Influence: The Principle of Liking

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini

Liking

• As a rule, we most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like. This simple rule is used in hundreds of ways by total strangers to get us to comply with their requests.
• By providing the hostess with a % of the take, the Tupperware Corporation arranges for its customers to buy from and for a friend rather than an unknown sales person. In this way, the attraction, the warmth, the security, and the obligation of friendship are brought to bear on the sales setting.
• They understand perfectly how much more difficult it is for us to turn down a charity request when it comes from a friend or a neighbor. The friend doesn't even have to be present to be effective; often just the mention of the friends name is enough.
• The key to the success of this method is that each new prospect is visited by a salesperson armed with the name of a friend "who suggested I call on you." Turning the salesperson away under those circumstances is difficult; its almost like rejecting the friend.
• Shaklee sales manual: "It would be impossible to over-estimate it's 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 a sale 50% made before you enter."
• There seems to be a click, whirr response to attractive people. Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence. Furthermore, we make these judgements without being aware that physical attractiveness plays a role in the process.
• It is apparent that good-looking people enjoy an enormous social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing better personality traits and intellectual capacities.
• We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background or lifestyle. Consequently, those who wish to be liked in order to increase our compliance can accomplish that purpose by appearing similar to us in any of a wide variety of ways.
• Even small similarities can be effective in producing a positive response to another and because a veneer of similarity can be so easily manufactured, I would advise special caution in the presence of requestors who claim to be "just-like-you".
• Many sales training programs now urge trainees to "mirror and match" the customer's body posture, mood, and verbal style, as similarities along each of these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results.
• The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective device for producing return liking and willing compliance.
• We tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false.
• 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.
• Although the familiarity produced by contact usually leads to greater liking, the opposite occurs if the contact carries distasteful experiences with it.
• 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.
• "The nature of bad news infects the teller." 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.
• Compliance professionals are incessantly trying to connect themselves or their products with the things we like. The advertiser is betting that we will respond to the product in the same ways we respond to the attractive models merely associated with it.
• Using what he termed "the luncheon technique," he found that his subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating.
• All kinds of desirable things can substitute for food in lending their likable qualities to the ideas, products, and people artificially linked to them. In the final analysis, then, that is why those good looking models are standing around in the magazine ads. And that is why radio programmers are instructed to insert the station's call letters jingle immediately before a hit song is played.
• The students had previously learned that, to be liked, they should connect themselves to good news but not bad news.
• The relationship between sport and the earnest fan is anything but game like. It is serious, intense, and highly personal.
• Isaac Asimov: "All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality... and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.
• Persia's messengers did not have to cause the news, my weatherman did not have to cause the weather and Pavlov's bell did not have to cause the food for powerful effects to occur. The association was enough.
• The results showed that many more home-school shirts were worn if the football team had won its game on the prior Saturday. What's more, the larger the margin of victory, the more such shirts appeared.
• Whenever our public image is damaged, we will experience an increased desire to restore that image by trumpeting our ties to successful others. At the same time, we will most scrupulously avoid publicizing our ties to failing others.