How To Elict Emotional Responses To Influence - Awesome!

There's a very strange mental bias that allows palm readers and psychics and truism to flourish. The mind tends to look for "hits" rather than "misses" and also tends to focus on what has been mentioned most recently. It's a combination of recency bias and confirmation bias.

For example, if I ask you if you feel happy today or think past the sale and ask you to what degree do you feel happy today, you have to access all of the mental associations of the word "happy" which probably will at least somewhat trigger an imaginary representation of what it means and may in fact trigger more happy feelings. If I ask you the opposite, you can imagine less positive emotions.

 If a palm reader one day says that you tend to be lazy, you will think of all the instances in which that characterization may fit you. If he comes back later and talks about how there are times in which you are tenacious and persistent you will tend to think of the times in which you were persistent or work ethic.

A very high percentage of people responding to specific lines of questioning will say yes.

The only way to really try to reduce bias when asking a question is to say "how happy OR unhappy are you" "how lazy or persistent are you. Or perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being lazy and 10 being active would you describe yourself.

But if you can accidentally create a response bias, you can intentionally create it through the understanding.

Open endeed pictures and stories that would make someone feel in a particular way can elicit an emotional response.

If you ask someone "do you consider yourself useful?" they will answer yes, by which you can then ask them if they would mind doing something useful for just a minute then proceed to try to promote your charity or ask them to create a survey. You can ask them if they feel helpful or adventurous as well, the key is having your request being consistent with the question.

This is one key aspect to PRE-suade as mentioned by Robert Cialdini in his book PRE-suasion.

You can also elicit a negative emotional response just before you present the solution to alleviate that negative emotion. (Humans tend to seek to avoid pain more than they seek pleasure.)

One of the problem with negative emotions is you don't want to associate it with your product or brand itself. It's not a good long term strategy to "fearmonger", but it can influence on a short term basis if you contrast it with a positive emotion and somewhere in the headline use phrasing that suggests the content will negative and then contrast it with a positive. Additionally, people may just click away from your site. SO you have to put it in context, not dwell on it, and convince them that you're going to teach them a technique that will bring positive emotions like amusement, joy, laughter, etc. That you will bring them a bright future. There's also liability risks of promising to relieve pain so you don't want to oversell this point directly. It's just one of many useful tools of persuasion to add to the toolbox.

source:https://www.quicksprout.com/2016/11/23/6-neuromarketing-hacks-for-maximum-content-impact/

Story telling with imagery combined with descriptive but open ended words that elicit responses is a great way to induce an emotional state, from which you can then use to lead.

Please be responsible with these tools.

It's useful to inspire people to be better versions of themselves. Be useful and responsible.