Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Their business is to make us comply, and their livelihoods depend on it.

Participant observation is a research approach in which the researcher becomes a spy of sorts.

When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold.

She will embrace a natural enemy just because it goes “cheep-cheep,” and she will mistreat or murder one of her own chicks just because it does not.

Just as the 'cheep-cheep' sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word 'because' trigger an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects...

Without them we would stand frozen—cataloging, appraising, and calibrating—as the time for action sped by and away.

By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship tapes cause them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace.

Many a man would hurry to buy the suit and scramble out of the shop with his "expensive = good" bargain before Poor Sid discovered the "mistake."

The look of amused bewilderment that immediately registers tells the story: Even though both hands are in the same bucket, the hand that has been in the cold water feels as if it is now in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is now in cold water.

These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but to be shown to them, so that the genuine properties in the company’s inventory would benefit from the comparison.

They received his holiday greeting card, click, and, whirr, they automatically sent one in return.

I remember my chin hitting my chest, though, when a brief newspaper item I was reading insisted that the aid had gone in the opposite direction.

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 unsuspecting passerby who suddenly finds a flower pressed into his hands or pinned to his jacket is under no circumstances allowed to give it back, even if he asserts that he does not want it.

The reciprocity rule that empowers their tactic is too strong—and socially beneficial—for us to want to violate it.

In true jujitsu fashion, the promoter who gives free samples can release the natural indebting force inherent in a gift while innocently appearing to have only the intention to inform.

The frightened captive with only a piece of bread in his hand then performed what may have been the most important act of his life.

Although the obligation to repay constitutes the essence of the reciprocity rule, it is the obligation to receive that makes the rule so easy to exploit.

She went from trash can to trash can beyond the immediate area to retrieve all the flowers that had been discarded by Krishna targets.

Consequently, we are trained from childhood to chafe, emotionally, under the saddle of obligation.

After learning the hard way, I no longer let a guy I meet in a club buy my drinks because I don’t want either of us to feel that I am obligated sexually.

It had not mattered that I do not like chocolate bars; the Boy Scout had made a concession to me, click, and, whirr, I responded with a concession of my own.

By presenting the zoo trip as a retreat from our initial request, our success rate increased dramatically.

Sometimes you gotta go at ’em backward.

How could we have been so stupid?

He had asked for the whole loaf when he was quite content to settle for half or even a quarter.

Either way, I benefit; it’s a case of heads I win, tails you lose.

What could there be about the technique that makes people who have been duped into compliance so bewilderingly likely to continue to comply?

Surrender or suffer heavy casualties.

Not knowing what to do, she extended it toward him again only to have him demand to know what he had to give in return.

Merely define whatever you have received from the inspector—extinguisher, safety information, hazard inspection—not as gifts, but as sales devices, and you will be free to decline (or accept) his purchase offer without even a tug from the reciprocity rule: A favor rightly follows a favor—not a piece of sales strategy.

Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse’s chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet.

Obviously, horse-race bettors are not alone in their willingness to believe in the correctness of a difficult choice, once made.

Sealed within the fortress walls of rigid consistency, we can be impervious to the sieges of reason.

When the leaders called for questions at the completion of the lecture, he raised his hand and gently but surely demolished the presentation we had just heard.

Quick, a hiding place from thought! Here, take this money.

Parents are simply not in a toy-buying mood, and the influences of advertising or reduced expense are not enough to shake that stony resistance.

If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment.

Note that the commitment was able to get twice as much compliance from those targets even though at the time it occurred it must have seemed to them an altogether inconsequential reply to an altogether superficial question—yet another fine example of social jujitsu at work.

Start small and build.

At first, even Freedman and Fraser were bewildered by their findings.

It scares me enough that I am rarely willing to sign a petition any-more, even for a position I support.

No; there it was in his own handwriting, an irrevocably documented act driving him to make his beliefs and his self-image consistent with what he had undeniably done.

Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures.

There is something magical about writing things down.

Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.

There must have been a thousand times when I thought I had to have a smoke.

On the face of it, these rites seem extraordinary and bizarre. Yet, at the same time, they can be seen to be remarkably similar in principle and even in detail to the common initiation ceremonies of school fraternities.

The new 'code' set off a riot so violent that city police and fire detachments were afraid to enter campus.

The more electric shock a woman received as part of the initiation ceremony, the more she later persuaded herself that her new group and its activities were interesting, intelligent, and desirable.

the remorseless close-order drill hour after hour in the burning sun, the mental and physical abuse, the humiliations, the frequent sadism at the hands of drill sergeants, all the claustrophobic and terrifying insults to the spirit which can make an outpost like Quantico or Parris Island one of the closest things in the free world to a concentration camp.

No, the fraternity chapters and Chinese Communists were playing for keeps.

Freedman’s severe threat, which had been so successful six weeks before, was almost totally unsuccessful when he was no longer able to back it up with punishment.

For the other boys, the dramatic event had come from the inside, not the outside.

Because we build new struts to undergird choices we have committed ourselves to, an exploitative individual can offer us an inducement for making such a choice, and after the decision has been made, can remove that inducement, knowing that our decision will probably stand on its own newly created legs.

I once witnessed a woman provide an embarrassed apology to a salesman who had used the last version of lowballing on her—this while she was signing a new-car contract giving him a huge commission.

Then the rug was pulled out.

Rather than reverting to their old habits, the lowballed residents increased their August energy savings to a stunning 41.6 percent.

I had been cornered by my own words.

Whenever my stomach tells me I would be a sucker to comply with a request merely because doing so would be consistent with some prior commitment I was tricked into, I relay that message to the requester.

Concentrating on the first burst of impression I sensed, the answer was clear and unqualified.

Listen, nobody’s gonna tell me how to run my business.

It is so blatant, so clearly counterfeit, that there could be no confusing it with the real thing.

The simulated chick sound was enough to start the female’s mothering tape whirring.

It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior.

Rather than disbanding in disillusion, the cultists often become strengthened in their convictions.

Exposed to a tremendous burst of publicity, they had made every attempt to dodge fame; given dozens of opportunities to proselyte, they had remained evasive and secretive and behaved with an almost superior indifference.

The women were braless or wore brassieres whose metal stays had been removed.

Where only hours earlier they had shunned newspaper reporters and felt that the attention they were getting in the press was painful, they now became avid seekers for publicity.

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.

Especially in an ambiguous situation, the tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing can lead to a fascinating phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance.”

It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible.

This, according to Latané and Darley, is the state of pluralistic ignorance “in which each person decides that since nobody is concerned, nothing is wrong.

Because we like to look poised and sophisticated in public and because we are unfamiliar with the reactions of those we do not know, we are unlikely to give off or correctly read expressions of concern when in a grouping of strangers.

A terrifying thought slashes to mind: 'Oh, God, I’m having a stroke!'

I remember thinking, "Oh no, it’s happening just like the research says. They’re all passing by!"

Only 33 percent of the wallets were returned when the first finder was seen as dissimilar, but fully 70 percent were returned when he was thought to be a similar other.

Well, I’m three years old, and Tommy is three years old. And Tommy can swim without a ring, so that means I can too.

The story of the Werther effect is both chilling and intriguing.

Upon learning of another’s suicide, an uncomfortably large number of people decide that suicide is an appropriate action for themselves as well.

When the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person’s suicide, older drivers died in such crashes.

When such a match was lost by a black fighter, the homicide rate during the following ten days rose significantly for young black male victims but not young white males.

And therein lies the awful beauty of the Reverend Jim Jones’s relocation strategy.

As slaughterhouse operators have long known, the mentality of a herd makes it easy to manage.

They were businessmen whose product was applause.

They seem almost smug in the recognition of our predicament: Either we must allow them to fool us or we must abandon the precious automatic pilots that make us so vulnerable to their tricks.

Whenever possible we ought to sting those responsible for the rigging of social evidence.

So intent would they be upon working themselves into the next lane that, without even checking the true condition of the road before them, the drivers would begin a line-long flank assault. Crash.

Odds at a racetrack are based on where the money is being bet.

The strength of that social bond is twice as likely to determine product purchase as is preference for the product itself.

There seems to be a click, whirr response to attractive people.

In fact, the attractive defendants were twice as likely to avoid jail as the unattractive ones.

Marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found to be not only more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester, but also to do so without bothering to read it first.

Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor. Click, whirr.

And the typical American classroom fosters precisely these unpleasant conditions.

Simply separating the boys into two residence cabins was enough to stimulate a “we vs. they” feeling between the groups; and assigning names to the two groups (the Eagles and the Rattlers) accelerated the sense of rivalry.

When the bus stopped at a refreshment stand, the boys of one group, with five dollars left in its treasury, decided to treat their former bitter adversaries to milkshakes!

Notice how she changed the reinforcement contingencies.

Now there is at least one crack in the gloom, and I find myself genuinely excited about it.

Compared to the rantings of Bad Cop, the words fall like music on the prisoner’s ears.

Should his message tell of military disaster, though, the reception would be quite different: He was summarily slain.

That’s right about the tornado, and I’ll tell you something else, I’ll send another one if you don’t back off.

It's a real tough decision. They've got big stars speaking for it, and big stars speaking against it. You don't know how to vote.

It may be “Tupperware” for the women, but it’s “Bingo” for the company.

When at a crucial point of play the referee called a foul against a player from the man’s home team, the mute veteran jumped from his chair, glared at the radio, and spoke his first words in more than three decades: “You dumb ass!” he cried.

Sometimes in the NBA, you feel like a dog.

As their team suffered loss after loss, more and more fans donned the bags until TV cameras were regularly able to record the extraordinary image of gathered masses of people shrouded in brown paper with nothing to identify them but the tips of their noses.

Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others of attainment.

Instead, we have to be sensitive to only one thing related to liking in our contacts with compliance practitioners: the feeling that we have come to like the practitioner more quickly or more deeply than we would have expected.

Mentally separate Dan from that Chevy or Toyota he’s trying to sell.

It works nine out of ten times.

You can no longer cry out, no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite.

Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse.

In tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command they could follow.

In what is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the incident, the train crew filed suit against him, requesting punitive damages for the "humiliation, mental anguish, and physical stress" they suffered because he hadn't allowed them to carry out their orders without cutting off his legs.

Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

People who have been spontaneous and interesting conversation partners for the prior half hour become respectful, accepting, and dull.

It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half inches taller than as the “student.”

Yet, in 95 percent of the instances, the nurses went straightaway to the ward medicine cabinet, where they secured the ordered dosage of Astrogen and started for the patient’s room to administer it.

Like the children of Hamelin who crowded after the Pied Piper, three and a half times as many people swept into traffic behind the suited jaywalker.

So intimidating was the aura of the prestige automobile, however, that 50 percent of the motorists waited respectfully behind it, never touching their horns, until it drove on.

What he does possess, however, is a physician’s title, “M.D.” Now, clearly, it is an empty title, connected to him in our minds through the device of playacting.

Perhaps they will mention a small shortcoming in their position or product ("Oh, the disadvantages of Benson & Hedges").

No matter what she selected, Vincent reacted identically: His brow furrowed, his hand hovered above his order pad, and after looking quickly over his shoulder for the manager, he leaned conspiratorially toward the table to report for all to hear, "I’m afraid that is not as good tonight as it normally is."

Seeming to argue against his financial interests served those interests extremely well.

Imperfections that would otherwise make for rubbish make for prized possessions when they bring along an abiding scarcity.

Because of its lost availability, the appliance jumps suddenly in attractiveness.

The idea is to dangle a carrot in front of the buyer’s face and then take it away.

As opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms; and we hate to lose the freedoms we already have.

Tell them one thing, they do the opposite; give them one toy, they want another; pick them up against their will, they wriggle and squirm to be put down; put them down against their will, they claw and struggle to be carried.

Could it be that had the youngsters been left to their own devices, their inflamed devotion would have amounted to no more than a flicker of puppy love?

Business is great. But they’re almost all being bought by people from out of town.

Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it.

If we are to believe the implications of the research, then the censorship is likely to increase the desire of students for sexual material and, consequently, to cause them to view themselves as the kind of individuals who like such material.

It appears, then, that even proper, official censorship in a courtroom setting creates problems for the censor.

The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.

When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all.

And when these now-established freedoms were threatened, the people lashed out the way a dog would if someone tried taking a fresh bone from its mouth.

One wonders whether the tuna flapping on a dry deck with only a bare hook in its mouth shares the what-hit-me bewilderment of the shopper arriving home with only a load of department-store bilge.

And then the bidding started. ABC opened with two million. I came back with two point four. ABC went to two point eight. And the fever of the thing caught us. Like a guy who had lost his mind, I kept bidding.

As this visceral current advances, the cognitive, rational side retreats.

This little device of simultaneous scheduling paved the way for later compliance because it created an atmosphere of competition for a limited resource.

As soon as we feel the tide of emotional arousal that flows from scarcity influences, we should use that rise in arousal as a signal to stop short.

ZAPPA: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

Today, the notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is only laughable.

Unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.

The real treachery, and the thing we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make their profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts.

It is…notable that the system painstakingly prevents the total elimination of outstanding obligations.

They apparently feel an obligation to give their business to the firm that rendered the initial, complimentary service.

Stand on a busy sidewalk, pick out an empty spot in the sky or on a tall building, and stare at it for a full minute.

So powerful was the snowballing social evidence in support of the Anabaptist position that it rapidly overwhelmed the disconfirming physical evidence and turned two thirds of the population of Holland’s great cities into adherents.

Making an ugly criminal more attractive may not reduce the chances that he will commit another crime; it may only reduce his chances of being sent to jail for it.

I found so much obedience, I hardly saw the need of taking the experiment to Germany.

For example, since 1900 the U.S. presidency has been won by the taller of the major-party candidates in twenty-one of the twenty-four elections.

heavy-handed restrictions on a young romantic alliance may well turn it clandestine, torrid, and sad.

The Social Power of a Uniform.

Parental Interference and Romantic Love: The Romeo and Juliet Effect.

Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique.

Contrast Effects in Judgments of Attractiveness: When Beauty Becomes a Social Problem.

Firefly Femme Fatales.

Airplane Accidents, Murder, and the Mass Media: Towards a Theory of Imitation and Suggestion.

Sherif, M. et al. Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers’ Cave Experiment.

Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader.

“bereavement” account of suicide-crash connection, 144–145

stomach signal and, 105–109

Jonestown mass suicide, 29–30, 152–156

pluralistic ignorance phenomenon

Romeo and Juliet effect and, 247–250, 271, 291n–292n

“social conditions” interpretation of suicide-crash connection

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

55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

Their business is to make us comply, and their livelihoods depend on it.

Participant observation is a research approach in which the researcher becomes a spy of sorts.

When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold.

She will embrace a natural enemy just because it goes “cheep-cheep,” and she will mistreat or murder one of her own chicks just because it does not.

Just as the 'cheep-cheep' sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word 'because' trigger an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects...

By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship tapes cause them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace.

The look of amused bewilderment that immediately registers tells the story: Even though both hands are in the same bucket, the hand that has been in the cold water feels as if it is now in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is now in cold water.

They received his holiday greeting card, click, and, whirr, they automatically sent one in return.

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.

Obviously, horse-race bettors are not alone in their willingness to believe in the correctness of a difficult choice, once made.

Only 33 percent of the wallets were returned when the first finder was seen as dissimilar, but fully 70 percent were returned when he was thought to be a similar other.

You can no longer cry out, no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite.

Imperfections that would otherwise make for rubbish make for prized possessions when they bring along an abiding scarcity.

The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.

And then the bidding started. ABC opened with two million. I came back with two point four. ABC went to two point eight. And the fever of the thing caught us. Like a guy who had lost his mind, I kept bidding.

This little device of simultaneous scheduling paved the way for later compliance because it created an atmosphere of competition for a limited resource.

Today, the notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is only laughable.