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December 8, 2016 - June 17, 2021
The
This seems too me to be mkore abour a probblem off systemms and culture enfoorxed overntime than about obeisance to a siibgle authority how mmny timees had these nurses been subjecte d to diiscipline andnncoorrection uphelldnby the orgbozation forquestuoningbab doocotr?
It is noteworthy that the two types of authority apparel shown by the above research to be influential—the guard uniform and business suit—are combined deftly by confidence men in a fraud called the bank-examiner scheme.
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 also does so unexpectedly.
Yet there is a perverse complication—the familiar one inherent in all weapons of influence: We shouldn’t want to resist altogether, or even most of the time. Generally, authority figures know what they are talking about. Physicians, judges, corporate executives, legislative leaders, and the like have typically gained their positions because of superior knowledge and judgment. Thus, as a rule, their directives offer excellent counsel. The trick is to be able to recognize without much strain or vigilance when authority promptings are best followed and when they should be resisted.
Posing two questions to ourselves can help enormously to accomplish this trick. The first is to ask, when we are confronted with what appears to be an authority figure’s influence attempt, “Is this authority truly an expert?” The question is helpful because it focuses our attention on a pair of crucial pieces of information: the authority’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials to the topic at hand. By orienting in this simple way toward the evidence for authority status, we can avoid the major pitfalls of automatic deference. An illustration or two is in order.
confronted with an authority we determine is a relevant expert. Before submitting to authority influence, it would be wise to ask a second simple question: “How truthful can we expect the expert to be here?” Authorities, even the best informed, may not present their information honestly to us. Therefore we need to consider their trustworthiness in the situation. In fact, most of the time, we do.
because of shamelessly low wages, servers in restaurants must supplement their earnings with tips. Leaving the sine qua non of good service aside, the most successful waiters and waitresses know certain tricks for increasing tips. They also know that the larger a customer’s bill, the larger the amount of money likely to come to them in a standard gratuity. In these two regards, then—building the size of the customer’s charge and building the percentage of that charge that is given as a tip—servers regularly act as compliance agents.
Rather than trying to line his own pockets, he seemed to have the customers’ best interests at heart.
Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated expert of proven sincerity?
Seeming to argue against his financial interests served those interests extremely well.
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. —G. K. CHESTERTON
newspaper story reported that the Mesa temple had recently been refurbished and that the renovations had been extensive enough to classify it as “new” by Church standards. Thus, for the next several days only, non-Mormon visitors could see the temple area traditionally banned to them. I remember quite well the effect of the article on me: I immediately resolved to take a tour. But when I phoned a friend to ask if he wanted to come along, I came to understand something that changed my decision just as quickly. After declining the invitation, my friend wondered why I seemed so intent on a visit.
It became clear as I spoke that the special lure of the temple had a sole cause: If I did not experience the restricted sector shortly, I would never again have the chance. Something that, on its own merits, held little appeal for me had become decidedly more attractive merely because it would soon become unavailable.
the scarcity principle—that opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited—I have begun to notice its influence over a whole range of my actions. For instance, I routinely will interrupt an interesting face-to-face conversation to answer the ring of an unknown caller.
The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. For instance, homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how much money they could save.
Especially enlightening as to the importance of scarcity in the collectibles market is the phenomenon of the “precious mistake.” Flawed items—a blurred stamp or a double-struck coin—are sometimes the most valued of all.
instructive irony here: Imperfections that would otherwise make for rubbish make for prized possessions when they bring along an abiding scarcity.
The purchase decision made and committed to publicly at an earlier, crucial point still holds. They buy.
Related to the limited-number technique is the “deadline” tactic, in which some official time limit is placed on the customer’s opportunity to get what the compliance professional is offering.
Much like my experience with the Mormon temple’s inner sanctum, people frequently find themselves doing what they wouldn’t particularly care to do simp...
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PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTANCE
In the instance of the scarcity principle, that power comes from two major sources. The first is familiar. Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts. The weakness is, as before, an enlightened one. In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality. Thus, one reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is that, by following it, we are usually and efficiently
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According to the theory, whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously. So when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than before.
Their findings were clear. When the barrier was too small to restrict access to the toy behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one behind. But when the barrier was big enough to be a true obstacle, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it three times faster than with the unobstructed
In all, the boys in this study demonstrated the classic terrible twos’ response to a limitation of their freedom: outright defiance.
By testing severely the limits of their freedoms (and coincidentally, the patience of their parents), the children are discovering where in their worlds they can expect to be controlled and where they can expect to be in control. As we will see later, the wise parent provides highly consistent information.
the emergence is from the role of child, with all of its attendant parental control, and toward the role of adult, with all of its attendant rights and duties. Not surprisingly, adolescents tend to focus less on the duties than on the rights they feel they have as young adults.
Do couples suffering parental interference react by committing themselves more firmly to the partnership and falling more deeply in love? According to a study done with 140 Colorado couples, that is exactly what they do. In fact, the researchers found that although parental interference was linked to some problems in the relationship—the partners viewed one another more critically and reported a greater number of negative behaviors in the other—that interference also made the pair feel greater love and desire for marriage.
For twos and teens, then, psychological reactance flows across the broad surface of experience, always turbulent and forceful. For most of the rest of us, the pool of reactant energy lies quiet and covered, erupting geyserlike only on occasion. Still, these eruptions manifest themselves in a variety of fascinating ways that are of interest not only to the student of human behavior but to lawmakers and policymakers as well.
every adult resident
Actually, adult bhead offnhousehold
After passage of the law, then, gun buying had become a frequent activity in Kennesaw, but not among those it was intended to cover; they were massively noncompliant. Only those individuals whose freedom in the matter had not been restricted by the law had the inclination to live by it.
Wow.. So far off the mark. 1: law was protedt against fiirearms ban in Illinois. 2: almoat all hojssehplds had firearms already
This sort of response is typical of individuals who have lost an established freedom and is crucial to an understanding of how psychological reactance and scarcity work on
When our freedom to have something is limited, the item becomes less available, and we experience an increased desire for it. However, we rarely recognize that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we want it.
Still, we need to make sense of our desire for the item, so we begin to assign it positive qualities to justify the desire. After all, it is natural to suppose that if one feels drawn to ...
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The tendency to want what has been banned and therefore to presume that it is more worthwhile is not limited to such commodities as laundry soap. In fact, the tendency is not limited to commodities at all but extends to restrictions on information.
In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information is becoming increasingly the determinant of wealth and power, it is important to understand how we typically react to attempts to censor or otherwise constrain our access to information.
there is surprisingly little evidence as to our reactions to the act of censoring them. Fortunately, the results of the few studies that have been done on the topic are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban.
The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it.
This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted.
The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship.
By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.
from a purely psychological point of view, those favoring strict censorship may wish to examine closely the results of a study done on Purdue University undergraduates.113 The students were shown some advertisements for a novel. For half the students, the advertising copy included the statement, “a book for adults only, restricted to those 21 years and over”; the other half of the students read about no such age restriction on the book. When the researchers later asked the students to indicate their feelings toward the book, they discovered the same pair of reactions we have noted with other
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Thus, as insurance companies have long suspected, juries make larger awards to victims if an insurance company will have to pay. The second finding of the study is the fascinating one, though. If the driver said he was insured and the judge ruled that evidence inadmissible (directing the jury to disregard it), the instruction to disregard had a boomerang effect, causing an average award of forty-six thousand dollars. So when certain juries learned that the driver was insured, they increased the damage payment by four thousand dollars. But when other juries were told officially that they must
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information may not have to be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce. According to the scarcity principle, then, we will find a piece of information more persuasive if we think we can’t get it elsewhere. This idea that exclusive information is more persuasive information is central to the thinking of two psychologists, Timothy Brock and Howard Fromkin, who have developed a “commodity theory” analysis of persuasion.115
This frame neatly explins why people feel speciall when thwy receive homeland seciroty briefings that are only coolwctions ofnopen spirce information qooth poor ANALYSIS
the fact that the news carrying the scarcity of information was itself scarce made it especially persuasive.116
newly experienced scarcity is the more powerful kind
social scientists have determined that such scarcity is a primary cause of political turmoil and violence. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this argument is James C. Davies, who states that we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal in those conditions.
it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people—who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things—who are especially liable to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be thos...
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But then, according to Davies’s analysis of social conditions, this rapid progress was stymied by events that soured the heady optimism of previous years. First, political and legal change proved substantially easier to enact than social change. Despite all the progressive legislation of the forties and fifties, blacks perceived that most neighborhoods, jobs, and schools remained segregated. Thus the Washington-based victories came to feel like defeats at home. For example, in the four years following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to integrate all public schools, blacks were the
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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.
