Dr. Seuss
Originally uploaded by lazaro

In 2002 I went to a Roy Williams (Wizard of Ads) seminar and he talked quite a bit about sound, rhyme and of course Dr. Seuss.

In essence here’s what I got out of it…

The largest part of the human brain involves the memory and
processing of SOUND.

Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) found early on that anapest is a very powerful sound tool.

In 1937, while Geisel was returning from an ocean voyage to Europe, the rhythm of the ship’s engines inspired the poem that became his first book.

He took over the children’s book market from good old “Dick” and “Jane” with his powerful use of strange words and more importantly- his use of anapest.

Most of Geisel’s books are written in anapestic tetrameter. (Although sometimes he would use trochaic tetrameter and from time to time iambic tetrameter.)

According to Williams…

“Any competent cognitive neuroscientist will confirm that echoic memory is vastly superior to iconic memory. Words, statements, phrases, jingles, and songs, which surprise Broca’s area of the brain, are much more easily implanted and recalled than visual images.”

“Echoic retention causes people to remember things they never committed to memory, and a working knowledge of it gives one the ability to work miracles through the power of words. Echoic retention and the power of words is the heart and soul of advertising, though very few ad professionals understand it.”

The only thing most people could remember after the long OJ Simpson trial was…….one two THREE, one two THREE.

“If it doesn’t fit you must acquit” – anapest.

Just read a recent blog on anchoring here: Mind Control Technique of Anchoring

It reminded me that many people don’t realize that there are two things that are called “anchoring” that are useful in persuasion.

One is from NLP and it’s discussed in the article above. It has also been covered by hundreds of other people in NLP community (including myself) so I won’t go into it in depth here.

I will summarize NLP Anchoring as follows: NLP anchoring involves creating a cue/trigger during a specific emotional state and then using that cue in the future to elicit that emotional state in a different context. In essence, it is the emotional equivalent to Pavlovian classical conditioning.

The other kind of anchoring, often called the “anchoring and adjustment heuristic,” is just as powerful, although different.

“Heuristic” is just a fancy name for a mental shortcut people use to solve problems and make decisions. Humans use “common sense,” and “intuition” to solve many day-to-day decision problems. These little mental shortcuts we use to make decisions have been very helpful to humans. They have allowed us to survive as a species and probably helped us to get to the top of the food chain. In essence, we can take incomplete information and often make relatively good decisions from it.

The problem with these mental shortcuts or heuristics is that in the modern world they can be manipulated to affect our decisions without us knowing. In fact, we are manipulated often by our tendency to use heuristics to make decisions.

Some of the most blatant manipulation of heuristics is done by politicians, media, government press release writers and attorneys.

That said, what is the “Anchoring Heuristic?” Well first off, the true label (given by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) is the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic.

It is a psychological heuristic that affects the way people intuitively assess value and probability. People use this heuristic when they start with an implicitly suggested reference point (”anchor”) and then make adjustments to reach an estimated value.

What I find interesting about this heuristic is that the subject matter of the “anchor” does not have to be related to the subject matter of the estimated value.

For example, an MIT professor had his students write down the last 2 digits of their social security number. He then had them write down bids on items like wine or chocolate. The half of the students with higher social security digits submitted bids which were 60% to 120% higher than the half of the students with lower social security digits.

HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PIECE TO THIS STUDY: Simply thinking about the first set of numbers highly influences the second numbers the students came up with even though the two numbers are unrelated.

Questions to Ponder:

1. What are some useful applications for the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic?
2. Where might you have been influenced by someone that has manipulated this heuristic?
3. How does Stepped Awareness fit in with this scientifically proven bias?

In my persuasion system I use a concept called “Stepped Awareness.” In general, I believe that how and where someone’s awareness is focused (internally or externally) will influence the decisions they make and therefore is very important in the persuasion process. That awareness can be “stepped” in order to obtain, naturally, the decision you choose.

Although I’ve used a few exercises in seminars to show the power of directing a persons awareness in persuasion, I never found a way to demonstrate it as well as I thought it could be.

Luckily I’ve found this great video: