Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Here’s the point for the influence process: whatever we can do to focus people on something—an idea, a person, an object—makes that thing seem more important to them than before.

They’ve been told that an effective way to convey a somewhat elusive concept to an audience is to describe it in terms of another concept that the audience can recognize readily.

“We’ve replaced business targets with business goals. And one of those goals is no longer to beat our competition; it’s to outdistance or outpace them.”

We convince others by using language that manages their mental associations to our message.

They include verbs that draw attention to concrete features of a situation, adjectives that pull one’s focus onto the traits (versus behaviors) of others, personal pronouns that highlight existing relationships, metaphors that frame a state of affairs so that it is interpreted in a singular way, or just particular wordings that link to targeted thoughts.

The payment offers stimulated compliance because they alerted recipients to the amount of need present in the situation.

the more someone needs our help, the more obligated we feel to provide it, the more guilty we feel if we don’t provide it, and the more likely we are to provide it.

more money signaled a stronger need on the part of the requester.

The unresolved mysteries account for a significant portion of the attention

Whereas descriptions require notice and questions require answers, mysteries require explanations.