Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

The book is full of astounding research findings like these, which have come to light over the last three decades. But "Pre-suasion" doesn't just reveal strange quirks of human psychology, like why you sometimes get a song stuck in your head all day. It also provides potential business applications.

So keep listening to learn the importance of website design, the power of asking someone if they're adventurous, and the role that ethics plays in using influencing techniques.

"Pre-suasion" is divided into three sections, comprising 14 chapters over 233 pages. It's written in a natural, conversational style, so it's a pleasure to read and never feels like a chore. Cialdini bases his findings on a lot of research, so there are 158 pages of references and notes at the back of the book for those who want to read more about how the studies were carried out and by whom.

In the book's third chapter, Cialdini turns his attention to… attention. He describes an experiment in which a furniture retailer tested two starkly different website designs to see how this affected customer behavior. One featured fluffy clouds in the background, and another featured pennies. Visitors to the cloud-filled page were more attracted to the soft, comfortable sofas on the site. Those who saw the penny design were drawn to the most reasonably priced products.

Pre-suading customers in this way can encourage them to put a premium on quality and comfort, rather than price. This, in turn, can help retailers avoid entering price wars with cheaper competitors, which they may end up losing.

In a similar study, a group of people were shown five-second flashes of an advertisement for a camera brand. When asked to rate the ad later, they responded far more positively to it, even though most couldn't recall ever having seen it. This research suggests that even subliminal exposure to a brand or product can encourage customers to be more receptive to it in the future.

Also in chapter three, Cialdini describes a fascinating study that looked at human focus. It found that the reading scores of children in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classroom was located near elevated subway tracks. The disturbance every four to five minutes of trains passing the school was thought to break the children's concentration.

When the New York City transit system and Board of Education were asked to install noise-dampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, the children's scores jumped up.

So if you want your customer to focus on your message, you should prepare an environment that's as free from distractions as possible.

Cialdini describes other ways that attention can be directed and limited. One of his key findings is: "What's focal is presumed causal." This means that when we're looking at something, we believe it to have more agency than we would if we weren't looking at it. This is a fascinating shortcoming of human psychology, and Cialdini has some remarkable data to back up the claim.

The social psychologist Dr Shelley Taylor studied people's perceptions of a scripted exchange between a couple. Viewers were positioned behind the man, looking over his shoulder at the woman, or vice versa, so they could see either the man's or the woman's face, but not both at once. In Taylor's tests, these bystanders almost always reported that the individual whose face they could see had dominated the exchange.

During rehearsals, Taylor even found herself admonishing one of the actors for being overbearing. Her colleagues, who weren't looking directly at the actor's face, told her that he wasn't behaving in that way. At that point, Taylor realized that she had proven her own hypothesis: you presume that whatever is most prominent in your attention has agency.

These findings have implications for the business world. For example, leaders and managers are assumed to have a huge influence on business performance because they're more visible than others. Cialdini points out that analysts have proven this to be false. Workforce quality, internal business systems, and market conditions have a greater impact on profits than a CEO does.

This quirk of human psychology is known as "the romance of leadership." As a result, the average employee of a large corporation in the U.S. is paid one half of one percent of what the CEO is paid. CEOs are highly visible, so they're deemed to be the cause of whatever successes, or failures, their companies experience. What is visually prominent is at the forefront of people's minds, and is therefore assumed to be the cause of events.

In chapter seven, Cialdini describes another fascinating study that looked at 89 companies on the New York Stock Exchange between 1990 and 2004. The research showed that those with easy-to-pronounce stock market symbols initially outperformed competitors. Pronounceable codes come to mind more easily than unpronounceable ones. Once a company's name is at the forefront of our attention, that company has an advantage over its competitors.

In chapter nine, Cialdini explains how a positive frame of mind can be the key to encouraging a positive response. For example, in one experiment, a group of test subjects was shown images of people smiling. They were then asked to try a new soft drink. That group drank more of the new beverage, and were willing to pay more for it, than groups who were shown other images.

Another finding suggests we feel an affinity with businesses that have names similar to our own, which means we're more likely to support them. An ad featuring a beautiful vista provokes positive associations in us, so the product being advertised is more likely to receive a positive response. In these cases, positive responses were prompted by creating a positive state of mind before introducing the product or message.

Positivity is also the key to a whole host of interesting studies that center on the weather. In one study, a male participant was asked to compliment young women and then ask for their phone numbers. He was successful 22.4 percent of the time in sunny weather, but only 13.9 percent on cloudy days.

Sunny weather also has been shown to increase people's sense of satisfaction with their existence as a whole. Research shows that drawing someone's attention to something as simple as good weather before making a suggestion can result in them being more receptive.

You can even redirect your own attention. This is done with a technique called "when-then" planning. It involves creating a trigger for redirecting your thoughts toward a goal. For example, saying that you plan to lose weight by eating less candy will likely fail. Instead, decide that WHEN you are offered dessert, THEN you'll order a mint tea. Creating an association like this will likely result in greater success. The offer of dessert draws your attention to your commitment to lose weight. In other words, you can pre-suade yourself to achieve your goals.

A desire to be consistent also affects our choices, Cialdini discovered. In chapter 10, he describes a study in which participants were asked if they considered themselves to be adventurous. Those who said yes were far more likely to accept an offer to try a new product. They acted in a way that was consistent with their claim to be adventurous. Groups that weren't asked this preliminary question were less likely to try a new product, even though those groups were statistically just as likely to contain the same proportion of adventurous and unadventurous people.

The lesson Cialdini wants us to take away from all this fascinating research is that what people see or feel or hear in the moments before you ask them to sign on the dotted line can make all the difference to their decision.

At this point, you may be wondering if this research could do more harm than good. Cialdini is well aware that people can become nervous when they discover how susceptible human beings are to suggestion and manipulation.

That's why chapter 13 of "Pre-suasion" is devoted to ethics. In it, Cialdini goes to great lengths to make it clear that his work doesn't offer a toolkit for unscrupulous dealings. On the contrary, he sets out to prove that unethical business practices don't pay.

Cialdini first makes the point that a tarnished reputation can have disastrous consequences for a business. Using statistics from the world of finance, he shows just how much value can be knocked off a company's stock when misconduct is made public.

Next, he looks at employee performance, and presents data suggesting that moral stress at work – that is, stress caused by pressure to act immorally – results in employee fatigue and job burnout. He carried out a survey which found that the more unethical the climate, the poorer the workers' job performance and the more stress they felt at work. He considers these findings strike one.

Cialdini then set up an experiment to measure employee turnover. Subjects were placed into groups with honest or dishonest leaders. Participants were later given the option of leaving their groups. While 51 percent opted to leave ethical groups, 80 percent chose to leave unethical groups. He had found his strike two.

For the third strike, Cialdini focused on those employees who chose to stay in unethical climates. He created an experiment that gave all participants the opportunity to cheat on a test. Those who chose to stay in unethical environments cheated 77 percent more than average. By contrast, among those who elected to stay in ethical environments, cheating was nonexistent or negligible.

But what does this mean in the real world? Well, to find out, Cialdini looks at a survey that asked employees to rate the ethicality of their workplaces, as defined by their leaders. It then asked them to rate their desire to leave those workplaces, and the extent to which they had economically harmed their employers. This last item included altering expense reports, sabotaging equipment to avoid work, and using company resources for private purposes. The results showed that those who willingly stayed in unethical environments were far more likely to engage in deceitful and financially costly activities.

Could the pre-suasion techniques in this book be applied in an unethical way? Perhaps they could, but Cialdini wouldn't recommend it. He provides convincing evidence that unethical behavior results in poor business performance. So if you want to keep employees of high integrity, you need to behave in an ethical way.

So, what's our last word on "Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade"?

As you can probably tell, we really like this book. The amount of data Cialdini has included to back up his claims is especially impressive. The jaw-dropping research findings presented in "Pre-suasion" create a very convincing argument in support of his core claim that we are pre-suaded before we're persuaded.

Perhaps we were even pre-suaded to like this book based on the strength of his previous work. Who can say? But even if you've never heard of Cialdini, we're confident that after reading a few chapters, you'll find yourself amazed by his findings, and convinced that he's on to something big.

Whether you're in marketing, management, sales, or you simply want to be an informed consumer, it's important to understand that a great deal of persuasion takes place in the mind of the recipient before a message is ever delivered. To discover more about this fascinating field, pick up a copy of this book and read it for yourself.

Oh, and a final word about those songs that get stuck in your head, which you heard about at the start. Studies have shown that we recall unfinished messages better than finished ones, Cialdini says. Our minds crave cognitive closure when we encounter unfinished patterns, narratives or activities. So, if you don't want to be humming that tune for the rest of the day, you should consider suffering all the way to the end before you turn off the radio.

"Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade," by Robert Cialdini, is published by Simon and Schuster.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.