If we are paying attention to something, it's important. That's how we decide to pay attention. But a communicator can reroute our attention to something that isn't important, but make it seem important as a consequence.

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it. It's the ability to cause people to have something at the top of their consciousness that makes them receptive to your message that's yet to come.

What I'm talking about is pre-suasion, directing their minds to the moment before they experience the content. There's this interesting study. A guy goes to a shopping mall in France. And he tries to get women's phone numbers as they pass various shops, so he could call for a date. But in neither of those cases was he very successful. He only got a number 13 percent of the time. But there was one kind of shop that doubled his success rate when women were passing it, a flower shop. Why? Because flowers put women in the mind-set of romance.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

There is a study that shows that people who were asked their political opinions, when there was a picture of the American flag in the corner of the questionnaire, reported more favorable attitudes toward Republican Party positions, because the flag is typically associated in people's minds with a Republican belief set. If people vote at a polling place inside a church, they vote more Republican. If they vote at a polling place inside a school, they vote more Democrat.

There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.

The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.