2nd Grade, Week 4: Power of suggestion

Suggestion is a process of forcing some idea to other people. This process can be conscious or unconscious, it can also be verbal or non-verbal. Forced idea can be an action that should be executed but it's not always the case. You can use suggestion to force an ideology, as well.

Simplest suggestion is a direct command: "Buy this product", but such suggestion is very obvious, that's way a salesman usually composes this command into a couple of consecutive sequences. Eg "Let me tell you why to BUY THIS PRODUCT. Don't BUY THIS PRODUCT if you are not going to use it ever again. Listen to the stories of happy customers that chose to BUY THIS PRODUCT"

Another way is a suggestion by position. Whatever the structure of your society or your book reading club is, people on top usually have more power over you than you'd think, if we imagine this sentence: "I will join you for diner tonight", said be a complete stranger, then a friend and then your boss, I can you know which will most probably force you to tidy your house and cook some better meal, that's the power an authority has over us.

Verbal suggestion can be also hidden, using words and phrases similar to what we want to suggest, eg instead of "give me a coffee" we can say "gimmick oh field" (My English suggestions suck...).

Non-verbal suggestion can be based on proximity (body distance), but also pictures, gestures, touches, sounds, smells, light and temperature, eg to cause a person being sleepy we can place it into a room of comfortable size with a nice soft sofa, dim lights, slow and relaxing background music and no distractions (no magazines, books, TV, etc).

We can also cause a person to choose a specific shape from a predefined set of shapes by "drawing" the shape in our communication via gestures BEFORE we inform the subject to randomly choose some shape (a person shouldn't know about the experiment beforehand else your suggestions will hardly take place).