Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

by Charles T. Munger

In a famous psychology experiment, Cialdini brilliantly demonstrated the power of compliance practitioners to mislead people by triggering their subconscious reciprocation tendency. Carrying out this experiment, Cialdini caused his compliance practitioners to wander around his campus and ask strangers to supervise a bunch of juvenile delinquents on a trip to a zoo. Because this happened on a campus, one person in six out of a large sample actually agreed to do this. After accumulating this 1-in-6 statistic, Cialdini changed his procedure. His practitioners next wandered around the campus asking strangers to devote a big chunk of time every week for two years to the supervision of juvenile delinquents. This ridiculous request got him a 100 percent rejection rate. But the practitioner had a follow-up question: “Will you at least spend one afternoon taking juvenile delinquents to a zoo?” This raised Cialdini’s former acceptance rate of 1 in 6 to 1 in 2—a tripling. What Cialdini’s compliance practitioners had done was make a small concession, which was reciprocated by a small concession from the other side. This subconscious reciprocation of a concession by Cialdini’s experimental subjects actually caused a much-increased percentage of them to end up irrationally agreeing to go to a zoo with juvenile delinquents. Now, a professor who can invent an experiment like that, which so powerfully demonstrates something so important, deserves much recognition in the wider world, which ...