Persuasion and Devil’s Advocacy Exercise

This set of exercises aims to teach students about key principles and methods of persuasion, as well as how to engage in constructive devil’s advocacy to improve others’ ideas. Students learn to identify the different principles of persuasion (Cialdini, 2021) in various change management scenarios, build proposals to effect change using these principles, and then critique each other’s plans using the devil’s advocacy method. They learn how to keep conflict constructive as they play the devil’s advocate.