We live in an interdependent world.

We can't do everything ourselves.

At home and at work, we need to be able to influence other people to do what we want.

Learning how to do so is the art and science of persuasion, a topic that has been written about continuously for 2500 years.

There are many proven persuasion techniques.

In this video I teach you about one of Dale Carnegie's favorite persuasion tips.

Altercasting

In Dale Carnegie's famous book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, he says one of the most useful influence techniques that he uses is to "give the other person a fine reputation to live up to." What does he mean by that?

He means that if we characterize people in a positive way, we talk about their good qualities,. We talk about any positive quality, they will act in such a way as to live up to the reputation that we've given them.

The technical name for this influence technique is altercasting. The word ‘alter’ means other, and ‘casting’ means as if to cast or place someone or into the role. I want to give you a few examples of how altercasting works, and then describe to you what's going on in the background, sort of psychologically and socially, that makes this influence technique so successful and so powerful.

Altercasting is essentially an influence technique where you cast someone into a social role so that they will be more likely to do the thing that we want them to do.

 

Example 1

If you're trying to sell infant formula to a mother or some sort of product that you think is healthy and nutritious, you can say to the mother,

“As a loving mother I know how important it is for you to give your children healthy and nutritious foods.”

This reminds a woman of her role as a mother, which we know has expectations that you take good care of your children, and part of taking good care of your children is giving them healthy and nutritious food. So we cast her into this role, we remind her of her role as a mother, and then we say we know you want to give your children healthy and nutritious food. “And oh by the way, I have new healthy, nutritious food to sell you.” That's one example.

Example 2

Say you're a successful person and you've reached a certain status in life. A salesman might try to say to you,

“A person in your position in life absolutely needs to have a car that reflects your station in life,” or “needs to have clothes that reflect your status.”

We cast you into the role as a successful person, businessman, or leader, whatever you are. We remind you of that social role, that there are expectations associated with that social role of being well-dressed or driving a fancy car. In that way we induce you to behave in a way that's consistent with the role that we just cast you into. This is altercasting.

Example 3

From a previous blog, I talked about a typical situation at work or in school where you're leading a group project, but you have one member of the group project who’s not pulling his or her own weight. In this case, we call that person Ron.

You have a group project, Ron was recommended to you, but he's been late to meetings and he's not showed up to others. Tomorrow the project is due and Ron hasn't done his part. He calls you up the night before and says he hasn't done his part and needs more time. Well, one thing you can say to Ron to get him to do his part is something like,

“Ron, I know you to be a committed and responsible and dedicated professional, and because I know you to be this sort of person, I know that you'll come to that meeting tomorrow prepared with your part completed just as you promised.”

So here we use altercasting. We cast Ron into the role as a committed, responsible, dedicated, professional person, reminding him that he is that way. We are inducing him to behave in a way that's consistent with that description. We are casting him into that role.

 

Why Altercasting Works

In order to understand why altercasting works, we have to first understand a few things about social roles. A social role is a set of expectations associated with a given social position. All of us can easily identify the social roles that we occupied. For me it's father, teacher, brother, friend, musician, stuff like that. These are my various social roles, and I could list many more of them, and all of us could.

What’s the associated definition of each of those roles? We could say,

“A father is a person who…”  

“A brother is a person who…”  

“A teacher is a person who… ”

Associated with each of those roles is a set of expectations. A role is really nothing more than the set of expectations associated with a given social position.

The thing about these expectations is they exert power over our behavior. We are under pressure in a way, or another way of putting it, we are motivated to live up to the expectations of these various social roles. But we have multiple social roles. I just listed four or five of my social roles, and each of them has slightly different expectations.

So how do I know which expectations to live up to in any given moment? Well that depends on which identity is salient. Salient is just another word for relevant or important. Which social role do I want to enact in this given moment? What altercasting does is increase the salience of the social role, and it reminds us of that social role and then motivates us to act in a way that's consistent with that role. We respond by doing the behavior that someone's trying to influence us to do.

 

Role Support

Another part of social roles is that they don't exist in the abstract. Social roles are created and sustained and maintained in social performances that is in our actions. Remember in my very first video, I talked about the world is a stage and we are all actors on a stage, metaphorically speaking. We're acting out these various social performances all the time in order to justify the claim that we occupy certain roles.

So if I want to be a YouTuber, I have to make YouTube videos. If I want to be a teacher, I have to teach. If I were to be a father, I have to parent. Each of our roles demands that we do these behaviors, that we put on these performances.

Every role is hungry for something called role support, or the external validation from important audiences. If my students don't think I'm a good teacher, I have a hard time maintaining my identity as a teacher. If my children don't think I'm a good parent, I have a hard time maintaining my identity as a good parent and so on. So every role requires support in the form of social validation for an audience.

One important thing that's happening in altercasting is that the person who is the influencer is offering us role support in exchange for the behavior. They're basically saying, “I'm reminding you of this role that you occupy, and I'm telling you, if you do this behavior it will garner you, support, and validation for this role that you value.”

This motivates us to do the behavior because we want support for that role and validation for our identities. We think, “Oh yeah, if I do this behavior I can get social validation for this role that I value, and feel more secure in my identity.” This motivates us to do the behavior.

 

Cognitive Dissonance

There's another psychological principle at work in alter casting, and that is what's called cognitive dissonance and our desire to avoid cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling when we have two conflicting beliefs, or when we engage in a behavior that is inconsistent with our beliefs.

For example, I say I'm a person who's concerned about the environment, but I have a piece of garbage and I'm somewhere in the city and there's no close garbage can. I'm really tempted to just litter but I can't because I feel like I'm someone who's concerned about the environment and littering would cause so much dissonance in my mind. I start to get that uncomfortable feeling of acting inconsistently with my own values and my own beliefs, that I won't do it. We are psychologically motivated to avoid this uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, and the way we avoid it primarily is acting consistently with our beliefs and values.

Altercasting reminds us of our role and of the expectations associated with that role, and it gives us an opportunity to act consistently with that role or with that identity, and this resolves dissonance. So this principle of consistency and avoiding dissonance is another psychological factor explaining why alter casting works.

 

Prominence and Salience Hierarchies

Roles are ranked in two different ways. I could ask you list the three most important roles in your life and you wouldn't have difficulty. For me it would be something like father, son, friend, scientist, and brother. That is what scientists call their prominence hierarchy. This means I am ranking in terms of the roles’ long-term importance to me.

Over the long term, being a father is my sort of most important role. But over the shorter term, I might be a teacher one moment, a friend one moment, and a scientist, a musician, a teacher, a YouTuber the next. Right now being a YouTuber is my most salient identity.

So we have the long-term ranking of our identities, the prominence hierarchy, and then we have the short-term, what's called the salient hierarchy. The salience hierarchy characterizes which of our many identities is active in a precise moment. For me in this precise moment, my YouTube identity is most salient. When I leave, it might be my college professor identity or something like that.

Alter casting is all about changing the salience of our identities or our roles in order to make an identity salient – an identity which is consistent with the behavior that they're trying to influence us to do. This can be applied to the above three examples: altercasting increases the salience of… 

The woman’s identity as a mother, so she’ll buy healthy food for her kids;

Your identity as a business person, so that you buy fancy clothes;

Ron's identity as a dedicated professional, so he'll do the group project.

All of those work because they influence the salience, the moment to moment importance of various of our identities.

 

Summary

How are we going to use this technique? We have to think of the behavior. We know what behavior we want people to do, and we have to say okay, which of a person's identities is that behavior consistent with? Which of their identities will this behavior reinforce? And then we want to remind them of that identity.

That's the basic trick. Figure out which identity the targeted behavior will be consistent with or will reinforce, and then remind the person of that identity. That's altercasting. It increases the salience of the identity, and then the person will be motivated to act in a way that is consistent with that role or that identity.

Give it a try. I think it's a really useful technique, you'll see it being used all the time. People mention our identities in order to influence them.

In the comments, I'd like to hear one example of when alter casting has been used on you. Tell me whether it worked or whether it didn't work.

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