Your Argument Isn’t Failing—Your Sequence Is: The Hidden Science of Persuasion

Friday, December 5, 2025.

In corporate America, persuasion is treated as a kind of moral arithmetic: if you collect enough strong evidence, arrange it neatly, and speak clearly, the audience should—by some unwritten code of professional decency—agree with you.

This belief persists despite decades of meetings proving the opposite.

If persuasion were determined by argument strength, quarterly planning sessions would be triumphs of logic rather than long-form testimonials to human impatience.

A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology—from Roman Linne, Jannis Hildebrandt, Gerd Bohner, and Hans-Peter Erb—offers an explanation so unflattering it feels like a diagnosis: people don’t respond to your argument; they respond to the sequence in which you slip it past their nervous system.

Professionals polish arguments with jeweler-like fussiness.
They should instead be rearranging them with jeweler-like cunning.

Why Persuasion Fails in Business: The Real Problem Is Argument Order, Not Argument Quality

Corporate communication worships the “strong argument,” as though ideas arrive at meetings on meritocratic wings.

The fantasy is simple: present the evidence correctly and thinking, responsible adults will update their views.

Sequential Information Processing (SIP) punctures this belief.
Humans do not evaluate ideas evenly. They evaluate them chronologically.

The first information becomes the frame, the rule, the expectation.

Everything after that is interpreted through the opening inference, not through objective analysis.

If persuasion were fair, content would matter most. But persuasion is chronological, and chronology is fucking ruthless.

Sequential Information Processing: The Science Behind Why First Impressions Control Every Meeting

SIP rests on a simple, devastating observation about most people:
The neuro-normative brain forms an expectation immediately and then works tirelessly to protect it.

Linne and colleagues draw from decades of persuasion theory to show that the first piece of information doesn’t just “start the conversation”—it configures the mental software.

New information isn’t absorbed neutrally; it is judged relative to what the brain has already decided the message is. Most souls live in stories of their own design.

This is why the first slide you barely rehearsed has more influence than the exquisitely crafted one at the end.

How Assimilation Shapes Interpretation Before Your Argument Even Begins

As soon as your opening point lands, the brain engages in assimilation: the act of squeezing new information into conformity with the initial expectation.

If you set a positive frame, ambiguous data becomes uplifting. If you set a cautious frame, ambiguous data becomes a cautionary tale.

Assimilation isn’t stupidity. It’s efficiency.
People do not have the time or energy to rebuild the frame every time you change topics.

This means that, by the time you arrive at your strongest argument—proudly positioned as “the conclusion”—your audience has already decided how to interpret it.

You are fighting gravity with a whiteboard marker.

When Assimilation Breaks: Using the Contrast Effect to Actually Change Minds

There is one force strong enough to crack assimilation: contrast.

Contrast occurs when new information so sharply contradicts the initial expectation that the brain cannot jam the pieces together.

The mental lens fractures, forcing the audience to rebuild perspective rather than stretch the old one beyond recognition.

This is persuasion’s closest thing to a plot twist.
Not a gentle nudge.
A cognitive interruption.

Most communicators avoid contrast because they fear “coming on too strong.”

Meanwhile, the research shows that coming on too vague is the real danger—gradual transitions allow assimilation to smother your message before it ever has a chance.

The Cashless Study: A Real-World Demonstration That Sequence Beats Strength

To test SIP in action, the researchers used a topic of moderate controversy: abolishing cash in favor of digital payments.

Participants were first given an argument for or against the abolition of cash. This opening became their expectation.

Then came three more arguments—identical across participants—but presented in different orders:

• Extreme → mild
• Mild → extreme

The results were spectacularly unfair.

Participants who received a negative opening followed immediately by a strong positive argument shifted their attitudes most dramatically.

The discrepancy forced contrast; the frame collapsed; the mind reopened.

But when the same arguments were delivered gradually, in a polite progression, the audience barely moved.

Assimilation swallowed everything whole.

Same arguments.
Same participants.
Different sequence.
Different cognition.

This is why your “excellent data” keeps failing to persuade: the sequence drains it of power before it ever reaches the intellectual bloodstream.

Why Executives Lose Arguments: The Silent Power of Early Expectations

Executives routinely bury their strongest argument in the back half of the presentation, as though persuasion were a marathon requiring stamina instead of architecture requiring structure.

They warm up gently, ease into nuance, and save “the good stuff” for the end.

By the time they arrive, the audience has mentally left the building.

SIP makes this clear:
The outcome of a persuasive exchange is mostly decided in the opening moments.
Not because people are lazy, but because cognition is sequential and coherence-hungry.

Once the train leaves the station, you can only persuade along the track you laid at the start.

The Limits of SIP Research—And Why They Don’t Rescue Your Slide Deck

Yes, the original study involved individual participants, not full boardroom theatrics.
Yes, real executive meetings involve credibility cues, interpersonal politics, and status hierarchies.
Yes, expertise doe moderates susceptibility. We know all this, bless your heart.

None of this eliminates sequence effects.
It merely adds more variables to the same basic, unyielding rule.

Even highly educated, highly motivated folks fall for sequencing.

This is not because they lack intelligence—it is because human cognition operates on momentum.

How to Use Sequence Strategically: Reinforcement vs. Change

If your goal is reinforcement—to strengthen what your audience already believes—open with your strongest aligned argument. Let assimilation handle the rest. Your job is to maintain the frame, not to tinker with it.

If your goal is change—a genuine shift in perspective—do the opposite:

1. State the prevailing belief clearly.

2. Follow it immediately with your sharpest contradiction.

3. Do not soften.

4. Do not ease in.

5. Do not methodically “build your case.”

You are not building a case.
You are breaking a fucking frame.

The One Skill Every Communicator Needs: Learn to Control the Sequence

Persuasion is not a debate.
It is not a vote.
It is not even a dialogue.

It is a sequence. Whoever controls the sequence controls the room.

And if you don’t control the sequence, someone else controls the conclusion.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Linne, R., Hildebrandt, J., Bohner, G., & Erb, H.-P. (2022). Sequential information processing: How the order of arguments shapes attitudes through assimilation and contrast. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 859843. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.859843

Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 752–766. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.752

Kruglanski, A. W., Erb, H.-P., Pierro, A., Mannetti, L., & Chun, W. Y. (2006). A parametric unimodel of human judgment: Integrating dual-process frameworks in social cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 749–776. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.749