Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

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.

However, a third type of request showed this was not the case. It seems it was not the whole series of words but the first one, because, that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word because and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” The result was once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information was added to justify their compliance.

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.

Captainitis. Accident investigators from the US Federal Aviation Administration noted that, frequently, an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by the other crew members and resulted in a crash. It seems, despite the clear and strong personal importance of the issues, the crew members were using the “If an expert says so, it must be true” rule in failing to attend or respond to the captain’s disastrous mistake.

ethologists.

contrast principle

the rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay what another person has provided us.

I also thought that if I were to give advice to someone who’d just received thanks for a meaningful favor, 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.

Take the case of the medical controversy surrounding the safety of calcium-channel blockers, a class of drugs for heart disease. One study discovered that 100 percent of the scientists who found and published results supportive of the drugs had received prior support (free trips, research funding, or employment) from the pharmaceutical companies; but only 37 percent of those critical of the drugs had received any such prior support. If scientists, “disposed by training to be discerning, critical, and alert,” can be swayed by the insistent undertow of exchange, we should fully expect that politicians will be too.

In short, problem-free may not feel as good to people as problem-freed.

Paradoxically,

We automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, agreeableness, trustworthiness, and intelligence. Furthermore, we make these judgments without realizing attractiveness has played a role in the process.

One scientist, Daniel Hamermesh, who wrote a book on the topic, estimated that over the course of one’s career, being attractive earns a worker an extra $230,000.

Thus, it’s apparent that good-looking people enjoy an enormous social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, better paid, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing more desirable personality traits and greater intellectual capacities. Moreover, the social benefits of good looks begin to accumulate early.

People feel good about themselves after a compliment and proud of whatever trait or behavior produced the praise.

Children praised for their conscientiousness on a task performed more conscientiously on a related task days afterward. Similarly, adults complimented on their helpful tendencies became significantly more helpful in a separate setting much later.

What’s the implication? If there’s someone who ordinarily performs commendably—perhaps a conscientious colleague who often comes prepared for meetings or a helpful friend who frequently tries hard to give useful feedback on your ideas—compliment him or her not just on the behavior but, instead, on the trait. You’ll probably see more of it.

Often we don’t realize our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it.

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’s assertion, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

digression

An innocent association with either bad things or good things will influence how people feel about us.

As a result, attractive people are more persuasive both

in terms of getting what they request and changing others’ attitudes.

proselytize

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.

Consider how this simple insight made one man a multimillionaire. His name was Sylvan Goldman and, after acquiring several small grocery stores in 1934, he noticed his customers stopped buying when their handheld shopping baskets got too heavy. This inspired him to invent the shopping cart, which in its earliest form was a folding chair equipped with wheels and a pair of heavy metal baskets. The contraption was so unfamiliar-looking that, at first, none of Goldman’s customers used one—even after he built a more-than-adequate supply, placed several in a prominent place in the store, and erected signs describing their uses and benefits. Frustrated and about to give up, he tried one more idea to reduce his customers’ uncertainty, one based on social proof. He hired shoppers to wheel the carts through the store. His true customers soon began following suit, his invention swept the nation, and he died a wealthy man with an estate of over $400 million.

pluralistic ignorance.

placidly,

For example, it has been shown that immediately following certain kinds of highly publicized suicide stories, the number of people who die in commercial-airline crashes increases by 1,000 percent! Even more alarming: the increase is not limited to airplane deaths. The number of automobile fatalities shoots up as well.

His research demonstrated that immediately following a front-page suicide story, the suicide rate increases dramatically in those geographical areas where the story has been highly publicized. It’s Phillips’s argument that certain troubled people who read of another’s self-inflicted death kill themselves in imitation.

In a morbid illustration of the principle of social proof, these people decide how they should act on the basis of how some other troubled person has acted.

Realizing that the clearest test of this possibility would come from the records of automobile crashes involving a single car and a lone driver, Phillips compared the age of the suicide-story victim with the ages of the lone drivers killed in single-car crashes immediately after the story appeared in print. Once again, the predictions were strikingly accurate: when the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person’s suicide, it was older drivers who died in such crashes.

Perhaps nowhere are we brought into more dramatic contact with the unsettling side of the principle of social proof than in the realm of copycat crime. Back in the 1970s, our attention was brought to the phenomenon in the form of airplane hijackings, which seemed to spread like airborne viruses. In the 1980s, our focus shifted to product tamperings, such as the famous cases of Tylenol capsules injected with cyanide and Gerber baby-food products laced with glass. According to FBI forensic experts, each nationally publicized incident of this sort spawned an average of thirty more incidents.

Whatever the reason for the regularity of this pattern, we know that travelers’ safety is most severely jeopardized three to four days after a suicide-murder story and then again, but to a lesser degree, a few days later. We would be well advised, then, to take special care in our travels at these times.

In short, persuasive communications should avoid employing information that can normalize undesirable conduct.

With each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half-inch, so that he was seen as two and a half inches taller as the “professor” than as the “student.” Other studies found both that after winning an election, politicians became taller

The results are frightening indeed. That 95 percent of regular staff nurses complied unhesitatingly with a patently improper instruction of this sort must give us all as potential hospital patients great reason for concern. The midwestern study showed that mistakes are hardly limited to trivial slips in the administration of harmless ear drops or the like but, rather, extend to grave and dangerous blunders.

Bickman’s basic procedure was to ask passersby on the street to comply with some odd request (for example, to pick up a discarded paper bag or stand on the other side of a bus-stop sign). In half of the instances, the requester, a young man, was dressed in ordinary street clothes; in the rest, he wore a security guard’s uniform. Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requester when he was wearing the guard costume. Similar results were obtained when the requester was female.

Nearly all the pedestrians complied with his directive when he wore the guard costume,

Five stars is too good to be true. The more stars assigned to a product, the higher is the likelihood of purchase—but only up to a point. When the average rating moves past the optimal 4.2 to 4.7 range, purchasers become suspicious that the ratings are phony and are less likely to buy.

In fact, if a site includes some negative reviews, the conversion rate jumps by 67 percent.

One prominent theory accounts for the primacy of loss over gain in evolutionary terms. If one has enough to survive, an increase in resources will be helpful but a decrease in those same resources could be fatal. Consequently, it would be adaptive to be especially sensitive to the possibility of loss

As we have seen, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

limited-supply appeals are more effective than limited-time appeals

when people know what they can’t have, their desire for it will shoot up. Although this

people see a thing as more desirable when it recently has become less available than when it has been scarce all along.