INFLUENCE: The Principle of Commitment

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini

Commitment

• Leonardo Da Vinci: "It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."
• Like the other weapons of influence, this one lies deep within us, directing our actions with quiet power. It is, quite simply, our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.
• Thirty-seconds before putting down their money, they had been tentative and uncertain; thirty seconds after the deed, they were significantly more optimistic and self-assured. Once a stand had been taken, the need for consistency pressured these people to bring what they felt and believed into line with what they had already done. They simply convinced themselves that they had made the right choice and, no doubt, felt better about it all.
• We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.
• Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action.
• The drive to be (and look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests.
• To understand why consistency is so powerful a motive, it is important to recognize that in most circumstances consistency is valued and adaptive. Inconsistency is commonly thought to be an undesirable personality trait.
• But because it is so typically in our best interests to be consistent we easily fall into the habit of being automatically so, even in situations where it is not the sensible way to be.
• Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We really don't have to think hard about the issue anymore.
• It allows us a convenient, relatively effortless and efficient method for dealing with complex daily environments that make severe demands on our mental energies and capacities. It is not hard to understand, then, why automatic consistency is a difficult reaction to curb. It offers us a way to evade the rigors of continuing thought.
• With our consistency tapes operating then, we can go about our business happily excused from the toil of having to think too much.
• For the exploiters, whose interests will be served by an unthinking, mechanical reaction to their requests, our tendency for automatic consistency is a gold mine. So clever are they at arranging to have us play our consistency tapes when it profits them that we seldom realize that we have been taken. In fine jujitsu fashion, they structure their interactions with us so that our own need to be consistent will lead directly to their benefit.
• 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.
• ... and asked them to predict what they would say if asked to spend 3 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 they would volunteer. The consequence of this sly commitment procedure was a 700% increase in volunteers when, a few days later, a representative of the American Cancer Society did call and ask for neighborhood canvassers.
• Have you noticed that callers asking you to contribute to some cause or another these days seem to begin things by inquiring about your current health and well-being? People who have just asserted that they are doing/feeling fine - even as part of a sociable exchange - will consequently find it awkward to appear stingy in the context of their own admittedly favored circumstances.
• The "How are you feeling" technique was by far superior to its rival (33% vs 15% compliance), because it alone drew and exploitable public commitment from its targets. 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.
• The Chinese prison-camp program shows that its personnel relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures to gain the desired compliance from prisoners.
• The Chinese answer was elementary: Start small and build
• A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the Unites States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case.
• He would make a list and sign it
• He would read his list in a discussion group
• He would be asked to write an essay to expand on it
• His essay may be broadcast over the radio
• Many times a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed and with the new "collaborator" label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration.
• For the salesperson, the strategy is to obtain a large purchase by starting with a small one. Almost any small sale will do because the purpose of that small transaction is not profit. It is commitment. Further purchases even much larger ones, are expected to flow naturally from the commitment.
• 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.
• Because they had innocently complied with a trivial safe driving request a couple of weeks before, these homeowners became remarkably willing to comply with another such request that was massive in size.
• Approximately half of these people consented to the installation of the DRIVE CAREFULLY billboard, even though the small commitment they had made weeks earlier was not to driver safety but to an entirely different public service topic: state beautification.
• Signing the beautification petition changed the view these people had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles.
• 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.
• Once a person's self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image.
• You can use small commitments to manipulate a person's self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into "public servants", prospects into "customers", prisoners into "collaborators". And once you've got a man's self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.
• Not all commitments affect self-image however. There are certain conditions that should be present for a commitment to be effective in this way.
• Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than their deeds.
• A mans behavior tells him about himself.
• The Chinese set about arranging the prison-camp experience so that their captives would consistently act in desired ways. Before long, the Chinese knew, these actions would begin to take their toll, causing the men to change their views of themselves to align with what they had done.
• Writing was one sort of confirming action that the Chinese urged incessantly upon the men. It was never enough for the prisoners to listen quietly or even to agree verbally; they were always pushed to write it down as well. If a prisoner was not willing to write a desired response freely, he was prevailed upon to copy it.
• A written declaration has some great advantages. First, it provides physical evidence that the act occurred. Second is that it can be shown to other people. (Of course, that means it can be used to persuade those people.) But more important for the purpose of commitment, it can persuade them that the author genuinely believes what was written.
• Even those people who knew that the author had been assigned to do a pro-Castro essay guessed that he liked Castro. It seems that a statement of belief produces a click, whirr response in those who view it. Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, observers automatically assume that someone who makes such a statement means it.
• What those around us think is true of us is enormously important in determining what we ourselves think is true.
• Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside, there is a pressure to bring self-image into line with action. From the outside there is a sneakier pressure - a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others perceive us.
• Members of the staff are asked to set individual sales goals and commit themselves to those goals by personally recording them on paper.
• Re: Cooling off laws & refunds - The companies have since learned a beautifully simple tactic that cuts the number of such cancellations drastically. They merely have the customer, rather than the salesman, fill out the sales agreement. That personal commitment along has proved to be "a very important psychological aid in preventing customers from backing out of their contracts."
• Something special happens when people personally put their commitments down on paper. They live up to what they have written down.
• Proctor & Gamble and General Foods are always running those "25-50-, or 100 words or less" testimonial contests. The purpose behind the testimonial contests is the same as the purpose behind the political essay contests of the Chinese Communists. In both instances the aim is to get as many people as possible to go on record as liking the product.
• Re: testimonial contests: Thousands of people who testify in writing to the products appeal and who, consequently, experience that "magical" pull to believe what they have written.
• One reason that written testaments are effective in bringing about the genuine personal change is that they can so easily be made public.
• Whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person.
• For appearances sake, then, the more public a stand, the more reluctant we will be to change it.
• By far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.
• Many weight-reduction clinics require their clients to write down an immediate weight-loss goal and show that goal to as many friends, relatives and neighbors as possible. Clinic operators report that frequently this simple technique works where all else has failed.
• Evidence is clear that the more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater is it's ability to influence the attitudes of the person who made it.
• Persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same with a minimum of effort.
• College women who had to endure a severely embarrassing initiation ceremony in order to gain access to a sex discussion group convinced themselves that their new group and its discussions were extremely valuable, even though the other group members had rehearsed to be as "worthless and uninteresting" as possible.
• Re: Fraternity Hell Night - They function oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believed what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and troublesome initiation rites.
• The severity of an initiation ceremony significantly heightens the newcomers commitment to the group.
• His military training was not only successful, it was specifically intended to create desired levels of pride and camaraderie among those who endured and survived it.
• It appears that commitments are most effective in changing a person's self-image and future behavior when they are active, public and effortful.
• The reason the Chinese withheld large prizes in favor of less powerful inducements: They wanted the men to own what they had done. No excuses, no ways out were allowed. It was not enough to wring commitments out of their men; those men had to be made to take inner responsibility for their actions.
• Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won't get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won't feel committed to it.
• Compliance professionals love commitments that produce inner change. The effects of the change are lasting. So, once a man has been induced to take action that shifts his self-image to that of, let's say, a public spirited citizen, he is likely to be public spirited in a variety of other circumstances where his compliance may also be desired, and he is likely to continue his public spirited behavior for as long as his new self-image holds.
• Re: inner change - There is no need for the compliance professional to undertake a costly and continuing effort to reinforce the change; the pressure for consistency will take care of all that. After our friend comes to view himself as a public spirited citizen, he will automatically begin to see things differently. He will convince himself that it is the correct way to be.
• Because we build new struts to under gird 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.
• Re: lowballing - For certain customers, a very good price is offered on a car, perhaps as much as four hundred dollars below competitor's prices. The good deal, however, is not genuine; the dealer never intends it to go through. It's only purpose is to cause a prospect to decide to purchase a car from the dealership.
• No matter which variety of lowballing is used, the sequence is the same:
• An advantage is offered that induces a favorable purchase decision; then, sometime after the decision has been made but before the bargain has been sealed, the original purchase advantage is deftly removed.
• The loss can be shrugged off by the customer who is consoled, even made happy, by the array of other good reasons favoring the choice. It never occurs to the buyer that those additional reasons might never have existed had the choice not been made in the first place.
• The impressive thing about the lowball tactic is its ability to make a person feel pleased with a poor choice. Those who have only poor choices to offer us, then are especially fond of the technique.
• Re: people who promised to conserve energy - Just good intentions coupled with information about saving fuel, then, were not enough to change habits.
• Those residents agreeing to save energy would have their names publicized in newspaper articles as public-spirited, fuel-conserving citizens. The effect was immediate. The chance to have their names in the paper had motivated these residents to substantial conservation efforts for a period of a month.
• Did they return to their old, wasteful habits when the chance to be in the newspaper was removed? Hardly. For each of the remaining winter months they actually conserved more fuel than they had during the time they thought they would be publicly celebrated for it!
• Once made, that commitment started generating it's own support: The homeowners began acquiring new energy habits, began feeling good about their public-spirited efforts, began convincing themselves of the vital need to reduce American dependence on foreign oil... With all these new reasons present to justify the commitment to use less energy, it is no wonder that the commitment remained firm even after the original reason, newspaper publicity, had been kicked away.