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When we use communication to persuade, our chances of success are better if we add a little art—art of conversation, art of generating inference, and art of engagement. The lizard responds to art.

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, authors of the linguistics classic Relevance: Communication and Cognition, tell us that every time we send a message, even conversationally, we make a promise to the receiver.1 We promise that he or she will want to receive the message we are sending. Any time we attempt to communicate with an audience of one or many, we make the tacit guarantee that they will find the message worthy of attention. The lizard automatically understands that promise and is disappointed if the promise is broken. If a message only dully repeats what the receiver already knows for certain, it is not worthy of the receiver’s attention. Let’s say our message is “You really should stop smoking.” Our receiver likely already knows he or she should stop smoking and has heard that message a thousand times. The message “You really should stop smoking” violates our tacit guarantee and breaks our mutually understood promise that the message is worthy of the receiver’s attention. The receiver lowers his or her expectation about what to expect from our future messages, and it becomes harder for us to reach and to persuade. If you hope to persuade, have something interesting to say. By sending a message in whatever form, you are implicitly promising the receiver you have something to say they will want to hear. Don’t break that promise. Asking for behavior change while having nothing interesting to say is not persuasive.

Provide some new information or a new way of looking at the old information. Say what you have to say in a different, clever, or amusing way. Talk about something your target wants and show them how they can get it by doing what you ask. When you talk about something your target wants, there is a good chance they’ll find what you say interesting.

Promising a receiver that he or she will want to receive our message is a high hurdle. Our normal tendency in persuasion is to create a message based on what we want to say with little regard to what the audience wants to receive.

Crafting a message that the receiver wants to get requires climbing inside the head of the receiver and understanding how the receiver looks at the world. This is a complete turnaround. Rather than crafting a message by carefully honing what we want to say, we have to craft a message that the receiver will want to hear. If we break our promise, we take a big step backward in persuasion.When attempting to be persuasive, how much of what parents say, of what spouses say, of what friends say fulfills the tacit guarantee of being a message the receiver will want to receive? Attempts at persuasion that fail to merit the attention of the audience are nagging.In 2014, the Obama administration produced a Public Service Announcement to encourage people to enlist in the fight against sexual assault and to visit the Website, ItsOnUs.org. The public service announcement consisted largely of a variety of celebrities looking sternly into the camera and saying, “It’s on us.” The video is an example of nagging.This message isn’t concerned with what receivers want to hear, only with what the sender wants to say.More than one-third of the people who expressed an opinion on this ad disliked it. It’s clear from the comments that most of those who disliked the ad are in the ad’s primary target, young men.Why wouldn’t this message work? Why would young men dislike an ad that literally says:

• “Stop sexual assault.”• “Don’t blame the victim.”• “Get a friend home safe.”

This message is not worthy of attention because it doesn’t communicate what its target would like to hear. It only communicates what the sender wants to say.

Young men not only disliked this ad, it made them angry. Why?

The negative emotional reaction to the ad comes from its tone and style. What an ad says is less important than how the ad says it. The disapproving looks and somber music of the ad give the impression of parents wagging their fingers at sons who’ve disappointed them. The tone, style, and selection of spokespeople seem to communicate to many that young men are an embarrassment. That’s not what the message literally says, but what an ad literally says and what an ad communicates are two different things.

It is possible to come at the problem in a different way.

One should start by thinking about what young men want that they can get by taking the anti-sexual assault pledge. For example, young men want to feel manly. They buy certain cigarettes to feel manly. They buy certain beers to feel manly. They wear certain clothes to feel manly. Can young men feel manly by taking the anti-sexual assault pledge? Of course they can. But young men won’t feel manly by taking an apologetic, whiny “It’s on us” pledge. If Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone (or your favorite manly men) tell young men that “Real men don’t” and encourage them to take the “Real men don’t” pledge, many would take the pledge and few would get angry.

The “It’s on us” message, as created, encourages people outside the target to pat themselves on the back for being against sexual assault. Unfortunately, it makes its target angry and doesn’t do anything to reduce the problem. Talk about what young men want and show them how to get it. Make the message something young men want to hear, not something you want to say.

Sperber and Wilson have another piece of advice for us that might lead us to craft very different persuasive messages. Sperber and Wilson tell us that conversations work best when we leave out of the message anything receivers can and will provide on their own.

Leaving everything out that receivers can provide on their own requires clearly understanding how our receivers think. Our message unmistakably communicates how much help we think our audience needs to process it. If we are right, we compliment our audience and suggest an intimacy of connection. If we are wrong, we either insult our audience with too much information or our message is unintelligible because of too little information. The amount of help we offer the audience is critical to our success and understanding how much help to provide requires getting inside the head of the audience.