Month: September 2007

This is my second speech on the science of influence.

In my previous speech, I explained why these rules of influence work so well.

I then went on to explain the “contrast principle”.

And lastly, I addressed the first rule of influence – reciprocity – the universal rule of equal exchange.

Now, who’s waiting for more?

The second rule of influence is called “commitment and consistency”.

Being perceived as consistent in one’s believes, words and deed, offer three advantages.
1. Good personal consistency is highly valued by society.
2. It provides a short-cut to make future decisions based on earlier ones.
3. Sometimes a rational decision done with careful deliberation maybe too painful to accept

Let’s consider a scenario. How many of you buy Christmas gifts for your kids? I see, quite a few. Imagine this conversation between you and your son a month before Christmas.
You: “So what do you want from Santa for Christmas this year?”.
You son replies: “I’d love to the new baseball game for my Nintendo Wii!”.
You ask, “but why?”
You sons responds, “Everyone wants it, it’s a really cool game, it feels like real baseball. And it will make my Christmas so much better.”
You respond: “alright, let’s see what Santa brings this year, I’m sure he won’t disappoint you”.

Now, couple of weeks later, it’s almost time, so you look for the new baseball game at Amazon, you can’t find it, then you go to all your electronic local stores, they were all out-of-stock. As Christmas nears, you are growing desperate. At the last minute, you decided to buy your son the skiing game instead, which has plenty in stock at your local BestBuy the day before Christmas. You were thinking, skiing, baseball, they are all participatory sports, what’s the difference.

Christmas morning, your son tears open the gift wrapping, and look a bit disappointed. You tried to console him, “cheer up, I heard skiing game is much better”.
Your son responds, “Thanks dad, it’s no baseball, and you promised that Santa Clause will bring me the baseball game for Christmas.”

You feel really guilty. Although Christmas season is over, you still can’t get over it. Then, in late January, the baseball game start showing up on store shelves again. What do you do? The first chance you got, you buy your son a copy of the baseball game, to keep your promise.

Ladies, and gentleman, what I’ve described here was based on a real story. Some toy manufactures in the past has done this, where they deliberately pump-up the advertising for a specific toy, and under-supply it to the stores, so parents instead of buying one, actually bought two games for their kids to keep their promise.

As also demonstrated by this little scenario, the key to the successful deployment of this principle is commitment.

Allow me to demonstrate some important characteristics to increase the level of commitment.

[Aud 01], would you say you are an environmentally friendly person? Yes, do you recycle regularly? Sounds like you are really into it. Would you please come up here and note the fact with the words “[Aud 01]” recycles regularly. Let’s applaud for [Aud 01]’s recycling effort. Thanks you. Now, the Environmental Working Group is running a campaign, we looking for volunteers to put up a sign in their front yard that simply says “Save the Earth, Recycle”. Since you recycle regularly, would you agree for us to put a sign in you front yard for a month? Great. Thank you for being such a good citizen, I wish more people are like you. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’d point out the sign is about 5 feet high 3 feet wide with large yellow letters. Will that be a problem? You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Great, thanks, we’ll be over next week.

The point I’m trying to get across here is that it’s not just any commitment, the most long-lasting commitment has these four characteristics: active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated.

Active means the commitment was acted by the person. People infer their likings via their own behaviors. The simply act of coming up here and writing it down makes it stick.

Public means it’s done publicly. That’s why I ask [Aud 01] in front of an audience. Having it written down also helps me to refer to it publicly later.

Effortful means the commitment takes effort. Me asking [Aud 01] to come up here and write it down intentionally increased the effort of the commitment.

Viewing as internally motivated, not coerced means the person making the commitment internalizes the commitment as their own. The key is to offer a reward that is disportionately smaller than the effort involved. I only offered verbal encouragement and praise, nothing more. Thinking back, [Aud 01] is likely to think it’s he/she willingness to commit, since the reward was not big enough to justify the motivation.

I can not stress strongly enough that this rule and any other rules of influence should be applied with the full ethical implication in mind. Using it to manipulate others for your own gain will not establish a long trusting relationship.

To recognize and resist influence of consistency pressure, we need to listen to our gut and our heart. There are situations where your gut tells you that you are making the wrong decisions, or committing to things unwillingly. In this case, explain to the requester that it will be foolish for you to comply.

In other situations, you can not be certain that you’ve been taken advantage of. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?” If the answer is no, reconsider the commitment and act accordingly.

To summarize, the second rule of influence is commitment and consistency. It leverages people’s tendency to value consistency to obtain compliance.

I’m here to talk to you about the science and practice of influence.

Webster’s definitions of influence is as follows “the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command”

Without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command are the key phrases here.

The famous painter Salvador Dali said: “The secret of my influence has always been that it remains secret”.

Influence has been a subject of social psychology for quite a long time. I’ll talk about the Professor Robert Cialdini’s work captured in his book “Influence – Science and Practice”.

Humans develop automatic stereotyped behavior triggered by specific heuristic to save time and energy in decision making.

An example used in the book was a jewelry store owner in a vacation town that mistakenly doubled the price of her turquoise necklaces instead of halving it, and was surprised that they sold much faster. This was because of the shortcut people take in determining quality when no other pieces of information are available, they simply equated price with quality.

Understanding the rules of influence is important not only in what we can leverage in situations where it’s called for and ethical, but also to understand how others uses the rules on us so we’ll recognize them and switch to deliberate decision-making mode.

Since influence is a big topic, I’ve broken my speech to a few parts. I’ll address in part one, the contrast principle and the first two weapons of influence – reciprocity and commitment and consistency.

An important principle in human perception is the contrast principle, which basically states when two things are presented in sequence, and if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is.

Imagine that I lift up a big piece of rock off the ground, and put it in your hand first. Then I tell you to drop it and hand you a marble. Now if I ask you how much the marble weigh, you would’ve estimated the marble to be lighter than it actually is.

Another neat trick to demonstrate this principle is an experience to do at home. Have three pails of water, one on the left is quite hot, the one in the middle is at room temperature, and the one on the right has ice in it. Now put your left hand into the hot water pail, and at the same time, put your right hand into the ice water pail. After 10 seconds, put both hands in the room-temperature pail. You’ll be amazed by the perceived different in temperature from the same bowl of water.

This is also why sales person always try to show you the most expensive items they have that meet your need, so that a cheaper alternative seems much cheaper by comparison.

The first rule of influence is reciprocity – it says that we should repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. Reciprocity is has 3 characteristic First, it’s extremely powerful, it’s the basis for social exchange and commerce. Secondly, it applies to uninvited first favors. And thirdly, it can result in unequal exchanges.

The first is the direct approach.

If you shop at Costco, you must have noticed all the people there giving out product samples, whether it’s a piece of sausage on stick, or some nuts. I rarely take these, but on the occasion I do take them, I somehow always purchase more of other stuff. Observe yourself sometime, and you’ll notice the pattern as well. What’s interesting was that I did not always buy the stuff they were passing out, but more of other items as if I owed Costco something.

Another form of reciprocity is called rejection then retreat, also known as door in the face. This tactic basically means making an initial request, and when rejected, make a smaller request.

Let me demonstrate. Audience member one, would you spend 8 hours every other Saturday to read to kids? No? How about 2 hour a month?

You see, by making the second request smaller in comparison you invoke both the contrast principle and the reciprocity rule. 2 hour a month compared with 8 hours a week seemed a smaller commitment than it actually it is.

So how do you deal with people applying this reciprocity rule to influence us? Simply rejecting any initial offer or a favor or sacrifice is not the best approach, you never know if the person offering it is sincere.

The more realistic approach to accept the offer initially thus obliging ourselves to return the favor. However, if during a later date that you determined the offer was a compliance tactic, feel free to rid yourself of the obligation, and react to it without regard to the initial offer.

I need to stress again that these compliance techniques should be employed by you in an ethical way, which is to say, not used to exploit people’s behavior or decision for your own benefit. The reason is first, it’s not right. And secondly, that although they work in short-term or one time interaction, repeated application of these techniques will make people uncomfortable around you and sour your relationships in the long run.

So remember the first rule of influence – reciprocity.

I’ll talk about the other rules of influence the next time.