what followed as gospel.

Our susceptibility to pre-suasive techniques appears to be hard-wired into us. Mr Cialdini’s favourite study was conducted on 18-month-old infants who were variously shown images of a single person and pairs of people. After looking at the pictures, the infants were asked to pick up things that had been dropped on the floor. The babies who had been shown pictures of a single person were three times less likely to co-operate than those who had been shown pictures of groups. “I’m glad I was sitting down when I read that,” he says. “It proved that if we drew background attention to an idea it is more important to us.”

One of the easiest ways of getting someone to focus on something is making them look at it, and once they do that, what they see assumes a larger significance than it otherwise would.

In one experiment two people were having an argument and were watched by another pair, one of which looked at one combatant, the other at the other. In every case, the spectators gave greater importance to the person whose face that they could see, and judged them to have won the argument.

The conclusion sounds obvious, and yet we hardly ever act accordingly. In a meeting, if we have something important to say, the usual thing is to sit next to the person chairing it. This turns out to be the worst possible place as they cannot see you — instead, anyone wanting to be heard must sit directly opposite the person who is leading the meeting.

Our susceptibility to the most basic cues is proved by test after test. Motivational pictures and slogans genuinely (and depressingly) appear to encourage people to do drastically better. “If you show people doing an analytical task a picture of Rodin’s thinker, 41 per cent more get correct answers,” Mr Cialdini says.

A college in the US that was trying to raise the grades of women sitting science subjects found that if the exams were invigilated by prominent women scientists — or if there were pictures of such women on the walls, the grades went up. The same, he says, could be applied in a corporate setting. Companies should display images of important female leaders, and if they don’t employ any such people they should borrow someone else’s.

“They could have pictures of women executives at other firms,” he suggests, implying that Sheryl Sandberg should adorn the walls at LinkedIn, or Mary Barra at Ford. “Women need to see pictures of what is possible,” he says.

Mr Cialdini himself uses pictures to pre-suade himself to do a better job. Whenever he is writing, he puts a picture of the person he is writing it for on the corner of his screen. “I want that low-level reminder, that cue to make the language and the diction in line with that audience.”

Failing photographs, particular words can work too. If you have presented an idea to someone at work 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.”

Some words do good, while some words can do damage. When Mr Cialdini was asked to give a talk to employees at SSM Health, he was told that the non-profit medical group had banned bullet points — not the blobs themselves but the word bullet, which was deemed out of line with their caring values. Mr Cialdini at first thought this silly, but subsequent research proves that all violent imagery has a powerful effect on behaviour.

While SSM Health was manipulating behaviour to good ends, what about those that use pre-suasion techniques for bad ones? Mr Cialdini reassures himself that it is never in companies’ interests to engage in unethical pre-suasion, as it makes employees behave badly, leads to long-term financial decline and is potentially ruinous to a company’s reputation. He may be right in the very long term, but in the meantime it leaves plenty of scope for Svengali.