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"An engaging, highly readable survey of the sophisticated methods of persuasion we encounter in various situations. From television to telemarketing and from self-deception to suicide cults, Levine takes a hard look at all the ways we attempt to persuade each other—and how and why they work (or don't). . . . The next time you wonder what possessed you to pay $50 for a medallion commemorating the series finale of Friends, you'll know where to turn."
—Slashdot.org
"If you're like most people, you think advertising and marketing work—just not on you. Robert Levine's The Power of Persuasion demonstrates how even the best-educated cynics among us can be victimized by sales pitches."
—The Globe and Mail
"Levine puts [his] analysis in the service of his real mission—to arm the reader against manipulation."
—The Wall Street Journal
"This wonderful book will change the way you think and act in many realms of your life."
—Philip Zimbardo former president, American Psychological Association
Or, How Can Everyone Be Less Gullible Than Everyone Else?
They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ... -General John B. Sedgwick (Union army Civil War officer's last words, uttered during the Battle of Spotsylvania, 1864)
It was January 1984 and I was on the lookout for Big Brother. Being a social psychologist-one who researches mind control, no less-I'd been pumping up for George Orwell's banner year for some time. In a few weeks, I would be offering a special course called "The Social Psychology of 1984." That morning, I'd been preparing my outline.
I wanted my students to become familiar with the despots. How might unwitting victims defend against tyrants like O'Brien, the party spokesperson in 1984, who tells us, "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable"? Grr!
We would hunt down Big Brothers. I reread the opening page of Orwell's novel:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith ..., who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazedfrom the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
I'd begin with the obvious totalitarian monsters. There were Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. I was moving my way down the list when the doorbell rang. Damn. No doubt it was the pushy, scam-artist salesman I'd heard so much about from my neighbors. I walked to the door. Big Brother's image (as I recalled it from an old magazine illustration, at least) was in my mind's eye and the music from the shower scene in Psycho was playing in my ears. I put on my best natural-born-killer stare and ripped open the door. But, alas, it was Mario, a sweet young gentleman who-I'd completely forgotten-had an appointment to clean my chimney. Mario jumped back, frightened, and courteously asked if he had come at a bad time. I apologized for my rudeness and invited him in.
This was the first time Mario had worked for me. We'd met just a few days earlier at a children's soccer game. I liked Mario at once. He was soft-spoken, un-self-centered, and had a clever sense of humor-just the sort of person I find easy to talk with. It turned out we had quite a bit in common. Both of us were recent fathers. We'd traveled to many of the same places. We knew some of the same people. To cap off my attraction, when I revealed my occupation and that I sometimes wrote for popular magazines, Mario excitedly recalled reading one of my articles a little while back. In fact, he still talked to friends about it. When I learned that Mario worked as a chimney sweep-I knew that my fireplace was long overdue for maintenance-I hired him on the spot.
After recovering from my nasty greeting at the door, I left Mario to his task and returned to working on my Big Brother list. Let's see, we should certainly study Mao Tse-tsung, or should I call him Mao Zedong? Then, after these hall of fame dictators, we'll move on to recent clones-maybe Idi Amin, Mu'ammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein. An hour later, I was getting around to the Svengali-like cult leaders. I could start with Charles Manson, then Jim Jones, and ...
Mario called out to announce he was finished. After I inspected his work, Mario handed me the bill. It was a few dollars less than our agreed-upon amount. "The job was easier than I expected," he proudly explained. Was this a good man or what?
"But," he added, "I had a problem requiring action. There was damage on several bricks that posed a serious fire hazard." Apparently only one known chemical, something known informally in the trade as brikono, would correct the problem. Unfortunately, brikono was very expensive. It had just jumped in price, and was now listing for a "criminal" $200 a quart. Even worse, it was very hard to find at any price. But he made me promise I'd call around for at least two quarts before lighting the fireplace. I thanked Mario. We said good-bye. He got into his truck.
A few moments later he was back at my door with a big smile on his face. "I found two quarts of brikono in the back of my truck," he said. "They're the last of my old batch. You can have them for the old price-$125 apiece." I inquired about his fee for the work. "How about I just put it on for free and you can owe me one?" he answered. I wrote out a check on the spot. The job took all of twenty minutes.
Two days later I was again hard at work on my Big Brother hit list. At the moment I was considering whether to add a category for terrorist psychopaths. We could study the Boston Strangler and then the Hillside Strangler and ...
Suddenly I thought of Mario, and-as EST guru Werner Erhard, yet another master of manipulation, would say-I got it. I phoned the chimney-sweep company. They'd never heard of Mario. I tried the soccer league commissioner. Same answer. I called my bank. Sorry, my check had been cashed. Two hundred fifty dollars' worth of brikono?
Suckered again.
Looking back, I suppose my $250 were well spent. One of the most successful means for building resistance to mind control is early, controlled exposure to the tricks we're likely to encounter. Two hundred fifty dollars may not have been the cheapest of inoculations, but who knows how much the next Mario would have cost me. My dose was hardly a permanent cure-I'm forever surprised by my gullibility-but it has led me to sound the danger alarm that much sooner on many warranted occasions.
More important, Mario expanded my vision of mind control. "The Social Psychology of 1984," it became clear, needed to become much more than a hunt for Big Brothers. In today's world they are the least of our problems because we usually recognize them. We know who and what we're dealing with. It's the people we're unprepared for who present the greatest threat. The fast-talking salesman puts us on alert. But the nice guys, the friendly thieves who sell beneath the threshold of our awareness, put us at their mercy.
The psychology of persuasion emanates from three directions: the characteristics of the source, the mind-set of the target person, and the psychological context within which the communication takes place. Think of it as them, you, and-as Martin Buber called it-the between. Any or all of the three can tilt the power balance either toward or against you. If the latter occurs, you're vulnerable.
Mario had me going on all three fronts. First, I was seduced by his appeal as a person-his nonthreatening, trustworthy, family-man come-on. Second, his patient, careful arrangement of the context made the unreasonable appear reasonable. The context, this matter of the between, is a complicated one. How it impacts people encompasses much of the domain of my field of social psychology, and of this book. If Mario hadn't built up slowly to his brikono pitch-if he'd come on a "cold call," as it's known in the trade; or, if I'd met Mario in another context (Sing Sing would have been nice)-his pitch might have been laughable. But, as my grandmother used to say, if I had four wheels I'd be a bus. Finally, Mario had the good fortune to walk in when my mindset -watching for ominous Big Brothers-had me ridiculously disarmed for his amiable assault.
Psychological disarmament is what often sets the stage for persuasion. One of life's crueler ironies is that we're most vulnerable at those very moments when we feel in least danger. Unfortunately, the illusion of invulnerability pretty well defines our resting state. Even when there is no manipulative outsider pulling our strings, most of us have a tendency to view our futures with unrealistic optimism. Studies have shown that people generally approach the threats of life with the philosophy that bad things are more likely to happen to other people than to themselves. With uncanny faulty logic, most people will tell you they're less prone to become victims than everyone around them.
Our perception of immunity casts a wide net. Studies have found, for example, that people will tell you they're considerably less at risk than other people when it comes to disease, death, divorce, unwanted pregnancy, work and jobs, and natural disasters.
Disease. Most people believe they're less likely than others to be stricken by diseases-everything ranging from pneumonia and lung cancer to senility and tooth decay. The ratio of individuals who believe they're less at risk than the average person to those who say they're more at risk is 2 to 1 for lung cancer, 3 to 1 for influenza, 5 to 1 for pneumonia, 7 to 1 for food poisoning, and 9 to 1 for asthma. In some cases, there may be some sensibility to this perceived immunity. When people say (as almost everyone does) that they are less likely to develop lung cancer, for example, perhaps they're actually taking precautions to prevent this disease. In many cases, however, the people who are most at risk are the ones most convinced of their immunity. In an Australian study, for example, an overwhelming number of smokers said their own risk of developing heart disease, lung cancer, and other smoking-related diseases is significantly less than that of other smokers. Another study, this one in the United States, followed smokers who went through a smoking-cessation clinic. Those who relapsed midway through the program actually gave lower estimates of their smoking risks than they'd given at the beginning of the program. In yet another U.S. survey, it was found that only a small minority of smokers (17 percent) believed the tar level of their cigarette brand was higher than average.
Death. Most people are convinced they have a better chance of living past eighty than the next person. In one study, college students (the maestros of perceived invulnerability-take it from a professor), after being informed the average age of death in the United States is seventy-five, went on to estimate their own age of death at, on average, eighty-four years.
Divorce. The current divorce rate in the United States hovers around 50 percent. But if you ask single or currently married people, it seems the next victim is always going to be someone else. In one large survey, people who had recently applied for marriage licenses estimated, with impressive accuracy, that about half of all marriages made in the United States today will end in divorce. But when asked about the probability of their own marriage dissolving, the median estimate was exactly 0 percent.
Should the impossible happen, and their marriages don't work out, respondents were just as unreasonably optimistic about how they'd be affected. More than 40 percent of men expected to get primary custody of the children if they divorced, even though the same men estimated that children live primarily with their divorced fathers only 20 percent of the time. Women, on average, estimated that 80 percent of divorced mothers have primary custody of their children, but more than 95 percent of them expected this to be the case if they divorced. Women estimated (very optimistically) that 40 percent of divorcing women are awarded alimony, but 81 percent of them were confident they would get it if they asked. And those deadbeat fathers we read about? Not in any of these homes. Women estimated (fairly accurately) that some 40 percent of parents who are awarded child support actually receive all their payments. But, if they were the ones awarded support, 98 percent of the women were sure their spouse would pay up faithfully.
Unwanted pregnancy. Sexually active women college students, asked to compare themselves to peers, said they were 34 percent as likely to get pregnant as other coeds, 21 percent as likely as other women their age, and 20 percent as likely as average American women of childbearing age.
Work and jobs. College students say their colleagues are over 42 percent more likely to end up with lower starting salaries than they are, 44 percent less likely to end up owning their own home, and 50 percent less likely to be satisfied with their postgraduation job. People in general believe they're 32 percent less likely to get fired from their jobs than are other people.
Natural disasters. In a survey of people living in California's high-risk earthquake areas, respondents underestimated the likelihood of a major quake occurring in the next two decades by 27 percent. In another survey, people who had experienced the devastating 7.1 earthquake that struck northern California in 1989 were asked to estimate the likelihood that they and other people would be seriously hurt by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, in the future. Three days after experiencing the quake, the obviously shaken survivors had turned pessimistic: they said they were more likely to be seriously hurt by a future disaster than were other people. But when questioned again three months later, the same survivors had returned to their old illusions of invulnerability: they believed the likelihood they'd be hurt in the future was significantly less than that of either the average student or the average person living in their area.
And the list goes on. Studies show we underestimate our own chances of being victimized by everything from being sued to getting mugged to tripping and breaking a bone to becoming sterile. "All men think all men are mortal but themselves," as poet Edward Young wrote.
I'm not saying our illusion of invulnerability is cast in stone. Hardly. Studies show, for example, that when someone close to us is victimized, we often flip 180 degrees, now becoming unrealistically pessimistic about what may happen to us. This is especially true when the victim seems at all similar to ourselves. If someone your age drops dead of a heart attack, and you hear that person lived the same lifestyle and ate the same diet you do, I challenge you not to consider your own vulnerability.
There are also vast individual differences in the voracity of our beliefs. Some individuals are obviously as chronically pessimistic about the future as others are optimistic. ("How do you know the sky has fallen?" asked Henny Penny. "I saw it with my eyes," said Chicken Little. "I heard it with my ears. And a piece of it fell on my poor little head.") It's notable that the most severe pessimists often grasp their vulnerability most clearly. In one study, for example, clinically depressed and psychologically normal people were asked to surmise what others thought about them.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Acknowledgments.
Introduction.
ONE: The Illusion of Invulnerability
Or, How Can Everyone Be Less Gullible Than Everyone Else?
TWO: Whom Do We Trust? Experts, Honesty, and Likability
Or, the Supersalesmen Don’t Look Like Salesmen at All.
THREE: Killing You with Kindness
Or, Beware of Strangers Bearing Unexpected Gifts.
FOUR: The Contrast Principle
Or, How Black Gets Turned into White.
FIVE: $2 + $2 = $5
Or, Learning to Avoid Stupid Mental Arithmetic.
SIX: The Hot Button
Or, How Mental Shortcuts Can Lead You into Trouble.
SEVEN: Gradually Escalating the Commitments
Or, Making You Say Yes by Never Saying No.
EIGHT: Winning Hearts and Minds
Or, the Road to Perpetual Persuasion.
NINE: Jonestown
Or, the Dark End of the Dark Side of Persuasion.
TEN: The Art of Resistance
Or, Some Unsolicited Advice for Using and Defending against Persuasion.
Notes.
Index.
Anonymous
Posted October 5, 2012
this is a really good book. it exposes a lot of the "lies and deception" out there. Levine talks a lot about manipulating people and techniques used. overall really good book, will open up a lot of peoples eyes and not be so guillable. another book that talks about deceptiona nd lies is by kevin trudeau.
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Overview
"An engaging, highly readable survey of the sophisticated methods of persuasion we encounter in various situations. From television to telemarketing and from self-deception to suicide cults, Levine takes a hard look at all the ways we attempt to persuade each other—and how and why they work (or don't). . . . The next time you wonder what possessed you to pay $50 for a medallion commemorating the series finale of Friends, you'll know where to turn."
—Slashdot.org
"If you're like most people, you think advertising and marketing work—just not on ...