Invisible Influence: The Power to Persuade Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

6

Compliance-Causing Questions

When you ask anyone if they intend to take some specific action, they become more likely to follow through than if they had never been asked.

And it doesn’t matter if the person responds “no” or not.

Your asking and their entertaining the question creates an intention that tends to remain available to higher level “employees of you” until you have done the deed.

Now, do understand that people ask you intention questions all the time and you do not act on all of them. But you act on far more intention questions than you might think possible.

It’s the way the brain is wired and how the processes all interact with each other.

If you ask someone, “Will you buy a Mac before Christmas?” that someone is much more likely to buy a Mac than the person you asked, “Will you buy a computer before Christmas?” The second person is much more likely to buy a computer than the person you asked nothing of.

A one-second question will very probably cause them to buy a new laptop, or in the first case a Mac, much more often than you or they would have predicted.

The employees of you are fast at work. And they do keep track of information.

As soon as you buy the computer, the employee pulls the constant nagging reminders about computer purchases and the notion is forgotten.

Let’s get more precise here.

“Are you going to go to dinner with me this month?”

You ask that question and the other person now has an employee (a part) in charge of making certain that she goes out ...