Sublime

Our tagline at maslansky + partners is “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.”®

Content:

In numerous experiments, people react very differently to the information that “ninety of one hundred are alive” than to “ten of one hundred are dead”—even though the content of the two statements is exactly the same.

Tetlock's book Expert Political Judgment:

“If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said you wanted to support Law and Economics, he would be much more open to the idea,” he confided. “Law and Economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government.

As political pollster Frank Luntz said, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”

On the contrary, it’s a matter of finding the most appealing and persuasive way to present a preexisting proposition or program in a more accurate light.

The bottom line: You can’t rally people around a strategy or an idea if they don’t understand what you’re saying—or zone out.

World Values Survey,