March 26th, 2007
This article is the second in a series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. If we see two things in sequence that are different from one another, we will tend to see the second one as more different than it actually is. This is called perceptual contrast. For example, a realtor or car salesman might show us a unit that is overpriced and in poor condition before showing us the one they really want us to buy. By contrast, the second one looks like a great deal and we want it more.
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March 18th, 2007
I believe a lot of expertise about how people change their minds and their behavior resides in the selling and advertising and industries. A core mission of Take Back Your Brain is to learn the secrets those industries know about how to influence us and use them to make it more likely we will achieve our own goals. To that end I’ve been reading lots of books about sales, marketing and advertising. One of the best so far is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini.
Cialdini identifies what he calls “compliance professionals”, such as salemen, fund raisers, con artists and advertisers. He researched the book for three years by trying to learn what they know about how to influence us. He distills and organizes the thousands of tactics he observed down into a handful of basic techniques that he calls “weapons of automatic influence,” the common denominators found in most of the techniques he studied. He claims that each of them is based on a human psychological principle that has the “…ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingess to say yes without thinking first.”
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March 11th, 2007
The Hipster PDA is an ideal environment for personal ads. You proably already have cards in your stack for a calendar, to-do lists, and notes. To start advertising just include a couple more cards with personal messages or pictures on them. Once you have “installed” an ad, you will likely encounter it several times a day as you flip through your cards. Of course it’s ridiculously easy to move ads cards in and out of the stack, and I change them frequently to keep it fresh.
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March 6th, 2007
Sure. Affirmations are messages to ourselves advocating things we want, repeated many times. That’s exactly what we’re doing. But 21st century technology gives us tools to do it really, really well.
The idea was first introduced by a French psychologist named Emile Coue in the 1920’s. What has changed a great deal in 80-plus years is the technology we have available to create and deliver those messages.
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