“I don’t know I had the terms to explain it, but… I knew that he had turned a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’. So there was something powerful there inside what he had said.”
Robert Cialdini from a 2-part episode of Hidden Brain: Persuasion
In my last post, I introduced psychologist Robert Cialdini and the seven principles of persuasion he identified during his long career. If you don’t look too closely, this kind of talk could be mistaken for the shallow self-help advice from a get rich quick huckster, but Cialdini’s credentials and research are academically solid.
I described one principle last time, reciprocity, and gave a couple examples. This time I’ll do the same for a second principle: commitment and consistency.
Like most primates, humans are social creatures. The nucleus of a society is trust: the confidence that various people—family, friends, lovers, business partners—will fulfill their agreements and obligations. Evolution has imbued us with a concern for duty and trustworthiness. So one important piece of persuasion is our tendency to behave consistent with the commitments we have made. Cialdini gives this example:
Robert Cialdini:
It was a place called Gordon’s Restaurant. And Gordon, he had a problem that was, at the time, not unique to his restaurant: no-shows. People who called, booked a table, and then just didn’t appear. Didn’t call ahead to cancel. And it was a big problem for him. And he went to listen to what his receptionist said. When she took a reservation, she would say, “Thank you for calling Gordon’s Restaurant. Please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation.” And that ended the call. He asked her to add two words and to say, “Will you please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation?” And then he asked her to pause. So what would you say? How would you fill that pause?
Shankar Vedantam:
I would say, “Yes. Of course, I would call.”
Robert Cialdini:
And that’s your commitment, Shankar. You have now publicly committed yourself to it. And no shows at Gordon’s Restaurant dropped by 64% that day, and never went back up.
This anecdote supports the notion that people are inherently motivated to follow their commitments, in this case, a private one between customer and proprietor. The principle of commitment and consistency, though, goes further.
Robert Cialdini:
And it’s in private that you make a commitment, you get a significant increase. But if it’s in public, you get a much larger increase in congruency of a subsequent behavior. The one that produces the biggest leap forward in terms of compliance, it’s the public commitment.
Shankar Vedantam:
One of the techniques that follows from this principle is something called the foot-in-the-door technique. What is the foot-in-the-door technique, Bob?
Robert Cialdini:
It’s a technique that was uncovered back in the ’60s by Jonathan Freedman, in which he asked people to make a small initial step in a particular direction… The interesting thing is that, if they had made that first step, they were significantly more likely to say yes to the larger request.
So the classic study was, people in Palo Alto, California, Freedman was at Stanford at the time, they were asked to put a small sign in their window of their car or their home that said, “Please drive safely. National Driver Safety Week.” Some were asked to do so. Others of their neighbors were not asked to do that. Then a week later, somebody came to their homes and asked them to put a big sign on their lawn promoting driver safety week. Those people who put the small sign in their window were significantly more likely to put the large sign on their lawn.
“One assumption about compliance that has often been made either explicitly or implicitly is that once a person has been induced to comply with a small request he is more likely to comply with a larger demand. This is the principle that is commonly referred to as the foot-in-the-door or gradation technique”
Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of personality and social psychology, 4(2), 195.
So persuasion is sometimes as simple as eliciting someone’s explicit commitment to do something they implicitly know is right and achievable. Our human social nature compels them to follow through in many circumstances.