Guest Post by Scott Adams
I’m seeing a lot of “list” journalism now that is designed to paint President Trump in a negative light. The power of the list is that the more items on the list, the more persuasive it looks, even if the items are weak. Here’s a good example.
If you want to create a persuasive political attack list, be sure to include the following elements in various combinations.
Continue reading “How to Criticize a Political Opponent Using List Persuasion”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
The common view we see from the mainstream media is that President Trump is a monster and there is no doubt about it. In support of that view, they offer plenty of evidence. And by evidence, I mean they hallucinate they can read minds.
Pundit creates news by reading minds
One of the biggest illusions of life is that we humans are good at deducing the inner thoughts of both strangers and loved ones based on observing their actions. The truth is that we are terrible at knowing what others are thinking. We just think we are good at it. No one is good at it. No one.
Need proof of that claim?
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Now that some time has passed, and emotions have subsided a bit, I can tell you about the best persuasion play of the past year. The credit goes to the anti-Trump media. They convinced much of the world that the President of the United States referred to a bunch of racists with tiki torches in Charlottesville as “fine people.”
Continue reading “The Charlottesville Fake News Was the Best Persuasion Play of the Past Year”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Yesterday President Trump unexpectedly said he would be “honored” to meet North Korea’s Kim Jung-un.
And that’s how a Master Persuader creates an asset out of nothing.
I’ll explain.
By holding out the possibility of meeting with Kim Jung-un, President Trump has conjured out of thin air a virtual “asset” that he can use for negotiating with North Korea. I’m sure the North Korean leader would like the international respect and recognition that such a meeting would confer. Best of all, Jung-un could use that future meeting as evidence for his citizens that he stared-down America and negotiated a great deal in which we remove some of our military assets while they end their nuclear weapons program. Or something like that.
Continue reading “Using Persuasion to Create Assets Out of Nothing”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
I made the mistake of turning on CNN yesterday and saw all the hypnotized pundits trying to work the secret persuasion word “chaos” into every comment about President Trump. That’s your tell that none of the pundits are offering independent opinions. They are part of the hive mind led by some uncredited persuader on their side. Someone told them to say “chaos” a lot, and so they do. This might signal the return of Godzilla. Reminds me of “dark,” their hive-mind word for the summer of 2016.
It appears that Trump’s counter-persuasion for “chaos” involves framing his administration as “disruptive.” That’s a good persuasion move because it doesn’t deny the observations. A disruption looks a lot like chaos from the outside. Two movies on one screen.
Continue reading “Is President Trump Doing Management Wrong?”
Guest Post by Scott Adams
I’m having a fun time watching President Trump flood the news cycle with so many stories and outrages that no one can keep up. Here’s how the math of persuasion works in this situation:
1 outrage out of 3 headlines in a week: Bad Persuasion
25 outrages out of 25 headlines in a week: Excellent Persuasion
At the moment there are so many outrages, executive orders, protests, and controversies that none of them can get enough oxygen in our brains. I can’t obsess about problem X because the rest of the alphabet is coming at me at the same time.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
One of the magical things about economics is that you can create an economic asset out of nothing but persuasion. For example, if you persuade people to be more optimistic about the economy, people invest more money, buy more products, create more jobs, and generally manifest the better economy from their own expectations. This magic of creating wealth from nothing but persuasion is one of the reasons President-elect Trump will be different from other presidents. He knows how to do this particular brand of economic magic. He has been doing it for years with his own company. The more common names for this phenomenon are branding and licensing. Companies license the Trump name for their buildings and other products because they recognize the name as a psychological asset that Trump created by persuasion.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
I’m hearing lots of after-the-fact explanations for why Trump won the election. The most common interpretation of events is that many citizens had a view of the country that pundits, pollsters, and the Clinton campaign missed. But somehow Trump accurately identified the mood of the people – especially in the Great Lakes region – and crafted a message to fit their emotions.
That explanation of events fits the observed data. Trump’s priorities do seem to match what polls tell us people are thinking and feeling. Or at least enough people feel that way to give Trump the Electoral College win. In this view of the world, Trump is a populist who has good instincts about what people want to hear.
But as I have been teaching you for the past year, people can be living in different movies while physically inhabiting the same spacetime. In your movie, Trump might be a populist as the experts are saying. But in my movie, Trump is a Master Persuader. And the script for my movie fits the observed facts just as well as yours. Maybe better.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Today I see in the news that Google is trying to dehypnotize potential ISIS recruits by manipulating what content they see when they try to search for pro-ISIS stuff. That’s mind control. And it works.
Meanwhile, Facebook is trying to have it both ways by insisting that advertising on their platform is effective while claiming the tsunami of fake news articles about the election – which outnumbered legitimate stories – had no impact on the election. But either way, it’s mind control. Because ads work.
Mind control also takes the form of A-B testing, which is common practice for most tech companies. That involves rapidly testing up to thousands of variables for different ad variations until they know what is the most effective way to manipulate consumers. In other words, mind control. And it works.
Twitter is allegedly “shadowbanning” some users – including me – because they don’t like how I might be persuading people. Shadowbanning means limiting how many of my users see my content. That’s mind control, and it works. The fewer people that see what I tweet, the fewer I can influence.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
As amazing as this sounds, I watched a video clip of Dr. Drew explaining to CNN’s Don Lemon that Trump does NOT show signs of insanity or dangerous narcissism. Indeed, as Dr. Drew explained, some healthy narcissism is probably helpful for leaders because they want to be seen as successful. (I have said the same in this blog post, and also this one, which are totally worth another look.)
Is the amazing part of this story that Dr. Drew thinks Trump is probably sane?
No.
The amazing part is that Team Clinton’s persuasion is now so powerful that the question of Trump’s sanity seemed like a legitimate question for the press.
Okay, okay, I know you don’t think the press is legitimate, and CNN is clearly favoring Clinton. But even under those conditions you still need events in the real world to support your pro-Clinton narrative. And apparently CNN thought it had that justification. They had cover from all the pro-Clinton pundits who are saying Trump is mentally unbalanced (with different language).
Guest post by Scott Adams
I have been writing about Donald Trump’s powers of persuasion for months and yet many of my readers are still persuasion doubters. I get that. We like to think of ourselves as creatures of reason.
But we are not creatures of reason. We aren’t even close. Science has known this for a long time.
For example, here’s a story about an experiment that changed men’s votes (from Clinton to Trump) just by priming the men with a gender-related question. The effect was dramatic and immediate.
You should be skeptical of any study until you see it replicated. But I’ve studied persuasion for years, and this study looks credible to me. If you have read my Persuasion Reading List – especially the book Influence – you already know that humans can be reprogrammed this easily.
The effect you see in the study is a big reason I predict Trump will win the general election in a landslide. Trump understands persuasion at this level, as he often demonstrates. His opponents do not. He’s bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight.
Guest Post by Scott Adams
Persuasion is a learned skill. It involves a well-understood set of science-tested tools. For whatever reason, Donald Trump is bristling with talent for persuasion and Hillary Clinton has none (that I can detect) except for basic political skills and her gender identity. Persuasion is not the only talent you want in a president, so I won’t try to oversell it. But let’s see what kinds of issues are susceptible to a president’s powers of persuasion.
I can think of two types of problems that can be solved with persuasion:
1. The Economy
2. Terrorism
Economies need two things in order to function. They need resources, and they need an optimistic mindset. Optimists with access to resources invest in new ventures, and they spend for consumption. That’s all you need for a robust economy, so long as you have an educated citizenry, no natural disasters, no big wars, and the government stays out of your way.
I realize that sounds like an oversimplification of economics, but it isn’t. If you have optimism and resources, (and no huge outside problems) almost everything else takes care of itself in time. Capitalism does the rest.
To a large extent, the mood of citizens determines the future of the economy. In the United States of 2016, resources are plenty. All that matters is how we use those resources. And that depends on our collective psychology. In other words, the entire economy can be persuaded.
Obviously you don’t want too much optimism in an economy. That gives you housing bubbles and stock bubbles. A properly persuasive president would move citizens to the middle of the optimism range where things work well.