Scott Adams' Blog

“Excuse me”

Posted May 18th, 2016 @ 9:48am in #Trump #megyn kelly

Last night I watched Megyn Kelly’s much-anticipated interview with Donald Trump. Here are my quick reactions in terms of persuasion.

Megyn Kelly was the big winner for the night. Her new show probably had strong ratings and it was well-timed to promote her book release.  She also did a great job of connecting with Trump on a personal level. And kudos on her style decisions – the red dress was perfect. You rarely see someone make a whole barrel of lemonade from one lemon, but Kelly is pulling it off. Impressive.

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Impossible To Ignore

Posted May 17th, 2016 @ 10:06am in #trump #clinton2016

I added a new book to my Persuasion Reading List. The book is Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions

This is a must-read for anyone interested in influencing an audience. The book explains the science behind making things memorable and shows you how to do it. And memory is the foundation of influence.

Full disclosure, the author is a friend of mine, and a business colleague. I have hired Dr. Simon twice to consult on my projects. She crafted the slides I use for public presentations as well as a Slideshare presentation about my book.

How good is she? Well, in the old days people would come up to me after I gave a speech and compliment me for being entertaining. These days the first question is usually “Who made your slides and how can I hire that person?”

Seriously. That happens nearly every time. And I disappoint people by saying they probably can’t afford her. But most people can afford a book, so this should help.

If you want to see some presentations that use Dr. Simon’s methods, check out these two.

Presentation 1 (About memory)

Presentation 2 (About my book)

And if you want to see how Dr. Carmen evaluated Trump versus Clinton in terms of memorable campaign content, read the analysis below that I asked her to put together. She’s not taking sides, just pointing out technique. 

In Dr. Simon’s words…

What does science tell us about the current political messages?

In the book Impossible to Ignore, I advocate that memory is at the root of all decision-making. So if we want to influence people’s choices, we must influence what they remember. How does this play in the current political elections? We can answer this question by understanding how memory works and what candidates are doing to stay on people’s minds long enough to impact their final choice.

1. We remember what we understand

Check out the Hillary’s and Trump’s official web sites. Looking at a screen shot “above the fold,” which message are viewers more likely to remember in a few days from now? Example A or Example B? The former is confusing, indistinct, scattered – literally and metaphorically, therefore forgettable. The latter is crisp, clear, easy to understand… in short, memorable.

Example A

Example B

2. We remember not only what is repeated, but what is repeatable.

It is intuitive to believe that repetition leads to memory. And we tend to repeat what is repeatable. But what makes a message easily repeatable? Science demonstrates that one of the criteria for a repeatable message is portability.

Take famous movie lines, such as “Say hello to my little friend” (Scarface), “You talking to me?” (Taxi Driver), “I’ll have what she’s having” (When Harry Met Sally) – these phrases contain simple words that can be used in many contexts, beyond their original habitat. 

Analyzing Trump’s and Hillary’s message – it is easy to repeat “Make America Great Again” – simple syntax and we can replace the word “America” with something else and use it in different contexts, from trivial to serious (Make pancakes great again or Make democracy great again). For Hillary…we don’t know what her message is and what we should repeat. Ironically, her home page repeats Trump’s name…

3. Nostalgia is memorable

Nostalgia is an emotion that helps to abstract and extract meaning. It is especially effective with cynical audiences because it levels the knowledge in the room. And when everyone feels like an equal, people are more likely to trust each other, and more likely to allow themselves to be swayed in a certain direction by others.

The formal definition of nostalgia is a “bittersweet longing for home.” During this emotional state, we yearn for an idealized or sanitized version of the past. In reminiscing about the “good, old days,” we ignore many negative traces.

Nostalgia works best when we are torn between the past and the future…whenever there is some anxiety between two worlds, one that used to be and one that is emerging without much direction.

“Make America Great Again” works because it romances the past and many people tend to look back to the past for emotional security. What’s less threatening and comforting will feel good.

By contrast…to what mental spot is Hillary sending people with her messaging?

Since there is no crisp slogan, it is hard to anchor the brain to a secure spot, from which it can make decisions.

— end —

You just learned something. Read the book for more. Follow on Twitter here: @areyoumemorable

Trump’s VP Pick Prediction

Posted May 17th, 2016 @ 8:50am in #Trump

Here’s a good summary on Business Insider of the top 14 likely VP picks for Trump. See if you can predict who Trump will choose.

Few things are harder to predict than a VP choice because the situation stays fluid until the actual selection. And frankly, I don’t know much about the fourteen people mentioned in the link. You probably don’t know much about them either. But watch how much that doesn’t matter.

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Reframing Our Problems

Posted May 16th, 2016 @ 8:56am in #Trump #ISIS #Economy

ISIS Reframing

The United States treats ISIS like a military problem, which it is. But I’ve written in this blog that it might be more useful to think of ISIS, and terrorism in general, as a persuasion problem with a military component. Framed this way, the military is just one element of persuading the other side to stop trying to kill us. 

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The John Miller Thing

Posted May 15th, 2016 @ 10:32am in #Trump

By now you have heard the news that back in the eighties Donald Trump sometimes pretended he was his own publicist and called members of the media to say good things about Trump’s projects. He used the names John Miller and John Barron. 

We also learned this week that the New York media always knew Trump made those calls himself. It was an open secret. And he still denied it. What-the-heck?

I won’t waste your time speculating about whether it was really Trump on those audio recordings that recently surfaced. Because it was Trump. Instead, I’ll give you some context so you can decide for yourself why Trump did it and why he later denied it.

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The Mother of All Campaign Errors

Posted May 13th, 2016 @ 9:34am in #Trump

This is one of the biggest campaign errors you will ever see. It is a Clinton tweet that accidentally looks pro-Trump. 

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Power, Persuasion, and Attractiveness

Posted May 13th, 2016 @ 9:05am in #Trump #clinton2016

I created two surveys on Twitter to see which candidate for president of the United States has the most attractive supporters. My Twitter followers are mostly pro-Trump, and male, so I expected the biased result you see below. That didn’t make it any less funny.

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About Those Trump Policy Details

Posted May 11th, 2016 @ 8:29am in #Trump

Do you remember a few months ago when people were saying Donald Trump didn’t really want to be president? I don’t hear that now. Trump ended that speculation by becoming the presumptive GOP nominee. That’s one way to do it.

I also remember a lot of people calling Trump a “clown” last year. That was before he annihilated sixteen of the best candidates that the Republican party has ever fielded. That doesn’t seem so clownish.

Do you remember all of Trump’s vulgar insults from last year? It turns out that those linguistic kill shots were engineered for persuasion, and A-B tested at live rallies for effectiveness. Today, no one doubts how well those Trump nicknames worked.

Have I mentioned that when Trump was a child, his minister was the famous Norman Vincent Peale? Peale wrote a huuuuugely influential book called The Power of Positive Thinking. Critics said the book is full of unsubstantiated claims. (Sound familiar?) Critics also said the book uses well-known hypnosis techniques. Hypnosis? Hmmm. That’s the sort of skill that could turn a much-hated person into a president.

As a side note, Peale was good friends with Richard Nixon. That was probably a coincidence. It is probably also a coincidence that Nixon is credited with one of the most important hypnosis gambits of all time.  The gambit was so successful that it has Nixon’s name on it. It’s called “Nixon goes to China.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. That gambit might remind you of “Trump Goes to Megyn Kelly’s Interview.” Anyway, I digress.

My point today is that Donald Trump does not have as many policy details as his critics demand. And if a candidate does not have sufficient policy details, it might mean that candidate is a stupid clown who is not serious about being President of the United States.

Or…

It might mean that Trump is a skilled persuader who understands that people don’t make decisions based on policy details, logic, reason, common sense, or any other illusion of rationality. People are emotional creatures who rationalize their actions after the fact. Science knows that free will is an illusion. Trump knows it too. I say that about Trump with confidence because you can’t be a Master Persuader until you understand that people are fundamentally irrational.

So what do you do if you want to persuade voters but you don’t want to give policy details that are nothing but targets for critics? A trained persuader would create a situation in which everyone can see whatever they want to see. Trump literally takes both sides of the issues whenever he can. As a candidate, he’s a human Rorschach test. I might see in Trump a skilled persuader who always makes aggressive opening offers, and you might see a future dictator. We are looking at the same set of facts but we are primed by our experiences to interpret them differently. I study persuasion in all its forms and perhaps you watch the History Channel too much. Trump’s persuasion strategy depends on a growing number of voters finding something they like about him and fewer people reflexively making History Channel analogies. So far, it seems to be working. You’ll see Trump’s strategy fully-flowered over the summer. Watch for how many different reasons people offer for why they support him. That’s your tell.

From a business standpoint, Trump knows that Presidents make decisions based on current knowledge, not past knowledge. And by next year, a lot of what we think we know will be updated. If Trump said today exactly what he plans to do next year, it would be dumb. No CEO acts that way. No president acts that way either. It is useful to have broad policy preferences, but the details will change because of negotiations and because of newer information.

You also have to assume that a sitting President has more information than any of the candidates. At least I hope so. And that means anything the candidates say about fighting ISIS, for example, is probably under-informed. The same could be said for the economy because a president typically has more and better advisors than a candidate.

Here’s a little test you can try at home. In your mind, divide your friends and coworkers into two groups. One group understands a lot about making business decisions and one group has no business experience. Ask each of them individually this question:

How much detail should Trump provide on his policies?

A. Lots of detail so we know exactly what he plans to do.

B. We only need the big picture now because the details will be negotiated later, and the environment will change by then. Also, presidents have access to better advice and information than candidates.

I predict that your most experienced friends and coworkers will choose B. Let me know in the comments how it goes.

—

If you think Norman Vincent Peale is dead, you might like my book that has nothing to do with him. 

The Apology Gambit

Posted May 9th, 2016 @ 12:52pm in #Trump #clinton2016

One thing we know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t apologize when he is wrong. He doesn’t apologize when he is offensive. He doesn’t apologize for mistakes. As crazy as that sounds, I have blogged that it gives him a sort of superpower for negotiating. He creates an expectation that Donald Trump never budges even while he makes other people budge all the time. 

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A Few Observations on Clinton-Trump Persuasion

Posted May 6th, 2016 @ 9:56am in #Trump #clinton

In no particular order…

The Paul Ryan Exchange

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said yesterday, “I’m just not ready to back Donald Trump.” That was an example of good negotiating. “Not ready” means he hopes to be able to back Trump someday, but only if Trump changes in some unspecified ways that Ryan wants. It gives Ryan leverage. It was a strong move.

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