Principles of Persuasion
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Homo Sapiens is cursed by being an idiot, but blessed by being smart enough to know it.
The levers of persuasion share common principles. If you learn and understand these common threads, you can better apply the tools and influence others.
The levers of persuasion come from deep, evolutionary habits. Your ancestors’ brains evolved to survive in a world different than yours.
Don’t think you can out-maneuver evolution. You’ve only been around, what, several decades? Evolution has been working for millennia .
Your evolutionary tendencies have immense power over you. More importantly, you can use them to have immense influence over others.
Doesn’t matter if you have a PhD in logic. You may think you’re rational. You’re not (see also Principle #4).
Charlie Munger is quoted in Seeking Wisdom saying:
“I’ve gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically doing these things . . . . One approach is rationality . . . . And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions – many of which are wrong.”
Your brain is incredibly lazy.
Thanks to evolution (see Principle #1), your brain prefers the path of least resistance. This is because your ancestors evolved in a world where they didn’t know when they would get their next meal. And their brains picked up on that lesson.
So the human brain wants to conserve energy. Your brain doesn’t like weighing the pros and cons of going to the gym or ordering dessert. If it can make the decision in a lazy way, it totally will.
This is expertly described in Thinking Fast and Slow , where Daniel Kahneman outlines your brain’s “fast” and “slow” modes. The “fast” brain is automatic and emotional; the “slow” one is logical and effortful.
But your brain prefers the fast mode because it takes less effort; it has to be intentionally kicked into the slow mode. This leads to errors like availability bias , where your brain thinks things are more probable and believable if it can more easily imagine them.
Your brain has to be consciously flipped into the slow mode; it prefers the fast.
As Kahneman explains in Thinking Fast and Slow , “Anything that makes it easier for the [your brain] to run smoothly will . . . bias beliefs.”
Never trust how you think humans work. Base your beliefs only on their actual behavior .
As Richard Feynman famously said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Humans are notorious self-deceivers. Never trust how someone says they would act in a situation. Look only to their actual actions.
Facts can lend authority if they’re from reliable sources. But, generally, your psychology is easily overpowered by emotions and mental shortcuts. Don’t believe for a second that facts determine outcomes. Anyone who watched the 2016 presidential election knows this.
As Scott Adams writes in Win Bigly : “A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.”
In sum, your brain evolved to be an irrational , lazy , and unreliable organic computer.
It’s a wonder you could put your socks on this morning, isn’t it?
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Confirmation Bias: You’ll Believe It When You See It
Presidential Debate Bingo
How to Make Fake News
Visual Psychology of Images
Primacy and Recency Biases: Be First or Last
May 2020
February 2020
January 2020
September 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
Anchoring
Authority
Availability Bias
Because
Branding Others
Cialdini
Confirmation Bias
Consistency
Contrast
Copywriting
Ethics
Fake News
Framing
General Persuasion Tools
High-Ground Maneuver
In Practice
Labeling
Likability
Pacing and Leading
Primacy
Principles
Recency
Reciprocity
Repetition
Sales
Scarcity
Self Improvement
Self-Reference Effect
Social Proof
Strategic Ambiguity
Thinking Past the Sale
Visualization