The Power of Persuasion and Pre-Suasion to Create Change – Transcript

00:08I'm Dr. Robert Cialdini, and as you can tell by the title of my presentation, I want to talk about two routes to producing change that you can use to produce change as a communicator. One is the familiar one of persuasion, which has to do with which psychological processes you put in to your message to move people in your direction.

00:31And the other, persuasion, is less familiar, we'll talk about that later, but let's talk about this first more familiar route to change. I'm on record as claiming that there are seven universal principles of persuasion, principles of influence, and if you include one or another of those principles into a message, you significantly increase the likelihood of ascent to that message. Now

00:59the word likelihood is crucial here because we're dealing with human behavior, there are no certainties in human behavior, but there are probabilities. And it's my claim that if you increase, that you can increase the likelihood that people will say yes to you if you include one or another of these seven universal principles of influence. So let's take a quick tour through them. The first is reciprocity. People give back to you the form of

01:26behavior you have first given to them because of the feeling of obligation to give back to those who have first given, people say yes to those they owe. Second principle is scarcity. If you can show people that what you have to offer them this idea, this product, this service, this opportunity is rare or unique or dwindling in availability, you significantly increase the likelihood

01:56that they will lend ascent to it. Next principle is authority. If you can show people that you have knowledge, that is expertise on a particular topic, or that what you are recommending is aligned with what experts, true authorities on the topic are recommending, they will be significantly more likely to say yes to that recommendation. Next principle is

02:22consistency. If you can ask people to take a small step in your direction, once they've done that, they will want to be consistent with what they have already said or done by saying yes to a larger request that is logically congruent with what they have already done. Next principle is liking. Nobody would be surprised to know that we prefer to say yes to

02:50those we like, but there are two small practices you can employ to increase the rapport that people feel with you when you make your request. One is to point to genuine similarities between the two of you. The other is to point to genuinely praiseworthy features of that person, give a compliment, and in both instances people will like

03:16you more and they will say yes to you more as a consequence. Finally, excuse me, next is the principle of social proof. One way people reduce uncertainty about what they should do in a situation is not to look inside themselves. If they're uncertain, that's not the place to go. It's to go outside of themselves and one place they look is to people around them, like them. If you can point out that many others are doing what you are

03:46suggesting or recommending, they will be more likely to do the same. And then finally is the principle of unity. People say yes to you if you can arrange for them to see you as sharing an important social identity with them, not just being similar to them in preferences or styles and this sort of thing, but

04:11being of them, being one of them, all kinds of barriers to influence drop under those circumstances. So I have to say that these principles have been good to me. I put each of them one to a chapter in a book I wrote that has become more successful than I could have sensibly imagined in not just the United States, but in 44 different languages that book has

04:38been published. For example, I have a colleague, a Polish colleague, Dr Wilhelmina Wozynska, who said to me, you know Bob, your book influence is so famous in Poland, my students think you're dead, which I thought was a sobering yet validating commentary on the book. So I was willing to coast along on the assumption

05:06that these seven principles provide the optimal way to be successful in any persuasive appeal until one Saturday afternoon when something happened that changed all of that.

05:22I answered a knock on my door to find a man who was asking me to contribute to a good cause after school programs for children in my school district. And I gave him a lot of money, more money than I normally give to people who come to my door, especially since he didn't show me any ID to indicate that he was from my school district. In fact, I gave him twice as much

05:50money as I normally do, even though he didn't use any of the universal principles of influence to spur me to that contribution. And I remember closing that door and leaning back against it and saying to myself, what just happened here, Chaldean? This guy didn't use any of your principles, but he got you to give twice as much money.

06:17And it occurred to me what he had done. He had used pre-suasion on me. Now in a minute I'll be more specific about exactly how he used it, but let me just describe what I mean by pre-suasion. Pre-suasion opens the door to persuasion, and it does so by arranging for recipients of a message

06:46to become sympathetic to it before they encounter the message. Now you might say, what is this? I'm kind of magic? Can you get people to agree with a message before they know what's in it? It's not magic. It's solid behavioral science, because for one reason, as a communicator, you know what's going to be in your message before you send it.

07:15And if you can arrange for your recipient to be in a state of mind that is aligned with the message that they are yet to receive when they do encounter that message, they will have been readied for it and will become more sympathetic to it as a consequence. Now there's a psychological reason

07:37why this works the way it does. When we perceive ourselves paying attention to a particular concept or idea, we presume that it must warrant that attention. It must be important enough in the scheme of things for us to deflect our attention to it.

08:05So by temporarily changing what people view as important by shifting their focus to it, we get them to perceive this concept or idea as more important before they receive the message that presents that idea. Daniel Kahneman was once asked, what's the most important insight that if people had

08:32in mind, if they knew this insight, it would help them most deal with the various experiences that they have in the world. And here's what he said, nothing is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

08:49In other words, if as a communicator you can bring recipients attention, focus of attention, get them thinking about a particular concept before you send a message that embodies that concept, they will have seen it as more important because they had been thinking about it. All right, well now we're in a position

09:16to explain further what happened to me that Saturday afternoon with that charity solicitor who got me to give twice as much money as I normally give to such a solicitor without using any of my principles. He didn't use social proof, he didn't say all your neighbors are doing this, he didn't use liking, he didn't praise my or compliment my landscaping, he didn't use authority by saying all the experts say it's very important for

09:45children to have after-school programs, didn't use any of that. Here's what he did persuasively to get me focused on the importance of those programs. He brought his seven-year-old daughter with him and he focused my attention on the challenges and difficulties and problems that children face after school when often their parents are working,

10:14they have to go and just sit in front of the TV or to some unfocused kind of experience, well if we give them these after-school programs now their problems will be solved. Well I had just been focused on children and the problems of children which elevated them in priority in my mind compared to the all the other

10:40ways that I could give money to help various causes. I think that's what happened. Well that's mine in theory, but let's see if we could explain how you might be able to use this process of persuasion to achieve various goals that you might have for yourself and others around you. Let's take as the first goal generating top performance from ourselves and from others.

11:07Common goal. How many of you have been in various business offices and seen signage like this, right, that urge achievement and and performance and conquering the problems and so on. These are very popular in call centers for example.

11:25Some of them have on the poster a word like achieve or win along with an image like these. Sometimes there's just the word, just achieve, conquer, overcome. Other times it's just a picture of an image that's associated with achievement like this one of a runner winning race. Well the researchers Chance and

11:50Latham did a pilot study that showed that this image elicits associations of achievement in the eyes of those who see it. So they decided to do an experiment in a call center located in a Canadian University, McGill University.

12:11These callers were to contact alumni and try to get them to donate to the university's general fund and in half of the cases the caller was given a tip sheet that included a series of tips for them to be sure to include in their appeal for donations.

12:32Things having to do with the importance of university programs and sustaining these programs and so on, the various tips. And for half of the individuals those tips were just on a plain sheet of paper. For the other half of the callers that those same tips were on a sheet of paper that had this image of a runner winning a race in the background. Let's see what Chance and Latham found