Persuasive Technique Using Quotes

Cult (totalistic type): a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g., isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressure, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.

The rulers of tomorrow's over-populated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cul­tural uniformity upon adults and their children. To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coer­cion and threats of physical violence. If this kind of tyranny is to be avoided, we must begin without delay to educate ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government.

Want to know if someone is lying or betraying your trust? Notice that during a conversation the person has these four attitudes: he leans on his hand, he leans on his face, he crosses his arms and he maintains a posture that is tilted somewhere, not erect.

In the next chapters, you will find a collection of the most powerful persuasive and manipulative techniques used by advertisers, emotional predators, vendors, politicians and all those who are able to change the thoughts of an individual or a group of people. You can use these techniques both to protect

The term ‘brainwashing’ is really describing a synthesis of coercive persuasion and influence techniques used to gain undue influence over people. The way you recognize undue influence is you will see people acting against their own best interest but consistently acting in the best interest of a person who has undue influence over them.

In the Moonies, I was taught to suppress negative thoughts by using a technique called thought stopping. I repeated the phrase “Crush Satan” or “True Parents” (the term used to describe Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han) whenever any doubt arose in my mind. Another way to control thoughts is through the use of loaded language, which, as Lifton pointed out, is purposely designed to invoke an emotional response. When I look at the list of thought-controlling techniques—reducing complex thoughts into clichés and platitudinous buzz words; forbidding critical questions about the leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate or evil—it is astounding how many Trump exploits. As I have mentioned, one of the most effective techniques in the thought control arsenal is hypnosis. Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, described Trump, with his oversimplifications, repetitions, insinuating tone of voice, and use of vivid imagery, as a Master Wizard in the art of hypnosis and persuasion.

Yet another way of avoiding the game would be perfect honesty and straightforwardness, since one of the main techniques of those who seek power is deceit and secrecy. But being perfectly honest will inevitably hurt and insult a great many people, some of whom will choose to injure you in return. No one will see your honest statement as completely objective and free of some personal motivation. And they will be right: In truth, the use of honesty is indeed a power strategy, intended to convince people of one’s noble, good-hearted, selfless character. It is a form of persuasion, even a subtle form of coercion.

Love bombing is a technique typically used by emotional manipulators at the start of their interaction with a victim. It involves the intense, sudden, and forceful display of positive feelings toward a victim. This may seem counterintuitive at first. If a person is trying to harm someone, why do they act so intensively positive at first? Because it serves their own objectives!

Six Simple Listening Tips Here are six simple tips for not only practicing good listening in your customer conversations but also for creating a high-impact customer experience by showing them that you’re engaged. 1. Don’t speak: This is easy to say but sometimes hard to do. You simply cannot listen if you’re speaking or poised on the edge of interrupting the other person. So what should you do? Just shut up and pay attention to what your customer is saying. 2. Make eye contact: Since a majority of our communication is non-verbal, looking at a person is one of the best ways to clearly demonstrate focus and attention. Even when you’re on a video call, customers can often tell (by the way your eyes dart around) if you’re looking at them on the screen or if you are distracted. Keep that gaze locked! (But a nice, friendly gaze… not a creepy one.) 3. Use visual/auditory cues: Smiling, nodding, and appearing pensive are all great ways to communicate understanding and acknowledgment. Even small auditory cues like the occasional “yes” or “uh-huh” can show your customer that you’re following along. 4. Write things down: Writing things down not only helps you remember key pieces of information later on, but it also demonstrates to the customer that you’re interested enough in their insights to memorialize them in writing. But what if they can’t see you taking notes, for example, on a phone or video call? No problem. Just tell them you are! After your customer finishes telling you something, simply pause for a moment and say “I’m just writing this down” to produce the same effect. 5. Recap: Nothing illustrates great attention to detail like repeating back or summarizing the insights the customer shared with you. This is especially powerful when the insights were shared earlier in the conversation. For extra impact, quote them directly using their exact words, prefaced by the phrase “What I heard you say was… ” Echoing someone’s exact words is a powerful and scientifically proven persuasive technique (we’ll be exploring this tactic in more detail as it relates to handling customer objections in chapter 7). 6. Ask good follow-up questions: When a customer answers your question, resist the temptation to say, “That’s great” or “Awesome!” and then move on to the next question. Asking killer follow-up questions like “Tell me more about that,” “Can you give me an example?” or “How long has that been going on?” is a great way to demonstrate your interest in the customer’s perspective and leave the call with high-impact insights. In fact, when it comes to addressing customer objections, a study by Gong.io found that top performers ask follow-up questions 54 percent of the time, versus 31 percent for average performers.6

Bernays not only knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to get people excited about being manipulated, a process he describes in detail in his 1947 book, The Engineering of Consent. The book enumerates a variety of persuasive techniques, including propaganda, advertising, and other forms of mass communication, that he used to create seemingly any desired response from the public.

The process of depersonalization begins long before combat, and political leaders of all persuasions have used the same techniques. Nazi leader Hermann Goering explained that the imagination of a people must be reshaped in order to prepare a reluctant citizenry for war: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war. . . . It is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.” His prison psychologist, G. M. Gilbert, answered that a democracy is different; people have a say through their vote, and in the United States only Congress can declare war. Goering responded, “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”4

Conservatives have adopted messaging strategies that allowed them to succeed politically even with policies that don’t have strong popular support. Indeed, that is one reason they turned the tide against President Obama in 2010—simple, relentless messaging. Similarly, those who deny the reality of climate science have made use of the best rhetorical techniques. Those seeking to inform the public about the very real dangers of a warming climate will need to learn the lessons of the best communicators if they are to overcome the most well-funded disinformation campaign in history.

environmental science be worth my while? Do I have a chance to get a good grade?” The answers to these questions depend, to a large extent, on you and how you decide to apply yourself. Expecting to be interested and to do either well or poorly in your classes often turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can do a thing, or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” Cultivating good study skills can help you to reach your goals and make your experience in environmental science a satisfying and rewarding one. The purpose of this introduction is to give you some tips to help you get off to a good start in studying. You’ll find that many of these techniques are also useful in other courses and after you graduate, as well. Environmental science, as you can see by skimming through the table of contents of this book, is a complex, transdisciplinary field that draws from many academic specialties. It is loaded with facts, ideas, theories, and confusing data. It is also a dynamic, highly contested subject. Topics such as environmental contributions to cancer rates, potential dangers of pesticides, or when and how much global warming may be caused by human activities are widely disputed. Often you will find distinguished and persuasive experts who take completely opposite positions on any particular question. It will take an active, organized approach on your part to make sense of the vast amount of information you’ll encounter here. And it will take critical, thoughtful reasoning to formulate your own position on the many controversial theories and

A few recent studies have shown that when someone disagrees with you, a good technique to use is to speak faster so they have less time to process what you are saying.

forward when you ask an emotionally charged question, and then continuing to lean forward while your prospect answers (while also using the active listening techniques I laid out above in number 3).

One remarkably successful technique had resulted from Trump’s ground game. After the candidate gave speeches, the CA team was able to do a great deal of persuasion measurement, or “brand lift studies,” and then used clips from the more-well-received speeches in online ads.

Attention Write a headline that gets readers’ attention and makes them want to read on (chapter 6) Tell relevant readers that you’re talking to them Offer a benefit or the solution to a problem Use a creative concept (chapter 9) to generate more interest Interest Introduce the product and what it does See the reader’s situation or problem from their perspective and show how the product helps them (see ‘See it from the reader’s side’ in chapter 11) Give the reader the information they need to understand the product or what it does (see below) Tell a story – of how the product was made, or of someone who used it and benefited as a result (see ‘Tell a story’ in chapter 11) Desire Describe the benefits (chapter 3) in greater detail to make the reader want the product Evoke the experience of using the product (see ‘Make it real’ in chapter 11) Use persuasive techniques (chapter 13) to strengthen the benefits Activate social proof by bringing in testimonials, case studies, endorsements or reviews to show that other people are using and benefiting from the product (See ‘Social proof’ in chapter 13) Action Recap the main benefit(s) and/or return to the creative theme Use persuasion (chapter 13) to remove obstacles, overcome objections and convince readers that it’s OK to act – or point out the negative consequences of not acting Tell the reader what to do next with a strong, clear call to action

But if he seems to be fishing for pertinent information with overly personal questions, if he keeps trying to find ways that he can commiserate with you so that you will confide in him, or if he is using fancy language and flattery to make you feel ingratiated and charmed by him, then that is a bad sign that he is trying to get an emotional hook into you to manipulate you.

Imagine a world where people say the first thing that comes to mind, a world where you told the truth to everyone you talked with. For example, let’s say you took one look at your boss early in the morning only for you to tell him he looks like a weakling. Or imagine yourself as a salesperson telling a customer how firm and perky her breasts are or a woman telling her male neighbor how nice and tight his butt is.

, kicked, and threw one another to and fro. Temptation, much to Lindsay’s chagrin, lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins. Pitchmen in their efforts at persuasion all but seized the ambulant youths by their lapels. “Exotic smoking practices around the world, of great anthropological value!” “Scientific exhibit here boys, latest improvements to the hypodermic syringe and its many uses!” Here were Waziris from Waziristan exhibiting upon one another various techniques for waylaying travelers, which reckoned in that country as a major source of income. . . . Tarahumara Indians from northern Mexico crouched, apparently in total nakedness, inside lath-and-plaster replicas of the caves of their

Behavioral economists have shown the effectiveness of this technique in another important domain: saving for the future. In one of the most powerful demonstrations of this persuasion strategy, Nudge co-author Richard Thaler and his research colleague Shlomo Benartzi showed that they could drastically boost participation rates in 401( k) plans. Using what they called the “Save More Tomorrow” program, rather than asking workers to participate in the program immediately, they instead asked workers to commit to putting a portion of their future salary increases into the plan. Although this program was successful for many reasons, one central reason is that it effectively shifted workers’ thoughts about the program from the concrete terms associated with it (e.g., “I’ll have less money in my paycheck each month”) to more abstract terms about how it would help them achieve their broader values and goals (e.g., “I should do this because it’s important and the right thing to do for my family”).

And that’s your chance to say, in the I care and I feel your pain tonality: “I get it, Bill. I’ve been around the block a couple of thousand times now, and I know that these things typically don’t resolve themselves unless you take serious action to resolve them. “In fact, let me say this: one of the true beauties here is that …,” and now you’re going to quickly resell the Three Tens, using a concise yet very powerful consolidation of the tertiary language patterns that you created for each of the Three Tens, which will focus almost exclusively on the emotional side of the equation—using the technique of future pacing to paint your prospect that all-important pain-free picture of the future, where he can actually see himself using your product and getting the exact benefits he was promised and feeling great as a result of that; and, from there, you’re going to transition directly into a soft close and ask for the order again.

Be assured that any strategy able to triple the percentage of compliance with a substantial request (from 17 to 50 percent in our experiment) will be used often in a variety of natural settings. Labor negotiators, for instance, often use the tactic of making extreme demands that they do not expect to win but from which they can retreat and draw real concessions from the opposing side. It would appear, then, that the procedure would be more effective the larger the initial request because there would be more room available for illusory concessions. This is true only up to a point. Research conducted at Bar-Ilan University in Israel on the rejection-then-retreat technique shows that if the first set of demands is so extreme as to be seen as unreasonable, the tactic backfires. In such cases, the party who has made the extreme first request is not seen to be bargaining in good faith. Any subsequent retreat from that wholly unrealistic initial position is not viewed as a genuine concession and, thus, is not reciprocated. The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated just enough to allow for a series of small reciprocal concessions and counteroffers that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent.11

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