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.

INFLUENCE: The Principle of Authority

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini

Authority

• Re: Stanley Milgram shock experiment: What could make us do such things? Milgram is sure he knows the answer. It has to do, he says, with a deep-seated sense of duty to authority within us all.
• Milgram: "It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study."
• We are trained from birth that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong.
• We rarely agonize over the pros and cons of authority's demands. In fact, our obedience frequently takes place in a click, whirr fashion with little or no conscience deliberation. Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation.
• Once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience. Although such mindless obedience leads us to appropriate action in the great majority of cases, there will be conspicuous exceptions - because we are reacting rather than thinking.
• Once a legitimate authority has given an order, subordinates stop thinking in the situation and start reacting.
• Re: Robert Young Sanka Commercial: Ability to use the influence of the Authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The appearance of authority was enough.
• When in a click, whirr mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance.
• Compliance professionals who are short on substance: Con artists, for example, drape themselves with the titles, clothes, and trappings of authority. They love nothing more than to emerge elegantly dressed from a fine automobile and to introduce themselves to their prospective "mark" as Doctor or Judge or Professor or Commissioner Someone. They understand that when they are so equipped, their chances for compliance are greatly increased.
• Re Titles: Titles are simultaneously the most difficult and easiest symbols of authority to acquire. To earn one normally takes years of work and achievement. Yet it is possible for somebody who has put in none of this effort to adopt the mere label and receive a kind of automatic deference.
• Our actions are frequently more influenced by a title than by the nature of the person claiming it.
• Highly trained and skilled nurses were not using that training or skill sufficiently to check on a doctor's judgement; instead, when confronted with a physicians directives, they would simply defer.
• Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requestor when he wore the guard costume.
• Nearly all the pedestrians complied with his directive when he had worn the guard costume, but fewer than 1/2 did so when he dressed normally.
• 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.
• People were unable to predict correctly how they or others would react to authority influence. In each instance, the effect of such influence was grossly underestimated. This property of authority status may account for much of its success as a compliance device. Not only does it work forcefully on us, but it also does so unexpectedly.
• Because we typically misperceive the profound impact of authority (and its symbols) on our actions, we are at the disadvantage of being insufficiently cautious about its presence in compliance situations.
• Isn't it fascinating how, when we are whirring along, what is obvious often doesn't matter unless we pay specific attention to it?
• A tactic compliance practitioners use to assure us of their sincerity: They will seem to argue to a degree against their own interests. Correctly done, this can be a subtly effective device for proving their honesty. Perhaps they will mention a small shortcoming in their position or product. Invariably, though, the drawback will be a secondary one that is easily overcome by more significant advantages. By establishing their basic truthfulness on minor issues, the compliance professionals who use this ploy can then be more believable when stressing the important aspects of their argument.
• Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated expert of proven sincerity? Vincent the waiter: Much of his profit came from an apparent lack of concern for personal profit. Seeming to argue against his financial interests served those interests extremely well.