Influence: Science and Practice

by Robert B. Cialdini

Based on the research findings we have seen, my advice would be to isolate one individual from the crowd: Stare, speak, and point directly at that person and no one else: “You, sir, in the blue jacket, I need help. Call an ambulance.” With that one utterance you would dispel all the uncertainties that might prevent or delay help. With that one statement you will have put the man in the blue jacket in the role of “rescuer.” He should now understand that emergency aid is needed; he should understand that he, not someone else, is responsible for providing the aid; and, finally, he should understand exactly how to provide it. All the scientific evidence indicates that the result should be quick, effective assistance.

The trick had been to get the ball rolling in the direction of help. Once that was accomplished, social proof’s natural momentum did the rest.

In general, then, your best strategy when in need of emergency help is to reduce the uncertainties of those around you concerning your condition and their responsibilities. Be as precise as possible about your need for aid. Do not allow bystanders to come to their own conclusions because, especially in a crowd, the principle of social proof and the consequent pluralistic ignorance effect might well cause them to view your situation as a nonemergency. Of all the techniques in this book designed to produce compliance with a request, this one is the most important to remember. After all, the failure of your request for emergency aid could mean your life.

The principle of social proof operates most powerfully when we are observing the behavior of people just like us

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others to be similar to ourselves (Park, 2001; Stangor, Sechrist, & Jost, 2001).

After a suicide has made front-page news, airplanes—private planes, corporate jets, airliners—begin falling out of the sky at an alarming rate.

Upon learning of another’s suicide, an uncomfortably large number of people decide that suicide is an appropriate action for themselves as well. Some of these individuals then proceed to commit the act in a straightforward, no-bones-about-it fashion, causing the suicide rate to jump. Others, however, are less direct. For any of several reasons—to protect their reputations, to spare their families the shame and hurt, to allow their dependents to collect on insurance policies—they do not want to appear to have killed themselves. They would rather seem to have died accidentally. So, purposively but furtively, they cause the wreck of a car or a plane they are operating or are simply riding in.

Homicides in this country have a simulated, copycat character after highly publicized acts of violence.

widely publicized aggression has the nasty tendency to spread to similar victims, no matter whether the aggression is inflicted on the self or on another.

media officials need to think deeply about how and how prominently to present reports of killing sprees. Such reports are not only riveting, sensational, and newsworthy, they are malignant.

To my mind, the single act in the history of the People’s Temple that most contributed to the members’ mindless compliance that day occurred a year earlier with the relocation of the Temple to a jungled country of unfamiliar customs and people.

From my own perspective, most attempts to analyze the Jonestown incident have focused too much on the personal qualities of Jim Jones. Although he was without question a man of rare dynamism, the power he wielded strikes me as coming less from his remarkable personal style than from his understanding of fundamental psychological principles. His real genius as a leader was his realization of the limitations of individual leadership. No leader can hope to persuade, regularly and single-handedly, all the members of the group. A forceful leader can reasonably expect, however, to persuade some sizable proportion of group members. Then the raw information that a substantial number of group members has been convinced can, by itself, convince the rest (Watts & Dodd, 2007). Thus, the most influential leaders are those who know how to arrange group conditions to allow the principle of social proof to work in their favor.

There are two types of situations in which incorrect data cause the principle of social proof to give us poor counsel. The first occurs when the social evidence has been purposely falsified. Invariably these situations are manufactured by exploiters intent on creating the impression—reality be damned—that a multitude is performing the way the exploiters want us to perform. The canned laughter of TV comedy shows is one variety of faked data of this sort, but there is a great deal more, and much of the fakery is strikingly obvious.

With no more cost than a bit of vigilance for plainly counterfeit social evidence, then, we can protect ourselves nicely.

In addition to the times when social evidence is deliberately faked, there is another time when the principle of social proof will regularly steer us wrong. In such an instance, an innocent, natural error will produce snowballing social proof that pushes us to an incorrect decision. The pluralistic ignorance phenomenon, in which everyone at an emergency sees no cause for alarm, is one example of this process.

research tells us that citizens of Far Eastern societies have a greater tendency to respond to social proof information that do those from Western cultures (Bond & Smith, 1996).

This account provides certain insights into the way we respond to social proof. First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because its members are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.

2Have you ever noticed that despite their good looks, many attractive people don’t seem to share the positive impressions of their personalities and abilities that observers have? Research has not only confirmed the tenuous and inconsistent relationship between attractiveness and self-esteem (see Adams, 1977), it has also offered a possible explanation. One set of authors has produced evidence suggesting that good-looking people are aware that other people’s positive evaluations of them are not based on their actual traits and abilities but are often caused by an attractiveness “halo” (Major, Carrington, & Carnevale, 1984). Consequently, many attractive people who are exposed to this confusing information may be left with an uncertain self-concept.

We like people who are similar to us (Burger et al., 2004). This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. Consequently, those who want us to like them so that we will comply with them can accomplish that purpose by appearing similar to us in a wide variety of ways.

Another way requesters can manipulate similarity to increase liking and compliance is to claim that they have backgrounds and interests similar to ours.

Indeed, it would be wise these days to be careful around salespeople who just seem to be just like you. Many sales training programs now urge trainees to “mirror and match” the customer’s body posture, mood, and verbal style, as similarities along each of these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Locke & Horowitz, 1990; van Baaren et al., 2003).

Chris was more than just a flatterer. He structured his praise to give the reader a reputation to live up to. In so doing, he combined a potent element of the Liking principle with the force of the Consistency principle.

Your friend will prefer the true print, but you will prefer the reverse image. Why? Because you both will be responding favorably to the more familiar face—your friend to the one the world sees and you to the transposed one you find in the mirror every day (Mita, Dermer, & Knight, 1977).

The answer lies partially in the unconscious way that familiarity affects liking. Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

unpleasant conditions such as frustration, conflict, or competition leads to less liking

What the researchers learned is that it didn’t take much to bring on certain kinds of ill will. Simply separating the boys into two residence cabins was enough to stimulate a “we versus they” feeling between the groups; letting the boys assign names to the two groups (the Eagles and the Rattlers) accelerated the sense of rivalry.

At this point, it was evident to Sherif that the recipe for disharmony was quick and easy: just separate the participants into groups and let them sit for a while in their own juices. Then mix together over the flame of continued competition. And there you have it: Cross-group hatred at a rolling boil.

They constructed a series of situations in which competition between the groups would have harmed everyone’s interest; instead, cooperation was necessary for mutual benefit.

When success resulted from the mutual efforts, it became especially difficult to maintain feelings of hostility toward those who had been teammates in the triumph. 4

The essence of the jigsaw route to learning is to require that students work together to master the material to be tested on an upcoming examination. This end is accomplished by grouping students into cooperating teams and giving each student only part of the information—one piece of the puzzle—necessary to pass the test. Under this system the students must take turns teaching and helping one another. Everyone needs everyone else to do well. Like Sherif’s campers working on tasks that could be successfully accomplished only jointly, the students become allies rather than enemies.

What’s the point of this digression into the effects of school desegregation in race relations? The point is to make two points. First, although the familiarity produced by contact usually leads to greater liking, the opposite occurs if the contact carries distasteful experiences with it. Therefore, when children of different racial groups are thrown into the incessant, harsh competition of the standard American classroom, we ought to—and do—see hostilities worsen. Second, the evidence that team-oriented learning is an antidote to this disorder tells us about the heavy impact of cooperation on the liking process.

Compliance professionals are forever attempting to establish that we and they are working for the same goals, that we must “pull together” for mutual benefit, that they are, in essence, our teammates.

Our instruction about the way negative association works seems to have been primarily undertaken by our parents. Remember how they are always warning us against playing with the bad kids down the street? Remember how they said it didn’t matter if we did nothing bad ourselves because, in the eyes of the neighborhood, we would be “known by the company we kept.” Our parents were teaching us about guilt by association—and they were giving us a lesson in the negative side of the principle of association. And they were right. People do assume that we have the same personality traits as our friends (Miller, Campbell, Twedt, & O’Connell, 1966).

the speeches and the appeals for further contributions and heightened effort never come before the meal is served, only during or after.

Although the desire to bask in reflected glory exists to a degree in all of us, there seems to be something special about people who would take this normal tendency too far. Just what kind of people are they? Unless I miss my guess, they are not merely great sports aficionados; they are individuals with hidden personality flaws: poor self-concepts. Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others’ attainments. There are several varieties of this species that bloom throughout our culture. The persistent name-dropper is a classic example. So, too, is the rock-music groupie, who trades sexual favors for the right to tell friends that she or he was “with” a famous musician for a time. No matter which form it takes, the behavior of such individuals shares a similar theme—the rather tragic view of accomplishment as deriving from outside the self.

As in Milgram’s research, the midwestern hospital nurses’ study, and the security guard uniform experiment, people were unable to predict correctly how they or others would react to authority influence. In each instance, the effect of such influence was grossly underestimated. This property of authority status may account for much of its success as a compliance device. Not only does it work forcefully on us, but it does so unexpectedly.

One protective tactic we can use against authority status is to remove its element of surprise.

By turning in this simple way to the evidence for authority status, we can avoid the major pitfalls of automatic deference.

we should keep in mind a little tactic compliance practitioners often use to assure us of their sincerity: They will argue somewhat against their own interests. Correctly practiced, this approach can be a subtle yet effective device for “proving” their honesty. Perhaps they will mention a small shortcoming in their position or product. Invariably though, the drawback will be a secondary one that is easily overcome by more significant advantages—“Avis: We’re number two, but we try harder”; “L’Oreal, We’re more expensive but you’re worth it.” By establishing their basic truthfulness on minor issues, the compliance professionals who use this ploy can then be more believable when stressing the important aspects of their argument (Hunt, Domzal, & Kernan, 1981; Settle & Gorden, 1974; Ward & Brenner, 2006).

letters of recommendation sent to the personnel directors of major corporations produced the most favorable results for job candidates when the letters contained one unflattering comment about the candidate in an otherwise wholly positive set of specific remarks

As a rule, if an item is rare or becoming rare, it is more valuable. Especially enlightening on the importance of scarcity in the collectibles market is the phenomenon of the “precious mistake.” Flawed items—a blurred stamp or double-struck coin—are sometimes the most valued of all.

People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value (Hobfoll, 2001).

Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts.

Almost invariably, our response to banned information is to want to receive that information to a greater extent and to become more favorable toward it than we were before the ban.

This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position on an issue can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted.

In each case, a time of increasing well-being preceded a tight cluster of reversals that burst into violence.

It didn’t seem to make sense that within their 300-year history, most of which had been spent in servitude and much of the rest in privation, American blacks would choose the socially progressive sixties as the time to revolt. Indeed, as Davies points out, the two decades after the start of World War II had brought dramatic political and economic gains to the black population. In 1940, blacks faced stringent legal restrictions in such areas as housing, transportation and education; moreover, even when the amount of education was the same, the average black family earned only a bit more than half the amount its counterpart white family earned. Fifteen years later, much had changed. Federal legislation had struck down as unacceptable formal and informal attempts to segregate blacks in schools, public places, housing, and employment settings. Economic advances had been made, too; black family income had risen from 56 to 80 percent of that of a comparably educated white family.

In keeping with a distinct historical pattern of revolution, blacks in the United States were more rebellious when their prolonged progress was somewhat curtailed than they were before it began. This pattern offers a valuable lesson for would-be rulers: When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all.

Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.

The parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically invites rebellion by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the child.