How to Use Pre-suasive Tactics on Others – and Yourself | Robert Cialdini | Big Think

Pre-suasion is the process of arranging for an audience to agree with your message before they encounter it. Now that might sound like some form of magic, but it's not; it's established science. Very often, we can use pre-suasive tactics, even other kinds of influence tactics on ourselves, to increase the likelihood that we will reach our goals, that we will obtain the outcomes that we hope for in a particular situation.

There's research, for example, to show that if you depict for people an image of a runner winning a race, they become more achievement oriented and actually achieve their goal to a greater extent while that runner is in the background. There's another piece of research, a follow-up research, that shows that if you depict for people an image of Rodin's The Thinker, the statue, they become more analytic and deliberative, and they're more likely to solve problems—difficult complex problems that they're faced with.

So this is something we can do to ourselves. If we have a task that requires a lot of energy and motivation, put a picture of a runner winning a race in the corner of your computer screen where you'll see that cue there while you're performing the task. If you're analyzing a budget perhaps or developing some plan that requires a lot of strategic thinking, put a picture of The Thinker there, and you're more likely to achieve that particular goal.

The thing is, we get to control the cues in our environment that send us in directions that are likely to be successful for the particular task we have at hand. When writing my book, Pre-Suasion, I dedicated it to my grandchildren. And it was something I did for myself to pre-suade me to make that the best possible book I could develop and produce. It was to put the following image in my mind of each of my grandchildren, who are young right now.

Here's the image: when they're old enough to read it, I've left a copy with their parents for each of them, and I want their parents to give them the book and say, "You see this? This book was dedicated to you." Well, it better be a good book. It better be the highest quality book I can arrange. And so, while I was writing that book, there was a corner photograph of my grandkids on the screen of my computer; that picture kept me focused on quality.

No shortcuts allowed. This is for my grandkids; it better be the best book I can possibly generate. When I first started investigating the influence process, I actually became a spy of sorts. I went undercover to all of the major professions of our society dedicated to getting us to say yes. And I took training; I enrolled in the training programs of the salespeople, fundraisers, recruiters, public relations specialists, and so on, to see what were the techniques that were working most widely across the range—the broadest range of these influence approaches.

And what I found was interesting in that there was a particular kind of practitioner within those influence professions who rose to the top almost invariably. It wasn't the individual who spent most of his or her time crafting the message that they sent, although that was important to them; it was that they crafted what they said and did immediately before they delivered their message. That was the differentiator between the average scores and the aces of each profession.

Those people who were the highest achievers were pre-suaders. They acted like expert gardeners. They knew that it didn't matter how good this seed that you have might be; if you didn't prepare the earth for it first, it wasn't going to bear fullest fruit. So they cultivated the earth; they pretreated the ground before they planted their seed with their message. They did something that caused the recipients of their message to have a positive state of mind before they encountered the message itself.

The interesting question is: how do you go about cultivating the earth? How do you arrange for people to be in a frame of mind that is conducive to the message that you want to send? It is to recognize, first of all, what is the central element of your message? What is that...