Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Pre-Suasion:  A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini

NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2016

ISBN 978-1-5011-0979-9

(4)  To accomplish that, they did something that gave them a singular kind of persuasive traction:  before introducing their message, they arranged to make their audience sympathetic to it.

...The best persuaders become the best through _pre-suasion_ - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it’s necessary to pre-suade optimally.  But how?

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication:  what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.

(10)  I identified only six psychological principles that appeared to be deployed routinely in long-prospering influence businesses.  I’ve claimed that the six - reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, and consistency - represent certain psychological universals of persuasion…

(11)  … why organizations should steer sharply away from unethical persuasive practices:  those practices will lend themselves to the attraction and retention of employees who find cheating acceptable and who will ultimately cheat the organization as a consequence.

(22)  But it comes down to this:  in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses;  for confirmations of the idea rather than for disconfirmations.  It is easier to register the presence of something than its absence.

(23)  First, if a pollster wants to know only whether you are dissatisfied with something - it could be a consumer product or an elected representative or a government policy - watch out.  Be suspicious as well of the one who asks only if you are satisfied.  Single-chute questions of this sort can get you both to mistake and misstate your position.  I’d recommend declining to participate in surveys that employ this biased form of questioning.  Much better are those that use two-sided questions:  “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you you with this brand?”  “Are you happy or unjappy with the mayor’s performance in office?”  “To what extent do you agree or disagree with this country’s current approach to the Middle East?”  These kinds of inquiries invite you to consult your feelings evenhandedly.

(29)  However, just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it.  For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an _attentional blink_, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously.

NB:  Move on the blink

(29-30)  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.

(33)  Daniel Kahneman:  “Nothing in life is an important as you think it is _while_ you are thinking about it.”

(33-34)  … a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message _pre-loads_ it with importance.  This form of pre-suasion accounts for what many see as the principle role (labeled _agenda setting_) that the news media play in influencing public opinion.

(34)  As the political scientist Bernard Coehn wrote,”The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about."

(40)  Within the outcomes of the wallpaper and the banner ad studies is a larger lesson regarding the communication process:  seemingly dismissible informaiton presented in the background captures a vaulable kind of attention that allows for potent, almost entirely uncounted instances of influence.

(41)  It is clear that background information can both guide and distract focus of attention:  anyone seeking to influence optimally must manage that information thoughtfully.

(41-42)  Indeed, a lot of research has demonstrated that the more consideration people give to something, the more extreme (polarized) their opinions of it become.

(43)  Thus, to receive the benefits of focused attention, the key is to keep the focus unitary.  Some impressive ressearch demonstrates that merely engaging in a single-chute evaluation of one of several established hotel and resatuarant chains, consumer products, and even charity organizations can automatically cause people to value the focused-upon entity more and become more willing to support ii financially.

(49)  molar - pertaining to a solution containing one mole of solute per liter of solution;  noting or pertaining to gram-molecular weight.

(52)  The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behaviorial sicentists sometimes call the _norm of social responsibility_.  It states that we should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their need.  Several decades’ worth of research shows that, in general, 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.

(54)  … what is focal is seen to have causal properties - to have the ability to make events occur.

(63)  At the time, she [Chinese actress Nien Cheng performing Arthur Miller’s “Crucible"] was sure that parts of the dialogue had been rewritten by its Chinese director to connect with national audiences, because the questions asked of the accused in the play “were exactly the same as the quesitons I had been asked by the Cultural Revolutionaries.”  No American, she thought, could have known these precise workings, phrasings, and sequencings.

She was shocked to hear [Arthur] Miller reply that he had taken the questions from the record of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials - and that they were the same as were deployed within the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.  Later, it was the uncanny match to those in the Reilly interrogation that promoted Miller to get involved in Peter’s defense.  [Peter Reilly was coerced into a false confession of murder by police]

(69)  Using sex to sell a product works only for items that people frequently buy for sexually related purposes…

…In any situation, people are dramatically more likely to pay attention to and be influenced by stimuli that fit the goal they have for that situation.

(70)  … how much they [college students in couples] were regularly aware of and attentive to the hotties around them [was best indicator of a breakup in a questionnaire].

…we might want to be sensitive to any sustained upswign in our partner’s (or our own) attentiveness to attractive alternatives, as it might well offer an early signal of a partnership in peril.

(72)  As a rule, communications that present the most frightening consequences of poor health habits work better than milder messages or messages that present the positive consequences of good habits.

(73)  This approach, then, is how public health communicators can best reply truthful yet frightening facts:  by waiting to convey those facts until information about accessible assistance systems - programs, workshops, websites, and help lines - can be incorporated into their communications.

(74)  We also realized that these two contrary motivations, to fit in and to stand out, map perfectly onto a pair of longtime favorite commercial appeals.  One, of the “Don’t be left out” variety, urges us to join the many.  The other, the “Be one of the few” sort, urges us to step away from the many.  So, which should an advertiser be better advised to launch into the minds of prospects?  Our analysis made us think that the popularity-based message would be the right one in any situation where audience members had been exposed to frightening stimuli - perhaps in the middle of watching a violent film on TV - because threat-focused people want to join the crowd.  But sending that message in an ad to an audience watching a romantic film on TV would be a mistake, because amorously focused people want to step away from the crowd.

(75)  Put people in a wary state of mind via that opener, and, driven by a desire for safety, a popularity-based appeal will soar, whereas a distinctiveness-based appeal will sink.  But use it to put people in an amorous state of mind, and, driven by a consequent desire to stand out, the reverse will occur.

(77)  It finally dawned on Pavlov that he could account for both breakdowns in the same way:  upon entering a new space, both he and the visitors became novel (new) stimuli that hijacked the dog’s attention, diverting it from the bell and food while directing it to the changed circumstances of the lab.  Although he was not the first scientist to notice this type of occurrence, Pavlov recognized its purpose in the label he gave it:  the _investigative reflex_.  He understood that in order to survive, any animal needs to be acutely aware of immediate changes to its environment, investigating and evaluating these differences for the dangers or opportunities they might present.  So forceful is this reflex that it supersedes all other operations.

(79)  When I asked about it, she [film maker] offered a justification that fits with a pre-suasive dynamic:  “You use your cuts to get people to swing attention to the parts of your message you really want them to focus on.”  In other words, cuts are crucial to persuasive success because they cna be manipulated to bring into focus the feature of a message the persuader believes to be most convincing - by shifting the scene to that feature.  That cut will instigate an orienting response to the winning feature in audience members’ brains _before_ they even experience it.

(84)  Here, then, is another lesson in pre-suasion available for your use:  when you have a good case to make, you can employ - as openers - simple _self_-relevant cues (such as the word _you_) to predispose your audience toward a full consideration of that strong case before they see or hear it.

…I’d  been the victim of what behavior scientists call the _next-in-line effect_, and, as a consequence, I have since figured out how to avoid it and even use it on my behalf. 

NB:  waiting to perform makes paying attention to a preceding performance difficult if not impossible

(85)  Whether you offer your statement just before or after his, according to the next-in-line effect, Alex will have hard time processing your solution, no matter how good it is.  If your statement comes immediately prior to Alex’s, he’ll likely miss the specifics because he’ll be mentally rehearsing what he plans to say.  If it comes immediately following Alex’s, he’ll likely miss those specifics because he’ll be internally rehashing what he just said.  It’s what happened to me at that international conference.  The pulling and holding power of my heightened self-focus within those _underprivileged_ moments prevented me from appreciating the event’s merits.

How might you sail the waters of your meeting more expertly than your first inclination suggested?  I’d propose charting a course that takes into account both the next-in-line effect and the what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal effect.  Take a spot at the table across from Alex where (1) he’ll be sufficiently distant from his own presentation to hear yours fully, and (2), because of your visual prominence, he’ll see you as fully responsible for the insights within your fine recommendation for resolving the problem.  Of course, if you haven’t come up with a creditably reasoned solution to the problem, you might want to grab a chair right enxt to his so that in his self-focused-induced bubble, he won’t likely register the fact.

(86-87)  Zeigarnik effect:  For me, two important conclusions emerge from the findings of now over six hundred studies on the topic.  First (and altogether consistent with the beer garden series of events [waiter remembering orders perfectly but forgetting them immediately after serving them]), on a task that we feel committed to performing, we will remember all sorts of elelments of it better if we have not yet had the chance to finish, because our attention will remain drawn to it.  Second, if we are engaged in such a task, and are interrupted or pulled away, we’ll feel a discomforting, gnawing desire to get back to it.  That desire - which also pushes us to return to incomplete narratives, unresolved problems, unanswered questions, and unachieved goals - reflects a craving for cognitive closure.

(89)  She [a colleague] never lets herself finish a writing session at the end of a pargraph or even a thought.   She assured me she knows precisely what she wants to say at the end of that last paragraph or thought;  she just doesn’t allow herslef to say it until the next time.  Brilliant!  By keeping the final feature of every writing session near-finished, she uses the motivating force of the drive for closure to get her back to her chair quickly, impatient to write again.  So my colleague did have a writing secret after all.  It was one that hadn’t occurred to me, although it should have because it was present - if I’d just thought about it - in the body of work on the Zeigarnik effect that I knew well.  That was a type of lapse I’ve tried not to let recur, either in my writing or in another of my professional roles at the time:  university teaching.  I learned that I could icnrease my classroom effectiveness pre-suasively, by beginning each lecture with a special kind of unfinished story:  a mystery.

(92 - 94)  A little-recognized truth I often try to convey to various audeinces is that, in contests of persuasion, counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.  This superiority emerges especially when a counterclaim does more than refute a rival’s claim by showing it to be mistaken or misdirected in the particular instance, but does so instead by showing the rival communicator to be an untrustworthy source of information, generally.  Issuing a  counterargument demonstrateing that an opponent’s argument is not to be believed because its maker is misinformed on the topic will usually succeed on that singular issue.  But a counterargument that undermines an opponent’s argument by showing him or her to be dishonest in the matter will normally win that battle plus future battles with the opponent.

1. Pose the Mystery
2.  Deepen the Mustery
3.  Home In on the Proper Explanation by Considering (and Offering Evidence Against) Alternative Explanations
4.  Provide a Clue to the Proper Explanation
5.  Resolve the Mystery

(94)  When the logic of the situation hit them, the tobacco companies worked politically to ban their own ads, but solely on the air where the fairness doctrine applied - thereby ensuring that the anti-tobacco forces would no longer get free airtime to amke their counterargument.

(95)  Drive the Implication for the Phenomenon Under Study

One of the best ways to enhace audience acceptance of one’s message is to reduce the availability of strong counterarguments to it - because counterarguments are typically more powerful than arguments.

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

…Nowhere are the implications for effective messaging so stark than in a relatively recent research program designed to answer the question “What is language principally for?”  The leader among the group of researchers pursuing this line of inquiry is the renowned psycholinguist Gün Semin, whose conclusion, in my view, comes down to this:  the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners’ attention to a selected sector of reality.  Once that is accomplished, the listeners’ existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determien the reaction.

… Especially interesting are the linguistic devices that researchers have identified for driving attention to one or another aspect of reality.  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.  We’ll benefit by considering the last, and simplest, of these devices first.

(102)  “As a health organizaiton, we’re devoted to acts of healing, so we never use language associated with violence.  We don’t have _bullet_ points;  we have information points.  We don’t _attack_ a problem, we approach it.”

At the conference, I asked one of the participants, a physician, about the nonviolent-language policy.  He responded with even more examples:  “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.”  He even offered an impassioned rationale:  “Can’t you see how much better it is for us to associate ourselves with concepts like ‘goal’ and ‘outdistance’ than ‘target’ and ‘beat’?”  In truth, I couldn’t.  I was skeptical that such small working shifts would affect the thinking of individuals within the SSM system in any meaningful fashion.

But that was then.  I’m a convert now…. The conversion occurred after I undertook a concentrated review of an astounding body of research findings.

(103)  The results are alarming:  prior exposure to the violence-linked words led to a 48 percent jump in selected shock intensity.

… Multiple studies have shown that subtly exposing individuals to words that connote achievement (win, attain, succeed, master) increases their performance on an assigned task and more than doubles their willingness to keep working at it.

(107)  Remarkably, the size of the difference due to the change of a single word (22 percent) [crime as “beast” compared to crime as “virus”] was more than double the size of preferred solution differences that were naturally due to the readers’ gender (9 percent) or political party affiliation (8 percent).  When predicting voter preferences, political campaigns include the role of demographic factors such as gender and party affiliation.  Rarely, though do they consider the potentially greater predictive power of a pre-suasively deployed metaphor.  

(108)  For that reason, (1) raters reading a job candidate’s qualifications attached to a heavy (versus light) clipboard come to see the applicant as a more serious contender for the job;  (2) raters reading a report attached to a heavy clipboard come to see the topic as more important;  and (3) raters holding a heavy object (requiring more effort of them) put more effort into considering the pros and cons of an improvement project for their city.

…  Comparable findings have appeared in studies of another arena of human judgment:  personal warmth, where individuals who have held a warm object briefly - for example, a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee - immediately feel warmer toward, closer to, and more trusting of those around them.

(110)   The concept pre-loaded with associations most damaging to immediate assessments and future dealins is _untrustworthiness_, along with its concomitants, such as lying and cheating.

_Our hotties, ourselves._  On the upside of things, though, the factor with most favorable impact in the realm of human evaluation is one we have encountered before:  the self, which gains its power from a pair of sources.  Not only does it draw and hold our attention with neary electromagnetic strength, thereby enhancing perceived importance;  it also brings that attention to an entity that the great majority of us shower with positive associations.  Therefore, anything that is self-connected (or can be made to seem self-connected) gets an immediate lift in our eyes.

…Finally, researchers studying this general tendency to value entitites linked to the self (called implicit egoism)  have found that individuals prefer not just people but also commercial products - crackers, chocolates, and teas - with names that share letters of the alphabet with their own names.

(111)  The overvalued self isn’t always the personal self.  It can also be the social self - the one framed not by the characteristics of the individual but by the characteristics of that individual’s group.

(112)  “When our counterparts saw that our negotiator was speaking their language, Pashtun, they developed a kind of strong intimacy with us, and so the talks went well.”

(112-113)  Researchers in the filed of _cognitive poetics_ have even found that the fluency-producing properties of rhyme ead to enhanced persuasion.  The statement “Caution and measure will win you riches” is seen as more true whne chnaged to “Caution and measure win you treasure.”  There’s a mini-lesson hter for persuasive success:  to make it climb, make it rhyme.

Within the domain of general attraction, observers have a greater liking for those whose facial features are easy to recognize and whose names are easy to pronounce.  Tellingly, when people can process something with cognitive ease, they experience increased neuronal activity in the muscles of their face that produce a smile.  on the flip side, if it’s difficutl to process something, observers tend to dislike that experience and, accordingly, that thing.

(120)  Have you ever attended an arts performance disturbed by another audience member’s loud coughs?  IN addtion to the distracting noise, there’s another reason that performers of all sorts - stage actors, singers, musicians, dancers - hate the sound of even one cough:  it can become contagious.

NB:  disruption tactic, Alinksky’s bean supper before the symphony threat’s

(123)  … the elderly feel happier than they did when younger, stronger, and healthier.  The question of why this paracox exists has intrigued camps of lifespan researchers for decades.  AFter considering several possibilities, one set of investigators, led by the pshchologist Laura Carstensen, hit upon a surprising answer:  when it comes to dealing iwth all the negativity in their lives, seniors have decided that they just don’t have time for it, literally.

They’ve come to desire a time of emotional contentment for their remaining years, and they take deliverate steps to achieve it - something they accomplish by mastering the geography of self-influence.  The elderly go more frequently aand fully to the locations inside and outside themselves populted by mood-lifting personal experiences.  To a greater extent than younger individuals, seniors recall _positive_ memories, entertain _pleasant_ thoughts, seek out and retain _favorable_ information, search for and gaze at happy faces, and focus on the _upsides_ of their consumer products.

Notice that they route their travels to these sunny locales through a highly effective mental maneuver we’ve encountered before:  they focus their _attentions_ on those spots.  Indeed, the seniors with the best “attention management” skills (those good at orienting to and staying fixed on positive material) show the greatest mood enhancement.

(125)  Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book The Myths of Happiness

1.  Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down.

2.  Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehad to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities.

3.  Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.

… “But ike eating differently and going to the gym faithfully, you have to put in the effort every day.  You have to stay with it.”  That last comment seemed instructive about how the elderly have found happiness.

(132-133)  The basic idea of pre-suasion is that by guiding preliminary attention strategically, it’s possible for a communicator to move recipients into agreement with a message before they experience it.  After we attend to a specific concept, those concepts closely linked ot it enjoy a pribileged moemtn within our minds, acquiring influence that nonlinked concepts simply can’t match.  That is so for a pair of reasons.  First, once an opener concept (Germanic music, weight) receives our attention, closely associated secondary concepts (German wind, substance) become more accessible in consciousness, which greatly improves the chance that we will attend and respond to the linked concepts.  This newly enhanced stnading in consciousness elevates their capacity to color our perceptions, orient our thinking, affect our motivations, and thereby change our relevant behavior.  Second, at the same time, concepts not linked to the opener are suppressed in consciousness, making them less likely than before to receive our attention and gain influence.  Rather than being readied for action, they get decommissioned temporarily.

… The answer has to do with a rather underappreciated characteristic of mental activity:  its elements don’t just fire when ready;  they fire when _readied_.

(139)  if/when-then-plans:  They are designed to help us achieve a goal by readying us (1) to reciter certain cues in settings where we can further our goal, and (2) to take an appropriate action spurred by the cures and consistent with the goal.  Let’s say that we aim to lose weight and if/when-then plan maght be “If/when, after my business lunches, the server asks if I’d like to have dessert, _then_ I will order mint tea.”  

NB:  79-80% influence rises

(140)  The “if/when-then” wording is designed to put us on high alert for a particular atime or circumstance when a productive action could be performed.  WE become prepared, first, to _notice_ the favorable time or circumstance and, second, to _associate_ it automatically and directly with desired conduct.  Noteworthy is the self-tailored nature of this pre-suasive process.  We get to instlal in ourselves heightened vigilance for certain cues that we have targeted previously, and we get to employ a strong association that we have constructed previously between those cues and a beneficial step toward our goal.

(141)  To this point, we’ve covered a lot of data showing that (1) what is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action, and (2) this accessibility is influenced by the informational cues around us and by our raw association to them.

(142)  Simply being focused on the weather for a moment, reminded the survey participants of its potentially biasing influence and allowed them to correct their thinking accordingly.  Besides the comforting evidence that we are not so slavishly sujbect to the pulls of primal processes, there is another implication of this particular result that’s worth consideration:  it took only a simple, short _question_ to eliminate the bias.

(143)  … immediate, large-scale adjustments begin frequently with practices that do little more than redirect attention.

(146)  Sleep researchers have noted that in field tests of combat artillery units, teams that are fully rested often challenge orders to fire on hospitals or other civilian targets.  But after teeth-four to thirty-six sleepless hours, they often obey superiors’ directives without question and become more likely to shell anything.  Similarly, in criminal interrogations, even innocents suspects often can’t resist interrogators’ pressure for them to confess after hours of mentally exhausting questioning.  That’s why, although the typical interrogation lasts for less than an hour, interviews generating _false_ confessions average sixteen hours.

Besides fatigue, numerous other conditions can keep people form recognizing and correcting potentially foolish tendencies.  Indeed, such foolish tendencies are likely to predominate when a person is rushed, overloaded, preoccupied, indifferent, stressed, distracted, or, it seems, a conspiracy theorist.

(147)  Does the idea of having insufficient time to analyze all the points of a communication remind you of how you ahve to respond to the rapid-fire presentation of many messages these days?  Think about it for a second.  Better yet, think about it for an _unlimited_ time:  Isn’t this the way the broadcast media operate, transmitting a swift stream of information that can’t be easily slowed or reversed to give us the chance to process it thoroughly?  We’re not able to focus on the real quality of the advertiser’s case in a radio or television spot.  Nor are we able to respond mindfully to a news clip of a speech by a politician.  Instead, we’re left to a focus on secondary features of the presentations, such as the attractiveness of the advertising spokesperson or the politician’s charisma.

NB:  Trump

(155)  There are three main features of this sort [to increase recompense]:  in order to optimize the return, what we give first should be experienced as meaningful, unexpected, and customized.

(156)  At the next interrogation session, they brought him [Abu Jindal, bin Laden’s bodyguard] sugar-free cookies to eat with tea.  According to one of those interrogators, _that_ was the key turning point:  “We had shown him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him.  So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures."

(158)  Parallels in language style (the types of words and verbal expression conservation partners use) increase romantic attraction, relationship stability, and, somewhat amazingly, the likelihood that a hostage negotiation will end peacefully.  What’s more, this influence occurs even though the overlap of styles typically goes unnoticed by the conversation partners.

(160)  Similarities and compliments cause people to feel that you like _them_, and once they come to recognize that you like them, they’ll want to do business with you.  That’s because people trust that those who like them will try to steer them correctly.  So by my lights, the number rule for salespeople is to show customers that you genuinely like them.  There’s a wise adage that fits this logic well:  people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

(162)  But certain nations have developed cost-effective programs that work by firing up the (nonpolluting) engine of social proof.  They initially rate the environmental performance of polluting firms within an industry and then publicize the ratings, so that all companies in that industry can see where they stand relative to their peers.  The overall improvements have been dramatic - upward of 30 percent - almost all of which have come from changes made by the relatively heavy polluters, who recognized how poorly they’d been doing compared with their contemporaries.

(163)  It involves the second reason, besides validity that social-proof infomration works so well:  feasibility.  If I inform home owners that by saving energy, they _could_ also save a lot of money, it doesn’t mean they would be able to make it happen.  After all, I _could_ reduce my next power bill to zero if I turned off all the electricity in my house and curled up on the floor in the dark for a month;  but that’s not something I’d reasonably do.  A great strength of social-proof information is that it destorys the problem of uncertain achievability.  If people learn that many others like them are conserving energy, there is little doubt as to its feasibility.  It comes to seem realistic, and, therefore, implementable.

(165)  Rather than succumbing to the tendency to describe all of the most favorable features of an offer or idea up front and reserving mention of any drawbacks until the end of the presentation (or never), a communicator who references a weakness early on is immediately seen as more honest.  The advantage of this sequence is that, with perceived truthfulness already in place, when the major strengths of the case are advanced, the audience is more likely to believe them.

(169)  If one romantic partner agrees to pray _for the other’s well-being_ every day for an extended period of time, he or she becomes less likely to be unfaithful while doing so.  After all, such behavior would be inconsistent with the daily, actively made commitment to the partner’s welfare.

(175)  The experience of _unity_ is not about  simple similarities (although those can work too, but to a lesser degree, via the liking principle). It’s about shared identities.  It’s about the categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations.  A key characteristic of these categories is that their members tend to feel at one with, merged with, the others.  They are the categories in which the conduct of one member influences the self-esteem of other members.  Put simply, _we_ is the shared _me_.

(178)  For example, collectives that create a sense of we-ness among their members are characterized by the use of familial images and labels - brothers, sisterhood, forefathers, motherland, heritage - which lead to an increased willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the welfare of the group.

(189)  Nazi Josef Meisinger lobbying Japanese to exterminate Jews:  After the two [Rabbis] entered the meeting room, they and their translators stood before a tribunal of powerful members of the Japanese High Command, who would determine their community’s survival and who wasted little time in asking a pair of fateful questions:  Why do our allies the Nazis hate you so much?  And why should we take your side against them?  Rabbi Shatzkes, the scholar, comprehending the tangled complexity of the historical, religious, and economic issues involved, had no ready response.  But Rabbi Kalisch’s knowledge of human nature had equipped him to deliver the most impressive persuasive communication I have encountered in over thirty years of studying the process:  “Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, _like you_."

(193)  … collective dance, for instance, is depicted extraordinarily often in the drawings, rock art, and cave paintings of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.  The behavioral science record is equally clear as to why.  When people act in unitary ways. they become unit_ized_.  The resultant feeling of group solidarity serves societies’ interests well, producing degrees of loyalty and self-sacrifice associated usually with much smaller family units.

(194)  When people act in unison, they not only see themselves as more alike, they evaluate one another more positively afterward.  Their elevated like_ness_ turns into elevated _liking_.

(200)  J Scott Armstrong Persuasive Advertising:  Evidence-Based Principles

(205)  In the standard classroom, students tend to coalesce along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, finding friends and helpmates mainly within their own groups.  However, this pattern declines significantly after they’ve engaged co-creatively with students from the other groups within “cooperative learning” exercises, in which each student has to teach a portion of the information to the others so that they can all get a good score.  Companies struggle to get consumers to feel bonded with and therefore loyal to their brands;  it’s a battle they’ve been winning by inviting current and prospective customers to co-create with them novel or updated products and services, most often by providing the company with information as to desirable features.

(206)  However, within such marketing partnerships, consumer input must be framed as _advice to_ the company, not as opinions about or expectations for the company.  The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal.  Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s.  Providing an opinion or expectation, on the other hand, puts a person in an introspective state of mind, which involves focusing on oneself.  These only slightly different forms of consumer feedback - and the nonetheless vitally different merging-versus-separating mind-sets they produce - can have  a significant impact on consumer engagement with a brand.

(214-215)  Three features of a commercial organization known to ravage its health are poor employee performance, high employee turnover, and prevalent employee fraud and malfeasance.  The costs of each can be staggering.  Our claim is that organizations possessing an unethical work culture - in which employees participate in or simply observe regular wrongdoing -  will be beset by the three ourcomes.

NB:  Trump 

(223)  Honesty ratings by customers and clients of employees they interact with should be part of the employees’ incentive structures.  In addition, the ethical reputation of the company as a whole should be measured and included in assessments of yearly performance.  Finally, ratings by employees of the firm’s ethical orientation should be a component of senior management’s (and especially the CEO’s) compensation package.  

(225)  If, instead, the _patients_ are asked to fill in the card, that active step gets them more committed to keeping the appointment.  When this costless procedure was tried in the British medical clinic study, the subsequent no-show rate dropped by 18 percent.

(226)  Background exposure to the American flag put participants in mind of Republican party thinking;  indeed, a pilot study done by the researchers showed that, in 2008 anyway, Americans reliably made that link between the flag and Republicanism.

(228)  Modern life is becoming more and more like that bus hurtling down the highway:  speedy, turbulent, stimulus saturated, and mobile.  As a result, we are all becoming less and less able to think hard and well about what best to do in many situations.  Hence, even the most careful-minded of us are increasingly likely to react automatically to the cues for action that exist in those settings.

(233)  It’s also a conclusion that provides a fitting close to this book:  In large measure, _who_ we are with respect to any choice is _where_ we are, attentional, in the moment before the choice.  We can be channeled to that privileged moment by (choice-relevant) cues we haphazardly bump into in our daily settings, or, of greater concern, by the cues a knowing communicator has tactically placed there;  or, to much better and lasting effect, by the cues we have stored in those recurring sites to send us consistently in desired directions,  In each case, the made moment is pre-suasive.  Whether we are wary of the underlying process, attracted to its potential, or both, we’d be right to acknowledge its considerable power and wise to understand its inner workings.

(328)  The idea that success is _initiated_ not so much by crashing through barriers as by removing them is represented in the instructively paired descriptors assigned to the Hindu god Ganesha, “Lord of beginnings, remover of obstacles.”

(331)  International Cultic Studies Association http://www.icsahome.com

(332)  Although both pre-suasive openers increased actual voting the next day, the one that put people in touch with their preferred identities as voters was the more effective in each election.

(335)  Kahneman essay http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_17.html#kahneman

(343)  Scott Armstrong’s exceptional book Persuasive Advertising (2010)

…. a larger literature affirming the powerful role of one’s current goals on one’s attention in any situation.

(344)  When climate change warnings detailed dire and catastrophic consequences, belief in climate change actually declined;  but this decline was reversed when the warnings included potential solutions to the problem.

(346-347)  In a related vein, there is one highly self-relevant piece of information that health communicators could use to increase the chance that a recipient would be more likely to undertake a healthier lifestyle:  the recipient’s birth date.  For a few months after a birthday, people are more willing to engage in healthy behaviors, such as exercise, than at other times of the year.  Therefore, a personalized “Happy Birthday” message sent to individuals that urged recipients to set fitness goals for the upcoming year would come at precisely the right time.  By the way, when urging such goal setting, the communicator should recommend that the recipient set a range-based goal (for instance, to lose three to five pounds).  That is because a range-based goal neatly incorporates two sepatrate reference points that people use when deciding whether to continue to act on an intention:  one that is feasible and another that is challenging.  The birthday research was conducted by Dai, Milkman, and Riis, who view birthdays as just one instance of a variety of specifically breaking points in time (including the start of a week, month, or year) when people feel ready to make a fresh start and , thereby, are particularly inclined to act in idealized ways.

(349)  … recipients of a kindness are made _happier_ for a longer time if they are unsure of who provided it and why

(351-352)  Besides the self-reliant and the unfinished, there are other features of an idea that make it stick in attention and consciousness, such as a consistent history of being associated with reward.  In their highly information and deservedly bestselling book, _Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die_ Chip and Dan Heath explicate several more:  the simple, the unexpected, the concrete, the credible, the emotional, and the story-based.  For an approach to this issue that is based on memory research, see Carmen Sinon’s instructive book, _Impossible to Ignore:  Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions_ (2016).

(359)  It’s worth knowing that happy seniors don’t blindly deny the existence of unpleasantness.  They accept the bad;  they just don’t dwell on it, choosing to concentrate on the good instead.  For example, in their marriages, the thing that most distinguishes their approach to conflict from that of younger couples is the tendency to turn their focus away from partnership clashes toward other, more pleasant topics.

….Marc Maron:  "I think in most cases, the difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment to it."

(361)  Lyubomirsky’s 12 happiness-inducing activities:  http://thehowofhappiness.com/about-the-book

(367)  Easily the most comprehensive and well-supported conceptualization of how and when we correct our judgements comes from teh Flexible Correction Model of Ohio State University psuchologists Duane Wegener and Richard Petty, in which they argue that correction is likely to occur when people recognize that they are susceptible to an unwanted bias, and they have both the motivation and the ability to take steps to counter it.  As a general takeaway, it would be accurate to say that primitive association processes predispose us toward certain conduct;  but provided we notice the processes and have the desire and capacity to correct for them, they do not predetermine our conduct.

(372)  Still, it’s worth noting that in the family of factors related to reciprocity, obligation has an equally active but sweeter sister - gratitude - that operates to stimulate returns not so much because recipients of favors feel a sense of debt as they feel a sense of appreciation.  Although both feelign reliably spur positive reciprocation, gratitudde appears to be related to the intensificaiton of relationships rather than just the instigation of maintenance of them.

… Nowhere are the benefits of giving first in business (and in life) presented and traced forward so convincingly as in Adam Grant’s book _Give and Take:  A Revolutionary Approach to Success_, which I recommend highly.

(374)  Analysis indicates that lower initial prices generate higher purchase prices.  One reason:  lower starting prices bring in more bidders who notice all the interest and mistakenly infer that it is due to the inherent worth of the item rather than its enticing price…  Essentially, they apply social proof logic and think, “Wow, if there are so many bidders for this thing, it must be good."

(380)  … making a group identity prominent in consciousness causes individuals to focus their attention intently on information that fits with that identity… which causes them, in turn, to see that information as more important and causal.

(382)  More recently, researchers have develop a personality scale that asseses the degree to which an individual identifies spontaneously with all humanity.  This important scale, which includes measures of the frequency of use of the pronoun _we_, the coneption of others as _family_, and the extent of _self-otther overlap_ with people in general, predicts willijngness ot help the needy in other countries by contributing to internaitonal humanitarian relief efforts.

(384)  William H McNeill (1995, 152)[Keeping Together in Time:  Dance and Drill in Human History]:  “moving rhythmically while giving voice together is the surest, most speedy, and efficacious way of creating and sustaining [meaningful] communities that our species has ever hit upon.”

(385)  After marching together, marchers became more willing to comply with a fellow marcher’s request to harm members of an out-group;  and this was the case not only when the requester was an authority figure (Wiltermuth, 2012a) but also a peeer (Wiltermuth, 2012b).

(387)  The [Elaine Aron] procedure [reciprocal, turn-taking progressively deeper 36 questions] has been used in somewhat modified form to reduce prejudice between ethnic groups, even among individuals with highly prejudiced initial attitudes.

(390)  …deleterious effects of workplace stress of health outcomes is comparable to that of secondhand tobacco smoke.

…It is worth knowing that the kinds of activities that most led to feelings of moral stress were those that required employees to be dishonest with customers in order to perform their job-related duties.