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.

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.

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.

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.

The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.

By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.

A few years ago, the Bose Acoustics Corporation had a new product, the Bose Wave Music System. And their ad campaign for it was not successful until they changed one thing. At the top of the ad they said, "Hear what you've been missing." And that caused the skyrocketing of the interest in purchasing of the product. Why? Because with something new, people are uncertain, and when they are uncertain, they want to avoid losses.