Go Ahead, Put Your Door in My Face

Techniques & Tactics. 

I am sure that all teenagers go through this phase were which you want to do everything (probably I’m still in this phase so this is me, not judging so much), and go to every party, and do everything that is “de moda” and you’ll never stop until your parents say “YES!”

Recently in psychology I learned a very sneaky tactic that’s called The Door in the Face Technique, lets say I want to get a piercing (I actually don’t, but this is actually a very good example. Just wait.) I go to my mom and say “Mom I really need to ask you something.” Ill tell her that I really want to get a tattoo. That it’s something I’ve really wanted for a while but that I’ve been afraid to ask. Obviously she will say no. And of course I won’t be disappointed, because this is the answer I was looking for. I look sad and disappointed, and then I go ahead and say, “what about a piercing in the ear?” It is more likely for her to say yes to this permission than she did for the tattoo one. It’s like magic really.

Persuasion is really an art if you can master it as well as Heinrichs does.

There is also the exact opposite, the foot in the door technique, you ask for a small favor first and then when you know they are willing to do it for you, you go ahead and ask a bigger one. Works too. Like a charm. But I prefer The Door in the Face Technique.

All of this is just so elementary!! As I continued reading what Heinrichs had to say about persuasion my sneaky techniques seemed not so sneaky after all. You will never know but there are smarter and better ways to get people to do what you want them to do.

In chapter four we go back to what we have been learning about in class, ethos, pathos and logos. Heinrichs takes it to a whole other level in this chapter with new and very ingenious ways of putting these Aristotle methods into action. What he teaches us to do in this chapter… “To persuade people-to make them desire your choice and commit to the action you want”(42) You don’t just want to convince someone, you have to make them feel happy about their choice. Just as Heinrichs every time he left his boss’s office, he “would leave his office in a good mood after losing every point”(43).

There is also a new type of persuasion that I had never heard before, the type were you are so nice, or lets put it in another way…So agreeable that you make the person feel better. “She agreed with me so much that I found myself siding with my lousy employers”(44). I didn’t even know that could happen, but I guess now I have another tool to persuade people.

In this chapter Heinrichs gives us “megatools”(45) of rhetoric and he explains in which situations we should and shouldn’t use each.