The creator of Dilbert explains Trump's persuasion style and reminds us why people stopped caring about facts by Scott Adams on Nov 1, 2017, 12:19 PM Advertisement
 - In this excerpt from "Win Bigly," Dilbert creator Scott Adams says both he and Trump use the same method of persuasion.
- The method involves making claims that contain exaggerations or factual errors.
- Adams credits the method with raising his own profile ahead of the 2016 US presidential election — and with Trump's election win.
- Adams says he doesn't prefer to ignore facts.
- It's just that a "Master Persuader" can do it and still come out on top.
In August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. In those early days of the election, the overwhelming majority of pundits in the business regarded Trump as a novelty and a sideshow. Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts and reason. When I started writing favorable blog posts about Trump’s persuasion talents, it felt like going to war alone. In California, where I live, it seemed as if most Trump supporters were in hiding because of the social and career risks of publicly supporting him. I wasn’t counting on anyone’s having my back in this fight.  Luckily, I was wrong. Trump’s Twitter followers adopted me immediately and had my back every step of the way. When the critics came after me on Twitter and elsewhere, Trump supporters flooded in to back me.
I didn’t ask them to do it. They just did. One of my motivations for writing this book is that so many people who supported me on Twitter specifically asked me to write it. This book is a favor returned. By the way, reciprocity is a big thing in persuasion. When you do someone a favor, it triggers an automatic reciprocity reflex in the recipient. Humans are hardwired to reciprocate kindness. Sales professionals use this persuasion method all the time. If a salesperson buys you lunch or fixes a problem for you, you’re being persuaded. You might think you can resist persuasion techniques just by recognizing them in action. But knowing the technique won’t protect you as much as you might think. See Persuasion Tip 3. So why did I say Trump had exactly a 98 percent chance of winning when I couldn’t possibly know the odds? Why did I say Trump had exactly a 98 percent chance of winning when I couldn’t possibly know the odds? If that’s a persuasion technique. You saw Trump use the intentional wrongness persuasion play over and over, and almost always to good effect. The method goes like this: 1. Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. 2. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. 3. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion. I picked 98 percent because Nate Silver was saying 2 percent. I did that for branding and persuasion purposes. If I had boringly predicted that Trump would win the election, without any odds attached to it, the public would have easily shrugged it off as another minor celebrity’s irrelevant opinion. But if I make you pause to argue with me in your mind about the accuracy of the 98 percent estimate, it deepens my persuasion on the main point—that Trump has a surprisingly high likelihood of winning. I picked 98 percent as my Trump prediction because Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com was saying 2 percent. I did that for branding and persuasion purposes. It is easier to remember my prediction both because of the way it fits with Silver’s prediction and for its audacity, which people perceived as “wrongness.” The prediction was designed to attract attention, and it did. It was also designed to pair my name with Nate Silver’s name to raise my profile by association. That worked too. Social media folks mentioned me in the same sentence with Silver countless times during the election, exactly as I had hoped. And every mention raised my importance as a political observer because I was being compared with someone already important in that field. Keep in mind that at this point in our story I was playing the wrong sport. I was a cartoonist writing about politics and persuasion. I needed whatever credibility I could get to build an audience for my Trump blogging. Using a little bit of wrongness (my precise 98 percent prediction), I managed to attract more attention than I would have otherwise. And that conferred on me some credibility by association. As long as I was literally in the same sentence with Nate Silver, I would gain some credibility by proximity alone.  Trump used the intentional wrongness persuasion play off then, and it seemed to work every time, at least in terms of attracting attention where he wanted it. It even works when you know he’s doing it. If you’re talking about whatever topic he wants you to focus on, he has your mind right where he wants it, even if you are criticizing him for his errors while you are there.
For example, take Trump’s campaign promise that he would build a “wall” on the border of Mexico. Common sense tells you that solid walls are not the best solution for all types of terrain. In many locations, the most cost-effective solutions might include wire fences, or digital monitoring of various types, or something else. If Trump had wanted to be accurate, he would have mentioned all of those solutions every time he talked about border security. He did make some casual admissions that the border would be secured in different ways in different places. But most of the time he ignored those details, and wisely so. By continuing to call it a “wall” without details, he caused the public and the media to view that as an error. So they argued about it. They fact-checked it. They put together cost estimates. They criticized Trump for not understanding that it couldn’t be a “wall” the entire way. How stupid can he be????? And when they were done criticizing Trump for the “error” of saying he would build one big solid “wall,” the critics had convinced themselves that border security was a higher priority than they had thought coming into the conversation.  The ideas that you think about the most are the ones that automatically and irrationally rise in your mental list of priorities. And Trump made us think about the wall a lot. He did that because he knew voters would see him as the strongest voice on the topic.
It also sucked up media energy that might have focused on political topics he didn’t understand at the same depth as his competitors. Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason. I’ve said Trump is the best persuader I have ever seen in action. The wall is a perfect example. Consider how much discipline it took for him to avoid continually clarifying that his “wall” was really a patchwork of solutions that depend on the terrain. In order to pull off this type of weapons grade persuasion, he had to be willing to endure brutal criticism about how dumb he was to think he could secure the border with a solid wall. To make those criticisms go away, all Trump needed to do was clarify that the “wall” was actually a variety of different border solutions, depending on cost and terrain, every time he mentioned it. Easy as pie. But the Master Persuader didn’t want the critics to be silenced. He wanted them to make border control the biggest issue in the campaign just by talking nonstop about how Trump’s “wall” was impractical. As long as people were talking about the wall, Trump was the most important person in the conversation. The Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most. And what about the facts and details? Not so important. Those can get worked out later. I don’t believe Trump purposely injects errors into his work except in the form of oversimplification and hyperbole, as in the wall example. That stuff is intentional for sure. But for the smaller “errors” it is more that he doesn’t bother to correct himself.  I use a similar technique with my blog when someone points out a typo.
Sometimes I leave the typo because it makes you pause and reread the sentence a few times to figure out what the typo was supposed to mean. The “mistake” attracts your energy to my writing, and that’s what a writer wants. I want your focus. Some mistakes are just ordinary mistakes. But when you see a consistent stream of “mistakes” from a Master Persuader, be open to the possibility that some of those mistakes are about controlling your focus and energy. When you first saw the title of this book, did you think to yourself that Trump doesn’t say “bigly,” he says “big league”? If you noticed my title “error,” it probably helped you remember the book. And now whenever you hear the words “bigly” or “big league” in some other context, it will make you think of this book. The things you think about the most, and remember best, seem more important to you than other things. That’s the persuasion I engineered into the title. During the presidential campaign, it seemed that candidate Trump was making one factual error aIf ther another. Social media and the mainstream media were in a feeding frenzy. If they called him a liar, a con man, and just plain stupid. Some went so far as to question his sanity. Even more puzzling, Trump often stuck to his claims after the media thoroughly debunked them in front of the world. He still didn’t budge. It was mind-boggling. No one was quite sure if the problem was his honesty, his lack of homework, or some sort of brain problem. But one thing we all knew for sure was that it was hard to ignore. If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts. And if they know they don’t have better facts, they change the subject. People are not easily switched from one political opinion to another. And facts are weak persuasion. So Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don’t want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does. Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don’t want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does. And I know you want to believe that having a president who ignores facts makes the world a worse place, in a number of vague ways that you can’t quite articulate. But Trump tends to be directionally accurate on the important stuff, and the little stuff never seems to matter. I want to be clear that I’m not expressing a preference for ignoring facts. I’m simply saying that a Master Persuader can do it and still come out ahead, no matter how many times the media points out the errors. The average consumer of political news can hold only a handful of issues in his head. Any of the lesser topics get flushed out of memory. So Trump can invent any reality he wants for the less important topics. All you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do. True story: Ten minutes ago I read a long list of Trump’s tweets that PolitiFact judged to be factually inaccurate. I can recall only a few of them. They all blended together in my mind, and none made much of an impression. I had no personal or emotional connection to any of them. They were just background noise. If Trump had apologized for any of his factual “errors,” I would remember whatever alleged wrongness triggered the apology. If Trump had apologized for any of his factual 'errors,' I would remember whatever alleged wrongness triggered the apology. That would stick in my mind. I assume that’s at least partly why he doesn’t do apologies. Apologizing would be a sign of weakness and invite continual demands for more apologies. In Trump’s specific case, apologies wouldn’t have helped his campaign because there would have been too many demands for them. But in the case of normal people who are not Master Persuaders and only occasionally make public mistakes, apologies are still usually the right way to go. If I haven’t yet persuaded you that “mistakes” can be useful in persuasion, consider a small 2012 study by researcher Daniel Oppenheimer that found students had better recall when a font was harder to read.3 Oppenheimer explains the unexpected result by noting that people slow down and concentrate harder to compensate for the hard to-read font. That extra concentration is what makes lasting memories form. For more science on the topic of how intentional “mistakes” can aid in memory retention, I recommend the book Impossible to Ignore, by Dr. Carmen Simon. The gist of it is that you need to surprise the brain or make it work a little extra to form memories. Our brains automatically delete our routine memories fairly quickly. Most of us don’t know what we were doing on this day a year ago. But we easily remember things that violate our expectations. A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts. Trump inaccurately described his plans for the wall—it probably won’t be a physical wall for the entire border span—and that lowered his credibility and tainted his brand.  But he makes up for it by using solid gold visual persuasion, calls to emotion, simplicity, repetition, and the “mistake” itself to make his wall idea compelling.
If you’re using super strong persuasion, you can be wrong on the facts, and even the logic of your argument, and still win. I will pause here to tell you that while there is lots of science behind the best ways to influence people, choosing among the many ways to persuade via “surprising the brain” can be more art than science. No two situations are alike, so knowing what methods of persuasion worked in a different context might not help you in your current situation. Warning: Intentionally ignoring facts and logic in public is a dangerous strategy unless you are a Master Persuader with thick skin and an appetite for risk. Most of us don’t have the persuasion skills, risk profile, and moral flexibility to pull it off. We don’t know for sure that Trump came out ahead by oversimplifying his wall idea to the point where it sounded crazy to critics and even some supporters. But in my judgment, he probably did come out ahead. By inauguration day, we were talking about the costs and the details of the wall; the country had already accepted that the wall would probably get built, at least in part. And in the long run, presidents are judged by their success. Love it or hate it, historians will someday probably judge Trump’s wall to be a presidential success story. Success cures most types of “mistakes.” Scott Adams is the creator of the popular comic Dilbert. In 2015, Adams predicted that Trump had a 98% chance of winning the 2016 US presidential election. Adams based this prediction on Trump’s persuasion tactics. SEE ALSO: MEET THE CABINET: Here's who Trump has appointed to senior leadership positions
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