The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,26

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 newscaster 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