Nick Kolenda - Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior

Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior

Copyright 2013 Kolenda Entertainment, LLC

www.NickKolenda.com

ISBN: 0615815650

ISBN-13: 9780615815657

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Researchers are somewhat unlucky. Many work their butts off to expand our knowledge of human behavior, yet the majority of those researchers remain unknown and unrecognized.

Though theyre under tremendous pressure to publish or perish, researchers are pressured to publish their work in top-level academic journals (journals that youll be hard-pressed to find in any mainstream household). In fact, researchers who publish their work in a book for the general public are sometimes viewed as a sellout, so it seems like many researchers are destined to remain unknown because of those unfortunate circumstances.

Accordingly, Id like to acknowledge all of the researchers who are helping to further our understanding of human behavior. In particular, I want to acknowledge the researchers whose work sparked my own interest in this pursuit: Robert Cialdini, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, John Bargh, Gavan Fitzsimons, Richard Petty, John Cacioppo, Leon Festinger, Ap Dijskterhuis, and the list goes on. Your work is truly revolutionary, and you deserve the utmost recognition and praise.

Preface

Let me guess. You skipped over the Acknowledgments and came directly to the Preface, right? Most people do. If you are among that majority, go back and read the Acknowledgments, and then come back here.

Are you back? Great. My name is Nick Kolenda, and Ive been a professional mind reader for 10 years. Do I have supernatural powers? Nope. Just a pretty good knack at reading people and influencing their thoughts.

As a mind reader, Ive structured my entire performance around the concept of psychological influence, and over the course of 10 years, I developed a unique method to unconsciously influence peoples thoughts. Where does the mind reading come into play? Because those people are unaware that I influenced their thoughts, I can reveal the thought that I implanted and, essentially, read their mind. Ive always kept my method hidden, but this book finally reveals that explanation (and the psychology behind why it works).

But this book stems far beyond that one mind reading application. Not only will Methods of Persuasion teach you how to influence peoples thoughts, but it will also teach you how to use psychology to control their behavior. In addition to my unique background as a mind reader, I also have an educational background in persuasion through my degrees in marketing and psychology. While in college, I became obsessed with finding the psychological forces that guide human behavior, and although most people can barely make it through one scholarly article, I sifted through hundredsif not thousandsof academic journal articles, trying to pinpoint proven principles that guide our behavior.

In my pursuit, I discovered several psychological forces that exert an incredibly powerful influence on our behavior. These principles are so pervasive and ingrained within us that they guide our behavior every day without our conscious awareness. More importantly, if you know how to alter those forces, you can use them to guide peoples behavior.

This book will teach you those principles and more.

Best wishes,

Nick Kolenda

October, 2013

Introduction

Humans are marionettes. Attached to each of us are sets of strings that, when pulled in a certain direction, guide our behavior without our awareness. If you know how to control the strings, then you know how to control behavior. This book teaches you how to control those strings. This book will teach you how to successfully (and ethically) become a puppeteer in a world full of human marionettes.

Because of my peculiar background as a mind reader and psychology researcher, the book that youre holding is pretty unique. But theres one particular distinction that makes it especially different from other books on persuasion. Most persuasion books simply list an arsenal of tactics that you can use at your disposal; however, the persuasion methods in this book have been strategically arranged into a chronological seven-step process. If you need to persuade someone to perform a specific task, you can follow the exact steps described in this book to achieve your goal. Although you can still pick and choose the persuasion tactics that you want to implement, this step-by-step guide will get you headed in the right direction.

Conveniently, this step-by-step persuasion process follows the acronym METHODS (do you get the book titles double entendre?). The overall steps in METHODS include:

• Step 1: Mold Their Perception
• Step 2: Elicit Congruent Attitudes
• Step 3: Trigger Social Pressure
• Step 4: Habituate Your Message
• Step 5: Optimize Your Message
• Step 6: Drive Their Momentum
• Step 7: Sustain Their Compliance

It might seem like a simple list, but the amount of psychology literature that I scoured to produce that list is mind-numbing (feel free to take a gander at the list of references at the end of the book).

Part of my goal in writing this book was to make it the book in your collection with the most highlighting. You wont find any long-winded explanations, irrelevant anecdotes, or any other type of fluff because Ive tried to make everything as direct and straight to the point as possible (while still making the book interesting and engaging to read).

Last-Minute Background Info. Before jumping straight to the first step in METHODS, theres some last-minute background information that can help you gain the most from reading this book.

Persuasion Is Not Manipulation . The term manipulation generally refers to a malicious attempt to influence another person through questionable or blatantly unethical tactics (e.g., lying and deceit). The term persuasion is sometimes grouped with manipulation, which is very unfortunate because the two terms represent very different ideas.

The tactics in this book are neither ethical nor unethical; how you use these tactics will determine that outcome. Although its not my job to persuade you to adopt a moral outlook, I wholeheartedly oppose anyone who tries to use these tactics to manipulate people. The principles in this book can be very powerful, and I urge everyone to use them with proper care and concern for other people. You should never try to persuade people to perform actions if you know that those actions are not in their best interest.

Definitions . In this book, Ill use the term target when referring to the person(s) that youre trying to persuade. For example, if youre trying to persuade a coworker to write you a recommendation, your coworker would be your target (you should also note that I will randomly alternate between using he and she pronouns when referring to a hypothetical person).

Ill also use the term request when youre trying to persuade someone to perform a specific behavior (e.g., to write a recommendation), and Ill use the term message when referring to the medium that you use for persuasion (e.g., an e-mail to your coworker). But both terms will be used more or less interchangeably.

Lastly, most of the techniques in this book exert a nonconscious influence, meaning that people will be unaware that those principles are guiding their behavior. In writing this book, I chose to use the word nonconscious because the terms subconscious and unconscious have a connotation that theres some part of our brain responsible for unconscious processes (which isnt the case). The term nonconscious seems more accurate because it makes no such claim; it just refers to everything that occurs outside of our awareness.