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A List of Persuasion Techniques Review (Part 1)

Rinaldo Ugrina
18 min readDec 5, 2020

Cialdini’s principles of persuasion are not the only ones — far from it. There are tons of triggers and buttons in our brains that you can push to receive the same, powerful outcome: persuasion.

What follows is a list of persuasion techniques.

Focusing effect

“We can only pay attention to a few things”

Most commercial choices have way too many aspects for a normal human being to take them all into account. Therefore, we have a tendency to only focus on a few of them, excluding those that are less conspicuous. Those that have noticeable differences, for example. This way we place too much importance on one aspect, causing an error in accurately predicting how happy we will be with each option.

This unequal focus on aspects is called the focusing effect (the focusing effect is closely related to the attentional bias).

Example from a Nobel Prize winning psychologist

For example, Schkade and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (1998) asked people how much happier they believe Californians are compared to Midwesterners. In general, we think that Californians must be considerably happier. In reality, there’s no difference…

What happens is that we focus on and overweigh typical differences like sunny weather and the easy-going stereotype of a Californian. Whereas in reality, there is a huge number of aspects that are often even more important influencers of happiness (crime rates, for one).

Online persuasion tips:

  • Put the focus on only a few (a max of three) USP’s.
  • Emphasize your most unique USP so intensely that your customers lose focus on less favorable aspects.
  • Don’t just focus on your best aspects, but also on those that differ significantly from your competitors.
  • Also, emphasize the huge change that happens the moment people buy your product or use your service.

An A/B test example:

Online Dialogue tested the effect of putting more focus on the interest rate for the online bank ‘MoneYou’ (operates in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany). Moving the interest rate from the title into the visual in a focus-attracting manner improved their conversion rate 17%.

Further reading on the focusing effect:

  • Schkade, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9, 340–346.
  • Focusing effect on Wikipedia

Context Dependent Memory

“We tend to forget things when we’re out of context.”

Do you recognize the following situation? You enter your basement/garage, but instantly forget why you went there. You walk back, and as soon as you enter the kitchen you go “Oh, I remember, I went to get the juicer!” That’s cue-dependent forgetting and remembering; it is our tendency to forget things which are out of context and to recall information more easily when the original contextual cues are present (the cues that were also present when we learned it).

Take for example retargeting: Someone visited your website and looked at a product. Now you recognize this person elsewhere on the web and promote the same product again in a banner. Since the person is on a totally different website, a lot of the cues are gone. Cue-dependent forgetting tells us that it helps to include original elements of your site in the banner (colors, logos, icons, etc). You might even show the banner that’s already on your site so that people will recognize the banner easily somewhere else.

Using the same contextual cues (coloring, content, pictures, etc.) across media will facilitate the recall of your brand and products more easily and thus increase the likelihood that people will at least browse your product item catalog.

Scientific research example:

Imagine you’re required to remember a list of 10 words while sitting next to a swimming pool. Meanwhile, I try to remember the same list of words, but being a scuba diver I try doing this on the bottom of the pool.

Subsequently, we’re asked to recall the list of 10 words. Now, who’s best at remembering the list? As early as 1975, Godden & Baddeley discovered that this depends on where we’re asked to remember the list. Assuming all other factors are equal, I’ll remember more when the recall session occurs under water, and you’ll remember better when asked ‘on land’. Changing the cues and context between encoding and retrieval reduces our ability to recall.

Moreover, all sorts of contextual cues influence our memory, such as body position or emotional states. The latter we call “State-dependent memory”. It tells us for example that, if I was drunk while learning something, I’d actually better be off being equally inebriated when trying to recall what I learned.

Online persuasion tips:

  • In general: Try to create a consistent context in your online presence across platforms and sites using the same contextual cues (from SEO, SEA, display, sites, to apps and social media, etc.).
  • When you want a visitor to remember you or your offer at some point, prime them with contextual cues that will be present in the situation where you want them to remember you.
  • When you have a recurring visitor, use cues from their previous visit to help them remember that visit.

And apart from contextual cues, do the same for other types of cues like bodily positions, emotional states etc.

Further reading on context-dependent memory:

Self-generation affect effect

“If we figured it out ourselves, we like it better”

The self-generation affect effect (or the ‘not invented here — bias’ as people like Dan Ariely phrase it) is the cognitive version of the physical labor-love effect (also termed the IKEA effect). Not only does physical effort increase liking, but it also works just as well for cognitive effort… We tend to like ideas and information better when they’ve been generated by our own mind (instead of ideas that we read or hear from someone else). Even if people invest just a small amount of cognitive energy in an idea or solution, they like it much more. Not only do we like our own ideas better, but we remember them better too, see: self-generation memory effect).

Because of the self-generation affect effect, we become overly committed to our own ideas. So if you want your customer to remember and like your product, an effective strategy might be to have him generate the information himself (or parts of it).

Lego very successfully employs this tactic with their LEGO ideas product line.

Scientific research example:

Imagine that you’re thinking about solutions to the problem of water waste, specifically how communities can reduce the amount of water they use. Suddenly, Dan Ariely materializes out of thin air. He’s here to help you. He hands you a paper with 50 words, and you’re instructed to combine these words to come up with a solution. You try it, and it works! You come up with the following idea: ‘Water lawns using recycled water recovered from household drains’.

In reality, this is the one and only solution you can create from the 50 words (in that sense it’s not your idea, it’s Dan’s idea that you pieced together). Will this cognitive effort boost your liking for this solution? Ariely found that it will indeed(2010, p. 116)! You’ll like this idea more than other ideas simply because your brain generated it and put effort in it (Dan even found that just giving you the 10 words to form the sentence already boosts your liking for the idea).

Online persuasion tips:

Make people think about your product or service (“play hard to get”):

  • Ask questions in your content.
  • Ask for answers in a proactive way (i.e. by means of a feedback tool).
  • Why they’re considering your offer?
  • Why did they buy the product when they did?
  • Try not to just provide your USP’s, but ask your customer to think of one or two himself.
  • Allow people to tailor your product. Not just to satisfy individual preferences, but also to invest cognitive effort and thereby liking (you might even allow your customers to create and design their own products).

Further reading on the self-generation affect effect:

  • Ariely, Dan (2010) The Upside of Irrationality. New York: Harper Collins (p. 116–117).
  • The “IKEA Effect”: When Labor Leads to Love. Michael I., Norton Daniel Mochon, Dan Ariely.
  • IKEA Effect on Wikipedia.

Affect Heuristic

“We decide differently depending on our emotional state”

The way we feel influences our decisions and their outcomes made in that moment. When we’re happy, for example, we’re more likely to try new things. But if we’re worried, we make more conservative choices. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that our emotional response to a website, app, or Facebook page alters our judgment.

Because of this dependence on our emotional state, we make different decisions based on the same set of facts. Overall, this affect heuristic is involved in nearly every decision we make.

The affect heuristic is typically used while judging the risks and benefits of a choice depending on the positive or negative feelings that people associate with the outcomes. It’s the equivalent of “going with your gut instinct”.

According to the Affect Infusion Model (AIM, by Joseph Forgas), the effects of our mood on our judgments become stronger in complex situations (that demand substantial cognitive processing). So, the more complicated and unanticipated a decision is, the more we rely on the affect heuristic.

Scientific research example:

Imagine you’re not a regular gambler and you participate in a gambling study. First, you’re asked to watch a video clip. Next, you’re given $10 to gamble in a computerized card-cutting game.

=> How many trials will you play on the gambling game?

Hill et. al. (2001) found that the answer to this question depends on your mood. The videos they showed either induced a happy, neutral, or depressed mood. If you watched the happy video, you’re more persistent (and play more trials) than you would’ve if you had watched the depressing video. This is because gambling, when seen as a new and unfamiliar experience complete with the bright lights and colors that are a characteristic feature of casinos, requires a great deal of information processing, making it especially unattractive to someone in a bad mood.

Online persuasion tips:

  • Test inducing a tiny bit of sadness or melancholy if you want users to make a conservative choice (like renewing a subscription).
  • Make sure that when you induce a negative mood, you clearly provide the comforting and reassuring aspects of your offer.

Further reading on the reflection effect:

Facial distraction

“We can’t resist looking at faces”

When we (subconsciously) notice faces in our surroundings, we tend to first scan those faces (as shown in the picture), before looking at anything else.

Moreover, we cognitively process those faces thoroughly. Facial recognition is distinct from object recognition in terms of visual processing. There are distinctly separate parts of our brain involved (the so-called Fusiform Face Areas), and — more importantly — our brain puts a lot of complex processing into analyzing faces. Note: Some visual processing of complex non-face shapes happen in this area as well.

Note: Some visual processing of complex non-face shapes happen in this area as well.

Faces take up a huge amount of cognitive capacity in your brain (mostly subconsciously). Offline, this can be quite persuasive. When someone looks at you, you look back and instantly perceive all their facial expressions. More importantly, you pay more attention to their verbal message as well. Online the same thing happens, but it works counter effectively. Your message is — most of the time — written in text, other images, bulleted lists etc. A face on the page can actually detract attention from your message, ultimately decreasing your persuasiveness.

Scientific research example:

From birth, we’re innately wired to search for faces. According to Mondloch et. al. (1999) newborns show a preference for following moving faces within the first 30 minutes of life. This is likely subcortical, with increasing cortical influence as weeks go by. When we’re four months old, we’re already processing faces as distinct objects.

There’s also neurological evidence supporting the importance of faces. People with a neurological disorder called ‘prosopagnosia’ are unable to recognize faces. However, they do recognize all other objects. The existence of this disorder proves the human brain has evolved a dedicated system for facial recognition separate from object recognition.

Finally, research shows that the more familiar/recognizable a face is, the more it attracts attention.

Online persuasion tips:

Although faces attract attention, they can distract attention from your content. So:

  • Use faces to attract attention outside your own platforms (i.e. in banners, especially recognizable faces!)
  • If you currently show a face on your platform (where you have already have the user’s attention), test an iteration without one
  • If you do use a face… use Gaze Cueing to redirect attention to your most persuasive content!

Further reading on the reflection effect:

Attentional Bias

“We pay attention to things that touch us (emotionally)”

The Attentional Bias is our tendency to pay more attention to emotionally dominant stimuli and to neglect other seemingly irrelevant data when making decisions. So the more something touches us, the more attention we pay to it.

Classic examples of dominant emotions are i.e. pain, fear, and sex. Research studying the Attentional Bias effect often involves ‘Dot Probe’ studies. In these studies, a test subject has to look at the center of a screen, where two pictures with different emotions are shortly shown.

When the pictures are gone, a dot (dot probe) appears where one of the pictures was placed, and your reaction time (the amount of time it takes to look at the dot) is measured. Emotionally dominant pictures cue one’s attention: Reaction time is quickest when the dot probe is congruent with the more emotionally dominant picture (except when you have emotional deficits).

Scientific research example:

Imagine you have an intense fear of spiders. Now I ask you to do ‘The Stroop Test’: in this test, I confront you with rows of words that are printed in different colors (e.g., red, green, yellow, and blue). All you have to do is name the color (not pronounce the word).

A consistent finding in Stroop studies with anxious patients is that their color naming of threatening words (spider, arachnid, spinner, tarantula, etc.) is slower than that of neutral words, and slower than with non-anxious patients. This is because it’s hard to ignore emotionally dominant stimuli.

Online persuasion tips:

  • If your brand or product is related in a positive way to an intense emotion, promote this visually and contextually.
  • Display your USP’s and CTA close to the most emotionally dominant parts of your page (e.g. an expressive image).
  • Place counter-persuasive elements (like ‘terms & conditions’ or ‘privacy’) away from the emotionally dominant parts of your page.

Further reading on the reflection effect:

Fear Appeals

“We will fight threats, but only if we’re told how to defeat them”

A fear appeal is a persuasive message that scares someone with the intent to motivate him to act against the threat. But since we don’t like threats, we tend to deny them or use other defense mechanisms in order to lower our fear. Therefore, fear appeal -or ‘fear evoked persuasion’- is a technique that should be used rather delicately.

Multiple variables have been found to influence the effectiveness of fear appeals, such as perceived severity, individual characteristics, and more importantly, susceptibility. Also, the intensity of the fear: Weak fear appeals may not attract enough attention, yet strong fear appeals may cause an individual to avoid or ignore a message by employing defense mechanisms.

But even with the right amount of induced fear, fear appeals alone are not persuasive enough to motivate behavior. The most important ingredient in an effective fear appeal cocktail is ‘perceived efficacy’. Perceived efficacy is a combination of both self-efficacy (“can I avert the threat myself?”) and response-efficacy (“will the action recommended indeed avert the threat?”).

A clarifying example:

Imagine you’re a smoker and you see an anti-smoking campaign displaying a cruel image and words like “a slow and painful death”.

What would you do? Would you think, “Oh but I don’t want to die, and definitely not slowly and painfully. I quit!” Well, it turns out that smokers simply deny the message. And even if they don’t, they’ll come up with all sorts of counter-arguments, such as “I smoke only 1 cigarette a day”, “but I eat super healthy”, “my family has no history of heart disease”, or “hey, my grandma lived to be 90 and she smoked her whole life!″ You’ve heard them all before.

The campaign shown would probably be more effective if an efficacy-boosting call-to-action had been added, such as:

“Smoking can cause a slow and painful death: Join 230.000 successful stoppers, and go to www.stop-simply.de right now!”

Online persuasion tips:

  • Use personally relevant threats (not too small nor too big).
  • Make sure you directly boost your customers’ efficacy by convincingly offering your solution as easy and effective.
  • Provide a clear and strong call-to-action directly after / next to your scaring message.

And of course, when your customer responds, make him feel good again by reassuring he took a step towards a better life

Reflection Effect

We’re risk-averse when we have something to gain, but risk-seeking when we’ve got something to lose.

The reflection effect explains that we have opposing ‘risk preferences’ for uncertain choices, determined by whether the possible outcome is a gain or a loss. This effect supports both the Ambiguity and Risk Aversion biases, but only in cases where we can gain something.

Conversely, when we stand to lose something, we strongly prefer to take risks that might mitigate the loss (and therefore, display risk-seeking behavior). This risk-averse versus risk-seeking behavior is called the reflection effect.

This reflection effect was discovered by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his late friend Amos Tversky, and included in their famous ‘Prospect Theory’. The Reflection Effect is expressed in the S shape of the value function in Prospect Theory: concave for gains (indicating risk aversion) and convex for losses (indicating risk seeking).

Scientific research example:

In their famous 1981 article “The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice”, Tversky & Kaheman describe the following dilemma:

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. There are 2 possible programs to combat the disease:

  • If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
  • If Program B is adopted, there’s a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

In this case, we display risk-averse behavior and choose the ‘certain option’, Program A (72%).

However, Tversky & Kahneman gave a second group the same cover story, but with a different formulation of the alternative programs:

  • If Program A is adopted, 400 people die.
  • If Program B is adopted, there’s a 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.

Now almost all switch to risk-seeking behavior, choosing program B (78%).

Online persuasion tips:

  • When you want customers to make a risk-averse choice (such as staying with you), test by phrasing your USP’s as gains.
  • When you want customers to make a risk-seeking choice (such as switching to you), phrase your USP’s as losses.

Further reading on the reflection effect:

  • Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981): The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458.
  • Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A., Econemetrica, Vol 47, No 2, 263–292 (1979); “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk”.
  • Lindzey, G. & Aronson, E. (eds.) (1985): The Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd Edition.

Gaze Cueing

We automatically focus our orientation to the same object that others are looking at

When we’re confronted with faces, we can’t help but to intensely process the eyes and their highly expressive surrounding region. Eyes reveal otherwise secret and complex mental states such as emotions, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Research indicates that eye contact accounts for roughly 55% of the information in a face-to-face conversation!

Eyes also have the irresistible power to attract and direct our attention. The perceived gaze direction of a face shifts our visual attention as a powerful magnet in the same direction.

Scientific research example:

Imagine you’re participating in a research study and are tasked with looking at a computer screen when a face pops up. You’re asked to indicate, as quickly as possible, on which side of the face you see a symbol or letter appear.

Against your knowledge, however, your researchers (psychologists Friesen & Kingstone) sometimes try to distract you by showing the face looking in a congruent or incongruent direction (about half a second before the symbol appears on it). Do you think this little trick influences your speed in identifying which side of the face the symbol is on?

It sure does! Congruent gaze cueing (eyes looking in the direction of the symbol) significantly helps you in your performance, whereas incongruent gaze cueing makes it worse…

An A/B test example:

The Dutch online bank MoneYou tested gaze cueing by displaying a face in their ‘mortgage quick quote’ widget looking in the direction of the quick quote fields instead of looking at the visitor. This resulted in a 9% increase of quote requests.

Online persuasion tips:

  • When using faces on your website, direct their look towards the most important element(s) on your page.
  • Consistenly place your important elements -like your CTA- on one side (right side is optimal), and have faces on your site looking in that direction.
  • Place negative elements (i.e. prices) outside the perceived gaze direction.

Further reading on Gaze Cueing:

Further reading on the reflection effect:

  • Fear Appeal on Wikipedia
  • Kaylene C. Williams, Research in Business and Economics Journal, “Fear appeal theory”
  • Cohen, E. L., Shumate, M. D. and Gold, A. Health Communication, 22(2), 91–102 (2007). “Anti-Smoking Media Campaign Messages: Theory and Practice”.

Forer effect

We most easily identify with vague, mostly positive, and general personality descriptions

The Forer Effect is our tendency to highly rate the accuracy of descriptions of our personality that supposedly are tailored ‘specifically to us’. In actuality, they’re vague, mostly positive, and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Because the message is positive but also slightly vague, we inject our own meaning into the it, and thus the statement seems personally relevant (beware that the self-serving bias has been shown to cancel out the Forer effect).

Scientific research example:

Imagine you just started university and you’re sitting in an Introduction to Psychology class. Your professor (psychologist Bertram Forer) gives you a personality test to complete. So you do. A week later Bertram presents the results. The resulting personality description includes sentences like “you have a great need for other people to like and admire you”, “you have a tendency to be critical of yourself”, and “you have a great deal of unused capacity”…

How do you rate the accuracy of this description to fit your own personality? Well, Bertram Forer found that on average his students (back in 1948) rated their personality description with a 4.2 on a 5-point scale. Pretty good for a description that — in reality — was the same for everyone.

Online persuasion tips:

If you want your customers to personally bond with your brand, or if you can otherwise use ‘a feeling of recognition within your prospect’, for the sake of persuasion:

  • Refer to rather vague and general personality traits (e.g. “Are you the kind of person that likes to share knowledge?”).
  • List mainly positive traits of your brand or products.
  • Mention that your solution is perfect for ‘these kind of people’ (and test with having ‘an authority’ mentioning it about you).

Further reading on the forer effect:

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This is the 11th post out of 12 for the mini-degree in Conversion Optimization I’m doing at CXL Institute.

Conversion Optimization
User Experience
Web Design
Persuasion

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Rinaldo Ugrina

Written by Rinaldo Ugrina

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Creativity is just connecting things. I publish a weekly newsletter with some thoughts, side project updates and weekly findings: http://rinaldo.email/

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