Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (28 page)

• First, the commercial is so absurd that it’s easy to remember (the
  bizarreness effect
  describes how bizarre images are more easily remembered; McDaniel et al., 1995).
  
• Second, the next time people experience hunger—a naturally occurring need state—they will be primed to think of your brand. Upon experiencing their hunger, they might remember your silly commercial about the food baby, which would then trigger their memory for your brand.
  
• Third, the fact that your brand will pop into their mind so easily takes advantage of conceptual fluency; the ease with which your brand came to their mind will be misattributed to a desire to consume your brand (Lee & Labroo, 2004)
  
• Fourth, since they will already be in a state of need (i.e., hungry), they’ll be actively looking for a way to solve that need. Because they will already be thinking of your brand, your food product becomes a perfect candidate to solve their need.
  
• Fifth, the next time that people see a baby (or hear the expression “food baby”), they might ask the people around them if they’ve seen your commercial, which would spark a conversation around your brand (Berger, 2013). These conversations would sustain ongoing word-of-mouth with your brand and automate part of your marketing efforts.
  

Although this strategy has the most relevance for marketers, the principle is very powerful. To keep your product or message at the top of someone’s mind, you should associate it with something that people encounter on a frequent basis. Each time someone is exposed to those “naturally occurring primes,” they will likely think of your product or message.

Enhance Your Attractiveness.
Welcome to the last specific strategy in the book. I decided to end with a topic that: (1) packs a powerful persuasion punch, and (2) remains in high demand. In this strategy, you’ll learn how to enhance your perceived attractiveness.

Imagine that a researcher approached you while you were walking across a sturdy bridge, and she asked you to complete a questionnaire. Would your perception of her attractiveness change if, instead of a safe bridge, you were walking across a wobbly suspension bridge? Research suggests that it
would
change because of your heightened arousal (ah yes, the same state of arousal that was discussed a few chapters ago).

Dutton and Aron (1974) conducted that bridge experiment to examine the connection between arousal and attraction. In their study, a female approached males when they were walking across either a wobbly suspension bridge or a safe and sturdy bridge. After each male completed the questionnaire, the female researcher gave him her phone number and invited him to call with any questions. The results were astounding. Of the sixteen males who crossed the safe bridge, only two of them (13 percent) followed up with a phone call. Of the 18 males that crossed the wobbly suspension bridge, however, a whopping 9 of them (50 percent) called the female researcher. The dangerous nature of the suspension bridge caused those males to experience higher arousal (e.g., rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, etc.), and they looked for surrounding cues to label that aroused state. Although the bridge served as one possible explanation, the female researcher represented another possible explanation. Because males who crossed the safe bridge experienced very little arousal, there was nothing to misattribute to the female researcher, and so fewer of those males followed up with a phone call.

Other studies have even found that people can remain fully aware of the true source of arousal yet still develop stronger feelings of attraction toward the other person. You’re reclining back in a dentist’s chair when
bam
! The chair suddenly drops back 35-degrees, and a heavy brass plate collides with a steel plate on the floor, producing an incredibly loud and startling bang. Unless you’re Superman, you’d probably feel some arousal from that startling experience, as did participants in one study (Dienstbier, 1989). But even though participants knew the true source of their arousal, they still found the experimenter nearby to be significantly more attractive.

How can you take advantage of this principle to enhance your perceived attractiveness? Fortunately, there are plenty of situations where people experience a naturally higher state of arousal besides a wobbly bridge and a broken dentist’s chair. If you’re hoping to meet a potential romantic partner, one option is to join a gym, a place where nearly everyone is in a natural state of arousal. When you interact with fellow gym goers, they’re more likely to interpret their state of arousal as attractive feelings toward you, and thus you stand a better chance of sparking a romance with gym members (White, Fishbein, & Rutsein, 1981).

Similarly, if you begin dating someone, you could choose dates that take advantage of naturally occurring arousal, such as a scary movie or an amusement park. Scary movies have been found to increase the affiliation between couples (Cohen, Waugh, & Place, 1989), and roller coasters at amusement parks lead people to rate their seat partner as more attractive (Meston & Frohlich, 2003).

There are other options out there too; you just need to use some creative brainstorming. Like every principle in this book, you’re not limited to the example strategies that I described in the chapter. As I mentioned in the introduction, I chose to explain the psychology behind every principle so that you can brainstorm your own persuasion applications. Rather than give you fish, my goal has been to teach you how to catch your own fish.

Now that you understand some of the principles that guide human behavior, you can start to develop your own creative uses for those principles. I’m confident that you’ll soon find that the applications are truly endless. Much like a puppeteer can use the strings to control a marionette, you’ll soon find yourself becoming a master puppeteer in our world full of human marionettes. And with that last “metaphor” (wink wink), I’ll now present one last Real World Application and end the book with a unique summary to help you make sense of all of the principles that were described throughout the book.

REAL WORLD APPLICATION: THE FAMILY VACATION (PART 3)

You’ve somewhat cracked your husband’s closed-mindedness, and he’s now on the fence about taking the family trip to Disneyland. To give him that extra boost of persuasion, you decide to classically condition him to find the vacation even more appealing.

Each time that your husband is in a good mood, you bring up the idea of travel in general. You don’t bring up the idea about the family vacation (because that might spark psychological reactance if he notices your devious motive). Instead, you mention unrelated aspects of travel, such as your coworker’s recent trip to France or your family’s trip to Italy a few years ago.

Not only does that tactic further reinforce your repeated exposures, but it also classically conditions your husband to find the idea of travel more appealing. By consistently presenting the idea of travel to your husband when he’s in a pleasant mood, you can cause his positive emotions to transfer to the family vacation idea. Your husband will unknowingly develop a more positive attitude toward the vacation because of those continuous exposures.

After you condition him for a week or two, you once again mention the possible family trip to Disneyland, and his response is a breath of fresh air. He’s finally on board. Overjoyed, you give him a big hug and kiss as your mind frantically races about planning the trip. You can’t wait to give your daughter a memory that will last a lifetime.

Putting It All Together

So there you go. That was
Methods of Persuasion
. You can smile knowing that we officially reached the end of the book.

Before I
summarize
the main principles from the book, it’s now my turn to try and persuade you to comply with a request. I’m at a huge disadvantage, though, because you’re now familiar with all of my potential tactics; if I incorporate any of the strategies from the book, you’ll see right through them. So I’m forced to rely on one final persuasion technique: a genuine, heartfelt plea.

What’s the favor? I need you to purchase 100 copies of this book to give to your friends so that you can spread the word about my book . . . I’m kidding! The favor is pretty small. And, in fact, I’ll even let you choose between one of two potential options (or if you want to do both, then that’s even better!). If you thought that the information in this book was interesting and/or helpful, you could help me out
tremendously
if you:

• Write a positive review on Amazon (which will help me market the book through social proof).
  
• Subscribe to my blog at www.NickKolenda.com (which will help you stay updated on new articles, books, and videos from me).
  

So, in regard to not using psychological principles in my request . . . I might have used a few principles. Well, I might have used more than a few. Did you realize that I used over half the principles from this book in that short request? Let’s backtrack and review the principles that I used so that you have a better idea about how you can start implementing them in your own life. This review will be a good summary of the book.

The psychology started in the very first paragraph when I mentioned that you can smile having reached the end of the book. Using the word “smile” was two-fold. First, exposing people to the word “smile” activates the facial muscles used in smiling (Foroni & Semin, 2009), so that was my attempt to control your body language (Chapter 4). Second, people generally put “smiling” in their schema of open-mindedness, so exposing you to that word may have primed a perception that was more open-minded (Chapter 1).

Further, you’ll notice that I specifically said that you can smile knowing that “we” officially reached the end of the book. Using that first person pronoun helped emphasize that we belong to the same ingroup (Chapter 7) because it subtly implied that we were part of the same arduous journey, so to speak.

In the next paragraph, you might have noticed that “summarize” was bolded, which probably seemed out of place. This deliberate bolding was my attempt to grab your attention using the pique technique. If you were mindlessly reading along, that “mistake” may have woken you up from reading on autopilot so that you would use systematic processing to evaluate my request (Chapter 10).

As that same paragraph continues, I tried to disguise my psychological strategies by saying that it was pointless to try to use them. By disguising my strategies, I tried to make it seem like I wasn’t trying to persuade you or control your behavior; otherwise, you may have engaged in psychological reactance by automatically resisting my request (Chapter 13).

Immediately before I presented my request in the next paragraph, I anchored your perception by using a contrast effect. The request to purchase 100 copies of my book seemed so large that when I later presented the two smaller requests, you perceived them to be even smaller than if I hadn’t presented that large request (Chapter 2).

Even the two requests themselves contained psychological principles. Not only did I promote your autonomy by giving you the choice of the request (Chapter 12), but I also followed each request with justification. If you were still using heuristic processing (which we all do to some extent), you would automatically assume that those reasons would be valid, and you would be more likely to comply (Chapter 11).

It’s amazing how easy it can be to implement those principles into everyday situations. In one simple request to you, I managed to use a principle from over half of the chapters in this book. Further, even though you were aware of those principles, I’m willing to bet that many of them still flew under your radar. That’s another great benefit about these principles. When you implement them on people who don’t know them, they’ll be even more invisible. Finally, I hope you also realize that, although this book outlines a step-by-step process, you can also pick and choose when to use these principles. The METHODS process is a helpful guide, but there are no strict step-by-step rules. You’re free to use the principles at your disposal.

With all applications aside, however, you could truly help me out by doing one of those two options that I mentioned. If you didn’t think this book merited one of those two options, then please let me know what it
would
need. I poured my heart and brain into making this book as interesting and helpful as possible, so if you can think of a way to improve it, I would love to incorporate that suggestion into the next edition.

References

Aarts, H., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2003). The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
,
84
(1), 18–28.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
,
103
(24), 9369–9372.

Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation.
Personality and Social Psychology Review
,
13
(3), 219–235.