The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,28

smiles did in the 1984 election.

There are in these two studies, I think, very important clues as to what makes someone like Tom Gau—or, for that matter, any of the Salesmen in our lives—so effective. The first is that little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things. In the headphone study, the editorial had no impact on those whose heads were still. It wasn’t particularly persuasive. But as soon as listeners started nodding, it became very persuasive. In the case of Jennings, Mullen says that someone’s subtle signals in favor of one politician or another usually don’t matter at all. But in the particular, unguarded way that people watch the news, a little bias can suddenly go a long way. “When people watch the news, they don’t intentionally filter biases out, or feel they have to argue against the expression of the newscaster,” Mullen explains. “It’s not like someone saying: this is a very good candidate who deserves your vote. This isn’t an obvious verbal message that we automatically dig in our heels against. It’s much more subtle and for that reason much more insidious, and that much harder to insulate ourselves against.”

The second implication of these studies is that nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say. Jennings, after all, wasn’t injecting all kinds of pro Reagan comments in his newscasts. In fact, as I mentioned, ABC was independently observed to have been the most hostile to Reagan. One of the conclusions of the authors of the headphones study—Gary Wells of the University of Alberta and Richard Petty of the University of Missouri—was that “television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g., bouncing ball).” Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think.

The third—and perhaps most important—implication of these studies is that persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle. If you asked the head nodders why they wanted tuition to increase so dramatically—tuition that would come out of their own pockets—none of them would say, because I was nodding my head while I listened to that editorial. They’d probably say that it was because they found the editorial particularly insightful or intelligent. They would attribute their attitudes to some more obvious, logical cause. Similarly the ABC viewers who voted for Reagan would never, in a thousand years, tell you that they voted that way because Peter Jennings smiled every time he mentioned the President. They’d say that it was because they liked Reagan’s policies, or they thought he was doing a good job. It would never have occurred to them that they could be persuaded to reach a conclusion by something so arbitrary and seemingly insignificant as a smile or a nod from a newscaster. If we want to understand what makes someone like Tom Gau so persuasive, in other words, we have to look at much more than his obvious eloquence. We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

11.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place. We know that people talk back and forth. They listen. They interrupt. They move their hands. In the case of my meeting with Tom Gau, we were sitting in a modest size office. I was in a chair pulled up in front of his desk. I had my legs crossed and a pad and pen on my lap. I was wearing a blue shirt and black pants and a black jacket. He was sitting behind the desk in a high backed chair. He was wearing a pair of blue suit pants and a crisply pressed white shirt and a red tie. Some of the time he leaned forward and planted his elbows in front of him. Other times he sat back in his chair and waved his hands in the air. Between us, on the blank surface of the desk, I placed my tape recorder. That’s what you would have seen, if I showed you a videotape of our meeting. But if you had taken that videotape and slowed it down, until you were looking