Our brain loves shortcuts, and they can be used to manipulate us.

themselves with one or another of the levers of influence that exist in the social environment. To do so may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and launches one of our automatic behavior programs. Trust the human profiteers to learn quickly how to benefit from our tendency to respond mechanical

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Much of the compliance process (wherein one person is spurred to comply with another person’s request) can be understood in terms of a human tendency for automatic, shortcut responding. Most of us have developed a set of trigger features for compliance—that is, specific pieces of information that normally tell us when compliance with a request is l

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