Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (17 page)

Afterward, the researchers asked each group to evaluate a few different stimuli, including the same ideographs, similar ideographs, and new unrelated polygons. Compared to participants who were shown one exposure of 25 ideographs, and compared to a control group that wasn’t exposed to any ideographs, participants who were exposed to the repeated ideographs evaluated all other stimuli more positively because of their enhanced mood. The conclusion: merely experiencing any form of repeated event or exposure can enhance our feelings in general, which can then lead to greater positive feelings toward other stimuli that we encounter.

Have you noticed that all of the chapter titles in this book use a similar wording style? Every chapter title uses a sequence of three words (with an action verb as the first word), and this style is repeated for every chapter. Each time that you begin a new chapter and become exposed to that repeated wording style, your ease of processing that title can put you in a better mood, which can lead you to perceive the contents of that chapter more favorably.

Create Greater Proximity.
If you were attending a college class in a large lecture hall with hundreds of students, would you remember every person from that class at the end of the semester? Probably not. But even if you don’t remember a specific person, research shows that having been in the mere proximity of someone can create a favorable perception of that person.

Two researchers conducted a neat field experiment to test that claim (Moreland & Beach, 1992). The researchers asked four female students to be confederates in an experiment, and their job was to attend a predetermined number of classes in a psychology course (0, 5, 10, or 15 classes). Because they were instructed not to interact with other students, and because the classes were held in a large lecture hall, their presence was unnoticed by most students.

At the end of the semester, the researchers showed students a picture of each confederate that attended the class, and they asked the students to evaluate the four females. Despite possessing only vague memories, if any, for those confederates, students perceived the confederates to be more similar and attractive with the more classes they attended. When we’re in the mere general vicinity of someone more often, that person is likely to find us more attractive!

Sure
, you may be thinking,
people might prefer a photograph if they’ve been exposed to it before. Heck, people might even find someone more attractive if they were repeatedly exposed to that person. But is this effect strong enough to influence our actual behavior?

Good question. Repeated exposures, even if they occur nonconsciously, can exert tremendous influence on our behavior as well. Remember the researchers who conducted the experiment with the geometric shapes? They conducted a follow-up experiment where they instructed people to read anonyms poems and collaborate with two other participants to make a unanimous decision regarding the gender of the anonymous poet. However, only one person was an actual participant in the experiment; the other two people were confederates hired by the researchers. They were instructed to disagree with each other, which would force the actual participant to then choose a side.

Before those discussions occurred, the genuine participants were repeatedly flashed with one of three pictures: a blank picture, a picture of Confederate A, or a picture of Confederate B (similar to the previous studies, these stimuli were flashed so quickly that participants failed to consciously notice them). The researchers wanted to examine how those nonconscious exposures would influence their interactions with the two confederates, and the results were startling.

Among participants who were flashed with a neutral blank picture, roughly 50 percent agreed with Confederate A, and 50 percent agreed with Confederate B, an expected even split. When participants were repeatedly flashed with a photograph of Confederate B prior to the discussion, 65 percent of participants agreed with Confederate B, and only 35 percent agreed with Confederate A. But when participants were instead flashed with a photograph of Confederate A, 71 percent of participants agreed with Confederate A, and only 29 percent agreed with Confederate B (Bornstein, Leone, & Galley, 1987). Repeated exposures not only influence our perception of a stimulus (e.g., someone’s level of attractiveness), but repeated exposures can also influence our actual behavior, a very helpful notion when it comes to persuasion.

CHAPTER 9

Desensitize Negative Messages

When I originally wrote this book, I tried to illustrate the concept in this chapter by formatting the font in the previous chapter in a certain way. From section to section, I wanted to change a small aspect of the font until it reached a completely new style and size by the end of that chapter. In the original manuscript, the font began as 10 pt Georgia, but it ended as 11 pt Palatino Linotype (specifically, the font changed from 10 pt Georgia to 10.5 pt Cambria to 10.5 pt Palatino Linotype to 11 pt Palatino Linotype).

Though I wasn’t able to incorporate those font changes due to the complexity of the formatting, editing, and publishing process, how the heck would that concept even relate to this chapter?

When you know that people will perceive your request to be unfavorable, you can sometimes habituate that request in small, incremental steps so that you can eventually integrate your entire message without their awareness. Because those font changes would have been so small, most readers would have remained completely oblivious to those changes. However, if they were to compare the beginning font with the end font, the difference would have been remarkable. This chapter will teach you exactly when and why many people become blind to certain changes and how you can present your message so that your target will become blind to negative aspects of your message.

This chapter also starts to border the ethical boundary, so I strongly urge you to exercise proper judgment when using these techniques. I wholeheartedly oppose anyone who tries to use these tactics for outcomes that aren’t in other people’s best interest. I even debated whether to include this chapter in the book, but there
are
many instances where camouflaging a negative feature can be in the best interest of other people (e.g., persuading your kids to enjoy eating vegetables or doing their homework).

WHY DO SOME CHANGES GO UNNOTICED?

Why would readers be less apt to notice the font changes? By nature, we experience
change blindness
, an alarming inability to detect changes, especially when those changes are small and unexpected. This section will describe three facets of change blindness.

Gradual Changes.
First, it’s very difficult to detect changes that occur in small increments. There’s a concept known as the
just noticeable difference
(or the
difference threshold
), which refers to the minimum amount of change that’s needed in a stimulus in order for people to detect that change (Ono, 1967).

If you wanted, you could conduct a number of experiments to figure out the exact level of change that’s needed for people to actually notice that a specific stimulus has been altered. Once you know the minimum percentage of change that triggers detection, you can make a change in your stimulus that’s below that “just noticeable difference” so that your change remains undetected.

The previous wording may sound funky, so here’s an example to illustrate. Suppose that you need to increase the price of a product that you sell, but you don’t want that price increase to attract attention from consumers. You could conduct some experiments to determine the exact price point that people start to notice that increase in price, and you can then increase your price to a point below that “just noticeable difference” so that you minimize the number of people who notice your price increase.

If you’re in a position where you can’t conduct those experiments to figure out the exact level of difference that gets noticed, you can still intuitively take advantage of the difference threshold. Rather than make a large negative change to your message, you should “habituate” that message by making changes in small and gradual increments.

If I had immediately changed the font in the previous chapter from 10pt Georgia to 11pt Palatino Linotype, nearly everyone would notice because it’s a very abrupt and prominent change. If those changes occurred in small and gradual increments, however, people would have been less apt to notice because those changes would have been more likely to fall below their difference threshold.

Side-by-Side Comparisons.
Another facet of change blindness involves the ability to perform a side-by-side comparison of the original stimulus with the new stimulus. When people can perform a side-by-side comparison, any change will become much more readily noticed.

In the previous chapter, you would have been able to perform a side-by-side comparison of each section, so it would have been particularly important that the changes occur in very small increments. On the other hand, if each section had magically disappeared after you read it, the font changes would have become even more camouflaged because you would have no reference point to compare the new font.

Simons and Levin (1998) showed the alarming extent of our inability to detect change when we can’t perform a side-by-side comparison. When a researcher asked a random passerby on the street for directions, two workers carrying a very large painting walked between them, and unbeknownst to the passerby, the researcher changed places with one of the workers behind the large painting. The goal was to find out how many people would continue the conversation with no idea that they were talking to a new person.

Take a guess at the percentage of people who were completely oblivious to the fact that they were talking to a new person. 5 percent? 10 percent? 15 percent? Nope. An astonishing
50 percent
of people failed to notice that they were talking to an entirely different person! Our ability to detect change becomes
dramatically
weakened when we can’t compare the new stimulus to the original stimulus.

But as you’ll learn next, there was another principle that caused people not to notice that large change.

Expectations.
People didn’t notice that they were talking to an entirely different person partly because they weren’t expecting a change to occur.

Remember the exercise from the second chapter where people fail to notice the extra “a” in the phrase, “our brains can be a a mystery”? People expect to see that phrase without the extra “a,” and so those expectations mold their perception to become oblivious to the discrepancy. Similarly, people
expected
to have a normal conversation with the researcher, and those expectations molded their perception so that they were oblivious to the striking change.

Let’s look at an example that combines all three facets of change blindness. All three reasons discussed in this section—gradual changes, side-by-side comparisons, and expectations—can explain the mystery of the potato chip bag. Weren’t potato chip bags much larger at one point? Indeed they were. Why did we fail to notice those reductions in size?

• First, marketers
  gradually
  reduced the size of the bag, and those changes were so small that most people failed to notice those changes.
  
• Second, unless people had a collection of potato chip bags in their home (which I’m assuming is a small percentage of people, but you never know . . .), people weren’t able to perform a
  side-by-side comparison
  of the original bags with the newer bags.
  
• Third, marketers changed the size to avoid changing something that people
  do
  typically notice: prices. Although we’re constantly on guard about potential price increases, we don’t typically “expect” the size of potato chip bags to change, so marketers cleverly took advantage of our diverted attention.
  

Now that you know the reasons when and why we fail to notice changes, the next section will teach you how to apply this principle so that people will fail to notice negative aspects about your message.

PERSUASION STRATEGY: DESENSITIZE NEGATIVE MESSAGES

This section will explain how to use change blindness to influence your target to accept a message or comply with a request, even if he finds it unfavorable (e.g., parents persuading their child to eat vegetables).

Systematic Desensitization.
In certain situations where your target will find your message unfavorable, you can habituate that message through
systematic desensitization
. Most commonly used as a form of therapy, systematic desensitization helps people overcome phobias by gradually exposing them to more and more anxiety-arousing stimuli.

Consider “Little Peter,” a 2-year-old boy who was terrified of rabbits (Jones, 1924). To help him overcome his fear, a researcher gave him candy (a stimulus that produced a favorable response) while placing a rabbit in the far side of the room. Because the rabbit was still far away, the positive response from the candy overpowered the anxiety produced from the rabbit. That process was repeated every day for the following two months, and each time, the researcher brought the rabbit
slightly
closer to Peter. By the end of the two months, Peter had become so desensitized to the rabbit’s presence that his fear had completely vanished.