543: Robert Cialdini | Pre-suasion

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This is the art of charm.

Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business Love and Life. Hey all, Jordan Harbinger from The Art of Charm here. Today we're talking with Robert Cialdini, author of the seminal work Influence. You've probably almost all heard or read this book at some point. It is amazing. And today we're going to be talking about his first solo work in 30 years entitled Pre-Suasion. We'll discuss how persuasive people shape others' behavior and how we can use these same techniques on others as well as ourselves how to gain and retain someone's attention and how language, geography, and imaging alter our perceptions of what causes events and how the media uses these principles to influence us and set the agenda. Last but not least, how to increase our appeal by causing others to focus on us and why this phenomenon often lands innocent people in jail. All this and more on this episode with Robert Cialdini. And with that, welcome to The Art of Charm. We bring together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work. If you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes and the Toolbox. That's where we discuss things like body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at The Art of Charm. In the United States, you can text Charmed, that's C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444, and you can also go to theartofcharm.com. We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions. So enjoy this one with Robert Cialdini. Robert, tell us what you do in one sentence.

Well, these days I'm an author, a speaker, and a consultant on the topic of the science of persuasion.

A long time ago, when I was 13— I'm 36 now, just to make you feel extra old— I read your book Influence, at which point it was already, I think, 10 years old or something like that, because this is 1993, so it was 9 years old. I read it because I can't remember why. I don't remember how I even heard of it, but maybe I just saw it on the shelf and I thought it looked interesting. I bought it. It's probably one of the first books I read that a teacher didn't force me to read, and I thought, this is really cool. I had no idea this stuff was learnable and teachable. And teaching influence, persuasion, applied psychology, confidence, nonverbal communication, charisma, magnetism, whatever you want to call it, that's what we do at The Art of Charm. So if you go back to the earliest spark of me getting interested in any of this. It comes down to your first book. So it's really cool to have you on the show now, decades later.

Well, that's so gratifying to hear, I have to say.

Yeah, I'm glad, because but for your book, I would never have thought, oh my gosh, you can teach things like this, and then started to just go deep down that rabbit hole. And of course, as a 13-year-old kid, I misused it like crazy wherever I was given a chance.

But, um, you know, I have a colleague who says that he's given a copy of that book Influence to each of his grown children and has scrupulously avoided giving one to his wife because she is as influential as she needs to be already. Right.

It's like she already seems to have a good handle on reciprocity and a few other principles in the book. And I did come across it years and years and years later. When I was looking at the seduction community stuff, because it was part of that, I guess if you want to call it tribe or niche. And yes, it was all about let's take this and misuse it and use it in harmful ways instead of using the awareness that we've gained from it to become better people. And so I definitely understand you not wanting to shine a light on the dark side, because tell me what you think about this. If you really want to misuse something, you have to be able to know how to use it well in the first place. So why not just get good at it and make it win-win. There's really no advantage to misusing something like this. There just really isn't.

That's really a good insight I hadn't heard before, but I think that's right on the nail. To understand it well enough to misuse it, you need to know it well enough to be able to harness it for reasons that benefit everybody.

Yeah, it just seems pointless. It's kind of like saying, I'm gonna get just good enough at driving to run over innocent people, but I have no desire at being able to, you know, navigate and park successfully. It just doesn't make any sense. And I think people who go at any skill with learning the negative aspect in mind, looking to misuse it, they'll never be good enough at it to master it because they're ignoring the majority of what this was created for, which is for the good of humanity. Not to put too grandiose a spin on it, but I'm sure you didn't invent this stuff so that you could say, ah, look how stupid everybody is, right?

Right. If you use it in an ethical way, you just feel so much better about yourself. Your self-concept is so much more positive. There's every reason to know it well enough to be able to think about how to use it for everyone's benefit.

By the way, it's been 30 years since you wrote a book. Why? I don't know if you got the memo. You're supposed to milk it for all it's worth and keep writing every year until people get sick of you. You didn't do that.

Yes, well, you know, that's— the answer is very close to what you've just satirized there, and that is it's the first sole-authored book I've written in 30 years because I never had an idea that was big enough to write a book about until this one came along. And that's what motivated me to get back in front of the computer and start working in earnest on getting this information to the general public.

And I totally understand that, and I think a lot of us appreciate that. But I did Google you probably every year or two just to make sure you were still alive, because I'm like, is he ever gonna write anything else? What's going on here? And I'm glad that you did.

I am enthusiastic about the new book, and I'm eager to see how it will be received.

So the new work is called Pre-Suasion. Tell us, can we define pre-suasion first? Because everybody knows what persuasion is, but Now we've got this new prefix on there, and it changes— flips everything upside down.

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting recipients sympathetic to your message before they experience it. That sounds like magic, right?

Yes, it does.

It's not. It's established science. It happens by changing the state of mind that people are in before they receive your message. That is aligned with that state of mind. The idea is to go to the moment immediately before you deliver your offer or your idea and ask people to focus on a concept that is consistent with the idea that you will then present, and they will become more open to that idea, more receptive to it, because They've been sensitized to that material.

So the book, which I read in its entirety, essentially— of course, correct me wherever I'm wrong here— but the secret to persuasion doesn't lie in the message itself, but in part in the moment before the message is delivered. So it's kind of like setting the table to make the meal taste better, to make people eat it or whatever, to consume it. And you argue that the best persuaders actually spend a lot more time crafting what they do and what they say before they even make a request. And I think that is super interesting because it tracks everything we know about sales, which is essentially applied persuasion in many ways, where people try to build trust and get people to like and trust you and want to work with you. And you do that by asking for advice and referring them to other people and things like that. I think it's really interesting that this is applied science because in your first book, Influence, aside from it being the work on the subject now, when it was published, it flopped dismally. Why do you think people are more interested now?

You know, I think what's happened is that the idea of evidence-based decision-making has taken over the major institutions of our society: business, government, fundraising, even sports. People are thinking not about using anecdotes or war stories or hunches or guesses, to decide what to do. They're looking for evidence on which to base their decision. And the book Influence came along just as this concept of evidence-based decision-making was starting to gain traction. After 2 or 3 years of very poor sales, suddenly it took off because it provided a place where there was evidence from scientific research into what led to successful persuasion. And I think that's what changed to cause the upswing in sales.

I think it makes a lot of sense that now people want data. Conclusions, even if they make sense intuitively, or maybe especially if they make sense intuitively, are not necessarily taken at face value anymore. We want to see, okay, is this proven? Or is it just something that I'm supposed to believe because it's in a book? And moving forward to pre-suasion, essentially, it's— this is the front-loading of attention in many ways. And I love this concept because I think speaking of things that are taken at face value or understood intuitively, when somebody is trying to sell or persuade somebody, this process starts much sooner than we think. Can you tell us where the process begins? What is this moment of pre-suasion? Presuasion. What's happening here?

Suppose you're going to a job interview. You know that you're going to present your case to a person, or maybe even a set of people, who are going to evaluate candidates, and you're going to be compared to other individuals. And so you sit down and you're ready to present your case, your credentials. Here's what I'm going to recommend. Before you do that, say, you know, I'm very happy to be here and I want to answer all the questions you have of me, but before we begin, would you mind if I ask you a question? Why did you ask me here today? What was it about my resume that caused you to invite me in? You know what they're going to do? They're going to go on record describing your strengths. And in that moment, everything you present about your strengths will be processed more easily, be more aligned with the mind state you have asked them to put themselves in before you present your strengths.

Right. They essentially have to search and figure out a rationalization for their action as well. Even if they don't have a good reason, they're thinking, hmm, well, You must be qualified and somebody liked you and they're literally, they're building the scaffolding for you.

They're gonna go look at your resume. They're going to find reasons for calling you in. Your strengths, everything is aligned with the presentation of your strengths. They're just more willing to accept them.

This makes a lot of sense from the perspective of, say, sales because you don't wanna be chasing the prospect. And I can see this working in a job interview as well, just the example you gave, where they're rationalizing, or backwards rationalizing, I guess, is what we tend to call this, this concept, where they're thinking, okay, I must have done this for a reason. Since I don't have that reason readily available off the top of my head, I'm going to start creating the reasons, and then those become reality, or at least they become perception, even though you've had nothing to do with it. It's so much more powerful than saying, you must have had me here because I have a great resume and I look great on paper.

Exactly, which is, you might get pushback from, but when they do it themselves, when you ask them to search into the reasons that brought you here and get them to make public commitments to them, they're going to stay congruent with those commitments now.

Yes. Oh, the congruency concept. Tell us what you mean by that. That's extremely common in persuasion as well as, I would assume, pre-suasion. What do you mean by congruence?

Well, people want to be consistent with what they have originally said or done, especially in your presence. So if you can ask them to take a small step, uh, in your direction, something even really very minor, now if you ask for something that is logically consistent with that but larger, they will want to say yes in order to be congruent with what they have already said or done. That fits with this. Here's a good example. We have a company and we have a London office, and our manager over there was once asked to come into the National Health Service in the UK and help them with a problem. And this is a problem that a lot of us have. It's no-shows, people who don't show up for our meetings, people who make appointments and then don't appear, people who claim that they're going to do something and then they don't do it. Those kinds of issues. So these are people who make an appointment for a medical treatment of some sort, medical or dental treatment, and then they just don't appear. They just don't show up. It's very costly. So what medical offices have typically done is to call patients ahead of time the night before and remind them of the appointment. And that produces about a 3.5% increase in the likelihood that people will actually appear for their appointment. But that is costly. It costs time, it costs effort, personnel have to be employed to make those calls. A lot of times the calls never reach the person who was intended for it, and so on. So my colleague, Stephen J. Martin, tried a little commitment and consistency practice. You know how at the end of every medical or dental appointment, You go to the receptionist who gives you a little card with the date and time of the next appointment.

Right. Yeah. Your next cleaning is on May 5th and you're like, this is 4 months from now. I'm not going to remember that.

You're unlikely to remember that easily. Here's what Steve did. He asked them to make a small change. Instead of filling out the card and then handing it to the patient, the receptionist was instructed to hand a blank card to the patient and ask him or her to fill in the date and time themselves. So they made an active public voluntary commitment to coming in, and no-shows dropped by 18%. Wow. So you go from 3.5 at something that's costly to 18%. For something that was costless. Just by asking people to take a small step in your direction, and their desire to be consistent with what they have done publicly in front of you makes them more likely to live up to it. So one of the things we always teach in our seminars is people live up to what they write down. People live up to what they write down. We should always be asking them to write down their commitments to us. As a consequence of that active choice, they will be more likely to stay aligned with that commitment.

This is fantastic. And I noticed in the research for the book, for both books, you went as a trainee to job courses for jobs that involved persuasion. So this is real-life stuff. You went in and trained as a marketer, salesman. And I do this a lot for The Art of Charm. I'll go respond to an ad or I'll go to a seminar just to see what they're teaching and learning. It's really, really fascinating to see how sometimes people stumble across these things without quote unquote scientific study and are able to test for it through trial and error. Obviously, through scientific study, we're going to be a little bit more efficient here. What did you notice in this research about what high performers, high achievers in the sales or marketing field— what did you notice about how they spend their time in terms of crafting their message before they make a request?

Yes, this was the differentiator between someone who is merely an effective communicator, who became effective by focusing on the message itself, making sure that it was clear, it was concise, it was attractively presented, and so on, versus the truly superior persuaders who In addition, focused on what they did and said in the moment before they made their request. That's the thing that differentiated those individuals who were just average from those who were truly superior.

And why is that? I mean, what's going on here? What are they doing aside from— yeah, sure, they're spending more time and thought, but doing what exactly?

Yeah, they are aligning people's mind state before they present the request with the central features of their request, with the thing that their request emphasizes or highlights. So now people are especially open to and receptive to hearing the best features of the offer. We all have websites. What's the first thing a visitor to your website sees? It's your landing page. There was a study of an online furniture store that specialized in sofas, and here was their problem: they were getting a lot of visitors who just visited in a very fleeting way. They checked out the price and then they left, and they were concerned that They were losing that business to people who were interested in low-price sofas, right? So what they did was to change the background wallpaper of their website so that it depicted fluffy clouds. Those people who then came to that site with fluffy clouds on the background went into the site searching for comfortable furniture and indeed purchased more comfortable furniture because they had been put in mind of the concept of comfort persuasively before they ever encountered the information about the sofas. They were put in a state of mind that made them especially receptive to the idea of comfort. When they searched the site. And that's where they went, that they, they spent the majority of their time searching for the features of sofas having to do with comfort. They later rated those features as more important for them in deciding about a sofa, and then they preferred more comfortable sofas for purchase. These website designers were able to shift the mindset of people in the direction that they wanted them to go toward comfort, toward more expensive sofas before the visitors ever went through the material in the site concerning the sofa.

So this is kind of like priming in some way. I don't know if that's a technical term that I'm misusing.

It is like priming in a way. You are priming the pump.

Yeah.

You know how a paint primer— you put primer on a wall and it makes the coat of paint that you want to put on it more receptive to the wall. The wall now receives that coat of paint to a greater extent because of what you've done before to make that wall receptive.

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All right, back to Robert Cialdini. What's strange about this, and I almost— this is like borderline hokey, and I mean no offense, but when I looked at the book, I saw that it even extends to the level of metaphor. For example, hot versus iced coffee. When people are holding a cold beverage, they perceive the person talking to them as less warm and persuasive. That is so bizarre because how is our brain doing that? That almost seems ridiculous.

I know exactly how you feel because when I first read this stuff, I thought, "Oh no, this can't be true." You know, a perfect example is these signs, posters you see in a lot of workspaces that say "Achieve" or "Succeed" or "Persevere," that kind of thing. And maybe they'll show a picture of a runner winning a race, that kind of thing. And they think that that's going to spur more achievement. I always thought that was laughable, that that could be true. And then I saw a study from Canada, which has been replicated several times now. It wasn't just done once, right? They went into a call center. On this particular day, the callers were reaching out to members of a university alumni association, asking them to contribute to this university for various reasons. And they gave each of the callers a tip sheet with things they should say when recommending to alumni that they give a donation, various reasons why this was a good thing. For half of the callers in the call center, it was a blank piece of paper, and then the tip information was just printed on it. For the other half, there was a picture of a runner winning the race in the background on which the tip information was printed, kind of as a watermark. There was a depiction of a runner winning the race. So then they had these callers make the calls for their 3-hour stint, and those who had a runner winning the race on the back of their tip sheets made 60% more profit. They got 60% more donations. Because they were cued to the idea of achievement, and they made more calls, and they tried harder. They didn't take as many breaks. They were more focused on achievement because they had a depiction of achievement in their line of sight whenever they looked at the information they were supposed to relate to the recipients of their calls. And I remember saying to myself, this can't be. But then these researchers replicated the study. They did the same thing for 4 straight days, and they found the same results every day for 4 days. And this was a scientific study. Half of the callers were randomly assigned to a blank sheet a plain piece of paper with the tips on it, the other half randomly assigned to this photograph of a runner winning the race. This just took my breath away. But I think the question that you asked was, how can this be? What's the psychological process that makes this work so successfully? And here's the best I can come to. I've spent the last couple of years becoming a kind of cognitive scientist to study what happens in the brain when we pay attention to a particular concept, let's say like achievement. What happens is that the neurons in our brains then become more attuned to any new information that is related to that concept. They have become readied to process that new information in an especially efficient and effective way. So anytime we can focus people on a particular concept, let's say it is achievement, right? For a short period of time, they will become cognitively attuned to the concept of achievement and will act and will process information in a way that makes achievement more likely for them.

This is super interesting because I assume there's an evolutionary psychology grounding underneath this. It does really speak to the persuasive power of framing and pre-suasion. You also noted in your research that these sales guys in any position didn't rely on the legitimate merits of an offer. So the benefits and the costs. They just recognized that the psychological frame in which an appeal is first placed can carry equal or usually greater weight. So in other words, the frame of mind of the target is more important than the logical benefits of whatever it is that's being sold.

Yes. And the key is it's not that the merits of your case don't matter. They do. But if you want to supercharge them, You put people in a state of mind that's receptive to the merits of your case before they get to them, and they're ready to absorb them now differently.

What are privileged moments? Can you help us visualize what that means in a conversation after explaining, of course, what it is?

Yes. So a privileged moment is indeed the moment before you deliver your message. It's that space in time when it's available to you because you've got an audience, you've got a recipient, right, waiting for your message, poised to hear it. In that moment, if you place something that focuses the individual on the strengths of your message or the goal that you have with your message, That has now made your case more privileged in their mind compared to all the other cases that they, they could make. Yours has now become privileged.

So this is kind of why, to bring it back to car salesmen, it's like never let them walk off the lot, right? Because this is a window that can close, and once it's closed, you just have to start over.

That's right. It's a temporary state of attention to a particular concept that you have installed. Now, of course, what we'd like people to do is not to be just temporarily favorable to our ideas. We'd like them to be favorable to our ideas in the moment when, after we present them, when we can get their compliance. That's great. And we've just talked about ways that that happens. If we then revert back to this idea of commitment and consistency, we can see how if after we've got an individual to be favorable to our strength, we ask them to make commitment to it, to write something down that fits with that commitment, or to click a button on our site, now we become more than just temporarily favorable. In their mind. We become favorable in a durable, persisting way because they've acted now in a fashion that's consistent with our strengths.

Speaking of focus, you mentioned in the book that causing someone to focus on something can get that same result. And you give the example of the cult recruiter who causes you to focus on unhappiness and things like that. And you explain that a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message preloads that message or that element in the message with importance. Can you explain how that takes place in our everyday lives? The media example you gave us was brilliant.

This is another aspect of focused attention. When a person focuses his or her attention on a particular concept, there's a tendency to see that concept as more important than before because you're attending to it, because you're focused on it. We assume that if we're focused on something, it must be worthy of our attention, right? Because that's the way it normally is. We focus on those things that are most important in our environment, right? Most important for us to notice and to be aware of. But a communicator can get us to focus our attention on something. Sometimes it can be something like attention-attracting color can get us to focus on a particular item, or its placement in our visual field can get us to focus on it rather than something else. And as soon as we focus on it, we attribute to that thing more importance than we did before, and we're more likely therefore to want to pay attention to it and to seize it for our benefit. I just saw an article that showed that if you go to a supermarket and look on a shelf, and let's say there are 3 brands of canned peas on that shelf, one on the left, one in the center, and one on the right. There's a natural tendency for us to focus on the one in the center. That we just have a natural tendency to focus on what's in the middle in an array. That causes us to see that as a more, more important brand than the other two. And this is why brands will pay supermarkets a lot of money to have central placement on the shelf because we focus there and we assume that if we're focused on it, it's something that must deserve our attention and we buy it.

Right. So we can reverse engineer this basically. Oh, this is something I'm focusing on, it must be important. So we can actually force people to focus on certain things with product placement or by creating a false sense of importance by forcing people or tricking people into focusing on something. Because once we give something our narrowed attention, we backwards rationalize— there's that concept again— that the reason we're focusing on this is because it's important.

It's because it's important. And this was the news media does all the time. They will, they will focus our attention on particular issues in our culture, let's say, and for the time that the media are doing that for us, our estimate of the importance of those issues skyrockets. As soon as the media turns its attention away from those issues, our ratings of the importance of those issues drops significantly. So By simply making certain kinds of concepts prominent in our attention, the media can arrange for us to see them as the most important things that we should be paying attention to in our environment.

Basically, if we can distract people's attention from a topic, or if people otherwise fail to direct their attention to a topic, we then backwards rationalize. And again, this is happening subconsciously. That the thing that we're no longer focusing on is less important. The news media is just kind of the most obvious example of this, but this happens everywhere.

It happens everywhere, and savvy communicators know how to do that, especially in the moment right before they deliver their case. They make their offer. They bring people to a concept that focuses their attention on that idea, that concept. Which then makes their related offer seem more important.

And we see focus playing in different ways with persuasion as well, because not only do we deem things that we focus on as important, but we also see causal properties. In other words, we're focusing on something, therefore that must be the cause of whatever's happening right now or whatever happens next. Can you give us examples of that? I thought this was very very fascinating, especially the Tylenol and the police interrogation examples were kind of disturbingly fascinating.

Well, a number of years ago, the most famous case of product tampering involved somebody who went into some stores, some pharmacies in Chicago, and put poison capsules of Tylenol into some bottles of Tylenol, then replaced them on the shelf. People bought them, took the Tylenol, and died, right? It was something like 7 people of just from one family died. Okay, so anyway, what Tylenol did was to protect— they began publicizing this tampering case and telling people there are particular numbers on the bottles of Tylenol that have been associated with this tampering. One number was 1973, another number was 2301. They're not special numbers in any way except they were associated with Tylenol, and so the— with poison Tylenol. So now the media was presenting this information: watch out for these numbers, these are dangerous numbers. And they became very highly publicized, so people were paying attention to those numbers. The consequence was they started playing those numbers in state lotteries at unheard of levels. Why?

This makes no sense, right? Why would the lot number of Tylenol—

These are numbers associated with poison-filled death. Here's the reason. They were being brought to attention of the populace. And if it's something is high in attention, it is seen as having causal properties, being something that makes things happen. So people started playing those numbers in the lottery because they would make the lottery happen in the favor of those who played those numbers.

I mean, it's so far removed because it's like these people, it's not like, well, somebody got lucky with those numbers, so maybe there's luck attached. It's like, no, people die I'm gonna play 'em anyway.

I mean, that's right. It goes against everything we would think. The only way you can make sense of it is because those numbers were being raised in our attention, they became causal. They became seen as agents of causality, and that's why people started playing.

And there's an even more common, equally sinister, life-ruining way that focus can affect your life. Tell us about the police interrogation thing, because this This was brand new. I've never heard anything about this, and it's kind of scary, but also it seems like something we could reverse engineer in our own lives outside of maybe a police interrogation to our benefit.

Let's take the case. Let's suppose that you have an argument with a neighbor, and the next day the neighbor is found dead of murder, and the police bring you in and start interrogating you, and you start feeling that they're not just asking for information from you. They think you're a suspect and they're trying to pressure you or trick you into making this incriminating statements, right? Right. What can you do when— to ensure that a videotape that is recording this session, if it is viewed later by prosecutors or judges or jury members, they would see that any incriminating statements that you made had been caused not by you but by this interrogator who was trying to trick or coerce you into those kinds of statements. What could you do? And the answer is you have to find where the camera is in the room and move your chair so that it is no longer directly aimed at your face. Because the research shows that observers of a videotape who see a particular person as the focus of the camera in that tape, where the camera is focused directly on that person, they assume that person is the cause of whatever went on in that session, not the interrogator, but the person the camera was focused on, even though it was the interrogator who tricked or coerced the incriminating statement. If you are the focus of attention, you are seen as the cause of related events in that situation. So Here's what I am recommending. If you ever find yourself in this situation and somebody is mistakenly assuming that you are at fault for some crime, you're in that room and you see that camera is trained over the shoulder of the interrogator right onto your face, move your chair so that that camera is no longer focused focused exclusively on you, but it is focused equally on the face of the interrogator and you. Then observers of that tape will no longer assume that you were the cause of the incriminating statements, your guilt was the cause. They'll assume rightly that it was the interrogator's tricks that did it, because now the interrogator is in there line of sight, and the interrogator gets attributed with as much causality as you do, and so they'll see the truth.

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Thanks for listening and supporting the show. For a list of all the amazing sponsors and discount codes, visit theartofcharm.com/advertisers. Now back to Robert Cialdini. So since we know, I should say, that what's focal seems causal, you also mentioned in the work that faces in conversations, whoever we're facing in a conversation, say I'm looking over someone's shoulder, that person who's facing me seems more dominant. You tested this. The outcomes were always the same. Whoever's face was more visible was judged to be more causal, more dominant. So does that mean we can make ourselves more dominant by making ourselves more visible? Is that something that we can reverse engineer?

Exactly right. Exactly right. If you want to be seen as an agent of change, then in any discussion or any recommendation, In the materials that you present, your picture should be in the corner of the materials. It should be on the front of the material. If you're doing it face-to-face, you should do it across the table rather than next to that person so that they are looking directly at you and you get to be seen as an agent of change as a consequence, as a causal agent in all of it.

You dedicate a chapter to the importance of channeled attention, target shooting, chut-ing. What are some surefire ways we can secure attention, say, in a conversation or a networking situation? A lot of folks who listen to The Art of Charm, they're interested in this. How can we secure attention, maintain it?

Well, one thing we can do is be sure that whatever we say is self-relevant to the person we are talking about, because one of the things that channels people's attention is if it's connected to them. And one of the mistakes salespeople often make, for example, in presenting testimonials from previous customers or clients, is they will put at the top of the list of testimonials the individual who has had the greatest success, or the person they are proudest of having moved in their direction— some big company executive or some a large firm, vice president, whatever it might be, it's a mistake if the person across the table from you owns a series of mom-and-pop dry cleaner shops, right? Dry cleaner establishment. That's not them in the testimonial. That's somebody very different from them. They're simply not going to be paying attention to that. To the same degree, then if you put at the top of your testimonial somebody who owns a string of mom-and-pop candy stores or something like that, somebody similar, that's what's going to maintain their attention and make them want to follow the lead of that individual. We once did a study. You know how you go to hotel guest rooms and you'll find a sign somewhere asking you to reuse your towels and linen for the sake of the environment.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

70% of the hotel rooms I go in, they've got that kind of sign somewhere, and they all say, do this to save the environment, do this to save resources, do this to save the planet. Well, we know they want to save something else too.

Yeah, a little bit of money.

They want to save expenses so they don't have to launder those things. They don't have to pay for people in the laundry. They don't have to pay for the detergent. They don't have to pay to heat the water. They don't have to pay for anything if we just reuse our towel. So they do this for the environment. Well, we looked at an alternative message to send. We went into hotel rooms that we had the cooperation of managers at 3 hotels in the Phoenix, Arizona area where I live— a 3-star, 4-star, and a 5-star hotel— and we changed the message in rooms at random. Some people got the message that said, please reuse your towels, do this for the sake of the environment. Another set got a message that said, please reuse your towels, the majority of our guests do reuse them at least once during their stay. The majority of guests who stay at our hotel do. And that produced a significant increase. People were responding to what other people were doing. Now, here's the point about self-relevance. If instead we said, not the majority of guests who have stayed at our hotel in the past have reused their towels, the majority of guests who've stayed in this room that you're in have reused their towel, that produced the most reuse of any we have ever seen because people were saying, 'Who's like me? I'm going to follow the lead of the people who are most like me.' So the point is, always use testimonials that allow people to see themselves in that quote, to see themselves in that testimony. That's one thing that captures attention—self, the self. Another is mysteries. People are intrigued by mysteries, and they will stay focused on your story if, pre-suasively, you begin with a mystery. Something that they might not understand how that could be, and you're going to tell them. You're going to solve the mystery by moving through your material. So you might say something, "How could it be that our product became the bestseller after only a period of, what, 8 months? How could that be? People are going to open their ears and open their minds to the next thing you say that gives them closure on this mystery. They're going to want to listen to how this could be. And you know what you're going to tell them? You're going to tell them the strengths of your product. And they're going to listen to it and pay attention to it more fully than before. And when they are paying attention to the strengths of your product, they're going to see those things as more important and more causal, which is going to make them want to buy it.

How can we use language and imagery maybe to create more desirable outcomes in our conversations?

Researchers walked up to people, strangers on the street, asked them to participate in a long survey for which they would get no compensation on their communication habits. That was the survey. As you can imagine, very few people agreed. Only 29% of people agreed to participate in this survey. They walked up to another set of people and made the same request, except before they made the request, they said one sentence that increased the willingness of people to do this, to participate in the survey, from 29% to 77.3%. What was that sentence? Did they say, oh, you're going to learn a lot about yourself if you agree to do this? No. Did they say, oh, you know what, for you, we'll pay you if you're going to do this? No. Here's what they said. Do you consider yourself a helpful person?

Oh, nice.

A little framing.

Yep. And here's what happened. People reflected back on their history. They were sent down a psychological chute for memories of times when they were helpful. And sure enough, everybody is helpful. And so 97% of the people said, yes, I'm a helpful person.

Of course, yeah, who doesn't want to think of themselves as helpful?

And now, after setting them up before asking for the survey as helpful people, now the researcher said, could you be in this long survey on your communication habits to help us out. And now 77%. You go from 29% to 77% by focusing people on helpfulness before you ask them for help. That's how we can use language to steer people's attention to a particular concept that's consistent with the goal that we have for our message that's yet to come.

What about things like imagery, especially advertising? You know, they use the advertising imagery. Obviously, that's all in there, tested to be more persuasive. What are the mechanics at work behind things like advertising imagery and language, and even maybe things like geography, where we are? Can those sway our decisions as well?

Well, let's talk about geography for a minute, and then we can move back to advertising. But let's take another classic goal that we have for ourselves and sometimes for our teams at work. And that is to be more creative. Suppose we're encountering a problem that just won't yield, and everything we've tried hasn't been successful in solving this problem. So we think we've got to have a brainstorming session. We've got to get ourselves thinking outside of the box so that we can attack this problem in a fresh, original way. Right? So we call a meeting and we start this brainstorming session. Here's what we could do first, persuasively, to significantly increase the chance that we will come to a creative solution that we never thought about before. And that is to move to a room with a high ceiling, a big spacious room with a high ceiling. Why? Because open, expansive spaces are associated with open, expansive thinking. People get more creative and open and expansive when they're in a big space where there are no limits. They break out of the box. They overcome those constraints and limits if you put them in a big place. Have you ever seen this research that shows that people are more creative when they're out of doors than when they're inside?

I mean, I don't know, but I've definitely heard that all these creative minds of the past several centuries, they always wanted to go for a walk in their garden or their yard or whatever.

Yeah, it's for the same reason, because big spaces lend themselves to big thinking. It's just an association. Again, you focus on the concept of openness and you become more open to ideas, to new ideas.

So what does this say about the brain? It kind of sounds like we think in metaphor. If big space, big thinking, hot drink, warm feelings— I mean, does the brain operate that way? It does.

It operates in association. That's one of the big takeaways that I got from spending this 2 years studying the way the brain works. Thinking is a set of associations, right? So the brain works by linking things that are connected to one another, right? And coming up with implications and applications and ideas and so on. So that's what is so fundamental about this process. As soon as you focus people on a particular concept, then related concepts, concepts that are associated with the first one, become more prioritized. You have greater access to them, and to the extent that you have greater access to them, you see them as more important. Here's the study that I think really clinches it for me on how primitive this process is and how it works so fundamentally. There was a study done in Belgium. Researchers brought subjects into an experiment and showed them photographs of household objects. So a blender, a toaster, these kinds of things, right? And in the background, They had different kinds of figures of people standing. For a third of the subjects, they saw a single figure standing in the background of each of these photographs. For another third of the subjects, they saw two individuals standing apart, separate from one another, in the background. But for A third group of subjects, they saw two figures standing shoulder to shoulder, standing together. At the end of the display of these photographs, the experimenter always got up from the table and accidentally— I'm putting that in quotes— spilled a box of pencils onto the floor. And the question is, who got out of their chairs down on the floor and helped the experimenter pick up these pencils? And the answer is the subjects who saw the figures who were standing together in the photographs were 3 times as likely to get down spontaneously on the floor and help pick up. Why? Because togetherness is associated with helpfulness. Okay, now why did that take my breath away? Why did that finding make me sit back in my chair and have to read this particular aspect of this experiment 3 times before I believed it? It was that the subjects in this experiment were 18-month-old hardly able to talk, not able yet to reason or reflect, but they were swept by the mere association of people standing together with the idea of being helpful. That they understood. They knew that, that when people are together with one another, they assist one another. They're helpful to one another. So this tells me that this is a very primitive process that's going on in the human brain. It's there at 18 months to produce these big effects that we've been talking about.

So this is hardwired. All the stuff is hardwired. We can't get rid of it no matter how much we try. So what we can do is become aware of it and recognize when other people are using it on us and figure out white hat ways to reverse engineer it so that we can use it for ourselves.

Not only use it for ourselves, we can use it on ourselves. Do we want to be more achievement-oriented at work? We should put as our background wallpaper on our computer a picture of a runner winning the race. Why not? We're as human as anybody, right? We will be cued to achievement. If that's what we want, we should do that. And we can do this for ourselves. Do we want to be more helpful? Put a picture of people standing together in our environment. That will cue us to togetherness and collaboration. We don't have to just use this on the people around us. We can use it on ourselves.

And that, of course, is the best kind of brain science, something that works even when we know it's in play and that can be used to make us better. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure you deliver to the AOC family?

You know, I don't think so. I thought you've done a terrific job. You know, to be honest, not everybody thinks as well and prepares as well as you did for this interview. So I think we've covered all the bases.

Well, I'm so glad to have you on. One of my original favorite authors, one of the original influential works in my life that taught us that these skills can be learned and mastered and aren't just inborn. So thank you so much. For your time today and for your work as well.

I enjoyed the time to interact very much.

Really, really interesting. Look, this work is so deep. It's again probably like his last book, going to sell a bunch of copies and have people go, okay, and then get cited over and over and over. I think he's actually the most cited author in his field, which is very impressive. I mean, this is A lot of this stuff might seem like, oh, I've heard of this or I've seen this in action. The fact that this is now proven science is actually a really big deal. So if you haven't checked it out already, I highly recommend grabbing Influence. We'll have that linked in the show notes and Pre-Suasion, which I flew through this weekend. That'll be linked in the show notes as well. Really, really super interesting, super applicable book. I highly, highly recommend it. And if you enjoyed this, don't forget to thank Robert on Twitter. We'll have that linked in the show notes next to the resources, including, of course, The books. You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet, the show notes for this episode. We'll have that right on your phone. And I'm also on Twitter. A lot of stuff that never makes it to the show, articles, insights, and you can really easily engage with me there and producer Jason. I'm @TheArtOfCharm on Twitter. Bootcamps are live program details. bootcamp.theartofcharm.com. This is where we break down everything we teach here on the show in a live training format. It's a residential program. Guys come from all over the world to learn from us in person. It's really, really cool. It's by far my favorite element of running anything having to do with Art of Charm. We're sold out a few months in advance, so if you're thinking about it a little bit, you're not sure, you think it's interesting, get in touch ASAP. Call us, email us, whatever. We'll get you some info and you can plan ahead. And of course, the Social Capital Challenge, as I mentioned earlier, at theartofcharm.com/challenge or text Charmed, that's C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 333- 33444. That challenge is all about improving your networking skills, your connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop personal and professional relationships with you. And I'll send you that fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show. I'm also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward. It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and of course, a better thinker. That's theartofcharm.com/challenge, or text charmed here in the US to 33444. This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo. Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor. Show notes on the website are by Robert Cialdini, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web. So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.

Thanks for listening to The Art of Charm.

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