Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (20 page)

If you want your target to perceive your product to be unique or your service to be difficult, you can create this perception by increasing the perceived complexity of your message (e.g., using a difficult-to-read font). Presenting your message in a difficult-to-process format can decrease your target’s motivation and ability to evaluate your message, which can make them more likely to rely on other factors, such as processing fluency, to make their evaluation. If you can maintain an aesthetically pleasing message while decreasing processing fluency, you can cause people to perceive your product to be more unique or your service to be more difficult (thereby leading to a higher perceived value).

Enhance Their Mood.
Another factor that can decrease people’s motivation to evaluate a message is their mood. Generally, people who are in happy moods are less likely to critically evaluate a message (Bless et al., 1990).

When we’re in positive moods, we often develop a sense of naïve optimism. For example, one factor that perpetuates a financial bubble is irrational exuberance, a term coined by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. During the “dot-com bubble” in the late 90s, stock prices of Internet companies skyrocketed over several years, rising to a point where the underlying financials of those companies didn’t support the overinflated stock prices. As stock prices continued to soar, people developed a sense of naïve optimism and irrational exuberance. The positive emotions they experienced from their large gains led to a false assumption that stock prices would continue to rise, a perception that blinded them to the imminent burst of the bubble and the resulting depletion of their bank accounts.

Unlike positive moods, negative moods lead to a greater sense of skepticism. When people are in negative moods, they subtly assume that something must be wrong with a message, and that uncertainty causes them to analyze messages with a fine-toothed comb. Research has even confirmed that people in happy moods are influenced by both strong and weak arguments, whereas people in neutral or negative moods are only influenced by strong arguments (Mackie & Worth, 1991).

If you want your message to be evaluated simple-mindedly, or if your request is somewhat risky in nature, you should first brighten your target’s mood so that he develops a greater sense of optimism and a greater likelihood of complying with your request.

Spark Their Arousal.
Get your mind out of the gutter. This “arousal” is different than the sexual type of arousal, and this arousal can spark heuristic processing.

To understand this type of arousal, you first need to understand another concept. As humans, we think that we possess a solid grasp of our own emotions and feelings, and we tend to believe that all types of emotions—sadness, excitement, fear, etc.—produce different sensations and feelings within us. What’s surprising is that many of those emotions produce the same exact physiological response.

If they produce the same biological reactions, why do they feel so different? Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) proposed their
two-factor theory of emotion
to explain that we interpret emotional responses in two steps. First, we experience some general physiological arousal in response to a stimulus, and this “arousal” is usually characterized by a rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, sweaty palms, and other symptoms that are related to higher adrenaline. Second, after experiencing that state of arousal, we then look to the situation to interpret that state of arousal, and we label that arousal with the emotion that seems most fitting.

Consider two scenarios. In the first scenario, you’re walking down an alley late at night in a dangerous city, and out of the darkness appears a man with a gun asking for all of your money. In this situation, nearly all humans would feel a very powerful state of arousal, characterized by a rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, sweaty palms, etc.

In the other scenario, suppose that you bought a lottery ticket, and you’re sitting at home waiting for the numbers to be called. The television host appears, announces the numbers, and you realize that all of your numbers match. You just won $50 million dollars. How would your body react? You’d probably experience a rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, sweaty palms, and virtually all other symptoms that occurred when you were robbed.

Although getting robbed and winning the lottery are two very different scenarios, they produce very similar bodily reactions. Schachter and Singer proposed that those emotions feel very different (despite the same biological reactions) because we look to our environment and circumstances to label that arousal. In the first situation, we recognize that we’re being robbed, and so we label our arousal as fear. But in the second situation, we realize that we won a huge chunk of money, and so we label our arousal as excitement. Next time that you’re doing something that generates fear (e.g., public speaking), you could help ease your anxiety by giving your arousal a different label, such as excitement.

But in addition to persuading yourself, how can arousal help you persuade other people? Research shows that activating arousal can be beneficial because it activates heuristic processing. For example, people who were induced into a state of arousal via exercise were more influenced by a celebrity endorser (Sanbonmatsu & Kardes, 1988). If you need to ask your friend for a favor, you might be able to increase your chances of persuading her if you wait for your weekly trip to the gym to spring that request on her. Keep this concept of arousal in the back of your mind because the final chapter will revisit it and explain a few other applications and uses of arousal for persuasion.

But now that you know how to elicit a favorable evaluation of your request, the next chapter will discuss a reciprocal strategy: tweaking your message to suit a particular evaluation.

CHAPTER 11

Tweak Your Message

The previous chapter described how you can alter people’s motivation and ability to evaluate so that you can extract the most favorable type of evaluation for your message. Albeit an effective strategy, you’ll encounter instances where you won’t be able to change people’s evaluation. Are you out of luck? Nope. You just need to predict which type of evaluation they
will
use (by judging their motivation and ability), and you can tweak your message to better suit that evaluation. This chapter will jump straight to the persuasion strategies because the previous chapter already explained the relevant psychology.

PERSUASION STRATEGY: TWEAK YOUR MESSAGE

Here’s the overall strategy: if you know that your target will use systematic processing, you should focus on enhancing the strength of your arguments; if you know that your target will use heuristic processing, you should focus more attention on enhancing the peripheral aspects of your message. The persuasion strategies in this section will teach you some practical techniques to accomplish each of those goals.

HOW TO TWEAK YOUR MESSAGE FOR SYSTEMATIC PROCESSING

Unlike heuristic processing, which can be enhanced through many different aspects, systematic processing can only be enhanced through one main aspect: the strength of your message.

If you predict that your target will have high motivation and ability to evaluate your message, then you need to focus on building stronger supporting arguments. If you’re in a situation where you can’t improve the strength of your reasons, then you have two options. First, you can rely on the persuasion strategy in the previous chapter and decrease your target’s motivation and ability (e.g., decrease personal relevance, don’t grab their attention, etc.) so that they evaluate your message in a more simple-minded manner. The other option, however, is to enhance the
perceived
strength of your arguments. Luckily, there are a few very simple adjustments you can make to most messages that will enhance the perceived strength of the content. This section describes two techniques: using two-sided arguments and sequencing arguments properly.

Present Two-Sided Arguments.
Counterintuitive to our current beliefs, presenting a little bit of negative information about your message can actually benefit you. Research shows that two-sided arguments (arguments that present both positive and negative aspects of a message) can produce favorable changes in attitude and behavior (Rucker, Petty, & Briñol, 2008).

When a message contains only positive support, people tend to believe that the message is purposely excluding information, which causes them to be skeptical toward that message. On the other hand, when a message contains a small amount of negative information, people develop stronger attitudes because they believe that the information is more complete. When the situation is suitable, you should include a small amount of negative information in your message (as well as arguments to address and counter that negative information) because people will assume that you’ve considered both sides of the topic, and as a result, you’ll be able to persuade them more easily.

Properly Sequence Your Arguments.
In some situations, you’ll be providing a number of arguments to support your message (e.g., a school essay, a business proposal). To maximize the appeal of your message, you need to properly sequence those arguments.

Remember the primacy effect from the second chapter? It explained how information presented earlier in a sequence can influence how people perceive the rest of the information in that sequence. Similarly, there’s another powerful effect called the
recency effect
, which causes people to remember the final pieces of information in a sequence more easily than other pieces of information in that same sequence (Murdock, 1962). Let’s examine how you can use the primacy and recency effect to properly sequence arguments and enhance the strength of your message.

Position Strong Arguments First and Last.
Whether you’re writing a school essay, crafting a business proposal, or simply listing the reasons why your target should comply with your request, you should position your most compelling arguments first and last in your sequence. Those arguments will carry more weight in those positions due to the primacy and recency effect.

This advice also applies in situations where your performance will be judged against other people (e.g., talent show, job interview). You can enhance your perceived performance and become more memorable by choosing the first or last position in the line-up. Those positions are also favorable because they take advantage of conceptual fluency: when the judges are choosing the winner at the end, the first and last positions will come to their mind more easily, making the judges prone to misattributing that ease of remembering to a superior performance. If they can easily remember your performance, they will mistakenly jump to the conclusion that your performance was better than the others.

Suppose that you’re scheduling an interview for a job and you learn that the human resources person will be interviewing candidates throughout the course of the day. To increase your chances of getting the job, you should schedule the interview early in the morning (hopefully before all other candidates) or late in the afternoon (hopefully after all other candidates). Because those positions are more easily remembered, you stand a better chance of getting the job by remaining at the top of their awareness when they pick the winning candidate.

Are the first and last positions equal, or is one position more powerful than the other? If you’re a dedicated persuasion-ist and you want to take this sequencing strategy a step further, you should put your most compelling argument last when your target must decide immediately. Why? Because that argument will be in your target’s working memory when he makes the looming decision (Miller & Campbell, 1959). On the other hand, if your target will be waiting before deciding, then you should put your most compelling argument first because the primacy effect is more powerful in the long run.

In the previous job scenario, you should schedule your interview for late in the afternoon if you know that the company will be making a hiring decision very soon (because the recency effect is stronger in the short-term). But if you know that the company will not make a decision for a while, then you should schedule your interview as early as possible because the primacy effect becomes dominant over time.

Position Weak Arguments in the Middle.
Remember how it can be beneficial to include a small amount of negative information in your message? If you follow that advice, you should position that negative information in the middle of your sequence of arguments. Not only will that position still lead to the benefit of giving your message a more comprehensive appearance, but that negative information will then be more likely to fly under your target’s radar.

You should
never
position negative information or weak arguments first because of a potentially harmful principle known as the
inoculation effect
(McGuire, 1964). When a doctor gives you a shot (i.e., an inoculation), you typically receive a small dosage of the infection or disease so that your body can build an immunity to protect against it. The same concept applies to persuasion. If we’re first exposed to a weak argument, we resist that weak argument and develop greater resistance toward future arguments, even if those future arguments are stronger. Once we successfully resist an initial attempt at persuasion, we develop persuasion “antibodies” that help us resist future attacks more easily. You should always strive to make a good first impression because, once an impression has been formed, it becomes increasingly more difficult to change it.