License to Sin:
The Power of Intentional Suggestion
by Kevin Hogan
Page 2
The high pressure salesman sounds just like the District Attorney...
KEYPOINT: Is it any wonder that the PUBLIC places little credibility in salespeople when they communicate identically with those accused of committing a crime?!
And yet, Jeffrey's point cannot be moved. Asking questions, IS, selling...it's simply more precise to say, "asking persuasive questions with a gentle elegance."
So, what is it that makes a question powerful?
Imagine, if you will, that you have potential a client you would like to do business with. You can be valuable to them and vice versa.
"Hey, were you considering switching lawn mowers fairly soon?"
What would you think of working with me?"
A recent study of predicting whether people would perform vice behaviors more often based upon suggestion of doing such behaviors, in the form of a QUESTION showed fascinating results.
A new study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn is the first to explore how questioning can affect our behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue.
The study, in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.
"Research on attitude formation has increasingly recognized that attitudes can be comprised of separate negative and positive components which can result in attitude ambivalence," explain Gavin Fitzsimons (Duke University), Joseph C. Nunes (University of Southern California), and Patti Williams (University of Pennsylvania).
"In the present research we focus on vice behaviors, those for which consumers are likely to hold both positive and negative attitudes. We demonstrate that asking consumers to report their expectations regarding how often they will perform a vice behavior increases the incidence of these behaviors."
Intention questions are generally perceived as harmless, and the researchers found that this may cause consumers to lower the guard they would otherwise have with more explicitly persuasive pitches, such as advertising. In a series of three experiments, they demonstrate that seemingly benign questioning may serve as a liberating influence that allows consumers to give in to their desires more often than they would have otherwise.
Turn the page for an example...
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Kevin Hogan
Network 3000 Publishing
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Eagan, MN 55123
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