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Persuading Others: The Art of “Pre-Suasion” with Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University, Author, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Pre-suasion is the process of arranging for an audience to agree with your message before they encounter it. Now that might sound like some form of magic but it’s not, it’s established science.
Pre-Suade yourself
Very often we can use pre-suasive tactics, even other kinds of influence tactics on ourselves to increase the likelihood that we will reach our goals, that we will obtain the outcomes that we hope for in a particular situation. There’s research, for example, to show that if you depict for people an image of a runner winning a race they become more achievement-oriented and actually achieve their goal to a greater extent while that runner is in the background. There’s another piece of research that shows that if you depict for people an image of Rodin’s The Thinker, the statue, they become more analytic and deliberative and they’re more likely to solve problems, difficult complex problems that they’re faced with. So this is something we can do to ourselves.
If we have a task that requires a lot of energy and motivation, put a picture of a runner winning a race in the corner of your computer screen, where you’ll see that cue there while you’re preforming the task. If you’re analyzing a budget perhaps or developing some plan that requires a lot of strategic thinking, put a picture of The Thinker there and you’re more likely to achieve that particular goal. The thing is we get to control the cues in our environment that send us in directions that are likely to be successful for the particular task we have at hand.
When writing my book Pre-Suasion I dedicated it to my grandchildren. And it was something I did for myself to pre-suade me to make that the best possible book I could develop and produce. While I was writing that book there was a corner photograph of my grandkids on the screen of my computer, that picture kept me focused on quality. No shortcuts allowed. This is for my grandkids it better be the best book I can possibly generate.
Cultivate the earth
The interesting question is how do you go about cultivating the earth? How do you arrange for people to be in a frame of mind that is conducive to the message that you want to send? It is to recognize first of all what is the central element of your message? What is the feature of your message that would make it most wise for people to accept your offer? And then you take that dimension and go to the moment before you deliver your message and draw people’s attention to that idea to that dimension.
Let me give you an example. There was a study done by an online furniture store. They had furniture that was comfortable. They also had lower-end furniture that was attractive because it was inexpensive. They did an experiment. They sent half of the visitors to their site to a background depiction of clouds on the wallpaper of their site. So the landing page had fluffy clouds on the background. Those people rated comfort as the most important factor in buying a sofa; they spent more time searching for comfort related information inside the site; and they preferred comfortable furniture to purchase. The other half of the visitors were sent to a site that had as its background wallpaper pennies, coins, money. Those people rated cost as the most important feature for them for purchasing a sofa. They searched for price related information and they purchased more inexpensive furniture. They preferred to purchase more inexpensive furniture as a consequence. So you can see that what was the central dimension of the message, it could be comfort or it could be cost, could be installed in a customer’s mind ahead of time, which caused them to see that dimension as more important, to search for information relative to it, and to act on the basis of a product that gave them that dimension in a prioritized way.