9.
The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. Alpert’s motivation is to educate and to help. He’s not the kind of person who wants to twist your arm. As we talked, in fact, there were several key moments when he seemed to probe me for information, to find out what I knew, so he could add it to his own formidable database. To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For a social epidemic to start, though, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something. A good number of the young people who bought Hush Puppies, for instance, were people who once upon a time wouldn’t have been caught dead in them. Similarly, after Paul Revere had passed on his news, you can imagine that all of the men in the militia movement gathered around and made plans to confront the British the following morning. But it can’t have been an automatic process. Some people were probably gung ho. Some may have doubted the wisdom of confronting a trained, professional army with a homegrown militia. Others—who may not have known Revere personally—might have been skeptical about the accuracy of his information. That almost everyone, in the end, fell in line is something that we would normally credit to peer pressure. But peer pressure is not always an automatic or an unconscious process. It means, as often as not, that someone actually went up to one of his peers and pressured him. In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word of mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who are these Salesmen? And what makes them so good at what they do?
Tom Gau is a financial planner in Torrance, California, just south of Los Angeles. His firm—Kavesh and Gau—is the biggest in its field in southern California and one of the top financial planning firms in the country. He makes millions of dollars a year. Donald Moine, a behavioral psychologist who has written widely on the subject of persuasion, told me to look up Gau because Gau is “mesmerizing.” And so he is. Tom Gau happens to sell financial planning services. But he could, if he wanted to, sell absolutely anything. If we want to understand the persuasive personality type, Gau seems a good place to start.
Gau is in his forties. He is good looking, without being pretty at all. He is of medium height, lean, with slightly shaggy dark hair, a mustache, and a little bit of a hangdog expression. Give him a horse and a hat and he’d make an excellent cowboy. He looks like the actor Sam Elliot. When we met, Gau shook my hand. But as he told me later, usually when he meets someone he gives him a hug or—if it is a woman—a big kiss. As you would expect from a great salesman, he has a kind of natural exuberance.
“I love my clients, okay? I’ll bend over backwards for them,” Gau said. “I call my clients my family. I tell my clients, I’ve got two families. I’ve got my wife and my kids and I’ve got you.” Gau talks quickly, but in fits and starts. He’s always revving up and gearing down. Sometimes when he is making an aside he will rev up even further, as if to put in his own verbal parentheses. He asks lots of rhetorical questions. “I love my job. I love my job. I’m a workaholic. I get here at six and seven in the morning. I get out at nine at night. I manage a lot of money. I’m one of the top producers in the nation. But I don’t tell my clients that. I’m not here because of that. I’m here to help people. I love helping people. I don’t have to work anymore. I’m financially independent. So why am I here working these long hours? Because I love helping people. I love people. It’s called a relationship.”
Gau’s pitch is that his firm offers clients a level of service and expertise they’ll have difficulty getting anywhere else. Across the hall from his office is a law firm, affiliated with Kavesh and Gau, that handles wills and living trusts and all other legal matters related to financial planning. Gau has insurance specialists to handle insurance needs and stockbrokers to handle investments and retirement specialists for older clients. His arguments are rational and coherent. Moine has put together, in cooperation with Gau, what he calls a financial planner’s script book. Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients. He sat down with Gau, then, and tape recorded all of Gau’s answers and wrote them up in a book. Moine and Gau calculate that there are about twenty questions or statements that a planner needs to be prepared for. For example: “I can do it myself” is one, and for that the script book lists fifty potential answers. “Aren’t you concerned about making the wrong moves and having no one there to help you?” for instance. Or “I’m sure you do a good job at money management. However, did you know most wives outlive their husbands? If something should happen to you, would she be able to handle everything by herself?”
I can imagine someone buying this script book and memorizing each of these potential responses. I can also imagine that same person, over time, getting familiar enough with the material that he begins to judge, very well, what kinds of responses work best with what kinds of people. If you transcribed that person’s interactions with his clients, he would sound just like Tom Gau because he would be using all of Tom Gau’s words. According to the standard ways by which we measure persuasiveness—by the logic and appropriateness of the persuader’s arguments—that should make the people using the script book every bit as persuasive as Tom Gau. But is that really true? What was interesting about Gau is the extent to which he seemed to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of his words. He seems to have some kind of indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his mouth, that makes people who meet him want to agree with him. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likability. It’s all those things and yet something more. At one point I asked him whether he was happy, and he fairly bounced off his chair.
“Very. I’m probably the most optimistic person you could ever imagine. You take the most optimistic person you know and take it to the hundredth power, that’s me. Because you know what, the power of positive thinking will overcome so many things. There are so many people who are negative. Someone will say, you can’t do that. And I’ll say, what do you mean I can’t do that? We moved up to Ashland, Oregon, a little over five years ago. We found a house we really liked. It had been on the market for some time and it was a bit expensive. So I said to my wife, you know what, I’m going to make a ridiculously low offer. And she said, they’re never going to take that. I said, maybe not. What have we got to lose? The worst thing they can say is no. I’m not going to insult them. I’m going to give them my little pitch of here’s why I’m doing this. I’m going to make it clear what I’m suggesting. And you know what? They accepted the offer.” As Gau told me this story, I had no difficulty at all seeing him back in Ashland, somehow convincing the seller to part with his beautiful home for a ridiculous price. “Gosh darn it,” Gau said, “if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”
10.
The question of what makes someone—or something—persuasive is a lot less straightforward than it seems. We know it when we see it. But just what “it” is is not always obvious. Consider the following two examples, both drawn from the psychological literature. The first is an experiment that took place during the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. For eight days before the election, a group of psychologists led by Brian Mullen of Syracuse University videotaped the three national nightly news programs, which then, as now, were anchored by Peter Jennings at ABC, Tom Brokaw at NBC, and Dan Rather at CBS. Mullen examined the tapes and excerpted all references to the candidates, until he had 37 separate segments, each roughly two and a half seconds long. Those segments were then shown, with the sound turned off, to a group of randomly chosen people, who were asked to rate the facial expressions of each news
caster in each segment. The subjects had no idea what kind of experiment they were involved with, or what the newscasters were talking about. They were simply asked to score the emotional content of the expressions of these three men on a 21 point scale, with the lowest being “extremely negative” and the highest point on the scale “extremely positive.”
The results were fascinating. Dan Rather scored 10.46—which translates to an almost perfectly neutral expression—when he talked about Mondale, and 10.37 when he talked about Reagan. He looked the same when he talked about the Republican as he did when he talked about the Democrat. The same was true for Brokaw, who scored 11.21 for Mondale and 11.50 for Reagan. But Peter Jennings of ABC was much different. For Mondale, he scored 13.38. But when he talked about Reagan, his face lit up so much he scored 17.44. Mullen and his colleagues went out of their way to try to come up with an innocent explanation for this. Could it be, for example, that Jennings is just more expressive in general than his colleagues? The answer seemed to be no. The subjects were also shown control segments of the three newscasters, as they talked about unequivocally happy or sad subjects (the funeral of Indira Gandhi; a breakthrough in treating a congenital disease). But Jennings didn’t score any higher on the happy subjects or lower on the sad subjects than his counterparts. In fact, if anything, he seemed to be the least expressive of the three. It also isn’t the case that Jennings is simply someone who has a happy expression on his face all the time. Again, the opposite seemed to be true. On the “happy” segments inserted for comparison purposes, he scored 14.13, which was substantially lower than both Rather and Brokaw. The only possible conclusion, according to the study, is that Jennings exhibited a “significant and noticeable bias in facial expression” toward Reagan.
Now here is where the study gets interesting. Mullen and his colleagues then called up people in a number of cities around the country who regularly watch the evening network news and asked them who they voted for. In every case, those who watched ABC voted for Reagan in far greater numbers than those who watched CBS or NBC. In Cleveland, for example, 75 percent of ABC watchers voted Republican, versus 61.9 percent of CBS or NBC viewers. In Williamstown, Massachusetts, ABC viewers were 71.4 percent for Reagan versus 50 percent for the other two networks; in Erie, Pennsylvania, the difference was 73.7 percent to 50 percent. The subtle pro Reagan bias in Jennings’s face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.
As you can imagine, ABC News disputes this study vigorously. (“It’s my understanding that I’m the only social scientist to have the dubious distinction of being called a ‘jackass’ by Peter Jennings,” says Mullen.) It is hard to believe. Instinctively, I think, most of us would probably assume that the causation runs in the opposite direction, that Reagan supporters are drawn to ABC because of Jennings’s bias, not the other way around. But Mullen argues fairly convincingly that this isn’t plausible. For example, on other, more obvious levels—like, for example, story selection—ABC was shown to be the network most hostile to Reagan, so it’s just as easy to imagine hard core Republicans deserting ABC news for the rival networks. And to answer the question of whether his results were simply a fluke, four years later, in the Michael Dukakis–George Bush campaign, Mullen repeated his experiment, with the exact same results. “Jennings showed more smiles when referring to the Republican candidate than the Democrat,” Mullen said, “and again in a phone survey, viewers who watch ABC were more likely to have voted for Bush.”
Here is another example of the subtleties of persuasion. A large group of students were recruited for what they were told was a market research study by a company making high tech headphones. They were each given a headset and told that the company wanted to test to see how well they worked when the listener was in motion—dancing up and down, say, or moving his or her head. All of the students listened to songs by Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and then heard a radio editorial arguing that tuition at their university should be raised from its present level of $587 to $750. A third were told that while they listened to the taped radio editorial they should nod their heads vigorously up and down. The next third were told to shake their heads from side to side. The final third were the control group. They were told to keep their heads still. When they were finished, all the students were given a short questionnaire, asking them questions about the quality of the songs and the effect of the shaking. Slipped in at the end was the question the experimenters really wanted an answer to: “What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduate tuition per year?”
The answers to that question are just as difficult to believe as the answers to the newscasters poll. The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582—or just about where tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial—even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality—disagreed strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely—was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets. Somehow nodding, in the end, mattered as much as Peter Jennings’s smiles did in the 1984 election.
There are in these two studies, I think, very important clues as to what makes someone like Tom Gau—or, for that matter, any of the Salesmen in our lives—so effective. The first is that little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things. In the headphone study, the editorial had no impact on those whose heads were still. It wasn’t particularly persuasive. But as soon as listeners started nodding, it became very persuasive. In the case of Jennings, Mullen says that someone’s subtle signals in favor of one politician or another usually don’t matter at all. But in the particular, unguarded way that people watch the news, a little bias can suddenly go a long way. “When people watch the news, they don’t intentionally filter biases out, or feel they have to argue against the expression of the newscaster,” Mullen explains. “It’s not like someone saying: this is a very good candidate who deserves your vote. This isn’t an obvious verbal message that we automatically dig in our heels against. It’s much more subtle and for that reason much more insidious, and that much harder to insulate ourselves against.”
The second implication of these studies is that nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say. Jennings, after all, wasn’t injecting all kinds of pro Reagan comments in his newscasts. In fact, as I mentioned, ABC was independently observed to have been the most hostile to Reagan. One of the conclusions of the authors of the headphones study—Gary Wells of the University of Alberta and Richard Petty of the University of Missouri—was that “television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g., bouncing ball).” Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think.
The third—and perhaps most important—implication of these studies is that persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle. If you asked the head nodders why they wanted tuition to increase so dramatically—tuition that would come out of their own pockets—none of them would say, because I was nodding my head while I listened to that editorial. They’d probably say that it was because they found the editorial particularly insightful or intelligent. They would attribute their attitudes to some more obvious, logical cause. Similarly the ABC viewers who voted for Reagan would never, in a thousand years, tell you that they voted that way because Peter Jennings smiled every time he mentio
ned the President. They’d say that it was because they liked Reagan’s policies, or they thought he was doing a good job. It would never have occurred to them that they could be persuaded to reach a conclusion by something so arbitrary and seemingly insignificant as a smile or a nod from a newscaster. If we want to understand what makes someone like Tom Gau so persuasive, in other words, we have to look at much more than his obvious eloquence. We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.
11.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place. We know that people talk back and forth. They listen. They interrupt. They move their hands. In the case of my meeting with Tom Gau, we were sitting in a modest size office. I was in a chair pulled up in front of his desk. I had my legs crossed and a pad and pen on my lap. I was wearing a blue shirt and black pants and a black jacket. He was sitting behind the desk in a high backed chair. He was wearing a pair of blue suit pants and a crisply pressed white shirt and a red tie. Some of the time he leaned forward and planted his elbows in front of him. Other times he sat back in his chair and waved his hands in the air. Between us, on the blank surface of the desk, I placed my tape recorder. That’s what you would have seen, if I showed you a videotape of our meeting. But if you had taken that videotape and slowed it down, until you were looking at our interaction in slices of a fraction of a second, you would have seen something quite different. You would have seen the two of us engaging in what can only be described as an elaborate and precise dance.