Amazing psychology and mind tricks

Here's a great little mind trick to get people to agree with you.

The Scientifically-Proven Method For Getting People To Say "Yes" :

It's called the Yes-Ladder - a technique you can use for getting agreement to all kinds of things, provided you know what you're doing and know how to make a semi-compelling argument.

It works in many fields - from marketing and sales to even something like dating and seduction.

Here's a good example from marketing:

*picture by Vinh.Co

And you can continue from there - the person is hooked.

The trick is to start with something you know they'll say yes to.

Then you can follow up with something that's difficult to say no to. Then you can either ask about their preferences or ask more clarifying questions to solidify a yes.

Finally, ask the thing you really wanted to ask, and you'll most likely get a Yes to that as well.

Here's an example from dating:

“Are you spontaneous?" Yes

"Are you an adventurous person?" Sure

"Have you ever done anything that was a little crazy?" Yeah!

"Have you ever made out with someone you just met?" I think so!

"Wouldn’t you regret it if you didn’t?” Probably...

"Do you have some free time during the week?" Yeah

"Wanna go grab a drink?" Sure!

And you got yourself a date :)

(These questions are a random example; there can be a thousand different ones)

For those interested in how it works - here's the Science behind this mind trick:

The brain has an emotional feedback loop that causes you to seek out sensation and stimulation that will keep you feeling however you're feeling right now, either good or bad, and avoid anything that will make you feel different. That even applies to saying "yes" and "no."

There is a study called "Better think before agreeing twice - Mere agreement: A similarity-based persuasion mechanism," published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in 2010, which states:

"The present paper shows that the frequency of people's compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request but selected to induce agreement. We label this effect the ‘mere-agreement effect’ and present a two-step similarity-based mechanism to explain it.

Across five studies, we show that induced mere agreement subtly causes respondents to view the presenter of the statements as similar to themselves, which in turn increases the frequency compliance with a request from that same person. We support the similarity explanation by showing that the effect of agreement on compliance is suppressed when agreement is induced to indicate dissimilarity with the interviewer, when the request is made by some other person, and when the artificially high level of agreement is made salient. We also validate the practical relevance of the mere-agreement persuasion technique in a field study. We discuss how the mere-agreement effect can be broadly used as a tool to increase cooperation and be readily implemented in marketing interactions."

Pretty amazing, right?

The fact that you've gotten someone to agree with you on several statements in a row makes them significantly more likely to agree with your next statement, even if it's entirely unrelated to those previous ones.

Feel like a Jedi yet? :)

This doesn't necessarily have to be only about selling something or dating.

For example, let's say you have a friend who wants you to help him paint his house.

When he meets and talks to you, if he leads the conversation in the right direction, asking you certain questions that get a lot of affirmative answers - you are more likely going to agree to his request to help him paint his house, when he asks this of you later.

Don't take the examples too literally, think outside the box and imagine all the other possibilities.