I want to say something about the rhetorical device Frank Fujita did not comment on: establishing a Yes Set. In this, the speaker begins by making one or more statements that the listener will surely agree with. Then, having in this way "won the listener's trust," he makes the more questionable statement which he is really trying to sell the listener on.

My question is: why does this work? It's easy to give explanations that make sense on an intuitive level. That is to say, they make sense if we take for granted all those things we intuitively know about human psychology. But this is precisely what the psychologist should not want to do.

We hear a statement and we evaluate it as to whether we agree or not. What does that mean, to evaluate it, and why do we do that? Do we, in fact, always do that?

No, we tend to be more skeptical and critical in some contexts than others. In those interactions called arguments, we are especially critical, on the alert for statements we might object to.

Just as I believe that an argument is an expression of the same urge as that behind physical aggression and combat, my speculation is that this process of evaluating statements critically basically involves the same brain circuitry used to evaluate environments and situations as safe or not safe; the brain has to provide an answer to the question, "Do I need to be ready to fight or not?" And the answer provided seems to be not very complicated: either "Yes, I need to go into fight mode," or "No, there's no danger here," or "Maybe; this may be okay, but I need to stay alert because there may still be a possibility of danger."

Now how does the brain make its answer known to the subject? (This may seem like an odd question, but the brain is really a multiprocessor and there has to be a way of signalling the result of any process to the center of conscious control.) My belief (influenced by my study of NLP) is that the signal it sends is in the form of a feeling. As we NLPers would say, the signal is in the kinesthetic system.

Now the kinesthetic (or somasthetic) system changes much more slowly than the visual or auditory systems. In other words, there's a lot of intertia in the kinesthetic system. So once one has heard several sentences and the brain has been sending the signal, "These sentences are safe; you don't need to go into fight mode (or argument mode)," that signal will tend to persist for the following sentences. And if sentences follow each other fairly quickly, the brain doesn't have time to evaluate each one individually.

Anyway, that's my speculation. I think it would make an interesting topic to investigate and I think it's typical of many scientifically interesting hypotheses that a psychologist might come up with as a result of learning a little NLP.

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The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. --- Anne Lamott, BIRD BY BIRD