Yesterday I wrote about how the art of persuasion is central to pretty much everything I cover in my content—in particular business and the dating world.
Today on Twitter I posted each of Robert Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion. I’ll be writing more about each of these in turn—and how you can apply them—throughout this week.
Today, though, I want to consider a question that naturally comes up a lot when persuasion is discussed, namely, is it unethical?
Spoiler: I’m going to argue that studying persuasion is ethical as long as your intentions are good, and that if they are you owe it to people to be persuasive.
As I argued yesterday, in life there are various resources that we want (or need), and often in order to get them we have to convince someone else (or a group of people) that we are the right person to receive them.
Whether it’s sex, money, employment, status or something else, at some point we are all faced with a situation where we need to persuade another person of our worth, or of the worth of our ideas, or products, or whatever.
Every human being on the planet uses some form of persuasion. Even babies. Babies cry. That is their method of persuasion. Yes, it’s crude. But it often works.
The point is, whether we study persuasion or not we are certainly going to be using it. That being the case it makes sense for us to improve if we can.
Persuasion is a tool. It can be used for good or ill. You can persuade someone to do something that will improve his life immeasurably. Or you can persuade him to destroy it. In the latter case, the process of persuasion is not at fault: your intentions are.
To describe persuasion as unethical is rather like describing teaching as unethical. It’s not—it’s a method of imparting information. What matters from an ethical perspective is the information itself.
Certainly, persuasion can be used for unethical purposes, and it often is. But that’s not what I advocate. My philosophy has always been that you should shoot for a win-win outcome. In other words, if you are persuading someone to do something then it should be something that you are confident is right for them.
If you act unethically it will only come back to bite you anyway.
Let’s take copywriting as an example. You could write the most amazing piece of copy created to sell a crappy product. But what’s the point? You’ll only get loads of complaints and returns.
Assuming your product is good, persuasion is the icing on the cake—but it’s icing that gives you edge. And in a hugely competitive attention-based economy like ours, you need all of the edge (and icing) you can get.
Put it like this. Say two entrepreneurs go to market with new products. Both products are equal in terms of their specifications, their capabilities and so on. Even with a completely even playing field, the entrepreneur who is better able to persuade will be the more successful.
Learning to persuade is not about ethics–it’s about getting you, your ideas and your creations out into the world. And if you believe that what you have to offer is of high quality, then it could be argued that you actually owe it to people to learn the art of persuasion.
After all, if you fail to persuade then they won’t enjoy the benefits of what you have to offer.
Takeouts:
- Persuasion is not ethical or unethical, it’s a means of communication.
- You should always shoot for the win-win outcome.
- You owe it to people to learn to be persuasive if what you have to offer is of high quality.
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