It's not too hard to prompt inject humans, too.
- It's not too hard to prompt inject humans, too.[gf]
- The basic approach is to start a normal interaction routine and then abort it.
- For example, put out your hand to shake the other person's hand, but then pull it away in a natural way before they shake it.
- A couple of examples of this:
- Cialdini tells us that the best way to jump the queue at the photocopier is to say "I need to jump the queue because I need to make a copy".
- That is, to imply you have a good reason but… just say a thing everyone else says.
- Derren Brown is able to convince people on the street to give him their watch by doing this aborted routine carefully.
- Here's my mental model for what's happening.
- When you start a stored social routine, your brain expects to simply execute it.
- Presumably the prefrontal cortex goes to sleep until the routine finishes.
- When you pull the rug out, the brain fritzes.
- It's a kind of stunned chicken moment.
- The prefrontal cortex is put to sleep but now you need to actually think, so you just go along with whatever was suggested.
- The prefrontal cortex is what is suspicious and questions things, but it's temporarily off line.
- In that stunned chicken moment we're extremely suggestible.