What's focal is causal (And a story about false confessions)

It’s no wonder that we assign elevated import to factors that have our attention. We also assign them causality. Therefore, directed attention gives focal elements a specific kind of initial weight in any deliberation. It gives them standing as causes, which in turn gives them standing as answers to that most essential of human questions: Why? Because we typically allot special attention to the true causes around us, if we see ourselves giving such attention to some factor, we become more likely to think of it as a cause. Take monetary payments. Because the amount of money is so salient in the exchanges—“I’ll pay you x when you do y”—we tend to infer that the payment spurred the act, when, in fact, it was often some other, less visible factor. Economists, in particular, are prone to this bias because the monetary aspects of a situation dominate their attentions and analyses.

Thus, when Harvard Business School economist Felix Oberholzer-Gee approached people waiting in line at several different venues and offered them money to let him cut in, he recognized that a purely economics-based model would predict that the more cash he offered, the more people would agree to the exchange. And that’s what he found: half of everyone offered $1 let him cut in line; 65 percent did so if offered them $3, and acceptance rates jumped to 75 percent and 76 percent when he proposed the larger sums of $5 and $10.
According to classical economic theory, which enshrines financial self- interest as the primary cause of human behavior, those greater incentives convinced people to take the deal for their own fiscal betterment. How could any observer to the transaction doubt it? The highly visible incentives caused the obtained effects due to their direct links to personal monetary gain, right? Nothing surprising occurred here, right? Well, right, except for an additional finding that challenges all this thinking: almost no one took the money.“Gee,” Oberholzer-Gee must have said to himself, “that’s odd.” Indeed, a number of oddities appeared in his data, at least for adherents to the idea that the ultimate cause of human action is one’s own financial interest. For instance, although bigger cash incentives upped compliance with the line cutter’s wish, they didn’t increase acceptance of the payment; richer deals increasingly caused people to sacrifice their places in line but without taking the greater compensation. To explain his findings, Oberholzer-Gee stepped away from a consideration of salient economic factors and toward a hidden factor: an obligation people feel to help those in need.
The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behavioral scientists sometimes call the norm of social responsibility.

It states that we should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their need. Several decades’ worth of research shows that, in general, the more someone needs our help, the more obligated we feel to provide it, the more guilty we feel if we don’t provide it, and the more likely we are to provide it. When viewed through this lens, the puzzling findings make perfect sense. The payment offers stimulated compliance because they alerted recipients to the amount of need present in the situation. This account explains why larger financial inducements increased consent even though most people weren’t willing to pocket them: more money signaled a stronger need on the part of the requester. (“If this guy is willing to pay a lot to jump ahead of me, he must really need to get to the front fast.”)

It would be naïve to assert that fiscal factors are less than potent determinants of human action. Still, I’d argue that merely because they are so visible (and, therefore, prominent in attention), they are often less determining than they seem. Conversely, there are many other factors— social obligations, personal values, moral standards—that, merely because they are not readily observable, are often more determining than they seem.
Elements such as money that attract notice within human exchanges don’t just appear more important, they also appear more causal. And presumed causality, especially when acquired through channeled attention, is a big deal for creating influence—big enough to account for patterns of human conduct that can range from perplexing to alarming.

Taking a Chance

In the first of these categories, consider the most famous case of product tampering of all time. In the autumn of 1982, someone went into supermarkets and drug stores in the Chicago area, injected packaged capsules of Tylenol with cyanide, and then returned the containers to the store shelves, where they were later purchased. Several reasons exist for the incident’s long-standing notoriety. First, seven Chicago residents died from ingesting the poison—four of them family members who had swallowed capsules from the same Tylenol container. Second, their killer has never been found, giving the crime an uncomfortably memorable lack of closure.
But, for the most part, the case lives on today not so much for these regrettable reasons as for a pair of favorable ones: it led to the passage of important product safety legislation and to pharmaceutical industry shifts to tamperproof seals and packaging that have reduced risks to consumers. In addition—owing to the rapid, customer-centered steps taken by Tylenol’s maker, Johnson & Johnson, which recalled thirty-one million of the capsules from all stores—it produced a textbook approach to proper corporate crisis management that is still considered the gold standard. (The recommended approach urges companies to act without hesitation to fully inform and protect the public, even at substantial expense to its own immediate economic interests.) Aside from these high-profile features, another element of the case has gone almost entirely unnoticed but strikes me as remarkable. Early on, after it had been determined that the deaths were linked to bottles of Tylenol but before the extent of the tampering had been established, Johnson & Johnson issued nationwide warnings intended to prevent further harm. One widely communicated sort of warning alerted consumers to the production lot numbers on the affected bottles—numbers that identified where and when a particular batch of capsules had been manufactured. Because they were the first to be identified, two of the numbers received the most such publicity: lots 2,880 and 1,910.

Immediately, and bewilderingly, US residents of states that ran lotteries began playing those two numbers at unprecedented rates. In three states,
Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, officials announced that they had to halt wagers on the numbers because betting on them shot above “maximum liability levels.”To know how best to account for this set of events, let’s review the characteristics of the numbers. First, they were ordinary; not inherently memorable in any way. Second, they were associated with grievous misfortune. Moreover, they were intensely connected in American minds to imagery of poison-fed death. Yet many thousands of those minds responded to something about the numbers that lifted expectations of lottery success.
What? Our previous analysis offers one answer: Because of all the publicity surrounding them, they had become focal in attention; and what is focal is seen to have causal properties—to have the ability to make events occur.
It turned out that every one of the minds that thought those numbers would provide an advantage over chance was proved wrong by the subsequent lottery results. But I doubt that the losses taught those minds to avoid, in any general way, similar future errors. The tendency to presume that what is focal is causal holds sway too deeply, too automatically, and over too many types of human judgment.

Taking a Life

Imagine that you are in a café enjoying a cup of coffee. At the table directly in front of you, a man and a woman are deciding which movie to see that evening. After a few minutes, they settle on one of the options and set off to the theater. As they leave, you notice that one of your friends had been sitting at the table behind them. Your friend sees you, joins you, and remarks on the couple’s movie conversation, saying, “It’s always just one person who drives the decision in those kinds of debates, isn’t it?” You laugh and nod because you noticed that too: although the man was trying to be diplomatic about it, he clearly was the one who determined the couple’s movie choice.
Your amusement disappears, though, when your friend observes, “She sounded sweet, but she just pushed until she got her way.”
Dr. Shelley Taylor, a social psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), knows why you and your friend could have heard the same conversation but come to opposite judgments about who determined the end result. It was a small accident of seating arrangements: you were positioned to observe the exchange over the shoulder of the woman, making the man more visible and salient, while your friend had the reverse point of view. Taylor and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which bservers watched and listened to conversations that had been scripted carefully so that neither discussion partner contributed more than the other.
Some observers watched from a perspective that allowed them to see the face of one the parties over the shoulder of the other, while other observers saw both faces from the side, equally. All the observers were then asked to judge who had more influence in the discussion, based on tone, content, and direction. The outcomes were always the same: whomever’s face was more visible was judged to be more causal.
Taylor told me a funny but nonetheless enlightening story about how she first became convinced of the power of the what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal phenomenon. In setting up the initial study, she arranged for a pair of research assistants to rehearse a conversation in which it was critical for each discussion partner to contribute about equally. Standing alternately behind first one and then the other person, she found herself criticizing whomever she was facing for “dominating the exchange.” Finally, after several such critiques, two of Taylor’s colleagues, who were watching the conversation partners from the side, stopped her in exasperation, asserting that, to them, neither partner seemed to be dominating the conversation. Taylor reports that she knew then, without a single piece of data yet collected, that her experiment would be a success because the rehearsal had already produced the predicted effect—in her.
No matter what they tried, the researchers couldn’t stop observers from presuming that the causal agent in the interaction they’d witnessed was the one whose face was most visible to them. They were astonished to see it appear in “practically unmovable” and “automatic” form, even when the conversation topic was personally important to the observers; even when the observers were distracted by the researchers; even when the observers experienced a long delay before judging the discussants; and even when the observers expected to have to communicate their judgments to other people.
What’s more, not only did this pattern emerge whether the judges were male or female, but also it appeared whether the conversations were viewed in person or on videotape.26
When I asked Taylor about this last variation, she recalled that the taping was done for reasons of experimental control. By recording the same discussion from different camera angles, she could ensure that everything about the conversation itself would be identical every time she showed it. When her results were first published, that videotaped interactions could produce the what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal effect was not viewed as an important facet of Taylor’s findings. But circumstances have now changed, because certain kinds of videotaped interactions are used frequently to help determine the guilt or innocence of suspects in major crimes. To register how and why this is so, it is necessary to take an instructive detour and consider a frightening component of all highly developed criminal justice systems: the ability of police interrogators to generate confessions from individuals who did not commit the crime.
Extracted false confessions are unsettling for a pair of reasons. The first is societal and concerns the miscarriages of justice and the affronts to fairness that such manufactured confessions create within any culture. The second is more personal, involving the possibility that we ourselves might be induced to confess by the tactics of interrogators convinced, mistakenly, of our guilt.
Although for most of us such a possibility is remote, it is likely to be more real than we think. The idea that no innocent person could be persuaded to confess to a crime, especially a serious one, is wrong. It happens with disquieting frequency. Even though the confessions obtained in the great majority of police interrogations are in fact true and are corroborated by other evidence, legal scholars have uncovered a distressingly large number of elicited false confessions. Indeed, the confessions have often been shown later to be demonstrably false by evidence such as physical traces (DNA or fingerprint samples), newly obtained information (documentation of the suspect’s presence hundreds of miles away from the crime), and even proof that no crime occurred (when a presumed murder victim is discovered alive and well).27
The same legal scholars have proposed a long list of factors that can help explain persuaded false confessions. Two strike me as particularly potent. I can relate to the first as an ordinary citizen. If I were asked by authorities to come to the police station to help them resolve the suspicious death of one of my neighbors—perhaps one I’d argued with in the past—I’d be glad to oblige. It would be the civically responsible thing to do. And if during the consequent questioning I began to feel that I was a suspect in police eyes, I might continue on anyway without demanding to be represented by a lawyer because, as an innocent man, I’d be confident that my interrogators would recognize the truth in what I told them. Plus, I wouldn’t want to confirm any doubts they harbored about my innocence by seeming to hide behind a lawyer; instead, I’d want to walk away from the session with all those doubts dismissed.28
As a person of interest, my understandable inclinations—to help the police and then to convince them against my involvement—could lead me to ruin, though, for the other potent reason induced false confessions occur.

In this instance, it’s a reason I can relate to as a student of social influence: by deciding to persist through the interview on my own, I might subject myself to a set of techniques perfected by interrogators over centuries to get confessions from suspects. Some of the techniques are devious and have been shown by research to increase the likelihood of false confessions: lying about the existence of incriminating fingerprints or eyewitness testimony; pressing suspects to repeatedly imagine committing the crime; and putting them into a brain-clouded psychological state through sleep deprivation and relentless, exhaustive questioning. Defenders of such tactics insist that they are designed to extract the truth. An accompanying, complicating truth, however, is that sometimes they just extract confessions that are verifiably untrue.

A Story About False Confessions

Eighteen-year-old Peter Reilly’s life changed forever one night in 1973 when he returned home from a youth meeting at a local church to find his mother on the floor, dying in a pool of blood. Though shaken and reeling from the sight, he had the presence of mind to phone for help immediately. By the time aid arrived, however, Barbara Gibbons had died. An examination of the body revealed that she had been murdered savagely: her throat had been cut, three ribs had been broken, and the thigh bones of both legs had been fractured.
At five foot seven and 121 pounds, and with not a speck of blood on his body, clothes, or shoes, Peter Reilly seemed an unlikely killer. Yet from the start, when they found him staring blankly outside the room where his mother lay dead, the police suspected that Peter had murdered her. Some people in their Connecticut town laughed at her unconventional ways, but many others were not amused, describing her as unpredictable, volatile, belligerent, and unbalanced. She appeared to take delight in irritating the people she met—men especially—belittling, confronting, and challenging them. By any measure, Barbara Gibbons was a difficult woman to get along with. So it didn’t seem unreasonable to police officials that Peter, fed up with his mother’s constant antagonisms, would “fly off the handle” and murder her in a spasm of rage.
At the scene and even later when taken in for questioning, Peter waived his right to an attorney, thinking that if he told the truth, he would be believed and released in short order. That was a serious miscalculation, as he was not prepared, legally or psychologically, for the persuasive assault he would face. Over a period of sixteen hours, he was interrogated by a rotating team of four police officers, including a polygraph operator who informed Peter that, according to the lie detector, he had killed his mother. That exchange, as recorded in the interrogation’s transcript, left little question of the operator’s certainty in the matter:

Peter: Does that actually read my brain?

Polygraph operator: Definitely. Definitely.

Peter: Would it definitely be me? Could it have been someone else?

Polygraph operator: No way. Not from these reactions.

Actually, the results of polygraph examinations are far from infallible, even in the hands of experts. In fact, because of their unreliability, they are banned as evidence in the courts of many states and countries.
The chief interrogator then told Peter, falsely, that physical evidence had been obtained proving his guilt. He also suggested to the boy how he could have done it without remembering the event: he had become furious with his mother and erupted into a murderous fit during which he slaughtered her, and now he had repressed the horrible memory. It was their job, Peter’s and his, to “dig, dig, dig” at the boy’s subconscious until the memory surfaced.
Dig, dig, dig they did, exploring every way to bring back that memory, until Peter began to recall—dimly at first but then more vividly—slashing his mother’s throat and stomping on her body. By the time the interrogation was over, these imaginations had become reality for both the interrogators and Peter:

Interrogator: But you recall cutting her throat with a straight razor.

Peter: It’s hard to say. I think I recall doing it. I mean, I imagine myself doing it. It’s coming out of the back of my head.

Interrogator: How about her legs? What kind of vision do we get there? Can you remember stomping her legs?

Peter: You say it, then I imagine I’m doing it.

Interrogator: You’re not imagining anything. I think the truth is starting to come out. You want it out.

Peter: I know...

Analyzing and reanalyzing these images convinced Peter that they betrayed his guilt. Along with his interrogators, who pressured him to break through his “mental block,” the teenager pieced together from the scenes in his head an account of his actions that fit the details he’d been given of the murder.
Finally, a little more than twenty-four hours after the grizzly crime, though still uncertain of many specifics, Peter Reilly confessed to it in a written, signed statement. That statement conformed closely to the explanation that had been proposed by his interrogators and that he had come to accept as accurate, even though he believed none of it at the outset of his questioning and even though, as events demonstrated later, none of it was true.
When Peter awoke in a jail cell the next day, with the awful fatigue and the persuasive onslaught of the interrogation room gone, he no longer believed his confession. But it was too late to retract it convincingly. To virtually every official in the criminal justice system, it remained compelling evidence of his guilt: a judge rejected a motion to suppress it at Peter’s trial, ruling that it had been made voluntarily; the police were so satisfied that it incriminated Peter that they stopped considering other suspects; the prosecuting attorneys made it the centerpiece of their case; and the jury that ultimately convicted Peter of murder relied on it heavily in its deliberations.
To a one, these individuals did not believe that a normal person could be made to confess falsely to a crime without the use of threats, violence, or torture. And to a one, they were mistaken: Two years later, when the chief prosecutor died, evidence was found hidden in his files that placed Peter at a time and in a location on the night of the crime that established his innocence and that led to the repeal of his conviction, the dismissal of all charges, and his release from prison.



If you admit, we don’t acquit. Peter Reilly surrounded by deputy sheriffs taking him to prison after his conviction. 

There is an old saying that confession is good for the soul. But for criminal suspects, it is bad for just about everything else. Those who confess are much more likely to be charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to harsh punishment. As the great American jurist Daniel Webster recognized in 1830, “There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is a confession.” A century and a half later, renowned US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan expanded upon Webster’s assertion with a stunning observation about the criminal justice system: “the introduction of a confession makes other aspects of a trial in court superfluous; and the real trial, for all purposes, occurs as the confession is obtained.”
There is chilling evidence that Brennan was right. An analysis of 125 cases involving fabricated confessions found that suspects who first confessed but then renounced their statements and pled not guilty were still convicted at trial 81 percent of the time—yet these, recall, were all false confessions! Peter Reilly suffered the same fate as the great majority of individuals persuaded to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, which raises a legitimate question: Why should we spotlight his confession over other more publicized and harrowing cases with the same outcome—for example, those in which multiple suspects were convinced to claim that, as a group, they had perpetrated a crime none of them had committed? Notably, it wasn’t anything that had occurred during his interrogation, trial, conviction, or subsequent legal battles. It surfaced at an event twenty years later where Peter, who had been employed on and off in various low- level sales jobs, was a speaker on a panel considering the causes and consequences of wrongfully obtained confessions and where it was described, not by Peter, but by a man sitting next to him with the ordinaryname of Arthur Miller. This, though, was no ordinary Arthur Miller. It was the Arthur Miller, who some view as the greatest-ever American playwright, who wrote what some view as the greatest-ever American drama, Death of a Salesman, and who—if that isn’t enough to draw our notice—was married for five years to the woman some view as the greatest-ever American sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe.



Life for a salesman. Arthur Miller and Peter Reilly, who had worked in various sales positions, twenty years after the murder.

After being introduced to the audience by Peter as one of his key supporters, Miller explained his presence on the panel as due to a long- standing concern with “the business of confessions, in my life as well as in my plays.” During the period of anti-Communist fervor in the United States, in the 1950s, several of Miller’s friends and acquaintances were summoned to appear at hearings before congressional committees. There they were pushed in calculated questioning to confess to Communist Party affiliations as well as to knowing (and then revealing) the names of members of the party prominent in the entertainment world. Miller himself was subpoenaed by the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted, fined, and denied a passport for failing to answer all the chairman’s questions.
The role of confessions in Miller’s plays can be seen in e Crucible, the most frequently produced of all his works. Although set in 1692 during the Salem witchcraft trials, Miller wrote it allegorically to reflect the form of loaded questioning he witnessed in congressional hearings and that he later recognized in the Peter Reilly case.
Miller’s comments on the panel with Reilly were relatively brief. But they included an account of a meeting he had in New York with a Chinese woman named Nien Cheng. During Communist China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which was intended to purge the country of all captialistic elements, she was subjected to harsh interrogations designed to get her to confess to being an anti-Communist and a spy. With tear-rimmed eyes, Nien related to the playwright her deep feelings upon seeing, after her eventual release from prison, a production of e Crucible in her native country. At the time, she was sure that parts of the dialogue had been rewritten by its Chinese director to connect with national audiences, because the questions asked of the accused in the play “were exactly the same as the questions I had been asked by the Cultural Revolutionaries.” No American, she thought, could have known these precise wordings, phrasings, and sequencings.
She was shocked to hear Miller reply that he had taken the questions from the record of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials—and that they were the same as were deployed within the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Later, it was the uncanny match to those in the Reilly interrogation that prompted Miller to get involved in Peter’s defense.30
A scary implication arises from Miller’s story. Certain remarkably similar and effective practices have been developed over many years that enable investigators, in all manner of places and for all manner of purposes, to wring statements of guilt from suspects—sometimes innocent ones. This recognition led Miller and legal commentators to recommend that all interrogations involving major crimes be videotaped. That way, these commentators have argued, people who see the recordings—prosecutors, jury members, judges—can assess for themselves whether the confession was gained improperly. And, indeed, video recording of interrogation sessions in serious criminal cases has been increasingly adopted around the globe for this reason. It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a problem with it in practice: the point of view of the video camera is almost always behind the interrogator and onto the face of the suspect.
The legal issue of whether a confession had been made freely by the suspect or extracted improperly by an interrogator involves a judgment of causality—of who was responsible for the incriminating statement. As we know from the experiments of Professor Taylor, a camera angle arranged to record the face of one discussant over the shoulder of another biases that critical judgment toward the more visually salient of the two. We also know now—from the more recent experiments of social psychologist Daniel Lassiter—that such a camera angle aimed at a suspect during an interrogation leads observers of the recording to assign the suspect greater responsibility for a confession (and greater guilt). Moreover, as was the case when Taylor and her coworkers tried it, Lassiter and his coworkers found this outcome to be stubbornly persistent. In their studies, it surfaced regardless of whether the observers were men or women, college students or jury-eligible adults in their forties and fifties, exposed to the recording once or twice, intellectually deep or shallow, and previously informed or not about the potentially biasing impact of the camera angle. Perhaps most disturbingly, the identical pattern appeared whether the watchers were ordinary citizens, law enforcement personnel, or criminal court judges.
Nothing could change the camera angle’s prejudicial impact—except changing the camera angle itself. The bias disappeared when the recording showed the interrogation and confession from the side, so that the suspect and questioner were equally focal. In fact, it was possible to reverse the bias by showing observers a recording of the identical interaction with the camera trained over the suspect’s shoulder onto the interrogator’s face; then, compared with the side-view judgments, the interrogator was perceived to have coerced the confession. Manifestly here, what’s focal seems causal.
Thus, a potential dilemma exists for an innocent person—perhaps you— invited to a police station to help investigators solve a major crime. There is certainly nothing wrong with complying and providing that assistance; it’s what good citizens do. But matters would get more complicated if you began to sense that the session was designed not so much to obtain information from you as to obtain a possible confession from you. The standard recommendation of defense attorneys at this point would be to stop the proceedings and request a lawyer. That choice, though, has its risks. By terminating the session, you might not be able to give your questioners the facts they need to solve the crime quickly and to discount your involvement fully, which would allow you to dispel the specter of suspicion then and there.
Being suspected of a serious crime can be a terrifying, nasty, lingering experience that might well be prolonged by the appearance of having something to conceal. But choosing to go on with the increasingly interrogation-like session includes perils of its own. You might be laying yourself open to tactics that have evolved in disparate places over centuries to extract incriminating statements from suspects, including blameless ones.
There are ample grounds for caution here because, wherever employed, these are the techniques that have proven themselves to interrogators most able to achieve that end.
Suppose, after considering your options, you decide to soldier on through the interview in an earnest attempt to clear your name. Is there anything you could do to increase the odds that, should you be somehow tricked or pressured into making falsely incriminating comments, external observers would be able to identify the tricks and pressure as the causes? There is. It comes in two steps, straight from the research of Professors
Taylor and Lassiter.
First, find the camera in the room, which will usually be above and behind the police officer. Second, move your chair. Position yourself so that the recording of the session will depict your face and your questioner’s face equally. Don’t allow the what’s-focal-is-presumed-causal effect to disadvantage you at trial. Otherwise, as Justice Brennan believed, your trial might already be over.31
By the way, if you ever found yourself in the interview situation I described, and you chose to end the session and demand a lawyer, is there anything you might do to reduce police suspicions that you therefore have something to hide? I have a suggestion: blame me. Say that, although you’d like to cooperate fully on your own, you once read a book that urged you to consider extensive police questioning unsafe, even for innocent individuals.
Go ahead, blame me. You can even use my name. What are the police going to do, arrest me on a trumped-up charge, bring me down to the stationhouse, and employ Machiavellian tactics to gain a false confession? They’ll never win a conviction, because I’ll just find the camera and move my chair.
Evidence that people automatically view what’s focal as causal helps me to understand other phenomena that are difficult to explain. Leaders, for example, are accorded a much larger causal position than they typically deserve in the success or failure of the teams, groups, and organizations they head. Business performance analysts have termed this tendency “the romance of leadership” and have demonstrated that other factors (such as workforce quality, existing internal business systems, and market conditions) have a greater impact on corporate profits than CEO actions do; yet the leader is assigned outsize responsibility for company results. Thus even in the United States, where worker wages are relatively high, an analysis showed that the average employee in a large corporation is paid one half of 1 percent of what the CEO is paid. If that discrepancy seems hard to account for on grounds of economic or social fairness, perhaps we can account for it on other grounds: the person at the top is visually prominent, psychologically salient, and, hence, assigned an unduly causal role in the course of events.

End Note

In sum, because what’s salient is deemed important and what’s focal is deemed causal, a communicator who ushers audience members’ attention to selected facets of a message reaps a significant persuasive advantage: recipients’ receptivity to considering those facets prior to actually considering them. In a real sense, then, channeled attention can make recipients more open to a message pre-suasively, before they process it. It’s a persuader’s dream, because very often the biggest challenge for a communicator is not in providing a meritorious case but in convincing recipients to devote their limited time and energy to considering its merits.
Perceptions of issue importance and causality meet this challenge exquisitely.
If captured attention does indeed provide pre-suasive leverage to a communicator, a related issue arises: Are there any features of information that don’t even require a communicator’s special efforts to draw attention to them because, by their nature, they draw attention to themselves? 

Reference 
Chapter 4: from Presuasion (A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade) by Robert Cialdini

Tags: Book Summary,Communication Skills,Negotiation,