"Pre-suasion" is another word for priming.[1] Incidentally, priming is one of the most prominent areas of social science that was once considered solid, but has now become under increased scrutiny due to failed replications.[2][3]
And it has the potential to fail catastrophically for the guy doing this, too.
Can anyone still take the other side in a negotiation (or any other situation, really) seriously if it becomes know that they're trying to pull this parlor trick? Whoever is found out doing this would seem both ridiculous and repellent.
I've seen several references to the "replication crisis" in social sciences. Are there any prominent studies that have been replicated reliably? I'm just curious to look into them.
not a subject matter expert, but there doesn't seem to be controversy around the original concept of "priming speeds up recognition of related words". What seems to be controversial is priming modifying how things are interpreted, or even decision making. On the other hand, anchoring seems to be well accepted, and anchoring isn't far off from this version of priming.
I am reminded of the DoD funded paper out of UCLA on using MRIs to aide in the production of Middle Eastern focused, Pentagon directed social media propaganda using "pre-suasion" [1].
The paper states that three general categories of tactic are used to "pre-suade" civilians that may be otherwise on the lookout because they think someone may be trying to influence them (in which case cognitive defense mechanisms come into play).
The paper summarizes that a few techniques can be used in an attempt to circumvent active and alert defenses:
1. "affirmation" - attaching your message to something that the target wants to affirm or reaffirm and including your new information along with old information.
2. "resource depletion" - providing so much information or stimulation or messaging that the target is 'exhausted' of trying to resist the message and relaxes into coping with it.
3. "narrative persuasion" - masking the message or information in a story with which the target self-identifies, therein allowing the message to seem like legitimate material to the target.
All interesting, and perhaps accurate, except the very case mentioned, U.S. ability to influence opinion in the Middle East, is a good example of the limitations. I would not call our situation with regard to popular opinion in the Middle East in the last few years an unqualified success. Sometimes other things matter a lot more then your "pre-suasion". I think in a lot of cases these sorts of techniques get called in too late, and asked to do too much, to rescue a PR disaster.
The problem with all this nudging and using of biases to influence people is that it is hardly better than spicing their drinks with drugs to make them more complacent and willing to agree.
In my personal experience, being honest and reasonable, sticking to the facts and presenting good arguments have worked better in the long run than any eristic tricks. It depends, though, there are some fields where arguments do not really count and people are fairly irrational anyway, so I don't want to condemn these methods in general. Just as a tendency, it seems better to take other people seriously rather than only as allies or antagonists and as mere means to an end.
>The problem with all this nudging and using of biases to influence people is that it is hardly better than spicing their drinks with drugs to make them more complacent and willing to agree.
Funny that you mention that, because one of the recommended, "ethical" techniques mentioned in Influence is to serve caffeine to make the other party more compliant.
I agree with your personal experience, and I also dislike such methods. That said, I'm reminded of what I recently read in "Getting to Yes", which commented on underhand tactics. While not recommending them (and refraining from opinionating on morals), the book pointed out some things to consider; particularly:
- whether or not the other side is someone you'll want to maintain a longer-term relationship with
- how use of such methods affects your reputation as a negotiator
You might notice that this is, in fact, an promotion for the author's book. If it manages to persuade you to buy it, then we can say that he's a reliable source of information on persuasion, since he successfully persuaded you. If he didn't, then good job avoiding this snake-oil meta-salesman, how could you trust him if he couldn't even sell a book? Either way, well done, you have made the correct choice!
Cialdini is a salesman with credentials who's spent most of his time studying good salesmen and selling other salesmen on the idea of learning how to sell better.
At the end of his big bestseller Influence, he goes into a long-winded moralization about how he hopes his work helps people resist the terrible influence of immoral salesmanship... for example by being mindful of the "secret weapons" of Social Proof and Authority and Scarcity.
of course, he writes this in a book (a NATIONAL BESTSELLER as it says on the cover) that is literally covered in testimonials and promotional blurbs from "thought leaders" with credentials, mainstream publications like HBR and Fortune, praising Cialdini, PHD for revealing "little known secrets of Master Influencers" yada yada yada.
>If it manages to persuade you to buy it, then we can say that he's a reliable source of information on persuasion, since he successfully persuaded you.
Good catch. I did not notice he had written the article.
Well sure, buying the book may show he's a reliable source of information on persuasion.
But, you know, being a very widely cited researcher may show it better. :-) I've encountered references to his work in many places.
I think an important offshoot of this is to use specific language and ideas prior to your argument not to necessarily influence someone to the coming argument against their better judgement, but to actually free them to use accurate judgement.
I have no idea if it works, but I often try to lead gently into my arguments here. I try not to make too many assumptions about what the reader will think about the prerequisites for my argument, and so go through my assumptions about them and why I believe them, and then present my actual argument. It's my hope this somewhat softens the natural tendency to ignore evidence and claims counter to their own beliefs by presenting supporting evidence they might agree with first. This is a simple concept and one I'm sure many people use, whether they are specifically working around what they see as a deficit of human rationality like me, or just because they think it's effective (if it is!).
What I think is important about this is that it's an example of how we can use our cognitive biases for good. We can pit them against each other to open ourselves up to the more rational sides of our minds. It's important we don't associate all forms of manipulating our minds through presentation negatively through labeling. It's easy to say it's manipulation, and manipulation is bad, but that's just falling prey to another one of our cognitive biases, where we group similar things, and transfer attributes between them, whether they apply or not. It's very important we as a specifies learn from our weaknesses, and try to mitigate them, not just paper over them like they aren't there. I think the future is bleak if we don't.
I don't know if you used the technique on your own post but I find my self strongly agreeing with it ;)
Every technique, every tool, every idea can used for "good" and "bad". A problem I see is the massively overpowered tendency of the personal gains seekers and market winners and profit hunters to engross and harmfully misuse _everything_ for their gains. It makes me seek to discover how helpful and constructive ideas/techniques are violated (bcos they are only very shallowly understood) and used _against_ people. Quite often I find this has to do we the ethics an area is entertaining. So therapists, social workers f.e. will use those tools differently and in a more constructive way than ppl. in the Biz-World bound only to "Biz-Ethics".
"Priming" covers a lot of ground. At one end of the spectrum, there are fairly straightforward lexical priming effects. You can recognize the (scrambled/faint/etc) word "Banana" faster if you've been previously primed to think about fruit. These effects are pretty robust (at least as far as I know) and are fairly consistent with some models of memory.
At the other end of the spectrum are these embodied cognition experiments that fall back on "priming" as an explanation. For example, people allegedly walk more slowly after being primed with words related to old age, or view others as being more "warm" if the subject hands them a hot beverage. These typically do not replicate well and tend to fall back on vague, handwavey theories.
Any worthwhile scientific study is going to consist of highly controlled experiments that are designed to answer very specific questions.
To apply research results to negotiation/persuasion scenarios "in the wild" would be intractably difficult because the situations are going to be utterly uncontrolled.
By the same token, I don't think that it's reasonable to dismiss "priming" as a practical business communication tactic just because it isn't easy to perform a repeatable experiment about it.
This reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", which is terrific but probably oversells some of the research results.
Anyone know how well this new psychology stuff is surviving the replication crisis in the humanities?
Edit to add: less charitably, it also reminds me of Scott Adams' rambling blog posts about Donald Trump. Adams has persuaded himself that this persuasion stuff is like magic, and applies it to everything he sees. It's the new astrology.
> Anyone know how well this new psychology stuff is surviving the replication crisis in the humanities?
As a snarky rule of thumb, I'd say the likelihood of a study replicating is inversely proportional to the likelihood of a study showing up in a a TED Talk.
If someone claims that you can make people like you more by handing them hot drinks, or radically change their views on a topic with a brief conversation, I'd be skeptical. However, there still are a lot of people doing solid behavioral work that doesn't make a huge splash in the popular press.
I'm pretty sure Scott Adams is mentally unraveling with all the mental gymnastics he's going through projecting an image that he's not a Trump supporter.
If you're at all interested in psychology and the human mind, I highly recommend Cialdini's earlier book, Influence. It has some absolutely amazing insights into how people persuade and influence each other, and is one of the few non-fiction books I've read several times.
Odd thesis. Whatever comes before will influence how people perceive what comes after. Uses example of seeing clouds or coins; then buying a sofa. Those that saw soft things, bought softer sofas. Hm. I'm having trouble imagining how they measured that.
Then the opposite example is used - a queen says "I have a weak body but" and then excites the troops to battle. How is that similar? Its the opposite. They 'explain' it by suggesting the truthfulness of the initial statement establishes the truthfulness of the following statements. Very meta.
This sounds weak. Either 'pre-suasion' works one way or it doesn't? Which is it? I don't think the OP understood what they were saying. In fact, I think they made the whole thing up.
The "pre-suasion" in the Queen's case was to build trust (through disarming honesty) before attempting to convince the troops to believe in her strength.
The basic idea is that you shouldn't just jump right into the message you're trying to deliver, but first prime your audience to hear it. There are many ways to do this, not just one.
What I'm about to say is pretty hand-wavy (pre-suasion), but this concept of pre-suasion is important for when you are interviewing, or being interviewed for a job. Let's say you are interviewing someone for a position in your company, and you don't have an exact job description and set of requirements for that role; you are just looking to hire someone "good". That person can actually pre-suade you into overvaluing some skill, or aspect of their skill set that they want you to focus on. They can frame the argument in your mind as to whether you want to hire them on not based on an argument of their choosing. For example, they can make the argument in your mind that they are a fast developer, then the internal argument in your mind becomes whether they are truly fast or not, and if you are convinced that they are fast, then they become much more likely to be hired by you. This is not the best example, but it's a common sales tactic called "framing" the argument.
This is an area where being decent at deflecting into a personal area of expertise can be really effective.
And sometimes it doesn't require a deflection - if someone asks me about my favorite data structure, it's easy to go on for fifteen minutes about the beauty and utility of either union-find or Voronoi diagrams.
The author of the article is according to Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert comic strips) currently consulting for Hillary Clintons campaign. It will be interesting to see on 9th of November if his strategy worked or not.
> ... before the description of strengths, he declared with characteristic sincerity that what he was about to assert was “what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future.”. The result was a flood of favorable reaction to the letter ... as well as a per-share increase for the year of nearly five times that of the S&P.
I like Buffet but this kind of mythologizing doesn't help anyone. The report in question was the 2014 report (http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2014ltr.pdf) which is typically released in Feb of the following year (so early 2015). BRK.A underperfomed the S&P500 in the following year.
BRK.A did outperform the S&P500 in 2014, but unless I'm missing something, the author is attributing the performance in 2014 to the reaction to a letter released in early 2015.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through "Pre-suasion". It's a bit of a chore; you can definitely tell the author is an academic. But the content is a treasure trove. I have a feeling I'll be referring to it again and again.
I like to know about these kinds of tricks so that it is harder for people to use them against me. But I would hate to find myself using them against another person. It's dishonest and disrespectful.
My guideline is pretty simple: Would I be upset if someone used this tactic on me? If so, I shouldn't use it either.
I think the keys to winning people over are pretty simple, right? Kindness, authenticity, and making a good case for yourself (or whatever you're trying to persuade them on). People really don't respond well to any kind of manipulation tactic- you may find yourself winning the battle, but losing the war. I think if people can tell that you're owning a weakness in an authentic way, and then presenting a strength in an equally authentic way, that can be a good persuasion technique. However, if you're just bs'ing people to win them over, they will sense it, and you will fail.
I haven't read his book, but if anyone is curious on these experiments, you can read more on the following books (In fact, the article seems a mash of both of them):
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - The author mentions experiments where people exposed to more agressive or relaxed interactions can react differently and many other situations (similar to the money/cloud backgrounds examples).
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Describes interaction strategies to avoid conflicts and create trust (such as the letter example).
The thing is, you never know when someone is going to see through it and lose respect for you for using a tactic that's more transparent than you think.
[+] [-] hammock|9 years ago|reply
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) [2]http://www.chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/ [3]http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/Ramscar-Shaoul-Baa...
[+] [-] tpeo|9 years ago|reply
Can anyone still take the other side in a negotiation (or any other situation, really) seriously if it becomes know that they're trying to pull this parlor trick? Whoever is found out doing this would seem both ridiculous and repellent.
Like a pickup artist.
[+] [-] deegles|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kevinpet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihaveahadron|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jwtadvice|9 years ago|reply
The paper states that three general categories of tactic are used to "pre-suade" civilians that may be otherwise on the lookout because they think someone may be trying to influence them (in which case cognitive defense mechanisms come into play).
The paper summarizes that a few techniques can be used in an attempt to circumvent active and alert defenses:
1. "affirmation" - attaching your message to something that the target wants to affirm or reaffirm and including your new information along with old information.
2. "resource depletion" - providing so much information or stimulation or messaging that the target is 'exhausted' of trying to resist the message and relaxes into coping with it.
3. "narrative persuasion" - masking the message or information in a story with which the target self-identifies, therein allowing the message to seem like legitimate material to the target.
[1] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf
[+] [-] rossdavidh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|9 years ago|reply
In my personal experience, being honest and reasonable, sticking to the facts and presenting good arguments have worked better in the long run than any eristic tricks. It depends, though, there are some fields where arguments do not really count and people are fairly irrational anyway, so I don't want to condemn these methods in general. Just as a tendency, it seems better to take other people seriously rather than only as allies or antagonists and as mere means to an end.
[+] [-] SilasX|9 years ago|reply
Funny that you mention that, because one of the recommended, "ethical" techniques mentioned in Influence is to serve caffeine to make the other party more compliant.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|9 years ago|reply
- whether or not the other side is someone you'll want to maintain a longer-term relationship with
- how use of such methods affects your reputation as a negotiator
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TruthSHIFT|9 years ago|reply
Can you also pre-suade someone and then present an honest and reasonable argument?
[+] [-] tgb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingbat|9 years ago|reply
At the end of his big bestseller Influence, he goes into a long-winded moralization about how he hopes his work helps people resist the terrible influence of immoral salesmanship... for example by being mindful of the "secret weapons" of Social Proof and Authority and Scarcity.
of course, he writes this in a book (a NATIONAL BESTSELLER as it says on the cover) that is literally covered in testimonials and promotional blurbs from "thought leaders" with credentials, mainstream publications like HBR and Fortune, praising Cialdini, PHD for revealing "little known secrets of Master Influencers" yada yada yada.
[+] [-] BeetleB|9 years ago|reply
Good catch. I did not notice he had written the article.
Well sure, buying the book may show he's a reliable source of information on persuasion.
But, you know, being a very widely cited researcher may show it better. :-) I've encountered references to his work in many places.
[+] [-] kbenson|9 years ago|reply
I have no idea if it works, but I often try to lead gently into my arguments here. I try not to make too many assumptions about what the reader will think about the prerequisites for my argument, and so go through my assumptions about them and why I believe them, and then present my actual argument. It's my hope this somewhat softens the natural tendency to ignore evidence and claims counter to their own beliefs by presenting supporting evidence they might agree with first. This is a simple concept and one I'm sure many people use, whether they are specifically working around what they see as a deficit of human rationality like me, or just because they think it's effective (if it is!).
What I think is important about this is that it's an example of how we can use our cognitive biases for good. We can pit them against each other to open ourselves up to the more rational sides of our minds. It's important we don't associate all forms of manipulating our minds through presentation negatively through labeling. It's easy to say it's manipulation, and manipulation is bad, but that's just falling prey to another one of our cognitive biases, where we group similar things, and transfer attributes between them, whether they apply or not. It's very important we as a specifies learn from our weaknesses, and try to mitigate them, not just paper over them like they aren't there. I think the future is bleak if we don't.
[+] [-] pointernil|9 years ago|reply
Every technique, every tool, every idea can used for "good" and "bad". A problem I see is the massively overpowered tendency of the personal gains seekers and market winners and profit hunters to engross and harmfully misuse _everything_ for their gains. It makes me seek to discover how helpful and constructive ideas/techniques are violated (bcos they are only very shallowly understood) and used _against_ people. Quite often I find this has to do we the ethics an area is entertaining. So therapists, social workers f.e. will use those tools differently and in a more constructive way than ppl. in the Biz-World bound only to "Biz-Ethics".
[+] [-] davemabe|9 years ago|reply
See: http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/Ramscar-Shaoul-Baa...
[+] [-] mattkrause|9 years ago|reply
At the other end of the spectrum are these embodied cognition experiments that fall back on "priming" as an explanation. For example, people allegedly walk more slowly after being primed with words related to old age, or view others as being more "warm" if the subject hands them a hot beverage. These typically do not replicate well and tend to fall back on vague, handwavey theories.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|9 years ago|reply
To apply research results to negotiation/persuasion scenarios "in the wild" would be intractably difficult because the situations are going to be utterly uncontrolled.
By the same token, I don't think that it's reasonable to dismiss "priming" as a practical business communication tactic just because it isn't easy to perform a repeatable experiment about it.
[+] [-] iainmerrick|9 years ago|reply
Anyone know how well this new psychology stuff is surviving the replication crisis in the humanities?
Edit to add: less charitably, it also reminds me of Scott Adams' rambling blog posts about Donald Trump. Adams has persuaded himself that this persuasion stuff is like magic, and applies it to everything he sees. It's the new astrology.
[+] [-] mattkrause|9 years ago|reply
As a snarky rule of thumb, I'd say the likelihood of a study replicating is inversely proportional to the likelihood of a study showing up in a a TED Talk.
If someone claims that you can make people like you more by handing them hot drinks, or radically change their views on a topic with a brief conversation, I'd be skeptical. However, there still are a lot of people doing solid behavioral work that doesn't make a huge splash in the popular press.
[+] [-] mmastrac|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csallen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iainmerrick|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|9 years ago|reply
Then the opposite example is used - a queen says "I have a weak body but" and then excites the troops to battle. How is that similar? Its the opposite. They 'explain' it by suggesting the truthfulness of the initial statement establishes the truthfulness of the following statements. Very meta.
This sounds weak. Either 'pre-suasion' works one way or it doesn't? Which is it? I don't think the OP understood what they were saying. In fact, I think they made the whole thing up.
[+] [-] csallen|9 years ago|reply
The basic idea is that you shouldn't just jump right into the message you're trying to deliver, but first prime your audience to hear it. There are many ways to do this, not just one.
[+] [-] wppick|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrsh07|9 years ago|reply
And sometimes it doesn't require a deflection - if someone asks me about my favorite data structure, it's easy to go on for fifteen minutes about the beauty and utility of either union-find or Voronoi diagrams.
[+] [-] DominikR|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philipodonnell|9 years ago|reply
I like Buffet but this kind of mythologizing doesn't help anyone. The report in question was the 2014 report (http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2014ltr.pdf) which is typically released in Feb of the following year (so early 2015). BRK.A underperfomed the S&P500 in the following year.
BRK.A did outperform the S&P500 in 2014, but unless I'm missing something, the author is attributing the performance in 2014 to the reaction to a letter released in early 2015.
[+] [-] ph0rque|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodwink|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|9 years ago|reply
My guideline is pretty simple: Would I be upset if someone used this tactic on me? If so, I shouldn't use it either.
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 415Kathleem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elitro|9 years ago|reply
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - The author mentions experiments where people exposed to more agressive or relaxed interactions can react differently and many other situations (similar to the money/cloud backgrounds examples).
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Describes interaction strategies to avoid conflicts and create trust (such as the letter example).
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMc|9 years ago|reply
Oh yeah? How much more likely? And with what confidence interval?
[+] [-] paulpauper|9 years ago|reply
people are always looking for shortcuts and life hacks to get what they want, and I wish it were that easy