Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (21 page)

HOW TO TWEAK YOUR MESSAGE FOR HEURISTIC PROCESSING

There are an endless number of heuristics that people use to evaluate messages, but most of them relate to either you or your message. This section describes a few of those heuristics and how you can enhance them.

Their Perception of You.
You’re in a bar one night, and the drunkest man in the bar shouts and screams that the end of the world is approaching. Though an objectively scary claim, it probably wouldn’t faze you in the slightest bit. But suppose that, instead of a drunkard at the bar, a renowned scientist appears on television and claims that the end of the world is approaching. It’s the same exact claim, yet you’re now significantly more likely to wet yourself from fear.

People’s perception of a communicator can be a powerful heuristic that they use to immediately accept or reject a particular message. This section will explain two powerful aspects of that heuristic: perceived authority and attractiveness.

Authority.
If somebody told you to give an extremely powerful electric shock to an innocent bystander, would you do it? What if the person instructing you was wearing a lab coat? Would that make a difference? In one of the most groundbreaking and controversial experiments in the history of psychology, Stanley Milgram found that it makes a tremendous difference (Milgram, 1963).

In that experiment, two participants entered a room and waited for an experimenter. One person was a genuine participant, and unbeknownst to him, the other participant was a confederate hired by the experimenter.

After the two “participants” greeted each other, the experimenter entered the room and explained that the experiment was examining learning. He told participants that each of them would be randomly assigned to one of two roles: one participant would be given the role of “teacher,” and the other participant would be given the role of “learner.” The supposed randomness was actually fixed; the confederate was always the learner, and the true participant was always the teacher.

The experimenter then explained that the study was examining electric shock on learning, and the true participant watched the experimenter tightly strap the confederate into a scary-looking chair that would deliver the electric shocks. The participant’s role as “teacher” involved asking the “learner” a series of memory questions from a separate room. Each time that the confederate answered a question incorrectly, the participant was required to push a button that delivered an electric shock to him in the other room. The levels of shock ranged from 15 volts to a near-lethal 450 volts, increasing in 15-volt increments. With each incorrect answer, the participant was instructed to deliver a higher incremental shock.

Unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate in the other room wasn’t actually receiving shocks. Instead, the experiment was examining the extent to which people would obey the experimenter’s request to deliver the shocks (despite the confederate’s grunts that gradually escalated to agonizing screams of severe heart pain).

If at any point the participant asked the experimenter if he could stop delivering the shocks, the experimenter would give four prods in the following order:

1. Please continue.
   
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
   
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
   
4. You have no other choice but to continue.
   

If the participant persisted on stopping even after those four prods, then the experiment was terminated.

The results of the study were “shocking.” A staggering 65 percent of people administered the highest level of voltage (which participants were informed was near lethal). Even when they heard severe screams of pain, the majority of people still gave a powerful electric shock that could have killed another person.

This experiment has been conducted across the globe, and although the percentages vary depending on the culture, the results are generally consistent: humans are psychologically compelled to obey authority figures to a very large and frightening extent. Even ordinary and moral citizens will perform unthinkable acts if instructed by a higher authority.

How does that relate to persuasion? Much like our tendency to blindly follow authority, we also blindly trust experts in a particular field. When an expert makes a certain claim, rather than use systematic processing to critically evaluate that information, we often blindly trust the accuracy of that information merely because it came from an “expert.” For example, when students read a speech about acid rain, students who were told that the speech was written by an environmental studies major were more persuaded by the speech than students who were told that the speech was written by a mathematics major, even though the speech was exactly the same (Mackie & Worth, 1991).

If you’re not yet considered an expert, you can still use experts’ testimony to support your claims. With
Methods of Persuasion
being my first book, my perceived authority in this area is pretty low. Rather than try to convince you of my authority and knowledge, I tried to overcome that hurdle by heavily citing research to support my claims. In fact, I almost used footnotes for the citations, but I deliberately chose to include citations within the text to reinforce that these strategies are grounded in credible research.

Attractiveness.
In a perfect world, attractiveness shouldn’t affect your persuasion. But wait—we’re
not
living in a perfect world. Does attractiveness matter? Yes it does. Unfortunately, it matters to a scary extent. Take a look at some disturbing findings:

• Attractive criminals receive more lenient sentences (Sigall & Ostrove, 1975).
  
• Attractive infants receive more attention and caretaking (Glocker et al., 2009).
  
• Attractive men receive higher starting salaries, and attractive women earn more money later in their career (Frieze, Olson, & Russell, 1991).
  

Despite those positive benefits, are attractive people inherently “better” than other people? Many researchers have examined that question, but most have failed to produce evidence to support that claim. One of the only reliable traits where attractive people have a genuine advantage over other people is mating success (Rhodes et al., 2005).

All of the other benefits from physical attractiveness have emerged through psychological factors. Attractive people have a significant advantage because other people unknowingly act more favorably toward them. For example, when male students in one study were led to believe that they were speaking with an attractive female over the phone, not only did they develop a more favorable impression of the female’s personality, but the women on the other line, in turn, developed a favorable impression of the male’s personality (Snyder, Decker Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977).

Despite all of those alarming claims about attractiveness, there
are
techniques that you can use to enhance your perceived attractiveness. Two techniques that were discussed earlier include familiarity and similarity (Moreland & Beach, 1992; Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner, 2008). You can enhance your perceived attractiveness by: (1) being in the general vicinity of someone more often and, (2) revealing any type of similarity that you might share with that person.

But there’s another, more powerful technique that you can use. The final chapter will expand on this concept and explain another powerful way to enhance your perceived attractiveness (and why you’d have greater success in meeting a potential romantic partner at a gym).

Their Perception of Your Message.
Heuristics can be found not only in the source of a message (e.g., a communicator’s authority and attractiveness) but also in the message itself. This section will describe three peripheral cues in your message that can appeal to people who are using heuristic processing.

Amount of Information.
Consistent with the lazy nature of heuristic processing, we can easily be influenced by the sheer amount of supporting information that a message contains. Generally, people using heuristic processing will be more persuaded if you include more information in your message because they blindly assume that your message contains more support (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984).

Suppose that you’re shopping online for a blender. Because this decision is relatively unimportant, your motivation to evaluate the descriptions of each blender would be fairly low, and you would likely use heuristic processing. If you stumble across a blender with a lengthy description and long list of benefits, you’re more likely to assume that the extensive information implies a high-quality blender. If other blenders only offer a short description and list of benefits, you’re likely to rely on the length of descriptions to assume that the blender with more information is a higher-quality blender.

If you know that your target will use heuristic processing to decide between a set of options, you can guide his choice by providing more information under the option that you want him to select. Even if that information doesn’t necessarily support the benefit of that option, it can still influence your target’s decision.

Aesthetics.
Whether it occurs consciously or nonconsciously, people evaluate information based on the aesthetics of a message. Even important financial decisions, such as a financial analyst evaluating a company’s annual reports, can be influenced by the design and graphics within those financial reports (Townsend & Shu, 2010).

A promising new field—called
neuroaesthetics
—studies brain responses toward aesthetically pleasing stimuli (Chatterjee, 2010). One of the main findings from this field is that people experience a biological sense of pleasure when they view aesthetically pleasing material. For example, when researchers measured people’s neural responses when they viewed an assortment of paintings, they found that the orbitofrontal cortex (an area of our brain associated with rewards) became activated only for paintings that those people previously rated to be beautiful (Kawabata & Zeki, 2004).

Whenever we view aesthetically pleasing stimuli, our brain experiences a rewarding sensation, and we often misattribute that pleasurable feeling to the underlying content of that message. Therefore, you should always spend time enhancing the aesthetics of a message, even if it seems irrelevant.

Some marketers argue that website aesthetics are unimportant because “the only thing that matters is the strength of the content.” Don’t listen to those so-called marketing “gurus.” Website aesthetics are crucial for a number of reasons. First, people use aesthetics as a heuristic for quality; if your website is aesthetically pleasing, they’ll assume your content is above average, and vice versa. This benefit leads to a second benefit: aesthetics will influence website visitors to actually evaluate your content, a decision that’s usually made within 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard et al., 2006). The strongest content in the world won’t matter if people don’t actually stop to evaluate it.

Justification.
Would you mind reading this section while underlining it with your finger? Because that will help demonstrate the psychological principle in this section (I’ll explain why in a few paragraphs).

Imagine that you’re at a library. You’re in a rush to use the copier, but you’re waiting for someone to finish using it. Which of the following three requests do you think would help you the most?

• Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the copier?
  
• Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the copier, because I need to make some copies?
  
• Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the copier, because I am in a rush?
  

Did you guess the third reason? Technically, you’d be right. In the classic study that examined this scenario, 94 percent complied with the third request, whereas only 60 percent complied with the first request (Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978).

But what about the second request? When you think about it, that request is virtually the same as the first request. If you need to use a copier, then
obviously
you need to make some copies; adding “because I have to make some copies” shouldn’t make a difference.

What’s fascinating, though, is that the second request yielded 93 percent compliance, a nearly identical rate of compliance as the third request. When people provide a reason for their request, people who are using heuristic processing will generally assume that the reason is valid. Therefore, giving
any
reason—even a meaningless reason such as “because I have to make some copies”—can enhance your persuasion because it becomes a heuristic that your target uses to decide whether he will comply.

Are you still reading while underlining the words with your finger? It would be impossible to force every single reader to comply with that request, but the justification that I used—“because that will help demonstrate the psychological principle in this section”—would have elicited a larger percentage of compliance because it was a form of justification, even though the reason was almost meaningless (why else would I ask you to do that task otherwise?).

Whenever you present a message or make a request, you should almost always provide some sort of justification, even if it seems trivial. If people are using heuristic processing, they will mindlessly assume that your reason is valid, and they will be more likely to accept your message or comply with your request.