The art of persuasion should be approached with all responsibility. Recommendations of social psychologists from the USA and Great Britain.
If we want to seduce a child with a book who does not really like reading, then it is better to choose one where the name of the hero is consonant with the name of the child. This recommendation seems strange — which does not prevent it from being scientifically sound. Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini are social psychologists from US universities, and the third author, Steve Martin, runs a large consulting company in the UK and conducts business training, so their 50 ways to be persuasive are quite credible. Some of their observations are paradoxical. For example, it turned out that attempts to keep the national park intact are backfiring due to incorrectly drafted announcements. Compared to the control situation (no announcements), in which thefts were observed in 2,92% of cases, the message «Many visitors carried away pieces of petrified wood, which changes the natural state of the forest» led to an increase in thefts (7,92%). The authors explain this fact by the power of negative social confirmation: if a visitor is told that theft is a common phenomenon (“everyone does it”), then they involuntarily stimulate him to act like everyone else.
Mann, Ivanov and Ferber,
224 s.