Quotes About Persuasion

It's official. Highway patrolmen are not susceptible to the Jedi Mind Trick.

If you really want to persuade someone who doesn't wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent—all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.

But if you are hell-bent on persuading someone, or if your back is truly against the wall, you might as well give it your best shot.

Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn't resonate for the recipient, you won't get anywhere.

Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were after in the first place.

An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.

people respond to incentives—

La información es un faro, un garrote, una rama de olivo, en total, un elemento de disuasión, dependiendo de quién la maneje y cómo. La información es tan poderosa que la asunción de información, aun cuando ésta no exista realmente, puede tener un efecto revulsivo.

When someone is heavily invested in his or her opinion, it is inevitably hard to change the person's mind.

it is often possible to elicit the behavior you want through nonfinancial means.

it is even harder to persuade people who do not wish to be persuaded.

Humans respond to incentives.

Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion.

La información es un faro, un garrote, una rama de olivo, en total, un elemento de disuasión, dependiendo de quién la maneje y cómo.

if you are hoping to damage opponents' mental health, go ahead and tell them how inferior or dim-witted or nasty they are. But even if you are certifiably right on every point, you should not think for a minute that you will ever be able to persuade them. Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were after in the first place.

But if you want to think like a Freak, you must learn to be a master of incentives—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Freakonomics is out to dazzle you with facts; The Armchair Economist is out to dazzle you with logic.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin

Algunos experimentos han demostrado que a las personas les convence más un discurso político cuando el orador apela a su corazón y su mente con metáforas relacionadas con la familia.

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?