Five categories of persuasion
For multiple reasons, it is hard to change people’s minds. In particular:
- Nobody likes to admit — even to themselves — that they were wrong.
- Once a decision is made, it can be genuinely costly to change.
- Many views — especially political ones — are “tribal”. You believe what you believe because that’s what group membership requires you to believe.
- Analyzing things can be difficult and stressful. People like to make up their minds, resolve the uncertainty, and move on.
Yet tremendous resources are devoted to persuasion, meant to change or confirm people’s beliefs as the case may be. That’s the essence of such activities as marketing, religion, education, and political campaigns — not to mention blogging. I.e. — despite the difficulties, persuasion is widely (and of course correctly) believed to be possible. Let’s explore how that works.
Most persuasion and mind-changing, I believe, fits into five overlapping categories, which may be summarized as:
- Influencing people’s first impressions of or initial beliefs about a subject.
- Persuading somebody to narrow or otherwise change the scope of an ongoing belief.
- Influencing somebody’s level of confidence in an ongoing belief.
- Influencing the importance somebody ascribes to an ongoing belief.
- Actually changing somebody’s mind about something.
The first two are discussed below. The next two are discussed in a companion post. I’m still trying to figure out how the last one works. 🙂
1. Creating initial/first impressions is nice marketing work if you can get it:
- You don’t have the difficulties of changing somebody’s mind …
- … but you hope to impose those difficulties on all the persuaders who come after you.
Even so, there are multiple ways to screw up first-impression marketing, including:
- Make your story boring or unappealing.
- Make it so implausible that people don’t believe you.
- Lie in ways that are convincing at first, but get you in trouble when you are eventually caught.
2. More common are opportunities to influence the scope of somebody’s beliefs, generally via some version of: “Yes, there’s a lot of truth to what you believe, but it happens not to apply in every situation.” The basic idea here is:
- You agree with people sufficiently to perhaps not seem threatening to them.
- You nonetheless get to tell them there are reasons for doing whatever you wish them to do.
3. Scope-limitation is a classic strategy when selling against large technology vendors, along lines such as:
- “Oracle and DB2 may be great products for huge companies, but not for smaller ones such as yours.”
- “SAP may be great in many industries, but in your vertical market we’re better”.
Often such pitches also fall into another persuasion category, when you claim that your product’s advantages are important to a particular customer, while its disadvantages are not.
4. A huge subcategory of scope limitation pertains to time, in the template “Yes, that used to be true, so you were certainly correct to believe it. But now things have changed.” I think this helps explain the huge emphasis on news — real or imagined — as part of the persuasion process.
5. Political beliefs are particularly subject to exceptions and scope limitations. For example:
- People who generally oppose government spending usually have certain categories they don’t object to, such as defense, or social spending that they benefit from personally.
- Similarly, deficit spending is perceived as dangerous … but perhaps not in times of war … or maybe when politics have aligned to allow a tax cut.
- Populism-oriented voters can believe:
- Overall economic numbers accurately show that many people are doing well.
- Their own group, however, is struggling.
- Even the worst bigots make exceptions for certain individuals.
6. Two other kinds of persuasion can both be categorized as affecting the strength of somebody’s beliefs:
- Somebody maintains an opinion, but their perception of its importance is raised or lowered.
- Somebody maintains an opinion, but their confidence in it is weakened or strengthened.
These are addressed in a companion post.
7. Finally, I do of course have some thoughts about outright changing of people’s minds. In particular:
- Some decisions truly are in large part rational, even if not entirely so. Those lend themselves to opinion changes as people figure things out.
- Faith in leaders — political, business, religious, whatever — can of course be shaken. Followers seem most likely to turn on leaders when they feel they have been both lied to and betrayed. The classic example in US history is the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. But modern disillusionment with leadership of both US political parties serves as an example too.
People’s minds can be changed. The War on Truth is not unwinnable.
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