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# Getting past the mind's shortcuts
- URL: https://www.mastersinpublicaffairs.com/essays/getting-past-the-minds-shortcuts/
- Published: 2026-04-25T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-12T13:35:32.000Z
- Description: Our brain uses shortcuts. Can we tap into them?
- Author: Joseph Lavoie
- Tags: Influence, Robert Cialdini, #essay, #ai-4

> We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all of the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of the trigger features is present.  
> — Robert Cialdini, *Influence*

The human mind cannot deliberate on everything. The environment is too complex, life is too short, and the brain has adapted by building a library of shortcuts — preset programs that fire when a trigger feature shows up. 

Expensive things? *Usually good.* 

Experts? *Usually right.* 

Crowds? *Usually onto something.* 

The shortcuts are adaptive most of the time. They have to be, because we rely on them constantly without noticing.

> If you're too young to understand this reference, the closest analogy I can come with is how we so quickly and mindlessly scroll to the next thing in our feeds. 

Cialdini calls this *click-run*. Press a button, the cassette plays. And this classic book is about what happens when someone figures out how to press the button without providing any of the substance the button is supposed to signal. Put another way, how click-bait still works.

From that one idea, he built a taxonomy:

1. Reciprocity
2. Commitment and consistency
3. Social proof
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity
7. Unity.

Once you see understand these, you'll see them *everywhere.* I can’t look at an e-commerce site anymore, they all so desperately try to implement Cialdini’s principles. And as we learn, that’s a common mistake many practitioners make—to think they can apply these principles as a playbook. You can, but if you do, you’re an amateur.

Most of what we do in public affairs assumes deliberation. We respond to objections with better reasoning. And then we watch the campaign with the stronger case lose to the one with the stronger trigger. Which is why I’ve long argued that the campaign with the most emotive case wins. I still think that is largely true, but I had to re-read this book to realize I’ve been missing an important bit on *triggers*.

> Whoever fires the program controls the decision.

Cialdini says, plainly, that most influence happens *below* the level of argument. The receiver isn’t stopping to weigh the evidence. They’re running a preset program that was loaded before the argument arrived, and that will still be running after it’s forgotten. 

The Petrified Forest case brings this to light. A park sign designed to reduce theft — written the way most of us have written similar PSA campaign content at some point — nearly *tripled* the theft it was meant to prevent. A different sign, making the same moral plea through a different trigger, cut theft in *half*. Nobody on either side was persuaded differently. A different preset program ran.

And in this attention-starved economy, as everything gets noisier, these shortcuts matter more than ever.