How can you say that others can be convinced? Modern brain science tells you the answer

The key to persuasion is to get the prospect's raw brain to quickly understand the value you're demonstrating.

We want to find the code for persuasion, just as anyone with children may have heard of a book called "How to Say Children Will Listen, How to Say Children Will Listen."

Image from the web

Being accepted is essentially a series of reactions in the brain, that is, the other person's brain decides to accept the information you provide, which is a decision-making process. Needless to say, the benefits of mastering this password are like the trick to open the door in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the door is full of countless rare treasures.

If you want to use it well, you must first understand. To open the safe, you have to unlock it; to grasp the password of persuasion, we need to understand the brain.

The brain is magical and complex. At first, I was curious about my own ideas, but due to the limitations of technology, the brain was a black box for ancient people, and all the conclusions came from the observation of phenomena and naïve philosophical speculation (for this part, interested friends can check out the previous article in our column: It is not God who opens the window but yourself | Discoveries of modern neuroscience). With the development of modern science and technology, people have finally begun to have a quantifiable understanding of the brain. If we say that our current good life is due to the rapid development of physics, the discipline that plays a decisive role in the future may be brain neuroscience. The current scientific achievements in brain research are worth taking the time to understand.

First, McLean's Trinitarian hypothesis

People know the body before they know the brain. Other organs of the body have a significant feature, that is, different organs achieve different functions, which is very much in line with our basic understanding of things. So people are also exploring the brain along this path.

With the development of science and technology, there are many technologies that can help scientists better study the brain. For example, computer axial tomography (CAT), electroencephalogram (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation and so on.

An example of an fMRI scan in which the highlighted colors in the brain scan illustrate stronger metabolic activity (image from the web)

In the previous paragraph, there was a very hot news that Musk's company Neuralink was carrying out a brain-computer interface project, which could allow a monkey to play games with brain ideas by implanting brain-computer interfaces. Scientists have been able to point out very finely what a certain part of the brain does and what functions. But for us ordinary people, we don't need to understand neuron-level concepts, we need a simplified, easy-to-understand model.

In 1967, Paul MacLean, a physician at the National Institute of Mental Health, proposed an interesting hypothesis called the "triune brain" theory. He introduced Darwin's theory of evolution and explained the basic functions of the brain. Our brains are the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, divided into three layers from the inside out, in the order in which animals appeared in the evolutionary process.

Trinity Brain (Image from the Internet)

The first layer: the reptile brain. The innermost and earliest evolved central part of the brain, including the brainstem, cerebellum, and basal nucleus. This is the most core part of the brain, controlling our most basic physiological functions, such as digestion, breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, balance and so on. When you eat something, your stomach starts to squirm, and when you are hungry, your stomach grunts, who gave these action instructions? Have you ordered your stomach to start working? It's all automatic and doesn't require us to control it. This part of the brain goes back 500 million years. This part is like assembly language, which can directly manipulate the lowest-level chips.

The second layer: the mammalian brain, also known as the limbic system. As we evolve from reptiles to mammals, we face more complex environments and more complex and advanced brains. At the core, around the reptile brain, new structures are created to accommodate social group life, including structures related to emotions. Therefore, many people also call this part of the brain a perceptual brain, an emotional brain. It controls our anger, fear, pain, joy, sadness, fear, and many other emotion-related feelings. For example, when we see something delicious, we feel happy, and this "happiness" is a function of the limbic system, and then it sends a message to the reptile brain on the first layer, making us smile, or reaching for it. The limbic system converts external stimuli into emotions and then acts on the reptile brain, producing a direct physical response. That is why we are afraid when we ascend to a high level, and our legs are weak and unable to move; why we turn around and run away when danger strikes. Our emotions can bring about a quick response to the body.

Edge systems include:

1. Hippocampus, associated with long-term memory.
2. Amygdala, responsible for emotions, especially fear. Located at the end of the hippocampus, it is almond-shaped and part of the limbic system, which is the brain tissue that produces, recognizes, and regulates emotions, and controls learning and memory.
3. Thalamus, which collects information from the brainstem and sends it to different cortexes, acts like relay stations.
4. Hypothalamus, underneath the thalamus, controls self-balancing behaviors such as eating, drinking, body temperature, circadian rhythms, reproduction, and mood responses.

The third layer, the neocortex, or cerebral cortex, is the neo mammalian brain. This is the newly evolved brain structure that controls higher levels of cognitive function. For example, thinking, reasoning, logical judgment and so on. The neocortex of humans is the most developed of all animals, accounting for 80% of the total mass of our brains. This part of the brain doesn't grow until we're around 20 years old, and the quality peaks.

As Dr. Mark Schön, author of "Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You," says in the book:

"Like the progress of civilization, the human brain has evolved from a primitive state to a more advanced state, and each new and better brain is located in the upper part of the original brain."

In this regard, the famous Japanese physicist and popular science writer Michio Karai has a wonderful analogy: "In a sense, the human brain is like a museum, containing the remnants of all previous stages in millions of years of evolution, expanding rapidly outward and forward in size and function." ”

This hypothesis, although not rigorous, is very explanatory. With the continuous development of science and technology, our cognition of the brain is becoming more and more detailed, and the partition structure of the brain is becoming more and more refined, just like the following picture.

However, these are not the most important things for us, and this model can help us understand how the brain works very well. There's another model that helps us understand the brain's decision-making patterns, and that's the Daniel Kahneman's System One and System Two models.

Ii. Daniel Kahneman

Daniel · Kahneman (image from the internet)

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a psychologist named Daniel Kahneman. The award speech goes like this: The application of integrated insights from the field of psychological research to economics, especially in the context of uncertainty, has made outstanding contributions to human judgment and decision-making.

Kahneman divides the human way of thinking into two categories. One is fast thinking, and system one is a system of intuitive, unconscious, and fast thinking, which is what we often call subconscious, irrational, emotional, and so on. Emotions are like shortcuts to our actions, and when we press them, we will react. This is how the edge system behaves.

The other type is slow thinking, and system two is a conscious thinking system that needs to be actively controlled, which is what we often call rationality. System Two is slower and more energy-intensive, but it is also more fact-oriented and more inclined to logical reasoning. This is the logic of our cerebral cortex.

Let me give you an example. Let's say you're a customer who wants to buy a sales management system and wants to choose one of several candidate suppliers. You invite each salesperson to come to the company for an introduction. It stands to reason that you should focus on the specific content of these solutions, such as what are the characteristics of each supplier's product, how their service capabilities are, which one is more suitable for the actual situation of your company, and so on. However, you may be conscious, more likely to be unconsciously more attentive to the salesperson who is presenting, or to the process of presentation. Which salesman played well at that time, the speech process was more exciting, and the PPT did more beautifully, you gave a higher evaluation. Your colleague kindly reminds you that you may give your explanation that these aspects show the overall strength of the company. However, research data shows that the quality of a product is not related to the process of presentation by the salesperson, but these factors determine your judgment.

This is the problem of system one mentioned above, which is called cognitive bias.

Third, cognitive bias

1. What is cognitive bias

Now, when cognition is mentioned, cognitive bias is mentioned. The so-called cognitive bias is simply the mistakes made by quick thinking.

The so-called cognitive bias "is not an irregular thinking error, but a mindset, a predictable irrationality."

Studying cognitive bias is a hot area. The field of psychology calls it this effect, that effect. For example, the pregnant woman effect, the anchoring effect, the loss aversion effect, the multi-look effect, and so on. Call it an effect because it's not someone's particular mistake, but the same mistake that many people make in many situations. For example, the so-called pregnant woman effect is that usually you don't find out how many people are pregnant, but when you become pregnant yourself, or your wife is pregnant, you will suddenly find that pregnant women on the street are much more special. You buy a blue car and you find out how there are so many blue cars on the road.

2. What are the cognitive biases?

Now, scientists have studied various cognitive biases in great detail, about 200 kinds. A software engineer who is passionate about deciphering the code of human behavior has sorted it out, named 188 cognitive biases, and designed a very beautiful model called the Cognitive Bias Table.

Cognitive Bias Table (Image from the Web)

3. How is cognitive bias formed?

How did our actions come about?

Let's imagine that. You see a dog running towards you, and a visual signal forms in your retina. This signal travels to our neocortex, the area we use for higher cognition. Neocortex analysis and judgment: what kind of dog is this? Why is it running towards me? Will it bite me? After the neocortex makes a judgment, it informs the limbic system of the results, which produces an emotion: fear, which then translates this judgment into electrical and chemical signals transmitted to the reptile brain, controlling the body to turn around and run.

Well, here I made it up. The real situation is that the signal is directly given to the limbic system, and the limbic system is in charge, commanding the body to turn around and run. In primitive societies, this rapid response clearly had a survival advantage. What you see may not be dogs, but wolves.

There is a basic thesis in evolutionary psychology that a certain way of behaving or thinking mode we have now must have been used to solve a specific problem in the evolutionary process of our ancestors, so it can be passed down. Sweet things can give us a quick supply of energy, which is an advantage in the hunter-gatherer era of food shortages. So our brains fix this behavior.

The psychological mechanism of evolutionary formation manifests itself in its present form because it addresses a recurring specific problem related to survival and reproduction in evolutionary history.

— David Bass, Evolutionary Psychology

4. In decision-making, the system dominates one station

There are several reasons for this:

First of all, in the process of evolution, due to the constant pressure of survival, it is necessary to make a rapid response, which gives the system a great opportunity to show its skills. The lion is about to arrive, and we are still conducting a rational analysis?

Secondly, the energy consumption of system two is huge. The time it takes for humans to be free to obtain the energy they need is probably less than a few hundred years. In the process of millions of years of evolution, it has always faced the problem of not having enough to eat. The brain, an organ, accounts for 2% of the total weight of the human body, but consumes 20% of the overall energy. In the context of energy deficit, our brains develop patterns of energy conservation. Therefore, our brains choose to take shortcuts, and the energy-consuming system two is often shelved, and the system one is enough to meet most of the challenges.

Again, evolution has a hysteresis effect. According to the theory of evolutionary psychology, organisms need to go through thousands of generations of life cycles under specific selection pressures to reflect change. To put it bluntly, our current instinct is to form in the Stone Age. This is known as the "evolutionary time lags effect." The environment outside has changed dramatically in just a few millennia, and the settings of natural selection cannot be adapted in sync so quickly. The resulting incongruity is what psychologists call cognitive bias.

That's why, while we have advanced System Two, it's System One that often makes decisions.

Karniman won the Nobel Prize in Economics because he discovered the mystery of people's decision-making. In our normal behavioral decisions, both System One and System Two work, but System Two is too complex and often lazy. So most of the time, people are controlled by the system, which is why there are often biases and mistakes in human decision-making.

We think that our decisions are the rational judgments made by the highest level of the cerebral cortex, but in fact, often, it is the limbic system that really controls most decisions.

Since the edge system is the decision maker, we do what it likes.

Fourth, the theory of selling brain companies

Back to the book "Sales Brain Science| Insight into Customers, Fast Deals". The book's two authors, Patrick Renwack and Christopher Maureen, refer to McLean's Trinity hypothesis, naming the limbic system the primitive brain and the neocortex the rational brain, corresponding to Kahneman's systems one and two, respectively. Combined with the specific practice of sales, their theory was developed: neural maps.

At the heart of sales is persuasion. The insight of Renwacks and Maureen is that the primitive brain is the center of decision-making, and to succeed in persuasion, the information provided must be in a way that the primitive brain accepts. They call it the bottom-up persuasive effect:

"Successful persuasion information must first grasp the primitive brain and then convince the rational brain."

So, how can we better influence our primitive brains? The book gives 6 ways to stimulate, namely: personal, contrasting, sensible, easy to remember, visual and emotional.

What is specific and how to apply it is the main content of our next article.

To summarize:

1) Paul McLean's brain trinity hypothesis gives us a good understanding of how the brain works. Our brains are divided into three layers: the first is the reptile brain, which first evolved to control physiological functions; the second layer is the limbic system, which later evolved to control emotions; and the third layer, the newly evolved brain structure of the neocortex, controls higher cognitive functions.

2. Kahneman divides the way humans think into two categories. One is fast thinking, and system one is a system that relies on intuition, unconsciousness, and rapid thinking, which is how the limbic system behaves. The other type is slow thinking, and system two is a conscious thinking system that needs to be actively controlled, which is what we often call rationality.

3. The study found that system one is the main system for our daily decision-making. However, System One, as the center of decision-making, triggers cognitive bias.

4. Cognitive bias is the kind of mistakes made by quick thinking.

5) The science of persuasion is essentially to provide information to the other party in a way that is easier and better accepted by the primitive brain.

bibliography:

1. by Patrick Renwacks and Christopher Morin. "Sales Brain Science| Insight into Customers, Fast Deals"
2. By Kalai Doo. "Kalai Michio Physics Science Popularization Series (all four volumes)"
3. By Bill Sullivan. "Nice to meet "me""
4. by Dan Simmons. The Devil Is Behind You (All Three Books)
5. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
6. By Catherine Gallotti. Cognitive Psychology: Cognitive Science and Your Life
7. by Robert Sapowski. "Behavior"
8. Wan Weigang Column "Elite Daily Lesson"