Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

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This engages the human tendency for loss aversion—that people are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

The scarcity principle is most likely to hold under two optimizing conditions. First, scarce items are heightened in value when they are newly scarce. That is, we value those things that have recently become restricted more than we do those that were restricted all along. Second, we are most attracted to scarce resources when we compete with others for them.

The person whose beliefs, words, and deeds don’t match is seen as confused, two-faced, even mentally ill. On the other side, a high degree of consistency is normally associated with personal and intellectual strength.

cogency

“If you were the only person who believed in my client’s innocence, could you withstand the pressure of the rest of the jury to change your mind?” How could any self-respecting prospective juror say no?

“But, before we start, I wonder if you could answer a question for me. I’m curious, what was it about my background that attracted you to my candidacy?”

Many business organizations employ this approach regularly as well. For the salesperson, the strategy is to obtain a large purchase by starting with a small one. Almost any small sale will do because the purpose of that small transaction is not profit, it’s commitment. Further purchases, even much larger ones, are expected to flow naturally from the commitment. An article in the trade magazine American Salesman put it succinctly:

Selarom

The available data have proved him right: Just reducing the number of first-page fields from four to three increases registration completions by 50 percent.

The companies quickly learned a simple trick that cut the number of such cancellations markedly. They had the customer, rather than the salesperson, fill out the sales agreement. According to the sales-training program of a prominent encyclopedia company, that personal commitment alone proved to be “a very important psychological aid in preventing customers from backing out of their contracts.” Like the Amway corporation,

these organizations found that something special happens when people put their commitments on paper: they live up to what they write down.

Psychologists have long recognized a desire in most people to be and look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds.

indelibly

thus be worded: People are inclined to say yes to someone they consider one of them.

Neuroscientists have offered an explanation for the confusion: asking someone to imagine the self or a close other engages the same brain circuitry. This commonality can produce neuronal “cross-excitation” of the two—whereby a focus on one simultaneously activates the other and fosters a blurring of identities.

In general, these findings fit with emerging scholarship indicating that political-party adherents base many of their decisions less on ideology than on loyalty—born of feelings of “we”-ness.

referees and their less experienced counterparts. In Major League Baseball games, whether a pitch is called a strike is influenced by the racial match between the umpire and pitcher. In National Basketball Association games, officials call fewer fouls against own-race players;

Today, friendship groups frequently coalesce online, creating a subset of e-commerce activity called f-commerce.

contagious yawning, which occurs only because someone else has yawned. True to what we know about the effect of feelings of unity on human responding, the frequency of contagious yawning is directly related to the degree of personal attachment between the first and second yawner. Contagious yawning is likely to occur most among kin, followed by friends, then acquaintances, and least among strangers.

The study’s procedures were similar for the twenty-five dogs tested. During a five-minute period, each dog watched either the researcher or its owner yawn several times. The dogs’ reactions were recorded on video and then analyzed for the number of contagious yawns. The findings were clear-cut: cross-species contagious yawning did emerge, but only between dogs and their owners.

Surveys show that people check their phones on average over one hundred times a day, and 84 percent say they “couldn’t go a single day without their mobile devices.”