Persuasion and Influence: What Makes a Successful Persuader?

What makes people successful at influencing others? In this review, we focus on the role of the persuader (i.e., person who attempts to influence a recipient), drawing from findings in neuroscience to highlight key drivers that contribute to persuaders’ decisions to share information, and variables that distinguish successful persuaders from those who are less successful. We review evidence that people's motivations to share are guided in the brain by value-based decision making, with self-relevance and social-relevance as two key motivational inputs to the value computation. We then argue that persuaders who exhibit higher awareness of social considerations and increased recruitment of the brain's mentalizing system are more successful. We conclude by suggesting that approaches integrating social and neural networks can productively advance knowledge in this field.