Quotes About Persuasion

When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.

That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain

My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn't have the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.

muitas vezes, quem sai vencedor de uma disputa deve sua vitória não tanto à correção de seu julgamento na exposição de sua tese, mas, antes, à astúcia e habilidade com que a defendeu.

the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be.

We humans don't like uncertainty, so we are attracted to those who offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete. Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave. And if an environment is not chaotic already, a skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos. Candidate Trump was a champion of this method.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.

The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, 'I'm not interested.' You should try it. Don't offer a reason why you aren't interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others. There's no argument against a lack of interest.

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That's persuasion.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don't want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does. I want to be clear that I'm not expressing a preference for ignoring facts. I'm simply saying that a Master Persuader can do it and still come out ahead, no matter how many times the media points out the errors.

What I saw with Trump's candidacy for president is that the "within reason" part of our understanding about reality was about to change, bigly. I knew that candidate Trump's persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public's ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn't fit their mental model of living in a rational world.

If you don't understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people's opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn't the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don't change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren't wired that way.

When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn't have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don't use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason. But that's okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway. Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don't realize it.

Prior to the summer of 2016, while Senator Bernie Sanders was still competing for the Democratic nomination, the Clinton persuasion game was nonexistent. I have already described her campaign's backward-persuasion tweeting and their artless campaign slogans. As far as I could tell, no one trained in persuasion was advising the Clinton team. I saw no signs of that talent whatsoever, and the signs would have been obvious to me.

When a decision involves lots of facts, and we have access to all the facts, we are more likely to hallucinate that we used our powers of reason to reach a decision. But when we recognize that we don't have all the facts, we hallucinate that we used our gut feeling to bridge the gap. In both cases we acted irrationally, and we tried to rationalize it to ourselves after the fact. That's how the Persuasion Filter sees it.

Trump's many "mistakes" can be misleading. For example, he knows that saying provocative and often untrue statements will attract energy—which is good—but it comes with a high cost. You can't evaluate the costs of Trump's persuasion systems independently of the benefits. You have to look at the net.

A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts... On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.

You should never take financial advice from cartoonists, but let me tell you one thing that feels safe to share: If the CEO of a publicly traded company is routinely described as having a "reality distortion field"—as was the case with Steve Jobs—keep an eye on that company. That's a sign of a Master Persuader.

PERSUASION TIP 9 Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason. I've

Here's an example of why the idea that humans are rational is pure nonsense. One of my Twitter followers copied President Trump's inauguration speech and showed it to a "leftist friend," telling him it was President Obama's speech. His friend loved it.