Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (18 page)

Do you have a phobia that you want to overcome? Systematic desensitization works on adults as well. Researchers in one case study explained how they helped a woman overcome her severe phobia of spiders by exposing her to increasingly stressful spider-related stimuli (Carlin, Hoffman, & Weghorst, 1997). Over the span of a few months, they started by simply talking about spiders and then gradually increased to exposing photographs of spiders, fake toy spiders, and even spiders in virtual reality. By the end of the therapy, the researchers had resolved the woman’s incapacitating fear of spiders.

That’s great, Nick. But how does that relate to persuasion?
I’m glad you asked. Remember how I mentioned the example of parents persuading their kids to enjoy vegetables? If your kids really enjoy a particular meal—a meal that could easily be tweaked to incorporate vegetables—you could add a miniscule amount of vegetables the next time you cook that meal. With only a miniscule amount, your kids might eat the meal without asking any questions.

But each additional time that you cook that meal, you can
slightly
increase the amount of vegetables. Because your kids won’t be able to perform a side-by-side comparison with the last meal, they’ll be unlikely to notice that you put more vegetables in that meal. They might even think back and remember that they ate that same meal with a miniscule amount of something unknown, and because they still enjoyed it, they’re more likely to remain consistent with that original attitude by continuing to eat that meal with the slightly increased vegetable content.

You can continue that same process for months until your children finally notice
something
. But once they realize that they’ve been enjoying the meal for months
with
the vegetables, research suggests that they’ll be more likely to want to continue eating it with the vegetables (Lee, Frederick, & Ariely, 2006).

To summarize, if you want people to develop a favorable (or even neutral) attitude toward something that you know they will find unfavorable, you can “desensitize” your message by gradually habituating that message. This technique will be even more effective if: (1) the changes occur in small and gradual increments, (2) your target can’t perform a side-by-side comparison, (3) your target isn’t expecting any changes to occur, or (4) you combine the unfavorable stimulus with a pleasant stimulus (e.g., combining the candy with the rabbit, combining the yummy meal with the addition of vegetables).

A MIND READER’S PERSPECTIVE: DESENSITIZING SLEIGHT OF HAND

Before I changed my official title to “mind reader,” I performed as a “magician” for over five years. During that time, I became exposed to countless sleight of hand techniques that magicians use to avoid being detected. One common technique that magicians use to disguise their sleight of hand involves desensitizing their audience’s perception.

Put yourself in my shoes. You’re performing a mind reading show on stage, and you just tried to nonconsciously prime a particular thought in someone’s mind, but due to some clever and subtle questions, you discover that your attempt at priming failed. But as the stubborn mind reader you are, you don’t want to admit defeat. You want to figure out a way to make it seem like you still knew what that person was thinking.

You try to recover by resorting to Plan B. The new goal is to ask the person to name their thought out loud, while you undetectably write whatever they say on a piece of paper inside your pocket. If you can write that person’s thought undetected, you can use sleight of hand to switch the paper inside your pocket for a folded piece of paper that you’re holding in front of the audience. This switch can make it seem like you predicted that person’s thought from the very beginning, and you’ll still have a miracle in your hands (so to speak).

There’s a problem, however. If you just randomly stick your hand in your pocket, you’ll probably attract the audience’s attention, which would defeat Plan B. How can you disguise that action? You can desensitize the audience to the placement of your hand in your pocket by frequently putting your hand in your pocket throughout the show. This frequent positioning would desensitize the audience to the idea of your hand in your pocket, and they’ll be less likely to notice your hand in your pocket when you need to write the prediction. It takes a lot of practice to pull off undetectably, but that’s the trouble that many mind readers go through.

This type of demonstration would be much easier if you were doing it over a webcam because you wouldn’t even need to worry about a pocket; you could just write on the desk in front of you. In fact, with some proper showmanship, you could use this demonstration to freak people out via webcam and end up creating a viral video (hint: my video “Chat Roulette Mind Reading—Part 1”).

REAL WORLD APPLICATION: THE FAMILY VACATION (PART 2)

Remember the family vacation to Disneyland? Your budget-concerned husband is on the fence about taking the trip, but you decide to put the odds in your favor by habituating your request.

You leverage repeated exposures by “forgetting” to leave travel brochures, postcards, and other travel-related advertisements throughout the house. These advertisements will repeatedly expose your husband to the idea of taking a vacation, which will make him find the idea of travel more appealing. These tactics will be even more effective because, as you learned, nonconscious exposures are more powerful than conscious exposures. If your husband doesn’t consciously pay attention to these subtle advertisements, his attitude toward the vacation will be further enhanced through the mere exposure effect.

Those repeated exposures will also enhance your husband’s conceptual fluency for travel. When you bring up the idea again, he will be able to picture himself on vacation more easily because of those exposures, and he will misattribute that ease to a genuine desire to go on vacation.

After a week or two of letting these travel ads lie around the house, you finally ask him about his stance on the vacation. This time, your husband is somewhat more open to the idea, but he says that he still needs time to think about it. Ugh. You failed again to extract his compliance, but don’t fret. Luckily, there are still many more tactics to be covered, so we’ll revisit this scenario later in the book.

STEP 5

Optimize Your Message

OVERVIEW: OPTIMIZE YOUR MESSAGE

Look at that! We
finally
made it to the request. Let’s do a quick recap to summarize the four steps that brought you here:

• First, you molded your target’s mindset though priming, anchoring, and expectations, which helped you trigger a more favorable perception.
  
• Second, you changed your target’s body language and behavior to reflect someone who would comply with your request, which helped you extract a congruent attitude. As a result, your target has become much more likely to comply with your request to maintain consistency with that new attitude.
  
• Third, you emphasized social norms and built greater rapport so that you could exert additional pressure on your target.
  
• Fourth, you used repeated exposures and desensitization to habituate your target to your message. With heightened familiarity toward the topic of your request, your target has become even more likely to comply with it.
  

This next step in METHODS will teach you the proper way to present your message or request. Specifically, you’ll learn how people typically evaluate messages depending on the circumstances, and you’ll learn how to properly tweak your message so that it complements how your target will evaluate your message.

CHAPTER 10

Alter Their Evaluation

You trudge to work one morning overwhelmed with tiredness. You spent the entire night perfecting a monthly report so that you could impress your new boss. But your hard work paid off. You’re overjoyed with the final outcome, and you’re confident that your boss will recognize and appreciate your hard work.

You enter the building, walk directly to your boss’s office, and drop the report on her desk with a huge smile on your face. However, to your chagrin, your boss picks up the report, lightly flips through the pages, and hands the report back to you with a simple, “Thanks, it looks good.” Mortified that you spent the entire night working on a report that your boss merely glanced at for a few seconds, you trudge back to your desk and fight off the urge to fall asleep.

A few weeks later, the next monthly report is due. But you won’t make the same mistake again. Why bother putting forth the extra effort when your boss is only going to glance at it for a few seconds? This time, you only spend a half hour creating a semi-decent report so that you can leave work on time.

Next morning you walk into your boss’s office, drop the report on her desk, and to your mortification, your boss wants to critically evaluate it. She tells you that she’ll look though it and discuss it with you later that afternoon. You walk out of her office and trudge back to your desk with a huge knot in your stomach because you know that your competence will be judged in a poor light.

Whether it’s beneficial or harmful for your situation, people evaluate information differently depending on the circumstances. This chapter will teach you the two most basic ways that people evaluate messages and how you can trigger the most favorable type of evaluation for your situation.

THE TWO WAYS THAT PEOPLE EVALUATE MESSAGES

There are two basic ways in which we evaluate information: we use either systematic or heuristic processing (Chaiken, 1980).

Systematic Processing.
When the boss analyzed and scrutinized the report, she was using
systematic processing
, an effortful evaluation that involves critically analyzing information. When we use systematic processing (also known as the
central route to persuasion
), we’re more influenced by the underlying arguments and content of information. Would you ever:

• Spontaneously buy a house?
  
• Throw a dart at a map to decide your next vacation?
  
• Choose your brain surgeon based on his attractiveness?
  

Of course not. In those circumstances, you would do your homework and critically evaluate all of the details involved so that you can make a proper decision. But, as you’ll see next, we don’t always do that.

Heuristic Processing.
When the boss judged the monthly report by lightly flipping through the pages, she was using
heuristic
processing
, a simple-minded evaluation that relies on quick decision rules. When we use heuristic processing (also known as the
peripheral route to persuasion
), we’re more influenced by simple, irrelevant, and “peripheral” cues, such as:

• The sheer amount of information or support
  
• The aesthetics of a message
  
• The person presenting the message (e.g., his likability, attractiveness, perceived expertise, etc.)
  

Those peripheral cues don’t necessarily relate to the strength of a message, yet people often use those “heuristics” to make quick judgments about the overall content of information.

Now that you understand the difference between systematic and heuristic processing, the next section explains the two factors that determine which type of evaluation will generally be used in a given situation.

TWO FACTORS THAT DETERMINE HOW YOUR MESSAGE WILL BE EVALUATED

Two main researchers in the field of persuasion, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo (1986), developed the
elaboration-likelihood model
to describe the factors that determine how a message will be evaluated (whether systematically or heuristically). This section will describe the two main factors that they found in their research: motivation and ability to evaluate.

Motivation.
The first factor is someone’s motivation to evaluate your message. When your target’s motivation is high, your message will be evaluated using systematic processing; when your target’s motivation is low, your message will be evaluated using heuristic processing.