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 their mothering is triggered by one thing, the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features of the chicks, such as 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. (Location 170)
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. (Location 203)
Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library’s copying machine: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94 percent of people let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Under those circumstances, only 60 percent complied. At first glance, it appears the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words because I’m in a rush. 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. (Location 205)
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. (Location 220)
A man who owns an antique jewelry store in my town tells a story of how he learned the expensive = good lesson of social influence. A friend of his wanted a special birthday present for his fiancée. So, the jeweler picked out a necklace that would have sold in his store for 500butthathewaswillingtolethisfriendhavefor250. As soon as he saw it, the friend was enthusiastic about the piece. But when the jeweler quoted the 250price,theman’sfacefell,andhebeganbackingawayfromthedealbecausehewantedsomething“reallynice”forhisintendedbride.Whenadaylateritdawnedonthejewelerwhathadhappened,hecalledhisfriendandaskedhimtocomebacktothestorebecausehehadanothernecklacetoshowhim.Thistime,heintroducedthenewpieceatitsregular500 price. His friend liked it enough to buy it on the spot. But before any money was exchanged, the jeweler told him that, as a wedding gift, he would drop the price to 250.Themanwasthrilled.Now,ratherthanfindingthe250 sales price offensive, he was overjoyed—and grateful—to have it. (Location 227)
Although they probably didn’t realize it, by reacting solely to price, they were playing a shortcut version of betting the odds. Instead of stacking all the odds in their favor by trying painstakingly to master each feature signifying the worth of turquoise jewelry, they simplified things by counting on just one—the one they expected to reveal the quality of any item. They bet price alone would tell them all they needed to know. This time because someone mistook a “1/2” for a “2,” they bet wrong. But in the long run, over all the past and future situations of their lives, betting those shortcut odds represents the most rational approach. (Location 245)
You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. 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. (Location 257)
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. (Location 269)
people are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, run approach. (Location 278)
people are likely to respond in a controlled, thoughtful fashion only when they have both the desire and the ability to do so. I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics. Sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so intrusive, the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we are in no cognitive condition to operate mindfully. Important topic or not, we have to take the shortcut. (Location 291)
One group of organisms, termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an attempt to trick the animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior programs at the wrong times. (Location 316)
Take the deadly trick played by the killer females of one genus of firefly (Photuris) on the males of another firefly genus (Photinus). Understandably, the Photinus males scrupulously avoid contact with the bloodthirsty Photuris females. However, through centuries of natural selection, the Photuris female hunters have located a weakness in their prey—a special blinking courtship code by which members of the victims’ species tell one another they are ready to mate. By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship program causes them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace. (Location 318)
According to the Cornell research, you should beware if a review: lacks detail. It’s hard to describe what you haven’t actually experienced, which is why fake reviews often offer general praise rather than digging into specifics. “Truthful hotel reviews, for example, are more likely to use concrete words relating to the hotel, like ‘bathroom,’ ‘check-in’ or ‘price.’ Deceivers write more about things that set the scene, like ‘vacation,’ ‘business trip’ or ‘my husband.’” includes more first-person pronouns. If you’re anxious about coming across as sincere, apparently you talk about yourself more. That’s probably why words such as I and me appear more often in fake reviews. has more verbs than nouns. Language analysis shows that the fakes tend to include more verbs because their writers often substitute pleasant (or alarming) sounding stories for actual insight. Genuine reviews are heavier on nouns. (Location 346)
There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, which affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. If the second item is fairly different from the first, we tend to see it as being more different than it actually is. So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we estimate the second object as being heavier than we would have estimated it if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one. (Location 379)
Relatedly, if we are talking to an attractive individual at a party and are joined by a comparatively less attractive one, the second will strike us as being less attractive than he or she actually is. (Location 385)
Retail clothiers offer a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store to buy a suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money? Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. (Location 419)
sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. (Location 423)
The company maintained an unappealing house or two on its lists at inflated prices. These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but only to be shown to them so that the genuine properties in the company’s inventory would benefit from the comparison. (Location 435)
Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price of a car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another. In the wake of a many-thousand-dollar deal, a couple hundred extra dollars for a nicety such as an upgraded sound system seems almost trivial in comparison. The same will be true of the added expense of accessories, such as tinted windows, better tires, or special trim, that the dealer might suggest in sequence. The trick is to bring up the options independently of one another so that each small price will seem petty when compared to the already determined much larger price. (Location 439)
rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours. (Location 489)
Researchers working with charity fundraisers in the United Kingdom approached investment bankers as they came to work and asked for a large charitable donation—a full day’s salary, amounting to over a thousand dollars in some cases. Remarkably, if the request was preceded by a gift of a small packet of sweets, contributions more than doubled. (Location 492)
A widely shared and strongly held feeling of future obligation made an enormous difference in human social evolution because it meant that a person could give something (for example, food, energy, or care) to another with confidence that the gift was not being lost. For the first time in evolutionary history, one individual could give any of a variety of resources without actually giving them away. The result was the lowering of the natural inhibitions against transactions that must be begun by one person’s providing personal resources to another. (Location 509)
Although obligations extend into the future, their span is not unlimited. Especially for relatively small favors, the desire to repay seems to fade with time. But when gifts are of the truly notable and memorable sort, they can be remarkably long-lived. I (Location 516)
In 2015, at the age of ninety-four, the renowned British publisher Lord Arthur George Weidenfeld founded Operation Safe Haven, which rescued endangered Christian families from ISIS-held regions in the Middle East and transported them to safety in other countries. Although observers applauded this benevolence, they criticized its narrowness, wondering why the lord’s efforts didn’t extend to similarly threatened religious groups, such as Druze, Alawis, and Yazidis, in the same territories. Perhaps, one might think, the man was simply acting to benefit his own Christian brethren. But that easy explanation falls apart when one recognizes that Lord Weidenfeld was Jewish. He had come to England in 1938 on a Kindertransport train, organized by Christian societies to rescue Jewish children from Nazi persecution in Europe. Accounting for his actions in terms that reveal the prioritizing power of the rule of reciprocation, he said, “I can’t save the world, but … on the Jewish and Christian side … I had a debt to repay.” Clearly, the pull of reciprocity can be both lifesaving and lifelong. (Location 531)
A more interesting finding was that the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out in the condition under which subjects had been given a Coke by Joe. For those who owed him a favor, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. The subjects who indicated they disliked Joe bought just as many of his tickets as did those who indicated they liked him. The rule of reciprocation was so strong it simply overwhelmed the influence of a factor—liking for the requester—that normally affects the decision to comply. (Location 585)
Throughout the United States’ military involvement against the Taliban in Afghanistan, its intelligence officers faced a significant influence problem. They frequently needed information from local Afghans about the Taliban’s activities and whereabouts; but many of the locals showed little interest in providing it, for a pair of reasons. First, doing so would make them susceptible to Taliban retribution. Second, many harbored a strong distaste for the United States’ presence, goals, and representatives in Afghanistan. A CIA officer, who had experienced both of these sources of reluctance with a particular tribal patriarch, noticed the man seemed drained by his twin roles as tribal leader and husband to four younger wives. On the officer’s next visit, he came equipped with a small gift he placed discreetly in the elder’s hand, four Viagra tablets—one for each wife. The “potency” of this gift was evident on his return a week later when the chief “offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes.” (Location 592)
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.3 (Location 609)
Survey researchers have discovered that sending a monetary gift (e.g., a silver dollar or a $5 check) in an envelope with a mailed questionnaire greatly increases survey completion rates, compared to offering the same monetary amount as an after-the-fact reward. (Location 624)
My colleagues Steve J. Martin and Helen Mankin did a small study showing the impact of giving first in a set of McDonald’s restaurants located in Brazil and Colombia. In half of the locations, the children of adult customers received a balloon as they left the restaurant. In the other half of the locations, the children received a balloon as they entered. The total family check rose by 25 percent when the balloon was given first. Tellingly, this included a 20 percent increase in the purchase of coffee—an (Location 629)
On October 22, 1962, the temperature of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union soared to near boiling. In a televised address, President John F. Kennedy announced American reconnaissance planes had confirmed that Russian nuclear missiles had been shipped to Cuba, undercover, and aimed at the United States. He directed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to retrieve the missiles, declaring a naval blockade of ships carrying additional missiles into Cuba until the installed missiles were removed. Khrushchev responded that his ships, coursing for Cuba, would ignore this “outright piracy”; moreover, any attempt to enforce the blockade would be considered an aggressive act that would lead to war. Not just any war—a nuclear war estimated to destroy a third of humanity. For thirteen days, the people of the world held on to hope (and one another) as the two leaders stared menacingly at each other until one, Khrushchev, blinked, submitting to Kennedy’s unyielding negotiating style and consenting to bring his missiles home. At least, that’s the story I’d always heard of how the Cuban missile crisis ended. But now declassified tapes and documents from the time provide an entirely different account. Kennedy’s “win” was due not to his inflexible bargaining stance but, rather, to his willingness to remove US Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy in return for Khrushchev’s removal of missiles from Cuba. For reasons involving his political popularity, Kennedy made it a condition of the final agreement that the missile trade-off be kept secret; he didn’t want to be seen as conceding anything to the Soviets. (Location 683)
In one Southern California candy shop, researchers examined the buying patterns of customers who either did or did not receive a free piece of candy as they entered. Receiving the gift made recipients 42 percent more likely to make a purchase. Of course, it’s possible their increased buying wasn’t caused by the pull of reciprocity. Perhaps these customers simply liked what they’d tasted so much, they bought more of it. But a closer look doesn’t support this explanation. The recipients didn’t buy more of the candy they’d sampled; they only bought more of other types of candy. Seemingly, even if they didn’t particularly like the candy they were given, they still felt obligated to return the favor by purchasing something. (Location 714)
Despite the impressive force the rule of reciprocation commands, there is a set of conditions that magnifies that force even more: when the first gift is customized, and thereby personalized, to the recipient’s current needs or preferences. (Location 766)
Besides customizing a gift to a recipient’s preferences, customizing it to the recipient’s current needs can also supercharge the gift’s impact. (Location 773)
It wasn’t guests with an errorless stay who reported the highest satisfaction ratings and future loyalty. Rather, it was those who experienced a service stumble that was immediately put right by the hotel staff. There are multiple ways to understand why this occurred. For example, it may be that after guests know that the organization can efficiently fix mistakes, they become more confident that the same will be true in any future dealings. I don’t doubt this possibility, but I believe another factor is at work too: The remedy may well be perceived by guests as “special, personalized assistance” the hotel has gone out of its way to provide. By virtue of the rule of reciprocation, the hotel then becomes deserving of something special in return, in the form of superior ratings and loyalty. (Location 781)
general manager (GM) of the resort hotel where I was speaking stood up in the audience and related an incident that had occurred that day. A guest had wanted to play tennis with her two young children, but the pair of child-size racquets the resort maintained were already in use. So the GM had a staff member drive to a local sporting goods store, purchase another pair, and deliver them to his guest within twenty minutes of her disappointment. Afterward, the mother stopped by the GM’s office and said, “I’ve just booked our entire extended family into this resort for the Fourth of July weekend because of what you did for me.” Isn’t it interesting that had the resort stocked those additional two children’s racquets from the outset—in order to ensure its guests a “seamless experience”—their availability would not have been seen as a notable gift or service that warranted special gratitude and loyalty in the form of additional business? In fact, the racquets may have hardly registered as a blip on Mom’s resort-experience screen. (Location 788)
problem-free may not feel as good to people as problem-freed. (Location 798)
Little wonder that influential French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in describing the social pressures surrounding the gift-giving process, says there is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay. Although an obligation to repay constitutes the essence of the reciprocity rule, it’s the obligation to receive that makes the rule so easy to exploit. A responsibility to receive reduces our ability to choose those to whom we wish to be indebted and puts the power in the hands of others. (Location 812)
although the rule developed to promote equal exchanges between partners, it can be used to bring about decidedly unequal results. (Location 851)
A small initial favor can produce a sense of obligation to agree to a substantially larger return favor. (Location 854)
why should it be that small first favors often stimulate larger return favors? One important reason concerns the clearly unpleasant character of the feeling of indebtedness. Most of us find it highly disagreeable to be in a state of obligation. It weighs heavily on us and demands to be removed. (Location 870)
A Japanese proverb makes this point eloquently: “There’s nothing more expensive than that which comes for free.” (Location 877)
Another consequence, however, is an obligation to make a concession to someone who has made a concession to us. (Location 925)
the tendency to reciprocate with a concession is not so strong that it will work in all instances on all people; none of the levers of influence considered in this book is that strong. (Location 933)
The technique is a simple one that we can call the rejection-then-retreat technique, although it is also known as the door-in-the-face technique. Suppose you want me to agree to a certain request. One way to increase the chances I will comply is first to make a larger request of me, one that I will most likely turn down. Then, after I have refused, you make the smaller request that you were really interested in all along. Provided that you structured your requests skillfully, I should view your second request as a concession to me and should feel inclined to respond with a concession of my own—compliance with your second request. (Location 947)
Posing as representatives of the “County Youth Counseling Program,” we approached college students walking on campus and asked if they would be willing to chaperon a group of juvenile delinquents on a day trip to the zoo. This idea of being responsible for a group of juvenile delinquents of unspecified age for hours in a public place without pay was hardly an inviting one for these students. As we expected, the great majority (83 percent) refused. Yet we obtained very different results from a similar sample of college students who were asked the same question with one difference. Before inviting them to serve as unpaid chaperons on the zoo trip, we asked them for an even larger favor—to spend two hours per week as counselors to juvenile delinquents for a minimum of two years. It was only after they refused this extreme request, as all did, that we made the smaller, zoo-trip request. By presenting the zoo trip as a retreat from our initial request, our success rate increased dramatically. Three times as many of the students approached in this manner volunteered to serve as zoo chaperons. (Location 970)
Research conducted at Bar-Ilan University in Israel on the rejection-then-retreat technique shows that if the first set of demands is so extreme as to be seen as unreasonable, the tactic backfires. In such cases, the party who has made the extreme first request is not seen to be bargaining in good faith. (Location 982)
Any subsequent retreat from that wholly unrealistic initial position is not viewed as a genuine concession and, thus, is not reciprocated. The (Location 984)
the larger-then-smaller request procedure uses the contrast principle to make the smaller request look even smaller by comparison with the larger one. (Location 1009)
In this study, the targets were college students who were each asked to give a pint of blood as part of the annual campus blood drive. Targets in one group were first asked to give a pint of blood every six weeks for a minimum of three years. The other targets were asked only to give a pint of blood once. Those of both groups who agreed and later appeared at the blood center were then asked if they would be willing to give their phone numbers so they could be called upon to donate again in the future. Nearly all the students who were about to give a pint of blood as a result of the rejection-then-retreat technique agreed to donate again (84 percent), while less than half of the other students who appeared at the blood center did so (43 percent). (Location 1086)
Even for future favors, the rejection-then-retreat strategy proved superior. (Location 1091)
it seems that the rejection-then-retreat tactic spurs people not only to agree to a desired request but to carry out that request and, finally, to volunteer to perform further requests. (Location 1093)
little-known pair of positive by-products of the act of concession: feelings of greater responsibility for and satisfaction with the arrangement. It is this set of sweet side effects that enables the technique to move its victims to fulfill their agreements and engage in further such agreements. (Location 1097)
The requester’s concession within the rejection-then-retreat technique caused targets not only to say yes more often but also to feel more responsible for having “dictated” the final agreement. (Location 1113)
the subjects who were the targets of this strategy were the most satisfied with the final arrangement. It appears that an agreement that has been forged through the concessions of one’s opponents is quite satisfying. (Location 1117)
Because the tactic uses a requester’s concession to bring about compliance, the victim is likely to feel more satisfied with the arrangement as a result. It stands to reason that people who are satisfied with a given arrangement are more likely to be willing to agree to similar arrangements. (Location 1120)
Invariably declining a requester’s initial offer of a favor or sacrifice works better in theory than in practice. The major difficulty is that when it is first presented, it is difficult to know whether such an offer is honest or whether it is the initial step in an exploitation attempt. It’s (Location 1152)
It advises us to accept the offers of others but to accept the offers only for what they fundamentally are, not for what they are represented to be. (Location 1166)
If a person offers us a nice favor, we might well accept, recognizing that we have obligated ourselves to a return favor sometime in the future. To engage in this sort of arrangement with another is not to be exploited by that person through the rule of reciprocation. Quite the contrary; it is to participate fairly in the “honored network of obligation” (Location 1167)
Once we have determined the initial offer was not a favor but a compliance tactic, we need only react to it accordingly to be free of its influence. As long as we perceive and define the action as a compliance device instead of a favor, the giver no longer has the reciprocation rule as an ally: The rule says that favors are to be met with favors; it does not require that tricks be met with favors. (Location 1172)
resistance to the theory of evolution doesn’t stem from perceived inconsistencies in its logic; it stems from the theory’s perceived inconsistencies with people’s emotionally based preferences, beliefs, and values, which are frequently grounded in existing religious affiliations. (Location 1255)
it’s a fool’s errand to try to overcome faith-based, emotionally held beliefs with logical argumentation, as each represents a separate way of knowing. (Location 1257)
British writer Jonathan Swift saw it three hundred years ago and declared, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”—and (Location 1258)
when people were led to believe Clooney had made favorable comments about a book that took a pro-evolutionary stance, they became significantly more accepting of the theory. (Location 1264)
the change occurred regardless of the participants’ age, sex, or degree of religiosity. To assure the result wasn’t due to something unique to George Clooney, or to a male celebrity, the researchers redid the study using a widely liked female celebrity, the actress Emma Watson (of Harry Potter movies’ fame), and found the same pattern. (Location 1265)
to change feelings, counteract them with other feelings; and liking for a communicator offers a useful source of such feelings. (Location 1268)
At home parties, such as this Tupperware-style party for a line of eco-friendly cleaning products, the bond that exists between the partygoers and the party hostess usually seals the sale. (Location 1315)
Other compliance professionals have found the friend doesn’t even have to be present to be effective; often, just the mention of the friend’s name is enough. (Location 1317)
The Shaklee Corporation, which specializes in sales of various nutritional products, advises its salespeople to use the “endless chain” method for finding new customers. Once a customer admits he or she likes a product, that customer can be pressed for the names of friends who would also appreciate learning about it. The individuals on that list can then be approached for sales and a list of their friends, who can serve as sources for still other potential customers, and so on in an endless chain. (Location 1319)
The key to the success of the method is that each new prospect is visited by a salesperson armed with the name of a friend “who suggested I call on you.” (Location 1322)
“It would be impossible to overestimate its value. Phoning or calling on a prospect and being able to say that Mr. So-and-so, a friend of his, felt he would benefit by giving you a few moments of his time is virtually as good as a sale 50 percent made before you enter.” (Location 1325)
An analysis of one bank’s refer-a-friend program found that, compared to ordinary new customers, those referred by a friend proved 18 percent more loyal to the bank over a three-year period and 16 percent more profitable.2 READER’S (Location 1330)
There was a man in Detroit, Joe Girard, who specialized in using the liking rule to sell Chevrolets. He (Location 1357)
For all his success, the formula he employed was surprisingly simple. It consisted of offering people just two things: a fair price and someone they liked to buy from. (Location 1366)
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. (Location 1395)
We like people who are like us. It’s a fact that applies to human infants as young as nine months and holds true later in life whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. (Location 1405)
Several studies have demonstrated that we are more likely to help those who wear clothing akin to ours. (Location 1411)
Another way requesters can manipulate similarity to increase liking and compliance is to claim that they have interests similar to ours. (Location 1414)
People are even more likely to purchase a product if its brand name shares initial letters with their own name. (Location 1419)
one investigator increased the percentage of recipients who responded to a mailed survey by changing one small feature of the request: on a cover letter, he modified the name of the survey-taker to be similar to that of the survey recipient. Thus, Robert Greer received his survey from a survey-center official named Bob Gregar, while Cynthia Johnston received hers from a survey-center official named Cindy Johanson. Adding this bit of name resemblance to the invitation nearly doubled survey completion. (Location 1420)
many influence training programs now urge trainees to deliberately mimic their target’s body posture and verbal style, as similarities along these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results. (Location 1443)
food servers trained to mimic customers’ words received higher tips; (b) salespeople instructed to mirror customers’ verbal and nonverbal behavior sold more electronic equipment; and (c) negotiators taught to imitate opponents’ language or body movements got better results whether they were American, Dutch, or Thai. (Location 1444)
we tend to pay attention to differences rather than similarities. (Location 1466)
Jonathan Swift declared in a famous line of poetry, “’Tis an old maxim in the schools / That flattery’s the food of fools.” But he failed to tell us how eager people are to swallow those empty calories. (Location 1483)
when people flatter or claim affinity for us, they may well want something. If so, they’ll likely get it. After being complimented by a server in a restaurant (“You made a good choice”) or by a stylist in a hair salon (“Any hairstyle would look good on you”) customers responded with significantly larger tips. (Location 1489)
Remember Joe Girard, the world’s “Greatest Car Salesman,” who says the secret of his success was getting customers to like him? He did something that, on the face of it, seems foolish and costly. Each month he sent every one of his more than thirteen thousand former customers a holiday greeting card containing a printed message. The holiday greeting card changed from month to month (Happy New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving, and so on), but the message printed on the face of the card never varied. It read, “I like you.” As Joe explained it, “There’s nothing else on the card, nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.” (Location 1498)
we are phenomenal suckers for flattery. (Location 1508)
An experiment done on a group of men in North Carolina shows how helpless we can be in the face of praise. The men received comments about themselves from another person who needed a favor from them. Some of the men got only positive comments, some got only negative comments, and some got a mixture of good and bad. There were three interesting findings. First, the evaluator who provided only praise was liked best. Second, this tendency held true even when the men fully realized that the flatterer stood to gain from their liking of him. Finally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true. (Location 1509)
Give a compliment behind a deserving person’s back. (Location 1527)
Suppose you are at work and, in a meeting, your boss says something you consider very smart. It could be awkward and may appear self-serving to speak up and say so. What could you do instead? To be clear, my students were rarely confronted with this problem. Nonetheless, I have a solution: during a coffee break or at the end of the meeting, tell the boss’s assistant of your opinion: “You know, I thought what Sandy said about XYZ was brilliant.” Several outcomes are likely. First, because people want to be associated with good news in the minds of others and actively arrange for it, the assistant will most probably tell your boss what you said. Second, because you didn’t offer your positive assessment for the boss’s ears, no one (observers or boss) should assign you an unattractive ulterior motive. Third, because of what we know about the psychology of received compliments, your boss will believe your (sincere) praise and like you more for it.9 (Location 1529)
Find and give genuine compliments you want the recipient to live up to. People feel good about themselves after a compliment and proud of whatever trait or behavior produced the praise. Accordingly, one particularly beneficial form of sincere flattery would be to praise people when they’ve done a good thing we’d like them to continue doing. That way, they would be motivated to do more of the good thing in the future in order to live up to the admirable reputation we’ve given them. This idea is related to an influence tactic called altercasting, in which an individual is assigned a particular social role in hopes the person will then act in accord with the role. For example, by highlighting the role of protector, an insurance agent would make parents more willing to purchase life-insurance protection for their families. (Location 1537)
the altercasting technique can be successfully combined with a genuine compliment. That is, rather than just assigning a role to another, such as protector or teacher, we could honestly praise another who exhibited a commendable trait such as helpfulness or conscientiousness. (Location 1561)
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.10 (Location 1572)
it was evident that the recipe for disharmony was quick and easy. Just separate the participants into groups and let them stew for a while in their own juices. Then mix together over the flame of continued competition. And there you have it: cross-group hatred at a rolling boil. (Location 1648)
The crucial procedure was the researcher’s imposition of common goals on the groups. It was the cooperation required to achieve the goals that finally allowed the rival group members to experience one another as reasonable fellows, valued helpers, friends, and friends of friends. When success resulted from the mutual efforts, it became especially difficult to maintain feelings of hostility toward those who had been teammates in the triumph. (Location 1670)
although the familiarity produced by contact usually leads to greater liking, the opposite occurs if the contact carries distasteful or threatening experiences with it. (Location 1711)
Compliance professionals are forever attempting to establish that we and they are working for the same goals; that we must “pull together” for mutual benefit; that they are, in essence, our teammates. (Location 1719)
There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. (Location 1776)
The principle of association is a general one, governing both negative and positive connections. An innocent association with either bad things or good things will influence how people feel about us. (Location 1790)
Did you ever wonder why good-looking models are hired for all those automobile ads? What advertisers hope they are doing is lending the models’ positive traits—beauty and desirability—to the cars. Advertisers are betting that we will respond to their products in the same ways we respond to the attractive models merely associated with them—and we do. In (Location 1801)
Subsequent research by Feinberg strengthens the association explanation for his results. He has found that the presence of credit-card insignias in a room only facilitates spending by people who have had a positive history with credit cards. Those who have had a negative history with the cards—because they’ve paid an above-average number of interest charges in the previous year—do not show the facilitation effect. In fact, these individuals are more conservative in their spending tendencies when in the mere presence of credit-card logos. (Location 1821)
although it made great sense that sales of Mars rover toys would jump after a US Pathfinder rocket landed the real thing on the red planet in 1997, it made little sense that the same would happen to the popularity of Mars candy bars, which have nothing to do with the space project but are named after the candy company’s founder, Franklin Mars. Sales of the Nissan “Rogue” SUV saw a comparable—and otherwise inexplicable—jump after the 2016 Star Wars film, Rogue One, appeared. In a related effect, researchers have found that promotional signs proclaiming SALE increase purchases (even when there is no actual savings), not simply because shoppers consciously think, “Oh, I can save money here.” Rather, owing to a separate, additional tendency, buying becomes more likely because such signs have been repeatedly associated with good prices in the shoppers’ pasts. Consequently, any product connected to a Sale sign becomes automatically evaluated more favorably. (Location 1842)
it is a White House tradition to try to sway the votes of balking legislators over a meal. It can be a picnic lunch, an extravagant breakfast, or an elegant dinner; but when an important bill is up for grabs, out comes the silverware. Political fundraising these days regularly involves the presentation of food. Notice, too, that at the typical fundraising dinner the speeches and the appeals for further contributions and heightened effort never come before the meal is served, only during or after. There are several advantages to this technique. For example, time is saved and the reciprocity rule is engaged. The least recognized benefit, however, may be the one uncovered in research conducted in the 1930s by the distinguished psychologist Gregory Razran. Using what he termed the “luncheon technique,” he found that his subjects become fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating. In the example most relevant for our purposes, subjects were presented with some political statements they had rated once before. At the end of the experiment, Razran found that only certain of them had gained in approval—those that had been shown while food was being eaten. These changes in liking seem to have occurred unconsciously, as the subjects couldn’t remember which of the statements they had seen while food was being served. (Location 1868)
All this tells me we purposefully manipulate the visibility of our connections with winners and losers to make ourselves look good to anyone who views the connections. By showcasing the positive associations and burying the negative ones, we are trying to get observers to think more highly of us and like us more. (Location 1926)
Although the desire to bask in reflected glory exists to a degree in all of us, there seems to be something special about people who would take this normal tendency too far. Just what kind of people are they? In my view, they are not loyal fans who support their teams through good times and bad; they are what we call “fair-weather fans,” who trumpet their association only with winning teams. Unless I miss my guess, they are individuals with a hidden personality flaw: poor self-concept. Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from their own attainments but from their associations with others’ attainments. There are several varieties of this species that bloom throughout our culture. The persistent name-dropper is a classic example. So, too, is the rock-music groupie, who trades sexual favors for the right to tell friends that she or he was “with” a famous musician for a time. No matter which form it takes, the behavior of such individuals shares a similar theme—the rather tragic view of accomplishment as deriving from outside the self. (Location 1946)
Rather than trying to recognize and prevent the action of liking factors before they have a chance to work, we might want to let them work. Our vigilance should be directed not toward the things that may produce undue liking for a compliance practitioner but toward the fact that undue liking has been produced. The time to call up the defense is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances. (Location 1989)
That’s why it is so important to be alert to a sense of undue liking for a compliance practitioner. The recognition of that feeling can serve as our reminder to separate the dealer from the merits of the deal and make our decision based on considerations related only to the latter. (Location 2019)
Upon recognizing that we like a requester inordinately well under the circumstances, we should step back from the interaction, mentally separate the requester from his or her offer, and make any compliance decision based solely on the merits of the offer. (Location 2039)
the principle of social proof. This principle states that we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. (Location 2084)
As a result, advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest growing” or “largest selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that their product is good; they need only show that many others think so, which often seems proof enough. (Location 2086)
Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its major strength and major weakness. (Location 2090)
Our folly is not that we use others’ behavior to help decide what to do in a situation; that is in keeping with the well-founded principle of social proof. The folly occurs when we do so automatically in response to counterfeit evidence provided by profiteers. (Location 2094)
Certain nightclub owners manufacture a brand of visible social proof for their clubs’ quality by creating long waiting lines outside when there is plenty of room inside. Salespeople are taught to spice their pitches with invented accounts of numerous individuals who have purchased the product. Bartenders often salt their tip jars with a few dollar bills at the beginning of an evening to simulate tips left by prior customers. Church ushers sometimes salt collection baskets for the same reason and with the same positive effect on proceeds. Evangelical preachers are known to seed their audience with ringers, who are rehearsed to come forward at a specified time to give witness and donations. And, of course, product-rating websites are regularly infected with glowing reviews that manufacturers have faked or paid people to submit. (Location 2096)
When the city of Louisville, Kentucky, sent parking-ticket recipients a letter stating that the majority of such citations are paid within two weeks, payments increased by 130 percent, more than doubling parking-ticket revenue to the city. (Location 2116)
Many governments expend significant resources regulating, monitoring, and sanctioning companies that pollute our air and water; these expenditures often appear wasted on some of the offenders who either flout the regulations altogether or are willing to pay fines that are smaller than the expense of compliance. But certain nations have developed cost-effective programs that work by firing up the (nonpolluting) engine of social proof. They initially rate the environmental performance of polluting firms within an industry and then publicize the ratings so all companies in that industry can see where they stand relative to their peers. The improvements have been dramatic—upwards of 30 percent—almost all of which have come from changes made by the relatively heavy polluters, who recognized how poorly they’d been doing compared with their contemporaries. (Location 2123)
One psychologist in particular, Albert Bandura, led the way in developing such procedures to eliminate undesirable behavior. Bandura and his colleagues have shown how people suffering from phobias can be rid of these extreme fears in an amazingly simple fashion. For instance, in an initial study, nursery-school-aged children, chosen because they were terrified of dogs, merely watched a little boy playing happily with a dog for twenty minutes a day. This exhibition produced such marked changes in the reactions of the fearful children that after only four days, 67 percent of them were willing to climb into a playpen with a dog and remain confined there petting and scratching the dog while everyone else left the room. (Location 2130)
Although it is clear that we dislike those who take without giving in return (e.g., Wedekind & Milinski, 2000), a cross-cultural study has shown that those who break the reciprocity rule in the reverse direction—by giving without allowing the recipient an opportunity to repay—are also disliked for it. This result was found to hold for each of the three nationalities investigated—Americans, Swedes, and Japanese (Gergen et al., 1975). (Location 8707)
in France, where patrons of three restaurants were asked by their server as she cleared the table whether they’d like dessert. If a patron said no, the waitress immediately retreated to a proposal of coffee or tea, which nearly tripled the percentage of such orders. What I found particularly instructive appeared in another condition of the study in which, rather than immediately retreating to a proposal of coffee or tea, the waitress waited three minutes to do so. In this treatment, hot-drink orders only doubled (Guéguen, Jacob, & Meineri, 2011). Apparently, the finding that the obligation to reciprocate small favors declines over time (Flynn, 2003) also applies to the obligation to reciprocate small concessions. (Location 8730)
New highlights added March 28, 2024 at 1:38 PM
From the director of recruitment and training at a Toyota dealership in Tulsa, Oklahoma (Location 2143)
we decided to run our recruitment ads on radio during the after-work drive time. We ran an ad that focused on the great demand for our vehicles, how many people were buying them, and, consequently, how we needed to expand our sales force to keep up. As we hoped, we saw a significant jump in the number of applications to join our sales team. But, the biggest effect we saw was an increase in customer floor traffic, an increase in sales in both the new and used vehicle departments, and a noticeable difference in the attitudes of our customers. The wildest thing was that the total number of sales increased by 41.7 percent over the previous January!!! We did almost one-and-a-half times the amount of business as the year before in an automotive market that was down by 4.4 percent. (Location 2145)
whenever we run recruitment ads saying we need help to keep up with the demand for our vehicles, we see a significant increase in vehicle sales in those months. (Location 2152)
The high-demand information was “slipped into” an ad to recruit salespeople. Its notable success fits with evidence that people are more likely to be persuaded by information, including social-proof information, when they think it is not intended to persuade them (Bergquist, Nilsson, & Schultz, 2019; Howe, Carr, & Walton, in press). (Location 2155)
So it was with the Montanists of second-century Turkey, with the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Holland, with the Sabbataists of seventeenth-century Izmir, and with the Millerites of nineteenth-century America. And, thought a trio of interested social scientists, so it might be with a doomsday cult based in twentieth-century Chicago. The scientists—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter—who were then colleagues at the University of Minnesota, heard about the Chicago group and felt it worthy of close study. Their decision to investigate by joining the group, incognito, as new believers and by placing additional paid observers among its ranks resulted in a remarkably rich firsthand account of the goings-on before and after the day of predicted catastrophe, which they provided in their eminently readable book When Prophesy Fails. (Location 2172)
The cult of believers was small, never numbering more than thirty members. Its leaders were a middle-aged man and woman, whom, for purposes of publication, the researchers renamed Dr. Thomas Armstrong and Mrs. Marian Keech. (Location 2178)
Mrs. Keech, though, was the center of attention and activity. Earlier in the year, she had begun to receive messages from spiritual beings, whom she called the Guardians, located on other planets. It was these messages, flowing through Marian Keech’s hand via the device of “automatic writing,” that formed the bulk of the cult’s religious belief system. The teachings of the Guardians were a collection of New Age concepts, loosely linked to traditional… (Location 2181)
transmissions from the Guardians, always the subject of much discussion and interpretation among the group, gained new significance when they began to foretell a great impending disaster—a flood that would begin in the Western Hemisphere and eventually engulf the world. Although the cultists were understandably alarmed at first, further messages assured them they, and all those who believed in the lessons sent through Mrs. Keech, would survive. Before the calamity, spacemen were to arrive and carry off the believers in flying saucers to a place of safety, presumably on another planet. Little detail was provided about the rescue except that the believers were to ready themselves for pickup by rehearsing certain passwords to be exchanged (“I… (Location 2186)
the researchers observed the preparations during the weeks prior to the flood date, they noted with special interest two significant aspects of the members’ behavior. First, the level of commitment to the cult’s belief system was very high. In anticipation of their departure from doomed Earth, irrevocable steps were taken by the group members. Most incurred the opposition of family and friends to their beliefs but persisted, nonetheless, in their convictions, often when it meant losing the affections of these others. Several members were threatened by neighbors or family with legal actions designed to have them declared insane. Dr. Armstrong’s sister filed a motion to have his two younger children removed from his custody. Many believers quit their jobs or neglected their studies to devote all their time to the movement. Some gave or threw away their personal belongings, expecting… (Location 2192)
The second significant aspect of the believers’ preflood actions was a curious form of inaction. For individuals so clearly convinced of the validity of their creed, they did surprisingly little to spread the word. Although they initially publicized the news of the coming disaster, they made no attempt to seek converts, to proselytize actively. They were… (Location 2200)
The group’s distaste for recruitment efforts was evident in various ways besides the lack of personal persuasion attempts. Secrecy was maintained in many matters—extra copies of the lessons were burned, passwords and secret signs were instituted, the contents of certain private tape recordings were not to be discussed with outsiders (so secret were the tapes that even longtime believers were prohibited from taking notes on them). Publicity was avoided. As the day of disaster approached, increasing numbers of newspaper, TV, and… (Location 2204)
Afterward, the researchers summarized the group’s preflood stance on public exposure and recruitment in respectful tones: “Exposed to a tremendous burst of publicity, they had made every attempt to dodge fame; given dozens of opportunities to proselyte, they had remained… (Location 2212)
the believers began making final preparations for the arrival of the spaceship scheduled for midnight that night. The scene as viewed by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter must have seemed like absurdist theater. Otherwise ordinary people—housewives, college students, a high school boy, a publisher, a physician, a hardware-store clerk and his mother—were participating earnestly in tragic comedy. They took direction from a pair of members who were periodically in touch with the Guardians; Marian Keech’s written messages were being supplemented that evening by “the Bertha,” a former beautician through whose tongue the “Creator” gave instruction. They rehearsed their lines diligently, calling out in chorus the responses to be made before entering the rescue saucer: “I am my own porter.” “I am my own pointer.” They… (Location 2215)
Midnight had passed and nothing had happened. The cataclysm itself was less than seven hours away. (Location 2240)
Gradually, painfully, an atmosphere of despair and confusion settled over the group. They reexamined the prediction and the accompanying messages. Dr. Armstrong and Mrs. Keech reiterated their faith. The believers mulled over their predicament and discarded explanation after explanation as unsatisfactory. At one point, toward 4 A.M., Mrs. Keech broke down and cried bitterly. She knew, she sobbed, that there were some who were beginning to doubt but that the group must beam light to those who needed it most and that the group must hold together. The rest of the believers were losing their composure, too. They were all visibly shaken and many were close to tears. It was now almost 4:30 A.M. and still no way of handling the disconfirmation had been found. By now, too, most of the group were talking openly about the failure of the escort to come at midnight. The group seemed near dissolution. (Location 2245)
the researchers witnessed a pair of remarkable incidents, one after another. The first occurred at about 4:45 a.m. when Marian Keech’s hand suddenly began transcribing through “automatic writing” the text of a holy message from above. When read aloud, the communication proved to be an elegant explanation for the events of that night. “The little group, sitting… (Location 2253)
this explanation was not wholly satisfying by itself; for example, after hearing it, one member simply rose, put on his hat and coat, and left, never to return. Something additional was needed to… (Location 2257)
The atmosphere in the group changed abruptly and so did their behavior. Within minutes after she had read the message explaining the disconfirmation, Mrs. Keech received another message instructing her to publicize the explanation. She reached for the telephone and began dialing the number of a newspaper. While she was waiting to be connected, someone asked: “Marian, is this the first time you have called the newspaper yourself?” Her reply was immediate: “Oh yes, this is the first time I have ever called them. I have never had anything to tell them before, but now I feel it is urgent.” The whole group could have echoed her feelings, for they all felt a sense of urgency. As soon as Marian had finished her call, the other members took turns telephoning newspapers, wire services, radio stations, and national magazines to spread the explanation of the failure of the flood. In their desire to spread the word quickly and resoundingly, the believers now opened… (Location 2260)
Not only had the long-standing policies concerning secrecy and publicity done an about-face, but so, too, had the group’s attitude toward potential converts. Whereas likely recruits who previously visited the house had been mostly ignored, turned away, or treated with casual attention, the day following the disconfirmation saw a different story.… (Location 2269)
To what can we attribute the believers’ radical turnabout? Within a few hours, they had moved from clannish and taciturn hoarders of the Word to expansive and eager disseminators of it. (Location 2278)
The crucial event occurred sometime during “the night of the flood” when it became increasingly clear the prophecy would not be fulfilled. Oddly, it was not their prior certainty that drove the members to propagate the faith, it was an encroaching sense of uncertainty. It was the dawning realization that if the spaceship and flood predictions were wrong, so might be the entire belief system on which they rested. For those huddled in Marian Keech’s living room, that growing possibility must have seemed hideous. (Location 2281)
The group members had gone too far, given up too much for their beliefs to see them destroyed; the shame, the economic cost, the mockery would be too great to bear. (Location 2285)
From a young woman with a three-year-old child: I have to believe the flood is coming on the twenty-first because I’ve spent all my money. I quit my job, I quit computer school… . I have to believe. (Location 2287)
I’ve had to go a long way. I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie. I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any other truth. (Location 2291)
Because the only acceptable form of truth had been undercut by physical proof, there was but one way out of the corner for the group. It had to create another type of proof for the truth of its beliefs: social proof. (Location 2295)
If they could spread the Word, if they could inform the uninformed, if they could persuade the skeptics, and if, by so doing, they could win new converts, their threatened but treasured beliefs would become truer. (Location 2300)
The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more a given individual will perceive the idea to be correct. (Location 2302)
because the physical evidence could not be changed, the social evidence had to be. (Location 2303)
In the case of social proof, there are three main optimizing conditions: when we are unsure of what is best to do (uncertainty); when the evidence of what is best to do comes from numerous others (the many); and when that evidence comes from people like us (similarity). (Location 2307)
when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to accept the actions of others—because those actions reduce our uncertainty about what is correct behavior there. (Location 2312)
Remember this chapter’s account of restaurant managers in Beijing who greatly increased customers’ purchases of certain dishes on the menu by describing them as most popular? (Location 2315)
there was one kind of customer that was most likely to choose based on popularity—those who were infrequent and, therefore, unfamiliar visitors. (Location 2317)
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.4 (Location 2320)
This tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing can lead to a fascinating phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance. A thorough understanding of the phenomenon helps explain a troubling occurrence: the failure of bystanders to aid victims in agonizing need of help. (Location 2340)
Often an emergency is not obviously an emergency. Is the man lying in the alley a heart-attack victim or a drunk sleeping one off? Is the commotion next door an assault requiring the police or an especially loud marital spat where intervention would be inappropriate and unwelcome? What is going on? In times of such uncertainty, the natural tendency is to look around at the actions of others for clues. From the principle of social proof, we can determine from the way the other witnesses are reacting whether the event is or is not an emergency. What is easy to forget, though, is that everybody else observing the event is likely to be looking for social evidence to reduce their uncertainty. Because we all prefer to appear poised and unflustered among others, we are likely to search for that evidence placidly, with brief, camouflaged glances at those around us. Therefore, everyone is likely to see everyone else looking unruffled and failing to act. As a result, and by the principle of social proof, the event will be roundly interpreted as a nonemergency. (Location 2357)
Social scientists have a good idea of when bystanders will offer emergency aid. First, once uncertainty is removed and witnesses are convinced an emergency situation exists, aid is very likely. (Location 2366)
For example, in four separate experiments done in Florida, accident scenes involving a maintenance man were staged. When it was clear that the man was hurt and required assistance, he was helped 100 percent of the time in two of the experiments. In the other two experiments, where helping involved contact with potentially dangerous electric wires, the victim still received bystander aid in 90 percent of the instances. The situation becomes very different when, as in many cases, bystanders cannot be sure the event is an emergency. (Location 2368)
The key is the realization that groups of bystanders fail to help because the bystanders are unsure rather than unkind. They don’t help because they are unsure an emergency actually exists and whether they are responsible for taking action. When they are confident of their responsibilities for intervening in a clear emergency, people are exceedingly responsive. (Location 2375)
“You, sir, in the blue jacket, I need help. Call 911 for an ambulance.” With that one utterance, you would dispel all the uncertainties that might prevent or delay help. With that one statement you will have put the man in the blue jacket in the role of “rescuer.” He should now understand that emergency aid is needed; he should understand that he, not someone else, is responsible for providing the aid; and, finally, he should understand exactly how to provide it. (Location 2407)
In general, then, your best strategy when in need of emergency help is to reduce the uncertainties of those around you concerning your condition and their responsibilities. Be as precise as possible about your need for aid. Do not allow bystanders to come to their own conclusions because the principle of social proof and the consequent pluralistic-ignorance effect might well cause them to view your situation as a nonemergency. (Location 2427)
the researchers exposed subjects to a staged public fight between a man and a woman. When there were no cues as to the sort of relationship between the two, the great majority of male and female subjects (nearly 70 percent) assumed that the two were romantically involved; only 4 percent thought they were complete strangers. In other experiments where there were cues that defined the combatants’ relationship—the woman shouted either “I don’t know why I ever married you” or “I don’t know you”—the studies uncovered an ominous reaction on the part of bystanders. Although the severity of the fight was identical, observers were less willing to help the married woman because they thought it was a private matter in which their intervention would be unwanted and embarrassing to all concerned. (Location 2435)
There is a phenomenon called claquing, said to have begun in 1820 by a pair of Paris opera-house habitués named Sauton and Porcher. The men were more than operagoers, though. They were businessmen whose product was applause; and they knew how to structure social proof to incite it. (Location 2462)
Organizing their business under the title l’Assurance des succès dramatiques, they leased themselves and their employees to singers and opera managers who wished to be assured of an appreciative audience response. So effective were Sauton and Porcher in stimulating genuine audience reaction with their rigged reactions that, before long, claques (usually consisting of a leader—chef de claque—and several individual claqueurs) had become an established and persistent tradition throughout the world of opera. (Location 2467)
As music historian Robert Sabin (1964) notes, “By 1830 the claque was a full-bloom institution, collecting by day, applauding by night … But it is altogether probable that neither Sauton, nor his ally Porcher, had a notion of the extent to which their scheme of paid applause would be adopted and applied wherever opera is sung.” (Location 2470)
As claquing grew and developed, its practitioners offered an array of styles and strengths—the pleureuse, chosen for her ability to weep on cue; the bisseur, who called “bis” (repeat) and “encore” in ecstatic tones; and the rieur, selected for the infectious quality of his laugh. For our purposes, though, the most instructive parallel to modern forms can be observed in the business model of Sauton and Porcher and their successors: They charged by the staffer, recognizing that the more claqueurs they sent to be scattered among an audience, the greater would be the persuasive impression that many others liked the performance. (Location 2473)
A few years ago, a shopping mall in Essex, England, had a problem. During normal lunch hours, its food court became so congested that customers encountered long waits and a shortage of tables for their meals. For help, mall managers turned to a team of researchers who set up a study that provided a simple solution based on the psychological pull of “the many.” The solution also incorporated all three of the reasons why this optimizer of social proof works so forcefully: validity, feasibility, and social acceptance. The study itself was straightforward. The researchers created two posters urging mall visitors to enjoy an early lunch at the food court. One poster included an image of a single person doing so; the other poster was identical, except the image was of several such visitors. Reminding customers of the opportunity for an early lunch (as the first poster did) proved successful, producing a 25 percent increase in customer activity in the food court before noon. But the real success came from the second poster, which lifted prenoon consumer activity by 75 percent. (Location 2502)
Additional studies have shown that ads presenting increasingly larger percentages of customers favoring a brand (“4 out of 7” versus “5 out of 7” versus “6 out of 7”) get increasingly more observers to prefer the brand; moreover, this is the case because observers assume that the brand with the largest percentage of customers preferring it must be the right choice. (Location 2515)
fruit flies possess no complex cognitive capacities. Yet when female fruit flies viewed other females mating with a male that had been colored a particular tint (pink or green) by researchers, they became much more willing to choose a mate of the same color—70 percent of the time. (Location 2519)
In 1761, London experienced two moderate-sized earthquakes exactly a month apart. Convinced by this coincidence that a third, much larger quake would occur on the same date a month later, a soldier named Bell began spreading his prediction that the city would be destroyed on the fifth of April. At first, scant few paid him any heed. But those who did took the precaution of moving their families and possessions to surrounding areas. The sight of this small exodus stirred others to follow, which, in cascading waves over the next week, led to near panic and a large-scale evacuation. Great numbers of Londoners streamed into nearby villages, paying outrageous prices for any accommodations. Included in the terrified throngs were many who, according to MacKay, “had laughed at the prediction a week before, [but who] packed up their goods, when they saw others doing so, and hastened away.” After the designated day dawned and died without a tremor, the fugitives returned to the city furious at Mr. Bell for leading them astray. (Location 2531)
If we see a lot of other people doing something, it doesn’t just mean it’s probably a good idea. It also means we could probably do it too. (Location 2557)
besides perceived validity, a second reason “the many” is effective is that it communicates feasibility: if lots can do it, it must not be difficult to pull off. (Location 2560)
A study of residents of several Italian cities found that if residents believed many of their neighbors recycled in the home, then they were more willing to recycle themselves, in part, because they saw recycling as less difficult to manage. (Location 2562)
I once did a study to see what we could best say to influence people to conserve household energy. We delivered one of four messages to their homes, once a week for a month, asking them to reduce their energy consumption. Three of the messages contained a frequently employed reason for conserving energy—“The environment will benefit”; “It’s the socially responsible thing to do”; or “It will save you significant money on your next power bill”—whereas the fourth played the social-proof card, stating (honestly), “Most of your fellow community residents do try to conserve energy at home.” At the end of the month, we recorded how much energy was used and learned that the social proof–based message had generated 3.5 times as much energy savings as any of the other messages. The size of the difference surprised almost everyone associated with the study—me, for one, but also my fellow researchers and even a sample of other homeowners. The homeowners, in fact, expected that the social-proof message would be least effective. (Location 2564)
If I inform homeowners that by saving energy, they could also save a lot of money, it doesn’t mean they would be able to make it happen. After (Location 2576)
A great strength of “the many” is that it destroys the problem of uncertain achievability. (Location 2578)
If people learn that many others around them are conserving energy, there is little doubt as to its feasibility. It comes to seem realistic and, therefore, actionable.9 (Location 2579)
Compared to holding an opinion that fits with the group’s, holding an opinion that is out of line creates psychological distress. (Location 2585)
These twin needs—to foster social acceptance and to escape social rejection—help explain why cults can be so effective in recruiting and retaining members. An initial showering of affection on prospective members, called love bombing, is typical of cult-induction practices. It accounts for some of the success of these groups in attracting new members, especially those feeling lonely or disconnected. Later, threatened withdrawal of that affection explains the willingness of some members to remain in the group: After having cut their bonds to outsiders, as the cults invariably urge, members have nowhere else to turn for social acceptance. (Location 2602)
The principle of social proof operates most powerfully when we are observing the behavior of people just like us. It is the conduct of such people that gives us the greatest insight into what constitutes correct behavior for ourselves. As with “the many,” an action coming from similar others increases our confidence that it will prove valid, feasible, and socially acceptable should we perform it. Therefore, we are more inclined to follow the lead of our peers in a phenomenon we can call peer-suasion. (Location 2608)
Employees are more likely to engage in information sharing if they see it modeled by fellow coworkers than by managers. (Location 2616)
After an extensive review of environmental behavior change, the economist Robert Frank stated, “By far the strongest predictor of whether we install solar panels, buy electric cars, eat more responsibly, and support climate-friendly policies is the percentage of peers who take those steps.” (Location 2618)
Donations to charity more than doubled when the requester claimed to be similar to the donation targets, saying “I’m a student here too,” and implying that, therefore, they should want to support the same cause. (Location 2630)
People will use the actions of others to decide how to behave, especially when they view those others as similar to themselves. (Location 2632)
David Phillips, and he points a convincing finger at the “Werther effect.” The story of the Werther effect is both chilling and intriguing. More than two centuries ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great man of German literature, published a novel titled Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). The book, in which the hero, named Werther, commits suicide, had a remarkable impact. Not only did it provide Goethe with immediate fame, but it sparked a wave of emulative suicides across Europe. So powerful was this effect that authorities in several countries banned the novel. Phillips’s own work has traced the Werther effect to modern times. 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. Phillips derived his evidence for the modern-day Werther effect from examining twenty years of suicide statistics in the United States. He found that within two months after every front-page suicide story, an average of fifty-eight more people than usual killed themselves. In a sense, each front-page suicide story killed fifty-eight people who otherwise would have gone on living. Phillips also found this tendency for suicides to prompt suicides occurred principally in those parts of the country where the first was highly publicized. He observed that the wider the publicity given the first suicide, the greater the number of later ones (see figure 4.5). Newer research indicates the pattern isn’t limited to newspaper accounts. On March 31, 2017, Netflix premiered the web series 13 Reasons Why, in which a young high school student commits suicide and leaves behind a set of thirteen tapes detailing the reasons. In the next thirty days, suicides among young adolescents rose by 28.9 percent—to a number higher than at any month in the five-year span analyzed by the researchers, who ruled out “social conditions” explanations for the increase. (Location 2716)
Figure 4.5: Fluctuation in number of suicides before, during, and after month of suicide story (Location 2734)
Figure 4.6: Daily fluctuation in number of accident fatalities before, on, and after suicide-story date Author’s Note: As is apparent from these graphs, the greatest danger exists three to four days following the news story’s publication. After a brief drop-off, there comes another peak approximately one week later. By the eleventh day, there is no hint of an effect. This pattern across various types of data indicates something noteworthy about secret suicides. Those who try to disguise their imitative self-destruction as accidents wait a few days before committing the act—perhaps to build their courage, to plan the incident, or to put their affairs in order. 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. (Location 2791)
Five minutes before the start of school on May 20, 1999, fifteen-year-old Thomas (“TJ”) Solomon opened fire on his classmates, shooting six of them before he was stopped by a heroic teacher. In struggling to comprehend the underlying causes, we must recognize the effect on him of the publicity surrounding a year-long string of similar incidents—first in Jonesboro, Arkansas; then in Springfield Oregon; then in Littleton, Colorado; and then, just two days earlier, in Taber, Alberta. As one of his friends declared in response to the question of why distraught students were suddenly turning murderous at school, “Kids like TJ are seeing it and hearing it all the time now. It’s like the new way out for them” (Cohen, 1999). (Location 2833)
The People’s Temple was a cultlike organization based in San Francisco that drew its recruits from the city’s poor. In 1977, the Reverend Jim Jones—the group’s undisputed political, social, and spiritual leader—moved the bulk of the membership with him to a jungle settlement in Guyana, South America. There, the People’s Temple existed in relative obscurity until November 18, 1978, when Congressmen Leo R. Ryan of California (who had gone to Guyana to investigate the cult), three members of Ryan’s fact-finding party, and a cult defector were murdered as they tried to leave Jonestown by plane. Convinced that he would be arrested and implicated in the killings and that the demise of the People’s Temple would result, Jones sought to control the end of the Temple in his own way. He gathered the entire community around him and issued a call for each person’s death in a unified act of self-destruction. The first response was that of a young woman who calmly approached the now infamous vat of strawberry-flavored poison, administered one dose to her baby, one to herself, and then sat down in a field, where she and her child died in convulsions within four minutes. Others followed steadily in turn. Although a handful of Jonestowners escaped and a few others are reported to have resisted, the survivors claim that the great majority of the 910 people who died did so in an orderly, willful fashion. (Location 2839)
If the community had remained in San Francisco, would Reverend Jones’s suicide command have been obeyed? A highly speculative question to be sure, but the expert most familiar with the People’s Temple had no doubt about the answer. Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then chairman of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and director of its neuropsychiatric unit, was an authority on cults who had observed the People’s Temple for eight years prior to the Jonestown deaths. When interviewed in the immediate aftermath, he made what strikes me as an inordinately instructive statement: “This wouldn’t have happened in California. But they lived in total alienation from the rest of the world in a jungle situation in a hostile country.” (Location 2862)
To my mind, the single act in the history of the People’s Temple that most contributed to the members’ mindless compliance that day occurred a year earlier with the relocation of the Temple to a jungled country of unfamiliar customs and people. If we are to believe the stories of Jim Jones’s malevolent genius, he realized fully the massive psychological impact such a move would have on his followers. All at once, they found themselves in a place they knew nothing about. South America, and the rain forests of Guyana, especially, were unlike anything they had experienced in San Francisco. The environment—both physical and social—into which they were dropped must have seemed dreadfully uncertain. Ah, uncertainty—the right-hand man of the principle of social proof. We have already seen that when people are uncertain, they look to the actions of others to guide their own. In the alien, Guyanese environment, then, Temple members were particularly ready to follow the lead of others. As we have also seen, it is others of a special kind whose behavior will be most unquestioningly followed: similar others. Therein lies the awful beauty of Reverend Jones’s relocation strategy. In a country such as Guyana, there were no similar others for a Jonestown resident but the people of Jonestown itself. What was right for a member of the community was determined to a disproportionate degree by what other community members—influenced heavily by Jones—did and believed. When viewed in this light, the terrible orderliness, the lack of panic, the sense of calm with which these people moved to the vat of poison seems more comprehensible. They hadn’t been hypnotized by Jones; they had been convinced—partly by him but, more importantly, by peer-suasion—that suicide was correct conduct. The uncertainty they surely felt upon first hearing the death command must have caused them to look around them to identify the appropriate response. (Location 2869)
It is worth particular note that they found two impressive pieces of social evidence, each pointing in the same direction. First was the initial set of their compatriots, who quickly and willingly took the poison drafts. There will always be a few such fanatically obedient individuals in any strong leader-dominated group. Whether, in this instance, they had been specially instructed beforehand to serve as examples or whether they were just naturally the most compliant with Jones’s… (Location 2883)
The second source of social evidence came from the reactions of the crowd itself. Given the conditions, I suspect what occurred was a large-scale instance of the pluralistic-ignorance effect. Each Jonestowner looked to the actions of surrounding individuals to assess the situation and—finding calmness because everyone else, too, was surreptitiously… (Location 2889)
A forceful leader can reasonably expect, however, to persuade some sizable proportion of group members. Then, the raw information that a substantial number of fellow group members has been convinced can, by itself, convince the rest. (Location 2898)
Thus, the most influential leaders are those who know how to arrange group conditions to allow the principle of social proof to work in their favor. (Location 2900)
People’s brand choices moved in line with the choices of those like them, around them. The effects of distinct regions were so large that the researchers questioned the concept and relevance of “national brands.” Marketing managers might want to consider decentralized strategies targeting separate regions to a greater extent than they currently do, as research indicates people are regionally similar on attitudes, values, and personality traits—probably due to contagion effects.13 The (Location 2914)
Within its plea, the sign declared: YOUR HERITAGE IS BEING VANDALIZED EVERY DAY BY THEFT LOSSES OF PETRIFIED WOOD OF 14 TONS A YEAR, MOSTLY A SMALL PIECE AT A TIME. Whereupon, the scrupulously honest new visitor whispered, “We’d better get ours, too.” What was it about the sign’s wording that transformed an honorable young woman into an environmental criminal scheming to loot a national treasure?! (Location 2932)
Information campaigns stress that alcohol and drug use is intolerably high, that adolescent suicide rates are alarming, and that too few citizens exercise their right to vote. Although these claims may be both true and well intentioned, the campaigns’ creators have missed something critically important: within the lament “Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the undercutting message “Look at all the people who are doing it.” In trying to alert the public to the widespread nature of a problem, public-service communicators can end up making it worse, via the process of social proof. (Location 2943)
After an education program in which several young women described their eating disorders, participants came to show increased disorder symptoms themselves. After a suicide-prevention program informing New Jersey teenagers of the alarming number of adolescents who take their own lives, participants became more likely to see suicide as a potential solution to their own problems. After exposure to an alcohol-use deterrence program in which participants role-played resisting their peers’ repeated urgings to drink, junior high school students came to believe that alcohol use was more common among their peers than they’d originally thought. In short, persuasive communications should avoid employing information that can normalize undesirable conduct. (Location 2955)
Take, for example, the theft of fossils from the Petrified Forest National Park. Typically, few visitors remove pieces of wood from the park—fewer than 3 percent. Still, because the park receives two-thirds of a million visitors per year, the number of thefts is collectively high. Therefore, the site’s entrance signage was correct in stating that large numbers of fossils were being carried away by visitors. Even so, by focusing guests solely on the fact that thefts did occur with destructive regularity, park officials may have erred twice. Not only did they set the force of social proof against park goals (by implying, wrongly, that thievery was pervasive), but they missed the opportunity to harness the force of true social proof on behalf of park goals (by failing to label honorable guests as the great majority). (Location 2966)
Rather than relying only on evidence of existing social proof, a communicator can do at least as well by relying on evidence of future social proof. Researchers have identified a consequential quirk in human perception. When we notice a change, we expect the change will likely continue in the same direction when it appears as a trend. This simple presumption has fueled every financial-investment bull market and real-estate bubble on record. Observers of a succession of increasing valuations project them into the future in the form of further escalations. Gamblers who have experienced a few consecutive wins imagine they’re on a hot streak and the next gamble will generate yet another win. (Location 2979)
people believe that trends will continue in the same trajectory for a wide variety of behaviors, including those undertaken by only a minority of others—such as conserving water, choosing meatless meals, and completing surveys for no payment. (Location 2986)
when informed that only a minority performs one of these desired actions, people are reluctant to perform it themselves. However, if they learn that within the minority, more and more others are engaging in it, they jump on the bandwagon and begin enacting the behavior too. (Location 2988)
Because we assume they will continue in the same direction, trends don’t just tell us where others’ behaviors have been and are now; we think they also tell us where others’ behaviors will be. Thus, trends give us access to a special and potent form of social proof—future social proof. (Location 3005)
The difficulty is compounded by the realization that most of the time, we don’t want to guard against the information that social proof provides. The evidence it offers about the way we should act is usually valid and valuable. (Location 3018)
If we can become sensitive to situations in which the social-proof autopilot is working with inaccurate information, we can disengage the mechanism and grasp the controls when necessary. (Location 3028)
two types of situations in which incorrect data cause the principle of social proof to give us poor counsel. (Location 3030)
The first occurs when the social evidence has been purposely falsified. Invariably these situations are manufactured by exploiters intent on creating the impression—reality be damned—that a multitude is performing the way the exploiters want us to perform. The “sweetened” laughter of TV-comedy-show audiences is one variety of faked data of this sort, (Location 3031)
In addition to the times when social proof is deliberately faked, there is another time when the principle will regularly steer us wrong. In such an instance, an innocent, natural error will produce snowballing social proof that pushes us to an incorrect decision. The pluralistic-ignorance phenomenon, in which everyone at an emergency sees no cause for alarm, is one example of this process. (Location 3074)
First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because its members are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof. (Location 3082)
I remember one time a person put down $100 on a pre-race 10 to 1 shot, making it the early favorite. The rumors started circulating around the track—the early bettors knew something. Next thing you know, everyone (myself included) was betting on this horse. It ended up running last and had a bad leg. Many people lost a lot of money. Somebody came out ahead, though. (Location 3111)
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. In ambiguous situations, for instance, the decisions of bystanders to offer emergency aid are much more influenced by the actions of other bystanders than when the situation is a clear-cut emergency. A second condition under which social proof is most influential involves “the many”: people are more inclined to follow the lead of others in proportion to the others’ number. When we see multiple others performing an action, we become willing to follow because the action appears to be more (1) correct/valid, (2) feasible, and (3) socially acceptable. The third optimizing condition for social-proof information is similarity. People conform to the beliefs and actions of comparable others, especially their peers—a phenomenon we can call peer-suasion. Evidence for the powerful influence of the actions of similar others can be seen in suicide statistics compiled by sociologist David Phillips. (Location 3123)
There was such an experiment—actually, a whole series—run by a psychology professor named Milgram in which participants in the Teacher role delivered continued, intense, and dangerous levels of shock to a kicking, screeching, pleading Learner. Only one major aspect of the experiment was not genuine. No real shock was delivered; the Learner, who repeatedly cried out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor who only pretended to be shocked. The actual purpose of Milgram’s study, then, had nothing to do with the effects of punishment on learning and memory. Rather, it involved an entirely different question: When ordered by an authority figure, how much suffering will ordinary people be willing to inflict on an entirely innocent other person? (Location 3210)
Rather than yield to the pleas of the victim, about two-thirds of the subjects in Milgram’s experiment pulled every one of the thirty shock switches in front of them and continued to engage the last switch (450 volts) until the researcher ended the experiment. More unsettling still, almost none of the forty subjects in this study quit his job as Teacher when the victim first began to demand his release, nor later when he began to beg for it, nor even later when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram’s words, “definitely an agonized scream.” (Location 3217)
The evidence supporting Milgram’s obedience-to-authority explanation is strong. First, it is clear that without the researcher’s directives to continue, subjects would have ended the experiment quickly. They hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim’s anguish. They implored the researcher to let them stop. When he refused, they went on, but in the process they trembled, they perspired, they shook, they stammered protests and additional pleas for the victim’s release. Their fingernails dug into their flesh; they bit their lips until they bled; they held their heads in their hands; some fell into fits of uncontrollable nervous laughter. An outside observer to Milgram’s initial experiment described one subject. I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh, God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end. In (Location 3242)
In a later experiment, he had the researcher and the victim switch scripts so that the researcher told the Teacher to stop delivering shocks to the victim, while the victim insisted bravely that the Teacher continue. The result couldn’t have been clearer; 100 percent of the subjects refused to give one additional shock when it was merely the fellow subject who demanded it. (Location 3253)
The identical finding appeared in another version in which the researcher and fellow subject switched roles so that it was the researcher who was strapped into the chair and the fellow subject who ordered the Teacher to continue—over the protests of the researcher. Again, not one subject touched another shock lever. (Location 3256)
one more variation of the basic experiments. In this case, the Teacher faced two researchers who issued contradictory instructions; one ordered the Teacher to terminate the shocks when the victim cried out for release, while the other maintained that the experiment should go on. These conflicting directives reliably produced what may have been the project’s only humor: in tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command to follow: “Wait, wait. Which is it going to be? One says stop, one says go… . Which is it!?” (Location 3259)
the subjects tried frantically to determine the bigger boss. Failing this route to obedience with “the” authority, every subject followed his better instincts and ended the shocks. (Location 3263)
“It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study.” (Location 3267)
ability of another form of authority—government—to extract frightening levels of obedience from ordinary citizens. (Location 3268)
In the case of obedience to authority, even a brief consideration of human social organization offers justification aplenty. A multilayered and widely accepted system of authority confers an immense advantage upon a society. It allows the development of sophisticated structures for production of resources, trade, defense, expansion, and social control that would otherwise be impossible. (Location 3288)
Consequently, we are trained from birth to believe that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong. The message fills the parental lessons, schoolhouse rhymes, stories, and songs of our childhood and is carried forward in the legal, military, and political systems we encounter as adults. Notions of submission and loyalty to legitimate rule are accorded much value in each. (Location 3292)
Old Testament, we can read—in what might be the closest biblical representation of the Milgram experiment—the respectful account of Abraham’s willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. (Location 3296)
our obedience frequently takes place in a click, run fashion with little or no conscious deliberation. Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation. (Location 3303)
conforming to the dictates of authority figures has always had genuine practical advantages for us. From the start, these people (parents, teachers) knew more than we did, and we found taking their advice beneficial—partly because of their greater wisdom and partly because they controlled our rewards and punishments. As adults, the same benefits persist for the same reasons, though the authority figures are now employers, judges, and government leaders. Because their positions speak of greater access to information and power, it makes sense to comply with the wishes of properly constituted authorities. It makes so much sense that we often do so when it makes no sense at all. This (Location 3305)
Annual deaths in the United States from medical errors exceed those of all accidents, and, worldwide, 40 percent of primary- and outpatient-care patients are harmed by medical errors each year. (Location 3324)
in their book Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention, Temple University professors of pharmacy Michael Cohen and Neil Davis attribute much of the problem to the mindless deference given to the “boss” of a patient’s case: the attending physician. (Location 3326)
“In case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” (Location 3328)
for example, the classic case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis in an interview. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus. (Location 3328)
When in a click, run mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to its substance. (Location 3369)
telling illustration of the way our actions are frequently more influenced by the title than by the essence of the person claiming it. My friend travels quite a bit and often finds himself chatting with strangers in bars, restaurants, and airports. He says he has learned through much experience during these conversations never to use the title of professor. When he does, he finds that the tenor of the interaction changes immediately. People who have been spontaneous and interesting conversation partners until that moment become respectful, accepting, and dull. (Location 3380)
Studies investigating the way authority status affects perceptions of size have found that prestigious titles lead to height distortions. (Location 3389)
one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian college students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, the class was asked to estimate his height. 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.” (Location 3390)
For five years, a team of security-system hackers launched concerted attacks on the computer networks of nearly one thousand local banks and credit unions in the United States. Their hit rate was spectacular. In 963 of the cases, they were able to pierce the banks’ security systems and come away with such items as protected internal documents, loan applications, and customer databases. How did they manage to succeed 96 percent of the time, when banks are intensely on guard with their own sophisticated technological software to detect and prevent digital incursions? The answer is as basic as the method the hackers employed. They didn’t penetrate the banks’ advanced digital-security-system technology with even more advanced digital technology. In fact, they didn’t use digital technology at all. They used human psychology, embodied in the principle of authority. Because the hackers had no criminal intent—they had been hired by the banks to try to defeat the security systems—we know how they maneuvered to be so effective. Equipping themselves with the accoutrement (uniforms, badges, logos) of fire inspectors, government safety monitors, and pest exterminators, they were admitted to the facilities without appointments, escorted to restricted-access sectors, and left to do their work. However, it wasn’t the “work” bank personnel expected. Instead, it involved downloading sensitive programs and data from unattended computers and sometimes carrying data disks, laptops, and even big computer servers out the door as they left. In a newspaper account of the project (Robinson, 2008), Jim Stickley, the hacking team’s boss, provided an enlightening lesson, “[This] illustrates something provocative about the way security has changed with the rise of the Internet, which has shifted attention and dollars spent on security toward computer networks and threats from hackers. They’ve kind of forgotten the basics.” In the compliance arena, there’s little as basic as deference to authority. (Location 3445)
A series of studies by social psychologist Leonard Bickman indicates how difficult it can be to resist requests from figures in authority attire. 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. (Location 3467)
In a study conducted in Texas, researchers arranged for a thirty-one-year-old man to cross the street against the light, against the traffic, and against the law on a variety of occasions. In half of the cases, he was dressed in a freshly pressed business suit and tie; on the other occasions, he wore a work shirt and trousers. The researchers watched from a distance and counted the number of pedestrians who followed the man across the street; three-and-a-half times as many people swept into traffic behind the suited jaywalker. Noteworthy (Location 3481)
The title MD carries significantly more authority when placed in the visual context of a white coat. At first, I hated to wear white coats but later in my career came to understand that the garment carries power. On multiple occasions when I started work in a new hospital rotation, I made it a point to wear the white coat. Without fail my transition went smoothly. Interestingly, physicians are highly aware of this and have even created a pecking order assigning medical students the shortest white coats, while residents in training get medium length coats, and attending physicians have the longest white coats. In hospitals where nurses are aware of this hierarchy, they rarely question the orders of “long coats”; but when interacting with “short coats,” hospital staffers make alternative medical diagnosis and therapy suggestions openly—and sometimes rudely. (Location 3506)
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. (Location 3522)
Other examples of trappings, such as high-priced jewelry and cars, can have similar effects. (Location 3524)
According to a study done in the San Francisco Bay area, owners of prestige autos receive a special kind of deference from others. The experimenters discovered motorists would wait significantly longer before honking their horns at a new luxury car stopped in front of a green traffic light than at an older economy model. (Location 3526)
people were unable to predict correctly how they or others would react to authority influence. In each instance, the effect of the influence was grossly underestimated. This property of authority status may account for much of its success as a compliance device. Authority influence not only works forcefully on us but does so without our awareness. (Location 3535)
Audiences trust and follow the advice of a set of experts more than that of any one of them (Mannes, Soll, & Larrick, 2014). 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. (Location 3553)
But the first of these types, merely being in charge, has its problems. As a rule, people don’t like being ordered to do things. It often generates resistance and resentment. For this reason, most business schools teach prospective managers to avoid “command and control” approaches to leadership and embrace approaches designed to promote willing cooperation. (Location 3557)
It’s in this latter respect that the second type of authority, being viewed as highly informed, is so useful. People are usually happy, even eager, to go along with the recommendations of someone who knows more than they do on the matter at hand. (Location 3560)
Research distinguishes a particularly convincing such authority, the credible one. A credible authority possesses two distinct features in the minds of an audience: expertise and trustworthiness. (Location 3568)
expertise appears to create a halo effect for those who possess it; a therapist’s office with multiple diplomas and professional certifications on the wall produces higher ratings not only of the therapist’s proficiency but also of his or her kindness, friendliness, and interest in clients. (Location 3571)
Besides wanting our authorities to give us expert information, we want them to be trustworthy sources of the information. (Location 3581)
being perceived as trustworthy is an effective way to increase one’s influence and that it takes time for that perception to develop. (Location 3584)
It turns out a communicator can rapidly acquire perceived trustworthiness by employing a clever strategy. Rather than succumbing to the tendency to describe all the most favorable features of a case upfront and reserving mention of any drawbacks until the end of the presentation (or never), a communicator who references a weakness early on is seen as more honest. (Location 3586)
After Domino’s “NEW DOMINO’S” campaign of 2009 admitting to the past poor quality of its pizza, sales went sky high; (Location 3595)
The tactic can be particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, when a communicator mentions it, little additional damage is done, as no new information is added—except, crucially, that the communicator is an honest individual. (Location 3597)
A job candidate might say to an interviewer holding her résumé, “Although I am not experienced in this field, I am a very fast learner.” (Location 3598)
is important to recognize what I am not suggesting here—that at the start, a marketer or salesperson state, “Before we begin, let me tell you all the things that are wrong with me, my organization, and our products and services.” Rather, I am suggesting two things. First, if there is a drawback to be acknowledged, it should be presented relatively early in a message so the credibility it provides will color the rest of the appeal. Second, within a persuasive communication, there is an ideal place for one’s strongest argument or feature, which can undercut or overwhelm the downside. It is in the moment immediately following the admission of a shortcoming of one’s case when, bolstered by resulting source credibility, the highly favorable element is likely to be processed most deeply and accepted most fully. (Location 3631)
Using the twin components of a credible authority—expertise and trustworthiness—as a guide, posing two questions to ourselves can help determine when authority directives should and should not be followed. (Location 3650)
The first question to ask when confronted with an authority figure’s influence attempt is, Is this authority truly an expert? The question focuses our attention on two crucial pieces of information: the authority’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials to the topic at hand. (Location 3652)
It moves us effortlessly away from a focus on possibly meaningless symbols toward a consideration of genuine authority credentials. (Location 3661)
To defend ourselves against misleading appeals containing ersatz authorities, we should always ask, Is this authority truly an expert? (Location 3676)
second simple question: How truthful can I expect the expert to be? Authorities, even the best informed, may not present their information honestly to us; (Location 3682)
We allow ourselves to be swayed more by experts who seem to be impartial than by those who have something to gain by convincing us; (Location 3684)
By wondering how an expert stands to benefit from our compliance, we give ourselves another shield against undue and automatic influence. (Location 3685)
When asking ourselves about an authority’s trustworthiness, we should keep in mind the tactic compliance practitioners often use to assure us of their sincerity: they argue somewhat against their own interests. Correctly practiced, this approach can be a subtle yet effective device for “proving” their honesty. Perhaps they will mention a small shortcoming in their position or product. Invariably though, the drawback will be a secondary one that is easily overcome by more significant advantages—Avis: (Location 3687)
It’s crucial to distinguish between honest and dishonest versions of the practice. There is nothing inherently wrong with a communicator revealing a shortcoming or prior mistake at an early point of the message to reap the rewards of demonstrated truthfulness. (Location 3693)
