What new psychology suggests, it's the factor that is top of consciousness at the moment before you make that economic decision that will win the day.

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.