Thinking Fast and Slow — Influence

Stefano Arcaya
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

Our mind is fully interconnected with the surrounding world, its interconnections shape our behavior. Here we explain how influence is deconstructed and used according to Daniel Kahneman.

Our mind is highly influenceable because it is an Associative Machine. Based on David Hume (An enquiry concerning human understanding, 1748), Kahneman defines the association principles in our mind as interconnected ideas or memories of different types:

Causes (virus > cold);

Properties (lime > green);

Categories to which they belong (banana > fruit)

This process can happen all at once, and they can trigger many more interconnections, which in turn active others. It is clear that for most of their part, the processes are silent and hidden from our conscious selves. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because it is an alien experience. Not only is our mind working independently, it is also easily biased by information it receives, our decisions are based on ideas connected to what it’s available in the circumstance; the priming effect explains this process clearly as follows.

EAT

Now if you have to complete the below word, how would you do it:

SO_P

You probably completed the word as SOUP. What if you had read WASH at the beginning… most likely you would have completed the task with SOAP.
Extending this concept to Freudian insights, and using the ambiguity of above words (W_ _H, S_ _P), Kahneman sustains that people who were recently asked of an action of which they are ashamed are more likely to complete the fragments as WASH and SOAP, and less as WISH and SOUP. Thus, we might think that the prime effect can be found in daily situations where your attitude towards a person is influenced by her aesthetic characteristics or simply by the fact that she smiles often or not.

A study shows that a simple image located above a self-service caffè machine, where clients are required to pay for their milk, influences the total number of people who pay or not for it. In this case, images with eyes boosted payments.

We can use Kahneman basic framework to explain how the above process works: system 1 creates a story, system 2 believes in it influencing our behavior. The easier the story is created, the faster we believe in it; the ease becomes accelerator and break of the decision process. In other words, if you want to influence somebody, make sure to communicate clearly, consistently and repeatedly (commercials on TV), backed by a prime idea and in a friendly environment. In fact, a good mood loosens the control of system 2, meaning people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

Being aware of this mind processes could help us in our daily activities, as in not rejecting a good proposal due to lack of clarity, not being influenced by reiterated messages or apparently familiar breed linkings. Without forgetting that our mood can influence our decisions too.

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