In the last chapter, you saw that as we get closer to actually downloading your app or joining your site, you should dispel our concerns about granting you our attention as much or more than you demonstrate the benefits of your content. In the moment of truth, stop plugging your work and start plugging its holes. This will win you more active users than if you pretend the holes don’t exist.

Writing some persuasive text is only one of the many ways to do that, and it is the most direct, full-frontal, and rational approach. But in Chapter 4 on Gestalt psychology , you saw that text is not the only, nor always the most effective, tool at your disposal in a digital world. Indeed, there are just as many ways you can dispel our concerns by preventing us from thinking about them at all. This chapter is about that idea and when to use it.

You’re not the first meme-maker to think about persuading us to take the action that meets your business objectives. That goes back at least as early as the propaganda experts in World Wars I and II. In the United States, the guru of propaganda was Carl Iver Hovland, a psychologist and, in the context of his time, a patriot who was serving his country by getting people to purchase the federal bonds that financed the war. Propaganda predates even Hovland, of course, but he may have been the first to really watch how we react to it. As early as 1949, he noticed we were anything but passive. ⁱ He saw that when people are exposed to persuasive messages, they often “rehearse their own position and seek new ways of supporting it.” After a decade or so of research on that idea, Festinger and Maccoby (1964) ⁱⁱ concluded that Hovland was right:

• Certainly such a listener is not passive…he is very actively, inside his own mind, counterarguing, derogating the points the communicator makes, and derogating the communicator himself. In other words, we can imagine that there is really a dialogue going on, one side being vocal and the other subvocal… [I]f one could somehow prevent the listener from arguing back…it seems reasonable to expect that the persuasive message would then have more of an impact. (Emphasis added.)

Prevent the listener from arguing back. That is entirely different than counterarguing the counterarguments. This new idea was one of the more powerful insights into persuasion of the 20th century, sparking volumes of research that coalesced into a model by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in 1986 that described the central and peripheral routes to persuasion. ⁱⁱⁱ Here, we summarize it in a way that you as a digital meme-maker can use:

• If your value-proposition is strong, that is, unique, meets a clear need, and is differentiated from competitors, then use central routes to persuasionthat increase our attentional capacity to process your rational, argument-based message.

• If your value-proposition is weak, that is, similar to alternatives, not a necessity, and is only an incremental improvement over competitors, then use peripheral routes to persuasionand decrease our attentional capacity for counterarguing against your emotional image-based or lifestyle-based message.

Petty and Cacioppo’s model was powerful because it integrated cognitive psychology (attention), motivational psychology (addressing both approach and avoidance) and as you’ll see soon, social psychology (leveraging conformity and celebrities). Whereas in Chapter 7, our working-memory bottleneck was cast as a harsh reality challenging every meme-maker, Petty and Cacioppo showed you how to use displacement to your advantage. They argued you should clear working memory to allow for the arguments you want to get through, and clutter working memory with stimulation that will displace the resistance you want to squeeze out.

Finally, this model also acknowledged that not all business ventures are alike. Some of you are selling things we really need, and some of you are selling sugary water and deep-fried flour. As meme-makers, some of you are trying to get us to join WebMD and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the Ice-Bucket Challenge to fight ALS, while others are trying to get us to make in-app purchases of “badges” and other secondary-reinforcers, read vapid internet lists (“Top 10 moustache guys without their moustaches!”), and pay for porn. As the great singer Leonard Cohen said, everyone is a hustler. For better or for worse, Petty and Cacioppo’s model gives you all the tools to do that.

So what are some specific tactics of the central and peripheral routes to persuasion? You determine whether your value proposition is strong or weak, then you use the corresponding themes to develop messaging for your advertising campaigns.

• Central-routearguments to increase approach/or reduce avoidance:

  • There are many pros/few cons

  • There is a lot of value/little cost

  • This increases gains/minimizes risks

  • This saves time/takes no time

  • This saves attention (simple, convenient)/makes no attentional demands (spam, notifications)

  • This fulfills needs/ensures your needs don’t go unfulfilled

• Peripheral-routearguments to increase approach:

  • This will make you attractive (source effects)

  • People just like you like this (similar comparison others)

  • Experts recommend this (they thought about it so you don’t have to)

  • Everyone is doing this (conformity)

  • This earns you status

  • This feels good

  • You deserve this

  • This may not be valuable, but it could lead to valuable things (secondary reinforcers)

• Peripheral-routearguments to decrease avoidance:

  • Don’t listen to yourself think (bright color, loud noise, distracting pictures, scarcity of time to decide)

  • This chance won’t last (scarcity)

  • Disruption of counterarguing with mildly confusing messaging (Knowles & Linn, 2004)

  • You already showed some commitment; don’t change course (norm of consistency, Cialdini, 2007)

  • We already gave you something; it’s only right to give back (norm of reciprocity, Cialdini, 2007)

You’ll notice that the omega strategy of persuasion that we introduced last chapter appears here as a perigraphal route to reduce avoidance. Among the more interesting omega strategies is one in which you disrupt counterarguing with a purposefully confusing message. Knowles & Linn showed in one of their 2004 studies that people were more likely to drive the speed limit when the sign was posted as 24.5 miles per hour than 25 miles per hour. ^iv Why? Because 24.5 mph was a confusing message that disrupted people’s likelihood to resist it. The social-buying venture Groupon was famous in its early days for its quirky and confusing newsletters, which often triggered action. Later, the collaboration platform #Slack was among the fastest-growing apps on the web—and while it was installing, the screen showed the confusing message “You look nice today” in another example of how being unexpected can distract us from our own internal resistance and avoidance.

Another peripheral route to persuasion involves the norm in our society that shames us into staying consistent and avoiding changing our minds or “flip flopping.” Psychologist Robert Cialdini ^v showed that you can use this to your advantage by getting us to agree to a small request, and then implying that we shouldn’t stop or change course now. An example of this appears when you join a music-streaming service (like Pandora or Groove Music), or a cloud-storage service (like OneDrive or Dropbox) and you see a message telling you to populate the playlists or folders with data (e.g., “It’s lonely in here.” “You haven’t added any music yet.”)

Similarly, another norm in our society is the golden rule: if someone gives us something we should give something back. Cialdini showed that this is another peripheral route by which you can get us to act without thinking, and it works especially well in the digital world where you can give us very cheap gifts. Tell us you just gave us a few gigs of storage space, a few free minutes of talk time, a few free reads of an online article, or a few free texts. After that, send us a message that implies we should join your service, implying we should give something back. It works more often than you think, and more often than we would like to admit.

But at the heart of Petty and Cacioppo’s peripheral routes to prevent counterargument is simply to crank up the music, sound, or dramatic visualizations when your arguments are weak, and just as purposefully turn them all off when your arguments are strong. Online video, just like television commercials before them, succeeds or fails by this principle. To really get a sense for it, we rounded up some of the videos produced or sponsored by the candidates in the U.S. presidential election of 2016 .

Here are two videos from candidate Rand Paul’s supporters.

• One using central routes to dilate working-memory capacity: https://youtu.be/VNAQxMmuOrg

• One using peripheral routes to displace counterarguing: https://youtu.be/LtglptO4v34

Don’t worry, both ends of the political spectrum use the same tactic. Here are two videos from Hillary Clinton’s supporters:

• One using central routes to dilate working-memory capacity: https://youtu.be/41Eg7kZrKz4

• One using peripheral routes to displace counterarguing: https://youtu.be/0uY7gLZDmn4

We’ll end this chapter with the reverse point for users: when you notice that a company is using loud, distracting peripheral routes to persuasion, it might signal that their product is not entirely worth the cost. Any time you’re in a teen-apparel store with loud music, disconcertingly cold air-conditioning, and wall-sized posters of attractive models wearing perplexingly little clothing at all, ask yourself whether it might be intended to distract your internal counterargument against paying those prices for logoed T-shirts. A similar argument can be made for politicians.