When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity. — Dale Carnegie
Emotions create movement and action. Persuaders understand that people are persuaded by reason, but they are moved by emotion. People use logic to justify their actions to ourselves and to others. Emotion will always win over logic and that imagination will always win over reality. Think about talking to children about their fear of the dark, or to someone about their phobia of snakes. You know it is useless to use logic to persuade them that their thoughts and actions don’t make sense. They are still convinced that there is a problem. Evidence works best only when it is suited to the audience and their experience.
We Hear What We Want To Hear
Psychologist, B R Forer conducted a series of tests to investigate what he termed the ‘Barnum effect’ (named after 1940s American circus impresario and skilled psychological manipulator). He concluded that “people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone”.
He handed out the same personality description to each of his students, Forer asked them to mark the accuracy of the description in relation to their character on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 signifying an excellent assessment. The students’ evaluation averaged at 4.26. The same test carried out today, still produces an average mark of 4.2.
Laws of Emotional Manipulation
There are 6 psychological principle that directs the human behavior.
1. Consistency. We try to justify our earlier behavior.
2. Reciprocity. If somebody gives us something, we try to repay in kind.
3. Social Proof. We try to find out what other people think is correct.
4. Authority. We have a deep-seated sense of duty to authority figures.
5. Liking. We obey people we like.
6. Scarcity. If we come to want something, we can be made to fear that if we wait it will be gone. The opportunity to get it may pass.
With these, we can obtain 6 transformations principles :
1. Consistency. If you have made a commitment to the group and then break it, you can be made to feel guilty.
2. Reciprocity. If you accept the group’s food and attention, you feel you should repay them.
3. Social proof. If you look around in the group, you will see people behaving in particular ways. You imitate what you see and assume that such behavior is proper, good, and expected.
4. Authority. If you tend to respect authority, and your cult leader claims superior knowledge, power, and special missions in life, you accept him as an authority.
5. Liking. If you are the object of love bombing and other tactics that surround you, make you feel wanted and loved, and make you like the people in the group, you feel you ought to obey these people.
6. Scarcity. If you are told that without the group you will miss out on living a life without stress; miss out on attaining cosmic awareness and bliss; miss out on changing the world instantly or gaining the ability to travel back in time; or miss out on whatever the group offers that is tailored to seem essential to you, you will feel you must buy in now.
Manipulating Emotions With Their Own Bias
Whereas logic is the language of the conscious mind, emotion is the language of the unconscious mind. emotions are reactions to perceived and imagined stimuli, not based on logic, but on one’s own personal experiences. Emotions often outweigh our logic. Manipulators usually abuse superlatives to create positive feelings to stir their victims. They :
1. arouse the emotions of the audience to engage the listeners and distract them to influence and persuade them with their own bias, whether cultural, nationalistic or religious.
2. take advantage of emotional bias because emotion requires less effort than logic. Logic solicits cognitive effort, whereas emotion is automatic.
3. create their presentations to aim at engaging the audience’s emotions to entertain, because they are usually more interesting than logical ones.
4. create emotion-based arguments because they are often easier to recall than logic-based arguments.
5. understand that emotion is almost always leads more quickly to change than logic does
Manipulators know when to create positive or negative emotions and when to dispel negative emotions. They know the ways to tap into the prospects’ emotions, such as hope, love, pride, gratitude, and excitement. They decide ahead of time what emotional climate to create, and capture those emotions.
This is unfortunate because people are judged based on what Goleman called this skill as ‘‘emotional intelligence.’’ He emphasizes that “emotional intelligence” largely determines the success in relationships, work. Hence, many other people who cannot present themselves are dismissed by the bias against them.
Stereotypical Bias
Memory can be distorted towards stereotypes (e.g. racial or gender, or preferences towards one’s culture). This is worsen with the tendency of people preferring their own cultural and ethnic groups which further reinforce the bias against other groups with the bias for their own.
This bias is based on the Law of Likeness and Likelihood. The more people shared likeness, the more they shared congruence. Hence, to self-serve their similar outcomes and shared pursuits, they formed the Law of Social Proof, which is the reason for conformance and seeking of acceptance.
This is where the biased use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. They view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that they see other performing it. The principle of social proof can be used to stimulate a person’s compliance with a request by informing the person that many other individuals (the more, the better, the more “famous” the better) are or have been complying with it. This weapon of influence provides us with a shortcut for determining how to behave, but, as the same time, makes one who uses the shortcut vulnerable to the attacks of profiteers who lie in wait along its path (introduction seminars or guest dinners, retreats to recruit cult members — provide the models of the behavior the group wants to produce in the new recruit). Social proof is most influential under two conditions:
1. uncertainty (when people are unsure, when the situation is ambiguous, they are more likely to attend to the actions of others and to accept those actions as correct);
2. similarity (people are more inclined to follow the lead of similar others)
Recommendations on how to reduce our susceptibility to faulty social proof include a sensitivity to clearly counterfeit evidence of what similar others are doing and a recognition that the actions of similar others should not form the sole basis for their decisions.
As their minds are locked to a preferred group, what is not within their focus is dismissed and conveniently stereotyped.
Liking
People prefer to say yes to individuals they know and like. Unfortunately, in bias, they preferred in terms of likeliness. This influence the liking process by examining which factors compliance professionals emphasize to increase their overall attractiveness and their consequent effectiveness towards their preferred cultural or religious groups.
This is the direct factor that influences liking and compliance is similarity. Biased people like people who are like themselves and are more willing to say yes to their requests, often in an unthinking manner.
Another factor is for liking is physical beauty. Although it has long been suspected that physical beauty provides an advantage in social interaction, research indicates that the advantage may be greater than supposed. Physical attractiveness seems to engender a “halo” effect that extends to favorable impressions of other traits such as talent, kindness, and intelligence. As a result, attractive people are more persuasive both in terms of getting what they request and in changing others’ attitudes.
The feel-good factor is another bias factor. An example is that produces liking through is using praise. Although they can sometimes backfire when crudely transparent, compliments general enhance liking, and thus, compliance. Increased familiarity through repeated contact with a person or thing is yet another factor that normally facilitates liking. But this relationship holds true principally when the contact takes place under positive rather than negative circumstances. One positive circumstance that works especially well is mutual and successful cooperation.
A next factor linked to like is mere association. By connecting themselves or their products with positive things, merchants of influence frequently seek to share in the positivity through the process of association. Other individuals as well appear to recognize the effect of simple connections and try to associate themselves with favorable events and distance themselves from unfavorable events in the eyes of observers.
Ego
This relates to the Law of Esteem . I mentioned the example how using praise can create liking. The human esteem is so starved that it accept any flattery or praise it can get. People have a strong ego to desire for importance and approval. This forms their pride, which is a false sense of accomplishment because it is not based on true or pure motives.
Pride is a spiritual cancer; it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense. — C.S. Lewis
In propaganda and patriotism, this is used to create rivalry to veer polarity and incite actions and reactions against other group because each side will tend to their own ego and esteem. This determines conflict, cooperation, compliance and consensus between people. It is very generate animosity by creating competition. Most humans are very competitive. This arises from human egoism, esteem, and pride. Put a bit of insecurity and the ego will be in hostile mood. This is how politicians instill threat, competition, jealousy, and mistrust to distract people from examining their honesty while directing hatred outwards and away from themselves, and in doing so, secure themselves of their own seat in authority and influence.
An abundance mentality springs from an internal security, not from external rankings, comparisons, opinions, possessions, or associations. — Stephen R. Covey
Self-esteem and pride are actually opposites, even though the terms are commonly thought to be interchangeable. Pride is usually a red flag for low self-esteem because people use it to cover their weaknesses and insecurities. People afflicted with pride usually have a low opinion of themselves. They often will bully or berate others to feel and manifest their own self-importance.