Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 164. Rethinks: Using "Pre-suasion" to Influence Others

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

The inner workings of social influence and persuasion.Want to change someone’s mind? First, explains Robert Cialdini, you have to change their framing.For Cialdini, the Regent's Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, persuasion begins before we even deliver our pitch or presentation. Through what he calls “Pre-suasion,” communicators can prime audiences to receive messages in a specific way, simply by drawing their attention in specific directions. “It involves focusing people on—putting them in mind of—those motivators before they encounter [them] in the communicator’s message,” Cialdini says, “bringing people’s focus of attention onto something that is nested in the message…before that message is delivered, so they have been readied for the concept.”In this episode, Matt Abrahams and Cialdini talk about the motivating power of FOMO, getting better advice from others, and how your next wine purchase could be influenced by what music is playing in the shop.Episode Reference Links:Robert CialdiniRobert's books: Influence / Pre-SuasionEp.11 The Science of Influence: How to Persuade Others And Hold Their AttentionEp.142 Power and Persuasion: Live Insights from Stanford Experts Original Episode: Ep.76 Change My Mind: Using “Pre-suasion” to Influence Others Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (03:42) - Persuasion and Pre-suasion (07:03) - Priming and Framing in Pre-suasion (09:44) - Understanding Scarcity (12:34) - The Unity Principle (15:50) - Social Proof and Influence (21:10) - The Role of Language in Persuasion (24:09) - The Final Three Questions (29:49) - Conclusion   ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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Their support allows us to bring you quality content free of charge. If you've ever thought, I know I can do more, but something's holding me back. You're not alone. Whether you're navigating career growth, seeking better balance, or wanting to communicate with more confidence, coaching can help you bridge the gap between intention and action. At strawberry.comme, you'll get matched with a professional coach who's trained to help you clarify your goals, build lasting confidence, and make intentional choices professionally and personally. This is not therapy. It's not consulting. It's a thought partnership designed to help you take action with more clarity and purpose.

I strongly believe in the value of coaching. All of us can benefit from the help of a coach. Visit strawberry.me slash smart to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.combe slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. Hi, Matt here. If you think about it, most of our communication attempts to influence and persuade others to our point of view. We're opening up our archive to bring you a best of episode where I speak with world-renowned persuasion researcher Robert Chaldini,

who discussed with me how we can be more effective in both our persuasion and persuasion. Listen in to help you get your point of view across better. Regardless of if you're pitching or presenting, teaching or sharing, at its core, communication is often about influencing and motivating others. Yet we don't often take time to think about how to hone and improve our persuasive practices. Today, we will dive deeply into the intricacies of influence. I am Matt Abrams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the Pops. Today, I am super excited to get a chance to chat with Robert Chaldeini.

Bob is the Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. His research and coaching focus on persuasion and social influence. He is the author of two amazingly popular and impactful books, influence and persuasion. And I have to admit, Bob is one of my academic heroes. As an undergrad, Bob was a guest lecturer in Phil's and Barrow. Bartow's popular class, the psychology of mind control. And after hearing Bob's lecture, I chose a graduate school program where I could do research into social influence. Welcome, Bob, and thanks for pointing me to a field of study that I have continued to be fascinated by.

Well, I'm looking forward to our interaction, Matt, and look forward to spending some time with you and your listeners. Great. Let's jump right in. To get started, can you define and decide? distinguish between persuasion and what you call presuasion. And what role does attention and motivation play in these concepts? Oh, good question. Let's start with motivation first, which is the functional component of persuasion. Persuasion involves putting into a message factors that motivate people to say yes, such as the quality of an item or its attractive price or its fit with the recipient's values or self-image or the fact that it's the most popular choice among their peers, those kinds of things. If you put those into a message, they motivate people toward

assent. Tension, on the other hand, is the functional component of pre-suasion. It involves focusing people on, that is putting them in mind of one of those motivators before they encounter it in the communicator's message. Let's take an example. There was a study done with a furniture store that had its specialty sofas. And for half of the visitors to the store, researchers arranged for them to go to a landing page that had as its back. It's back. And it's background, fluffy clouds. The other half of the visitors went to a different landing page. The content was identical, but its background was small coins, pennies. Then the researchers gave the visitors options of various sofas to choose.

What they found was that those who encountered fluffy clouds were more likely to choose for purchase comfortable furniture whereas those who were exposed to pennies were more likely to prefer for purchase inexpensive furniture.

So whichever motivator of behavior, in this case, quality or price, was made salient, was brought to consciousness before they ever encountered the request, to choose one or another of the kinds of sofas,

directed the visitors to the one that was high in consciousness, was most accessible to them at the time. And there's an interesting mediator of all of this, and that is that not only did these visitors choose more high-quality furniture or less expensive furniture, depending on which landing page they saw, those people who saw clouds rated comfort as more important to them in deciding what to choose in a sofa,

whereas those who saw the pennies rated cost as more important to them in their decisions. This is absolutely fascinating to me. So what you can do in advance of actually even issuing your message can influence people by managing their attention. In some ways, it's priming and framing, isn't it? It is. It's what I call using an opener, bringing people's focus of attention onto something that is nested in the message that is yet to come. before that message is delivered. So they have been ready for the concept.

It's become more cognitively accessible and more important in their minds. Here's an example that reinforced this idea. There was a study of a wine shop in which the proprietor played either German or French music under the music system as visitors came in. Those who heard French music

were more likely to buy a French vintage. Those who heard German music were more likely to buy a bottle of German wine because things German or things French had been made more accessible in consciousness and made to seem more significant or to have greater import for their decision because it was high in consciousness at the time.

This to me really expands what we as communicators should be thinking about when we are crafting our influential messages. So I'm thinking things like the room in which we speak, how we organize it, the images we put on the slides that we might use. Are these the sort of things you're thinking about that can really influence people before the messages arrive? Exactly. Let's say you have a meeting of people who are on your team

and you're trying to break through with a problem that has just resisted your attempts to solve it. You need to think broadly about it. You need to think expansively about this topic rather than stay located in the frames of the approach you were taking. It turns out if you go into a room with high ceiling, and big windows, that expanse of the environment causes people to think more expansively and creatively. That's great.

I wonder now that we're all virtual, or many of us are still virtual, if the background image we put behind us might be influential. I think there's just so many things that we could play with now. And you've opened up a sandbox here that we can be thinking about these things. Wonderful. That's great. Presuasion is really, really fascinating to me, and I appreciate you illuminating that for us. You know, I shared that you had a big impact on my choice when I went to graduate school, but my interest in persuasion actually started when I was a young boy.

I vividly remember my father reading a newspaper back in the day when people actually read newspapers in paper, and he was laughing from behind the paper, and I asked him what he was laughing at. He showed me a comic strip. And in the comic strip, there was a picture of a father with his arm around his son pointing at a store that the father clearly owned. And across the store was the sign going out of business sale. And the caption read, Someday, son, this will all be yours. And I was befuddled. I didn't understand why my father found that so funny. And he explained it to me that the store was perpetually going out of business, that it was a marketing ploy to get people to come in. And that was my first introduction to the idea of scarcity. And in your book, Influence, you identify scarcity as a technique among others. And I'm wondering if you can take a moment to explain how that technique works and how you've seen it used today. People want more of those things they can have less of. Thing that is scarce, rare, dwindling, and availability becomes more attractive. And one major

reason is loss aversion. I mean. The prospects of losing something of value are twice as potent in motivating action than the prospects of gaining that very same resource. So in the case of loss, loss is the ultimate form of scarcity. It means you can't have it anymore. So people want those things that are dwindling in availability or scarcerer, you know, the acronym FOMO, fear of missing out. That's essentially what I think is a major part of why scarcity works

as powerfully as it does. So people can manufacture scarcity to motivate action in the direction that they want. And companies can as well. I mean, if you look at eBay, most of the exciting action, happens as those auctions are coming closer and closer to ending. Is that all correct? That's exactly right. In addition to scarcity, you highlight six other principles of persuasion, reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and unity. And we'll provide some links in our show notes to help everybody explore those in more detail. But I'd like to ask you to talk more about unity, which is the newest of your principles, and one that I think is particularly salient in our current cultural and political climate. What is the unity principle,

and how does it work exactly? People say yes to you if you can show them that you share with them an important personal or social identity. That is that you're a member of one of their we group, the groups that they use the term we to describe, right, to characterize. In other words, that you're not just like them that is similar, but you're of them. You're one of them.

And in the boundaries of those we groups, all resistance to influence declines. Let me give you an example. There was a study done on a university campus. Researchers took a young woman who was about college age, dressed like a college student, asked her to set up a table for the United Way on a heavily trafficked area of campus

and request people who are walking by to donate to the United Way. And because she looked similar to them, she was getting some contributions. But if she added one sentence to her request, she got four and a half times as many contributions. So what was the sentence? It was, I'm a student here too. I'm one of you. And people don't say no.

They don't. They don't reject the people who are of them. nearly as much as the people who are outside of those boundaries. And I'll tell you, these categories, these personal or social identities, can be ethnic, shared ethnic, or political, or religious, or community, or workplace, or even athletic team identities. I'll give you a personal example. I grew up in the state of Wisconsin

where the NFL football team there is the Green Bay Packers. So I grew up a Green Bay Packer fan. And a while ago, I saw an article in the newspaper that two musical artists, Justin Timberlake and Lil Wayne, were avid Green Bay Packer fans. And Matt, I immediately thought better of their music.

More importantly, I wanted them to succeed more. I'd like to move on, and I have always loved your creative research methodologies that you've used. Can you explain for our listeners how studying hotel towel use and stealing from national parks helped you identify how social norms can be used to influence people? Let's take the hotel study first. I remember being in a hotel room, this is several years ago, in seeing one of these cards that asked us to reuse our towels in linen, it's a hanging card usually in the bathroom somewhere on a doorknob or a towel rack,

and it often has a picture of some endangered woodland species of snow owls or something like this, and asking us to reuse our towels for the sake of the environment. And, you know, I'm a persuasion researcher. I'm a social influence researcher, and I'm always looking for places to study social influence. And I remember looking at this card and saying to myself, you know how it's a lot of there are these signs you see that say this space available for rent or this space available for lease on buildings and so on. I looked at that card and I said to myself, this space available for test. What could we say on the card? We can include all kinds of appeals besides do this for

the environment and to see which was most powerful. And so we did this. with various hotels. We had the cooperation of the managers, and we went into hotel rooms and randomly assigned various kinds of cards that were the same except for the recommendation. Please do this for, right? And the environment was one.

Please do this for future generations was another. But the one that made the most difference was the majority. the majority of guests who stay in this hotel have reused their towels, and that produced a significant increase in the willingness of people to reuse their towels. But even more interesting, we got a more significant effect if we said not just the majority of visitors to our hotel have reused their towels. the majority of visitors who've stayed in this room every year. We got significantly more now.

Because the principle we're talking about is the principle of social proof that if a lot of other people are doing something, it validates the behavior, makes it more correct. But if those people are comparable to us, staying in the same room, now that's not unity, that's just similarity here. They're like us, right? Well, that makes their behavior even more diagnostic of what we should do.

I have seen those signs in hotel rooms, in fact, just recently. And every time I think of you in that research, every time I put my towel back up rather than put it on the floor to go out, I think of that research. And how is this related to work you did in the petrified forests in Arizona? So at the petrified forest that is in Arizona, it's a national treasure, there's a big sign that appears as you enter the forest that uses this principle of social proof in an entirely wrongheaded way. It says so many people have been stealing petrified wood from the forest floor that's endangering the integrity of the forest. I know what the generators, the producers of that sign were intending, but they made a serious mistake in telling people that all of their peers steal. So what we did was to go into the park at different pathways and put up a sign

that essentially said, so many people have been doing this, it's problematic for the forest. Please don't be one of them. And on the sign, there were a picture of three people. stealing wood, picking up wood from the forest. That sign nearly tripled theft. You were teaching them how to steal. That's right. That it was a legitimate thing to do. It was okay. Everybody does this, right? We had another sign that instead of normalizing theft, marginalized it, That sign said if even one person steals from the forest, it undermines the integrity of the park. And we showed a single person picking up petrified word.

That sign halved theft compared to a control group. I find both those studies very fascinating. And they highlight how we can leverage social purpose. proof and norms to increase the likelihood of our persuasive success. It leads me to my next question because, in essence, the manipulations you were doing in both of those studies was changing wording and images. I'm curious to learn your thoughts about the role of language and wording and how they play out in persuasion.

Does word choice really matter? You know, let's begin with language. It worked for persuasion. Let's say you have an idea that you would like to move up the ladder in your organization because you think it's a terrific initiative that would help all concerned. But to do that, you need to get the buy-in of your colleagues before you, the ladder. And what you often will do is show them a summary of your idea or a blueprint and ask for their opinion on it to get their input. Getting their input is very important. It's the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do is to ask for their opinion.

Because when you ask for opinion, you get a critic. You get someone who steps back from you and goes inside, interest. to examine the pros and cons and the critique that he or she can deliver for your idea. If instead you activate the principle of unity by changing one word, instead of asking for that person's opinion, you ask for that person's advice on your idea. Now instead of getting a critic, you get a partner. you get somebody who's in it with you.

You get somebody who's a collaborator. And research shows that if you use the word advice rather than opinion, not only do you get more favorable evaluations of your idea, you get better input from them as to how to modify and improve your idea. just by simply changing one word, one word. You change the entire interaction and actually get more of what you were really looking for. That is fascinating. And it all has to do with the associations to that word.

The associations to opinion are critique. The associations to advice are part. partnership based. So we really do have to be mindful of the words we choose to help drive in the direction we are trying to achieve with our persuasion or our influence. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge.

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Are you up for that? Sure. Excellent. Okay. If you were to capture the best communication advice you have ever received as a five to seven word presentation slide title, what would it be? Don't have a favorite go-to. persuasive approach. Don't think, oh, scarcity, I'm always going to use

or don't think, oh, I'm always going to use social proof. No, no, you use the one that's in there. It's a fool game to think that the same approach will be optimal across settings and circumstances and populations. No, it won't. The way to be ethical and effective is to say, is there truly scarcity here, then I get to use it. Is there true authority here, science-based information that I have? Bring that to the surface. Is there true popularity or social proof involved?

Mention that inside your message. So there's several components of what I heard you say. One is be aware of your circumstance and adjust to it. So understand which of these tools is available to you ethically in the moment. and then don't rigidly lock into just one way of doing it. So part of it is awareness and then part of it is making use of what is available to you there. So let me move on to my second question. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? Right now, I'd say Greta Thunberg.

She's overcome certain cognitive and affective abnormalities, Asperger's depression, to become powerful communicator for the environment. And she lives her commitment to it, leading by example. And her messages are very clear and moving as well. Right. He really understands what gets through by stripping away the message to its purest form. And my final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Credibility, ethics, and application. Credibility, ethics, and application. Can you give us a sentence or two on each of those? Because those seem so foundational and important. Credibility, you have to be seen as someone who knows what he or she is doing, has the background, experience, credentials, to be somebody to listen to. Secondly, to maintain the ethics of the communication and the durability of the relationship. You can't fall people.

They won't come back. Have you ever been, have you ever found yourself being tricked into something by someone or product, service, communicator, politician, whatever. And then would you ever listen to that person again? Absolutely not. And in fact, I'd actively warn people against it. So part of a successful communication recipe is not just in the moment, but in the long term.

How do we maintain relationships in which people are willing to listen to us and follow our recommendations? And then finally, application. We have to give people a reason to listen to us, that there's something that they can now do with this piece of information that we've given them or this product or service that will be a fit to them will lead to positive outcomes for them.

We have to show them that. Well, thank you, Bob. It has been a great pleasure to chat with you and to learn from you and receive your advice. And thank you again for the influence you've had personally on my academic career and for helping all of us to become better at understanding the elements that go into successful persuasion and persuasion. It has been a true pleasure to chat with you. I enjoyed it, ma'am.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about influence, please listen to Episode 11 with Zad. Zach Tourmala, in episode 142, where several Stanford professors share their thoughts on power and persuasion. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Ibrahims. Our music is by Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and check out Faster,

smarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.