I Went Into the Book for Persuasion Advice, and Came Out with the Realization that I’m a Vulnerable Target

Many people want to learn how to persuade others, but few want to admit that they themselves are vulnerable to persuasive techniques and would benefit from countering them.

“Many people” includes me. I picked up Influence by Robert B. Caldini mainly because it appeared on a recommended book list, but also because I would like to improve my ability to persuade others. So I was a bit surprised when I learned that Dr. Cialdini looks at it from the other perspective, that his main focus is learning how to defend oneself from persuasive techniques.

I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy. For as long as I can recall, I’ve been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, fund-raisers, and operators of one sort or another…With personally disquieting frequency, I have always found myself in possession of unwanted magazine subscriptions or tickets to the sanitation workers’ ball. Probably this long-standing status as sucker accounts for my interest in the study of compliance: Just what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person?

Dr. Cialdini covers six categories of techniques to get “compliance” from others, but they all share a single pattern. We get too much information to process everything. We need psychological shortcuts to make decisions without exceeding our brain’s capacity. The shortcuts which we are accustomed to using will steer us in the right direction most of the time. For example, one of the “compliance” techniques is “social proof” – do the same thing everyone else is doing. If we are uncertain about what we should do, most of the time, doing the same thing which similar people are doing will be much better than doing something random. Reading a #1 New York Times bestseller is almost certainly going to be a better experience than reading a randomly chosen published book. Because these shortcuts are not based on carefully evaluating all available information, they can backfire. Sometimes they backfire by accident, and sometimes someone exploits them for their own gain.

At the end of the book, Dr. Cialdini urges readers to retaliate against anyone who exploits these shortcuts in a dishonest way. He says that, as we are swamped with more and more information, we depend on these mental shortcuts more than in the past. We cannot afford to lose these shortcuts. Therefore, we much punish people who reduce the effectiveness of these mental shortcuts by fraud. For example, if a company advertises a product in a way which suggests it is popular when it is not, in fact, popular, Dr. Cialdini says that he will send a letter to the company saying that he will boycott their products forever and that they should fire their advertising agency.

My Mom’s Been Reading The Invisible Orientation (Part 2)

Here is Part 1.

Ever since my mom started to actually talk to me about asexuality (which was about a month and a half after I returned to North America) she has been very focused on dating. She told me I could start an asexual dating website as a business – I pointed out to her that asexual dating websites already exist. When she asked me about them, I told her I never bothered to register at any because I am not interested in dating. My mother interpreted it as ‘not interested right now’ rather than ‘not interested at all’, and I wasn’t prepared to have a long serious discussion with her about it, mainly because I’m not entirely clear what I want. She also seemed to think of me going to ace meet-ups as a way of *ahem* shopping for asexy dates, and she usually asks me if I met anyone I really like after a meet-up.

Fast forward to my mother reading The Invisible Orientation.

She came to me, and said that the most striking thing she found in the book is that asexuals can date non-asexuals, and that the writer does not recommend that asexuals only look for asexual partners (note: I have not read that section of the book, so I do not know whether my mother is accurately representing what Julia Sondra Decker says). I replied ‘Well, of course’. It turns out that my mother was under the impression that a) of course I’m interested in dating and b) that asexuals can only date other asexuals. She said that internet dating is a wonderful thing for niche groups, and that I would have to find an asexual partner through the internet because it would be too difficult otherwise.

This is where I had to say straight out to my mother that I do not want to date.

And I don’t. I’d like to form some kind of chosen family at some point. I’m not sure how I’ll try to do that, but it won’t be through ‘dating’. I have never felt any inclination to date anybody, except in circumstances when the word ‘date’ is being used very, very loosely (I had a friend who I would go on ‘dates’ with, but a ‘date’ was simply anything we decided to do in advance together at a specific time, like go to the Wanhua District of Taipei. She is heterosexual).

Even though I’ve told my mother before that I don’t want to date, I don’t think she actually understood what I was saying until just then. Maybe she still doesn’t understand. We’ll see.

She also said that one of the most interesting parts of the book is the list of novels with ace characters. She asked me if I had read any of them. I have only read Quicksilver. My mom went ahead and got a bunch of these novels from the library, but I think most of these books are not her cup of tea (she hasn’t said much about them).

The Invisible Orientation has been a helpful book. It is a lot easier to hand it to my mother than to try to educate her about asexuality myself. It has also sparked dialogue, especially about this issue of dating where she had some misconceptions about myself and I avoided talking to her about it because it was easier to avoid the subject and I only had a vague notion of the misconceptions she had. I am very glad that this book exists.