Scott Adams talks about the Godzilla of persuasion coining the “Dark” killshot:
If you are following the media coverage after the GOP convention, you know that Democrats and their surrogates are describing Trump’s speech as “dark…”
“Dark” is a linguistic kill shot from the left. I assume all the TV pundits on Clinton’s team got the message to use the word “dark” right out of the gate. I confess that at first I didn’t recognize how good it is. It’s designed, Trump-style, and it didn’t come from an amateur. The Clinton team is playing some serious 3D chess now.
Do you remember all of those policy details Clinton talked about this week? Me neither. She’s done with that uselessness now. She went full-Voldemort on Trump this week and unleashed a “dark” spell. It’s a good one…
This linguistic kill shot has a partial fingerprint. If I’m right, Godzilla just got into the game.
I assume Godzilla is probably Robert Cialdini, an expert on persuasion and the author of the book Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion.
The thing is, Adams is right. Dark fits all of the checkmarks on influence. Vague, ominous, short, memorable, unique, etc. People can read their biases into it. It will facilitate confirmation bias later. And yet, we aren’t hearing it any more.
My suspicion is they have polled to judge the effect since then, and “Dark” didn’t work.
When they said the vision of the world which Trump presented was dark, the rabbit Cialdini saw bad-feels, which as a rabbit he didn’t like. Because rabbits project, his feeling was that all the rabbits would flee Trump’s dark and scary pasture, and begin to follow Hillary to her limitless fields of skittles and orange soda waterfalls.
But instead when people heard Dark, their amygdala perked up, and the idea of a dark world gave them the chills. It didn’t help that those who saw Trump’s speech would have seen a pretty accurate view of the world, which is legitimately a lot darker lately.
The thing is, Hillary is a liberal pussy who nobody trusts. Trump is a formidable Alpha man who faces adversity head on, tells you what he thinks no matter what the consequences, and is a known winner whose very name is associated with wealth and success.
If you have to share a foxhole with someone, in a dark and scary world, you want it to be Trump.
Dark failed because it was mortally salient, and like all mortal salience stimuli, it triggered a K-shift in the listener, which combined with our K-selected times was just overwhelmingly helpful to Trump.
This is the tidal effect inherent to r/K Theory. We like to think we have power, but under the tenets of r/K, we can only massage the edges. When things are mildly r or K, persuasion will have some effect. But when times go r then all of the conservative leadership in the world can’t drag a society to K, and when things shift K, all of the happy thoughts and psychological kung fu in the world can’t drag people’s psychologies back to r. Fighting r/K is like trying to turn back the tides.
The bottom line is, things are just too K right now, and that is bad for liberals and Cuckservatives alike.
This is Trump’s time.
In times like these, you can only ride the waves, and the waves today are unquestioningly heading toward K.