My review on Pre-suasion Book

How rational are we? What if someone tells us we are less rational than we think. In fact, a lot less rational we tend to believe. Pre-suasion is not telling it to us but trying to prove it with real-world examples and scientific evidence. The result? It is scary, real scary. One fact though, these techniques are not guaranteed to work all the time. They are to increase the persuasive power of your message.

To operate as efficiently as possible as human beings, we have to preserve energy by increasing the speed of the decision-making process. We cannot think everything thoroughly, do pros-cons analysis, and come to critically examined conclusions all the time. We need mental shortcuts to cut down this process in time. This perhaps is making our lives easier to live, also creates a massive vulnerability in our vetting process of external influences. Simply, it makes us more vulnerable to be persuaded by those who know this ancient art.

What’s the impact here? How severe is the situation? It is huge. Masses are mobilized this way. Individual opinions are swayed to more favorable outcomes by communicators.

There are many of them explained in the book. I cannot list all of them, but to give you an idea, lets’ start with one. One mental shortcut is liking. If you like someone, you will tend to accept what they say more likely. It shortcuts our brain circuitry and enables us to make a decision faster without exerting too much brainpower.

If you can make someone like you before communicating your message to them (hence pre-suasion as you prepare the person to be persuaded more easily), then you will get them to say “yes” more likely. What makes you like someone. Many things, but several of them are:

  1. If you look, talk, and dress up in similar ways.
  2. If you are from the same culture, country, city, or village.
  3. If you do the same things with them in sync.

The first two are pretty obvious but still powerful when used intentionally. The last one is pretty interesting because it is used almost all the time w/o us even recognizing them. Some examples are:

  1. People are praying together in sync.
  2. Soldiers are marching forward in sync.
  3. People are listening to music and dancing in sync.

Doing the same thing in sync with other people creates an interesting bond. I have seen the examples of this in my life a thousand times but never realized the magic of it. Once you create this bond, this identity, then you can claim to be part of it. Therefore, this established belonging to the same group and similarity builds a stronger trust between the listeners and the communicator. Hence, your persuasion doubles or triples.

This book has lots of gems inside to carefully reading eyes. Don’t read it for the sake of it. Constantly check your past to find out similar patterns. You will be surprised by who you actually are and who those people you actually see every day are.