[MUSIC] The previous segment introduced the idea that if there is one key idea to understand about Effective Persuasion it is the idea of Message Adaptation. The idea that different situations present different challenges to persuader's, different problems for persuader's to solve. And a strategy that works in one kind of situation won't necessarily work for some different problem. Which is all very nice in the abstract, but the question is, how do persuasion situations actually differ? That is, what are the different challenges that persuaders face? Well in fact, persuaders can face all sorts of different situations, all sorts of different challenges. And it's not possible here to catalogue all of them or to talk about how to handle all of them. However, there are certain sorts of persuasive challenges that recur, you see them over and over again. And you see these challenges, these problems for persuaders quite widely, that is this persuasive problems are quite general. They're not limited to anyone particular, influence setting or anyone specific target audience or anyone specific sort of desired behavior. And so, for example, influencing your co-workers, or your boss, or your subordinates, or your customers, or your family members. A spouse, children, parents, or your neighbors, or the city council, or the board of a charity where you volunteer, or, or, or. There are some basic fundamental recurring kinds of challenges, kinds of problems that persuaders face across all these different sorts of circumstances. Correspondingly, the toolkit I want to give you concerning how to address these challenges is also meant to be quite general. I want to give you tools that you can use as a basis for influence in all sorts of different concrete situations. What I wanna do now is give you an overview of these recurring persuasion challenges. And then beginning with the next segment, we start working through them, one by one. So, an overview of the challenges. There are four such challenges. Four common problems that a persuader might need to address. And as a way of organizing these four ideas, you can think of them as four different possible answers to a key questions. A questions that persuaders always ask themselves before embarking on persuasive efforts. And that questions is, why aren't people already doing this behavior? Expressed differently, why aren't people already doing what I want? Well, one possible answer is they don't think it's a good idea. That is, they don't have positive attitudes about what it is you want them to do. And so that's the first potential challenge for a persuader. Getting people to have appropriately positive attitudes. Getting them to think that what the persuader is urging is a good idea. But there's a second possible reason that people aren't already doing what you want. Namely, that social considerations are a barrier. What I mean to point to by talking about social considerations is what people think other people think or do. For example, it's possible for a person to have positive attitudes about doing something, but then not do it, because they think that other people think they shouldn't. I'm in favor of it but all these people around me are telling me it's a bad idea. Those social factors are a second possible challenge for persuaders. There's a third possible reason people aren't doing what you want, a third potential problem to address. People's perceived ability to perform the behavior. Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes and the social considerations about what other people think or do are all positive. But people don't think they can perform the behavior. Maybe they don't know how to perform the behavior. And so, they don't even try. And so, sometimes persuaders face the task of addressing that issue. Addressing people's ability to perform the behavior. Fourth, finally. Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes, and the social considerations are all positive, and people know they're able to engage in the behavior. And so, in some sense, they vaguely intend to do what you want. But somehow they don't translate those good intentions into action. That is sometimes the task a persuader faces is the task of helping people convert their intentions into behavior. Each of these is a different kind of persuasive challenge, a different kind of problem or puzzle for persuaders to solve. And because these are different challenges, they require different approaches. That's why, at the very outset, persuaders should ask themselves, why aren't people already doing the thing I want? If the answer is, they don't think it's a good idea, then you need to think about how to change their attitudes. But if the answer is they think it's a good idea, but they don't think they can perform the behavior, well then, you need a different approach. So that's the overview of these four common persuasion challenges we're going to be discussing. In the segments that follow we take up each of these in turn, and talk about how to address each one effectively. [MUSIC]
