Robert Cialdini explains pre-suasion: how what you set up before a message shapes whether people say yes, often without knowing it. He covers his core influence principles and argues the ethical move is steering people toward the dimension that makes their yes actually good for them.
Caused me to focus on an element of his message that brought that elevated to consciousness. One aspect of me, I care about children's issues. So I thought to myself, oh, there's a book here, wait a minute. All those principles, they weren't in here. Something else worked. Preschool. So the first email I'm going to send to Mercedes will be a picture of my family. Second level, contained a really odd number. We can call this panel. I learned all I need to learn. You know, you bring. You used an interesting word. You used the word trapped. Bob Cialdini's total sly social psychologist. He's pre swading me. He's persuaded me, he's like, you know, he's invoked reciprocation, liking, consistency, authority, social proof, scarcity. What's the morals of this? Can't you get people to do something that's against their best interests? You can. It's very important because as I suggested in that study with the clouds and the coins, people are unaware of the influence. I was unaware. I write books on this side and this guy came to my door. You got played. And I was unaware of what he had done until I closed the door and had to think about it in a concentrated way, what just happened there. So because we're not aware of this pre suasion, we're always focused on what's happening inside the message. We never think about what is going on before the message. We can be swayed without our recognition of it. So we have to be very ethical in this. And the way for me to think about it is to say, you know, let's take that furniture store study again. They could send people in one direction or another toward comfort, which is more expensive furniture, or toward price, which is less expensive. Here's what they need to do. They need to say, what is it about what I have to offer that would make it wise, wisest for people to say yes. If it's that their differentiating feature is price, even though that's not going to produce the largest profit margin for them, that's where they should send people. They should send people to the dimension of their argument that will make it wisest for them to say yes. Fantastic. What.
