Influence

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about people and how the people interact.

🎨 Impressions

As soon as (Frank) Zappa had been introduced and seated, the following exchange occurred: Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.*

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. –Alfred North Whitehead

• Although several important similarities exist between this kind of automaticity in humans and lower animals, there are some important differences as well. The automatic behavior patterns of humans tend to be learned rather than inborn, more flexible than the lock-step patterns of the lower animals, and responsive to a larger number of triggers.

• Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library 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 those asked 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 of those asked complied.

• Perhaps the common “because … just because” response of children asked to explain their behavior can be traced to their shrewd recognition of the unusual amount of power adults appear to assign to the word because.

• In marketing lore, the classic case of this phenomenon is that of Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey, which had been a struggling brand until its managers decided to raise its price to a level far above its competitors. Sales skyrocketed, even though nothing was changed in the product itself (Aaker, 1991). A recent brain-scan study helps explain why. When tasting the same wine, participants not only rated themselves as experiencing more pleasure if they thought it cost $45versus$5, their brain centers associated with pleasure became more activated by the experience as well .

• Japanese proverb makes this point eloquently: “There’s nothing more expensive than that which comes for free.”

• 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. Especially relevant to this book are those heuristics that tell us when to believe or do what we are told.

• It’s instructive that even though we often don’t take a complex approach to personally important topics, we wish our advisors—our physicians, accountants, lawyers, and brokers—to do precisely that for us (Kahn & Baron, 1995). When feeling overwhelmed by a complicated and consequential choice, we still want a fully considered, point-by-point analysis of it—an analysis we may not be able to achieve except, ironically enough, through a shortcut: reliance on an expert.

• Perhaps nowhere is this last point driven home more dramatically than in the life-and-death consequences of a phenomenon that airline industry officials have labeled Captainitis. Accident investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration have noted that, frequently, an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by the other crew members and resulted in a crash.

• Apparently, the tendency of males to be bamboozled by powerful mating signals extends to humans. Two University of Vienna biologists, Astrid Juette and Karl Grammer secretly exposed young men to airborne chemicals (called copulins) that mimic human vaginal scents. The men then rated the attractiveness of women’s faces. Exposure to the copulins increased the judged attractiveness of all the women and masked the genuine physical attractiveness differences among them

• Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece 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. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend much more on the purchase of a sweater; but the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: 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. The

• Much of the compliance process (wherein one person is spurred to comply with another person’s request) can be understood in terms of a human tendency for automatic, shortcut responding. Most individuals in our culture have developed a set of trigger features for compliance, that is, a set of specific pieces of information that normally tell us when compliance with a request is likely to be correct and beneficial.

• While small in scope, this study shows the action of one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us—the rule of reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, 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. By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favors, gifts, invitations, and the like.

• For the most part, however, there is a genuine distaste for an individual who fails to conform to the dictates of the reciprocity rule

• Interestingly enough, 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

• A student in one of my classes expressed it quite plainly in a paper she wrote: “After learning the hard way, I no longer let a guy I meet in a club buy me a drink because I don’t want either of us to feel that I am obligated sexually.” Research suggests that there is a basis for her concern. If, instead of paying for them herself, a woman allows a man to buy her drinks, she is immediately judged (by both men and women) as more sexually available to him

• Research conducted at BarIlan 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

• Against a requester who employs the rule for reciprocation, you and I face a formidable foe. By presenting us with either an initial favor or an initial concession, the requester will have enlisted a powerful ally in the campaign for our compliance. At first glance, our fortunes in such a situation would appear dismal. We could comply with the requester’s wish and, in so doing, succumb to the reciprocity rule. Or, we could refuse to comply and thereby suffer the brunt of the rule’s force upon our deeply conditioned feelings of fairness and obligation. Surrender or suffer heavy casualties.

• 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) the purchase offer without even a tug from the reciprocity rule: A favor rightly follows a favor—not a piece of sales strategy.

• According to sociologists and anthropologists, one of the most widespread and basic norms of human culture is embodied in the rule for reciprocation. The rule requires that one person try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient of an act to repayment in the future, the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with confidence that it is not being lost. This sense of future obligation within the rule makes possible the development of various kinds of continuing relationships, transactions, and exchanges that are beneficial to the society. Consequently, all members of the society are trained from childhood to abide by the rule or suffer serious social disapproval.

• The decision to comply with another’s request is frequently influenced by the reciprocity rule. One favorite and profitable tactic of certain compliance professionals is to give something before asking for a return favor.

• It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. –Leonardo Da Vinci

• Once we make a choice or take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.

• For instance, immediately after casting a ballot, voters believe more strongly that their candidate will win

• A quote attributed to the great British chemist, Michael Faraday, suggests the extent to which being consistent is approved—sometimes more than being right. When asked after a lecture if he meant to imply that a hated academic rival was always wrong, Faraday glowered at the questioner and replied, “He’s not that consistent.”

• 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. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand. Even preliminary leanings that occur before a final decision has to be made can bias us toward consistent subsequent choices

• Commitment practices involving substantially more finesse can be just as effective. For instance, suppose you wanted to increase the number of people in your area who would agree to go door-to-door collecting donations for your favorite charity. You would be wise to study the approach taken by social psychologist Steven J. Sherman. He simply called a sample of Bloomington, Indiana, residents as part of a survey he was taking and asked them to predict what they would say if asked to spend three hours collecting money for the American Cancer Society. Of course, not wanting to seem uncharitable to the survey-taker or to themselves, many of these people said that they would volunteer.

• Other groups of people interested in compliance are also aware of the usefulness and power of this approach. Charitable organizations, for instance, will often use progressively escalating commitments to induce individuals to perform major favors. Research has shown that such trivial first commitments as agreeing to be interviewed can begin a “momentum of compliance” that induces such later behaviors as organ or bone marrow donations

• The general idea is to pave the way for full-line distribution by starting with a small order… . Look at it this way—when a person has signed an order for your merchandise, even though the profit is so small it hardly compensates for the time and effort of making the call, he is no longer a prospect—he is a customer.

• What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.

• For example, it worked successfully for Charles DeGaulle, whose remarkable achievements for France were said to be matched only by his ego. When asked to explain why announcing to everyone that he would stop his heavy smoking obliged him to quit forever, he is reported to have replied gravely, “DeGaulle cannot go back on his word”

• The evidence is clear that the more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater is its ability to influence the attitudes of the person who made it. We can find that evidence quite nearby or as far away as the back regions of the primitive world.

• Initiation rites of tribal and fraternal societies: They simply will not die. Resisting all attempts to eliminate or suppress them, such hazing practices have been phenomenally resilient. Authorities, in the form of colonial governments or university administrations, have tried threats, social pressures, legal actions, banishments, bribes, and bans to persuade groups to remove the hazards and humiliations from their initiation ceremonies.

• There is another striking similarity between the initiation rites of tribal and fraternal societies: They simply will not die. Resisting all attempts to eliminate or suppress them, such hazing practices have been phenomenally resilient. Authorities, in the form of colonial governments or university administrations, have tried threats, social pressures, legal actions, banishments, bribes, and bans to persuade groups to remove the hazards and humiliations from their initiation ceremonies. None has been successful.

• “If hazing is a universal human activity, and every bit of evidence points to this conclusion, you most likely won’t be able to ban it effectively. Refuse to allow it openly and it will go underground. You can’t ban sex, you can’t prohibit alcohol, and you probably can’t eliminate hazing!”

• Indeed, one study of 54 tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity.

• Given Aronson and Mills’ demonstration that the severity of an initiation ceremony significantly heightens the newcomer’s commitment to the group, it is hardly surprising that groups will oppose all attempts to eliminate this crucial link to their future strength.

• A pledge who suffered through an arduous hazing could not be given the chance to believe he did so for charitable purposes. A prisoner who salted his political essay with anti-American comments could not be permitted to shrug it off as motivated by a big reward. No, the fraternity chapters and Chinese Communists were playing for keeps. It was not enough to wring commitments out of their men; those men had to be made to take inner responsibility for their actions.

• It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. Such pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with our wishes. However, if we want more than just that, if we want our children to believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to continue to perform the desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pressures, then we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner responsibility for the actions we want them to take.

• The only effective defense I know against the weapons of influence embodied in the combined principles of commitment and consistency is an awareness that, although consistency is generally good, even vital, there is a foolish, rigid variety to be shunned. We must be wary of the tendency to be automatically and unthinkingly consistent, for it lays us open to the maneuvers of those who want to exploit the mechanical commitment-consistency sequence for profit.

• It should come as no surprise that people with a particularly strong proclivity toward consistency in their attitudes and actions fall frequent victim to consistency-based influence tactics. Indeed, research I conducted that developed a scale to measure preference for consistency found just that; individuals who scored high on preference for consistency were especially likely to comply with a requester who used the foot-in-the-door or the low-ball technique

• What might be more surprising is that in a follow-up study employing subjects from ages 18 to 80, we found that preference for consistency increased with the years and that, once beyond the age of 50, our subjects displayed the strongest inclination of all to remain consistent with their earlier commitments

• An intensive examination of the tapes by researchers Anthony Pratkanis and Doug Shadel (2005) revealed widespread attempts by the fraud artists to get—or sometimes just claim—an initial small commitment from a target and then to extract funds by holding the target accountable for it. Note how, in the following separate tape excerpts, the scammer uses the consistency principle like a bludgeon on people whose preference for personal consistency gives that weapon formidable weight.

• Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. —Walter Lippmann

• Experiments have found that the use of canned merriment causes an audience to laugh longer and more often when humorous material is presented and to rate the material as funnier (Provine, 2000). In addition, some evidence indicates that canned laughter is most effective for poor jokes

• The principle of social proof. This principle states that we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct

• We view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

• “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”

• 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. The overarching need of the cultists to cling to those beliefs seeps poignantly from their own words.

• This, then, explains their sudden shift from secretive conspirators to zealous missionaries. It also explains the curious timing of the shift—precisely when a direct disconfirmation of their beliefs had rendered them least convincing to outsiders. It was necessary to risk the scorn and derision of the nonbelievers because publicity and recruitment efforts provided the only remaining hope. 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.

• The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more a given individual will perceive the idea to be correct.

• They examined the reports of the Genovese incident and, on the basis of their knowledge of social psychology, hit on what had seemed like the most unlikely explanation of all—the fact that 38 witnesses were present. Previous accounts of the story had invariably emphasized that no action was taken, even though 38 individuals had looked on. Latané and Darley suggested that no one had helped precisely because there were so many observers.

• Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others’ actions to decide how they themselves should act. In addition, there is another important working condition: similarity. The principle of social proof operates most powerfully when we are observing the behavior of people just like us

• Fatal crashes increase dramatically only in those regions where the suicide has been highly publicized.

• It consisted of offering people just two things: a fair price and someone they liked to buy from. “And that’s it,” he claimed in an interview. “Finding the salesman you like, plus the price. Put them both together, and you get a deal.”

• A halo effect occurs when one positive characteristic of a person dominates the way that person is viewed by others. The evidence is now clear that physical attractiveness is often such a characteristic.

• Economists examining U.S. and Canadian samples have found that attractive individuals get paid an average of 12–14 percent more than their unattractive coworkers

• The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective device for producing return liking and willing compliance

• How could such a thing happen? The answer lies partially in the unconscious way that familiarity affects liking. Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past. For example, in one experiment, the faces of several individuals were flashed on a screen so quickly that, later on, the subjects who were exposed to the faces in this manner couldn’t recall having seen any of them before. Yet, the more frequently a person’s face was flashed on the screen, the more these subjects came to like that person when they met in a subsequent interaction.

• For instance, although white students’ achievement levels remain steady, it is 10 times more likely that the academic performance of minority students will significantly increase rather than significantly decline after desegregation (Stephan, 1978).

• First, restaurant patrons gave larger tips when paying with a credit card instead of cash. In a second study, college students were willing to spend an average of 29 percent more money for mail-order catalog items when they examined the items in a room that contained some MasterCard insignias; moreover, they had no awareness that the credit card insignias were part of the experiment.

• People prefer to say yes to individuals they know and like. Recognizing this rule, compliance professionals commonly increase their effectiveness by emphasizing several factors that increase their overall attractiveness and likeability.

• A second factor that influences liking and compliance is similarity. We like people who are like us, and we are more willing to say yes to their requests, often in an unthinking manner. Another factor that produces liking is praise. Although they can sometimes backfire when crudely transparent, compliments generally enhance liking and, thus, compliance.

• Increased familiarity through repeated contact with a person or thing is yet another factor that normally facilitates liking. This relationship holds true principally when the contact takes place under positive rather than negative circumstances. One positive circumstance that works especially well is mutual and successful cooperation. A fifth factor linked to liking is association. By connecting themselves or their products with positive things, advertisers, politicians, and merchandisers frequently seek to share in the positivity through the process of association.

• Potentially effective strategy for reducing the unwanted influence of liking on compliance decisions requires a special sensitivity to the experience of undue liking for a requester.

• That 95 percent of regular staff nurses complied unhesitatingly with a patently improper instruction of this sort must give us all as potential hospital patients great reason for concern. What the midwestern study shows is that the mistakes are hardly limited to the trivial slips in the administration of harmless ear drops or the like, but extend to grave and dangerous blunders.

• The experimenters discovered that 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. The motorists had little patience with the economy-car driver: Nearly all sounded their horns, and the majority of these did so more than once; two simply rammed into the rear bumper.

• One protective tactic we can use against authority status is to remove its element of surprise. Because we typically misperceive the profound impact of authority (and its symbols) on our actions, we become insufficiently cautious about its presence in compliance situations.

• For example, one study found that letters of recommendation sent to the personnel directors of major corporations produced the most favorable results for job candidates when the letters contained one unflattering comment about the candidate in an otherwise wholly positive set of specific remarks

• In the Milgram studies of obedience we can see evidence of strong pressure in our society for compliance with the requests of an authority. Acting contrary to their own preferences, many normal, psychologically healthy individuals were willing to deliver dangerous and severe levels of pain to another person because they were directed to do so by an authority figure.

• It is possible to defend ourselves against the detrimental effects of authority influence by asking two questions: Is this authority truly an expert? How truthful can we expect this expert to be?

• That opportunities seem more valuable to us when they are less available—

• Especially under conditions of risk and uncertainty, the threat of potential loss plays a powerful role in human decision making

• For instance, it is little recognized that at the time of the American Revolution, the colonists had the highest standard of living and the lowest taxes in the Western World. According to historian Thomas Fleming (1997), it wasn’t until the British sought a cut of this widespread prosperity (by levying taxes) that the Americans revolted.

• Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.

• Part of the problem is that our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think. When we watch as something we want becomes less available, a physical agitation sets in.

• Fortunately there is information available on which we can base thoughtful decisions about scarce items. It comes, once again, from the chocolate chip cookie study, where the researchers uncovered something that seems strange but rings true regarding scarcity: Even though the scarce cookies were rated as significantly more desirable, they were not rated as any better-tasting than the abundant cookies.

• The joy is not in the experiencing of a scarce commodity but in the possessing of it.

• First, scarce items are heightened in value when they are newly scarce. That is, we value those things that have become recently restricted more than those that were restricted all along. Second, we are most attracted to scarce resources when we compete with others for them.

• Some people claimed that Pyne’s acid personal style was partially caused by a leg amputation that had embittered him to life; others said, no, he was just vituperative by nature. One evening rock musician Frank Zappa was a guest on the show. This was at a time in the 1960s when very long hair on men was still unusual and controversial. As soon as Zappa had been introduced and seated, the following exchange occurred: Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

• Very often when we make a decision about someone or something we don’t use all of the relevant available information. We use, instead, only a single, highly representative piece of the total.