Predictions 'predict' behaviours

Empress of China is a hot TV drama about the saga of China’s first female emperor. There are many clever episodes where techniques of persuasion are used in the drama and the following is an example. Princess Gaoyang commanded her husband Fang Yi’ai to egg her third eldest brother, the King of Wu, to rebel against her ninth eldest brother, the current Emperor. Rebellion was refused and emperor's son-in-law asked the Princess why he needed to mention the rebellion before the King of Wu. The Princess said:” The beliefs of human are like the seeds of the flowers. If they are not exposed to the sun, they will become withered quickly. Once they are revealed, whether by the people himself, or by others, they get the chance of becoming true. The same is with King of Wu’s belief. If his rebellion beliefs were never said aloud, they would only sparkle in his unconsciousness. Now that you have mentioned them, they may be activated in his mind. ” 

This is a photo of the scenery where the Princess is explaining the roll of prediction to her husband.

Such persuasion technique is a version of “Asking people to predict”. In addition to revealing people’s willingness to do the action, prediction does more to increase the tendency of performing the predicted action. Psychologists think this may come from “cognitive representation” mechanism that people who make predictions are actually forming the images of performing the actions and consequences of performing in their mind, which unconsciously increases the possibility to make the predictions into reality, even if they may contradict the conditions of reality and people’s initial intentions. In the TV plot, Princess Gaoyang used this technique by implanting a dream of becoming Emperor into the King of Wu’s mind by asking her husband, a favourite general under the King of Wu, to mention that the crown should have belonged to the King of Wu because of his talents. Who can resist the temptation of owning infinite treasure and authority once being predicted?

In reality, psychologist Greenwald (1986) has conducted several studies to prove the practicability of the “Asking people to predict” technique. In Experiment 1, after being confirmed that all participants knew the time and place for the next day’s registration, the subjects were divided into two groups. Half of the subjects were thanked and the other half were pressed to predict whether they would register to vote before the phone calls were ended. Registration and voting records were checked and the percentage of making the actions (registration) were displayed in the figure below. Experiment 2 was focused on the voting action and followed the same procedures as Experiment 1.

From the figure we see that in terms of both registration and voting, people register (10% increase) or vote (25% increase) more after making a prediction. Chi-square test confirmed significant difference in percentage registering or voting between prediction and non-prediction conditions. In addition to the effect of prediction, we can find a bit more from these figures: The difference in the increase between Experiment 1 (where participants were among the minority of people who did not register to vote) and Experiment 2 (where students were among the majority of people who had registered) shows that the prediction technique of persuasion is more effective in group members who are more familiar and willing to perform the target action.

It should be noted that the study did not distinguish between positive and negative predictions, emphasizing on the mere existence of prediction before taking action. In the same way, although Princess Gaoyang received a negative prediction from the King of Wu temporarily, the conversation turned out to be the beginning of Wu's rebellion. Thus, this study confirmed the persuasive trick used by Princess Gaoyang by proving the effect of prediction in persuading people into taking actions in the future.

By:
Feiyi Ouyang