Tag: persuasion

Are your Presidential candidates hypnotizing you?

We’ve all heard rumors that governmental figures are using “mass hypnosis” to influence and sway the people of our great nations.

Most of the time, this sounds like some silly conspiracy theory. But after all the recent news about the elections, I think it's time to find out if there's any truth to the rumors.

I sat down to analyze the speech patterns of the top three candidates at the time of this writing (Mar 08): Hilary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama.

Of course, without something to compare them to, numbers are just numbers. So I wanted to get some radically clear benchmarks for contrast. I picked one person who I'm fairly certain has no hypnotic skills – Bill Gates of Microsoft – and one who was notorious for his ability to hypnotize and influence the masses – Adolf Hitler.

In testing for hypnotic ability, I looked for these specific language patterns in a 500 word excerpt from each subject:

Every-day hypnotic language

“So you’re sitting there, looking at your screen screen, reading this article while your eyes scan across the page taking in each letter, each and every word, becoming even more curious about hypnosis with each and every breath you take.”

What you probably don’t realize is that the above sentence is hypnotic in nature.

When we talk to people, for the most part, we are trying to influence them. We’re taking a concept from our mind and trying to communicate it in words that will hopefully make the same concept in their mind...