词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Persuasion and Resistance

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the language of persuasion¹, from an expert.

RS: Eric Knowles is a social psychologist at the University of Arkansas. He heads a laboratory group that recently held a Symposium² on Resistance and Persuasion, with the National Science Foundation as a sponsor.

KNOWLES: "Persuasion and sales and offers of all sorts of things have become so regular, so frequent, that people often turn them off, they just tune³ them out and respond to them in a very scripted or stereotypic⁴ or automatic kind of way, typically saying 'no, I don't do that,' that sort of thing. So one of the things we find effective is to throw in an unexpected phrase or element into the offer."

AA: In one experiment involving sales messages, students of Professor Knowles went door-to-door selling some note cards drawn⁵ by children for a local charity. The price was three dollars. Sales nearly doubled, though, when they said the price in coins -- "three-hundred pennies" -- and then remarked: "Actually it's a pretty good bargain."

RS: Another experiment involved selling a kind of pastry⁶ for the campus Psychology⁷ Club. We normally call this kind of pastry a cupcake. But when the seller called them by the odd name of "half-cake," guess what happened.

KNOWLES: " What you need to do is visualize⁸ the interaction, and here is a student on campus, a nice young lady, with a tray full of a dozen cupcakes, half of them white frosting and half of them chocolate frosting. And people look at her and they look at the tray and nobody was in doubt what she was selling or how much it cost. It's just when we said it in a slightly funny way that she got about twenty percent more sales than when she just said it in the normal way."

AA: "A cupcake."

KNOWLES: "A cupcake. Now interestingly in that research, one of the ladies who was doing this research had just gotten back from France, spending a semester abroad, and so she sold cupcakes walking up to people in the middle of Arkansas and saying: 'We're selling these petite gateaux for fifty cents, they're delicious would you like to buy one?' That produced sales that were less, although not quite significantly less -- they were kind of in-between the other two. It led us to think that maybe you can say something that's too odd and makes the interaction become suspicious."

AA: "We laugh about this, but do you ever worry about the potential for misuse⁹ of your research?"

KNOWLES: "Sure. Here's -- my concern is not that, it's not that the disruption is devious¹⁰. The disruption by itself is not effective at all in increasing sales. So to go door-to-door and say 'we're selling these for three-hundred pennies' doesn't increase sales at all over 'we're selling them for three dollars.' But it makes the reason that one gives afterwards more persuasive¹¹. That is, I think what it does is to wake people up to thinking about and listening to the offer."

AA: According to Professor Knowles, most persuasion research has focused on how to make offers more attractive through such things as added incentives¹². He thinks a better way to persuade people is to try to reduce their resistance -- in other words, take away their reasons to say no.

RS: The idea is that when people do finally say yes, they will feel more strongly about their decision than if they had simply been persuaded grudgingly¹³ with more incentives. And one thing his research shows, Professor Knowles says, is that people are more likely to make a decision when they know they can reverse it.

AA: With sales, that would translate into being able to return an item if they don't like it.

KNOWLES: "Here, I live in northwest Arkansas and our major employer is the Wal-Mart headquarters. And Wal-Mart, Sam Walton, made a fortune in a number of ways, but one of the important things he did was to institute a no-questions-asked return policy in his stores."

AA: Professor Eric Knowles, head of the Omega Lab at the University of Arkansas. Omega is the Greek letter used as a symbol for "resistance."

RS: Now should you feel persuaded to write to us, our address is VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA or............And we're on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Hidden Persuasion"/Frank Sinatra

 

1 persuasion   

n.劝说；说服；持有某种信仰的宗派

参考例句：

• He decided to leave only after much persuasion.经过多方劝说，他才决定离开。
• After a lot of persuasion,she agreed to go.经过多次劝说后，她同意去了。

2 symposium   

n.讨论会，专题报告会；专题论文集

参考例句：

• What have you learned from the symposium?你参加了这次科学讨论会有什么体会？
• The specialists and scholars present at the symposium come from all corners of the country.出席研讨会的专家学者们来自全国各地。

3 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

4 stereotypic   

参考例句：

5 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

6 pastry   

n.油酥面团，酥皮糕点

参考例句：

• The cook pricked a few holes in the pastry.厨师在馅饼上戳了几个洞。
• The pastry crust was always underdone.馅饼的壳皮常常烤得不透。

7 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

8 visualize   

vt.使看得见，使具体化，想象，设想

参考例句：

• I remember meeting the man before but I can't visualize him.我记得以前见过那个人，但他的样子我想不起来了。
• She couldn't visualize flying through space.她无法想像在太空中飞行的景象。

9 misuse   

n.误用，滥用；vt.误用，滥用

参考例句：

• It disturbs me profoundly that you so misuse your talents.你如此滥用自己的才能，使我深感不安。
• He was sacked for computer misuse.他因滥用计算机而被解雇了。

10 devious   

adj.不坦率的，狡猾的；迂回的，曲折的

参考例句：

• Susan is a devious person and we can't depend on her.苏姗是个狡猾的人，我们不能依赖她。
• He is a man who achieves success by devious means.他这个人通过不正当手段获取成功。

11 persuasive   

adj.有说服力的，能说得使人相信的

参考例句：

• His arguments in favour of a new school are very persuasive.他赞成办一座新学校的理由很有说服力。
• The evidence was not really persuasive enough.证据并不是太有说服力。

12 incentives   

激励某人做某事的事物( incentive的名词复数 )； 刺激； 诱因； 动机

参考例句：

• tax incentives to encourage savings 鼓励储蓄的税收措施
• Furthermore, subsidies provide incentives only for investments in equipment. 更有甚者，提供津贴仅是为鼓励增添设备的投资。 来自英汉非文学 - 环境法 - 环境法

13 grudgingly   

参考例句：

• He grudgingly acknowledged having made a mistake. 他勉强承认他做错了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Their parents unwillingly [grudgingly] consented to the marriage. 他们的父母无可奈何地应允了这门亲事。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》