Introduction to the Power of Persuasion

Introduction

Have you ever found yourself buying something you don’t need? Most of us have. Do you think you are influenced by the adverts you see? Most of us don’t think so. But companies are spending millions on the advertising industry for one simple reason – ads work. And if you don’t even notice you’re being manipulated, even better – for them.

Before we start, let’s think about what the word ‘persuasion’ means. Persuasion means convincing other people to change their attitudes, opinions or feeling about something (which can often lead them to perform an action e.g. to buy your product or to vote for you in the next election). There are two ‘roads’ you can take to persuade people – the ‘deep’ and the ‘shallow’ path. People who take the ‘deep’ path to persuasion make up their mind about something after putting in a lot of thought into it. Think about buying a car or a new laptop – people are unlikely to just go and buy these things without putting in a lot of effort to research their options. However, thinking is very tiring! You need a lot of time to process the arguments, and you need to put in effort into finding and understanding the information you’re looking for. This means that you won’t choose this road very frequently (let’s be honest, who buys a new laptop every week?!).

The second road to persuasion that you can take is the ‘shallow’ road, which (you guessed it) requires a lot less time and effort. In fact, people can use various psychological tricks to persuade you without you being consciously aware of it! Yes, you read that right. Ads can manipulate us without us even realising. That’s how mindless people get sometimes, all to avoid the hard work of thinking (ugh). In 1984 Robert Cialdini published his book titled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, in which he outlines the ways in which people can be persuaded to think or do something. He identified six such ways, which we will treat as ‘weapons’ which can be used to manipulate people. These weapons are: Authority, Commitment, Liking, Scarcity, Reciprocity and Social Validation. Don’t worry if you’re not quite sure what these things are, I will guide you through them all. Start looking through the resources on the right and discover the different tools used for persuasion.

Objectives
• To become familiar with the different methods of persuasion
• To analyse adverts to identify the type of method used