Short YouTube talk by Robert Cialdini (April 22, 2014) about techniques for gaining listeners' attention. The speaker emphasizes that people often fail to hear messages because they do not 'open their ears and minds' and recommends offering new or exclusive information (e.g., unpublished findings or draft articles) so audiences will listen differently and give you early access credibility.
It's not that people are rejecting it. They're not hearing it in the first place because they're not opening their ears and opening their minds to it. The one that seems to me to be most powerful in this regard is to provide new or exclusive information that they haven't had access to before. What I am about to tell you is something that I just learned this week from our research department. We just had a new article published, or here's a draft of an article. It's not even published yet. They listen differently now because it's new and it's exclusive, and they will get access to it before anyone else. That's powerful. That causes them to listen to what you have to say differently than before.
