The art and science of persuasion is often discussed as though changing people's minds is about using the right arguments, the right tone of voice or the right negotiation tactic. But effective influence and persuasion isn't just about patter, body language or other techniques, it's also about understanding people's motivations.

In the scrabble to explain technique, it's easy to forget that there are certain universal goals of which, at least some of the time, we are barely aware. Influence and persuasion attempts must tap into these to really gain traction.

Techniques of persuasion

To illustrate these universal goals, let's have a look at six common techniques of influence that you'll have come across either explicitly or implicitly (from Cialdini, 2001):

1. Liking: It's much easier to influence someone who likes you. Successful influencers try to flatter and uncover similarities in order to build attraction.
2. Social proof. People like to follow one another, so influencers imply the herd is moving the same way.
3. Consistency. Most people prefer to keep their word. If people make a commitment, particularly if it's out loud or in writing, they are much more likely to keep it. Influencers should try to gain verbal or written commitments.
4. Scarcity. Even when companies have warehouses full of a product, they still advertise using time-limited offers that emphasise scarcity. People want what they can't have, or at least what might be running short.
5. Authority. People are strongly influenced by experts. Successful influencers flaunt their knowledge to establish their expertise.
6. Reciprocity. Give something to get something. When people feel indebted to you they are more likely to agree to what you want. This feeling could arise from something as simple as a compliment.

There are many more, but these six are often quoted, especially in business circles. The reason these work is that they tap into three basic human goals, and it's these goals that are the key to understanding how to influence and persuade people (from Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004).

1. Goal of affiliation

In the most part humans are social so they want to be liked. Rejection is no fun and we'll do almost anything to avoid it.

We reciprocate because it sends a message about our sociability. We try to elicit liking from other people by behaving in ways we guess will be attractive, like agreeing with them or complimenting them.

Not only do we want approval from specific people, we also want it from society at large (see this article on conformity). We want the things we do, think and believe to be broadly in line with what others do, think and believe. It's not impossible to be different, but it is difficult.

The techniques of liking and reciprocity mentioned above both clearly play on our desire for affiliation, as do many other techniques of persuasion and influence. Most people are joiners and followers so influencers like to give us something to join and someone to follow.

2. Goal of accuracy

People who don't care about doing things correctly never get anywhere in life. To achieve our goals in what is a complicated world, we have to be continually trying to work out the best course of action.

It could be accuracy in social situations, such as how to deal with the boss or how to make friends, or it could be accuracy in financial matters like how to get a good deal, or it could be accuracy in existential matters. Whatever the arena, people are always striving for the 'right' answer.

Influencers understand our need to be right and so they try to offer things that appeal to our need for accuracy. For example, experts or authority figures influence people heavily because they offer us a 'correct' view or way of doing things, especially one that we don't have to think too carefully about.

The techniques of social proof and scarcity both nag at our desire to be accurate because we assume other people are likely to be right and we don't want to miss out on a bargain.

3. Goal of maintaining positive self-concept

People want to protect their view of themselves because it takes a long time to build up a semi-coherent view of oneself and one's place in the world.

We work hard to keep our world-views intact: we want to maintain our self-esteem, to continue believing in the things we believe in and to honour whatever commitments we have espoused in the past. In an inconsistent world we at least should be self-consistent.

Persuaders and influencers can leverage this goal by invoking our sense of self-consistency. A trivial but instructive example is the foot-in-the-door technique. This is where an influencer asks you to agree to a small request before asking for a bigger one. Because people feel somehow that it would be inconsistent to agree to one request and then refuse the next one, they want to say yes again.

People will go to surprising lengths to maintain their positive view of themselves.

Unconscious motivators

Everybody wants to be accurate, to affiliate with others and to maintain their concept of themselves, however little awareness we might have of these goals. Effective persuasion and influence attempts can target one or more of these goals.

With these goals in mind it is possible to tailor persuasion attempts to the particular characteristics of an audience, rather than relying on transparent generic techniques. Whether it's at work, dealing with your boss, or at home negotiating with a neighbour, we can all benefit from thinking about other people's unconscious motivators. Then we can work out how to align our message with their goals.

→ More to come on the latest research into influence and persuasion.

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It's a mystery why money doesn't make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn't bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don't choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can't make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

Failure to savour

There's something missing from these accounts, though, and it's the old argument that when you live in luxurious surroundings, have experienced the best restaurants and received the most lavish gifts, it becomes more difficult to savour the simple things in life.

Supporting this account, a new study published in Psychological Science has found that participants were less able to savour positive emotions both when they were richer themselves and when they were prompted to think about wealth by looking at a picture of money (Quoidbach et al., 2010).

In a second study participants who were cued with the idea of money didn't enjoy or savour a chocolate bar as much as those not reminded of money. When participants looked at a picture of money beforehand, the average time spent eating the chocolate went down from 45 seconds to 32 seconds. Levels of enjoyment reported afterwards also went down, from 5 to 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is maximum enjoyment.

And this is only the effect of looking at a picture of money for a few seconds. Think what our society, with its constant reminders of opulence in both public and private, are doing to us. It's a wonder we can enjoy anything.

Relativistic psychology

This is just one facet of our mind's habit of comparing everything with everything else, from complex concepts like money right down to the most basic perceptual level. Like when you open your eyes in the morning, or turn up the volume on your mp3 player; for a moment the senses are overloaded but soon the contrast fades as the mind acclimatises.

It's easy to forget that things aren't 'loud' or 'bright', they are just 'louder' or 'brighter' than something else. Money is just one more thing that our minds treat in this relativistic fashion.

So spare a thought for the super-rich, the poor darlings can't appreciate a tin of spam, a lump of coal or a cardboard box in quite the same way that you and I can. It's not much of a silver lining I'll grant you, but it's something to hold on to.

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The line between real and fake has never been so blurred.

In the cinema, on television, in the newspapers, in public life: can we tell what's real and what's fake and does it matter? Perhaps authenticity is more important now that so much can be  faked so easily? Maybe the psychological costs of inauthenticity are greater than we might imagine?

A fascinating new study published in the journal Psychological Science hints at an answer by examining the effects of wearing fake designer sunglasses on the self (Gino et al., 2010).

The counterfeit self

Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, part of the reason we buy certain goods is because of the message it sends to other people about our status. Counterfeiters exploit this by producing goods which send the same message at a fraction of the cost; effectively telling other people that we are richer than we really are.

As long as they are good fakes, other people won't know any different. Even so,

"Although the wearer intends them to signal positive traits, wearing counterfeits can in fact send a negative signal to the self."

So Gino et al. wondered if this has consequences for the self, like an increase in unethical behaviour.

To test this out four experiments were carried out in which participants were given designer sunglasses and told in some conditions they were real and in other conditions fake—actually they were always real.

The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time.

People even became more cynical:

"...participants who believed they were wearing fake sunglasses interpreted other people’s behavior as more dishonest, considered common behaviors to be less truthful, and believed that others would be more likely to behave unethically."

Less authentic

In a final experiment the mechanism at work was tested. This suggested that people did feel less authentic when wearing the fake sunglasses, and this led to more unethical behaviour, which came as a surprise:

"...when we asked a separate set of students [..] to predict the impact of counterfeits, they were unaware of the consequences for ethical behavior."

So it seems for designer clothes, far from shrugging off inauthenticity, people sending fake signals about their wealth to others make themselves feel fake, with negative consequences for their behaviour.

This study could well have been commissioned by Gucci, Armani or any other brand (it wasn't), but still it raises the question of whether these types of findings would extend into areas of everyday life unrelated to branding. Perhaps in general faking it cues feelings of inauthenticity and consequently unethical behaviour? Given this research, I wouldn't be surprised.

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Anyone who has ever found themselves trying to turn on the bathroom light seconds after phoning  the power company to ask how long the power cut will last, knows how easily habits bypass our conscious thought processes.

Part of the reason habits are so difficult to change is they are triggered unconsciously, often by situations we've encountered time and time again. Before going into the bathroom: turn on the light. After getting new email: waste 10 minutes aimlessly surfing the web.

Temptations, on the other hand, play more on visceral factors like hunger, sex or thirst. We see a muffin and can't resist.

New research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Quinn et al. (2010) suggests a different strategy for changing a bad habit than for resisting a temptation.

"Don't do it!"

First, though, the researchers wanted to find out what habit-control strategies people use in everyday life. Ninety-nine students kept diaries of their battles with bad habits and temptations. Over 7 or 14 days they recorded each time they felt like giving in to a temptation or a bad habit they were trying to get rid of.

Top of the list for unwanted activities were excess sleeping, eating and procrastination (no big surprises there in a sample of students). The top strategies to combat these were:

• Vigilant monitoring: watching out for slip-ups and saying "Don't do it!" to yourself.
• Distraction: trying to think about something else.
• Stimulus control: removing the opportunity to perform the habit, say by leaving the bar, fast-food restaurant or electronics store.

For strong habits it was the vigilant monitoring that emerged from self-reports as the most useful strategy, with distraction in second place. While for strong temptations rather than habits, participants reported that stimulus control was the most effective strategy while monitoring dropped to third place behind distraction.

For both weak habits and weak temptations the strategy used mattered less, although for weak temptations the monitoring strategy emerged as the best.

How to defy a bad habit

As you'll be gathering from reading PsyBlog, though, psychologists are suspicious of what people say. Instead they like experiments to see what people do. So, in a second study they used a lab-based analogue of real life, to see if vigilant monitoring really is an effective strategy for controlling strong habits.

Sixty-five participants learned one response to a word, then in a second study had to change this response in defiance of the habit they'd built up.

Backing up the first study, the experiment found that vigilant monitoring was the most successful short-term strategy for suppressing a strong habit. Once again for weak habits the type of strategy used made little difference.

Habits versus temptations

So, why does vigilant monitoring work for habits but not for temptations?  Quinn et al. argue that it doesn't work for temptations because watching out for slip-ups heightens our attention to the temptation which we are, ironically, once again tempted by. Stimulus control, though, removes the opportunity: out of sight, out of mind.

Unlike temptations, habits are learnt by repetition and so they can sneak in under the radar. We find ourselves repeating them without thinking. Vigilant monitoring probably works because it helps us notice the habit and remember that we wanted to change it.

The bad news

But, as anyone who has ever tried to change a long-held habit will know, continually monitoring for bad habits is tiring and some days your self-control is weaker than others.

This isn't helped by what are known as 'ironic processes of control' which I cover in my series '10 more brilliant social psychology studies'. This is the idea that monitoring a thought in the hope of getting rid of it only makes that thought come back stronger.

In the long-term it may be necessary to try and replace the old habit with a new one. Unfortunately this new habit is likely to be much more unstable than the old one.

I'd like to leave you with better news but sometimes it's good to know the worst. We are often slaves to our habits and many of these habits are extremely hard to change because they are triggered outside our conscious awareness. Anyone who tells you different is either lying to themselves or trying to sell you a quick-fix that probably won't work.

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You and I can talk, we can reach out and touch each other on the arm and we can see each other, but we can never know exactly what's going on in the other's head.

It's partly why psychological science is so hard and it's why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.

Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an 'egocentric bias': because we're locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement.

Think abstract

In a new study published in Psychological Science, Eyal and Epley (2010) recommend using abstract thinking to get a better view of ourselves, as seen by others.

In one crucial experiment the researchers split 106 participants into two groups and asked them to judge how attractive they were to another person. The first group adopted the standard tactic of putting themselves in the other person's shoes, while the second group were asked to imagine how they would be rated by the other person in several months' time.

People trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes were awful at the task. In fact there was no association between how they thought others would rate them and how they actually did rate them. It seems when trying to judge how attractive we are to others, putting ourselves in their shoes doesn't work.

But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people's accuracy shot up. They weren't spot on, but they did much better. A further experiment confirmed these findings in general evaluations, suggesting this effect wasn't restricted to attractiveness.

Zoom out

The fine-grained, low-level way we tend to think of ourselves hinders us from understanding how others view us. You would think we would be able to judge how attractive we are to others - after all we've all got access to mirrors - but in reality we find it difficult. In some ways we are blinded by how much we know. Thinking about ourselves in the future, though, moves our mind to a more abstract level, allowing us to better see ourselves through others' eyes.

Although not examined in this research, the technique of thinking abstractly is likely to work best for people we don't know so well. On the other hand we are likely to have an accurate view of how our family or friends see us.

The yawning gap between the way we experience ourselves from the inside compared with how others see us is why we often have so much trouble working out how we are evaluated by others. When we look at ourselves, we can't see the wood for the trees; thinking abstractly allows us to zoom out and get the big picture.

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"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything." ~George Lois

Following on from a previous article on 7 unusual psychological techniques to boost creativity, which had a tremendous response, here are another 7 techniques for breaking through a creative block.

1. Counterfactual mindset

Conjuring up what might have been gives a powerful boost to creativity.

Markman et al. (2007) found that using counterfactuals (what might have happened but didn't) sometimes doubled people's creativity. But counterfactuals work best if they are tailored to the target problem:

• Analytical problems are best tackled with a subtractive mind-set: thinking about what could have been taken away from the situation.
• Expansive problems benefited most from an additive counterfactual mind-set: thinking about what could have been added to the situation.

2. Two problems are better than one

People solve many problems analogically: by recalling a similar old one and applying the same, or similar solution. Unfortunately studies have found that people are poor at recalling similar problems they've already solved.

In a counter-intuitive study, however, Kurtz and Lowenstein (2007) found that having two problems rather than one made it more likely that participants would recall problems they'd solved before, which helped them solve the current problem.

So don't avoid complications, gather them all up; they may well help jog your memory.

3. Generic verbs

Another boost for analogical thinking can be had from writing down the problem, then changing the problem-specific verbs to more generic ones.

What Clement et al. (1994) discovered when they tested this method was that analogical leaps are easier when problems were described in looser, more generic terms. In this study performance increased by more than 100% in some tasks.

This is just one of a number of techniques which encourage  focus on the gist of the problem rather than its specific details.

4. Synonyms and category taxonomies

Just like changing the verbs, re-encoding the problem using synonyms and category taxonomies can help.

This means analysing the type of problem and coming up with different ways of representing it. Lowenstein (2009; PDF) emphasises the importance of accessing the underlying structure of the problem in order to work out a solution.

5. Fight! Fight! Fight!

We tend to think that when people are arguing, they become more narrow-minded and rigid and consequently less creative.

But, according to research by Dreu and Nijstad (2008), the reverse may actually be true. Across four experiments they found that when in conflict people engaged more with a problem and generated more original ways of arguing.

Being in social conflict seems to give people an intense motivated focus. So, to get creative, start a fight.

6. Think love not sex

Forster et al. (2009) found that when experimental participants were primed with thoughts of love they became more creative, but when primed with carnal desire they became less creative (although more analytical).

While it certainly isn't the first time that love has been identified as a creative stimulus, psychologists have suggested a particular cognitive mechanism.

Love cues us with thoughts of the long-term, hence our minds zoom out and we reason more abstractly and analogically. Sex meanwhile cues the present, leading to a concrete analytical processing style. For creativity, abstraction and analogy are preferred.

7. Stop daydreaming

To increase creativity we're always hearing about the benefits of daydreaming for incubating ideas. It's a nice idea that all the work is going on under the hood with no effort from us. But you'll notice that all the methods covered here are active rather than passive.

That's because the research generally finds only very small benefits for periods of incubation or unconscious thought (Zhong et al., 2009). The problem with unconscious creativity is that it tends to remain unconscious, so we never find out about it, even if it exists.

The benefit of incubating or waiting may only be that it gives us time to forget all our initial bad ideas, to make way for better ones. Moreover, incubating only works if the unconscious already has lots of information to incubate, in other words if you've already done a lot of work on the problem.

So: stop daydreaming and start doing!

Move abroad and learn another language

If all that fails, including the 7 techniques from the previous article, then I've got one radical, bonus suggestion: move to another country and learn another language. Maddux and Galinsky (2009) found that people who had lived abroad performed better on a range of creative tasks.

In an experimental test of this idea, Maddux et al. (2010) asked participants to recall multicultural learning experiences and found that this made people more flexible in their thinking and better able to make creative connections.

This only worked when people had actually lived abroad, not when they just imagined it.

Caution

A word of caution about all these techniques. The types of tasks on which these techniques have been tested vary considerably. They may be quite different from the arena in which you are trying to be creative.

(Standard terms and conditions apply, your house may be repossessed if you don't keep up payments...etc...)

You'll have to see what works for you.

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For years psychologists have thought that a real smile, which reflects felt, positive emotion, is signalled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes.

This genuine smile is named after the French physician Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.

Oddly enough when some people try to fake a smile they look like one of Duchenne's subjects: in pain. It has been suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don't have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.

Others, though, may well be much better at faking a real smile, which is a handy trick because people automatically trust, like and want to be with those who appear to be showing real emotion.

Writing in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, however, Krumhuber and Manstead (2009) question whether this 80% estimate is anywhere near the mark. In the first of a series of experiments they found that 83% of the people in their study could produce fake smiles that others mistook for the real thing in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived genuine and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures. Then it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn't help much.

Instead, telling a real from fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

So the Duchenne smile has taken a bit of bashing in this research, which suggests that most people can fake crinkly eyes. Not only that but the crinkly eyes aren't as crucial for us in judging the sincerity of a smile as other factors. Rather than just the crinkly eyes, it's the whole movement of the face which tells a tale either of deception or of genuine, felt emotion.

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Committing words to memory is a notoriously hit-and-miss business. Over the last forty years psychologists have found three methods which consistently improve memory for words:

1. Imagery: recall is aided by creating an image of what you want to remember.
2. Elaboration: thinking of associations helps anchor words in your mind.
3. Generation: memory is improved when you have to put some work in to generate the target. E.g. guess the name of your favourite blog from this cryptic clue: _sy_log.

In research on trying to remember lists of words, these three methods have each produced memory improvements of 10% over simply reading words once.

That might not sound much, but it is an average over many studies and often for things that are hard to remember. Psychologists like testing people with non-words like 'trackle' or 'nosting' that could be words, but aren't.

Speak it...

Now, in a new series of studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, there's solid evidence for a fourth which could join the other big three memory enhancers (MacLeod et al., 2010).

And, you'll be happy to hear, it's very, very simple. It only involves saying the word you want to remember out loud to yourself. It doesn't even seem to matter if you don't vocalise the word, it only has to be mouthed. That's it.

According to MacLeod et al., saying a word out loud, or at least mouthing it, improves memory by increasing its distinctiveness, i.e. making it unusual compared to others.

Across 8 experiments in which participants were asked to read and remember lists of both words and nonwords, the researchers found memory improvements sometimes greater than 10%. They also ruled out some alternative explanations, finding that improvements were not:

• At the expense of unmouthed words. The effect was all benefit for the mouthed words and didn't decrease performance on unmouthed words.
• A result of "lazy reading" of words read silently.

...but be selective

Of course just reading all the words out loud would destroy the effect because then there's nothing for words said out loud to be distinctive in comparison with. It's only going to work when some words are said out loud compared with others not.

So if you're revising, or reading a report or a book and want to retain more of the important points, the key is to identify the right words and vocalise or sub-vocalise them.

This finding ties in with the general idea that we tend to remember people or things that stand out from the crowd. One gentle reminder though: if you are spotted mouthing random words in public, it's you that will stand out from the crowd.

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Professional athletes are particularly prone to superstitions, perhaps because so much rides on split-second timing, or what seems like luck.

Two dominant US sportsmen with superstitious behaviour are golfer Tiger Woods who always wears a red shirt on Tournament Sundays and basketball player Michael Jordan who wore the same blue underwear throughout his career.

We tend to think of this behaviour as irrational, despite feeling the pull of superstition ourselves (see: why rational people hate to tempt fate). New research published in Psychological Science, however, asks whether these superstitions are irrational if they work.

Damisch et al. (2010) wanted to see if simple superstitions like crossing your fingers or using a lucky charm improved performance on both motor and mental tasks. The answer was a rather surprising yes.

In the first experiment, 28 participants made, on average, 33% more 1m putts when handed a ball branded 'lucky' by experimenters (6.4 compared with 4.6 without).

In two further experiments the effect of participant's lucky charms on both memory and puzzle-solving was tested. Once again participants performed better in the presence of their lucky charms.

Confidence boost

To see why these superstitions improved performance, the researchers measured their self-efficacy (roughly equivalent to self-confidence) and goal-setting. This suggested that,

"The increased levels of self-efficacy that result from activating a superstition lead to higher self-set goals and greater persistence in the performance task."

In other words, the lucky charms appeared to be giving people the confidence to aim higher and keep trying. The belief, however tenuous, that there may be something to a particular superstition could help release nervous tension.

This may be because superstitions allow us the illusion of control in what is a scary, random world. Perhaps that's why superstitious behaviours to bring good luck are so common: they can sometimes work.

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An earworm is a song going around in your head that you can't get rid of. Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.

In new research, Beaman & Williams (2010) asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences. Here's what they found:

• Many earworms were pop songs, although adverts and TV/film themes and video game tunes were also mentioned.
• One-third generally experienced the chorus or refrain over and over again, but almost half said that it varied.
• 10% of participants reported that earworms stopped them doing other things.
• Contrary to popular belief those with musical training were no more likely to experience earworms.

Searching for earworms on Twitter reveals people have all kinds of songs stuck in their heads. From The Muppets theme tune, The Sound of Music tracks, to Richard Strauss' An Alpine Symphony.

Similarly this study revealed relatively little overlap between the songs going around in people's heads. This suggests that it's more the song's interaction with people rather than the song alone that creates the cognitive itch.

Not everyone was equally undisturbed by earworms though:

"Those who found the earworms most problematic were respondents who considered music particularly important. These participants also reported experiencing earworm episodes of longer duration and harder to control than participants for whom music was of less importance."

How to kill an earworm

Participants reported using all sorts of techniques for trying to get rid of earworms like listening to other songs and doing some work (two even reported drinking alcohol) but generally fighting the earworm just made it stronger. The reason for this is that, as psychologists have found, thought suppression can be counter-productive.

For most of us earworms are relatively untroubling. And if you are tempted to moan then just be thankful you're not the 21-year-old described in a case report by Praharaj et al. (2009). This man had had music from Hindi films going around in his head against his will for between 2 and 45 minutes at a time, up to 35 times a day, for five years. Unfortunately even powerful drugs couldn't stop the music.

So I don't want to hear any complaints about "We Will Rock You" or "Whomp - There It Is".

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