The Primrose Path

The stake in the ground doesn’t work well with a highly sceptical audience. When you anticipate a tough time, it is often best to take your listeners or readers down the primrose path. For my non-native English speaking friends, the expression “to lead someone down the primrose path” means taking small and seemingly innocuous steps to lead the person (figuratively speaking) where he or she wouldn’t otherwise have gone.

As an example I’ll use a case from the scientific and academic realm. A friend was going to speak at a scientific conference. He had a very controversial finding to present, and he knew he would be greeted with much scepticism. In this situation it would have been counterproductive to start by saying “I am going to prove to you this controversial point”. Too many people would have just blocked their minds to his new evidence. This is a natural human trait: we filter what we see and hear through our own experience and what we “know” to be true. So he led these scientists down the primrose path: “We all agree on A, and Dr X’s Whatsit experiment proved B, agreed? If we join those results to this other experiment C, clearly D must be true. Everyone still agree? Good. Well, there is another result, call it E, over here in a different realm (with peer-reviewed papers backing it up) that no one ever thought of applying. We agree with that result, too, right? I have taken the implications of D plus E, and, lo and behold, F must be true, right?” And the audience who had all been nodding their agreement, suddenly awakened with a “hey, how did we get here!?!” reaction. The message got through.

One key thing about the primrose path is that when it works, you have to be ready to go through it several times, patiently, to cement your audience’s agreement. As a technique for making your point and making it stick, it is highly effective. However, it is not suited for all messages. First, you need an airtight logical argument, or your credibility (and your message) will be lost. Second, it is rarely effective as a rallying cry or call to action. It is a good way to capture minds but not necessarily hearts. This means that when you use the primrose path method of presenting your argument, you need to already have plans for your follow-up steps to make sure the audience stays convinced. Depending on the situation this might be a quick follow-on email after a meeting re-iterating what was agreed, or a full blow publicity campaign. In the scientific example above, this would mean not only submitting a peer review article but also arranging for credible supporters to write letters to a scientific journal, and speaking at various conferences.