Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (3 page)

Consider the television show,
Grey’s Anatomy
. Nearly every scene before a commercial break in
Grey’s Anatomy
ends on a depressing cliffhanger. A likable main character just discovers the terrible news that she has cancer and is going to die within three months.
Bam!
Commercial break.

Choosing to air your commercial at this exact moment would be a horrible marketing strategy (unless your product is life insurance, perhaps). For one, viewers are likely to associate their depressed feelings with your product because of classical conditioning (explained in Chapter 14). More broadly, however, that depressing scene will activate a schema of sadness, hopelessness, or some other negative schema through which viewers will perceive and interpret your commercial. To avoid that negative association and detrimental schema, advertisers should avoid airing their commercial after harmful exposures, and instead, strive to position their commercial after favorable exposures (some favorable exposures will be explained later in this section).

Priming effects occur outside of advertising as well. Whether you’re giving a speech, writing a school essay, or even showing your spouse your new haircut, we experience instances each day where we want our message to be perceived in the best possible light. This section will explain one type of schema that you can activate in all situations, and you’ll also learn other types of favorable schemas that you can activate depending on the situation.

Standard Schema
. If you want to trigger a more open-minded perception in your target, why not simply prime a schema of open-mindedness? In fact, exposure to words merely relating to open-mindedness (e.g.,
flexible, elastic, rubber, change
) have been found to trigger more open-minded perceptions (Hassin, 2008). Bingo!

And there’s even more good news. Although it wouldn’t hurt to mention your “flexible” schedule, there’s an even simpler way to activate an open-minded schema. The studies in this chapter have shown that you can easily activate schemas by simply getting someone to think about a concept. To activate an open-minded perception, you simply need to expose your target to an example of open-mindedness.

One simple technique to activate an open-minded perception is to initiate a conversation that revolves around the idea of open-mindedness. Perhaps a few minutes before you present your message or make your request, you casually describe a story of someone who recently tried a new experience and enjoyed it. Even something as simple as the following can work:

• Remember how you told me that I should start listening to the band, Mumford & Sons? I didn’t like them at first, but I listened to them again, and I really like them now.
  

Making a simple and innocent statement about someone acting open-mindedly can help activate your target’s schema of open-mindedness, and that activation will trigger a more open-minded perception. Much like asking people to think about their mother can cause them to perceive someone as more motivated, getting someone to think about open-mindedness will create a lens through which they will perceive things from a more open-minded perspective.

And if the previous conversation starter doesn’t suit your personality or the situation, no worries! There are plenty of other conversation starters that you can use:

• What are your thoughts on skydiving? My friend Sandra was petrified about going, but she recently went, and she absolutely loved it.
  
• Do you like eggplant? My friend Bill used to hate eggplant with a passion, but he recently tried it and, it’s funny, he actually loves it now. I’ve never been a huge fan of eggplant, but I guess I’ll have to try it again sometime.
  
• My company just hired a new employee. Although I didn’t like him at first, I kept an open mind, and he’s finally starting to grow on me.
  

I’m not suggesting that you should lie, but rather, you should try to think of a genuine conversation piece that would revolve around the idea of open-mindedness. The more detailed and elaborate the conversation, the stronger you activate someone’s schema for open-mindedness, which will then trigger a more favorable perception of your message.

And if you can’t think of something relating to open-mindedness, you can still take advantage of this concept by activating other schemas that can still be very favorable for your situation. The next section explains some of those schemas.

Other Schemas
. One of the great benefits about priming is its versatility. Because of spreading activation, there are plenty of other effective schemas that you can activate to make your request seem more appealing.

Suppose that you’re placing an advertisement in a magazine to promote a book that you wrote on persuasion (pfft, who writes books on persuasion—that’s lame). When you speak with the editor or representative about your ad placement, you ask her to describe a few of the article topics that will appear in the issue, and you discover that one of the articles will describe an interview conducted with an author whose book recently became a bestseller.

As the devious persuader that you are, you decide to take advantage of the opportunity. You realize that the interview will prime magazine readers with a “bestseller” schema, and so you decide to purchase a full page ad for your book on the page immediately after the interview with the bestselling author. Even though readers will consciously recognize that you’re not the same author described in the interview on the previous page, they’re likely to perceive your book more favorably because a “bestseller” schema will have become activated. As a result, you’ll persuade a larger percentage of people to purchase your book than you would have persuaded by randomly choosing an ad placement.

Prime Their Behavior.
What if, instead of perception, you wanted to trigger compliance toward a request? In these situations that rely more on behavior, priming the concept of open-mindedness might not do the trick. So are you out of luck? Nope. You simply need to prime a different mindset.

Remember how elderly-related words activated people’s schema for the elderly and caused them to walk more slowly? Mounting research has shown that a variety of different behaviors can be triggered through priming. To see the endless potential of priming, take a look at Table 1.1 to see some interesting findings that other research as found.

Similar to the previous section, this section will describe some standard schemas that you can activate, along with a few other schemas that you can activate depending on the situation.

Standard Schemas
. What’s a good schema that can help you trigger compliance? You could use the same conversation-starter technique that was described in the previous section, except you could initiate a conversation revolving around compliance, rather than open-mindedness. A conversation about someone complying with a request might activate your target’s schema for compliance, which could then trigger a certain behavior that your target associates with compliance—namely, compliance.

Another standard schema that has garnered support from research is helpfulness. When people were exposed to words relating to helpfulness, they were more likely to help an experimenter who accidentally dropped items after the experiment had supposedly ended (Macrae & Johnston, 1998). And as you can see from the list of priming studies, similar effects have been found for activating schemas of politeness (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) and friendship (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003).

Finally, one last schema that you could activate in nearly any situation relates to a common social norm. Here’s a hint: it involves an occasion that occurs once a year. Give up? For centuries, the idea of gift giving has become heavily associated with our schema for birthdays. As a result, if you prime someone’s schema for birthday, you’re likely to trigger behavior associated with gift giving.

If I wanted to make a viral video, I could put the odds in my favor by using that “birthday” technique to persuade a large group of my Facebook friends to initially share the video. How? Before posting the video to my Facebook and asking my friends to share it, I could change my profile picture to a picture of me cutting a cake on my birthday (no matter how far back in time the picture was taken). Exposing people to that picture would then prime their schema for birthdays, and subsequently, the idea of gift giving. Because the idea of gift giving would become activated upon that exposure, my Facebook friends would feel greater pressure to comply with a favor, such as to share my video. Could that simple technique really cause a video to go viral? I used that exact technique with my YouTube video, “Chat Roulette Mind Reading—Part 1,” and an
astounding
number of my Facebook friends shared the video (which then went viral and reached almost a million views within the first week). There were obviously many other factors involved as well, but my new profile picture definitely didn’t hurt.

You should also realize that these types of priming effects often occur outside of our conscious awareness. If people see the picture of me cutting my birthday cake, they don’t need to think, “Oh, is it Nick’s birthday? I should probably do something nice for him by sharing his video.” In fact, they don’t even need to consciously
notice
my new profile picture. Much like a subliminal exposure to Apple’s logo can trigger creative behavior, a nonconscious exposure to my birthday-related picture can still trigger gift giving behavior. People will feel greater pressure to share my video, yet they won’t know why. Oh, the beauty of priming.

Other Schemas
. Suppose that you’re a teacher with rowdy students, and you wanted to extract better behavior from them. What could you do?

One idea is to take advantage of another social norm: being silent in a library. When people in one experiment were primed with a picture of a library and were told that they would be visiting a library, not only did they identify words relating to silence (e.g.,
silent, quiet, still, whisper
) more quickly, but they also demonstrated behavior consistent with the social norm of being in a library. Compared to people who were primed with a picture of a train station, people who were exposed to pictures of a library spoke using a quieter voice (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003).

To extract better behavior from your students, you could do something similar. By hanging pictures of a library on the wall of your classroom, you can prime your students’ schema for the library, which might activate behavior consistent with being in a library (i.e., being quiet). Although kids can be very difficult to persuade, if you use this strategy along with the other techniques in this book, you could start to regain control over your classroom.

The applications of priming are only limited by your imagination. Whenever you’re trying to persuade someone to accept a message or comply with a request, always brainstorm a possible schema that you can activate to put the odds further in your favor. That simple technique could be the extra push that you need to secure your target’s compliance.

A MIND READER’S PERSPECTIVE: HOW TO READ MINDS USING PRIMING

I started performing magic shows at a very young age, but I always hated referring to myself as a magician. A “magician” always seems to bring up the image of a dorky guy in a tuxedo pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and that type of image didn’t appeal to me (though I
am
a somewhat dorky guy, I don’t own a tuxedo and I’m allergic to rabbits).

Even though I now perform as a “mind reader,” nothing that I perform is based on any sort of supernatural phenomenon. In fact, there are only three main ways that anyone can “read minds.” You can either:

1. Use magic and deception (e.g., sleight of hand) to make it seem like you knew what someone was thinking.
   
2. Rely on body language, nonverbal behavior, and other deductive cues to guess what someone is thinking.
   
3. Prime someone to think of a specific thought without their awareness and then proceed to “read their mind.”
   

Which method do I use? I rely mostly on the third method, but I use the first and second methods to further enhance the impossibility of my demonstrations.

When I use the third method to nonconsciously influence people to think of something—whether it’s the Easter Bunny, the color orange, or a dessert cake—I use subtle cues in my script to prime a particular thought. I described the demonstration with the number seven at the beginning of the chapter, but I’ll give you another example. And again, go with the first answer that pops into your head. Think of a vegetable that you might find in a garden.