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###### tags: `Haus Party Strategy`
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# Haus Pre-Party Ideation: Persuasion
After Party Notes from April 7, 2022

- Moloch is in language; **Moloch is language**.
- The *one sentence persuasion* idea. "People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies."
- What are the dangers of reducing persuasion in this way?
- - What is the manipulative strategy of persuasion? What is the drive to manipulate language for positive or negative ends?
- Let's talk about emotional intelligence for facillitating understanding in corporate environments. Invented by and for professional situation to diffuse human frictions.
- Or are we talking about rhetoric?
- *Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.*
- Aristotle called it *a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics.*
- Plato defines rhetoric as *the persuasion of ignorant masses within the courts and assemblies.*
- In a sense, rheotric is adversarial to *truth* and might be considered a dangerous art.
- How far do we want to go down this philosophical rabbit hole? How do we bring it back to a meditation on DAOs and decentralized negotiations?
- How do we manipulate the effects of a mimetic/memetic field to manipulate the affects upon the members in our community?
- Let's consider the appeals to the adrenal: keying in to emotionally charged subjects to skillfully raise response in individuals. Is this innocent or malicious or neutral/agnostic?
- Let's explore reactionary outburst vs being carefully responsive. Can we talk about tact and poise? Are we trying to offend others, or ourselves, and are there redeeming qualities to being shaken out of our comfort zones? Where do we draw the line? How far is too far?

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Elaboration from Spencer April 11

- persuasion, influence, and anticapture ==> power and culture in DAOs
- Personally, I have been focused primarily on the importance of distributing executive (aka "hard") power, and how DAOs are uniquely capable of that. I have been paying too little attention to influence (aka "soft") power.
- Influence is downstream of executive power (after all, influencing is the act of convincing somebody else to execute some action that you yourself cannot), but it can be just as effective a vector for capture. Governance can be captured by attacking individuals who use their high degree of influence to convince a majority of community members to use each of their executive power in the way the attackers want.

So, some relevant discussion questions:
- What is influence? What forms can it take?
- How does it accumulate? How can it be distributed?
- What does capture-by-influence look like?
- What is the relationship to transparency and access to information?

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6 Principles of Persuasion in the Corpo Workplace
1. Reciprocity:
You need to be the first to act and to give someone a personalized and unexpected gift. To some extent, the value of the gift is less important that the act of the gift itself. These actions basically say, “I’ve scratched your back, now you scratch mine”.

2. Scarcity:
The less of something there is, the more people tend to want it. This holds true for experiences as well as for material products. To increase interest in your product or service, you may benefit from reducing its availability (or at least creating a sense of scarcity).

3. Authority:
Individuals who are authoritative, credible and knowledgeable experts in their fields are more influential and persuasive than those who are not. Part of the reason for this is that authority and credibility are some of the core building blocks of trust. When we trust people we are more likely to follow them. In reality, it’s less effective when individuals promote their own brilliance and authority than when others do it for them. Interestingly, though, it almost doesn’t matter who that other person is. Even if the person promoting you is known to benefit personally from doing so, their words of praise still increase your influence and ability to persuade.

4. Commitment and Consistency:
If I can convince you to act in a minor way in relation to something, then you’ll think of yourself as that type of person and be more likely to act in that way again in the future. You’ll also be more likely to increase your actions in that direction, if I suggest that you do so. It may be possible to use this principle to influence and persuade others. To do this, you need to find small things to persuade people to do, then move on to larger things from there.

5. Liking:
People are much more likely to be influenced and persuaded by those that they like, than those that they don’t. Given human nature, people are much more likely to like people who pay them compliments and who cooperate with them, than those who don’t. And, unfortunately, given positive evidence in relation to certain benefits of diversity, people are also much more likely to like people who are similar to them, than those who are not.

6. Consensus:
Humans are social by nature and generally feel that it’s important to conform to the norms of a social group. This means that when it comes to decision making, we often look around us to see what others are doing, before making our mind up.