Robert Cialdini explains how what you show people before a request shapes how they think. In one study, students who saw an image of a thinker before solving business problems solved 48% more than those shown a nature scene. The brain's attention system primes everything that follows.
12
About 6.6 problems
About 7.1 problems (not a significant difference)
Up to 48% better performance
As long as you consistently bring people's attention, sweep attention to the central element of your message, the goal of your message, they're not going to blank on it. Sweeping, changing attention produces something called an orienting response. In the brain, there's something called the O wave. You orient every time you change, you orient anew and it produces new focus and new import on whatever the focus lands on. So you have to arrange so that this message that you present at the top, there are repeats of that message or that image throughout your website, throughout your email, throughout your website. You have to begin with it first, but then you have to come back to it. It's a booster shot. And if that booster shot is relevant to your most fundamental element of your case, it will become more important. It will lead to assent. All right. Now here's why I like this study. The researchers said to themselves, all right, so this is how we generate top performance in others. How about certain situations, though, in which high energy, driven stamina and persistence is not what leads to high performance? How about when you've got a difficult problem that you have to solve, it's complex, you need to step back and think hard about it. You need to be thoughtful, deliberative, analytic in order to solve this problem. It might be the difference between first recruiting and marshaling. A lot of evidence, a lot of data. You have to go and search and find it, keep at it until you've got it all. But that's not the same as having to analyze it. Now, when you have to analyze all those data points now, you have to think hard about it. It's not just energy. So they did another study. This time the task was to solve 12 business problems. Difficult, complex business problems that students and business students were given at a university. And one group of these students had in the corner of the screen as they were solving these problems, a control image, the one that a lot of us have as our background wallpaper or our screensaver. It was an image. Just a nature scene. Calms us out. Another group of them got the runner winning the race. Let's see how it does on this difficult problem, this complex problem. But a third got an image that was designed to be associated with thoughtfulness. Any idea what that might be? Rodents. The thing now the question is, how many of the 12 problems did the students successfully complete in the period of time they were given? Nature scene. About six and a half. Six point six. The runner winning the race. Not a significant deflection at all. 7.1. Not significant, not reliable. But the thinker slowly up to 48% better performance. So you can see how we have to be tactical about how we use pre suasion. What we do first has to be associated with our major goal. That's what's going to cause people to see it as most important and to act in ways that are congruent with it.
