Influence: Science and Practice (2 page)

This feature highlights the experiences of individuals who have read
Influence
, recognized how one of the principles worked on (or for) them in a particular instance, and wrote to me describing the event. Their descriptions, which appear in the “Reader’s Reports” in each chapter, illustrate how easily and frequently we can fall victim to the influence process in our everyday lives. There are now twice as many firsthand accounts of how the book’s principles apply to business and personal lives.

An array of people deserve and have my appreciation for their aid in making
Influence
possible. Several of my academic colleagues read and provided perceptive comments on the entire manuscript in its initial draft form, greatly strengthening the subsequent versions. They are Gus Levine, Doug Kenrick, Art Beaman, and Mark Zanna. In addition, the first draft was read by a few family members and friends—Richard and Gloria Cialdini, Bobette Gorden, and Ted Hall—who offered not only much-needed emotional support but insightful substantive commentary as well.

A second, larger group provided helpful suggestions for selected chapters or groups of chapters: Todd Anderson, Sandy Braver, Catherine Chambers, Judi Cialdini, Nancy Eisenberg, Larry Ettkin, Joanne Gersten, Jeff Goldstein, Betsy Hans, Valerie Hans, Joe Hepworth, Holly Hunt, Ann Inskeep, Barry Leshowitz, Darwyn Linder, Debbie Littler, John Mowen, Igor Pavlov, Janis Posner, Trish Puryear, Marilyn Rall, John Reich, Peter Reingen, Diane Ruble, Phyllis Sensenig, Roman Sherman, and Henry Wellman.

Certain people were instrumental at the beginning stages. John Staley was the first publishing professional to recognize the project’s potential. Jim Sherman, Al Goethals, John Keating, Dan Wagner, Dalmas Taylor, Wendy Wood, and David Watson provided early, positive reviews that encouraged author and editors alike. My editors at Allyn and Bacon, Michelle Limoges and Liz Napolitano, were consistently congenial, helpful, and insightful. I would like to thank the following users of the book for their feedback during a telephone survey: Emory Griffin, Wheaton College; Robert Levine, California State, Fresno; Jeffrey Lewin, Georgia State University; David Miller, Daytona Beach Community College; Lois Mohr, Georgia State University; and Richard Rogers, Daytona Beach Community College. The past editions benefited substantially from the reviews of Assaad Azzi, Yale University; Robert M. Brady, University of Arkansas; Brian M. Cohen, University of Texas at San Antonio; Christian B. Crandall, University of Florida; Catherine Goodwin, University of Alaska; Robert G. Lowder, Bradley University; James W. Michael, Jr., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Eugene P. Sheehan, University of Northern Colorado; Jefferson A. Singer, Connecticut College; and Sandi W. Smith, Michigan State University. Thanks to the following reviewers of this new edition: Amy M. Buddie, Kennesaw State University; Maria Czyzewska, Texas State University; A. Celeste Farr, North Carolina State University; Arthur Frankel, Salve Regina University; and Brian Smith, Graceland University.

Finally, throughout the project, no one was more on my side than Bobette Gorden, who lived every word with me.

I wish to thank the following individuals who—either directly or through their course instructors—contributed the “Reader’s Reports” used in past editions: Pat Bobbs, Annie Carto, William Cooper, Alicia Friedman, William Graziano, Mark Hastings, Endayehu Kendie, Danuta Lubnicka, James Michaels, Steven Moysey, Paul Nail, Alan J. Resnik, Daryl Retzlaff, Geofrey Rosenberger, Dan Swift, and Karla Vasks. Special thanks are due to those who provided new Reader’s Reports for this edition: Hartnut Bock, Michael Conroy, Jonathan Harries, Karen Klawer (2), Katie Mueller, Paul Nail, Dan Norris, Sam Omar, Joanna Spychala, and Robert Stauth.

I would also like to invite new readers to contribute similar “Reports” for possible publication in a future edition. They can be sent to me at the Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104 or [email protected]. Finally, more influence-relevant information can be obtained at
www.Influenceatwork.com
.

R.B.C.

Introduction

I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy. For as long as I can recall, I’ve been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, fund-raisers, and operators of one sort or another. True, only some of these people have had dishonorable motives. The others—representatives of certain charitable agencies, for instance—have had the best of intentions. No matter. With personally disquieting frequency, I have always found myself in possession of unwanted magazine subscriptions or tickets to the sanitation workers’ ball. Probably this long-standing status as sucker accounts for my interest in the study of compliance: Just what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And which techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about such compliance? I have wondered why it is that a request stated in a certain way will be rejected, but a request that asks for the same favor in a slightly different fashion will be successful.

So in my role as an experimental social psychologist, I began to research the psychology of compliance. At first the research took the form of experiments performed, for the most part, in my laboratory and on college students. I wanted to find out which psychological principles influenced the tendency to comply with a request. Right now, psychologists know quite a bit about these principles—what they are and how they work. I have characterized such principles as weapons of influence and will be discussing some of the most important of them in this book.

After a time, though, I began to realize that the experimental work, while necessary, wasn’t enough. It didn’t allow me to judge the importance of the principles in the world beyond the psychology building and the campus where I was examining them. It became clear that if I was to understand fully the psychology of compliance, I would need to broaden my scope of investigation. I would need to look to the compliance professionals—the people who had been using the principles on me all my life. They know what works and what doesn’t; the law of survival of the fittest assures it. Their business is to make us comply, and their livelihoods depend on it. Those who don’t know how to get people to say yes soon fall away; those who do, stay and flourish.

Of course, the compliance professionals aren’t the only ones who know about and use these principles to help them get their way. We all employ them and fall victim to them to some degree in our daily interactions with neighbors, friends, lovers, and family. But the compliance practitioners have much more than the vague and amateurish understanding of what works than the rest of us have. As I thought about it, I knew that they represented the richest vein of information about compliance available to me. For nearly three years, then, I combined my experimental studies with a decidedly more entertaining program: I systematically immersed myself in the world of compliance professionals—salespeople, fund-raisers, advertisers, and others.

My purpose was to observe, from the inside, the techniques and strategies most commonly and effectively used by a broad range of compliance practitioners. That program of observation sometimes took the form of interviews with the practitioners themselves and sometimes with the natural enemies (for example, police bunco-squad officers, consumer agencies) of certain of the practitioners. At other times, it involved an intensive examination of the written materials by which compliance techniques are passed down from one generation to another—sales manuals and the like.

Most frequently, though, it took the form of participant observation. Participant observation is a research approach in which the researcher becomes a spy of sorts. With disguised identity and intent, the investigator infiltrates the setting of interest and becomes a full-fledged participant in the group to be studied. So when I wanted to learn about the compliance tactics of encyclopedia (or vacuum cleaner, or portrait photography, or dance lesson) sales organizations, I would answer a newspaper ad for sales trainees and have them teach me their methods. Using similar but not identical approaches, I was able to penetrate advertising, public relations, and fund-raising agencies to examine their techniques. Much of the evidence presented in this book, then, comes from my experience posing as a compliance professional, or aspiring professional, in a large variety of organizations dedicated to getting us to say yes.

One aspect of what I learned in this three-year period of participant observation was most instructive. Although there are thousands of different tactics that compliance practitioners employ to produce yes, the majority fall within six basic categories. Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and, in so doing, gives the tactics their power. This book is organized around these six principles. The principles—reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity—are each discussed in terms of their function in the society and in terms of how their enormous force can be commissioned by a compliance professional who deftly incorporates them into requests for purchases, donations, concessions, votes, or assent.
¹

¹
It is worth noting that I have not included among the six principles the simple rule of material self-interest: that people want to get the most and pay the least for their choices. This omission does not stem from any perception on my part that the desire to maximize benefits and minimize costs is unimportant in driving our decisions. Nor does it come from any evidence that I have that compliance professionals ignore the power of this rule. Quite the opposite: in my investigations, I frequently saw practitioners use (sometimes honestly, sometimes not) the compelling “I can give you a good deal” approach. I chose not to treat the material self-interest rule separately in this book because I see it as a motivational given, as a goes-without-saying factor that deserves acknowledgment, but not extensive description.

Finally, each principle is examined as to its ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingness to say yes without thinking first. The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent in the future. It will be increasingly important for the society, therefore, to understand the how and why of automatic influence.

Chapter 1
Weapons of Influence

Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

–Alfred North Whitehead

I
GOT A PHONE CALL ONE DAY FROM A FRIEND WHO HAD
recently opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even told her sales staff to “push” the items hard—again without success.

Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled an exasperated note to her head saleswoman, “Everything in this display case, price X½,” hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because the employee had read the “½” in her scrawled message as a “2,” the entire allotment had sold at twice the original price!

That’s when she called me. I thought I knew what had happened but told her that, if I were to explain things properly, she would have to listen to a story of mine. Actually, it isn’t my story; it’s about mother turkeys, and it belongs to the relatively new science of ethology—the study of animals in their natural settings. Turkey mothers are good mothers—loving, watchful, and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning, and huddling their young beneath them; but there is something odd about their method. Virtually all of this mothering is triggered by one thing: the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks, such as their smell, touch, or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.

The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviorist M. W. Fox (1974) in his description of an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is to be greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experiments found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. When, however, the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.