Practical Eloquence Blog

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To this point in this series on the psychology of persuasive communication, we’ve covered first impressions, attention, understanding, credibility, and deciding. Could anything possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, yes. You can’t be sure you’ve persuaded anybody until they’ve made an actual decision—and they may not be ready to that yet. Maybe they want to hear from other points of view, or gather additional information. Maybe they need to convince others. So, when they finally arrive at the decision point, will they remember enough of what you said to make the case for you?

A lot of what we’ve talked about already can certainly help. Capturing their attention ensures that it at least gets into their memory. By making your message clear, it’s more likely to connect to stuff they already know, and if they’ve seen value in what you said, they have an incentive to at least try to remember.

Yet, the sad fact is that people won’t remember most of what you told them even just a short time after the conversation. One book claims that, after a 10 minute presentation, people forget 50% of what you said immediately, 75% by the next day, and 90% a week later. That was an old study, but I would bet that it’s even worse today, with all the distractions we have in our lives.

That sounds bad. You put in all that time to prepare for a critical presentation and 90% of it goes to waste? Actually, it doesn’t have to be bad news. Remember that the test of persuasive communication is whether people actually decide or act the way you want them to, and 10% may be more than enough—as long as it’s the right 10%! So your first rule, if you have a complex topic is BE VERY CERTAIN ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO REMEMBER. Don’t get too ambitious and try to overload them with different points.

Next, to boost the odds that they will retain what you told them long enough to put it to use, here are four general principles:

Get them thinking

Dan Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, has a great line: “Memory is the residue of thought.” When you think about it, we’re bombarded daily with stimuli, experiences and information, so our brains need to “decide” what to try to retain. Can you remember the color of the car that was next to you at the red light three blocks form your office yesterday? Most likely not, unless you noticed it and thought about it for some reason. Maybe the driver was acting suspicious, or maybe you’ve been thinking about buying a new car and you liked the color. Willingham says it works like this: if you don’t think about it very much, your brain figures you won’t need it again so it doesn’t bother storing it. But if you think about it, it must be important so the brain figures you’ll need it again.

How do you use this? Do whatever you can to get them thinking and to show you what they’re thinking about it. Ask questions, solicit their feedback and questions and even provoke arguments. If you think they’re bought in and have to get approval from someone else, ask them to tell you what points they’re going to make If memory is the residue of thought, the more they think, the more residue remains.

Make it meaningful

Just as a jigsaw puzzle is difficult to complete without seeing the picture on the box, unconnected facts are tough to remember unless there’s some bigger picture to remember, which is why John Medina says, “meaning before detail”. But when you understand the larger meaning, the facts are easier to recall when you reconstruct the meaning. Make sure they get the big picture, which is incidentally the bulk of that 10% you want them to get.

Meaning is easier to get when they can perceive a clear structure to your logic. Chess masters can glance for just a few seconds at multiple games in progress and accurately reconstruct them from memory, which novices can’t do. But when their memory is tested using boards on which pieces are placed at random, their memories are just as bad as yours and mine—because there’s no logic for them to follow.

Far and away the easiest structure to remember is the basic structure of every story ever told: situation, conflict, and resolution, or as Kurt Vonnegut put it: “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again.”  It works great for entertainment but also just as well for persuasion. Any time you’re trying to talk someone into something, you need to get them into trouble then get them out.

Make them feel it

Emotions can be messy, and that’s exactly the point: messes can be hard to erase. So, if you’re talking about a problem that needs to be solved, you need to bring out more than the financial impact. Should they be afraid, angry, disgusted? If it’s a great opportunity, should they be excited, expectant, greedy?

If you want to talk about customer dissatisfaction, put a face on your statistics. Use vivid details that they can see, hear, feel and touch in their minds.

Make it sticky using five memory SAVER tools

Not all information is created equal in terms of its ability to stick in the minds of your listeners. Here are five tools under the acronym SAVER:

STORIES: Stories stick. I’ve mentioned story in the sense of the structure of your overall conversation or presentation, but this is about individual anecdotes.  Humans have passed on learning for millennia, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to hearing them, getting drawn in to their reality, and remembering them. But make your stories have a purpose beyond mere entertainment: because they’re so memorable, it’s important that any story you tell supports your theme or one of your main points.

ANALOGIES: Familiar things are more easily remembered, and analogies make things familiar. If you’re presenting an idea that is a big change from the status quo, analogies can make it seem safer by its familiarity. If it’s a sales presentation, some of the best analogies are drawn from the way your customer does business. If you can show them how your solution fits with something they already do, you get the double benefit of familiarity and credibility.

VISUALS: Forget the myth about auditory, visual and kinesthetic. We’re all visual learners; pictures stay in our minds far more commonly than abstract concepts and words. John Medina tells us in his book Brain Rules that retention goes from 10% to 65% when pictures are used. As with stories, this makes it important to make sure your pictures support your points, rather than just being decorative.

EXAMPLES: Examples make abstract things real. You see it every night on the evening news: if they run a story about the unemployment rate, they will profile a family struggling to make ends meet. Chip and Dan Heath call it the Mother Teresa effect, because she said, “If I see one, I will act.”

REPETITION: Churchill said, “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”  This is excellent advice, but pay attention to the subtlety: Churchill repeated it slightly differently each time, so that it doesn’t sound repetitious.

I’d like to leave you with one last thought, and I hope you will remember it. Of all people you want to remember your presentation, you are the most important. In fact, the study of memory was actually started by folks in my line of business. You might say they were my professional ancestors: those who taught public speaking skills in the ancient Greece and Rome. I those days speakers spoke for hours and it was considered unmanly to need notes, so they devised different ways of memorizing their points, and a lot of the mnemonic devices they used are the same ones that people in professional memory contests still use today. Today we’re told not to memorize our presentations because it makes you seem too scripted, but there’s a lot to be said for knowing your material cold—not word for word, but being able to talk without referring to notes, or what’s worse, looking back at your slides. People who have an excellent command of the facts are always impressive, and I would submit even more so today.

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Psychologists love to mess with economists’ heads. One of the best ways they’ve found to do this is with the Ultimatum Game. It goes like this: The experimenter makes an offer to two people. The first is given $10 and told to offer as much or as little of it as he wants to the second. The catch is that if the other person doesn’t accept the offer, no one gets the money. Here’s the question: if you are the acceptor, what is the minimum amount you would require to accept the offer?

If you were a truly rational economist, you would accept any amount greater than zero, even a penny—because it would leave you better off. But if you have blood rather than bits and bytes running through your veins, you would probably get insulted by a low offer and refuse it, in effect punishing yourself just so you could punish the other person. For the vast majority of actual human beings, emotion trumps logic in that case, and in many other cases as well.

Despite the best efforts of corporations to implement elaborate processes and systems to inoculate themselves, emotions are impossible to remove from every business decision, especially the more important ones. Gut-level Gus always has a place at the table, and effective persuaders ignore him at their peril – but they also know how to get on his good side. Gus is especially important to have as an ally because he’s the one most likely to see any decision turned into action.

In fact, we often—maybe even almost always—decide on an emotional/subconscious level and then afterwards tell ourselves or others a story that proves we used logic. We are not so much rational animals as rationalizing animals.

I probably don’t need to spend too much time convincing you that emotions can lead to less than optimal business decisions. Researchers have documented a correlation between sunny days and stock price rises, and many national stock markets fall when their country’s team is eliminated from the World Cup. Personally, we all have regretted things done or said in anger, excitement or lust. As the song says: “I know what I was feeling, but what was I thinking?”

But you may be surprised to know that emotions can actually improve the quality of decision making. We all have had the sense that something feels right, or feels wrong, and it pays to listen to your gut. (The normal metaphor is head vs. heart, but I use gut because it’s about a combination of the two.) It’s called introception, and it can actually be measured. In one experiment, hedge fund traders who were better attuned to what they were feeling at a particular time were more profitable in their trades, and the more experienced they were, the better they were at detecting their internal body signals.

Gus is fast. While Rational Randy is gathering additional data and calculating possible permutations, Gut-level Gus has already sized up the situation unconsciously and is signaling his decision through emotions. It’s like a chess master who sees a familiar pattern and knows exactly what move to choose without having to think several moves ahead.

Other studies have shown that people who have had damage to their orbitofrontal cortex, which connects their frontal lobes with their emotions, literally can’t tell what they’re feeling, and so they have severe trouble making even the simplest decisions in life.

One way to think about the emotions you feel just before you decide is to treat them as additional input for your decision. They don’t have to be decisive, but you shouldn’t ignore them or try to suppress them, either.

How to use pathos to improve your persuasion

But right now I’m not going to focus on how to use emotions to improve your own decision making. Let’s focus on how to use emotions to improve the quality your listeners’ decision-making (measured  selfishly as how likely it is that they will buy into what we’re selling).

In many ways, modern science isn’t telling us things we haven’t already known to a certain extent for thousands of years. Aristotle called it pathos, and it was co-equal with logos and ethos as a persuasive tool.

Which emotions are particularly important?

Fear: It sounds bad, but fear is the most powerful emotion you can tap into for persuasive effect. I’ve already talked about prospect theory, which tells us that potential losses outweigh gains. You might say that fear is the most rational emotion you can have, because it protects you against danger and possible loss. It can be used defensively, like IBM used to do with its FUD sale, by playing on the fear, uncertainty, and doubt associated with straying from the tried and true. Or it can be used offensively, by playing up the risk of not changing.

Anticipated regret: Mark Goulston, in his book, Just Listen, says that his long experience with top executives has shown that many are more afraid of making a mistake than in doing something right.

Shock: Sometimes people need to be jolted out of their complacency. John Kotter tells the story in his book Leading Change where an executive was having trouble selling his idea for centralizing his company’s procurement process, with a projected savings of close to a billion dollars. He had an intern go out and buy one pair of work gloves from each approved vendor, and piled them up on a conference table. When executives walked in and saw a three-foot-high-pile containing 424 pairs of gloves, they were shocked into action. As Kotter says, successful long term change in companies is not a product of analyze-think-change; it is driven by see-feel-change.

Happiness: You can also recruit positive emotions to help you sell your ideas. When people are in a good mood, they are more optimistic about the future, and more wiling to consider risks. They also are more affected by heuristics (mental short-cuts), such as whether they like you.

Pride: I’ve covered this one at length in episode 12, but let me remind you that people love to feel proud of their actions, so when you can show how their decision makes them or their organization live up to its values, it can be a powerful reason to act.

How to use appeal to Gut-level Gus

Your challenge is to know the emotional state of your listeners, and diminish or enhance it depending on how it aligns with your idea. Here are a few things you can do to get Gut-level Gus on your side:

1. Know your audience. How do they feel about the topic or situation? What is their emotional state at the time you’re talking to them?
2. Decide which emotions you want your audience to feel. As Maya Angelou said, “they won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
3. Get in tune with your own emotions.
4. Choose your time wisely. When emotions get too hot, logic gets crowded out.
5. Name it and tame it. If your listeners are in the “wrong” emotional state, you might be tempted to ignore it, but that won’t make it go away. You need to bring it out into the open. Acknowledge what they’re thinking, and empathize. As Goulston says, people like to “feel felt”.
6. Redirect the emotion if possible. If you can’t beat it, use it. For example, if they’re feeling anxious about change, you can ask questions to get them to articulate the risk of not changing.
7. Use impact questions. “How would you explain it to your boss if that happens?”
8. Personalize it.
9. Make it vivid.