Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Persuasion

An interesting interview from Freakonomics of a couple of authors. They wrote Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.

Some of the comments:
When haggling is possible, I decide the price I want to pay for an item and then place that amount of money in the seller’s hand. If they do not agree to the price I ask for my money back. They almost always would rather keep the money in their hand then the item.

— Posted by Valpey

One technique I saw demonstrated lately was to repeatedly gesture with one hand while talking about unquestionably negative things, and the other hand for clearly positive things. ‘Weighting’ the hands in this way allows you to influence further conversation by simply moving one hand or the other. It’s a neat trick.

— Posted by LL

I prefer to wave my hand by someone’s face once and say: “These are not the droids you are looking for.” It doesn’t always work but I often at least get a chuckle.

— Posted by JC

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