The mind’s ability to detect dissonance or incongruence may be our best tool when dealing with people of all sorts. When we communicate with other people, we always want to watch out for our own interests and the easiest way to do that is to avoid trickery or lies.

Of course, no one would tell you outright that he is lying or he is trying to deceive you in any way. No one would do that for you – and no one has to do that for you because you have your critical faculty and the reptilian complex at your disposal.

The human mind can detect dissonance at various conscious (and unconscious) levels. For example, let’s say that you have just learned that there is going to be a massive lay-off in your company because of management restructuring.

Around the same time that you have learned of this development, you were invited to a company party where all the employees are going to be drinking and enjoying themselves for a few hours. From the moment that you received the invitation to the company event you felt that something was really amiss.

Conflicting thoughts and emotions swirl in your mind and you may even feel suspicious about the invitation (even if the company party has been planned months before the news that there was going to be a massive lay-off in the company).

When you attend the company party, you see happy faces and people that you know. You smile and enjoy yourself like everybody else, but at the back of your mind, you are not fully convinced of the authenticity or genuineness of party.

What was the management up to? Why were the bosses throwing a party even if there was going to be a massive lay-off? At one point in the party, the dissonance starts to dissolve just a little bit.

You want to feel hopeful and some of the joy of the party starts rubbing off on you and you think once or twice that maybe the news wasn’t true and maybe something good was heading your way in the company. You feel hopeful, but there is dissonance.

Despite the dissonance, you feel hopeful… But why? The key element in this type of situation is manipulation. There is manipulation involved and when there is manipulation, there is always a desired feedback and outcome.

When the company throws a party it is trying to send a persuasive message to the people involved in the party. This message is hopefully understood and accepted by people, despite apprehensions and anxieties.

This is how non-verbal messages can be used to turn the tables even in the face of hard facts. And in the grand scheme of things, the ones who can use non-verbal persuasion to their advantage each and every time are the ones who emerge victorious, always.

When people rationalize, they are legitimizing their own point of view of something and they are resisting change

Now let’s move on to something equally important – something you have to learn carefully if you want to be really persuasive whenever you want to speak to someone face to face: people tend to process logical and illogical in such a way that everything would eventually align with their own biases and beliefs.

What does this mean? Well, people are prone to creating excuses to benefit themselves. Excuses aren’t ‘just’ excuses. Excuses are actually the end-products of people’s rationalizations about specific situations and outcomes. Why do people make excuses?

Usually, people resort to excuses because they don’t want to adapt another behavior or they don’t want to change an existing behavior. It is always easier to rationalize something as opposed to changing an existing behavior.

When a person rationalizes, he creates a space for the old behavior. When a person makes an excuse for something, he is really saying that he wants to maintain the old behavior because it simply works for him.

A person in effect legitimizes something and shows his resistance to change. Why is this so important to our study of human communication? Well, if we would go back to the communication cycle itself, we would see that a persuasive message essentially wants to achieve just one thing – change.

That’s it – we want someone to change for us because we want a particular outcome to emerge from the conversation or exchange. Persuasion and influence would be impossible if the other person was completely resistant to change.

Right now, I’m telling you that people are essentially resistant to change itself and a person would actually exert a lot of effort just to counter change itself.

Even the threat of change is usually countered with full force because humans have learned over time that in order to survive, a status quo has to be preserved. Preservation entails order and stability. Change is viewed as the antithesis of stability and order.

When something is changing and when this change is constant and continuous, the present order is disturbed and stability is removed from the equation. Thousands of years ago, instability usually meant migration from one place to another.

Change also meant that there might not be enough resources in a particular area to sustain family units that are living there. And so over time, humans have associated change with the tragedy or disaster. This kind of thinking has become part of the instinctual mindset of mankind.

So whenever a person is confronted with the possibility of change, he reacts negatively to that possibility not because he is being a pain but because people were designed to think in such a way.

So if we were to combine all this knowledge now, what are the implications of change or loss of stability when we try to persuade someone? How must a person communicate if he wants to introduce change even if people were designed to resist change in the first place?

In order to answer these questions, we have to simulate a situation where a person was trying to introduce a particular change but was unable to do so because of the distortion of his message.

Here’s the hypothetical situation: let’s say that Person B was trying to convince a whole room of people that they should invest their money into Company B because this company has been experiencing a lot of success in the past year and all economic markers point to the positive.

Unfortunately, Person B was trying to say “Company B is doing excellent!” but his body language was actually saying “Company B is secretly already in ruins, stay away!”.

People were naturally keen to discover the truth and the dissonance between what he was saying verbally and what he was stating non-verbally was enough to convince people not to listen to him. Person B completely lost his audience because he was unable to convince the room that Company B was indeed worth their time and effort.

Now let us examine what just happened in the hypothetical situation. Why didn’t the people in the room just believe Person B even if he was saying outright that Company B was doing extremely well? Why weren’t the people swayed by all the statistics and pie charts presented by Person B? The problem boils down to dissonance.

Person B wanted people to believe in him and he wanted to introduce change (i.e. investing in Company B instead of other companies). Since there is a natural resistance to change, people needed to see and hear that everything was indeed true.

As much as people wanted to see facts and figures, the audience also wanted to see confidence, conviction and genuineness in the speaker, because he was the only ‘live marker’ in the room. He was the fountain of information and people expected more of him.

People weren’t expecting more statistics and such, the audience wanted to see congruence in what his body language and what his verbal language was transmitting. Any incongruence between the two channels of communication will easily convince people that the speaker is not telling the whole truth.

People would become even more resistant to the message of change because their internal alarm systems have gone off because of the dissonance between the verbal language and the non-verbal language being used by the speaker.

When you think about it, so much is really at stake when we communicate to people. We can’t expect people to convince themselves to change.

Speakers need to convince people, period. Speakers need to deliver both content and non-verbal cues that will prevent people from being resistant to what is being said in the first place.