An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields
Why do our eyes widen when afraid and narrow to slits when disgusted?
Research findings by Cornell neuroscientist Adam Anderson suggest that human facial expressions arose from universal, adaptive reactions to environmental stimuli and not originally as social communication signals, lending support to Charles Darwin’s 19th-century theories on the evolution of emotion.
Anderson is an associate professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.
If you find yourself having to make an argument that you know isn’t very strong, or presenting an idea that is under developed, you’ll certainly want your target to process your message heuristically (quickly based on irrelevant aspects of your message). Now luckily if you’re in this type of situation, the chances of this happening are already in your favor since heuristic processing is usually what’s on autopilot for most people. However, if you think they’ll analyze it systematically, or maybe you just want to increase their likelihood of staying in autopilot, these strategies will be useful to you.
One thing that can really help you out in this instance, would be to get your target in a good mood if they aren’t already. When people are in a nice happy mood, they have a tendency to perceive information in an optimistic manner that they may otherwise be a bit more cautious with. Because of this, they will be more likely to choose not to critically analyze your message which will give you a better chance of gaining their compliance. If on the other hand, they’re just completely determined to stay in a bad mood, you might want to hold off on your proposal until their state of mind improves. When people are in negative moods, you’ll find that they have a tendency to be a little skeptical about things. This attitude will most likely cause them to process your message more thoroughly than I’m sure you’d like for them to, so pay attention to your targets mood before you present your information to them.
After that, you could help your case even more if you increase the complexity of your message in a way that makes it a bit difficult for them to grasp everything you’re saying. If your content is just slightly too intellectually complex for them to completely understand, they’ll rely on other aspects of your message in order to make their decision. Things that are completely irrelevant to your proposal like your friendliness, confidence, appearance, your perceived intelligence pertaining to the subject matter, and several other things that have nothing to do with your actual proposal. Since this is the case, you could have a very weak case to present to them, but if you present yourself with confidence, dress to professionally, act in a friendly manner, and basically portray yourself as a very likable person, you may very well be able to gain their compliance anyway.
Knowing how to effectively use these skills can be a lifesaver when you find yourself in situations like the ones above. Most people don’t know how to properly implement these tactics which makes it all the more valuable to you by giving you the edge to come out on top in difficult positions.
Courtesy of StockVault
Forbes: Entrepreneur delves into what really motivates people in this day and age! How can people, companies, and groups spur us into action?
There are plenty of options: advertising, marketing, and of course the ever popular and influential social media. It has been revealed long ago that influencing one’s emotions can in turn effect their actions.
Many of us think of Facebook when we think of social media and influencing emotions, especially in light of the recent news regarding Facebook’s experiment in manipulating their user’s emotions by removing all of the positive or negative posts from certain user’s feeds. Right or wrong, using emotions to control our actions is not recent news and many companies are now taking this to the next level.
According to Forbes’ article, Participant Media, which makes films that promote progressive causes and informs audiences in an effort to spur action, is currently working with Knight Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to create a brand new way to measure this impact.
The company is banking on the overwhelming evidence that story-telling touches our emotions as well as our intellects. Which strategies are more effective in galvanizing a viewer is the real question.
The Times also commented on this new way to measure the impact of social media,
Participant created an evolving index that compiles raw audience numbers for issue-driven narrative films, documentaries, television programs and online short videos, along with measures of conventional and social media activity, including Twitter TWTR +0.32% and Facebook presence. The two measures are then matched with the results of an online survey, about 25 minutes long, that asks as many as 350 viewers of each project an escalating set of questions about their emotional response and level of engagement. Did it affect you emotionally? Did you share information about it? Did you boycott a product or company? Did it change your life?
This Index will score films on whether they move people to take action, from sharing media on social channels to getting involved. However, Jay Rosen , a NYU journalism professor, purports,
“Action and behavior are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There’s a tension, then, between commercial behaviorism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism.”
It is important for corporate marketing specialists, especially in a consumer driven society, to know if what they are doing is working. The bigger question is, is taking the art of manipulating our emotions to the next level really what we want to do.
PsychCentral also has a similar article on how social sharing influences our emotions.