Dale Carnegie II: "Six Ways to Make People Like You"

In honor of what would have been my father's 96 birthday on October 30, my daughter Sophie are reading his second favorite book (after the Bible), Dale Carnegie's, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Here is my post on Part I.

Part II of is titled, Six Ways to Make People Like You.
Chapter 1: "Do This and You'll Be Welcome Anywhere"

• "It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men [and women] who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from such individuals that all human failures spring." Alfred Adler (52-53)
• "We are interested in people who are interested in us." Publilius Syrus (61)
• "Become genuinely interested in other people" (62).

Chapter 2: "A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression"

• "Smile" (70).
• "Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions" (67... reminds me of Victor Frankl)
• "The expression one wears on one's face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one's back" (63).
• "Smile when talking on the phone" (65).
• "Action and feeling go together... by regulating the action... we can indirectly regulate the feeling" (William James). To put it the way one of my students once did, "Motion brings emotion."
• "Nobody needs a smile so much as those who have none left to give" (70). Anon

Chapter 3: "If You Don't Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble"

• The bottom line of this chapter is, "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language" (79).
• It seems like my Dad may have talked to me about this sometime, the importance of remembering people's names. I've certainly absorbed it from somewhere. I'll say that my skills at the big picture carry a price on these sorts of unattached details. I remember things in connection to other things. Nevertheless, it is important and I work hard to remember names. I need to work harder.
• "One of the first lessons a politician learns is this: 'To recall a voter's name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion'" (77).
• You can extend this to the personal touch. I hear that Jim Barnes would sit throughout certain meanings signing letters to donors. I know President Mullen of Houghton sends personal notes to prospective students. Our online advisor sends not only personal notes and tea to each student, but meets with every online student one-on-one and knows their individual names and situations in detail.

Chapter 4: "An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist"

• "Be a good listener" (88).
• "People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves" (88).
• "Listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone" (81).
• "The ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait" Isaac Marcosson

Chapter 5: "How to Interest People"

• "The royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most" (89).

Chapter 6: "How to Make People Like You Instantly"

• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. "Let's obey the Golden Rule" (96).
• "Always make the other person feel important" (95)... "and do it sincerely" (105).
• "The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him [or her] feel important" (98).

Book Review: How to Win Friends and Influence People I

My daughter Sophie recently started reading perhaps my Dad's second favorite book (after the Bible): How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. My Dad actually took a Dale Carnegie course in the 50s. I've decided to read it with Sophie in honor of my Dad's birthday. He would have been 96 on October 30. I also sent a copy to my son.

Part I of the book is called, "Fundamental Techniques in Handling People."

Chapter 1: "If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive"

Here are some quotes:

• "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don't criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be" (5).
• "Criticism is futile because it puts people on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself."
• "Sharp criticisms and rebukes almost invariably end in futility" (11). 
• "When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion." (13).
• "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain--and most do." 
• "'A great man shows his greatness,' said Carlyle, 'by the way he treats little men.'" 
• "Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them." (16)

Chapter 2: "The Big Secret of Dealing with People"

• Most human wants are eventually gratified except one, what John Dewey called, "the desire to be important" (18).
• Charles Schwab considered his "ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess" (23). 
• Andrew Carnegie "praised his associates publicly as well as privately." 
• Dale Carnegie calls this "the power of appreciation" (25). It is not the same as flattery, which is insincere. "One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation" (27). 
• Honest appreciation gets results where criticism and ridicule fails. (28) 

Chapter 3: "He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He Who Cannot Walks a Lonely Way"

• "The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it" (31).
• "Arouse in the other person an eager want." "How can I make this person want to do it?" (33).
• "Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something" (31 -- this is called psychological egoism).
• "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own" (35).
• There are several examples of parenting where the parent yells at their children trying to get them to do something without success. The break-through is recognizing something the child wants that gets them to do what they need to do.

Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails (2)

The second chapter of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is titled, "The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail." Last week I gave a quick review of the first chapter that the old Monday reading group is going through. Yesterday we met to traverse chapter 2.

1. The bottom line of this chapter is that people's "moral" sensibilities (including their sense of politics and religion) are primarily intuitive. People just know what is right or wrong and then they find reasons after the fact to justify their sensibilities.

So, most of the time, our intuitions (the dog) lead to moral judgments which lead to reasoning (the tail). We then influence other people's intuitions with our reasonings. This is the social dimension of the moral/political/religious process.

In another part of the chapter, he likens our situation to a rider on an elephant. The elephant is our intuition, and the rider is our reasoning about our intuitions. Really, Haidt claims, the elephant is in control, and the rider is merely serving the elephant.

2. He begins with the story of the debate among moral psychologists. Plato thought that reason ruled the person (or at least should). Hume thought that our passions ruled our reason. Jefferson thought it was a both/and, that we sometimes relied on reason and sometimes relied on our emotions.

As it turns out, our emotions are not separate from our cognition. "Emotions" are intrinsic to human decision making and those whose brains are "disconnected" here have trouble making any decisions. "Emotions" are intrinsic to cognition--they are part of our reasoning, not something different as Jefferson pictured.

These are apparently fighting words, although to look at American politics and religion, it seems pretty obvious to me. People know what they believe, then they go find reasons to justify it. As a Bible teacher, I have often found that if I can find another way to get people to the theological or practical conclusion they want to believe, then I can get them to be more objective about the original meaning of biblical passages or about some item of theology.

3. Haidt does not deny that a person can change his or her moral intuitions by way of private reflection or reasoned judgment together. He simply claims that those instances are much rarer (especially the private reflection one) than the knee-jerk intuition. Contrary to stalwart names like Lawrence Kohlberg and John Rawls, Haidt and others have suggested that most people use reason to generate clever justifications for moral intuitions they already have.

It was fun to see Haidt reference Dale Carnegie, who was so influential on my Dad. You influence people, Carnegie suggested, not by confronting them with the truth and reason but by understanding the other person's point of view. Empathy is the best way to help change someone else who is taking a "righteous" point of view, not confrontation. My Dad used to quote, "A man convinced against his will is of the same mind still."

4. So Haidt calls this model a "social intuitionist" model. He has done a good job of reeling us in and as much as admits that he is plying his trade on people like me as readers. No doubt at some point he will cross a line and I will start to disagree. He jokingly suggests at the end of this chapter that if he hasn't managed to appeal to the reader's intuitions, perhaps that reader should stop reading. But of course, he is simply manipulating the rationally oriented reader to want then to read more so as to prove him wrong rationally.

There are hints already that I will not completely buy him. I did not think well of E. O. Wilson twenty years ago, but Haidt has appealed to my intuitions in such a way that I barely caught that I was feeling sorry for someone that I mocked in ethics class in the late 90s. We readers are being played or shall I say that my intuitions are being played. :-)

5. Keith Drury isn't back in town, but let me suggest some ways he might mock the field of biblical studies if he were at lunch with us. A great deal of biblical studies is simply scholars playing out their moral intuitions on the playing field of the biblical texts. N. T. Wright is a great case in point to me. He has these interpretive intuitions that he then applies his considerable reasoning skills to justify post hoc, IMO.

The whole theological interpretation enterprise strikes me as little else but a high falutin' way of reading our already existing theology into the biblical text while going through the motions of historical exegesis. In my opinion, half of the Hebrews scholarship of the last ten years is little more than sentimental manipulation of texts and history to say things we want to think.

There are exceptions, IMO. There are people who truly are willing to come to any interpretive conclusion. They are the scientist types who approach interpretation from a less predetermined direction. They are not popular right now. Postmodernism opened up the door to a theological Mardi Gras that has yet to simmer down.

But Haidt would tell me it has always been this way. I'm simply pointing out the current dominant intuition.