Techniques of Social Influence

The psychology of gaining compliance

Dariusz Dolinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138815179
• eBook ISBN: 9781317599630
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Psychology

Every day we are asked to fulfil others' requests, and we make regular requests of others too, seeking compliance with our desires, commands and suggestions. This accessible text provides a uniquely in-depth overview of the different social influence techniques people use in order to improve the chances of their requests being fulfilled. It both describes each of the techniques in question and explores the research behind them, considering questions such as: How do we know that they work? Under what conditions are they more or less likely to be effective? How might individuals successfully resist attempts by others to influence them?

The book groups social influence techniques according to a common characteristic: for instance, early chapters describe "sequential" techniques, and techniques involving egotistic mechanisms, such as using the name of one's interlocutor. Later chapters present techniques based on gestures and facial movements, and others based on the use of specific words, re-examining on the way whether "please" really is a magic word. In every case, author Dariusz Dolinski discusses the existing experimental studies exploring their effectiveness, and how that effectiveness is enhanced or reduced under certain conditions. The book draws on historical material as well as the most up-to-date research, and unpicks the methodological and theoretical controversies involved.

The ideal introduction for psychology graduates and undergraduates studying social influence and persuasion, Techniques of Social Influence will also appeal to scholars and students in neighbouring disciplines, as well as interested marketing professionals and practitioners in related fields.

1
INTRODUCTION

As a rule, the introduction is where the author explains to the reader what the book is about. Before I do that, however, I will take the liberty of a brief digression of a personal nature. Whenever I’m at some sort of gathering and find I am acquainted only with the host, my interactions with other guests go off “without a hitch”. I’m not a particularly shy person, so it’s rather easy for me to get to know others and to talk to them about more or less serious subjects. Problems begin when they ask me what I do for a living. My answer – that I am a psychologist – provokes a feeling of unease in my interlocutors. “So you must be observing us and analyzing,” I hear. “What do you think about us?” My answer, that I’m not observing or analyzing anybody but, just like everybody else, having a beer, chatting about Almodóvar’s latest film, Kundera’s books, recent sports events or political happenings, isn’t taken at face value by others. It gets worse when the conversation turns to questions like “So what is it you do exactly? Do you put people through psychotherapy, or devise intelligence tests?” I respond that I’m not a therapist and that I’ve never created any intelligence test, and nothing would indicate that I ever will. I explain that for many years I have been engaged in the study of social influence techniques. When I give a few examples by way of explanation, opinions about me are uniformly devastating: I am a guy who sits in a lab and dreams up schemes for effectively manipulating people.

As it is, psychologists concerned with social influence techniques usually aren’t thinking up new tricks. Our approach to the subject is just the opposite. The metaphor of full-cycle social psychology, applied by Robert Cialdini (1980), would seem to be a good illustration of this. The full cycle is a construction under which a social influence technique emerges in social life, and after it is “discovered”, investigated and described by scientists, it winds up back in that “real life”. So, a psychologist interested in these techniques observes the tricks applied by individuals whose professions or social roles involve them exerting influence on others. He thus watches the behaviour of a waiter with an interest in his client leaving a generous tip, a car salesman focused on getting people to buy automobiles from him, door-to-door salespeople determined to leave a set of knives in someone’s home and walk out with a fat wallet. Also of interest to the psychologist may be those working for charitable causes who are skilled in acquiring donations from sponsors, as well as politicians who quickly gain in popularity, which translates into votes from constituents. Of equal interest may also be observing a married couple in which one partner is able to convince the other to agree to far-reaching concessions.

Every social psychologist has a wealth of opportunities to observe practitioners of social influence techniques. I live and work in Wrocław, a city located in the centre of Europe – and more precisely in south-west Poland – with around 700,000 inhabitants. Yesterday I got out of my car, which I had parked around 200 metres from the Market Square, where I had arranged to meet up with a friend. While exiting my car I was approached by a man showing me where I could find a place to park, waving at me while I helplessly drove along the kerb in search of a free spot. I hadn’t even got out of the car when he offered me “a deal” on some car air fresheners. Why not? He was polite and pleasant, he had helped me and he also had one of my favourite scents, vanilla. A moment after this transaction and after I had closed my car door, a young boy who seemed around 12 years old ran up to me, bringing a bucket and an offer to wash my car. I might have taken him up on it if it weren’t for the fact that the water in his bucket looked even dirtier than the exterior of my vehicle. Besides that, I was probably feeling a bit ‘had’ by the air freshener salesman, whose offer wasn’t really that cheap, so I decided I wouldn’t just agree to everything people offered me. I set out briskly for the Market Square. Along the way I passed by two sellers of a newspaper I usually read (I wasn’t enticed, as I had already bought a copy earlier), one seller of another newspaper (I didn’t buy it because I don’t care for its politics) and one vagrant (I didn’t give him a cent). I did, however, take three flyers (two from language schools and one from a glassworks), which I immediately placed in the bin. I always take flyers. I know that some people, usually youngsters, are paid by the hour, but others are paid for the number of flyers they give out. I think this is a rather thankless and poorly paid job. Taking a flyer and throwing it into a bin, which is usually nearby, doesn’t cost me a thing. So I usually let people press flyers into my open hand, then maybe I take a look at them or not and throw them away immediately. On the way to the Market Square I was additionally tempted by storefronts promising incredible thrills inside, and a bank tried to talk me into taking out an unbelievably attractive loan. Before I had made it to City Hall, I walked by a man who resembled Lenin and was standing on a fruit box holding a giant red flag in his hand. At his feet lay a prominently displayed hat for tossing money into, and it contained 10- and 20-zloty banknotes. Obviously, the idea was to prevent someone from thinking that they could just toss in some loose change. Not even for a moment did I consider throwing anything in there. Next, I encountered a man dressed up in a suit and tie who tried to press a business card into my hand while explaining the virtues of a central vacuum system, and a painting salesman encouraging me to pick up an image of a beautiful deer in rutting season, saying that I could get it at steep discount while helping young artists at the same time. In both cases, I managed to not break my stride and avoided closer interaction.

The car fragrance salesman, the owner of a bucket with water, the panhandler, the Lenin lookalike, the newspaper salesmen and the deer painting peddler . . . in most of these cases, the people involved applied some more or less refined social influence technique. These techniques – as the aforementioned “sample of events” demonstrates – are relentlessly used by practitioners of social influence. I assume that you, the reader, have had experiences similar to mine, even if you live in another part of the globe. Regardless of their geographic location, practitioners of social influence all want one and the same – they want us to order and purchase various things from them, to give money for their causes, to fill in the surveys, questionnaires and other forms they put in our faces, to leave them generous tips and to undertake all sorts of obligations. We succumb to such pressure – sometimes subtle, sometimes less so – dozens or even hundreds of times a day. Quite often, as Daniel Howard indicates (1995), practitioners of social influence apply techniques consisting of connecting various methods into a chain, which makes it even more difficult to defend oneself from undesired social influence. Why do social influence techniques work? Why do they work even when we are perfectly aware that someone is attempting to influence us? Contrary to appearances, these are very difficult questions.

The basic question a psychologist who has succeeded in sniffing out some particular trick applied by practitioners of social influence must pose concerns the actual effectiveness of the technique. For example, does the way a shoe salesman usually “can’t find” a pair of shoes in the right size for the customer, but then manages to locate “the last pair” after a few minutes, really increase the chances that the customer will buy those shoes? Perhaps he would be equally inclined to buy them if the salesman took them out straight away? How to determine this? There is no better means than a carefully planned and meticulously performed experiment, or even better – a series of experiments. If the results of such empirical studies in fact reveal the effectiveness of the trick under analysis, then one of science’s most important questions must follow: “Why?” Why is a given technique a successful instrument of social influence? Here, the investigator primarily makes use of his knowledge about the mechanisms governing people’s reactions. Over the last few decades, psychology has made significant strides in this area.

However, many things remain uncertain, unclear and opaque. This is why there may be several potential mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of a particular social influence technique. The following series of experiments is thus aimed at determining which of them is in fact responsible for a particular trick’s effectiveness. Uncovering the mechanism thus also leads to the generation of knowledge about factors that can enhance, sometimes significantly, the effectiveness of the studied behaviour. The precisely verified and described technique now becomes an element of psychological knowledge. As such, it is also often propagated during all sorts of training sessions, university classes or seminars. It is also sometimes the case that a description of the technique can be found in books, such as this one. As a consequence, the technique can become an instrument of social influence for those who learn of it thanks to this manuscript. In this way, the circle of social psychology described by Robert Cialdini is complete. It has closed. The technique was born in real social life and has returned to it.

The great majority of psychological influences described in this book have travelled a similar path: from practice, through detailed empirical and theoretical analysis, to practice. It is no different with the techniques that my collaborators and I have studied for many years. We thus stake no claim to being the authors of most of these tricks. They are not our inventions. They are the creations of anonymous practitioners of social influence over thousands of years, individuals who derive all sorts of benefits, not only material, from their effectiveness. To obtain a full picture, it is necessary to say that, at times (although rarely), psychologists think up social influence techniques, or somewhat accidentally uncover them in the course of conducting empirical research.

In this book I also describe the results of various experiments by a host of social psychologists conducting research around the world. My primary objective is to introduce the reader to the current state of knowledge in the area of social influence techniques. At the same time, however, I devote significant space to research conducted by myself and my co-experimenters. I do this not because I feel our experiments are more interesting or more important than others; the possibility of offering a detailed presentation of one’s own research and thoughts is simply a natural privilege enjoyed by every author. I have decided to take advantage of it.

In works dedicated to social influence, various means of organizing the presented material have been adopted. The author of one of the most popular psychological books, Robert Cialdini (2001), states that six main laws or principles of social influence can be distinguished. They are the principles of reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. Cialdini dedicates successive chapters of his best-selling monograph Influence: Science and practice to them. This approach allows him to provide a good structure to the presented material. There is no doubt in my mind that the aforementioned principles are of particular significance, and they allow for an excellent explanation of various phenomena belonging to the area of social influence. The approach consisting in an argument constructed on six rules of social influence does, however, have certain flaws. First and foremost, it should be acknowledged that all techniques of social influence (or at least the majority of them) can be counted as one of these rules. Cialdini himself is of this opinion, but this is not so obvious to many other researchers. The framework of the aforementioned six basic rules is a poor fit for such techniques as those associated with emotions experienced by people, techniques based on the sudden induction of incogitance or those making use of egotistical mechanisms.

It is also worth noting that Cialdini uses descriptions of various tricks and techniques as specific illustrations of the rules he himself has differentiated, rendering the book coherent and believable. The problem is, among researchers there is no consensus as to the psychological basis for the effectiveness of particular means of exerting influence on people. In the relevant literature we may observe vigorous debate over the psychological mechanisms that underpin the effectiveness of assorted social influence techniques. Thus it is often possible to take issue with Cialdini’s “classification” of particular techniques.

In this book, the problem of organizing the content is resolved in a different manner. Pride of place is given to descriptions of particular social influence techniques and empirical studies testing their effectiveness. In addition, competing interpretations of techniques and research results under discussion are presented, and it is my hope that they will assist readers in coming to their own conclusions on the accuracy of each of them.

It is thus time to enumerate the subjects to be addressed in the individual chapters of this book. You are presently reading the first of them; it is an introduction to the subject of social influence and to the content of this manuscript. Chapter 2 examines what are referred to as sequential social influence techniques. They all consist in the main request being preceded by a different one. Depending on the particular technique, the secondary request can be harder or easier to fulfil than the one that follows it. The subject’s contact with the initial request – meaning whether he fulfils it, attempts to fulfil it or rejects it – influences the probability that he will want to fulfil the next one. Research on the effectiveness of sequential techniques and the search for mechanisms underlying them have a long and rich tradition in the science of psychology, which is why I have devoted many pages to describing them.

The remaining chapters are shorter. This is not because I feel the techniques presented in them are uninteresting, but rather because there is far less empirical research concerning them. The third chapter contains a presentation of techniques associated with people’s need to satisfy their ego and for self-presentation. Individuals undertake all sorts of activities throughout their lives in order to maintain self-esteem and to make a positive impression on others. These motivations can, in some cases, result in them being more inclined to act on requests, suggestions and orders addressed to them. Some social influence techniques are thus grounded in just these human needs.

Chapter 4 focuses on the content and form of messages directed at an individual on whom social pressure is being applied. Here I attempt to demonstrate the complex role words play in processes of social influence. A specific phrase or an individual word appearing in a particular moment of a social interaction can significantly affect the reaction of an individual to whom we turn with a request or suggestion. The thesis that interpersonal interactions are of a dynamic nature is a truism. That this dynamic can find itself under the control of the individual forming the request, and thus take the form of a social influence technique, is itself not a truism.

The fifth chapter describes just those techniques in which something out of the ordinary occurs when one person asks another for something. Chapter 6 contains descriptions of successful influence techniques based on emotional mechanisms. Here we can observe just how significant readiness to fulfil a request is on the influence of affective states experienced by the addressee of said request.

The seventh chapter – “A few more issues and final remarks” – as the term would suggest, closes out the book. Alongside a summary, I grant myself the liberty of presenting some of my reflections and doubts. I also consider the possibility of using psychological knowledge in practice and others of an ethical character, of particular importance concerning the exertion of influence on others. That should suffice to describe what you, dear Reader, will find in this book.

There is one more thing that requires clarification, something that with all certainty concerns social influence but is not in this work. In the book I focus almost exclusively on techniques designed to induce people to behave in a particular manner. However, I neither present nor analyze techniques for influencing cognitive attitudes. It must be stated clearly that such an approach under which the researcher is primarily interested in observable behaviours is not, at present, the dominant one in psychology. Quite the opposite, we may even say that it is “unfashionable”. As jokingly stated in the title of an article by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs and David Funder (2007), contemporary psychology has become “a science of self-reports and finger movements”. Since the 1970s there has been a steady decline of interest on the part of psychologists in non-verbal human behaviour. While writing their article, Baumeister and his colleagues opened up the then newest edition (January 2006) of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most influential psychological journals. And what did they find? The articles contain descriptions of individuals’ judgements and opinions. The contemporary researcher no longer follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, introspective types who listened to what subjects had to say; he rather asks them to press the appropriate button on a keyboard. The psychologist thus studies behaviours . . . consisting of pecking at a keyboard, he explores . . . finger movements! “We have to break up!” cries out Robert Cialdini – the leading researcher on altruism and social influence – in the title of his 2009 article. He observes that psychology is focusing more and more on explaining behaviours, while ignoring the actual causes of those behaviours. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that social psychology, in its drive to explain, has lost sight of just what is to be explained. In some places psychologists have got themselves into such a quagmire that they are only explaining processes of explanation.

The book which you hold in your hands is thus a continuation of Cialdini’s appeal “We have to break up!” It focuses on the reality of human behaviour, and not on their judgements, opinions or verbal declarations of particular behaviours. While this is an unfashionable approach, I follow it in the firm conviction that it is a proper one. Experiments studying real human behaviours are difficult to conduct, time-consuming and labour intensive. It is far easier to just ask subjects to imagine themselves in a situation and say how they would behave . . . simpler, quicker, easier . . . but doubts of a fundamental nature arise: do we, in this manner, get closer to the truth of human behaviour, or do we get further from that truth?

One of the most important experiments in the history of social psychology was conducted by Stanley Milgram (1974). Milgram demonstrated that in certain conditions the majority of participants in an experiment, ostensibly concerning the effect of punishment on learning, can be induced into shocking another participant with 450 volts of electricity. However, if we were to ask people how they would behave in the same circumstances, hardly anyone would be able to imagine themselves in the role of a person zapping another with such a horrendous amount of electricity. Things are similar in the case of investigations of social influence techniques. In Chapter 5 I describe research concerning the role of touch. As it occurs, when an individual is asked to do some favour, such as signing a petition, the chances that this request will be fulfilled are greater when we gently grasp this person by the arm or forearm. I told my students to imagine a stranger asking them to sign a petition, and then asked them whether the fact that this stranger were delicately touching their arm at the same time would influence the probability that they would agree to do so. They responded that it would obviously have an influence! But . . . they were convinced that the touch of a stranger would result in their refusal to fulfil the request! There are countless examples demonstrating that investigations of real human behaviours generate an entirely different picture than research on imagined own reactions.

Thus, in this book I consistently describe research concerning real social behaviours, and not work concerning verbal declarations about such behaviours. What is more, a clear majority of experiments presented within are field studies in which people are studied in their natural environment (in parks, libraries, restaurants, at universities or in their own homes) and not in a psychological laboratory. Furthermore, in the majority of these experiments, the subjects were unaware that they were interacting with psychologists conducting scientific research; they did not know that they were participating in an experiment. These facts give us the right to be confident in the veracity of the results, and that they demonstrate how people really behave in various situations and what conditions their reactions.

As the author, I obviously bear full responsibility for the content presented in this book. However, I would like its readers to be aware that it would not have come about without my friends, colleagues and collaborators – and also my students – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sequential techniques of social influence
• 3 Techniques involving egotistic and self-presentation mechanisms
• 4 The role of wording the request
• 5 Interaction dynamics and the surprise factor
• 6 Techniques of social influence using mood and emotion
• 7 A few more issues and final remarks
• References
• Index