1-Page Summary

People are Irrational and Emotional

You think of yourself as rational, making decisions with facts and logic. Instead, people are governed by emotion and heuristic thinking much more than they think.

Consider instead that humans are 90% irrational and emotion. They make a decision first by gut, then rationalize it afterward.

The only exceptions are when decisions have no emotional content, like buying an identical product for less money.

Think of humans as “moist robots,” a programmable entity that produces the right output when given the right inputs.

Master Persuaders

Master persuaders are people who have incredible persuasion skills and form “reality distortion fields.” Examples include Steve Jobs and Donald Trump.

Master persuaders often have a persuasion “talent stack,” or a collection of persuasion-related skills that work well together. The more you can combine, the more persuasive you will be.

According to Scott Adams, Trump’s talent stack made him very persuasive even when he wasn’t notably brilliant in any one field. Trump had the combination of (Publicity | Reputation | Strategy | Negotiating | Persuasion | Public speaking | Sense of humor | Quick on his feet | Thick skinned | High-energy | Size and appearance | Intelligence).

Persuasion Principles

This is Scott Adams’s ordering of methods of persuasion, from least to most effective:

• Word-thinking/semantics
• Pointing out hypocrisy
• Reason/facts
• Analogy
• Habit
• Appealing to aspirations
• Identity
• Appealing to fears

Set the Expectation of Being Persuaded

People are more easily persuaded if they expect to be persuaded.

• Doctors post their degrees on their walls. Salespeople drive fancy cars to show they’re good at their jobs.
• Trump wrote Art of the Deal and convinced the world he was a great negotiator. Now every person going in had subconscious permission to do worse against Trump as a persuader. Brilliantly, the book is not just about persuasion - it is persuasion.

Brand yourself as a winner. If people expect you to win, they will be biased toward making it happen.

Display Confidence and Energy

Display confidence to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself to get anyone else to believe. Energy is contagious.

People perceive high energy as competence and leadership.

Confidence works in signaling status and quality. People with status have the freedom to act however they like, including like assholes. People without status need to grovel and be excessively nice to get what they want.

Communicate Simply

Simple is catchier. It’s easier to understand and remember.

Get rid of extra words. Don’t write “he was very happy” when you can write “he was happy.” Prune your sentences.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers are lazier and less thoughtful than you think.

Visual Imagery

Images stick more stably in people’s minds, making them more readily available and thus thought about more.

Use simple imagery.

Leave it vague enough to let people fill in their own blanks.

Example: Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” If you’re like most people, you pictured a large concrete wall 15 feet high.

• Obviously, this would be impractical - a metal fence or digital sensors would be better - but the imagery was powerful. “The wall” was obviously more persuasive and catchy than “border control using a variety of security technologies.”
• He didn’t provide his own renderings or descriptions of the wall. Het let people imagine it, which made them more attracted to their own conception of the idea.

Persuasion Strategies and Tactics

Linguistic kill shot: a unique (non-trite), visual, meaningful catchphrase. “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Rubio.” Trump was called “dark.”

• Confirmation bias secures these nicknames.

High-ground maneuver: instead of engaging with a complaint specific to you, neutralize it by relating it to a universal problem everyone can relate to.

• In response to Antennagate, Steve Jobs said, “We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We want to make all our users happy.”

Visual persuasion: Images are far more effective than abstract words.

• Trump’s border wall along Mexico.
• Trump on SNL with a skit in the oval office. It became easier to picture him as President.

Pacing and leading: Follow the pace of your listener - speaking tone, content, beliefs. Then once you feel they’re following you, bring them to your conclusion.

• Trump matched the complexity of speech of his voters - simple words, simple sentences. This made him easier to relate to.

Anchoring to hyperbole, then backing off: Propose an outrageous solution. Then as people argue about it, dial it back to show an earnest concession.

• Trump proposed deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. This was clearly an impractical idea that branded Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our borders. He then walked it back to focusing on criminals.

Highlight the contrasts: Always present your solution in the context of worse alternatives. You will look more thorough/objective, and your option will look better.

• When trying to impress people, participate in activities at which you excel compared to others. People will form an impression of you as generally talented, even if you are otherwise equal to others.
• Compare someone’s small issue with a big problem. This will re-frame their small worries.

If these sound interesting, look in the full summary for many more tactics we don’t have space to cover here.

Example of Trump’s Persuasion

In a debate, Megyn Kelly asked, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’...” Trump interrupted, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” The crowd laughed and applauded. When Kelly finished the question, Trump continued with an answer about the problem of political correctness.

Here are the persuasive tactics Trump used, in just 3 words:

• Visual image - Rosie O’Donnell was a recognizable image, especially for people who disliked her.
• Pacing and leading - he knew his base detested O’Donnell for her outspoken liberal views, so the image was triggering
• High-ground maneuver - instead of apologizing for his remarks, he took to the high ground on the destructiveness of political correctness. This neutralized the question so that his seemingly insulting comments no longer mattered.
• Get people talking - the quip was so novel and interesting to ignore, the attention focused on him other than his 16 competitors.

Scott Adams considers this response a masterful move. Trump “converted Kelly’s attack into pure energy” and harnessed that energy for his own purposes.

Introduction

Most people think there is one objective reality, and we can understand that reality through facts and reason.

The problem is that we all think we’re the enlightened ones, and people who disagree with us just need better facts or better brains. If there is a single truth, isn’t it odd that everyone sees their personal beliefs as the truth, and that so many people disagree on what the truth is?

People actually make decisions more irrationally than they realize. We are subject to biases and pulled by our emotions. We make decisions first, and rationalize them after the fact. Analogously, asking someone what they want to do and why is also faulty. People don’t understand the reasons for their own behavior.

Consider humans as moist robots, computers that respond predictably when given certain inputs. Furthermore, moist robots can be reprogrammed if you know how to interface with them.

The view of reality that you have is a “filter” that interprets the data you get and predicts an outcome. The filter doesn’t have to be objectively correct - as long as it makes you happy and it predicts events accurately, it’s a good filter.

• The moist robot filter lets you influence people and predict people’s irrationalities more than if you assumed everyone was fact-based and rational all the time.
• You may think that you can will a successful future into being by envisioning it. Confirmation bias will highlight the times this worked and discard the failures. That’s fine - as long as it makes you happy and it works some of the time, it’s a decent filter for life.
• Multiple filters or interpretations of reality may explain the existing data. You won’t know which one is true until you see how it predicts future results.

Evolutionarily, the reason we don’t need to see reality objectively is that objectivity isn’t always necessary for survival. Any illusion that keeps humans alive enough to procreate is good enough.

Cognitive Biases

Cognitive biases may exist because they save the brain energy - the thoughts are not perfect but are good enough for survival. It would be exhausting to reinterpret your reality with every new piece of information.

The important principle here is that biases are not flaws in our operating system - they are the operating system.

Funnily enough, even when you know exactly what’s going on, it’s still effective.

• Everyone knows that $9.99 is chosen because it looks much cheaper than $10.00. It still works.
• The McGurk effect (video of someone saying “bah” with audio of “fah”). Even when you know the effect, you are still subject to it.

As we’ll explore in later chapters, many persuasion strategies take advantage of cognitive biases.

Confirmation Bias

What it is: you pay attention to information that confirms your prior beliefs, and discard data that contradicts your beliefs.

In politics, all sides suffer from this.

• There was alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. No smoking gun was reported, but there were stories of Russian influence on the election (eg Facebook). Anti-Trumpers say there is so much smoke that collusion must have happened. Trump supporters say that without evidence, Trump has been proven innocent.
• (Shortform example: watch different TV channels for liberals and conservatives and you’ll rarely see the same top stories at once. A scandal for a conservative politician will be the rage on the liberal channel and totally absent from the conservative channel, and vice versa.)

When trying to persuade, you might think that facts alone can win the day. But people will just filter the information for whatever confirms their current beliefs. People often don’t change opinions just because they see some information that discredited their opinion.

Cognitive Dissonance

What it is: When people perform actions that are inconsistent with their underlying beliefs, they rationalize the action in the context of their beliefs, often forming delusions.

Examples

• (Shortform example: one classic experiment showed that people who were paid nothing for a tedious task enjoyed it more than people who were paid more for the same task. The ones who were paid nothing had to reason subconsciously, “well this task is boring. But clearly I’m not doing it for money since I’m not getting paid. So maybe I enjoy it more than I thought I did?”)
• If you believe you’re an honest person but you do something dishonest, you rationalize the action as justified in a tortuous way.

According to Scott Adams, a “tell” for cognitive dissonance is the absurdity of the rationalization, and how many there are.

• Someone claims smoking won’t hurt him because a person smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100. This is a personal illusion where he is one of the few people alive who is immune to lung cancer.

Another tell is responding with an absurd absolute position, combined with a personal insult. This person doesn’t have a rational reason for their views, forming a dissonance in their mind that they resolve by discrediting the other person’s viewpoint.

• Someone expresses a view in favor of gun ownership. In return, someone says, “ha, so I guess you want to give guns to toddlers!”

Consistency Bias

What it is: People don’t want to change their minds. If you attack a person’s belief, that person will double down and entrench, rationalizing it along the way.

Recency Bias, Availability Bias

What it is: You tend to overweight information that you thought about recently, or that is more available to you.

Be wary when someone is repeatedly pressing your button to get you to return to an issue.

Two Movies on One Screen / Filters

What it is: People see differently realities. Given the exact same set of data, two people with two different reality filters will see two different things. Scott Adams calls this “one picture, two movies.

• Two people can view the same Presidential speech and have wildly different conclusions from it.
• Using mind-altering substances (even alcohol or caffeine will do) gives you a different experience of the world. You yourself can experience different realities just by going from normal to high.

Beware of selecting inaccurate filters. It’s easy to fit completely different explanations to the same set of facts. To be useful, the interpretation must be able to predict accurately.

Mass Delusions

People often assume these are rare, but Scott Adams argues mass delusions are the norm, and it’s the rare time when a population is behaving rationally.

Mass delusions are Often due to a combination of biases, including social proof, confirmation bias, loss aversion.

• Stock market booms and busts
• News reports that exaggerate the prevalence of a problem.
  • Orson Welles’s broadcast of War of the Worlds. A small portion of the country who heard it believed an alien invasion was occurring. Then, it became a folk myth that much of the country had been fooled.

Delusions can occur when there are 1) complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions, and 2) financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus. The mass delusion then continues a vicious cycle of swallowing more people.

• Scott Adams argues climate change has these tinges - climate prediction models have complications with room for bias. Tweak the assumptions and you get any outcome you want.
• (Shortform note: In medicine the consensus held that stomach ulcers were caused by stomach acid. Barry Marshall believed it was caused by a bacterium, but consensus ruled that bacteria could not survive stomach acid. He drank a vial of the bacteria and got ulcers.)

The Most Effective Persuasion Methods

There are broad categories of persuasion methods, ranging from logical reasoning to appeals to emotion.

Scott Adams considers some persuasion methods to be terribly weak and others to be formidably strong. We’ll cover his ranking of methods, starting from strong to weak.

Rank 1: Appeal to Fears

Fears trigger stronger reactions than positive emotions like hope, and is the strongest persuasion method of all.

Nuances of fears:

• Personal fears are more persuasive than generic large-scale problems (losing your house vs general climate change)
• A fear you think about more often is stronger than one rarely thought about.
• A visual fear is scarier than one without.
• A fear you’ve experienced firsthand (eg a crime) is scarier than a statistic.

Examples:

• In the 2016 US Presidential election, Trump engaged people on fears of losing jobs and crime.
• Clinton couldn’t use the same fears because of her brand, so she used Trump as the object of fear, portraying him as the next Hitler.
  • The painting of Trump as Hitler contributed to the militancy of Clinton supporters. If you had a chance to stop a literal Hitler and save millions of lives, you have moral authority to kill people to do it.

Rank 2: Identity

People like to back their tribe. If you seem like you’re on a person’s team, they’ll more likely support you.

• We evolved to feel safer with people who are like us, and oppose people who were different who seemed to be trying to hurt us.

People like to think of themselves as honorable and trustworthy. If you want to correct someone’s behavior, appeal to this high ground by asking if that is what the person wants to be.

When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to bias toward the group consensus.

Examples:

• Sports teams use local geographical tribes effectively.
• Trump reminded voters they were Americans first. Clinton appealed to women, minorities, and LGBTQ.

Rank 3: Aspirations

While a person’s aspirations don’t trigger as strong a reaction as fear, they still create powerful, uplifting feelings. To persuade, graft your story onto people’s existing aspirations.

Examples:

• Apple stresses personal creativity.
• Financial services companies stress being financially independent.
• Trump played to voter aspirations of being wealthier, safer, and greater. In contrast, Clinton used the weaker “Stronger Together,” which is more defensive than aspirational.

Rank 4: Habit

Instead of changing habits, try to piggyback onto existing habits.

Examples:

• Turn vitamins into once-a-day morning rituals like brushing teeth and shaving.
• Morning shows tie to the time period specifically. “Good Morning America,” “Morning Joe,” “Coffee with Scott Adams.”

Rank 5: Analogy

Analogies are relatively weak persuasion methods. They’re useful to explain a new unfamiliar concept and to be directionally correct.

However, analogies are so imprecise that they invite criticism on narrow grounds - “that analogy doesn’t work because of this detail.” Your opponent then uses this detail to invalidate the directional accuracy.

This is a form of persuasion by association - if two things have something in common, surely they must have many more things in common.

• To use an analogy - the analogy is the holster, and the negative association is the gun. The analogy (holster) is a vehicle for delivering the negative association (the gun).

These are more effective when piggybacking on other biases, like confirmation bias, visual imagery, and fears.

• The analogy of Trump to Hitler was effective for Clinton’s base, since it fit their confirmation bias, and to voters new to Trump, since it explained a new concept. It wasn’t effective for Trump supporters since they could poke holes in the analogy.

Rank 6: Reason

This is much less effective than people think. We tend to make our decisions first emotionally, then rationalize them later. Most topics are emotional - our identity, relationships, career choices, politics.

We deceptively think most of our lives are rational because many smaller decisions are rational - brushing teeth to avoid cavities, using coupons to save money, following the GPS navigator to save time. But the big decisions in life are actually mainly emotional.

Reason is most effective when there is no emotional content to a decision, like shopping for the best price of the same car across multiple sellers.

Example:

• In Jimmy Kimmel, people were presented Trump’s policy positions framed as Clinton’s, and asked if they agreed with those positions. Many said they did.

Rank 7: Hypocrisy

A persuasive attempt based on hypocrisy is arguing that the other person also did something they’re complaining about.

This is ineffective because it frames both parties as naughty children - there is no winning here.

Resist the reflex of feeling unfairly attacked and having to sling back mud. Appeal to the high ground: “I agree with you. We’ve learned a lot since that mistake. Let’s try to find the best way forward and stick to that.”

This frames yourself as the wise adult in a room of children and small thinkers - someone who knows how to solve problems.

Rank 8: Word-thinking

Word-thinking is an argument based around semantics. One person can adjust the definition without any appeal to reason or logic.

This is Scott Adams’s lowest ranked form of persuasion. If two people disagree on a definition, there is no room to go.

Examples:

• Trying to convince someone of your abortion viewpoint by changing their definition of what “life” is.
• People argued about whether Trump was “conservative enough” to represent the GOP.

General Notes on the Rankings

For all of these methods of persuasion, visual persuasion is stronger than oral persuasion. A visual argument lower on the list can be more effective than a verbal argument higher on the list. For example, an analogy invoking a strong image may be more effective than an oral appeal to aspirations.

During an argument, when people exhaust the better techniques, they go progressively down the list to weaker techniques, since they run out of ammunition. So if you’re using reason and someone argues back with an ad hominem, you can realize that they’ve run out of logic and are now desperate.

Exercise: Persuasion from Personal Experience

Think about effective persuasion methods you've seen recently.

• When have you recently seen an example of persuasion by appealing to fear? Was it effective?

• What persuasion method do you tend to use most? Are you satisfied with how persuasive you are to other people?

• What persuasive technique do other people use that frustrates you? Why is it frustrating?

Persuasion Principles

These are principles of persuasion that hold true with all methods of persuasion.

Communicate Simply

Simple is catchier. It’s easier to understand and remember.

Get rid of extra words. Don’t write “he was very happy” when you can write “he was happy.” Prune your sentences.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers are lazier and less thoughtful than you think.

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader and inspire curiosity. Keep rewriting it until it’s good.

• Scott Adams began his post with “I went from being a bad writer to being a good writer after taking a one-day course in business writing.”

For humorous writing, choose your words with specificity. Don’t say “drink” when you can sway “swill.”

Learn how brains organize ideas.

• “The boy hit the ball” is easier to understand than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Actors do things to objects.
• (Shortform note: start with the trunk of an idea, then attach details as branches and leaves to the trunk of the tree. Connect new ideas to other ideas the reader already knows. Summarize your main points after you’re done.)

Persuasion Talent Stack

A persuasion talent stack is a collection of persuasion-related skills that work well together. The more you can combine, the more persuasive you will be.

According to Scott Adams, Trump’s talent stack made him very persuasive even when he wasn’t notably brilliant in any one field.

• Trump had the combination of (Publicity | Reputation | Strategy | Negotiating | Persuasion | Public speaking | Sense of humor | Quick on his feet | Thick skinned | High-energy | Size and appearance | Intelligence)

One popular perception of how Trump won is that he understood the ethos of America and devised the policies they wanted. Adams argues the opposite - Trump convinced the public that his policies were the ones that mattered.

Combining multiple skills together is rare. Being pretty good at multiple skills makes you more valuable than being very good at one skill.

• Scott Adams notes that he is nowhere near the best cartoonist nor the best comedian, but he is one of the best comedian cartoonists.

Visual Imagery

Images stick more stably in people’s minds, making them more readily available and thus thought about more.

Use simple imagery.

Leave it vague enough to let people fill in their own blanks.

Examples

• Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” If you’re like most people, you pictured a large concrete wall 15 feet high.
  • Obviously, this would be impractical - a metal fence or digital sensors would be better - but the imagery was powerful. “The wall” was obviously more persuasive and catchy than “border control using a variety of security technologies.”
  • He didn’t provide his own renderings or descriptions of the wall. He let people imagine it, which made them more attracted to their own conception of the idea.
• Trump cultivated his visual identity:
  • On SNL, a skit imagined him as the president sitting in the Oval Office giving an address. This was a huge influence on picturing him as a legitimate president.
    • In contrast, Clinton’s SNL skit had her play a bartender serving a drunken Clinton. This visual imagery was terrible, especially in contrast with Trump, a noted abstainer.
  • Trump’s private jet reminds you of Air Force One. Filming him stepping out of the plane makes him look presidential.
• Trump’s bright red MAGA hat. It was clearly identifiable, created social proof and tribalism, made people’s beliefs consistent with their behavior of wearing the hat. Red is the color of sex and power, and also the Republican party.
• After accusations of racism, Trump was pictured kissing a lot of black babies.
• (Shortform note: when introducing the Macbook Air, Steve Jobs pulled it out of a manila envelope. Much more effective than simply saying the laptop was 13mm thick.)

Persuasion Strategies

These are high-level ideas to persuade. They establish a foundation for persuasion and underlie the specific words and tactics you use.

Set the Expectation of Being Persuaded

People are more easily persuaded if they expect to be persuaded.

• In his book, Scott Adams repeats that he’s a trained hypnotist. This sounds amazing, almost intimidating, until you realize there is no formal certification for this and makes him sound more credible than perhaps it deserves.
• Doctors post their degrees on their walls. Salespeople drive fancy cars to show they’re good at their jobs.
• Trump wrote Art of the Deal and convinced the world he was a great negotiator. Now every person going in had subconscious permission to do worse against Trump as a persuader. Brilliantly, the book is not just about persuasion - it is persuasion.
• It’s easier to persuade someone who is paying you for a service, since they perceive a higher value to your skills. They want and expect to be influenced.

Tactics

• Brand yourself as a winner. If people expect you to win, they will be biased toward making it happen.
• Improve your physical appearance. Dress for the part. Attractive people are more persuasive.
• Broadcast your credentials in a way that is natural but not braggy. Show a track record of success in whatever you plan to do.
• Meet in the most impressive space you can control. Broadcast power, talent, success.
• Set expectations ahead of time.

Display Confidence and Energy

Display confidence to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself to get anyone else to believe. Energy is contagious.

People perceive high energy as competence and leadership.

Confidence works in signaling status and quality.

• An implicit assumption is that people who are generally confident without substance will have been called out and had their reputation damaged. Therefore, someone who is perpetually confident must have some real substance and quality behind her.
• People with status have the freedom to act however they like, including like assholes. People without status need to grovel and be excessively nice to get what they want.
  • This causes the perception that assholes are more likely to be of high status. Thus causing the misperception that girls prefer to date assholes, when it is something else associated with assholes - money, social standing, confidence - that is the actual attractive thing
  • The dating tactic of “negging” tries to signal quality through being slightly rude.

Be the Voice of Certainty in Times of Uncertainty

In mass confusion, people gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice.

Offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete.

Use Occam’s Razor to your advantage. Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones with lots of variables and assumptions.

• While this might not be factually, scientifically true, it does appear to many to be the right explanation especially in times of uncertainty.
• Often, two things rising together look like they cause one another, rather than being merely correlated.
  • Example: Illegal immigrants seem to be taking American jobs.

Pacing and Leading

Pacing means matching the person you’re persuading in as many ways as possible - how she thinks, speaks, breathes, moves, sits. People see you as the same as them and get comfortable with you.

Then you can lead, and the subject will be comfortable following.

• Trump matched the complexity of speech of his voters - simple words, simple sentences. This made him easier to relate to.
• Scott Adams introduces himself as an ultraliberal who is pro-choice, pro-marijuana, reparations for African-Americans for slavery. This gets liberal readers on his side instead of rejecting his opinion totally.

Explicitly point out your audience’s state of mind to build a bond with them.

• “By now you’re wondering…”
• “If you’re like most people, you’ll be thinking…”
• If the person doesn’t have this in mind at the time, no harm is done. But if she does, then you gain credibility for reading her mind.

Leave enough blank space in your argument for the person to identify with.

• In Scott Adams’s comic, Dilbert has no last name so you can identify with him as an everyman professional.
• Trump’s insistence on a big wall left many people to fill in their own blanks for how the wall should work. This made people attach to it more than if he had itemized the specifications of a wall.

The Fake Because

People may have already made their decisions but are afraid to publicly endorse it. Give them an excuse to agree with you. As Dale Carnegie says, appeal to their higher motives.

• In the election, people claimed to be able to switch sides because of some gross action the other did. Trump supporters may have been afraid to endorse Trump because of the fear of bullying, but Clinton’s email scandals gave them the “fake because” to say that was the last straw.
• (Shortform example: an employee might be threatening to leave for another company. You give them a better offer, while also pointing out their importance and how their team would suffer if they left. The employee may stay primarily for the money, but they also now have a nobler reason to express publicly.)

Get People Talking

Use recency/availability bias to your advantage. If people talk about you or your ideas, then they will seem higher priority than otherwise. Move people’s energy to the topics that help you.

• Similar: “no press is bad press.”

Consider being directionally accurate, but with some exaggeration or factual error that will attract criticism. People will spend hours talking about how wrong it is, repeating it in their minds so much that the ideas have large mental impact.

• Trump’s calling his plan “the wall” invited plenty of skepticism about its cost, feasibility, construction materials, and Trump’s intelligence. He could have backed down and said, “of course we know it’s not going to be a brick wall all the way through.” But he didn’t want to silence his critics - talking about the wall anchored Trump as the most important person in the conversation, and made border control a top issue in the public’s mind.
• Doing this is a dangerous strategy unless you have a thick skin, risk tolerance, and moral flexibility.

Surprise the brain to form memories.

• Consider introducing typos in your writing to grab the audience’s attention. This is why Scott Adams titled his book “Win Bigly.”

Brand by Association

By associating with an image or idea, some of the goodness or the badness rubs off on you.

• Celebrity endorsements, reasoning by analogy, and using symbols like the American flag all employ this.
• Decorating your living space to be emotionally pleasing will make you happy just as you walk into it.
• If you tell too many bathroom jokes, your friends may start subconsciously associating you with excrement.
• If you talk endlessly about your health problems, you may be associated strongly with your disease, which is a bummer for most people.

Instead, fill people’s heads with positive thoughts and they will associate those good feelings with you.

• When meeting, don’t complain about the weather or traffic. Be positive and talk about what’s exciting in your life or theirs.
• People associate positive memories with dogs - so having a dog with you when you meet someone allows transference of some of that positivity over to you.

Hook your bandwagon to another brand.

• Trump attached himself to the Reagan mythology.
• Scott Adams introduced his “98% Trump win” prediction to mirror Nate Silver’s 2% prediction. This established Adams’s credibility when he was just a cartoonist writing about politics. Just being in the same sentence as Nate Silver established credibility.
• (Shortform example: many startups explain by analogy - “the Uber of dog walking.”)

Prime people with images representing what you want them to believe.

• Exposing people to stories of generosity make them more generous.
• In priming experiments, holding ballot votes in a school environment made voters more amenable to policies favoring school funding.

Avoid negative associations.

• To stand apart, Carly Fiorina described a video of an abortion that went wrong, to capture the anti-abortion base. This press sounded good on paper since it led to discussion. But she associated her brand with a dead baby. People don’t want to think about dead babies one second longer than they need to.

Persuasion Tactics

These are specific tactics to take in different situations. Beyond the persuasion principles and strategies above, these tactics teach how to persuade on a word-by-word basis.

Linguistic Kill Shot

A Linguistic Kill Shot is a nickname or catchphrase targeting your opponent. It can be so persuasive that it quickly ends an argument. They are more effective when novel (uncommon, unexpected) and visual.

The 2016 US Presidential election showed a variety of nicknames, some masterful and others ineffective.

• Trump’s: “Low-energy Jeb.” “Lyin’ Ted.” “Lil’ Marco.” “Crooked Hillary.” “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”
  • Note how the most memorable names weren’t common - no use of “liberal.”
  • Note too the deliberate contraction of words that invites a double take - lyin’, lil’.
  • These all fed confirmation bias and visual imagery - Jeb did indeed look listless, Ted did have beady little eyes that made him look untrustworthy.
• Clinton’s nicknames for Trump weren’t as effective:
  • “Donald Duck” was meant to show him ducking criticism, but it associated him with an adorable beloved character and neutralized the Hitler image.
  • “Drumpf” was Trump’s Austrian original name. It was novel, but didn’t have any associations, and thus was unpersuasive. It was also inconsistent with Clinton’s brand of being welcoming to foreigners.
  • “Dangerous Donald” was better, but some people actually wanted a renegade candidate dangerous to the establishment (which Hillary represented) - it wouldn’t turn his base over.
• Adams believes the best linguistic attack on Trump was describing him as “dark.”
  • It has sinister character but is vague enough to allow the person to fill in the blank with whatever scares them most. It captures all of our fears into a tidy package.
  • It’s unusual in politics and easily used in conversation
• Scott Adams himself uses plenty of key terms in his book - “Master Persuader,” “weapons-grade persuasion skills”

Because of availability bias and confirmation bias, these visual catchphrases become more powerful over time as we receive evidence that fits the name. All that people needed to confirm “Lyin’ Ted” was some evidence that he had been less than truthful at one time, and the nickname would stick.

Furthermore, because they are simple, they are more likely to be used often, making them more available in people’s minds. These effects can form a virtuous cycle.

Create Effective Slogans

Like Linguistic Kill Shots, slogans are short phrases that convey your message.

Principles

• Make the slogan about the highest ideals you are striving for, not about your independent company or team.
• Each word should have a positive connotation or symbolism.
• Have good rhythm, like iambic pentameter or percussion through consonants.

Scott Adams discusses the two slogans in the 2016 US Presidential election.

Trump: “Make America Great Again”

This slogan was first used by Reagan in 1980. When this was reported as criticism, it might have actually helped Trump - since Trump was an outsider to politics, the association to Reagan gave Trump slightly more credibility.

Decomposing the slogan by word:

• Make: An active verb, connotes action and change. Also subtly connotes manufacturing and job creation.
• America: Obviously a positively evocative word. It conveyed that Trump stood for the entire nation instead of for himself, fitting Trump’s “America first” stance.
• Great: Everyone wants to be great. Greatness can be interpreted however one wants.
• Again: A return to former glory days, which many of Trump’s voters pined for. This provoked some controversy over whether America was already great or not, which got people talking about the slogan.

The slogan was then put on a red hat, red meaning action, dominance, and sex (in contrast to Hillary’s pink hats). Red also meant Republican.

Adams says saying Make America Great Again had good percussion rhythm with regular consonant sounds, independent of the meaning. Contrast with Clinton’s “I’m with her,” which lacks those benefits.

Hillary Clinton’s Slogans

According to Scott Adams, Clinton’s slogans focused too much on her gender and unity of her party, not about America in general. Clinton used a variety of slogans throughout her campaign, never having one with as much common appearance as Trump’s:

“I’m with her”

• This strongly emphasized her gender, which implied some sort of advantage.
• It also focuses strongly on the voter’s action and Clinton as a candidate, not the nation in general.

“I’m Ready for Hillary”

• Same problems as above, but with some added smug superiority around being “ready” for a woman president.

“Fighting for Us”

• Who is us? If it’s America, why not say so?
• “Us” can be taken too strongly to mean the in-group, and whatever people feel excluded from - women, minorities, immigrants. Would white male voters feel comfortable with saying “fight for us?”

“Breaking down barriers”

• Suggests Clinton is fighting for the disadvantaged, but does this threaten people who are established - does it entail taking jobs?
• This is also too evocative of breaking down international barriers and letting illegal immigrants in, the antithesis of Trump’s wall.
• However, this slogan does have good percussion.

“Stronger Together”

• The best one of the bunch, highlighting more unity.
• But as Clinton supporters became bullies to Trump supporters, it sounded like a pack of bullies attacking people who disagreed.

High-Ground Maneuver

Instead of engaging with a complaint specific to you, neutralize it by relating it to a higher concept everyone can agree with. Clarify your intent along a direction that no one can blame you for.

Examples:

• In response to Antennagate, Steve Jobs said, “We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We want to make all our users happy.”
  • While he got heat for not being apologetic, the question of whether the iPhone 4 was a dud vanished. If Jobs had kowtowed and sheepishly admitted fault, the iPhone could have continued being the butt of jokes.
• In response to being labeled a whiner, Trump said he was the best whiner of all time, and that’s exactly what the country needs.
  • The low ground is debating whether whiner is a fair label for Trump. The high ground is whether being a whiner is good for the United States.
• When switching sides to Trump, Scott Adams wrote: “I don’t know a lot about policy. I don’t know the best way to defeat ISIS. Neither do you. I don’t know the best way to negotiate trade policies. Neither do you.” Then he wrote about how Trump was the most persuasive presidential candidate he had ever seen.
  • This neutralized the counter of “how can you support Trump, he cares so much about policy X.”

Scott Adams also illustrated how the high-ground maneuver could be used in previous controversies.

• For the military: if a military drone kills civilians, say “War is messy. No one wants civilians to die. We will study this situation carefully to see how we’ll avoid it in the future.”
• BP oil spill: “All the easy sources of oil are gone, depleted. We all want clean energy in our future, but it will take time. If the oil industry doesn’t take risks today, gas prices will keep going up and make life harder. No one wants oil spill accidents to happen. We’ll study this carefully and do everything we can to make things right.”

In the face of victory, encourage your own supporters to take the high ground.

• When Trump won, Scott Adams counseled his followers to avoid gloating and not fight back, for the better of the country.

Appeal to universal ideals that everyone aspires to.

• (Shortform example: “What would Jesus do?”)

Create Two Ways to Win, No Way to Lose

Say you want X to happen. The strategy is: say publicly that if X doesn’t happen, then that would have been because of reason Y unfavorable to you.

• If X doesn’t happen, then you look like you were right and you get a small victory, even if you didn’t get what you wanted
• If X does happen (partially because the people overcompensated to not look like reason Y), then you win, and you can also take credit for X happening.

This is abstract, so let’s cover some examples:

• Iran detained American sailors in Jan 2016. Trump said that if Iran didn’t release the sailors soon, he would make Iran pay when he became President.
  • If Iran kept detaining the sailors, Trump would be validated in his tough stance.
  • If Iran released the sailors, Trump could take credit for releasing the sailors, even if he had nothing to do with Iran’s decision.
  • This was a win-win for Trump , no matter what Iran did.
• A judge of Mexican heritage was in charge of Trump’s Trump University case. Trump argued that a Mexican judge would find it hard to be biased, given Trump’s reputation for being unfriendly to Mexican immigrants.
  • If Trump lost the case, then he could claim validation that the judge really was biased all along.
  • If the judge overcorrected for the belief and ruled favorably for Trump University, then Trump would get the more important battle - legal victory.

Another strategy: say you and your opponent have the same overall goals (eg make your company more money) but have different strategies on how to do it. Pitch your strategy as follows:

• If you’re right about your strategy, then the important high-level goal is achieved, and everyone is ultimately happy.
• If you’re wrong and your opponent is right, then we learn something valuable about what doesn’t work, and we can trust the opponent’s reasoning more in the future.

Another strategy: be ambiguous about wording your position so that you say things both sides want to hear. People fill in what they want to hear, and you avoid provoking strong reaction with a more explicit position.

• Trump was clearly tough on illegal immigration. But he dialed it back by focusing on those who committed additional crimes after entering. This allowed people on both sides to see what they wanted - those supporting immigration could agree that we needed to be tough on illegal immigrant criminals.
• When commenting on Trump, Scott Adams disavowed Trump for his racist ambiguity while praising Trump’s persuasive accomplishments. This allowed Trump critics to not reject Scott Adams immediately.
• (Shortform example: Trump said that gay marriage was a state issue, and that states have already decided. To gay marriage supporters, this sounded better than a denial of gay rights. To conservatives, this highlighted state rights and less federal control.)

Another strategy: If you have an argument to make, neutralize the predictable counterarguments upfront. People who agree with your counterarguments, who would otherwise be your opponents, will identify with you. Meanwhile, people who disagree with the counterarguments will dismiss them and focus on your main argument.

• (Shortform example: Say you’re writing an opinion that guns should be regulated more. Note beforehand that you know most gun owners are legally abiding citizens, that your friends are gun owners, you’ve gone shooting before and find it fun, you know gun owners care about home safety, that it will be impossible to confiscate guns in this country. Then talk about how mass shootings do need to be stopped somehow. Gun owners will have their concerns about their motives neutralized upfront, so they’ll listen to your point more.)

Highlight the Contrasts

People pick up on contrasts more than things in a vacuum. This is a basic cognitive phenomenon (going all the way to visual perception in our retinal cells).

Present your idea in the context of alternatives that are clearly worse. Empower it with visuals and employment of fear.

• By presenting all the options, including the bad ones, you gain credibility for being thorough.

Examples

• When trying to impress people, participate in activities at which you excel compared to others. People will form an impression of you as generally talented, even if you are otherwise equal to others.
• Compare someone’s small issue with a big problem. This will re-frame their small worries.
• Presidents pick running mates who complement them somehow, but do not spark concerns about why the #2 is not #1.
  • Pence was a seasoned politician and classic conservative. But standing next to the charismatic and colorful Trump, he looked pale and staid.
  • Same with Clinton picking Al Gore and Reagan picking George HW Bush.
  • However, when Bush needed a running mate, he picked the even more blase Dan Quayle. Since Bush was already less charismatic than Reagan, now Quayle was two levels of charisma away from Reagan.

Anchor to an Extreme, then Dial it Back

People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state.

Start with an extreme, then dial it back. People will see the moderation as a concession, and see you as more moderate than you might really be.

• When selling a business, prime the buyer by mentioning the high price paid by someone else in a different context. It might be totally unrelated - like someone buying a $100 million yacht.

When you have a negative reputation, act in opposition to it

• Trump had a reputation for being Hitler. He deliberately acted more moderately, scaling back his deportation plans and dropping support for waterboarding

Clarify Your Intent

What matters more than what you say is what the listener believes you are thinking.

You can pay lip service to things, but this is heavily discounted if the listener knows you’re being disingenuous.

You can say awful things as jokes, but people can forgive you if they know you don’t mean bad intent.

• On McCain, Trump joked that he preferred war veterans who weren’t captured. According to Adams, to a California sense of humor, this is an attack on the individual. To a New York sense of humor, people are laughing at the awful inappropriateness of the joke, not at McCain for being captured.
• Thus to a portion of the country, Trump was refreshing for his bluntness and honesty, even if he said some things displeasing in normal politics

Construct Sentences Deliberately

First impressions matter. People weigh the first part of a sentence more than the second part.

• Hillary had a series of tweets/slogans: “Imagine President Trump [doing some bad thing.” “Love Trumps Hate.” The problem is that the first few words of each phrase suggests an action that is counterproductive: “Imagine President Trump, “Love Trump”

Miscellaneous Tactics

Here are a variety of tactics in the book, though Scott Adams does not pursue any to much depth.

Social Proof

“Many people are saying…” This establishes some credibility for what Trump was saying, even if exaggerated.

Direct Requests

“Believe me…” This is a direct command disguised as throwaway words.

Ask directly for what you want.

Repetition

Repetition is persuasion. It reinforces a message and makes it more readily available.

Trump: “It’s true. It’s true.”

Hypnosis

Hypnosis works well when the subject has no objection to modifying a behavior. It works for phobias; it doesn’t work for smokers and overeaters who want to keep doing it. It doesn’t make people do things they know to be wrong while fully conscious.

How then, do hynposis demonstrations make people do embarrassing things? As an observer, you project your preferences on the subjects, thinking you would never do those things, thus making hypnosis seem to have dramatic powers. In reality, part of the illusion is selecting subjects who would normally be willing to do silly things in public.

Detect Lies

When accusing someone of wrongdoing, a not guilty person will immediately deny the accusation and castigate you for even suggesting the mistake. A guilty person will ask what evidence you have, since they want to know if they can double down on the lie or need to confess.

New-CEO Move

Create visible victories within days of taking the job to set the tone.

Within days of his inauguration, Trump declared victories for Ford and Carrier to set a good first impression for the direction of the economy.

People Get Used to You Over Time

People get used to minor annoyances if enough time passes. If your brain didn’t habituate to your environment, every little annoyance would be paralyzing.

For Trump, most people expected that their initial first impression would remain stable, and the disbelief they felt about Trump being a candidate would persist throughout the election cycle. Adams suspected the opposite - that people who were undecided would get used to his personality over time, and the novelty would wear off.

Dilute the Outrage

If you have one controversy, people will impale you on it. If you have 100, people will dilute their attention, with none gaining enough force to kill you.

Even though liberal coverage of Trump was usually negative, he introduced so many points of controversy daily that he couldn’t be impaled by any single barb. He deflected attention off big stories by introducing new provocations. One might mistake this as buffoonery; instead, Adams suggests this was deliberately direction attention to topics favorable to him.

Think Past the Sale

Make the subject imagine what happens after a decision has been made, biasing the person toward making the decision.

Examples Using Multiple Persuasion Strategies and Tactics

Here are a few examples of Trump using multiple persuasive tools together in a single response.

Rosie O’Donnell

In a debate, Megyn Kelly asked, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’...” Trump interrupted, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” The crowd laughed and applauded. When Kelly finished the question, Trump continued with an answer about the problem of political correctness.

Here are the persuasive tactics Trump used, in just 3 words:

• Visual image - Rosie O’Donnell was a recognizable image, especially for people who disliked her.
• Pacing and leading - he knew his base detested O’Donnell for her outspoken liberal views, so the image was triggering
• High-ground maneuver - instead of apologizing for his remarks, he took to the high ground on the destructiveness of political correctness. This neutralized the question so that his seemingly insulting comments no longer mattered.
• Get people talking - the quip was so novel and interesting to ignore, the attention focused on him other than his 16 competitors.

Scott Adams considers this response a masterful move. Trump “converted Kelly’s attack into pure energy” and harnessed that energy for his own purposes.

Pope

Trump was asked a question about the Pope’s criticism of capitalism.

Engaging on this level was a lose-lose - if he agreed with the Pope he would be against capitalism; if he disagreed, he would risk offending religious people. Either way, this would be boring.

Trump responded that he would tell the Pope that ISIS is coming to get him, and they have plans to take over the Vatican. This is a tremendous visual image, and it completely changes the topic.

Exercise: Persuade Better

Try to be more persuasive in an upcoming situation.

• What is an upcoming situation where you need to be persuasive? This can be at work or in personal life.

• How can you add visual imagery to your argument to make it more persuasive?

• Pick a favorite persuasive tool from the strategies or tactics. What is it? How can you use it in your persuasive argument?

Notes on the 2016 Election

These are remaining notes on the 2016 US Presidential election that didn’t fit clearly into the persuasive ideas above.

On Trump’s Campaign Tactics

For some critics, Trump’s lack of specificity on his policies was maddening. But for his supporters, this was fine - he matched their overall priorities, and supporters trusted him to get the details right once elected.

Scott Adams always knew Trump would drift back to the middle once elected, so Adams wasn’t concerned about Trump’s actual policies.

During the election, a wide range of issues were discussed, and Trump endured endless criticism. While this in total might have seemed to sink Trump, in reality the average person can hold only a handful of issues in her mind. Any less important topic fades from memory. All that she would remember is a general impression, that Trump didn’t apologize and his opponents called him a liar, like always.

Reflections on Trump’s Scandals

Trump had a number of scandals during the campaign, and while liberals hoped each one would sink Trump, they rarely had the impact hoped.

Scott Adams reflects on the impact of each scandal.

Trump’s Taxes

• Releasing taxes was a losing situation if he had truly scandalous things in it. It’d invite endless scrutiny that he’d have to defend. Since most voters aren’t versed in accounting, mountains might be made of molehills.
• In this case, it was better for opponents to imagine problems than for Trump to face them head-on.
• Trump’s missing taxes invoked little visual imagery and fear, so the persuasive impact was likely low.

KKK Slow Denial

• In an interview on CNN, Trump was asked about KKK grand wizard David Duke and whether he would explicitly say he didn’t want the votes of white supremacists. Trump hemmed and hawed, saying he didn’t know much about David Duke and would have to look more into it. Trump later said he had earpiece trouble that explained his confusion.
• Given that Trump had previously disavowed support of the KKK and did so a day after the interview, Adams believe there was some chance Trump actually had earpiece trouble. But this was a clear persuasive error.
• If it was strategic, Trump may have been simply waiting until the last moment to dissociate from a possible ally.
• Adams considers this the biggest error in the campaign, as it fed the narrative of him as a dark racist.

Judge Curiel

• A lawsuit against Trump University reached a court whose judge was of Mexican heritage. Trump said he wasn’t sure the judge could be impartial because she was Mexican. Trump explained that he meant the judge that because of Trump’s illegal immigration policies, the judge would indirectly be biased.
• Taken least graciously, Trump was literally saying that Mexican judges couldn’t be objective.
• Adams considers this a win-win. After his (clumsy) statement, the judge would either rule against Trump and he would seem validated; or the judge would overcorrect for the bias and allow the extension Trump sought, which would remove the toxic Trump U from the election cycle.

Khan Controversy

• At a DNC convention, a Muslim lawyer talked about his son who died in the military. When asked about the speech, Trump wondered why his wife stood silently on the stage and implied that Muslim convention stifled female speech.
• Trump was painted as anti-veteran and a xenophobe. In his favor, this might have triggered fears of outside beliefs becoming dangerous for domestic women.
• Adams believes this was a small negative for Trump, if not neutral. He had done enough to support veterans in the past that he couldn’t commonly be seen as anti-veteran.

Pussygate

• When Trump was preparing for a TV show, he said to the host, "when you're a star, they [women] let you do it, you can do anything... grab them by the pussy."
• This was bad for Trump. It had a strong visual element and fed his reputation as a dark sexist.
• But as a silver lining, it actually softened his Hitler image - he got promoted to an ordinarily flawed guy engaging in some lewd talk. And he already had some element of a “bad boy” image, so it wasn’t as shocking than if he’d presented himself as an angel.

Reflections on Clinton’s Scandals

“Basket of deplorables”

• Clinton said half of Trump’s supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic...a basket of deplorables.” Trump said this pointed to her “true contempt for everyday Americans.” Adams considers Trump’s choice of the word “contempt” as ideal, much better than “awful, inappropriate, sick,” etc.
• This furthered the perception that Clinton was fighting for her team and not for all of America. It rallied Trump supporters who were tired of being attacked for being racists when they were primarily interested in his character and politics.

Wikileaks, Comey, Email server

• Clinton used a private email server as Secretary of State, leading to a series of related allegations involving impropriety around information - DNC emails showing a shared debate question, Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
• All of this virtual tech stuff got conflated and gave the impression that something just wasn’t quite right - where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This also fit the confirmation bias of “Crooked Hillary.”
• While many might have pointed to this as a reason to vote for Trump, Adams believes that this was a “fake because” - Trump voters had made up their minds, and this was just an excuse for them to declare support for Trump.