Unexpectedness can enhance overall persuasiveness of your ideas and arguments. But it is in particular very useful when you want to overcome biased views or more ingrained attitudes and stereotypes.
Anwar Sadat’s Unexpected Move in Egyptian Israeli Peace Talks
One example of how unexpectedness can help comes from the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty negotiations. Israel considered Egypt responsible for the 1973 Yom Kippur war. So understandably, Israelis did not think of Egyptians as their best friends.
Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat knew that in the minds of Israelis he was the enemy. As a result, all his peace treaty proposals would be in vain.
So Sadat made an unexpected move: he flew to Jerusalem and spoke before Knesset (the Israeli parliament). At that time, not even the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. So it was a radical move for an Arab leader to visit Jerusalem (but not necessarily recognize it as Israel’s capital).
Sadat’s move was unexpected, so it likely unfroze some rigid Israeli beliefs about him. Also, it created cognitive dissonance in the Israeli minds, who now had two conflicting beliefs: Sadat is the enemy and Sadat’s actions show that he approaches us better than even some of our best friends.
Eventually, Israel and Egypt concluded a peace treaty in 1977. A year later, Sadat and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin received a Nobel Peace Prize.
What this example illustrates is that unexpectedness can help overcome rigid thinking and ingrained beliefs. It temporarily unfreezes rigid attitudes, so to speak. And this makes it more likely that people won’t automatically or mindlessly reject your arguments without considering them even a little.
This effect is demonstrated by specific techniques that rely on creating unexpectedness to temporarily unfreeze thinking, such as the disrupt-then-reframe technique.
Research on Disrupt-Then-Reframe Technique
As the name implies, the technique consists of two basic steps. First, you present your message with some speech disruption – an odd phrase or dysfluency in language – something that creates slight confusion. In the second step you present the reframe – a persuasive reason for your message.
In the original experiment on this technique by Davis and Knowles (1999), the experimenters tried it on door-to-door sales of note cards for a local charity.
The basic sales pitch was simple:
“We’re selling this pack of eight note cards for three dollars. They are a bargain. Would you buy some?”
So here the sales pitch contained the basic message (“We’re selling this pack of eight note cards for three dollars”) and the reframe (“They are a bargain”). 35 percent of the people bought the note cards after hearing this basic sales pitch.
The disrupt-then-reframe condition used the same sales pitch with one apparently insignificant difference – instead of saying “three dollars” it said “three hundred pennies”:
“We’re selling this pack of eight note cards for three hundred pennies. They are a bargain. Would you buy some?”
“Three hundred pennies” is an odd way of saying three dollars, so it must have slightly confused the potential buyers. But the sales almost doubled – 65% of the people bought the note cards.
The important thing about this technique is the sequence. In the subsequent experiments, the researchers found that the technique doesn’t work if it is reversed. Likewise, the disruption alone (“They’re 300 pennies”) also does not produce any significant differences.
Most of the research on this technique has been done using sales situations, but we can apply it with all kinds of messages, from political speeches to advocacy campaigns.
Unexpectedness and Strong vs Weak Arguments
One important condition for using unexpectedness is that it should be used with strong reasons. If it is used with weak arguments it may backfire.
The reason is that an unexpected message surprises people and they pay more attention to it. Thanks to the increased attention, they are thinking about it more carefully. In essence, people are more likely to meditate on your message if it surprises them.
However, what effect this increased cognitive elaboration has depends on the strength of your arguments. The more carefully they are thinking about strong arguments, the more persuasive your message becomes. But the more carefully they are thinking about weak arguments, the less persuasive your message becomes.
References
- B.P. Davis and E.S. Knowles. “A Disrupt-Then-Reframe Technique of Social Influence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 76, 192–199 (1999).
- Richard E. Petty, John T. Cacioppo, Rachel Goldman. “Personal Involvement as a Determinant of Argument-Based Persuasion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 41, 847-55 (1981).
- Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion (1986).