Pre-Suasion – by Robert Cialdini

After his 1984 masterpiece ‘Influence‘, Robert Cialdini brings us his second book: Pre-Suasion.

Influence was all about the CONTENT of your message, whereas Pre-Suasion shows us that it’s also important to manage the CONTEXT. The secret doesn’t just lie in the message itself, but in the interactions before the message is delivered.

You will learn the ‘single chute question’ for the recipient to hunt for confirmations, how the ‘focusing illusion’ is used by the media to create irrationally disproportionate fear with the news, and a three stage process to persuade in any situation using the six weapons of influence. The key thing, however, is to be authentic and point out the persuasive tool only if it is genuinely there – if you’re being a fraud, it simply won’t work.

This book is a weapon. Please use it wisely.

Pre-Suasion Summary

Robert Cialdini is commonly referred to as ‘The Godfather of Influence”. His first cult classic was first published in 1984 and has been impacting the world or marketing and psychology ever since. His first book was Influence (see book #XX for more on this). Influence was all about the CONTENT of a message – what things can you put in to your offer or request that will make people more likely to comply by accepting your idea or buying your product. This book, Pre-Suasion published in 2016, is all about the CONTEXT of the message – what can you do before you make your offer that will make people more favourable to your suggestion. This book is all about what you direct peoples’ attention to before you make your offer so that they’re more likely to accept. 

PREsuasion is the first step toward PERsuasion. It’s all about the things you do to ‘set the table’ that people don’t even realise. It’s all about putting people in the right “psychological frame” introducing the message. “What we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next”. 

Positive Test Strategy 

Cialdini talks about narrowing peoples’ focus down a certain chute. Once they’ve started moving down that chute, they’ll continue moving in that direction. He talks about “target chuting” or the “positive test strategy”, where if we ask someone to look for something they’ll often find it. If we ask someone: ‘Are you happy? Rate your happiness from 1 to 10’, they will look for recent examples in their memory of times when they were happy and good things happened to them. They’ll rate their happiness pretty highly. But let’s say we modify the question and instead ask: ‘Are you unhappy? Rate your happiness from 1 to 10’. By sending someone down this target chute, they’ll look for recent examples when bad things happened that made them unhappy. This ‘positive test’ means that our brain always searches for confirmatory information that would make the statement true. When we look for unhappy memories we’ll find them, and as a result we rate our overall happiness much lower than we otherwise would have. 

Another example was a researcher in a shopping centre with a clip board. The research would ask people walking past if they could spare two minutes to help b answering a short questionnaire. In this control group, 29% of people did so. To the other half of the people that walked past, the researcher would first ask them a question: ‘do you consider yourself a helpful people?’. Of course nearly everyone said yes. Of these people, who were first subconsciously prompted to think of times when they had been helpful, their compliance rate went up almost 3X – 77% of these people stopped to fill out the survey. 

Background Settings 

Without even noticing, the environment we find ourselves in really impacts our behaviour and decision making. One study in the early 2000s analysed the importance of the background of a website. On a furniture site, half of the participants had a background that showed little fluffy clouds, and the other half saw little coins. This was something seemingly small and insignificant, not really anything that people actively looked it. But what researchers found was that the people with coins on their screen were heavily impacted by PRICE and were looking to find the cheapest couch, but those with clouds were focused on COMFORT and we looking for top quality couches. 

Other similar studies found how important background settings were to decision making. In a liquor store, people bought more French wine if the store played French music instead of German music, even though no one paid any attention to what music was playing. If you ask a girl for her number, she’s more likely to give it if you’re standing outside a florist (we associate flowers with love and romance) than if you’re standing outside a bakery. One study also found blokes were more successful when asking a woman on a date if they were first asked directions to Valentine Street than if they were asked how to get to Martin Street.

What’s Focal is Causal 

The things we’re thinking about not only seem more important to us, they also seem more causal. As in, if we’re focused on one set of arguments over another, we believe that these are the reasons that something happened. 

One study that illustrated this was the importance of perspective in videotaped confessions. Hypothetical juries were ruling on hypothetical court cases and were shown videos of a police officer interrogating the accused and getting a verbal confession. The angle of the video made a huge difference – if the camera was over the policeperson’s shoulder looking at the suspect juries took that as an honest confession, but if the camera showed more of the police officer than the suspect the juries believed that this was a false confession made due to the pressure tactics of the police officer. 

We also see this in the sporting world. The captain and the coach are the main leaders we talk about and they’re the most heavily scrutinised by pundits and news reporters. When the teams winning, the coach gets all of the credit, but when the team is losing, the coach gets all of the blame. 

Ziergarnik Effect

Things tend to occupy our brain when we have ‘unfinished business’. If we leave any open loops, they will keep playing on our mind until we close them out. This is a psychological concept known as the ‘Ziergarnik Effect’. 

Bluma Ziergarnik published her research in 1927, showing us that waiters had a far better memory of order that were not yet delivered to the table or not yet paid for than those that had already been completed. As a test, there was a large group of diners. The 12 diners ordered a range of meals and drinks. Without writing these down, the waited memorised the meals, drinks and the seat at which each person was sitting. 20 minutes later, the waiter brought out the meals and placed them correctly in front of each diner. Then, 5 minutes later, the diners covered their meals and asked the waiter to recall who had ordered what. The waiter didn’t even get close. 

Was it the extra five minutes that made the waiter forget? Not likely. He had already retained them in his memory for 20 minutes prior to that. The reason was that this open loop had been closed. After taking the orders, this was an open task in his mind. As soon as he’d placed the last meal in front of the last diner, his task was complete. As there was foreseeably no reason to continue to hold this information in his mind, he could effectively erase it from his memory and make room for other things. 

One important application of this is to realise that if there’s something playing on your mind, you won’t be able to be fully present and effective at what you do. Take any opportunity you can to close out any pending tasks so that you can focus and be more productive. This is recognising the Ziergarnik Effect and ensuring it doesn’t work AGAINST you. You can also harness the Ziergarnik Effect and make it work FOR you: by deliberately leaving open loops and unfinished tasks, your mind will subconsciously divert extra resources toward it. One example of this comes from the British novelist Somerset Maugham. He would never complete a writing session at the end of a page or a paragraph – she would always stop mid-sentence and leave it ‘unfinished’. That way, his mind keep thinking about the story he was invested in and it have a great starting place for the following day’s writing session.