How do customers reason when we make our case? Why is it so hard to persuade, even on solid rational grounds?

I have prepared, I am sure of my arguments, the logic of my case is solid, and yet the person in front of me sticks to their view even though it is completely irrational.

Have we ever caught ourselves thinking this way? I certainly believe so!

Why, then, is it so hard to make our arguments prevail?

Because changing one’s mind takes effort (or because our logic is not as unassailable as we think and we try not to see our own weak points).

So how do we form our impressions?

First impressions of an object, service, product, or person can rest on many things, including:

• Context: understood as the situation and the setting, but also the person’s own state.
• Salience: how much does this object attract attention in the current context (and perhaps not in another)?
• Familiarity: we tend to rate more positively the objects we have seen often, even when no interaction has taken place. On the link between repeated exposure and liking there is a review with meta-analysis covering twenty years of research, from 1968 to 1987 (Bornstein, 1989).
• Connections: we judge on the basis of similarities (even irrational ones) with other objects.
• Expectations: these have a very strong effect on our impressions; we look for confirmation more than for information.

None of these cues allows us to make a well-founded judgment; the processes that lead to first impressions are automatic and unavoidable. These automatic processes let us handle information very quickly and superficially, so we cannot really refrain from judging objects we consider relevant.

When we find ourselves in front of someone, then, we need to know that they have already judged us and our product, probably before ever having seen us. It is also important to bear in mind that context covers not only external elements but also what we happen to be thinking at that moment. We also use associations to interpret objects. These associations may depend on the culture we belong to (e.g., work and money), on the groups we are part of (e.g., family, company, role), and on our personal history as well. Once created, these associations are permanent: activating one of the terms immediately makes all the connected ones more accessible. Clearly, then, when we encounter an advertising message or a salesperson, connections that call for distrust are activated right away.

What we are thinking at that moment activates cognitive representations that influence our impressions of the objects we come into contact with (mood is the most obvious case).

E. T. Higgins carried out many experiments on how first impressions form depending on the accessibility of certain terms (Higgins, Rholes, and Jones, 1977: http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/category_accessibility_and_impression_formation.pdf)

In one of them, he had two groups of students memorize terms related either to “adventurous” or to “reckless.” He then had the students read a story about mountain climbing and kayaking down rivers. When he asked for an assessment of the story’s protagonist, the judgments were more or less positive depending on which group the students had started in. The priming effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)) is very hard to recognize because it is unconscious, and it can last a long time (even the whole day), although since 2012 many priming studies, particularly those on long-lasting effects, have failed to replicate (source: the Wikipedia entry cited, consulted in 2026). Continuous activation leads to chronic activation. This speeds up some operations, but it also explains how, in certain workplaces, colleagues come to share judgments that differ from those expressed in other settings and that individuals accept as well.

Set against this “superficial processing” is “systematic processing” (and any stage in between, depending on time, attention, and existing relationships http://info.psu.edu.sa/psu/maths/010%20Information%20Processing%20Theory%2005.pdf) . Systematic processing is slower and more laborious, so it takes time and, above all, motivation. This is what the experiments of Chaiken (1980) showed: people who were highly involved in the issue changed their opinion according to the number of arguments presented, while those with little involvement changed it according to how likable the speaker was. This kind of processing lets us go deeper and reach a more careful judgment, but one that is still tied to prior experience and knowledge and to errors of judgment.

So we have to ask ourselves: what motivation does our counterpart (the customer) have to question their initial judgment and think the matter through? This is one of the most important forms of resistance facing anyone who works in marketing or sales, because superficial processing is automatic and costs no effort, whereas going deeper is tiring and takes more time. The step matters because if we are unable to process deeply, or are not motivated to, we stay with our first convictions.

A rational argument put to a customer is not effective unless they have first agreed to process the information more deeply. Within a meeting, we need to identify a few moments in which both sides pay closer attention. Even once there is a real exchange, attention remains fragile, so it is better to save any comment, joke, or digression for another time.

Our impressions tend to resist change, even when we know they are unreliable. And since impressions shape our interactions and expectations, we are subject to confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias), which leads us to look for confirmation of our impressions. An extensive review is that of Nickerson (1998), who defines it as the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. Moreover, even when we recognize it as wrong, the first impression is not erased; on the contrary, its effects can last over time. We therefore need to know that once we have cleared up a point, there is no guarantee that the result will hold.

(Alberto Viotto)