CXL Scholarship- Digital psychology & Persuasion MiniDegree — Week 6 of 12

Hello,

I am here again with one more review of minidegree of Digital Psychology and Persuasion. This is my 6th week of learning! could not believe that time flies so fast! I mean there is just few more weeks till Christmas. Although, holidays probably will be different this year..:( but we will see! Today I wanna talk about a really interesting course: Nonconscious motivation, so I have learned about Dual process theory, liking, social proof, authority, reciprocity Let’s start!

Dual Process theory

Probably the one that has received most attention in pop psychology is the right brain, left brain split where the right brain is associated with emotion and art and creativity and the left brain is the sort of reasoning, rational side that does speech and math and logic and so on. Yes, those activities do tend to skew towards one side of the brain or the other but, in fact, science has shown that our brain’s very flexible.That area can change over time. If there’s injury to one part of the brain that function even can be relocated.

Every decision-making process seems to involve various parts of the brain. Nothing’s ever happening just in the right side of the brain or the left side of the brain. So it’s useful short hand.If you want to say something is a left brain idea, that, people will understand that but not so good for thinking about how our brains actually work. There was a three brain theoryt hat was popular for a whileand is still actually referred today sometimes in business contexts and that split up a little bit more. The lizard brain that was primarily instinct,the paleo brain that was emotion, and then the neo brain that was, again, that conscious portion of our brain.The modern brain.And that theory, the original one was the, went all the way back to our lizard or our dinosaur days.

There’s something called the reflective impulsive model. A couple German psychologists came up with this with reflective being focused on facts and values and then the impulsive driven more by association, motivation. Not that much used either in science or business these days. Now one that I do find kind of useful the elephant and the rider metaphor. Idea comes from a scientist named Jonathan Haidtwho basically likens the duality of our brain to a rider on an elephant.And basically assigns the rider about one percent of the responsibility for the direction and the elephant for 99 percent.

And the rider’s a lot smaller than the elephant so what they encourage you to do to change behavior, now in their case they were talking about changing an individual’s behavior. But you can think about that as changing your customer’s behavior too,is to, in essence, you erase obstacles in the path of the elephant and if you make it really easy for the elephant to get to the destination you want, that’s the path that the elephant will pursue and of course that sounds an awful lot like eliminating friction as we just spoke about.

And then there’s system two and that’s conscious control, high effort, our thought processes that use logic, verbal reasoning and so on.It’s important to understand that system one is generally considered to be the default system. That’s the system that our brains are in, more or less, automatically.That’s the default.That’s the system they want to be in.So that if you are trying to push your customer’s brain into that system two thinking,it’s going to be hard work for you and it’s going to be hard work for your customer’s brain.

Liking

It’s easy to find shared attributes using social media these days.You can look at somebody’s LinkedIn profile, their Facebook profile,and almost undoubtedly, you’re going to come up with three or four things that you have in common. And as you introduce those,you will create that liking effect. Also, very effective if you are in a person’s house or office you will find things that you recognize,you have in common.

Studies show that when you flatter somebody, they will like you more and they will remember more of what you say. And the strange thing is that additional studies have found that those effects happen even if the flattery is insincere. Even if, for instance, you were talking to a car salesperson and they’re complimenting you.

Social Proof

Classic social proof is showing that you’ve got a lot of subscribers.In this case, not only is there a large numberof subscribers, saying this is why you should give us your email address because you’ll be joining a half million other people who already have done so.

Another kind of differentiation in social proof is whether it’s action based or preference based. For instance, if you’re selling a product, you could say people ordered your product or people prefer your product.For a video, you could say that 3,000 people viewed the video or 3,000 people liked the video.For an example, you could say,20 thousand designers, use our software.Saying 20 thousand designers prefer our software would probably be a legitimate statement.

Authority

Authority comes from a variety of things.It comes from position, from a uniform and many other things.

Tim Ferriss is an authority himself.He’s a New York Times bestselling author,latest book hit number one on the bestseller chart,so you wouldn’t think that he would nee da lot of other authority, but in fact,he uses authority himself on his website. He has quotations from authority sites like The New York Times and Wired magazine, and various other folks all showing that hey, okay,these authority symbols also recognized that Tim Ferriss is a really smart guy.And he uses social proof in different places by showing that his book is at the topof the bestseller charts for a couple of very popular publications.And also he’s got thousands and thousands of reviews with an amazing number of citations and so on.

Reciprocity

Now reciprocation sometimes called reciprocity, is Cialdini’s next principle,and it basically means that if I do something for you, you are more likely to do something for me in return. And there’s a couple key elements in reciprocation

Now you may have run across Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula.And this is something that’s used by internet marketers, sometimes high pressure marketers to sell information products and actually all kinds of products. And I think there’s something to be learned from that.Even if you may not employ all the tactics that the launch calls for,if you follow the outline, they almost always begin with a series of videos.

With this I am ending today’s post, I hope someone will find it helpful. Thanks for reading till end, have a great day!