Everyday influence:

• Someone once counted how many times people tried to influence him/her in a day. He/She lost count at 500 in the mid-morning.
• Conservative estimates suggest that a person will receive up to 400 persuasive appeals from marketers alone in the course of a single day.
• Each year, the average American spends 1550 hours of TV, listens to 1160 hours of radio, and spends 290 hours reading newspapers and magazines. If you watch the normal amount of TV, each day you'll have seen 100 TV ads.
• Successful persuasion makes physical coercion unnecessary--interpersonally and internationally. Thus society benefits from persuasion.

 

Definitions:

• Inducing a change in attitude is called persuasion.
• It has been found that simply playing classical music or Frank Sinatra over a loudspeaker will empty a parking lot full of teens in no time. And those teens have not changed their attitudes one bit! This is called influence.
• The Socratic Effect, studied by the famous influence researcher, William McGuire, states that by merely directing thoughts to attitudes and beliefs with logical implications for one another, those attitudes and beliefs become more consistent.

 

How many tactics are there?:

• ‘How many influence tactics are there?’ There's even debate over how to think about the question. Some think we should be looking for basic, underlying dimensions to influence approaches. Others attempt to identify families or clusters of tactics. Still others attempt to collate the number of individual tactics that can be identified.
• The question "How many tactics are there?" is like asking how many branches are on a tree,­ it depends where you take your cross section. You could look at the trunk and say there's basically one big branch. Or you could choose a spot half way up the tree and count a number of large branches. Or you could climb to the top of the tree and count hundreds of twigs.
• But human behavior is complex, and so is the art and science of shaping it. Those who are willing to grapple with the complexities are those who ultimately have the upper hand in controlling human behavior.

 

Ethics:

• Those who do not understand the power of social influence may live in the happy delusion of unlimited freedom, but the influence expert is aware that social influence is powerful enough to make certain actions and thoughts extremely likely on the part of the influence target.
• I'd contend we only enjoy the limited amount of freedom that remains between the powerful influences that largely determine our everyday lives. Because we are not consciously aware of those influences, we perceive freedom.
• Ethical issues become increasingly complicated when it becomes apparent that psychological determinants and restrictions to freedom lie, to a large extent, in the minds of those who are being influenced--rather than being imposed from the outside in a coercive nature.
• Since persuasion isn't force or coercion, the ethicality of influence quickly transcends off-handed pronouncements of right or wrong.

 

Persuasive disciplines:

• Advertising agencies have traditionally emphasized the role of creativity and current trends in their influence attempts.
• Advertising is an evolutionary crucible of social influence, because of the great variety of influence techniques that are tried and discarded.
• The more precisely a product can be targeted to a specific consumer, the greater the marketer's ability to influence people to buy that particular product.

 

The social psychological approach:

• Social psychology attempts to generate general answers and propose fundamental laws about how the human "hardware" functions.
• Speaking rapidly interferes with critical acceptance, which is good if you have a weak argument, but bad if you have a strong one.
• As the lawyer develops his talk, and uses stronger arguments, he needs to speak more slowly--giving his audience a chance to cognitively process his arguments.

 

Persuasion peddlers and magic elixirs:

• When it comes to the study of persuasion, there's plenty of bad information to go around.
• The knowledge of influence is vital to survival in societies that are based on persuasion, not coercion.
• What happens when a large demand exists but no sanctioned product to fill it?           A black market develops. And our society has a teeming, thriving black market of influence.

 

The structure of influence:

• The field is filled with thousands of fascinating findings and tactics held together by a loose and perplexingly weak connective structure.
• The theoretical connective tissue of our science is in a formative state of development. But within the intellectual universe of social influence, there are brilliant constellations of theories and results that are remarkably reliable.
• There are thousands of efficient influence tools awaiting our use (and more appearing each passing year), but no definitive publication telling us how to apply them.

Mindfulness:

• You see, you are the owner of a hunter-gatherer brain, which was just the machine for the job of hunting and gathering, which we humans did to survive thousands of years ago.
• Considerable evidence has amassed showing that humans don't like to think.
• Your brain has a similar response to thinking hard as it does to physical pain! Your brain doesn't like to do it, and avoids it when it can.

 

Mindlessness:

• Dr. Gregory Neidert, says that we humans are running our brains at idle about 90% to 95% of the time. Only when a topic is important to us and actually requires effortful thought do we engage our brains and make them do some real work.
• You may have noticed that people who think for a living (lawyers, doctors, investors, consultants) are paid a lot of money. That's because they are doing something for you that you'd rather not do for yourself--learn, memorize, and think!
• Sometimes, you just have to think in order to get yourself out of a jam or improve your state in life.