The Americans have a Latin term caveat emptor. It means “Let the buyer beware.” When persuading, presenting, convincing, selling Americans present the positive picture: what works. Americans do not feel obligated to present or to reveal what doesn’t work, what is negative. In the U.S. business culture the audience is obligated to expose what doesn’t work by asking critical questions. Persuasive is selling what works, and not what doesn’t work.
caveat emptor
caveat: may he/she beware. emptor: buyer. caveat emptor is Latin for “Let the buyer beware”. Generally, caveat emptor is the contract law principle that controls the sale of real property after the date of closing, but may also apply to sales of other goods.
The phrase caveat emptor and its use as a disclaimer of warranties arises from the fact that buyers typically have less information than the seller about the good or service they are purchasing. This quality of the situation is known as information asymmetry. Defects in the good or service may be hidden from the buyer, and only known to the seller.
caveat emptor is a short form of Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit: “Let a purchaser beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of the nature of the property which he is buying from another party.”
A common way that information asymmetry between seller and buyer has been addressed is through a legally binding warranty, such as a guarantee of satisfaction.
Selfie Election
Facing a Selfie Election, Presidential Hopefuls Grin and Bear It. July 4, 2015. Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker. New York Times.
“Press that white button! This right here,” the former secretary of state instructed a technologically deficient fan in New Hampshire who was fumbling to work an iPhone camera. Her patience thinning, Hillary Rodham Clinton took matters into her own hands and jabbed the button herself.
Who wants their babies kissed or their yard signs autographed anymore? This is the Selfie Election. And if you are running for president, you have no choice but to submit.
Candidates can now spend an hour exhausting a line of eager selfie seekers. Jeb Bush has perfected a technique suited to his 6-foot-3 frame: For his shorter fans, he will take the picture with his own outstretched selfie stick of an arm.
“They just have to put up with it, because how do you decipher who is a fan and who wants to fill their profile with pictures of them with candidates?” said Mr. Robinson, editor of The Iowa Republican, a political publication.
Senator Marco Rubio will indulge people who want selfies. But he often travels with a professional photographer who takes photos of him with voters as an aide trails behind, handing out index cards listing a website where supporters can go to download their pictures.
The benefit? Not only does the photographer speed the process and produce higher-quality images, but voters are asked to provide personal information on Mr. Rubio’s website. Before they can view their photos, Rubio supporters have told the campaign their name, their home and email addresses, which issues matter most to them and if they are willing to volunteer.
Robber Barons
Robber Barons was the name given to exceptionally successful business people in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the Robber Barons came from humble backgrounds, and started businesses at times when many industries were beginning to grow substantially.
Robber Barons were both admired as people who became rich and powerful, yet hated as monopolists who exploited their workers. In fact, these Barons were able to create such a large divide between rich and poor that Jay Gould, a gold and railroad Baron, once allegedly said “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”
In 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed, the first law enacted to limit the exploitation scope of the Robber Barons’ business practies. The Sherman Act outlawed monopolies and anything which unreasonably restricted trade, such as price fixing. Over the following decades, more business regulations were enacted, bringing the reign of the Robber Barons slowly to an end.
American Teaching
Perhaps because of the high cost of tuition at American universities, Americans typically view students as customers and schools as businesses. As such, teachers will attempt to cater to the needs of their students – if a certain process doesn’t interest the customers (students), the teacher will change it in order to keep the customers attentive.
During their classes, if American teachers notice that students aren’t paying attention, they will often include several amusing anecdotes that they tell throughout the class to keep their students’ focus.
For example, during a physics class, it would not be uncommon for an American professor to stop the lecture to talk to students about how Herman Weyl (one of the early proponents of group theory) had an affair with Erwin Schrodinger’s (the physicist who’s best known not only for his quantum mechanics equation but also for his potentially dead cat) wife, or how Murray Gell-Mann (who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics) was so narcissistic that he once warned his cab driver not to cash his check, because he believed that his signature was worth more than his cab fare had been.
American teachers will also include anecdotal stories from their own lives if these stories have any relevance to the subject matter. For example, if the teacher is describing a discovery made at CERN, he/she might talk about a colleague who worked there.
When car salesmen lie
An older video, but very clever.
Eyewitness News
The first eyewitness news program began at KYW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959. Although this program was called Eyewitness News, it still followed the traditional news format (a news anchor reading the news while looking into a studio camera), until Al Primo became the news director in the early 1960s. Primo, a former anchorman, decided that instead of the typical news format, his news station would rely primarily on visuals, especially film and videotape.
Soon, the new format had spread to more than 200 local television stations across the country, and in 1965 KYW moved from Cleveland to Philadelphia, where Primo formed the first on-camera reporting team. Now, in addition to news anchors, reporters could be seen onscreen.
As the eyewitness format grew in popularity, more developments occurred all over the US. WLS in Chicago began using co-anchors who would chat on air about the news stories, a new style which was known as “happy talk.” At WABC in New York, field reporters appeared on-camera to discuss the stories about which they were reporting.
Eventually eyewitness news became so standard and so popular with the masses that now it is often referred to as “people’s news.” These days, virtually all local television and network stations in the U.S. use some form of eyewitness news, and many countries in Europe and Latin America also use similar news reporting styles.
Personal Experience
Although Americans strive to be analytical, objective, scientific, what most persuades them is experience. For Americans experience is fact, real data, empirical, irrefutable. Theory, logic, rigorous analysis are seldom more convincing than hearing a person say: “I was there. I saw it with my own eyes” or “We tried the approach and it worked”.
Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. As a philosophy, it emerged with the rise of experimental science and was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by thinkers such as John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The idiom “seeing is believing” signals the belief that people can only really believe what they experience personally.
“I have not yet begun to fight”
These were the words of Captain John Paul Jones, an American immigrant who volunteered for service in the Navy. During the American Revolution, he was ordered to sail to European waters where he was expected to attack British ships and seaports and generally create havoc.
In 1779, following Jones’ attack on the coast of Ireland, he sailed a squadron of five ships north around the tip of Scotland to a position near Northern England. There, he met a large merchant convoy that was escorted by two ships in the British navy (including the impressive 44-gun Serapis) and immediately gave chase.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s58mlY1R6k[/embedyt]It wasn’t long before the British ships gained the advantage, and Jones’ flagship, the Bonhomme Richard took critical damage and began to sink. Seeing this, the British captain demanded Captain Jones’ surrender.
However, rather than surrender, Jones responded with his now famous words “I have not yet begun to fight.” After this, Jones and his crew increased the ferocity of their attack so much that, despite their inferior ships, inferior training, and initially inferior position, they ultimately won the battle.