Month: August 2008

Categories
Psychology

Bill Clinton Congruency Clip

Check out this clip of Bill Clinton responding to a heckler. Notice his congruency. I love it.

0:05 – Clinton: “That’s not true!” (this is perfect. he interrupts it right as it comes in.)

0:11 – Heckler: “You know it’s true!”

0:14 – Clinton stretches out his arm slowly, with his palm facing down, and says in a parental tone, “Now will you just calm down.”

0:26 – Clinton: “Now let me tell you somethin… If I were dying of ambition…”

0:38 – Clinton: “And let me tell ya somethin else! Let me tell ya something else!” — He’s tapping into this urge for people to have “real” politicians who have normal emotions, and are -upset- just like they are, at certain “ills” of society. Clinton frames the Heckler this way:

0:45 – Clinton: “If you can find a better way to treat any human being including myself …

0:50 – Clinton: “I did not cause it, I’ve been tryin to do something about it, I’ve treated you and all the other people who have interrupted my rallys, with a hell of a lot more respect than you’ve treated me, and <inaudible>”

Notice his body language at different points… initially it catches him off-guard, but he gets more confident at every step. I really like his technique here.

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Categories
Hypnosis and NLP Psychology

Are crowds suggestible?

I was reading a Psyblog post talking about the myths of crowd psychology. One of the common claims is that crowds are suggestible.

From Psyblog:

2. Crowds are suggestible
The idea that people in crowds have heightened suggestibility is also a relatively common myth. People are said to copy each other, looking for a leader, being open to others’ suggestion about how they should behave, perhaps resulting from a lack of social structure.

Schweingruber and Wohlstein simply find no research to back up this claim. If there is some truth to the idea that people in crowds are suggestible, no one has managed to demonstrate it empirically. One scholar has asked why, if crowds are so suggestible, they don’t disperse when asked to do so by an authority figure.

[PWC] What do you think? Are crowds suggestible?

Maybe there is a prevailing belief or conviction that states that when in a crowd, people should ignore authority and follow their emotional convictions. Perhaps crowds are only suggestible to certain TYPES of suggestions – such as words like “Terrorist” or “Fire” that trigger instant emotional response and a “wake up” signal to the conscious mind.

Also, lets think about what it means to “study [crowd psychology]”

Crowd psychology, in this instance, is being used as a nominalization. The standard test for whether or not something is a nominalization is, “can you put it in a wheelbarrow?” or “can you hold it in your hand?”

The word “crowd psychology” has a lot of ACTIVITY associated with it. There’s a lot going on there. When you study the mind, does the mind ever stop? And multiple minds, certainly you have some voices here and some voices there.

One scholar has asked why, if crowds are so suggestible, they don’t disperse when asked to do so by an authority figure.

So I dispute the way that “crowds” is being used in this context. When you nominalize words, they get frozen in time and instead of a “movie” you get a “picture.” And more importantly, you lose a LOT of “data” when you go from a movie to a picture.

Also notice how this is structured. Always look for structure. “Such and such simply find no research to back up this claim” — that could only mean that they did a meta-analysis of all of the secondary data / existing research, and said that there wasn’t enough conclusive evidence, to date.

Comments?

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Categories
Personal Development

Books I want to buy

For the loyal readers of my blog and forums, I decided to type up a list of everything I have bookmarked for future reading.

Note that on this list is -only- books that have been recommended to me.

Here’s a tip for anyone who dares to implement — ONLY read books/articles/seminars that are personally recommended to you as the best. That’s what I do, and I haven’t read a bad book yet. I just keep reading what is the best of the best.

Some of these books I have read, but most of them I haven’t read, so don’t ask me questions about them. I’m just saying they’re on my list of books to read. Which is a very valuable list.

I decided not to type them out, but just to let you see the links:

(code was here)

I’ll type up in another post what the books are that I’ve already read and enjoyed. That’s a much longer list. I have like 3 big bookshelves in my library.

Take care

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