One applicable tactic being employed with increasing frequency by various organizations is to request evaluation of their products and services—only their products and services.

As a result, even though cut-heavy TV commercials draw more total attention, they produce significantly less memory for the ad’s persuasive claims and significantly less persuasion. It’s easy to understand why: viewers’ attention isn’t fixated on the ads’ best points but is scattered all over the material’s relevant and irrelevant attributes. For

He was asked to specify the one scientific concept that, if appreciated properly, would most improve everyone’s understanding of the world. Although in response he provided a

as a high-performance health care organization, SSM did not prohibit the use of achievement-related words. Instead, it replaced such words possessing menacing associations (target, beat) with comparable words that did not (goal, outdistance).

There were few cues in that environment to spur me to think routinely and automatically of those individuals as I wrote. From my desk at home, though, the cues were matched to the task.

Moreover, the narrowed perspective, though temporary, is anything but inconsequential. For a persuasively privileged moment, it renders these individuals highly vulnerable to aligned requests—as

Merely stating an intention to reach a goal or even forming an ordinary action plan is considerably less likely to succeed. There are good reasons for the superiority of if/when-then plans: the specific sequencing of elements within the plans can help us defeat the traditional enemies of goal achievement. The “if/when-then” wording is designed to

abbreviate such an arduous process by selecting the first practicable candidate that presents itself. This tendency has a quirky name, “satisficing”—a term coined by economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—to serve as a blend of the words satisfy and suffice. The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser when facing a decision—to

when it comes to dealing with all the negativity in their lives, seniors have decided that they just don’t have time for it, literally.