Category: Persuasion

I’ll admit it. A few of the techniques for persuasion I’ve covered here on PsyBlog have been a little outlandish and impractical.

Things like swearing, talking in the right ear and pouring coffee down someone’s throat. The studies are interesting and fun but not widely useful.

The question is: which persuasion technique, based on psychological research, is most practical, can easily be used by anyone in almost any circumstances and has been consistently shown to work?

The answer is: the ‘But You Are Free’ technique. This simple approach is all about reaffirming people’s freedom to choose. When you ask someone to do something, you add on the sentiment that they are free to choose.

By reaffirming their freedom you are indirectly saying to them: I am not threatening your right to say no. You have a free choice.

A recent review of the 42 psychology studies carried out on this technique has shown that it is surprisingly effective given how simple it is (Carpenter, 2013). All in all, over 22,000 people have been tested by researchers. Across all the studies it was found to double the chances that someone would say ‘yes’ to the request.

People have been shown to donate more to good causes, agree more readily to a survey and give more to someone asking for a bus fare home.

The exact words used are not especially important. The studies have shown that using the phrase “But obviously do not feel obliged,” worked just as well as “but you are free”.

What is important is that the request is made face-to-face: the power of the technique drops off otherwise. Even over email, though, it does still have an effect, although it is somewhat reduced.

The BYAF technique is so simple and amenable that it can easily be used in conjunction with other approaches.

It also underlines the fact that people hate to be hemmed in or have their choices reduced. We seem to react against this attempt to limit us by becoming more closed-minded.

The BYAF technique, as with any good method of persuasion, is about helping other people come to the decision you want through their own free will. If they have other options, like simply walking away, and start to feel corralled, then you can wave them goodbye.

On the other hand, respecting people’s autonomy has the happy side-effect of making them more open to persuasion. You can look good and be more likely to get what you want. Nice.

Image credit: Lori Greig

…no, actually, for a very good psychological reason I’m not going to repeat any of it here.

Let’s just say that some people believe weird stuff and leave it at that. It turns out that just one of the fascinating reasons that people accept odd ideas is that they keep getting repeated, even if only to debunk them.

So, where does all this misinformation come from, why do people believe it and how can right-thinking people counter it?

(The following is based on an excellent article by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues).

Where misinformation comes from

1. Rumours and fiction

People love sensational stories. They like to pass on tales that make the listener very happy, disgusted or afraid: anything that provokes a strong emotional response.

Neutral stories, which are probably more likely to be true, but much more boring, therefore get short shrift.

More bizarrely, people have been shown to believe things that they’ve read in novels that have clearly been totally made up. This is true even when:

• They are obviously works of fiction,
• and when they are told the fiction contains misinformation,
• and when the real facts are relatively well-known.

This may be partly because people’s defences tend to be lower when they’re consuming popular entertainments.

2. Politicians

We may all be aware that politicians will say anything to get elected, but can we tell the difference between the truth and the lies they’ve told?

Studies have found that, in fact, people find it very difficult tell the difference. It seems that knowing that politicians lie is no barrier to people believing those lies.

3. The Media

The usual sources of misinformation in the media are oversimplification and the need for providing balance.

The need for balance is an interesting one because the issues themselves aren’t always ‘balanced’. For example over 95% of climate scientists agree that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions, but you wouldn’t know that from many media debates on the issue, which are hobbled by the perceived need to always provide a ‘balanced’ viewpoint.

4. The Internet

There are a lot of good things to be said about the internet but it’s still a source of fantastic amounts of misinformation. Here’s a frightening fact:

“A survey of the first 50 Web sites matching the search term “weight loss diets” revealed that only 3 delivered sound dietary advice.”

Plus people tend to seek out information that confirms their existing points of view. And this is an exercise that has become much easier now the internet provides such a huge range of viewpoints. No matter what people believe they can find some other people who also believe it to back them up.

Why people believe misinformation

It’s pretty clear that lies and misinformation are floating about all over the place. But if we all know that politicians, the media and the internet sometimes lie, then how come some people end up believing it?

The problem is that the way people go about believing things (or not) is fundamentally weird. Few bother actually checking the facts for themselves; the majority use these mental short-cuts:

• Does it feel right? In other words does the new information square with what I already believe? For example, a Republican is more likely to accept untruths about where President Obama was born because the lie is convenient.
• Does it make sense? Things that are easy to understand are easier to believe. The mind repels complicated stuff, defending itself by saying: oh, it’s probably a lie (see my previous article: 8 Studies Demonstrating the Power of Simplicity).
• Is the source believable? People who seem authoritative, like those in positions of power, are more likely to be believed. For example, doctors can create havoc by giving bad advice in public because people tend to believe them.
• Who else believes it? People prefer to go along with the herd. Unfortunately people also have in inbuilt bias towards thinking that most other people agree with them, even if, in reality, they don’t (see: Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Effect).

But this still doesn’t explain why people continue to believe all kinds of weird stuff, even after it’s been proven to them that it’s false. It turns out that even once misinformation has been completely retracted and those involved have admitted it was lies, the misinformation is difficult to kill.

There are all sorts of reasons but one is based on how memory works: we tend to find it much easier to recall the gist of things rather than the exact details. Usually this is handy because it means we can learn specific things, say that cooking beef makes it easier to digest, and generalise it to the fact that cooking makes many foods more palatable.

The down side of this is that it’s easy for people to remember the gist of some piece of misinformation (the moon is made of cheese), but forget that they heard it from a totally unreliable source (a mischievous child).

8 ways to counter misinformation

So, is it possible to kill off misinformation? Lewandowsky and co-authors say yes, but it’s hard and you will need help from these 8 psychological techniques:

1. More than the truth

Changing people’s minds isn’t just about telling them they are wrong; if only it were. To be convinced people need to hear an alternative account that explains why something happened, not just that the misinformation is wrong. Ideally it should also explain the motivations for the lie.

2. Short and sweet

This alternative account, though, shouldn’t be too complicated. The shorter it is, the sweeter it will work. Give people too much and they switch off: just a few salient facts will do.

3. Don’t repeat the myth

Try to avoid repeating the myth. Remember that people find the gist of things easiest to recall. If you keep repeating the myth, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Here comes some misinformation…

You’ll have to repeat the myth once, though, so people know what you’re talking about. So tell them beforehand that there is misleading information coming.

5. Facts facts facts

Then, after the myth, keep repeating the facts. Each repetition builds up the rebuttal’s strength in people’s minds. The power of repetition to influence people is clear, see: The Illusion of Truth.

6. Attack the source

What is the source of the misinformation? And what do they know? Nothing! Encouraging people to be a little more sceptical can help.

One of the challenges here is that people tend to believe those who say things that fit in with their worldview. So that’s why it’s important to…

7. Affirm world-view

You have to keep the audience onside, even if you’re telling them things they don’t want to hear. You can do this by framing things within the audience’s world-view. For example you might say to a ‘birther’: “Hey, neither of us likes Obama or his politics, but the fact is he was born in Hawaii.”

Telling people things they don’t want to hear is a balancing act. You’ve got to go far enough to make the point, but not so far as to put them off.

8. Affirm identity

Another way of avoiding people’s natural resistance to facts they find unpleasant is to get them to affirm their identity. So you might indirectly get people to think about things that are important to them like their family, friends and ideals.

Research suggests this helps people deal with inconsistencies between their beliefs and the new information that is conflicting with it.

Mud sticks

Of course all these techniques are already used by opinion-formers and influencers, which is why it’s so important to know about them. As Lewandowsky and colleagues conclude:

“Correcting misinformation is cognitively indistinguishable from misinforming people to replace their preexisting correct beliefs. It follows that it is important for the general public to have a basic understanding of misinformation effects… Widespread awareness of the fact that people may “throw mud” because they know it will “stick”…will contribute to a well-informed populace.”

Image credit: Steve Rhodes

Changing people’s minds is hard.

We resist having our attitudes adjusted by others, especially when the message isn’t directly relevant to us and we aren’t paying that much attention.

But what if you could get people to change their own minds? People will listen to themselves and will automatically generate arguments that have personal relevance for them.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Actually people are being encouraged to persuade themselves all the time. Here are a few examples:

1. When a parent wants to change a child’s behaviour they might ask them why it is wrong, rather than just telling them it is wrong.
2. When we’re encouraged to take part in role-playing exercises, we might espouse attitudes and values we don’t believe in.
3. When we want to change our behaviour, say, to healthier eating, we might try to convince ourselves we don’t like the forbidden foods as much as we do.

So, there are all kinds of situations in which we are arguing with ourselves, whether it’s because we’ve initiated it ourselves, or because we’ve been subtly encouraged to do so by someone else.

Self-persuasion

But does it work? Does self-persuasion make any real difference?

Janis and King (1954) tested this by having some participants give a talk while two others listened. Then they swapped around and one of the passive listeners gave a talk to the other two on a different topic.

What emerged was that, on average, people were more convinced by the talk when they gave it themselves than when they merely heard it passively. This suggests that we really are persuaded more strongly when we make the argument ourselves, even if it isn’t in line with our own viewpoint.

The same trick works with attitudes to smoking. People are more put off smoking when they deliver an anti-smoking message than when they passively receive it (research described in Brinol et al., 2012).

We see the same effect for self-confidence. When people are told to present themselves in a self-confident way to others, they actually feel more self-confident themselves.

The explanation seems to be that we are very good at convincing ourselves because we know just what sorts of arguments will sway us.

So if you want someone to persuade themselves, you can try asking them to put aside their own attitude for a moment and try getting them to generate their own arguments for the point you want to make.

Whatever the cover story, as long as the person is encouraged to generate their own arguments, it has a chance of changing their mind.

Image credit: Gary Knight

Marketers have known for years that stories are a powerful tool for persuading people. That’s partly because stories (unlike statistics) are easy to understand.

That’s why politicians try to persuade us by telling stories about their vision of the world. They do spout statistics as well, but normally only in support of some kind of grand narrative.

We instinctively understand that people resist being told what to do, but will respond to the moral of a story. So we try to persuade each other with little stories about ‘someone we know’. Then we simplify and embellish them to make the moral clear.

Engage to persuade

Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.

Stories work so well to persuade us because, if they’re well told, we get swept up in them, we are transported inside them.

Transportation is key to why they work. Once inside the story we are less likely to notice things which don’t match up with our everyday experience.

For example an aspirational Hollywood movie with a can-do spirit might convince us that we can tackle any problem, despite what we know about how the real world works.

Also, when concentrating on a story people are less aware that they are subject to a persuasion attempt: the message gets in under the radar.

Two sorts of people who may be particularly susceptible to being persuaded by stories are those who seek out emotional situations and those who enjoy thinking (Thompson & Haddock, 2011).

Stories which contain emotional elements draw in those looking for an emotional charge. Meanwhile the twists and turns of the plot and the meaning of the story draw in those looking to rev up their brains.

Whether through emotion or thought, stories that engage are more likely to persuade. The higher the emotional and semantic content of a story, then, the more likely they are to distract people from the persuasion attempt.

Crafting better stories

Highly persuasive stories need to be engaging. Here are some more factors that make an engaging and persuasive story (from Green & Brock, 2005):

• Literary techniques like foregrounding, which is using things like irony or metaphor to make the banal and everyday seem new and fresh. It’s about shaking the reader out of the mundane.
• Imagery is important as it helps the story come alive in the reader’s mind.
• Suspense keep us reading for the oldest of reasons: to find out what happens next.
• Modelling: if you want someone to change a behaviour, then you can model it. The character in the story has to go through the transformation that you want the reader to go through.

For inspiration break down your favourite novels, TV shows or films to see how the narrative works. Oddly whether the story is true or not doesn’t seem to matter that much, people are persuaded by fiction just as much as fact.

There are all sorts of innovative applications. Doctors at Harvard Medical School are given stories and novels to read to encourage humane treatment of their patients. Lawyers continually use stories in court to persuade. Public health bodies lobby TV shows to get their health issues included in popular narratives.

Persuading through narrative is as old as the hills and it works. So what’s your story?

Image credit: Stephen Poff

Say you’re the government and you want to stop people smoking. Should you put really scary warnings on the packets emphasising the health risks?

Or maybe you should tell people about the positive side of becoming a non-smoker, like having whiter teeth, smelling better and being able to run more than 20 metres without having a coughing fit.

Our instinctive reaction is to go with scaring people witless. Throw away the carrots and start wielding the big stick. The theory being that people pay more attention to frightening messages, so they are more likely to take them to heart.

As you’ll have noticed, most government agencies agree. Billions are spent each year in countries across the world on campaigns that focus on the negative. This is the way persuasive health messages are normally targeted at the public. We, the downtrodden masses, must be frightened into changing our foolish ways.

But what does the research say?

Originally it agreed that framing messages in terms of losses tends to get people’s attention, but research has begun to question this ‘common sense’ conclusion.

A recent analysis added up the results of 29 different studies, which had been carried out on 6,378 people in total (O’Keefe & Jensen, 2008). They didn’t just include health messages like smoking cessation, but also consumer advertising.

What they found was none of the expected advantage for loss-framed messages, indeed there was a slight persuasive advantage for messages that were framed positively. But this advantage for gain-framed appeals seemed to be mainly confined to disease prevention, such as encouraging people to use sunscreen. However another review of the field also found an advantage for gain-framed appeals in encouraging healthy eating (O’Keefe & Jensen, in press).

All of these findings are weird because normally bad things attract our attention more than good things and so they are processed more thoroughly. That’s why the newspapers and TV are full of alarming stories: like it or not, that’s what we pay attention to.

We don’t really know why loss-framed appeals turn out to be no more effective, and in some cases worse, than gain-framed appeals. O’Keefe and Jensen suggest it might be because we don’t like to be bullied by the government—or by anyone for that matter—into changing our behaviour.

Could be true but I prefer their second explanation which is simply that we prefer to think about nice things. Given the choice between visualising lung cancer and contemplating a dazzling white smile, I know which one I prefer to think about. And if I spend more time thinking about it, then it’s got a better chance of persuading me than if I put it straight out of my mind.

Image credit: Luca

Nowadays people tend to use ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’ interchangeably. For some this is a linguistic faux pas, but what about psychologically? Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ terms?

On the surface the difference seems very slight. “I feel economic recovery is just around the corner,” and “I think economic recovery is just around the corner,” send much the same message.

Nevertheless a new study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin finds this tiny difference can influence the power of a persuasive message (Mayer & Tormala, 2010).

Persuasive thoughts and feelings

Nicole Mayer and Zakary Tormala first assessed the natural tendencies of 65 participants to think either cognitively or affectively. Did they tend to describe the world with reference to feelings (e.g. unpleasant or pleasant; scary or comforting) or in terms of thoughts (e.g. useless or useful; harmful or beneficial).

Then they were given a persuasive message to read about donating blood which contained exactly the same arguments, except where one used the word ‘think’, the other used ‘feel’. Afterwards each person was asked how likely they were to donate blood in the future.

People who thought about the world in cognitive terms were more persuaded to give blood when the message was framed in terms of ‘thinking’. On the other hand the group that used emotional words was more persuaded when ‘feel’ was used.

This suggests that if you want to persuade someone, then it’s useful to know whether they are a thinker or a feeler and target your message accordingly. If you don’t already know then the easiest way to find out is listen for whether they describe the world cognitively or affectively.

Going in cold

But what if you are trying to persuade someone cold, without knowing whether they are a thinker or a feeler? Then you’ll have to rely on short-cuts, and one of the most obvious short-cuts is gender because women have a tendency to give greater weight to emotionally-framed arguments, while men give greater weight to cognitively-framed arguments.

To check this theory out Mayer and Tormala gave men and women adverts for a new movie. Tormala explains the results:

“…we found that women were more persuaded by an ad for a new movie when it quoted reviews beginning with ‘I feel.’ Men, however, were more persuaded by the same basic ad when it quoted reviews beginning with ‘I think.'”

A vital caveat to this research, particularly relevant because of the gender difference, is that it is not assessing whether messages should persuade rationally or emotionally at a deep level (I’ll come on to that). This study is all about framing: the terms in which a message is couched.

Emotional messages can be couched in emotional language, but they can also be couched in cognitive language. I can say “I feel happy,” or “I’m thinking happy thoughts.” Both messages contain emotional content but people respond to them in different ways.

So this study is less about the content and more about the surface appearance. If you appear to be referring more to either emotions or thoughts then people who think in those terms are more persuaded.

Studies have looked beyond the mere surface of persuasive messages at whether truly affective or cognitive messages are more persuasive. These generally find messages are more persuasive if they match the attitude’s encoding. In other words if people tend to think cognitively about, say, economic policy, then the most persuasive arguments are likely to be those that are deeply cognitive. But if attitudes are more affectively tinged, an emotional argument is likely to trump the cognitive.

Rational emotions

Looking closer at these findings, there are also reliable differences between people. We vary individually in our desire for both the cognitive and affective components of messages. In an experimental test of this, Haddock et al. (2008) found that people’s ‘need for cognition’ and ‘need for affect’ was central to how persuasive messages were processed. And just like Mayer and Tormala, Haddock and colleagues found that persuasion was boosted if the message matched those individual preferences.

In practical terms, though, Mayer and Tormala win out because in their experiment the deep meaning of a message doesn’t need to be changed, it only needs to appear to have changed. There are likely to be some losses in persuasive power, but for a manipulation that is so simple to implement, it’s a neat way of boosting persuasive power. The only challenge is picking the audience as either a thinker or a feeler. Once past that, your message is easily tailored.

In the grand arena of ideas, we have tended to see emotion as the poorer cousin to thought, especially in the context of persuasion. We have this idea that using an emotional argument, or being swayed by one, somehow denotes lesser intelligence. But attitudes towards emotional arguments are warming as psychologists have uncovered the vital role emotions play in our thinking.

Rather than seeing emotions as opposed to rationality, psychologists frequently describe them as vital components of reason. Contrary to centuries of prejudice, an emotional thought isn’t necessarily an irrational one.

Image credit: Dirk Dallas

Every argument has at least two sides, even if sometimes, we’re not prepared to admit it. But in the heat of battle many people present their own side of the argument as though there’s no alternative.

You don’t have to go far online to find numerous examples of just that; take your pick of the issues from climate change to the Middle East. The instinct is to avoid drawing attention to weaknesses for fear of undermining our own point of view.

Counter-arguments

Over the years psychologists have compared one-sided and two-sided arguments to see which are the most persuasive in different contexts. Daniel O’Keefe at the University of Illinois collected together the results of 107 different studies on sidedness and persuasion conducted over 50 years which, between them, recruited 20,111 participants (O’Keefe, 1999, Communication Yearbook, 22, pp. 209-249).

The results of this meta-analysis provide persuasive reading. What he found across different types of persuasive messages and with varied audiences, was that two-sided arguments are more persuasive than their one-sided equivalents.

There’s one big proviso to this: when presenting the opposing view it’s vital to raise counter-arguments. Two-sided arguments which don’t refute the opposing view can be significantly less persuasive than a comparable one-sided argument.

This is probably where the common fear of raising opposing arguments comes from. We instinctively understand that the safest course is to present only our own side, otherwise we risk losing traction with the audience.

But if we bring up opposing arguments, then shoot them down, not only is the audience more likely to be swayed, we also see a boost in our credibility.

In his paper Daniel O’Keefe looks at whether there are exceptions to this general rule of using a two-sided argument in persuasion.

• Sympathetic audience: it was thought that one-sided arguments are more effective if the audience is already sympathetic, i.e. when preaching to the converted. O’Keefe found no evidence for this; even a sympathetic audience is more convinced by a two-sided argument.
• Low educational level: nowadays this would be called ‘dumbing down’. Again O’Keefe found no evidence that people with lower educational levels are more persuaded by a one-sided message.
• Advertising messages: this is the one exception to the rule about refuting the other side’s arguments. O’Keefe found that it doesn’t matter whether advertisers bring up counter-arguments or not, it makes little difference to audience persuasion. Perhaps this is because we still know it’s advertising, so we ignore the advertisers attempts to present a balanced argument.

Triumph of reason

Overall this is a nice conclusion, in that not only is a balanced argument more appealing morally, it is also more persuasive. And it doesn’t matter whether counter-arguments are introduced at the start, the end, or mixed in; as long as they are refuted, we are more likely to persuade the audience.

So, no matter how hard-line you are on a particular issue, remember that people aren’t idiots, they know there are two sides to every story and they’ll discount your message unless you acknowledge and counter the other side.

Image credit: Articulate Matter

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

Participants were told that some in the university agreed that people should be allowed to end their own lives under certain circumstances, while others did not. In fact participants were chosen because they agreed that voluntary euthanasia should be legal and the experimenters wanted to see if they could be persuaded otherwise.

Attitude adjuster

Before the attempt to change their minds, half the participants were given moderate doses of caffeine, while the other half took a placebo. Both groups were double-blinded so that neither the researchers nor the participants knew who had taken what. Then they were given six stories to read which argued against euthanasia.

When asked afterwards for their attitude to voluntary euthanasia, those who had drunk caffeine were more influenced by the persuasive message than those who’d had the placebo.

On top of this, participants were asked about their attitude towards abortion which, the experimenters guessed, would be indirectly influenced, since someone who disapproves of euthanasia is also likely to disapprove of abortion. And this is exactly what they found. The persuasive message had spread to a related idea and the effect was strongest amongst those who had consumed caffeine.

Pay attention!

But why? What is it about caffeine that opens us up to persuasion?

The reason that a lot of persuasive messages pass us by is simply that we’re often not paying much attention to them; our minds easily wander and we prefer not to think too hard unless it’s unavoidable. By increasing our arousal, though, caffeine makes us process incoming messages more thoroughly, potentially leading to increased persuasion.

So watch out, all that coffee isn’t just making you twitchy, it’s also making you more susceptible to influence, even if only by enhancing your attention.

Image credit: illuminaut