Monday, September 22, 2008

BFBV Newsletter - Professor Sanjay Bakshi

If you want to improve your persuasive skills you have to learn how to exploit other people’s availability bias. You already know that people overweigh information which is extra-vivid, recent, and experienced personally than vicariously.

First impressions count. So do last impressions. So when you make a pitch to anyone, frame it in such a way that people to whom you are pitching remember your first lines and your last lines. Often the lines in the middle don’t really matter. What people remember is how they perceived you when they first met you and when they last met you.

Frame your requests as vividly as you can. Frame them around something personal to the requestee. And frame them around something that happened recently and which is in the forefront of the requestee’s mind.
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Imagine that you have a request that you want to make to your boss. You have an idea which will, in your view, immensely benefit your company. Now there are two ways in which you can present this information to your boss. First, you can tell her how your company stands to gain if your proposal is implemented. The second way is to reverse it by framing the request in loss terms. This time, you tell your boss how your company stands to lose if it did not implement your lovely proposal.

Framing it in loss terms will significantly improve your chances of succeeding in your efforts to convince your boss, unless there are other forces at work.

That bit about “other forces at work” is somewhat important because I don’t want 113 of you in my class to approach your favorite potential employers at placement time with suggestions on how they stand to lose by not hiring you! If 113 of you frame it that way, well then there might be some very undesirable unintended consequences of your behavior!

Let me move on to contrast effect. What has that to do with framing and its influence on your persuasion skills? Lots. When you frame your request using the technique of reciprocal concessions described so well by Robert Cialdini in his book, and discussed in the class, you increase your chances of compliance. Ask for the moon, expecting to be refused and then ask for what you wanted to get in the first place.

Another example in framing is to do with what Mr. Munger calls “reason respecting tendency.”

People like reasons when they are asked to comply with a request. I call this the “power of because.”

The lesson is obvious for you future framers. Always give a reason for your request because it will increase its probability of compliance. When you have a good reason then provide it. When you don’t, then just invent one!”
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