Rational choice? Not a chance.
Our decision to marry a particular person is not based on logical or rational facts. We don't select our spouse based on age, height, weight, health index, cooking skills, professional achievements, educational achievements, wealth index, number of siblings, etc. We may have preferences vaguely stored in our minds, but in the end, we married the person who was there when we were ready.
Our decision to buy the forever home is not based on logical or rational financial or environmental facts. We may have started with a list of budget, house size, location, number of rooms, school distance, work distance, etc. But the house we eventually bought may have little resemblance to our preferences. If the house price is higher than our budget, we believe that cuts in other expenses, reasonable or not, can justify our purchase as being practical. If the distance to work is farther than our original preference, we will make ourselves believe that the traffic is OK when we need to be out of the door. Ultimately, we bought the house we fell in love with.
Rational choice? Not a chance.
The two most important decisions are (1) getting married and (2) buying a forever home. Yet, logical or rational reasons were nowhere to be seen when we made those decisions.
Knowing humans do not make rational decisions is essential to help us get the support of our political or social concerns, get engaged and married, raise the necessary capital for our companies, close large and small sales contracts, and gain consensus from colleagues, friends, and families for various proposals and other seemingly difficult decisions. We can win them over if we know how to approach their hearts.
The most critical first step to getting others' approval or agreement is to lead them to resonate with the problems you are trying to solve. Your audience will only see the risks in your proposed solutions or actions if they do not resonate with the problem you perceive.
They may have experienced the problem you have. But if the problem is of relatively low frequency or low impact or utterly irrelevant to them, they may not see the necessity to solve it.
They have to see and resonate with your difficult experiences caused by the identified problem. Otherwise, they will not agree to any solution you may propose.
For example, you may see that Donald Trump must not be re-elected as the next US President. Why? To you, Trump is a despicable person, and he has no business in running the highest office for the country. Many will disagree with you, and still, many are indifferent.
To convince others to support your view on Trump, you must first convince them what in your life experiences have caused you to see Trump as a threat.
Say you have been sexually harassed. You see Trump as a sexual predator, and so you see Trump as a threat to our nation if he were to be the US President again. But your straight male audiences may not have been sexually harassed in their lives. Your male audiences may see Trump as a great ally regarding reducing business regulations or strengthening international trade policies. They can intellectually relate but do not emotionally resonate with your sexual predator concern.
Your approach is to show sexual harassment as a clear and present danger in the lives of people they can relate to. One way to lead straight males to resonate with your sexual harassment concern is to dig up stories of catholic priests' sexual abuse of their young male churchgoers. Another way is to have other males talk about their sisters or wives who male predators have sexually abused. Then, relate the sexual predators' personalities, social positions, and character traits to Trump. Now your audiences may be able to connect to your reality of Trump being a negative influence, sending a permissive message to other sexual predators.
The examples I have may only work in some situations. But my message is to avoid seeking logical agreement. No success awaits you at the end of your rational and logical arguments. That is why many social media commentary wars are seemingly illogical yet attract so much ink on the digital pages. These social media commentaries are logical arguments no reader could heed when debating a hotly controversial topic.
Gain your audience's emotional agreement, and you are on your way to success. A logical argument is academic and best used as column fodder.
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