Speaker 1: I have heard it said that the most valuable thing in today's world, post-industrial world, is the human being's attention and how to get it. Is that true? I believe that. Psychology professor Robert Cialdini, marketing maven, art enthusiast, palm reader.

Speaker 2: I used to be a palm reader, and I learned the trick that they use to make people say they're right almost always.

Speaker 1: So what was the trick? In the 80s, Cialdini wrote an attention-getting classic, Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion, intended to arm consumers against manipulative marketers. But those who made the book famous were the persuaders themselves, who make a living beckoning

Speaker 2: us every step we take. Those ads, those sites, that's old-school persuasion, directing people's minds to the content. In recent years, however, Cialdini has made a new discovery about how to spin friends and influence people. What I'm talking about is persuasion, directing their minds to the moment before they experience the content. Yes, persuasion, the title of his new book. Persuasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it. Before they even hear it, you mean? It is what you say immediately before you deliver your message that leverages your success tremendously. Or if you are the messagee that plays you like a puppet. The best salesman I ever saw told people, I left something in the car, can I get your key to let myself back in? I have an acquaintance who claims he got three great jobs by saying something before he began the job interview in each instance. And I have a friend who's a consultant who says he never gets pushback on the price he offers for his services if he says one thing first.

Speaker 1: And persuasion demonstrably works, as we'll try to demonstrate throughout this story, by prepping the mind for the message subliminally.

Speaker 2: There's this interesting study, a guy goes to a shopping mall in France and he tries to get women's phone numbers as they pass various shops so he could call for a date. One of them is a shoe store and another was a bakery, but in neither of those cases was he very successful. He only got a number 13% of the time. But there was one kind of shop that doubled his success rate when women were passing it, a flower shop. Why? Because flowers put women in the mindset of romance. But consciously, persuasively, by exploiting a rule of thumb passed down to us by evolution. If we are paying attention to something, it's important. That's how we decide to pay attention. But a communicator can reroute our attention to something that isn't important, but make it seem important as a consequence. As a consequence of the very fact that we're subconsciously paying attention to it. There's a study that shows that people who were asked their political opinions when there was a picture of the American flag in the corner of the questionnaire reported more favorable attitudes toward Republican Party positions because the flag is typically associated in people's minds with a Republican belief set. These are churches, and studies show that persuasive cues can subconsciously affect actual voting. If people vote at a polling place inside a church, they vote more Republican. If they vote at a polling place inside a school, they vote more Democrat. Now marketers, or at least some of them, have studied persuasion's potency.

Speaker 1: One online furniture store tested images of fluffy clouds vs. cold, hard cash on its home

Speaker 2: page. Those who saw the background depiction of clouds searched the site for more comfortable furniture. Those who went to the site that had money in the background became cost conscious and preferred to purchase less expensive furniture.

Speaker 1: But isn't it obvious that our consciousness is being affected by what our perceptive apparatus?

Speaker 2: Almost no one recognizes that the clouds or the coins had any impact on their behavior, and yet it did at significant levels. It's the cue that drives you in the direction of what seems more important now because you're focused on it. Which is why we flashed the thinker at the top of this story, to pre-suade you to ponder

Speaker 1: the puzzles we posed at the outset, but never answered. What was the trick of the salesman, the job seeker, the pricey consultant?

Speaker 2: In each instance, they did something first. Starting with the salesman who claimed he'd forgotten something in his car. He created a sense of trust, because who do you let back into your house by giving them your key, except someone you trust?

Speaker 1: And that made people more likely to buy what he was selling?

Speaker 2: Yes, because he had created a mindset in them that they were dealing with a trustworthy character. And the guy who got the jobs? Before every interview, he asked the interviewers, why did you bring me in today? What was it about my qualifications that made you attracted to my candidacy? And what does that do? It caused people to start focusing on the positive aspects of his case before they even began discussing it. And the consultant who never got pushed back on his fees? He would show prospects his proposal and his $75,000 fee, and he would say, as you can tell, I won't be able to charge you a million dollars for this. And what does that do? Compared to a million dollars, $75,000 now seems trivial. And why did Cialdini urge us to lead this story with puzzles? One way to get persuasive attention to your case is to begin with a mystery story. Mysteries cause people to want to understand, to get closure, which cause them, I hope, to want to stay with the programming and listen till the end. So read my palm. No. Paul, I can see that you're a stubborn man. I'm somewhat stubborn. What I've done is to send you down a memory track where you would encounter times when you were stubborn, and you would look at me and say, that's right. And that's the whole deal? No. I looked at your palm and saw the same thing, but said, you're a very flexible man. Now I have sent you down a memory track where you would encounter times when you were flexible, and you would say to me, that's right, that's who I am. Well, I might not be quite that histrionic, but I think I would say, yes, flexible. And I have even done that with a person at a party, read his palm, told him he was stubborn at the beginning, told him that he was a flexible guy at the end, and he said, you're right both times.

Speaker 1: But, hey, Making Sense is supposed to be the NewsHour's weekly economics segment. So economics, as it's taught and practiced, is based on the notion of rational maximization. Correct. This is not rational maximization.

Speaker 2: No. What new psychology suggests, it's the factor that is top of consciousness at the moment before you make that economic decision that will win the day.

Speaker 1: And so, from Midtown Manhattan, reporting stubbornly, yet flexibly, this is economics correspondent Paul Solman.

Speaker 2: Now we know.