Social Engineering Blogs

Most persuasion techniques out there work because they play on a natural human desire or tendency that happens so easily, you don’t notice it unless you know what the other person is doing. Our natural desire to be consistent is no different.

Humans have always felt a strong desire to behave in a way that matches their beliefs. Of course, if we didn’t have this natural desire, you wouldn’t really be able to trust anyone because they wouldn’t feel the need to walk their talk. When our actions don’t match our beliefs, we experience what’s called cognitive dissonance. This is the feeling of discomfort you feel when you realize that you hold conflicting beliefs or ideas about something. When you notice this, you have a natural urge to fix the inconsistency. That’s where it gets interesting.

You can do several different things to correct this inconsistency that you’ve discovered. You can change your belief so that it matches your behavior, devalue the belief so that it’s really not important to you anymore, or change your behavior to match your belief. Now most of the time we do this without realizing it since it’s such an automatic response. That’s why pointing out an inconsistency in ones beliefs or behavior can be such a powerful persuasion technique.

Of course when you decide to use cognitive dissonance for this purpose, you should never try to deceive them by presenting a false area of conflict. Only use this method if there really is an incongruence in their beliefs and behavior. Secondly, when you reveal that inconsistency to them, be sure to ease the conversation in that direction by asking some open ended questions that will lead to you revealing the inconsistency, rather than telling them that their behavior/beliefs are incongruent right off the bat. By doing this, you’ll have a better chance of them receiving what you have to say with an open mind. If you just come right out and accuse them of being incongruent, there’s a much greater chance they will put up a defensive attitude, and deny any evidence you might have that conflicts with their beliefs.

When you present your point in the right way and get them to listen to you with an open mind, you’ll have a good chance of getting them to change whatever it is you want them to change. If it’s a certain belief you’re trying to change, present your evidence in a way that conveys an incongruent belief rather than an incongruent action. Whatever they perceive to be incongruent will most likely be changed. Of course if you were trying to change a behavior, you would attribute the inconsistency to the behavior instead of a value/belief.

Keep an eye out for tomorrows post where I’ll show you some real life examples of using cognitive dissonance to change another persons belief, attitude, value, or behavior in a certain area.

Throughout the course of the day, you’re constantly making decisions. Everything from what you’ll have for dinner, to whether or not you punch someone for making you mad. What you might not realize, is how many of these decisions are made using anchors.

Anchors are anything that we consciously or subconsciously use to guide our decisions. For instance, if I were to ask you if you think the average U.S. income was more or less than $35,000,000/yr, what would you say. Okay, now if you were to guess what the exact amount actually is, what would you say? Chances are, if you ask someone else to guess the exact amount without having them tell you whether they think it’s above or below $35,000,000/yr, they would most likely come up with a number lower than yours.

The reason yours would be higher is because you were exposed to the amount of $35,000,000 and they were not. Now obviously you know the average income is far less than $35,000,000, but even though you are aware of this, your mind will still use $35,000,000 as an anchor for coming up with an exact estimate of what the actual amount really is. Lets say you think it’s between $35,000 and $60,000. Since your mind is using a larger number as an anchor, you’ll tend to go from that number down to figure out your answer. So, the first number that you will run into that’s within your range is $60,000. Because of this, your answer will lie in the latter part of your range (around $60,000).

The most interesting part about psychological anchors, is that even if you were aware of this concept and it’s ability to influence your decisions, that knowledge wouldn’t keep the anchor from having an effect on your decision making. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool of persuasion.

One persuasion technique that i’ve mentioned before, where you ask someone a large favor to which they reject and follow it with smaller request that they usually end up accepting, is done using anchors. This works because their mind uses the larger request (that you really don’t care if they accept or not) as an anchor when deciding whether or not they’ll accept the second, much smaller request. Since their mind is in a sense comparing the smaller favor to the larger one, they’re much more likely to say yes because it’s the better option and it seems easy, when in reality it’s just easier than the large request.

When people make decisions, they’re going to use some type of anchor whether they’re aware of it or not. If you want to increase the likelihood of that decision being made in your favor, give them an anchor their mind can work with that favors the decision you want them to come to. Trust me, this technique can make your life a whole lot easier. Just make sure you use it in a responsible manner.