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The second important thing to understand is that we, too, have our preset programs, and although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into running the right programs at the wrong times.
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason.
The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a simplifying principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: expensive = good. Research shows that people who are unsure of an item’s quality often use this stereotype. Thus the vacationers, who wanted “good” jewelry, saw the turquoise pieces as decidedly more valuable and desirable when nothing about them was enhanced but the price. Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality, and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to a dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers.
We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of the trigger features is present.
Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes.
We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when an issue is important to us.
It is more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first; to fail to do so not only loses the force of the contrast principle but also causes the principle to work against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one makes the expensive item seem even more costly—hardly a desirable consequence for sales organizations.
The rule says that we should try to repay what another person has provided us.
I’d warn against minimizing the favor in all-too-common language that disengages the influence of the rule of reciprocation: “No big deal.” “Don’t think a thing about it.” “I would have done it for anybody.” Instead, I’d recommend retaining that (earned) influence by saying something such as, “Listen, if our positions were ever reversed, I know you’d do the same for me.” The benefits should be considerable.3
The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more a given individual will perceive the idea to be correct.
There’s an age-old truism that makes this point: “If one person says you have a tail, you laugh it off as stupid; but, if three people say it, you turn around.”
Social proof is most influential under three conditions. The first is uncertainty. When people are unsure, when the situation is ambiguous, they are more likely to attend to the actions of others and to accept those actions as correct.
People judge those dressed in higher quality apparel, even higher quality T-shirts, as more competent than those in lesser quality attire—and the judgments occur automatically, in less than a second.
Thus, a communicator who does the work of collecting and then pointing to support from multiple experts will be more successful than a communicator who settles for claiming the support of just one.
a communicator who references a weakness early on is seen as more honest.
When reacting to authority in an automatic fashion, people have a tendency to do so in response to mere symbols of authority rather than to its substance. Three kinds of symbols effective in this regard are titles, clothing, and trappings such as automobiles.
