Influence: Changing Minds

Idea Influence Chances

When you attempt to influence someone with your ideas, you have a certain chance of succeeding at making them believers too. There are a number of factors involved.

Influence % = Message + Belief + Skill + Charisma + Relationship + Medium + Knowledge + Audience + Luck

Luck Factor

Luck always plays a role in influence chances. The mental environment is a complex system and both external circumstances and internal thought processes are mysterious. There are many factors which can be accounted for, but their mechanisms are subtle, their interactions are unpredictable and the outcome is uncertain. People call the factors they don't understand luck. In gaming simulation, this is represented as a random factor.

Message Skill Factor

Not all messages are created equally. A well-crafted message in the words of a fool can beat a weak message from the mouth of a master.

When do you use messages and when do you use single ideas?

Skill Factor

Having the right skill for the communications medium you are using is crucial to using it to maximum effect. Most messages are geared towards a particular medium. A complex message can take advantage of a book whereas a short message is all you can fit into a concise medium like advertising or television.

Belief Factor

If you don’t believe in an idea yourself, you can’t express it with conviction. If you believe strongly, your words sound sincere and persuasive. Your base chance of convincing someone of your idea depends on your belief in the idea.

Charisma Factor

Natural charisma gives you the abil

Media Factor

The medium is the message-altering factor that shapes how you communicate. The media factor varies depending on the properties of the media used. Media factors are described in detail later.

Knowledge Factor

“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

Understanding the subject matter in detail allows you to cite factual evidence to support your ideas, discredit opposing ideas and counter opposing criticism.

A knowledge skill may support an idea so that you can add your Knowledge skill % against the risk of the idea you are opposing.

If the opposing idea is supported by a Knowledge test also, compare the Knowledge test scores and apply the highest while cancelling the effects of the lowest out.

Audience Factor

Understanding people is key to communicating with them.

Resisting Influence Chances

Influence is not a one-sided exchange. Weather you speak your mind in conversation or consider ideas silently when reading a newspaper, your own ideas come into play to respond to the ideas you encounter.

Gaining and Dropping Ideas

When you assign a cultural idea at the time of your profiling, you keep or reject all the ideas the culture relates to.

Ideas Gain Belief With Influence

Ideas that dominate your thinking gain more weight in the future. Each time an idea wins an influence chance it gains belief equal to the margin of success.

Interactive Ideas

Idea Linkages

Ideas form connections that link them together. Ideas get linked and bundled. Relations get attached to people and ideas get attached to those relations.

Role-Playing Waters Down Simulation

Ideas have complex behaviors that are beyond the scope of simple role-playing. Computer simulation will allow more complexity and realism in the complex interactions of ideas. Ideas can be modelled very much like agents or programs.

Burning Out On An Idea

Sometimes people run out of steam and give up their most cherished beliefs, becoming burn-outs who overdid it and let stress get to them.

Trigger

If you are unhappy and one of your idea influence chances fails, there’s a 1% risk you can become burnt out on the idea. When you get sick of an idea you try changing your mind to avoid it for a while.

The Idea Influence Process

1. Profiling

Profile your ideas to identify those you most want to spread.

2. Messaging

Assemble a message from a selection of your ideas.

3. Media

Use media to communicate your message to audiences.

4. Impact

Observe the impact of your message on the ideas of audiences.

Influence Impact

What percentage of the audience is swayed and to what degree?

Analyzing Impact

In simulation, detailed information about an idea or message’s immediate impact is available to players, but in reality one can only estimate based on what numbers you can gather. Market research and focus groups are used by advertisers to determine which advertising seems most effective. What impact is achieved? Higher successes translate into greater action.

Some are more persuaded and have more belief than others in any overall group, but it is not necessary to break this distribution down until it is relevant. If a negative idea has any success, then some people are persuaded against. Thus, the more resistance, the more polarized your result will be, with a greater percentage on a smaller number of believers.

The Realism Factor

Real influence is more difficult to achieve than it is in gaming . The Sim in Game mode gives people a level of persuadability that they might not have in the real world, so that successes are more dramatic than they might tend to be in reality. On the other hand, sometime the real world is unpredictable and amazing results happen as if by fate. It balances out more or less.