Hey ! Welcome to the December issue of Genius in Leadership and the 21 Immutable Laws of Persuasion. If you are just getting into this, go ahead and check out laws 1-6 when you get a chance. The seventh law of persuasion is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which refers to the uncomfortable feeling which we experience when the thoughts in our consciousness don’t match our behaviors.

In other words, if you get drunk the night before getting up in front of a live audience and giving a speech on sobriety, that guilty feeling that you get is cognitive dissonance. Its persuasive power comes when you modify your behavior in order to make it consistent with what you are teaching or even thinking.

For example, if you were to continue this habit of drinking and speaking on sobriety you would eventually quit one of them just to end the guilt.

Now, cognitive dissonance is one of the strongest behavioral transformation strategies and has even been used to brainwash people in POW camps. For example, a prisoner would be brought into a room, treated kindly and asked to make a list of all the things that were “not so good about their country.” Later, the same thing would be done, but this time they were asked to write things which were “not so bad” about the country which had taken them prisoner.

The guards would then take these two lists and read them over the loudspeaker to the other prisoners. Shockingly, the prisoner would defend the words which they had written rather than admit to duplicity and deal with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.

Now, how can this be used to persuade a person? It begins with questions which cause people to look at where their thoughts and desires are not matching their actions. For example, you might be writing a sales letter for a financial product and have questions like:

“How long have you been telling yourself that you were going to get your finances in order?”

Now, obviously this does not work on people who have their money in order. That’s okay, those are not the people you need to persuade to buy our product. However, these kinds of questions make stir up the feeling of cognitive dissonance and force that person to take action to end the guilt.

Such is the persuasive power of cognitive dissonance.

So that’s the 7^th law of persuasion. Next month, we will be exploring the 8th law of persuasion “Storytelling” (not to be confused with lying).  If you’re interested in reading more about the 21 laws of persuasion, please visit our copywriting services page for your free copy of the full 21 Laws Ebook.  To read about any of the previous laws, simply click on the law below.

1. Trance Breaking
2. Curiosity
3. Hope
4. Jealousy
5. Responsibility
6. Integrity

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