Clarity depends on contrast. In this case, the begging man’s sign moved people in the park to empathize with him by starkly comparing their reality with his. Robert Cialdini, the Arizona State University scholar and one of the most important social scientists of the last generation, calls this “the contrast principle.”11 We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation. In his work over the past three decades, Cialdini has recast how both academics and practitioners understand the dynamics of influencing others. And one of
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