CONCLUSION
The secrets of persuasion are effective because they address the lizard inside: our automatic, nonconscious mental system. We know now this automatic system affects all our choices and is the sole influence in many. But we learned this only recently.
In the past, the theory of persuasion had focused on the us we are familiar with: the reflective mental system, the only mental system available to consciousness. The theory emphasized factual information, reasoning, and an orderly flow from information to attitude to behavior.
However, successful practitioners of persuasion—from the ancient rhetoricians, to modern, expert salespeople like Dale Carnegie and Bill Bernbach—didn’t let the theory of persuasion stop them from doing what they knew worked. They intuitively spoke to the automatic, nonconscious mental system.
To be successful, you need to deal with the lizard inside. The lizard is much faster than our reflective mental system, has much greater capacity, works effortlessly, can’t be turned off, is focused on the here and now, and is capable of performing tasks that are either innate (like seeing) or learned through great repetition (like speaking English).
In order to persuade the lizard, the automatic, nonconscious mental system, speak its language:
• Mental availability. Your automatic system pays the most attention to and assumes the importance of things and people that come most easily to mind.
• Association. An idea in the mind activates other associated ideas and each of these ideas activates still more ideas. Associations occur even if you don’t want them to. You can’t stop association, but you can adjust it.
• Action. For the lizard, you are what you do no matter why you do it.
• Emotion. The automatic system uses emotion to communicate its desires and is swayed by emotion—liking, repulsion, fear, or happiness.
• The preferences and behavior of others. The automatic, nonconscious mental system uses the preferences and behavior of others to help form its own preferences and even to help evaluate how happy it is with a choice it has already made.
Aim at what people do, not their attitude. Many actions are spontaneous and don’t pass through an attitudinal screen.
Changing the act is your ultimate goal. Aim at that goal. Fortunately, the act may be easier to change than the attitude. And changing the act is likely to be a more effective way of changing the attitude than the reverse. When you aim to change the act, you have a much wider array of persuasive tools to work with. Lay out the leaky hose—the series of smaller action steps that lead to the ultimate act you aim to encourage or discourage. Figure out precisely where to focus your persuasive attempt to have the biggest impact on the outcome.
Talk about what the target wants even if the target members don’t consciously know exactly what they want. When you stop trying to change what people want and instead try to show people how to get what they want, your message becomes dramatically different. Your persuasive attempts become less strident, preachy, and moralistic and more focused on the desires of the target. Only then will the target listen.
Remember: With many daily decisions, the automatic system, not the reflective system, is in charge and factual information is not the answer. Rational information can have little impact on a decision that is not rationally made.
When identifying the desires that can motivate the action you wish, remember:
• Don’t think small. Offer to fulfill a fundamental human desire. Other desires have less magic.
• Look for a universal motivation. Similarities in motivation across groups will generally be greater than differences.
• Offer a reward that is immediate, certain, and emotional.
Don’t ask people why they do what they do, or how they choose, or what’s most important in their decision. People don’t know the answer, but they think they do. Bad information is worse than no information.
Unearth the answer with some basic research, whether informal or formal. See what people who already act as you would like associate with that action. Decide whether the same association would also motivate your target. If so, begin to build the association. If not, find something else in the overlap of what your target wants and the possible outcomes of the action. Build that association.
Focus on feelings. When you focus on a feeling rather than an attribute, you:
• Gain the power of promising an end rather than a means.
• Gain precision because, without guidance, an attribute can lead to many different feelings.
• Turn a delayed, uncertain, rational benefit into an immediate, certain, and emotional reward.
• Tap into an additional class of rewards that doesn’t depend on the physical experience of the action you rec-ommend—actor image rewards.
When you promise the feeling of participating in an attractive actor image, you:
• Offer your target the opportunity to appear to others as the person they would like to be—public image enhancement.
• Offer your target the opportunity to appear to themselves as the person they would like to be—self-image enhancement.
• Imply a variety of positive qualities of the action naturally associated with that actor image.
Perception is an unconscious process carried out by the lizard inside, the automatic mental system. Expectation guides perception. You can change the experience by changing the expectation. If we expect carrots to taste a little better, they will.
What we see, feel, taste, or smell depends to a great degree on what we expect to see, feel, taste, or smell. What the eye sees depends, only in part, on what is there to be seen. What the eye sees also depends on what it expects to see. No eye is without expectation. No eye is innocent. You can create the expectation.
Communication may not be the best way to change the behavior of the target. Changing the situation will often be more effective in getting the target to act differently.
When you do use communication to persuade, remember that what you literally say may be less important than how you say it.
All persuasion can use a little of the art of conversation—making a tacit guarantee that the message is one the audience will want to receive and literally communicating only what the audience cannot provide on their own, establishing a degree of complicity and a level of emotional closeness.
All persuasion can use a little of the art of generating inference—thinking of the message not so much as content, but more as the behavior of people who act the way you would like the audience to act because behavior implies much more about those people than you could say.
And all persuasion can use a little of the art of engagement—making your message unexpected, encouraging the audience to seek the pleasure that comes from deciphering a clever arrangement of signs.
With a little art you increase your chance of persuasion.
Persuasion is defined as convincing by means of reasoned argument. The definition is wrong.
Because the remarkably capable lizard is in charge of most decisions, reasoned argument is a waste of time. You can only persuade the lizard if you speak its language and show the lizard a better way to fulfill its desires.