Which is all very nice in the abstract, but the question is, how do persuasion situations actually differ? That is, what are the different challenges that persuaders face? Well in fact, persuaders can face all sorts of different situations, all sorts of different challenges. However, there are certain sorts of persuasive challenges that recur, you see them over and over again.
1. Getting people to have appropriately positive attitudes.
why aren’t people already doing this behavior? why aren’t people already doing what I want? Well, one possible answer is they don’t think it’s a good idea.
Getting them to think that what the persuader is urging is a good idea.
Consequence-based arguments
You make arguments supporting what you’re advocating. You try to give people good reasons why they should favor the thing you want, why they should follow the course of action you’re advocating.
Overwhelmingly, when people make arguments for a course of action, the arguments they make are arguments based on consequences.
Consequences, outcomes, are a natural source of good reasons for doing something. They are a natural source of justifications for actions.
So the question is, when you make arguments from consequences, what can you do to maximize their persuasiveness? As a place to start in sorting out answers to that question, notice that these consequence-based arguments are conditionals. They have an antecedent, the if part.
Consequence desirability
One way in which cultures differ, is in what’s called individual collectivism.
People vary in the degree to which they consider longer term, as opposed to shorter term consequences of behavior.
And the caution I want to give you here is, don’t too easily assume you know which consequences to emphasize, which arguments will be most persuasive.
So the big takeaway here is, don’t think narrowly about what consequences to discuss. Don’t assume you know what consequences will be most persuasive to your audience. The argument that seems best to you, the argument that seems most persuasive to you. That argument won’t necessarily be the best one for convincing your audience.
Consequence likelihood
Because even if people are convinced about the desirability of the outcomes you’re talking about, they may have doubts about whether those outcomes will actually occur.
Describe one or more parallel cases, that is, examples of similar situations in which the effect happened. Instead of showing people just one example or two examples, sometimes the persuader will have information about multiple examples, multiple parallel cases.
And that’s to describe the underlying mechanism that is explained to people how the advocated action comes to produce the claimed consequence.
If the people you’re trying to persuade seem uncertain about whether the outcomes you’re pointing to will really happen.
One thing to think about is, can I give them some description of how it’s going to happen, how this effect is going to come about? Can I give them a picture of the underlying mechanism? Because that may help them to see that the effect is in fact likely to occur.
Addressing counterarguments
make your own positive arguments.
But you’ll be more persuasive if, in addition to advancing those supportive arguments, you also undertake refutation of opposing arguments. It’s better to try to refute people’s objections than to ignore them.
What’s the best thing to do then as a persuader? Briefly, the best strategy is to try to overwhelm those opposing considerations by invoking all of your supportive arguments, all your positive points.
Instead, better for you to emphasize all the positive, supportive considerations you can so that even if the audience is thinking about those counterarguments, they can see that your supporting arguments outweigh them.
Now having said that, there might be one exception, one situation in which acknowledging but not refuting counterarguments might be a good idea, namely, when you’re facing an audience that doesn’t trust you. In that situation, straightforward acknowledgement of drawbacks to your proposal can boost your believability because people aren’t expecting that of you.
3. People’s perceived ability to perform the behavior.
Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes and the social considerations about what other people think or do are all positive. But people don’t think they can perform the behavior.
Maybe they don’t know how to perform the behavior. And so, they don’t even try. And so, sometimes persuaders face the task of addressing that issue.
Addressing people’s ability to perform the behavior.
Why not? Because they don’t think they can do it, that is, they think they lack the ability to perform the behavior or they think it’s just too hard, too difficult.
The importance of perceived ability
As I said, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if people aren’t performing the behavior you want it must be because they don’t see that it’s a good thing to do.
But that is potentially a trap, is potentially a mistake. And there’s something specific you want to get done during that meeting.
Some decision you want to get made, some agreement you want to be reached, some information you want to be sure is conveyed, some framework that needs to be established.
One barrier to people doing what you want can be their perceived ability to perform the behavior.
Be alert to the possibility that you may need to somehow address people’s perceptions of behavioral ability, behavioral difficulty.
removing obstacles
Okay, suppose you’re facing this persuasion challenge, that people just don’t think they can perform the behavior.
The question is, what can you do as an influence agent in those situations? In this segment and the next one, I want to give you three abstract strategies, three general ways of potentially influencing perceived behavioral ability.
You might directly remove some obstacle to behavioral performance.
There are two kinds of obstacles that people might face and so two kinds that you might remove.
- One, is informational, that is, sometimes people just lack information that’s relevant to behavioral performance.
- A second kind of obstacle is substantive, material, not just a lack of information, but something beyond that.
So, first strategy for addressing people’s behavioral ability is directly removing obstacles to performing the behavior. And to crystallize the key idea here, when you’re trying to get people to do something, make it easy for them to do it, don’ t make it hard.
And you think that perceived behavioral ability, perceived behavioral difficulty, might be an issue, stop and ask yourself, are there things I can do that would make it easier for people to do this? Is there information they need? Are there material obstacles I could help them address? That’s the first general strategy for influencing perceived behavioral ability, directly removing those obstacles.
Rehearsal and modeling
Providing opportunities for rehearsal or practice of the behavior.
A third strategy is exposure to modeling. That is, seeing someone else successfully perform the behavior. Seeing someone else model the behavior for them.
Modeling involved vicarious success, seeing someone else successfully perform the behavior and so where rehearsal involves instilling the belief I’ve done it before so I can do it again, modeling involves instilling a belief like well if they can do it, I can do it.
So before rushing off to try to get them to have positive attitudes, you might at least ask yourself are there ways we could make that process easier for people? Streamline it somehow? Remove barriers.
Do we need to give them some guided practice at doing it? Rehearsal.
Could we maybe show them how other people manage to get this done on time.
4. Addressing people’s ability to perform the behavior.
Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes, and the social considerations are all positive, and people know they’re able to engage in the behavior. And so, in some sense, they vaguely intend to do what you want. But somehow they don’t translate those good intentions into action.
That is sometimes the task a persuader faces is the task of helping people convert their intentions into behavior.
The challenge of encouraging people to convert their existing good intentions into actions.
Sometimes, all those things are lined up positively so people, in some sense, intend to do the desired behavior but then they don’t follow through.
And in that situation, the challenge that the persuader faces is the challenge of getting people to convert their intentions into behavior.
Prompt
Using prompts, a prompt is a simple cue that makes performance of the behavior salient, brings it into conscious awareness.
The thing is, prompts won’t always work. Yes, it a right kinds of situations they can be very useful, but it has to be the right sort of situation.
And what sort of situation is that? Well, broadly speaking, there are at least two necessary conditions for a prompt to be successful.
First, the person must already be willing to do the behavior. The person must already believe themselves capable of performing the behavior, that is, perceived behavioral ability must be sufficiently high. So, where people are willing to do the behavior and they think themselves able to do the behavior, but they’re just not doing it, not closing that gap between intention and action, maybe all they need is a simple prompt, a little prod, a little reminder.
And second, perceived behavioral ability must be sufficiently high.
So in the right circumstances, prompts can be very powerful, but it has to be the right circumstance.
Explicit planning
Encouraging people to engage in explicit planning about their behavior, about their performance of the behavior, that is, you get people to specify when and where and how they’re going to do the behaviors. And the effect of doing this, is to make people more likely to actually follow through on their intentions.
Explicit planning helps people convert their intentions into behaviour.
The reason these explicit planning interventions work, is that they encourage people to move from an abstract general intention to a much more specific concrete intention.
In short, when people already have the desired general intention, but the persuasive challenge is getting them to try to translate that intention into behavior, one useful strategy may be to encourage them to explicitly plan their behavioral performance.
An organization facing just a situation found that people who engaged in that explicit planning, were in fact more likely to subsequently attend a training session.
That is, explicit planning made people more likely to convert their intentions into behavior.
So, encouraging explicit planning can be a handy strategy to have in your toolkit.
But in order for explicit planning interventions to work, at least two conditions have to be met.
- First, and sort of obviously, people must already have the appropriate abstract intention.
- And second, perceived behavioral ability must be sufficiently high.
They might not have thought concretely about how they’re going to do it however, and that’s where explicit planning comes in.
Inducing guilt
So this third strategy is, to put it crudely, to make people feel bad about their inconsistency.
If people are going to experience these negative feelings, guilt, hypocrisy, dissonance, two things have to be salient to them at the same time.
First, their existing positive attitudes and intentions on the one hand, and second, their inconsistent behaviors on the other.
The idea is that when both these things are prominent, the inconsistency will be so apparent that people feel uncomfortable. So uncomfortable as to motivate them to change their behavior.
In order to make people feel uncomfortable about inconsistency between their attitudes and their actions, uncomfortable enough to change their behaviors, you need to make both those elements salient for them.
Making people uncomfortable with their inconsistency can be effective in getting people to start acting consistently with their positive intentions.
But, this can be a dangerous strategy, one that produces negative reactions.
- First, people often react negatively to overt attempts to make them feel guilty, and that can make them resistant to change.
- If people can be led to think simultaneously about both their existing attitudes and their inconsistent behavior, that can be enough to make people feel uncomfortable, without you having to reproach them explicitly.
- And that’s if people’s perceived behavioral ability is not sufficiently high. If they think the behavior is just too difficult to do. In other words, it’s possible for this strategy to backfire if perceived behavioral ability isn’t sufficiently high.
So if you’re thinking of using this strategy, make sure that the people you’re trying to influence think they can perform the action you’re trying to encourage.
To wrap up this idea, one way of encouraging people to convert their existing good intentions into actions is to make people feel guilty, hypocritical, uncomfortable about that inconsistency.
This strategy can work to change people’s behavior, but it’s a dangerous strategy.
Summary
Why aren’t people already doing what I want, why aren’t they already doing the behavior.
And the reason you should ask yourself such questions, is that the answer will point you toward the right kind of tools, point you towards the influence strategies you should be considering
One possible answer is, people don’t think it is a good idea, they have negative attitudes that’s why they’re not doing it.
Well then you’d wanna think about how you might go about influencing those social factors.
Well then, you’d wanna think about how you could boost perceived behavioral ability.
people seem to intend to do what I want, but they’re still not actually doing it.
You take different sorts of approaches depending on which of these four challenges you are facing.
2. social considerations are a barrier.
Changing descriptive norms
And one reason for that can be that in addition to being influenced by their personal attitudes, they can also be influenced by social considerations, factors connected with people’s perceptions of what other people think about what you’re doing.
The first one is the person’s perception of what other people do. The term of art here is descriptive norm. The descriptive norm is the person’s perception of whether other people perform the behavior.
I think it’s a good idea, but nobody else seems to be doing it, so I’m not going to. But I should add, descriptive norm messages are not guaranteed to be successful.
Ask yourself are other people also doing this and might it be useful to convey that to the person I am trying to influence to let them know that lots of other people, lots of their coworkers, or their peers or other people like them, lots of other people have done it.
De-emphasizing prescriptive norm
I can be influenced by what I think other people think I should be doing. You might try to get the person to de-emphasize the prescriptive norm as an influence on their decision. Get them to put less weight on it.
Remember the situation we’re discussing is one in which people already have the desired positive attitudes, but it’s their prescriptive norm perceptions, their sense of what other people think they should do that’s preventing them from going forward. Well, one possible way of encouraging them to follow their inclinations, to follow their attitudes, is to suggest that in making their decision, they should place more weight on their own attitudes than on what other people think.
This should be your decision, this is something that affects you much more than anybody else. So you should do what you think is right. This is the kind of choice that other people really can’t make for you. And if you happen to know the particular other person whose views are being influential, you can think about whether you might have some basis for urging the persuadee to discount that person’s view specifically.
So the first possible strategy here, where people have positive attitudes, but they’re being influenced by what other people think they should do, the first possible strategy, try to get the person to put less weight on their prescriptive norm perceptions, and place more weight on their attitudes.
Changing prescriptive norms
Persuaders naturally think about communicating with the person they’re trying to persuade. But it can sometimes be useful for persuaders to stop and ask themselves Is there someone else I should also be talking to? Someone whose views will influence the person I’m trying to persuade? Someone who is an opinion leader for them? Someone whose views matter to them? As one example of that, United States Army recruiting.
Sometimes the challenge the persuader faces isn’t that the persuadee has negative attitudes, it’s that the persuadee has negative prescriptive norms.
First, is there a way I could perhaps get the person to emphasize their own attitudes more than what other people think they should do? And second, is there someone else I might talk to? Someone around the person I’m trying to influence? People in their network, somebody whose opinions they value.