How to Manipulate via a Presentation: for Good or Evil
A Method that Works
About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
A few years ago, I decided that I really, REALLY needed to get better at using PowerPoint. I’d seen so many shitty presentations that I figured mine were probably shitty too. So, I watched the vids from people who studied how to do it. They were helpful. But then I put my philosophy hat on and approached the topic from that perspective. I think I came up with some good ideas that I haven’t seen elsewhere. They definitely can be made to promote evil instead of good.
When you give a PP presentation, you have audience members. You have a goal with them. Typically, you want to get them to know something, make a certain decision, or have a certain emotion (or some combo of these). The PP presentation is a sequence of slides meant to increase the probability that you’ll reach that goal.
So, how does one craft the presentation in order to reach the goal?
You probably believe that if you could just get them to have such-and-such sequence TE of thoughts and emotions (TE = thoughts and emotions), then they would reach the goal you have in mind for them. They will come to know the cool thing you’re trying to teach them, or they will make the beneficial decision you want them to make (e.g., buy your product or service), or they will have the emotion you want them to have (warm fuzzy feelings about your political or moral cause).
So, you want to craft your sequence of slides to make them go through sequence TE. But how do you do that?
At that point I realized that if I can control the audience member’s eyes and ears, then I have a great chance at guiding them through TE. The thoughts that go through their minds during the presentation will be mostly dictated by what they hear and what they see. That’s just biology.
Controlling their ears is easy, since I’m the only one talking in the room. But how do I control their eyes?
Answer: when I go from slide A to slide B, there’s exactly one new thing on B compared to A. It’s probably a sentence, phrase, or word. Given human biology, their eyes will be drawn to the single difference in B versus A. That’s how I control their eyes.
They see the new bit of language and read it—so now I know what state their mind is in. After giving them two seconds to read it, then I say something that helps them along sequence TE.
If your new slide has multiple new things on it, then you’ve lost control. God only knows if they will focus on what you want them to focus on. So, make it just one new thing, every time you can.
In order to pull this off, you really need to think hard about TE: what is the precise sequence of thoughts and emotions that will most likely get them to reach the goal? It’s not easy to figure this out. This is the hard part. But after you’ve done it, you can design the PP slides to correspond to the steps of TE.
This means that you’ll have many PP slides. But that’s okay, since you’ll be going through them pretty quickly. Slide S1 has one sentence, say. Slide S2 will have that sentence plus one more. Slide S3 will have the previous two sentences plus one more. And so on.
Of course, it’s not always sentences. Sometimes the new item will be a simple graph or picture. Or just a bullet point or even a single word. After the new slide is up, you give them a few seconds to read it, and then you talk, so as to get them on the next step of TE.
If they get distracted, it’s not the end of the world because the contents of the last few slides are usually on the current slide. Not always, but often.
Obviously, this isn’t guaranteed to work. For one thing, maybe your TE isn’t convincing, contrary to what you thought. But even if it is, it will be convincing only for people of the right background. Others, with different backgrounds, will be able to see through your self-serving, manipulative bullshit (joking).