Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (8 page)

From that moment, I started conveying the same expectations for everyone else that I hypnotize, even to this day. If I’m hypnotizing someone that I just met, after 5 to 10 minutes of speaking with him, I smile and say, “It’s funny. You seem like a very hypnotizable person. You seem like someone who could easily go into a deep state of hypnosis. That’s a great quality to have.” Because many people have doubts about their ability to be hypnotized (often because of how it’s portrayed on stage), that statement removes any mental defenses that the person may possess, and it reinforces their expectations that they
will
be hypnotized. In turn, that makes it easier for me to guide them into a deep state of hypnosis.

Although I learned hypnosis mainly by studying the academic research on the subject, I recommend seeking proper training if you’re interested in learning it. Hypnotherapy training is offered throughout the country and probably near your location. Hypnosis is a fantastic skill to possess, but because it can be very powerful, you should seek proper training if you’re interested in learning it.

REAL WORLD APPLICATION: THE FAMILY VACATION (PART 1)

At the end of each step in METHODS, I’ll present a “Real World Application” to demonstrate how you can begin implementing that step into daily scenarios. In this first application, you want your family to take a vacation in a few months, but you expect to encounter some resistance from your budget-concerned husband. You know that your family has enough money saved, so you decide to implement a few tactics to make him more open-minded.

Considering your seven-year-old daughter, Mackenzie, you decide that a small trip to Disneyland would not only give her a great memory, but it would also be an affordable vacation compared to a worldwide alternative. In order to make your husband more open to that idea, you plan to anchor his perception by gathering travel information for two potential vacations: (1) a very expensive vacation around the world, and (2) the trip to Disneyland on which you have your heart set.

You know that your budget-concerned husband would never go for the first option, so you plan to present that decoy to set an absurdly high anchor point. When you present the second vacation option (the trip to Disneyland), a contrast effect will make this vacation seem much smaller because of your husband’s newly anchored perception.

He gets home from work one day, and you put that plan into action. But before you bring up the idea about taking a family vacation, you put the odds further in your favor by mentioning that Mackenzie has been starting to eat vegetables—a food that she’s always disliked. With this conversation involving Mackenzie’s open-mindedness, you hope to activate your husband’s schema for open-mindedness so that he will temporarily develop a more open-minded perception.

As you transition from that conversation into the idea about taking a vacation (e.g., “Speaking of Mackenzie . . .”), you present the very expensive vacation option, which he immediately rejects, as expected. But with his perception attached to that high anchor point, you then present the second option about the trip to Disneyland. With an intense look of contemplation, he mentions that he’s on the fence and that he’ll need time to think about it.

Darn. It wasn’t the response that you wanted, but don’t worry. This book will explain an enormous number of additional persuasion tactics that you can use to crack your husband’s closed-mindedness. We’ll revisit this scenario later, and I’ll explain how you can incorporate other persuasion tactics to garner his compliance.

STEP 2

Elicit Congruent Attitudes

OVERVIEW: ELICIT CONGRUENT ATTITUDES

I mentioned in the introduction to this book that part of my goal was to make this book the most highlighted book in your collection. Though a seemingly innocent statement, it contained a few powerful psychological principles:

• First, that statement primed the idea of highlighting, which made you more likely to engage in that behavior (Chapter 1: Prime Their Mindset).
  
• The fact that I mentioned this book should be the most highlighted book in your collection conveyed high expectations (Chapter 3: Convey High Expectations). With your heightened expectations, you were likely to engage in a self-fulfilling prophecy by highlighting more than you typically would. Though that statement wouldn’t have worked if you never highlight at all, I’m sure that there
  are
  many people reading this book that
  are
  highlighting more than they typically would.
  

But there’s another very important benefit from mentioning that statement about highlighting, and this benefit is the main focus of the second step in METHODS:

• If you see yourself highlighting more than you typically would highlight, you’re likely to develop a congruent attitude that this book is very helpful and informative.
  

The term “congruent” essentially means “consistent.” If your target is engaging in a certain behavior (e.g., highlighting), he will feel greater pressure to develop an attitude that is “congruent” with his behavior. For example, if he’s highlighting more than he would typically highlight, then he will infer that he must really like this book.

That notion is the main principle of Step 2 in METHODS. Because people experience a natural urge to hold attitudes that are consistent with their behavior, you can elicit an attitude that would be favorable for your situation by altering someone’s body language or behavior to reflect that attitude. The next two chapters will explain why this principle is so powerful and how you can start applying it.

CHAPTER 4

Control Body Language

While you read this opening description of the chapter, place a pen in your mouth, and bite it with your teeth. Keep holding it with your teeth until you reach the next section . . . I’ll explain why in a few paragraphs.

Body language is a booming topic. Walk into any bookstore and you’re bound to find a large assortment of books about how you can use body language to instantly decode someone’s inner thoughts. Unfortunately, many of those books are inaccurate and misleading because they make claims that are only based on intuition, rather than credible research. Does that mean the field of body language is doomed? Nope. Luckily, although some aspects make the field of body language seem like a pseudoscience, there
has
been some credible evidence to support some surprising claims. Accordingly, all of the principles in this chapter are grounded in that credible research.

Specifically, this chapter focuses on one fascinating topic that’s been attracting a lot of attention from researchers over the past decade:
embodied cognition
. Embodied cognition can explain why:

• A job applicant has a better chance of getting the job if his résumé is attached to a heavy clipboard compared to a lighter clipboard (Jostmann, Lakens, & Schubert, 2009).
  
• Writing down negative thoughts about yourself can lower your self-esteem, but only when you write those thoughts with your dominant hand (Briñol & Petty, 2008).
  
• People who press their arm upward against a table eat significantly more cookies than people who press their arm downward on a table (Förster, 2003).
  

Embodied cognition asserts that the mind and body are intertwined. We typically assume that the mind influences the body, but the relationship also works in the reverse direction. That is, your body and behavioral actions can influence your thoughts, perception, attitudes, and many other cognitive mechanisms.

Over time, we come to associate specific behavioral actions with particular states of mind. These associations eventually become so strong that our mere body movements and positioning can trigger the corresponding cognitive mechanism (Niedenthal et al., 2005). For example, the act of making a fist has become so heavily associated with hostility that men who were subtly influenced to make a fist (under the disguise of a “rock, paper, scissors” type of task) rated themselves as more assertive in a seemingly unrelated questionnaire (Schubert & Koole, 2009).

Now that you have a better “grasp” of embodied cognition, the original three bulleted findings might make more sense:

• If a résumé feels heavier—even if it’s only due to a heavy clipboard—people falsely associate the heaviness with value. Not only is there a nonsensical belief that more information is packed into the résumé, but there’s also the common metaphor that important things tend to “carry more weight.”
  
• Why does writing down negative thoughts about yourself lower your self-esteem only when you write them with your dominant hand? When you write down negative thoughts with your nondominant hand, the effect disappears because you’re less confident in your writing ability. The lack of confidence that you feel from writing is misattributed to a lack of confidence in the accuracy of those negative thoughts.
  
• When we push our arm upward against a table, that movement resembles bending our arm inward, an action that we perform when we bring something toward us. Because we perform that action when we find something appealing, people who were asked to push their arm upward ate significantly more cookies compared to people who were asked to push their arm downward, an action that we perform when we push something away from us.
  

As you’ll discover in this chapter, embodied cognition is a fascinating phenomenon with tremendous potential.

For those of you who are still biting a pen with your teeth, you can take it out now. Why on earth did I ask you to do that? When you hold a pen in your mouth by biting it with your teeth, this facial positioning causes you to exude the same expressions that you exude when you smile (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). You’re now in a better mood than you were at the beginning of the chapter. The next section will explain why that’s the case.

WHY IS EMBODIED COGNITION SO POWERFUL?

Still skeptical about embodied cognition? There are a few psychological principles that can explain why it occurs.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis.
Remember how I asked you to read the opening description while biting a pen with your teeth? A group of researchers asked people to view a series of cartoons while holding a pen in their mouth. They asked some people to bite the pen with their teeth, and they asked other people to simply hold the pen with their lips. The researchers found that people who were biting the pen with their teeth (a position that caused them to smile) found the cartoons more amusing compared to people who were holding the pen with their lips (a position that didn’t cause them to smile) (Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988).

To explain that phenomenon—which has become known as the
facial feedback hypothesis
—Robert Zajonc proposed a
vascular theory of emotion
, a theory suggesting that our body language can trigger biological mechanisms that, in turn, influence our emotional state and interpretation of information. When he and his colleagues (1989) asked German students to repeat certain vowel sounds (
i, e, o, a, u, ah, ü
), they found that students exhibited lower forehead temperature when they repeated
e
and
ah
vowel sounds (sounds that caused them to exude smiling expressions). Those smiling expressions cooled the students’ arterial blood, which produced a more pleasant mood by lowering their brain temperature. Conversely, repeating
u
and
ü
sounds forced students to frown, which decreased blood flow and heightened brain temperature, thereby dampening their mood. The mere act of smiling can spark biological mechanisms, which can then trigger attitudes and emotions that we associate with smiling.

Even if particular body language doesn’t directly trigger biological responses that alter our mood (e.g., smiling lowers brain temperature, which enhances our mood), our body language can still influence cognitive mechanisms because of self-perception theory.

Self-Perception Theory.
Self-perception theory
proposes that we sometimes infer our attitudes by examining our behavior (Bem, 1972). If we hold an ambiguous attitude toward something, we try to make sense of that attitude by examining our actions and body language. For example, when people viewed photographs of celebrities, they perceived them to be less famous when they were asked to view the pictures while furrowing their eyebrows, a facial expression associated with exerting mental effort (Strack & Neumann, 2000). When people furrowed their eyebrows, they inferred from their facial expression that they were exerting mental effort to think of that celebrity, an inference that led them to perceive the celebrities to be less famous.