Everyone knows that the easiest way to resolve a dispute is to avoid it. However, sometimes a situation requires you to defend your point of view and convince the most stubborn interlocutor of your innocence. The following 10 tips will help you with this.
1. Be careful and polite.
First of all, do not play with the thin threads of a person’s pride: you should not offend him, humiliate him and become personal, you will not prove anything to him and he will go into the defensive position of denying everything in the world (antagonism). And to convince a person in this state is almost impossible.
2. First, strong arguments
First speak the strongest and most powerful arguments for your position. No need to start with little things, immediately release heavy artillery, and only then small infantry to reinforce it.
3. Build trust
Try to increase your status and image: give reasons that you know this in practice, that you have been doing this for many years and got concrete results or made a lot of money from it.
4. Be cunning
A powerful weapon is to say the following: “Yes, that's exactly what you are right in, this is a good thought, but here you are completely wrong ...” When a person feels that his thoughts have been noticed, he can already listen to yours.
5. Rough flattery
Praise the man! Compliments, and especially unexpected compliments, will surprise and please everyone, and this is exactly what you need - to relax your opponent and reduce his control over the situation.
6. Consistency
Rule of sequence: first tell the person what he agrees with (even if these are absolutely obvious things), and then your point of view. The likelihood of agreement in this case increases many times.
7. Take the conversation away from dangerous topics
Avoid “sharp corners” and those that can increase the conflict, as well as those that are a weak point for you.
If something like this pops up, urgently turn off the conversation from this, say: “We are not talking about this, but about ...”, “this has nothing to do with the matter, only ...”.
8. Notice every little thing
Watch for non-verbal behavior of a person, it can show a lot. Non-verbal behavior is posture, gestures and facial expressions. If you notice that after some argument, the person's eyes twitched, then continue to open this argument further and in great detail - this is your strongest argument and the person understands and is nervous.
9. People love the good and the profit.
Convince a person that what you tell him is very useful and even beneficial for him, and that his position on the contrary will not bring him anything other than “just his position”.
10. Show unexpected attentiveness and respect.
Listen carefully to your interlocutor, even if he annoys you: any person will notice that they are attentive to him, and especially those who know that despite the fact that you do not agree with him, you are attentive to him. Thus, you can stand out from other people with whom he has ever argued.
Six universal principles of social influence:
mutual exchange (we feel obligated to provide service for service),
credibility (we are looking for experts to say how to do),
obligations / consistency (we want to act in accordance with our obligations and value system),
scarcity (the less available the resource, the more we want it),
goodwill (the more we like a person, the more we want to say “yes” to him) and
social proof (in our behavior we are guided by what others do).
The more a person who leaves a review looks like a new target audience, the more convincing the message will be. This means that when determining which particular reviews you should provide to potential customers, you should exclude your ego from the process. You should start not with those reviews that you are most proud of, but with those that were left by people whose circumstances are closest to your audience. For example, a school teacher trying to convince a student to attend school more often should be asked to talk about the benefits of studying not as an excellent student from the first desk, but as someone who looks like a truant.
What is one of the most persuasive subjects in the world? Of course you are, a mirror. No one doubts that the main goal of the mirror is to show how we look from the side. But the mirror is also a window that allows you to see - which, perhaps even more important - how we want to look. When we see ourselves in the mirror, we try to act in a more socially desirable way.
Take, for example, a study conducted by sociologist Arthur Beeman and his colleagues at Halloween. Instead of conducting research in a university laboratory or on the street, Beeman temporarily turned eighteen local homes into a research laboratory. When the children asking for sweets rang the doorbell of one of the houses, the researchers greeted them, asked for their names, and then pointed to a large bowl of sweets. They told the children that each of them could take one candy, and, noticing that they needed to do some things, they quickly left the room. The results of the experiment showed that more than a third of the children took more than expected. To be precise, 33.7 percent. Then the researchers decided to see if the level of theft of sweets with the help of mirrors would decrease. In the second experiment, before the bell rang, the researcher turned a large mirror at such an angle that the children who took sweets should see themselves in the mirror. What was the frequency of theft with a mirror? Only 8.9 percent.
How residents of different countries behave in similar situations
Take, for example, the research conducted by Michael Morris and his fellow employees at Citibank, one of the world's largest multinational financial corporations. Scientists conducted a survey of employees at Citibank branches in four different countries: USA, Germany, Spain and China (Hong Kong). We studied the voluntary willingness of employees to help a colleague who asked for help to cope with work. Although many of the factors affecting the respondents were the same, the factors that had the strongest influence varied from country to country.
For example, employees who work in the United States are more likely to use a direct service sharing approach. They asked, “What did this person do for me?” And felt obligated to help voluntarily if the person who had requested the service did them a favor. German employees were most influenced by whether the request corresponded to the rules of the organization. To decide whether to fulfill the request, they tentatively asked: “Does my help comply with the official rules, accepted instructions and standards?” Citibank’s Spanish staff decision was mainly based on friendly relations that encourage loyalty to friends, regardless their position or status. They asked: “Is this person somehow connected with my friends?” And, finally, the Chinese employees primarily appealed to the authorities in the form of devotion to persons with high status who are in a small group. They asked: “Is this request related to someone in my unit, especially someone who is in a high position?”
Robert Cialdini "The Psychology of Persuasion. 50 Proven Ways to Be Convincing"
The book is on the official website of Mann, Ivanov and Ferber Publishing House.
List of CIS stores where you can To buy a book.
Original name: Robert B. Cialdini "Yes !: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive"
About the book in one sentence: You will find out what influences decisions and actions of people in various situations.
