保险业务员的心理学机密

2013 年，我生命中的第二位顶尖推销员又出现了。这一次，是一位保险业务员。保险业务员和汽车销售员不同的地方在于，保险业务员卖的商品，不是汽车那样的实体，而是虚拟的事物。

此外，保险业务员还必须出外勤，必须只身进入陌生客户的家中或办公室，所以没有办法向汽车销售员那样先在经销商的门市部中设计好「陷阱」（例如软椅、热咖啡或巧克力）。

还有，汽车销售员面对的是早已决定好要买车，但只是不知该买哪一台车的消费者，然而保险业务员面对的，却常常是根本没有计划要买保险的客户。

因此，保险业务员的任务难度，其实远高于汽车销售员。这一年，也就是美国购车事件后的整整第十年。此时的我，早已拿到认知神经科学学位、做过博士后研究，并且开始教书。当我这位「象牙塔里的嘴炮心理学家」，对上「社会中的实战心理学高手」时，究竟是谁胜谁败呢？

一天下午，陌生人来电。一位叫做「雪莉」的女士，说想与我见面谈谈小孩的健康保险规划。她说，我有一位学长知道我可能会有此需求，因此强烈推荐她与我联系。这位学长，平时待我不薄，我到新加坡之后，一直受到他的照顾。因此，我一听是学长介绍，顿时卸下心房，欣然接受了邀约。

隔天，雪莉姐带着送给小孩的可爱衣物，笑容可掬的来到我的办公室。一见面，就先送上一轮疯狂的谬赞，年轻有为、修长帅气、谈吐不凡，各种只有在通告天王玉琳哥口中才听得到的荒谬溢美之词，大概全都被她给说了一遍。

随后，雪莉姐马上把椅子拉到我的右方坐下，开始进入正题。

她说，小孩的简单意外医疗险，是一定要保的，一个月只要不到10 元新币（大约200 台币），这种小钱没必要省。我点点头，表示乐意购买。此时，雪莉姐见到滩头堡已拿下，立刻话锋一转，劈头问到：「钱难赚、囝细汉，如果你明天就被车撞死，该怎么办？」接着她又说，每一万名男性，就有4600 个人会罹患癌症，如果你罹癌，老婆小孩该怎么办？财务将如何规划？

这两个问题，问得我当场哑口无言。接下来，战局急转直下，大家应该也猜得到结局了吧！不出半小时，雪莉姐带着一抹微笑，从容的带着好几张百万保险订单回家庆功去了。

在这短短30 分钟之内，各种绵密快绝的心理学技巧让我毫无喘息的机会。以下我们就一起用慢动作来仔细拆解其中几项高招。

笑脸 *** 弄你的潜意识

首先，就是雪莉姐脸上带着让所有人都难以拒绝的笑容。大家都知道笑容的威力强大，但是你知道笑容竟然强大到可以在潜意识下影响我们的行为吗？在一项心理学研究中，研究人员找来了口渴的受试者，先请他们喝一种饮料，并且询问他们愿意花多少钱买这些饮料。在受试者喝饮料之前，研究人员先在萤幕上播放了速度快到受试者根本看不见的笑脸。

结果发现，这些「看不见的笑脸」仍然会增加受试者接下来的饮用量，而且受试者也愿意付较多的钱购买这些饮料注1。此外，脑造影实验也发现，即使受试者看不见这些带有情绪的脸，他们脑中的杏仁核也会对这些情绪作出反应注2。这么看来，「笑逐颜开值千金」这句话似乎还真有几分依据。

赞美偷走你的心

接下来，就是雪莉姐连珠炮式的谬赞。大家可能会以为，低诚意的恭维话语应该没什么功效，毕竟，我们都知道对方只是做做表面功夫、随便褒扬几句罢了，这种称赞怎么会有用呢？但是研究显示，表面的恭维确实有效。

在一项消费者行为研究中，研究人员要求受试者想像自己接到百货公司随机寄出的广告信函，上面写着类似以下的赞词：「您的穿衣品味卓越，若您能光临，我们将倍感荣幸」。虽然受试者都明确知道这些语言只是胡诌，但是，经过这样的谬赞后，他们对该百货公司的喜好感，仍然比没有受到谬赞的受试者要高出许多注3。

这个「谬赞效应」，其实出乎很多人的意料。我们一般都会认为，当别人说的只是表面赞语，我们心中也清楚知道对方只是在说场面话时，自己应该不会受到任何影响，但是事实证明并非如此。因此，下次再听到别人口中的浮夸不实的赞美之词，或是收到可能毫无诚心的脸书百赞，记得想一想这个研究，别再不知不觉的就让别人骗走你的心喔！

右耳根子比较软？

笑容与赞美，都还只是基本功夫。但是，雪莉姐选择在我的右方坐下，可就真的是意义深远。右方，究竟代表了什么意涵呢？原来，大多数人的右耳根子似乎比较软。

早在1961 年，加拿大的心理学家奇姆拉（Doreen Kimura）就已经在实验室中发现，人们在倾听言语时，偏好使用右耳注4，而且，如果只能使用单边耳朵进行活动时，大多数人也都喜欢用右耳注5。

那么现实生活中，是否也观察得到类似的状况呢？当然也有！浪漫且喜欢用语言调情的义大利人，就发现了夜店中的「右耳效应」。义大利的心理学家在夜店中进行田野调查后发现，286 名客人在相互交谈时，有72% 的机会是对着右耳倾说。

在另一项实验里，他们请实验人员在吵杂夜店中对着客人轻声细语，然后观察对方会使用哪一只耳朵凑上来想再听清楚，结果发现，在160 名客人中，有58% 会凑上右耳。此外，当实验人员对着176 名客人的右耳或左耳提出要香烟的请求时，对右耳提出要求的成功率也明显比较高注6。

唉，早知如此，我就应该抢著坐在雪莉姐的右边，或许这样，我还有机会说服她给我一些保险折扣呢！

小商品引诱大买卖

雪莉姐的下一招，我称作是「滩头堡效应」。滩头堡效应就是，只要先打下滩头堡（让客户愿意购买小商品），就有更大的机会可以步步进逼进行大买卖。

在行销心理学专家乔汀尼（Robert B. Cialdini）的《就是要说服你》一书中，就提到不少这类的案例。

例如，当随机要求路边的住户在自家草皮插上「小心开车」的大标志时，只有17% 的人会接受。但是如果先请住户在窗户上贴上小小的「小心开车」贴纸，两周后再要求他们在自家草皮插上大标志，其成功率就会高达76%。

同样的，一般人会同意陌生人进入家中进行商品调查的机率只有22%，但是，如果先用电话做过访问，三天后成功进入对方家中进行商品调查的机率就会高达56%。

还记得雪莉姐一开始就卖给我的儿童意外医疗险吗？她想必是算准了我一定会购买这项每个月不到10 新币的小保险，殊不知，丢了滩头堡，就注定输到老。以后大家如果确定自己没有要买任何东西，最好就别跟推销员闲聊或购买小东西，要不然，这些步步逼心的行销心理学技巧，真的是会吃人不吐骨啊！

数字心理游戏

雪莉大姐的最后一项擒拿巧门，就是玩弄数字心理游戏。在理财作家史威格（Jason Zweig）的神经经济学畅销书《大脑炼金术》中，就举出许多类似的数字心理效应。

比方说，「44% 的无癌健康率」，和「每一万人就有5600 人会罹患癌症」，后者是不是听起来比较严重呢？「92% 的手术成功率」，和「每一万人就有800 人会因手术死亡」，后者是不是比较可怕？

这种数字心理效应的关键在于，当你使用百分比时，大家比较容易专注在冰冷的数学比例上，但是当你提及真实人数，冷冰冰的数字就立刻变成了活生生的人。栩栩如生的4600 人罹患癌症以及800 例手术死亡，很容易就会打动人心。

因此，大家千万要小心，推销员想要隐藏风险时，通常都会使用冰冷的数字百分比。但是他们想要突显正面好处时，却又会使用具体的真实人数。应付数字游戏的小诀窍，就是同时在脑中转换两种数字表现方式：对方如果说百分比，你就换算成人数，对方如果说人数，你就换成百分比。逆向 *** 作，就不会轻而易举的被牵着鼻子走罗！

后记：保单的下落

很显然的，这场「象牙塔里的嘴炮心理学家」与「社会中的实战心理高手」之战，后者完胜。奇怪，人家不是说十年河东，十年河西吗？怎么我十年前惨败给桑尼大叔，十年后仍然被雪莉大姐给完封呢？看来，就算再给我好几个十年磨练，也不一定到得了彼岸啊！

当天晚上，我拿着预定保单回家，女王见状，果不其然的就是一阵数落。大梦初醒之后，我们也约了雪莉姐重新议约。还好，最后谈判成功，原本上百万的保单，变成只买了三个人每个月10 元新币的意外医疗险。各位读者，要做重大决定前，最好还是别冲动，多想想、找朋友谈一谈，缓个几天再定案喔！

注1 Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge, “Unconscious Emotion,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13, no. 3 (2004): 120–123.

注2 Williams MA et al., (2004). Amygdala responses to fearful and happy facial expressions under conditions of binocular suppression. J Neurosci. 2004 Mar 2424(12):2898-904..

注3 Elaine Chan, Jaideep Sengupta (2010) Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective. Journal of Marketing Research: February 2010, Vol. 47, No. 1,

注4 Kimura D (1961) Cerebral dominance and the perception of verbal stimuli. Can J Psychol 15:166–171..

注5 Porac C, Coren S (1981) Lateral preferences and human behavior. Springer, NewYork

注6 Marzoli et al. Side biases in humans (Homo sapiens): three ecological studies on hemispheric asymmetries. Naturwissenschaften, 2009DOI: 10.1007/s00114-009-0571-4

来自： https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/04/17/7-realistic-drawing-skills/

Knowing how to draw is something most people feel is mostly about artistic talent. You can either draw or you can’t.

I disagree.

Instead, I think drawing is mostly about having a set of specific techniques, that anyone can learn, which make it a lot easier to draw something realistically.

I’m not a professional artist, and so my experience comes mostly from drawing as a hobby. However, as many professional artists have long-since mastered these basic skills, they often struggle to teach them.

I’d like to share what I think some of these basic skills are, along with resources you can use to master them. If you do, I promise that you’ll be able to draw much, much better than you do now.

The most basic skill of drawing is to notice how things actually look, instead of what you know they’re really like. This sounds vague and hand-wavey, but it’s really not.

Consider drawing something simple like a table.

Question: How big is each leg of the table?

The obvious answer is that they’re all the same. That’s how tables are built. If they weren’t it would be all wonky.

Yet that’s not how a table actually looks. Because some legs are in the background, and viewed at different angles, the lines you put down to represent the table legs aren’t actually the same size.

The first question to ask when drawing is always, “what does it actually look like?” How do the edges of the object actually look, (i.e. what angles do they form and what size are they) rather than what you “know” them to be like as 3D objects.

For a great resource on mastering this core skill, I suggest Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain .

If seeing how things actually look is the first skill, the second is using this knowledge in a precise way to make accurate drawings.

There’s a few different ways you can do this.

The easiest is tracing. You copy over an image to preserve the lines and structures in the original. If you have a piece of glass and a dry-erase marker you can even do this to “trace” a real-life scene rather than an image.

The next level up is drawing from a grid. Apply a grid to your scene or image you want to copy, and then draw into a grid on your paper. I did this a lot when I started, and it’s a good way to get better at drawing without feeling like you’re cheating as much.

The final level is to triangulate. This maintains precision without relying on grids and tracing is to block in the shapes by locating reference points and then meticulously building up the scene by comparing angles and sizes of lines. This requires some effort, but it’s my favorite because it allows arbitrary degrees of accuracy and transfers better to looser sketches which don’t use the technique (unlike tracing or grid drawing).

The basics of this technique are as follows:

The best resource for learning how to apply this drawing technique is Virtruvian Studios course on drawing .

Drawing is hard because lines which are perpendicular in the real world, become weird angles on 2D scenes due to perspective.

Perspective is particularly important when drawing a scene of regular objects which recede into a distance. Therefore, it’s very important for things like drawing buildings, landscapes or big scenes. It’s less important for drawing faces and still lifes, where the subject doesn’t change all that much in terms of distance to the viewer.

While you can apply the same method as the one above to accurately draw a scene with buildings, it is often more useful as a shortcut to consider making vanishing points instead.

There’s three main types of perspective drawings you might consider:

One-point perspective has a single vanishing point. This can happen when you’re looking down a road, for instance, and the buildings, lampposts and statues on the side are receding into the distance. The idea being what in the center is smallest, with what’s on the left and right being bigger and bigger.

**Two-point perspective has two vanishing points. **This happens when you’re looking at the corner of a building, and you want to consider two streets going off in each direction. The idea here being that what is in the middle is largest, with everything to the left and right getting smaller and smaller.

**Three point perspective has, you guessed it, three vanishing points. **This is like two-point perspective, except now it also recedes above you. This is often the case when you’re looking up at a tall building and the top of the building takes up less room than the bottom, even thought each floor is (in the 3D world) the same size.

When I started learning about perspective, I found it very confusing. When should I use one point? Two points? The dreaded three?

The logic behind vanishing points is that all the lines that go “into” one vanishing point are actually parallel in a 3D scene. Look back at the above images. In a one point perspective, all the lines that go “into” the picture are all parallel. In a two point perspective, in contrast, there are two sets of lines which are themselves pointed in different directions.

This means that a scene can, in theory, have any number of vanishing points, each corresponding to the parallel lines themselves. If you’re doing a sketch of an old European city, for instance, you may have buildings that sit at strange angles to each other, resulting in a set of lines and vanishing points for each.

Don’t get hung up on the technicalities of vanishing points when you get started. Instead, use them as a benchmark for blocking in your scene. If you know a group of lines (say all the tops of windows for a building) are going to be parallel, you can quickly estimate the vanishing point and sketch them all in more accurately than trying to guess the angle of each one on its own

You can get started with this by actually drawing vanishing points and making your buildings or objects fit. A quicker way, once you’re more experienced is simply to expect the lines in your buildings to be self-consistent.

If you’re sketching a building for instance, and decide to draw the top of a roof at a 15 degree angle, and you know it recedes off to the right, then you know the tops of your windows can’t be at a sharper angle than that one.

This rule-of-thumb can help you make self-consistent drawings much faster than the painstaking method of triangulating points, by exploiting the regularity in the structures you want to draw.

We’ve already seen how applying our knowledge of the 3D world to 2D drawings can lead to misleading images. But, that was relatively minor to the problems relative contrast can cause.

Consider this famous optical illusion:

The two squares are exactly the same value, except one looks light and the other dark. Relative contrast makes it very easy to overestimate the lightness of light objects in shadow and the darkness of dark objects in the light.

How can you avoid this problem? One way is to take a photograph and open it up in an image editing program like photoshop. There you can use the eye-dropper tool and actually sample the local value and see how it compares to other things you’ve already drawn.

Except that feels a bit like cheating. Plus it doesn’t really train your mind to sense the correct brightness value just by looking at the objects.

How do artists overcome their brain’s tendency to adjust for relative contrast? By squinting.

<figcaption style="margin-top: 0.5emmargin-bottom: 1emcolor: rgb(85, 93, 102)text-align: centerfont-size: 13px">With details blurred out (and less light, so fewer color receptors are active) it’s easier to make out the overall shade without getting distracted by the details.</figcaption>

That may sound ridiculous, but it actually works. Squinting, so you’re seeing the scene as a blurry set of shapes through your eyelashes, reduces a lot of the information in the scene. It also turns the scene into splotches of light and dark which are easier to assess on their own without the distractions of relative contrast.

Try it yourself, pick out two objects in the room and squint to compare their brightness. Now open your eyes and see how they look without squinting. Do you see a difference?

Squinting is just one technique, but if you really want to understand how to draw lights and darks, I suggest How to Draw Light &Shadow by Will Kemp.

A mistake I made a lot early on in drawing was putting in a lot of details on one section, without filling in everything else. I’d try to draw a boat, and I’d start putting in the lettering I see on the side of the ship before I’ve even sketched out any of the scene.

One theory I have about why this often doesn’t work, is that people have expectations of accuracy. If I show you a really low-resolution photograph, or an impressionistic painting, you’re unlikely to say it lacks artistic merit, just because it isn’t photorealistic. The relationships it does portray are accurate enough that you can see what it is.

On the other hand, if you make part of your image extremely accurate, it makes deviations from accuracy on bigger things much more noticeable. A face drawn realistically will be judged much worse for slight imperfections than one done as a sketch.

A useful skill to learn when drawing, therefore, is to start by getting the big things right. How big is the thing you’re drawing? How much wider is it than it is tall? How big is it compared to the other things you’re putting in?

Once you’ve mapped those things out right, you can actually be pretty loose with a lot of details and still have a “realistic” looking drawing. Look at the windows on this painting. They are basically splotches, yet we accept it as realistic because the big things were done right.

Artist Cynthia Hamilton

Curves are a lot harder to draw than straight lines. For starters, they’re more complicated than lines. You need more information to represent a curve than a straight line, so there’s more ways you can screw one up.

Second, curves often are harder to freehand draw accurately. A straight line, with practice, isn’t too hard to do freehand, even if it doesn’t meet the accuracy of one done with a ruler. However, curves often go against the natural motion of your hand, so it’s often the case that you’ll draw it wrong if done in a single motion.

The starting point, as always, is to see how the curve really is. If you had to draw tangent lines on its surface, what would they be? Does it form corners, or does it stay curved the whole way? A common mistake when drawing vases in still lifes is to kink the corners at the end, not recognizing that it will form an ellipse instead.

Next, you can sketch out a few line segments to break up a complex or sharply turning curve into a few straight-line segments as approximation. This will help you stay roughly in the right ballpark when you put curves in.

Finally, draw your curve, asking yourself how it is accelerating and slowing down at different parts of your line segment.

All of these skills don’t matter if you don’t practice them. The biggest obstacle to drawing is fearing that it won’t turn out right—that you’ll put effort in and you’ll end up with something embarrassing.

This is why I think some people have convinced themselves they don’t have artistic talent.

At some point they received negative feedback about something they drew, either from a peer, teacher or parent (or even from their own expectations) and this made drawing something frustrating, instead of pleasant. They stopped doing it because thinking of drawing brings up those old fears and anxieties.

However, the truth is that drawing is mostly about cultivating a bunch of specific, learnable skills like the ones above. Anyone can learn them, they just require practice. In order to practice, you need to stop being afraid of drawing.

There’s a few ways you can build up your confidence to master these skills:

Don’t give up and keep practicing to draw better!

Resources mentioned in this post:

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