Chase has spent a significant amount of his life focusing on human behavior resulting from interrogation. While contemplating how to get someone to confess or offer information, a therapist informed him that his techniques may be used to produce a rapid behavioral change in therapy, sales, or emergency situations such as crisis management.

What you do with persuasion is manipulating electricity and chemicals, because that is all there is in our brains. Or is it?

Chase spoke in detail about the triune brain theory. The triune brain theory states that as we have evolved as creatures, the first that developed is the reptilian brain, which helps with basic survival like breathing, keeping your digestive system working and your heart beating.

Then comes the mammalian brain, which is bigger and has more emotional and cognitive functions. It is what separates us as human beings and higher primates. With the mammalian brain, we take about 90% of our decisions.

Lastly, the most recently developed part is the neocortex. This is the part that can put reason behind the decisions that we take. This part of the brain takes credit for our decisions. It is the part that can explain because it is responsible for logical thinking.

Our mammalian brain automatically reads nonverbal signals from other people and what we get is a gut feeling, or what we call intuition, about another person. So, even when you observe a confident speaker, if the verbal does not match the nonverbal, you get that gut sensation that something isn’t quite right.

Chase explained in detail what the triune brain theory states about the reptilian, mammalian, and neocortex part of our brains.

Persuasion exists and works because our ancestors needed to survive. When something triggers us on an emotional or authority level, we are persuaded because for our ancestors, that’s something that could potentially save your life.

All this comes together in something known as The F.A.T.E. model, the four elements of evolutionary psychology – fear, authority, tribe, and emotion, which Chase also discussed in detail in his session.

The FATE model consists of Focus, Authority, Tribe, and Emotion. Focus is generated by novelty, and novelty is the fastest way for a speaker to generate focus. Authority is what people are naturally inclined to obey, and Chase gave a tip about it – never move faster than you could than if you were underwater. Our brains see slow, controlled movements as an authority. The tribe is important because you could be seen as deviant if you are an outcast. And the last is emotion, which is what we base our decisions on, any time we make a new memory.

Emotions are very essential to trigger in all your speeches and presentations. For example, if we touch the hot stove, we create a memory for us to not do that again. Emotional memories are specifically programmed to keep us alive and not repeat something or continue to repeat something in the future.

So that’s how that model works. But Chase also shared his four laws of human behavior, which you can immediately put to use.

According to Chase, 90% of our decisions are taken in our mammalian brain, and those decisions are influenced heavily by what he calls the F.A.T.E. model because it is what has kept our ancestors alive.

Chase said that these laws are four lenses through which you can look at other people and profile them in your mind. As a behavioral profiler and expert, he shared that he sees people as reasons. For example, he sees the angry and aggressive individual on one side and then the eight-year-old child inside that person who made a very secret promise to themselves to never be hurt again. Seeing people as reasons for their behavior could change your entire life, Chase ensured.

Chase describes the four laws in detail in his session that we definitely recommend watching.

In terms of the secret ingredient of persuasion, Chase talked about suggestibility.

Suggestibility is the likelihood that a person will accept and act on a new piece of information that is presented to them. And you can manufacture suggestibility in a situation. For example, when you are on stage trying to sell to your audience something.

Here’s one more of the terrific advice Chase gave everyone at the conference that we want to share here, too. When you want to measure the level of attention in the room like a speaker, all you have to do is a look at the human eye.

The average blink rate per minute is around 12 to 15 times. When we stress or are disinterested, our blink rate goes up to 70 blinks per minute. The more focused and relaxed we are, the blink rate goes down. Our blink rate might drop to as low as four times per minute when we are deeply engaged.

So, next time, pay attention to your audience’s blink rate, and most importantly, if it is speeding up or slowing down. Look around, and if you see it starting to speed up, adjust your tone, change your slide, or do anything interactive to regain your audience’s attention. A high blink rate indicates that you are losing your audience’s concentration.