Persuasion

Psychologist Robert Cialdini recently revised his classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, originally published in 1984. This is one of those interesting cases from the history of psychology where the method of finding things out was just as interesting as the findings. To learn how people influence one another, Cialdini took on an assumed name and signed up for some new jobs. He took training programs designed for used-car dealers, real estate agents, waiters, door-to-door salesmen, and high-end clothing retailers. In each of them, he quizzed his instructors on how to sell things more effectively and took notes on their best tricks for manipulating people's minds and their pocketbooks. From those lessons he distilled six basic principles for changing people's behavior (with a seventh added in the new edition), all of which fundamentally rely on the Intuitive mind. In other words, Cialdini was most interested in the things that people do to guide someone into a particular course of action, without that person's awareness.

Here are Cialdini's six principles of persuasion:

1. Reciprocity – people are more likely to do what you want if you have first done them a favor. One classic example of this principle (no longer allowed) was the long-standing practice of pharmaceutical companies purchasing things for doctors, such as a nice lunch or a fancy vacation. The physicians would swear up and down that their prescribing decisions weren’t swayed by these gifts, but their behavior said otherwise. This illustrates Cialdini’s basic point that the six influence processes operate outside of conscious awareness, by directly speaking to the Intuitive mind. In another example from Cialdini's work, waiters receive higher tips when they offer inside information that suggests they have their customers' best interests at heart. For instance, a server could say "I really like the special tonight, I always order that myself," or better yet, "we're supposed to suggest the fish, but personally I think it's not all that good -- why don't you try the steak?" The second example is even more persuasive because it seems to go against the server's own interests, all in the service of pleasing the customer. The customer is then likely to reciprocate with a larger monetary reward. Reciprocity explains the truth of the old saying "there's no such thing as a free lunch": Having eaten the sandwich, you feel an obligation to help the person who fed it to you. This is not a conscious judgment, but one based in the powerful social impulses of the Intuitive mind.

2. Commitment and Consistency – this principle is also sometimes known as the “foot in the door,” or starting with little requests in order to pave the way for bigger ones. The idea is that once someone has taken a small step in the direction that you’d like them to, they are more likely to follow that by also taking a larger step. Once, for instance, a salesman came to my home for a “free test” to discover whether we had hard water. Who wants to pass up something free (that’s reciprocity again)? The process took multiple steps that used interesting chemical apparatus, and the salesman kept up an amusing patter throughout – sort of like a magic show. The process required us to say "yes" multiple times, to affirm that we noted what the salesman was showing us, that we wanted to see our results, and that we were interested in receiving an estimate of cost to fix the problem. By the end of the process the salesman had so abused our tolerance by exceeding the promised one-hour timeframe that I was more than delighted to say "no" to his sales pitch and kick him out of my house. Overall his strategy was a good one -- he established a pattern in which we were amused and kept on saying "yes," until he finally got to the important "yes" where we would agree to his large asking price. But unfortunately he wasn't all that good at managing other Intuitive factors such as likability (see below), and I just ended up mad at him by the time his sales pitch concluded. The desire to appear consistent to others taps into our Intuitive minds' concern over social perception, and perhaps also taps into broader Narratives about oneself and the world as posited by Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory.

3. Social Proof - the basic idea of social proof is that if everyone else is doing something, I should probably be doing it too. Social proof was the concept behind television programs' long-standing use of laugh tracks to emphasize the funny parts of their programs: As viewers heard the laughter onscreen, they were prompted to laugh along. Street musicians and church ushers are other people who sometimes use the principle of social proof, by "salting" their collection boxes with a little of their own money to start. When people see the money given by others, they are more likely to also contribute. And of course, "modeling" is a well-established behavior change method that relies on social proof -- people see someone else performing a desired behavior, and then emulate them. More problematic examples of social proof are found in the behavior of cults, and the acceptance of conspiracy theories like QAnon -- people see others behaving in a particular way, and follow along with their peers. In general social proof is a good strategy to live by: Most of the time it is a good idea to buy insurance, own your own home, stay married, and do other conventional things that make your life less chaotic and more predictable. And social proof is the main principle that helps us to achieve good results in science by way of peer review. But sometimes social proof can make us keep doing things that are not good for us, especially when we are surrounded by others who aren't making good decisions. And in rare cases, simply doing the same thing as everyone else can lead to a collective disaster, as in the example of selling all your stock investments during a general market crash; it's far better to do your own thing in that situation than to be caught up in doing the same thing as everyone else!

4. Likability - being likable can get you a long way in life, and Cialdini summarizes a large body of research showing that we are more likely to comply with someone's requests when we find them likable. Likability can arise from a variety of sources, including physical attractiveness, compliments, a sense that someone is similar to us, the experience of working together toward a shared goal, or simply repeated contact with someone over time. John F. Kennedy's presidential victory over Richard Nixon is a widely cited example of likability's effects, with Nixon coming across as more experienced but dramatically less likable when the two candidates appeared for the first time in a televised presidential debate. Donald Trump's electoral success was also heavily based on likability, although in his case it was likability only to a subset of voters who identified with him (perhaps an interaction between likability and the "commitment and consistency" strategy of influence).The "good cop/bad cop" tactic of interrogation also relies on the principle of likability, with one law enforcement officer coming across as likable because of a willingness to defuse or prevent the negative actions of a more threatening or argumentative partner. In broader terms, anyone who presents him- or herself as a friend or confidant is using the influence tactic of likability. 

5. Authority - in contrast to the principle of likability, the principle of authority relies on a sense that someone is different from you, and in fact better than you in some area of expertise. The classic example of authority as an influence strategy is Stanley Milgram's obedience study, in which participants were asked to administer a series of progressively more painful electric shocks (actually a sham) to a person in another room who screamed in response. The experimenter used authoritarian tactics like commanding the participant or saying "the experiment requires that you continue," and in general the participants complied. Cialdini notes that authority can be acquired in a variety of ways, including things like dressing in a professional way; displaying a university degree, license, or other credentials; speaking in a polished manner; or having impressive titles like "doctor" or "professor." My colleagues in nursing are particularly likely to list a lot of letters after their names, while our friends in medicine are content with just "MD" -- perhaps an indication of the relative status of those letters. Many charlatans demonstrate to us that the trappings of authority are particularly easy to fake, but they still exert an unconscious influence on people's behavior. And of course, legitimate authorities like courts or governments are able to force our compliance at times, but the trappings of authority still help these institutions to achieve their desired results.

6. Scarcity - Cialdini's psychological principle of scarcity is the same as economics' law of supply and demand. The more people want a thing, and the less available it is, the more it will be valued. People can be influenced by creating an artificial sense of scarcity, for example by emphasizing how many other people are bidding on an item or by creating a limited-time opportunity. Cialdini also links scarcity to the idea of psychological reactance, the phenomenon of people wanting things that they are told they can't have. This influence technique has sometimes been described, in contrast to the foot in the door, as the "door in the face" method -- if you make an extreme demand and then back off it, people will be more likely to agree to your revised second offer than if you had led with that. Scarcity is implicated in this method because people feel that your second offer is letting them off the hook from the first, objectionable offer, which is still lurking there as a threat in the back of their minds. In another example of the scarcity principle, gun sales tend to surge whenever there is a suggestion of new policies that would limit access to guns. And Cialdini also describes the principle of scarcity at work in auctions, where competition for a single item can lead to bidding wars, because each party is triggered by the potential mental "loss" of an item that they don't yet actually possess.

Cialdini refers to all of these methods as "weapons of automatic influence," and in fact they can be easily weaponized. Cialdini himself starts the book by noting "I have always been a patsy," and clever influencers frequently use these techniques to get our money, trick us into doing them favors, or win elections. Cialdini learned these methods at the feet of master manipulators, whom he likes to describe as "influence practitioners." In the 37 years since its publication, the book has been used by salespeople and government leaders who make a living by influencing others, as well as by ordinary people trying to resist others' influence. Clearly these secrets of the Intuitive mind can be used for evil as well as for good. 

To prevent misuse of the techniques, Cialdini advocates increased awareness and active "resistance" -- for example, boycotting the products of advertisers who use the techniques for profit, or voting out politicians who manipulate facts in order to manipulate our Intuitive reactions. That's a good strategy -- it brings the Narrative mind back into play in order to counteract our automatic tendencies. Yet we are fundamentally disadvantaged compared to the people Cialdini calls "compliance practitioners," and as Cialdini's tactics of influence have become more widespread we are actually subjected to them more often than ever before. Furthermore, many of them have been automated, and we are bombarded with more intensive and more frequent influence attempts than we have attentional capacity to process. Cialdini isn't wrong that we need to resist these efforts. But awareness alone is probably not enough. Instead, we may need to drastically restructure our environments in some way to reduce the number of influence attempts that we confront in everyday life.

Cialdini's new edition offers a seventh principle, unity, that might also help us. The new principle was previously subsumed under "likability," because people who we find similar to us are also generally more likable. To increase our influence over others, we can emphasize areas in which we agree or things that we have in common. The technique appeals to people's need to belong to a group. Unfortunately, it's relatively easy to remind people of their affiliation with a small subgroup of humanity, or to increase their sense of belonging by pitting them against some other group. But the principle of unity might also allow us to remind people of our shared affiliation with very large groups such as the human race. The unity principle might help us to remember shared goals and larger-level considerations, and thereby defend against some of the smaller-level tactics that are commonly used to influence our behavior outside of our awareness.