卡耐基演讲·二、首先要获得听众的赞同

西北大学前校长华特·狄尔·史柯特说：“凡是进入了头脑的意见、概念或结论，都会被认为是真实的，除非有相反的理念阻碍，那另当别论。”其实，就是说要坚持听众赞同的思想。我的好友哈理·欧沃斯霍教授在纽约社会研究新校的讲演中，条理分明地阐释了这种概念的心理背景：Walter Dill Scott, former president of Northwestern University, said that" every idea, concept, or conclusion which enters the mind is held as true unless hindered by some contradictory idea." That boils down to keeping the audience yes-minded. My good friend Professor Harry Overstreet brilliantly examined the psychological background of this concept in a lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York City:

“有技巧的演讲者，一开始便获得了许多赞同的反应。于是他借此为听众铺上路，让他们向赞同的方向前进。这就像撞球游戏里弹子的运动情况，把它往一个方向推动后，如果想让它转向，要费些力气，如果想把它推到相反的方向，则需要用更大的力量。”The skillful speaker gets at the outset a number of yes-responses. He has thereby set the psychological processes of his listeners moving in the affirmative direction. It is like the movement of a billiard ball. Propel it in one direction, and it takes some force to deflect it, far more force to send it back in the opposite direction.

人的心理在这方面表现得很明显。当一个人说“不”，而且真心如此，他所做的不仅仅是一个由横撇竖点组成的字。他整个的身体——腺体、神经、肌肉——就会一起把他包裹起来进入一种抵抗之中。通常，他会有微小的身体上的撤退，或撤退的准备，有时甚至非常明显。也就是说，他的整个神经、肌肉系统都戒备起来抗拒接受。相反，一个人说“是”时，就绝无撤退的行为发生。整个身体是处在一种前进、接纳、开放的状态中。所以，如果从开始我们就能获得多一些的“是”，那么成功抓住听众注意力的可能性就越大，从而为我们最终的建议被听众接受铺路。The psychological patterns here are quite clear. When a person says "no" and really means it, he is doing far more than saying a word of two letters. His entire organism-glandular, nervous, muscular-gathers itself together into a condition of rejection. There is, usually in minute but sometimes in observable degree, a physical withdrawal, or readiness for withdrawal. The whole neuromuscular system, in short, sets itself on guard against acceptance. Where, on the contrary, a person says "yes" none of the-withdrawing activities takes place. The organism is in a forward-moving, accepting, open attitude. Hence the more" yeses" we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

获得“是”的赞同态度，是非常简单的技巧，但经常被人忽视。人们常常以为，如果一开始不采取敌对的姿态，好像就不足以显示自己的重要性了，于是激进派和保守派的人一开会，不用片刻就让大家火冒三丈了。说实话，这样究竟有什么好处？如果一个人这样做仅仅是为了找点乐子，还情有可原，可是如果他希望能达成什么事，不免就太愚蠢了。It is a very simple technique-this yes-response.And yet how much neglected! It often seems as if people get a sense of their own importance by antagonizing at the outset. The radical comes into a conference with his conservative brethren; and immediately he must make them furious! What, as a matter of fact, is the good of it? If he simply does it in order to get some pleasure out of it for himself, he may be pardoned. But if he expects to achieve something, he is only psychologically stupid.

一开始就让学生、顾客、孩子、丈夫或妻子说“不”，然后再想把这有增无减的否定变为肯定，可能需要神一样的智慧和耐心了。Get a student to say "no" at the beginning, or a customer, child, husband, or wife, and it takes the wisdom and patience of angels to transform that bristling negative into an affirmative.

怎样一开口就获得希望的“赞同反应”呢？很简单。看看林肯说到的其中的秘密：“我展开并赢得一场议论的方式，是先找到一个共同的赞同点。”他甚至在讨论高度紧张的奴隶问题时，都能找到这种共同的赞同点。一家中立的报纸《明镜》报在报道一场他的讲演时这样叙述：“前半个小时，他的反对者几乎会同意他说的每一个词。然后，他抓住这一点开始领着他们走，一点一点地，到最后就似乎已经把他们全引入了自己的栏圈里。”How is one going to get these desirable" yes-responses" at the very outset? Fairly simple. "My way of opening and winning an argument," confided Lincoln, "is to first find a common ground of agreement." Lincoln found it even when he was discussing the highly inflammable subject of slavery. "For the first half hour," declared The Mirror, a neutral paper reporting one of his talks, "his opponents would agree with every word he uttered. From that point he began to lead them off, little by little, until it seemed as if he had got them all into his fold."

这不是很明显的事实吗？演讲人与听众争辩，只会引起他们的固执，让他们变得死命防守，几乎没有可能改变他们的思想。你说：“我要证明这样是否明智。”听众会认为这是一种挑衅而无声地说：“那咱们走着瞧！”Is it not evident that the speaker who argues with his audience is merely arousing their stubbornness, putting them on the defensive, making it well-nigh impossible for them to change their minds? Is it wise to start by saying, "I am going to prove so and so"? Aren't your hearers liable to accept that as a challenge and remark silently, "Let's see you do it"?

开始强调一些所有听众和你都相信的事情，再找一个适合的问题，让听众愿意听，这样是不是有利很多？这时，再带着听众一起去追寻答案。在这个过程中，把你十分清楚的事实陈列在他们的面前，他们就会被你引领，接受你的结论。对于这种他们自己发现的事实，他们会给予更多的信任。“看似一场解说的议论，才是最好的议论”。Is it not much more advantageous to begin by stressing something that you and all of your hearers believe, and then to raise some pertinent question that everyone would like to have answered? Then take your audience with you in an earnest search for the answer. While on that search, present the facts as you see them so clearly that they will be led to accept your conclusions as their own. They will have much more faith in some truth that they have discovered for themselves. "The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation."

在各种争议中，不论分歧有多大、多尖锐，总会有一些共同的赞同点是讲演者可以用来让大家产生心灵共鸣的。例如：1960年2月3日，英国首相哈罗德·马克米兰向南非联邦议会发表讲演。当时，南非当局采取种族隔离政策，而他必须面对立法团体陈述英国无种族歧视的观点。他有没有一开始便对这种分歧进行阐述？没有。他开始的时候去强调了南非在经济上有了不起的成就，对世界有重大的贡献，然后才巧妙而机智地提出了观点分歧的问题。即使讲到这里，他还是指出，他非常了解这些分歧都是来自各自真诚的信念。整场讲演非常精彩，可与林肯在苏姆特堡前那些温和却坚定的言辞相比。“身为英国的一员，”首相说，“我们真诚地希望能给予南非支持和鼓励，不过希望各位不要介意我的直言：在我们的领土上，我们正在设法给予自由人政治前途。这是我们坚定的信念，所以我们无法在支持和鼓励各位的同时，不违反自己的信念。我认为，我们应该像朋友一样，不管谁是谁非，都来共同面对一个事实：今天我们之间还存有分歧。”In every controversy, no matter how wide and bitter the differences, there is always some common ground of agreement on which a speaker can invite everyone to meet. To illustrate: On February 3, 1960, the prime minister of Great Britain, Harold Macmillan, addressed both houses of the Parliament of the Union of South Africa. He had to present the United Kingdom's nonracial viewpoint before the legislature body at a time when apartheid was the prevailing policy. Did he begin his talk with this essential difference in outlook? No. He began by stressing the great economic progress made by South Africa, the significant contributions made by South Africa to the world. Then, with skill and tact he brought up the questions of differing viewpoints. Even here, he indicated that he was well aware that these differences were based on sincere conviction. His whole talk was a masterly statement reminding one of Lincoln's gentle but firm utterances in the years before Fort Sumter. "As a fellow member of the commonwealth," said the Prime Minister, "it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won't mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect. I think we ought as friends to face together, without seeking to apportion credit or blame, the fact that in the world of today this difference of outlook lies between us."

不论一个人有多坚决地想和演讲者对抗，像这样的言论，也会让他相信演讲者公正坦诚的心。No matter how determined one was to differ with a speaker, a statement like that would tend to convince you of the speaker's fair-mindedness.

假设马克米兰首相一开口就强调双方政策上的差异，而不提出共同的赞同点，后果将会怎样？詹姆士·哈威·罗宾生教授在其后启人深思的书《思想的酝酿》里，对这个问题作出答复：What would have been the result had Prime Minister Macmillan set out immediately to emphasize the difference in policy rather than the common ground of agreement? Professor James Harvey Robinson's enlightening book, The Mind in the Making, gives the psychological answer to that question:

“有时，我们发现自己会在毫不抵抗、情绪毫不激动的状况下改变心思。但是如果人家说我们错了，我们就会讨厌这样的责备，便死活不同意了。在我们信仰形成的过程中，不会去刻意留心，可是有任何人表示与我们不同道时，我们就会对自己的信仰满怀有些偏激的狂爱。明显的是，我们所珍爱的并非理念本身，而是遭受威胁的自尊……这小小的‘我’是人类最要紧的一个词，适当加以考虑才是大智慧的表现。不论它是我的晚餐，我的狗，我的家，我的信仰，我的国家，还是我的神，一样具有相同的力量。我们不仅仅憎恨别人指责我们的表不准，我们的车破旧，还讨厌别人让我们修正我们所认为的火星运河论，或‘Epicteus’的发音，柳皮精的药用价值，或萨尔责一世的年代等这些概念。我们喜欢继续相信自己习惯于接受的事实，一旦我们的任何假设受到怀疑，激起的愤怒会导致我们找一切借口来坚持它。这样，大多数我们所谓的‘讲理’，就是找出一大堆论据来让自己继续相信已经相信的东西。”We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem which is threatened ... The little word my is the most important one in human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and my house, or my faith, my country and my God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of "Epictetus" of the medicinal value of salicine, or of the date of Sargon I, are subject to revision ... We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.