The Forbidden As Persuasion By Kenrick Cleveland At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

'Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.' - Geoffrey Chaucer

Forbidden fruit.. . some believe it started with the apple in the Garden of Eden. There was only one thing Adam and Eve were asked not to touch, and that's what they wanted more than anything (or at least, that's what she wanted more than anything).

And look at our culture today.. . we've got people confessing to various oddities in taxicabs, on talk shows, we've got secret societies, hidden cameras, underage drinking.. . all of it hinging on secrets and the lure of the forbidden.

Just look at the popularity of that one show where they catch online predators. At first I thought this was a one-time special but there were over a dozen episodes. The premise is that the "reporter" or "investigative journalist" poses as an under-aged online chatter and sets up a "date" with the alleged predator. The strangest part.. . after a few episodes had aired, nearly every single one of the men caught says to the person, 'I knew it. I knew this was a trap.'

And yet, the guy went through with the date even having had the intuition that it was a trap. They'd go through with it despite the public humiliation, possible prison time and personal devastation.Why!?! How is this possible?

(Obviously this example is not just about the forbidden, but about a baser human instinct which we'll explore in a later article.)

The forbidden is a desire to know more. There is a story in the Bible of the tower of Babel where man tried to build a tower so high as to reach God and know what God knows. The tower was destroyed and all of their tongues were mixed up so that they couldn't understand each other and work in concert to build up because only God knows what God knows.

So what is it about the forbidden that intrigues us? And more importantly for our purposes of persuasion, how can we use this innate instinct of wanting to know the unknowable and be in on the secret, to sell more effectively?

We may not always be able to get to the full blown forbidden, but we can sure get to the hidden and we can sure get there through secrets.

Telling your prospects and clients "secrets" gives you the chance to learn theirs. Simply say, 'Hey, let me share this with you. I don't tell this to everybody, but here's a secret'. Or say, 'I have something personal to share.. . I feel like I can trust you enough to tell you this... '

Telling our prospects secrets, even secrets that aren't super profound, it tends to show that we trust them and the 'law of reciprocity' says that they will respond in kind by trusting us.

In his book, "The Psychology of Persuasion", Robert Cialdini, explains, "One of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us is the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us."

In other words, secrets will get someone to hear you and accept you and then share back with you. And what does that mean? Well, there's rapport. There's trust. There's belief.

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