Bovee and Thill's Most Popular Business Communication Online Magazine Posts

How to change attitudes months after a persuasive message is delivered.

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations.

Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for.

Psychological research on persuasion suggests that stories which transport people are more likely to be persuasive.

According to positive psychologists, saying "thank you" is no longer just good manners, it is also beneficial to the self.

To take the best known examples, studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states, and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.

Contrary to our intuition, research suggests that more trusting people are better than cynics at detecting when others are lying.

The World Wide Web is growing at rapid pace. On average, more than a billion new pages are added to it every day.

To give you an idea of how big world wide web is, this video, 60 Seconds, will cover some really interesting facts about websites that we use on a day-to-day basis.

You ask someone for a favour and they say no. Where do you go from there?

According to two experiments conducted by Boster and colleagues, you ask: "Why not?", then try to deal with the objections.

The key is transforming the 'no' from a flat refusal into an obstacle to be surmounted. If you can deal with the obstacle, the theory goes, your request is more likely to be granted.

Boster and colleagues tested this approach against these three other well-established methods of gaining compliance to a request:

Perfection is hard to achieve in any walk of life and persuasion is no different. It relies on many things going just right at the crucial moment; the perfect synchronisation of source, message and audience. But even if perfection is unlikely, we all need to know what to aim for.

To bring you the current series on the psychology of persuasion I've been reading lots of research, much more than is covered in recent posts. As I read, I noticed the same themes cropping up over and over again.

Here are the most important points for crafting the perfect persuasive message, all of which have scientific evidence to back them up.

Many organisations claim they want to foster creativity—and so they should—but unintentionally, through their working practices, creativity is killed stone dead.

That's what Teresa Amabile, now Director of the Harvard Business School, found when looking back over decades of her research in organisations (Amabile, 1998). As part of one research program she examined seven companies in three different industries, having team members report back daily on their work.

After two years she found marked differences in how organisations dealt with creativity. Whether or not they intended to, some of the organisations seemed to know the perfect ways to kill creativity, while others set up excellent environments for their employees to be creative.

Since so many organisations seem to be aiming to kill creativity, here are the six main methods: . . .

There are some wild claims out there for the power of visualisation.

Things like: if you can imagine it, then it will come to you. Of course there's always been a huge market for telling people things they want to hear, even if it's complete rubbish.

Still, visualisation can certainly be important in reaching goals.