Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

we can exert strategic, pre-suasive control over them. First, we can choose to enter situations that possess the set of associations we want to experience. When we don’t have such available choices, we can frontload impending situations with cues carrying associations that will send us in personally gainful directions.

Behavioral scientists have long asserted the existence of two ways of assessing and knowing. The most recent such assertion to gain widespread attention is Daniel Kahneman’s treatment of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. The first is fast, associative, intuitive, and often emotional, whereas the second is slower, deliberative,

the takeaway here is that an effective linkage between concepts doesn’t have to be located in prevailing reality. It can be constructed. The concepts only have to be experienced as linked directly in some way for the subsequent presentation of one to prepare the other for pertinent action.

It makes sense, then, that in early and middle age, it can be so hard to turn our minds away from tribulations. To serve our principal aims at those times, we need to be receptive to the real presence of negatives in order to learn from and deal with them. The problem arises when we allow ourselves to become mired in the emotions they generate; whe

on the background wallpaper of the site’s landing page. That maneuver led those visitors to assign elevated levels of importance to comfort when asked what they were looking for in a sofa. Those same visitors also became more likely to search the site for information about the comfort features of the sofas in stock and, most notably, to choose a mo

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.

an additional (seventh) universal principle of influence: unity. There is a certain type of unity—of identity—that best characterizes a We relationship

Classrooms with heavily decorated walls displaying lots of posters, maps, and artwork reduce the test scores of young children learning science material there. It is clear that background information can both guide and distract focus of attention; anyone seeking to influence optimally must manage that information thoughtfully.21

focused you on the trait of stubbornness, sending you down a single psychological chute constructed unfairly to confirm my judgment.