Split-Second Persuasion By Kevin Dutton PDF Free Download

A lot of the “persuasion” this book refers to depends on your being able to deflate someone with a witty rejoinder – “Yes Madam, I am drunk. But tomorrow I’ll be sober and you’ll still be dumb.” Or the persuasion referred to depends on diffusing a situation by making common cause with someone – “I stole a souvenir fork too. But I think the hostess saw us. I suggest we return the forks to the table.”

But for most of us, if we can come up with any such rejoinder at all, it will be an esprit de l’escalier – a comeback we think of too late when we’re already out the door and down the staircase. We can’t be trained to think of these rejoinders. Delivering one on target is often a matter of pure luck. Besides, this isn’t the kind of persuasion I had in mind when I got this book. I was hoping to find ways of changing a person’s mind on issues important to me, or of influencing people away from what I perceive to be their damaging fixations.

The book does eventually address this deeper aspect of persuasion. There are some insights here, particularly in the middle of the book where Dutton considers the type of influence that molds dedicated cult members and the type of influence that primes a person to become the victim of psychopaths or other very mercenary characters. However, there are a couple of things that detract from Dutton’s presentation even in these more serious sections.

For one thing, he offers up a potpourri of brain studies and experiments that show which parts of the brain are involved in different thinking processes. The presumption is that if we can change people’s neural pathways, we might be able to change their minds. Most of the brain studies cited are flimsy one-off researches on a limited set of volunteers. The book is really like one long “Psychology Today” series of updates for the casual lay reader. Such studies are often contradicted by the very next such study. I was especially put out with this kind of research after having read Ray Tallis’ book “Aping Mankind,”  Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity  which intelligently challenges the presumptions of such hit-or-miss studies.

Then what might be valuable insights here tend to be overridden, or overwritten, by Dutton’s forced attempts at snappy writing. Dutton (an Englishman who uses a fair smattering of Brit colloquialisms) often indulges in barrages of mixed metaphors. “In the courtroom, rape often constitutes a crucible of persuasion jujitsu in which opposing lawyers lock horns not so much over the minds of the jury as over their hearts.”

What’s more, he often both anthropomorphizes the brain and simultaneously compares it to a computer. “Your brain’s so busy running it’s fear program – it completely overrides its lie detection “module.” When you think things through using the standards that the more serious writer Ray Tallis uses, you can see how both types of metaphors are very misleading.

Overall, these pages tend to be just too much pop psychology. The insights offered don’t form any consistent approach that a reader can put into practice. After all the mixed metaphor and parlor game type novelties involving modes of perception – what’s left are the good old stand-by techniques of influence. Be friendly; make an appeal to self-interest; look people straight in the eye; dress well; and sound self-assured. But we already knew that.