Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

208 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making

to do so. Think of the millions of consumers who have been infl uenced to drink Coca-Cola by

slogans such as Coke is it! and Taste the feeling.

When audiences make decisions primarily on the basis on their intuitions, the form or

style of a message can have a greater persuasive impact on them than its content or substance.

Consequently, persuasive documents and presentations must not only appeal to them on a

rational level, they must also appeal to the audience on an intuitive level if only to ensure that

competing proposals are not more persuasive for purely subjective reasons. Chapter 5 explores

intuitive decision making and the techniques, such as framing, that appeal to audiences on the

intuitive level.

Some of the many differences between the rational mode of decision making and the

intuitive mode are highlighted in Table 5.1 , adapted from a paper by Nobel laureate Daniel

Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick.^1 Whereas rational decisions are based on objec-

tive experience and information, intuitive decisions are based on subjective experience or the

feelings of the decision maker. Unlike the rational mode, which is used consciously and only

if believed to be necessary, the intuitive mode operates automatically at all times. The rational

mode of decision making is a slow and deliberate process that requires effort to make the neces-

sary comparisons, calculations, and trade-offs. The intuitive mode, on the other hand, is fast and

effortless, and the decisions it comes up with are not based on comparisons or calculations but

on holistic impressions.

The rational mode requires abstract and quantitative information for its comparisons and calcu-

lations. It makes sense of the information it inputs using rules and deductive reasoning. The intuitive

mode, in contrast, responds best to concrete and attention-getting stimuli, a photograph of a shiny

red sports car, for example. It interprets the information it inputs by making associations with situ-

ations from the past that produced similar responses. In the rational mode information-acquisition

and information-integration processes are carried out in a serial sequence, one comparison at a

time. In the intuitive mode audiences carry out those processes beneath conscious awareness in a

parallel manner that allows them to recognize different confi gurations or patterns of information

immediately.^2

Brain Regions Activated. In his review of the neuroscience research, social psychologist Mat-

thew Lieberman concludes that rational-mode processing activates lateral and medial regions of

both the frontal and parietal lobes, as well as medial regions of the temporal lobe (see Figures 3.4

and 3.5 , p. 108). These regions have been linked to executive control and explicit learning.

TABLE 5.1 A Comparison of Intuitive and Rational Cognitive Processes

Intuitive Mode Rational Mode

Focus of awareness Subjective experience Objective experience

When activated At all times As needed

How activated Automatically Consciously

Speed Rapid Slow

Output Holistic impression Effortful trade-offs

Stimuli Concrete and attention getting Abstract and quantitative

Comprehension Associative, Similarity based Deductive, Rule based

Information acquisition Parallel Serial

Information integration Confi gural Feature by feature

Source: Adapted from Kahneman and Frederick (2002)