preview

Summary Of The Psychology Of Persuasion By Kevin Hogan

Decent Essays

The book The Psychology of Persuasion How to Persuade Others to Your Way of Thinking is a self-help book written by Kevin Hogan. It is designed to turn ordinary people into master persuaders; capable of persuading anyone into doing anything they want. The book is more directed towards salesman, however, after reading the book I can see that the methods can easily be utilized in everyday life. He uses a model as the building block for his methods. The model is called The Paradigm of Persuasion. The Paradigm of Persuasion is broken down into six parts, foundation, fundamentals, preparation, presentation and results. The core of the model is the fundamental, preparation and presentation parts. These parts are broken down into different sections …show more content…

Hogan asks of his readers, and one of the most important, is to change the way they think. He wants his readers to be more goal oriented and calls this Outcome Based Thinking. He states “Outcome-Based thinking is the ability to visualize the precise outcome of a process before beginning that process. It is the ability to set goals and keep them in mind all the through the persuasion process (Hogan, 1996).” Not only does Mr. Hogan want them to do it during the persuasion process, he also wants them to do it in life. He asks that his readers write down their life goals and the steps needed to get there. Then asks that before you go into any negotiation you know, what exactly you want, what does the other person want, what is the least you will accept, what problems could arise in the process, how will you deal with the problems and use them as a benefit for the other person, and how will you bring the process to a conclusion. Writing down your goals is not only instrumental in persuasion, but also in real life. Many motivational speakers, fortune five hundred companies, and even the United States Military all stress the benefits of writing down your goals. Dr. Gail Matthews a psychology professor at the Dominican State University in California conducted a study on the importance of writing down your goals. She found that people who just wrote down their goals were significantly more likely to complete them than those that just thought them (Matthews, …show more content…

He calls these the basic concepts or principals of persuasion. These laws provide the foundation of his model and should be kept in mind during every negotiation. Many of these laws are based on psychological theories. The first law is the Law of Reciprocity. Basically if you do something for someone they will have the desire to do something back. This is comes from Reciprocal Altruism “the principal that, if we help other people now, those others will return the favor should we need their help in the future (Stangor, 2012).” Next is the Law of Contrast. He defines this as “when two items are relatively different from each other, we will see them as more different if placed close together in time or space (Hogan, 1996)”. Surprisingly, this law comes from the Law of Association which was first studied by Aristotle over 2000 years ago (Boeree, 2000). Another of his laws is the Law of Power. It states that “people have power over other people to the degree that they are perceived to as having greater authority, strength or expertise (Hogan, 1996).” This law is extremely well documented. There was a famous experiment conducted in July of 1961 called the Milgram experiment which documented how far someone was willing to go when giving an order from an authority figure. The results were astonishing. 65% of the participants theoretically shocked someone to death on the order of an authority figure (Stangor, 2012). The last

Get Access