Introduction to “fixed action patterns” (or “click-run” responses): these are triggers that cause the subject to take a deterministic action. Some fixed action patterns are:

• using « because » triggers people to comply with your favor
• Expensive = good, inexpensive = bad (e.g. jewelry store selling more items after doubling the price, energy drink experience: people who paid more expected stronger effects and actually experienced them)
• Authority / expert implies compliance, except when the subject matters personally to the responder. Then they’ll analyze the arguments. (E.g. captainitis: cases of obvious errors made by a flight captain not corrected by other crew members)
• perceptual contrast: affects the way we see two things that are presented one after the other. We will over estimate the number of calories in a burger if we do it after estimating that of a salad. The relative difference plays in our absolute estimate. Salesman tries to sell you the costliest item first so that the second one seems way less costly in comparison

The book is organized around 6 principles of influences.

Reciprocation

• if you make a gift to somebody they will reciprocate the favor. This sense of future indebtedness lowers the natural inhibition against transactions (someone needs to give away something first). The rule plays on an obligation to receive a gift.

• however, the desire to repay fades with time.

• Compliance is not prompted by affection: people feel the same need to repay whether they like the person or not.

• Reciprocation works more if gift is personalized to customer or their current need

• The debt (that we ask for) can be much higher than the gift we did

• Reciprocation also works for concessions: a concession should be met by another one. First make a larger request, then retreat to a smaller one (we were actually interested in this small request all along).

  • examples: the kid trying to sell tickets but then offering a retreat to candy bars instead, or the watergate scandal as both using the contrast principle (see suit first then buy expensive sweater) and concession

  • however, this backfires if the first request is seen as unreasonable, in which case you are seen as not bargaining in good faith.

  • People follow through more than without the rejection-then-retreat method.

  • Do people refuse to engage in the future (due to resentment for example)? No, accepting the concession causes people to feel responsible for the contract and live up to it.

• a defense against reciprocation: accept the favor in good faith but be ready to redefine them as tricks later on. If they turned out to be a trick it’s okay to reject the subsequent request.

Stories:

• a woman who does not change jobs because her manager sends her and her sons Christmas and birthday gifts.
• Free sample story: supermarket operator who sold 1000lbs of cheese by inviting customers to cut off slivers for themselves as free samples (on a separate note, it seems that the principle of commitment and consistency also plays a role here)
• People leaving reviews in hotels are those that encountered an issue that was solved well by the staff
• I personally remember a time where I was looking to purchase a car. The salesman insisted on giving me free snacks despite my initial refusal. I understood only later that he was hoping to trigger the reciprocation principle.

Personal note: the problem for applying the reciprocity rule online is that the customer doesn’t have to face anybody before retracting. They don’t face the awkwardness of walking away.

Liking

• Only feelings can counteract with other feelings. The reason why people don’t believe in evolution is not flaws in the logic, it is emotions, beliefs and values: « It’s useless to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into ». If you tell non-believers that George Clooney believes in evolution they become convinced.

• 92% of consumers trust a product recommendation from someone they know. the next best thing is online reviews with 70%

• it’s harder to turn down a donation request when it’s a friend

• simply mentioning a friend by name works: “X suggested I should talk to you about <stuff I’m selling>”

• Attractiveness produces click-run response. Good looking = good. Dress well.

• Similarity:

  • show similar interests, mimick words and non verbal behavior

  • Researcher increased percentage of recipients who responded to a mailed survey by making the name of the sender close to that of the recipient. E.g. Cynthia Johnson would receive the survey from an official called Cindy Johansson. Nearly doubled completion rate.

  • In negotiations, bargainers are more likely to come to an agreement after learning of similarities

• Compliments:

  • Give a compliment behind a person’s back

  • Give compliments you want the recipient to live up to

  • « You seem to have an uncommon ability to structure data logically » given by a computer yielded affection towards the machine and made participants feel prouder of their work

  • Joe Girard: won best car salesman for 12 years straight, averaging 5+ cars sold every day. He sent a letter containing « I like you » to all of his 13000 former customers, 12 times a year

• “Alter-casting”: an individual is assigned a particular social role in hopes the person will act accordingly. E.g. by highlighting the role of protector, an insurance agent could make parents buy life insurance

• Repetition:

  • The more we see something (it feels familiar) the more we like it

  • however, repeated contact under unpleasant conditions decreases liking

• Situations where cooperation is necessary increases liking. Example: salespeople acting like your teammate, going into the manager’s office to « bargain » a deal

• Association:

  • Shakespeare: the nature of bad news infects the teller. We associate unpleasant informations with the person telling them. Works with positive news as well: halo effect.

  • during the American moon shot, every product made a reference to the American space program (to benefit from the aura).

  • After “Star Wars: Rogue” one came out, the Nissan « rogue » SUV saw an inexplicable jump.

  • People think of something more favorably if they’re eating.

  • Radio plays the jingle immediately before a big hit song.

  • Why are models hired for car ads? Manufacturers hope to associate beauty and desirability to the car by association

Social Proof

• « when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another » - Eric Hoffer
• 80% of college students saw the use of torture in interrogation as morally acceptable after being told that the majority of their peers favored it
• Drunk driving, hit and run etc are more likely if perpetrators believe that it is performed frequently by others
• After learning that the majority of their peers eat fruit to be healthy, Dutch students increased fruit consumption by 35%, all while assuring that they had no intention to change
• Just watching other kids playing with dogs cures the phobia of children
• People are more persuaded by information if they think that the intent is not to persuade them. Example: ad to recruit more sales people due to increased demand causes more customer interest
• Social proof helps us reduce our uncertainty about what to do
• Advice for requesting help during an emergency: point to someone specifically and give instructions “you in the blue jacket I need help, call 911”. Otherwise it gets classified as a non-emergency (social proof acts in your disfavor, as people see other people not reacting)
• During a presidential debate, the participant who elicits the most clapping and cheering is found to have won the debate by spectators
• Love bombing: how cult recruit and retain members. Initial showering of affection on prospective members, later threatened from withdrawal.
• Similarity is critical: we are affected by social proof only by our cohort (e.g colleagues but not managers, boys but not girls in the classroom, anti-smoking programs at school have long lasting effects only when it used same age peer leaders as teachers)
• Werther effect (Goethe): imitative suicide. Train wrecks, airplane crashes etc go up after a suicide is publicized. Those are hidden, imitative suicides. Imitation is especially strong in same cohort
• « it is a constant of life that many people live their life in psychological pain. How they deal with the pain depends on how others just like them have chosen to deal with it »
• Mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana (people’s temple cult)
• By alarming of suicide rates, low voting rates, alcohol and drug use, public officials only encourage it via social proof
• What if my startup has few users ? I can’t rely on social proof. You can point to future social proof: even if a minority exhibits a behavior, if it is growing, people want to get on the bandwagon. Future social proof can be used. (Example ?)
• We assume that if a lot of people are doing it, they must know something we don’t
• Beware of faked social proof (fake queues, only keeping good reviews i.e. selection bias)
• 3 conditions for social proof: uncertainty in the situation (meaning we seek other’s reactions to guide our own), many people, similarity with me (peer-suasion)

Authority

• Milgram’s experiment. The only case where it doesn’t work is if there is uncertainty in the authority and judgment falls back to the subject.

• Just dressing the part suffices. Example of famous actor who played a doctor, also played in a cough syrup commercial which boosted sales

• Wearing expensive clothing signals more competence

• Trustworthiness:

  • reference weaknesses of a product/performance etc early on (example of Warren Buffet mentioning bad investment at the start of his annual letter).

  • Appear to have no allegiance when giving a recommendation.

  • Recommendation letters containing an unflattering comment about the candidate convert better.

  • Be an authority (by having knowledge) rather than in authority. People don’t like to be ordered around.

Scarcity

• things that are difficult to get are typically better
• Apple under-supplies its stores with iPhones on the day of a launch. It fuels future desire for it. Scarcity by itself creates value (stamps or coins with a defect for example)
• only offer items for sale one at a time, not in abundance. Sales tactic: tell the interested customer that it was the last one and you already sold it. Because of its lost availability, the item becomes even more attractive. Before checking in the back, they ask them to commit and invariably come back with the item. Being in supply again, they might lose interest but by now they’re committed.
• Advertise on an item’s rare feature.
• People want conformity (buy the same brand) but distinctiveness (e.g. a different color)
• In general limited-supply appeals are more effective than limited-time appeals

Loss aversion:

• Daniel Kahneman’s prospect theory. People spend more to avoid losing something than obtaining it (loss aversion). Change « agree to this and we will have a deal » to « we have deal, agree to this if you don’t want to lose it ». The evolutionary reason: if one has enough to survive, a marginal increase in resources will be helpful but a decrease in them could be fatal.
• losses have a greater impact on attention (measured by gaze), physiological arousal (measured by heart rate, pupillary dilation) and brain activation (cortical stimulation)
• People are more willing to switch, cheat etc.. to prevent a loss of money, status than to gain it.
• fear of losing one of few items. Purchases on booking shot up once they introduced « only 2 rooms left at this price ».

Case study on a financial scam:

• First comes the "opening call" in which. a salesman identifies himself as representing a company with an impressive-sounding name and Wall Street address. He will simply ask the potential customer to receive the company's literature.
• A second call involves a sales pitch. The salesman first describes the great profits to be made and then tells the customer that it is no longer possible to invest.
• The third call gives the customer a chance to get in on the deal, he said, and is offered with a great deal of urgency. The idea is to dangle a carrot in front of the buyer's face and then take it away. The aim is to get someone to buy it quickly, without thinking too much about it. Sometimes, the salesman will be out of breath on the third call and will tell the customer that he "just came off the trading floor."

Psychological reactance theory by Jack Brehm:

• when free choice is threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us want these choices significantly more than before
• Roméo and Juliet effect: love was so strong because of parental interdiction
• Shoppers are more likely to sign a petition favoring federal price control after they had been informed that a federal official opposed the distribution of the petition
• Officials are more likely to punish violators on the violators’ birthday especially if they used it to plead for leniency
• Prohibition of laundry detergent containing phosphate in Miami. Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before. They rated them higher in all regards, compared to Tampa residents, unaffected by the restriction. They wanted what they could no longer have.
• To make sense of our heightened desire we assign better qualities to the object. The cause and effect are: we want it more (due to reactance) thus, to explain our desire, we rate it higher.
• Same for bans on information. People change mind on a subject after hearing it has been censored, without hearing arguments for it. We value scarce information more. **
• Mentioning a drawback to the suggested change reduces the perception of the customer to be pushed in one direction. (It also adds credibility because it mitigates the conflict of interest). Using “but you are free to say no” or “of course, do as you wish” increases compliance.
• We value things that recently became less available more than those that have always been scarce. Especially if they became scarce because of social demand.
• James C Davies states that revolutions are more likely to occur when a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short sharp reversal in those conditions.

A defense against scarcity: recognize when you are under heightened arousal due to scarcity tactics being used against you.

Commitment and consistency

using consistency to make someone commit to something.

• we want to look like consistent people
• Being viewed as X by others makes us act correspondingly (e.g. being charitable). Former president of Egypt Anwar Sadat would tell opponents that they are widely known for their cooperativeness before negotiating. He gave them a reputation to uphold.
• The more severe, embarrassing, painful the initiation, the more positive new members feel about the group (hazing). why ? we justify allowing ourselves to go through this initiation by keeping the group in higher regard, in order to keep consistency ?
• Large material rewards or threats may motivate immediate compliance but they don’t produce long term commitment. We accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think that we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressure.
• Commitments are most effective when they are public, effortful and viewed as internally motivated because those change self image. They can “grow their own legs” even after the external motivation was removed.

Examples:

• Amazon’s $5k incentive to quit program. By choosing not to quit, workers feel more committed because it was their decision.
• Horse betting: people feel even more confident on their decision after betting even though the odds didn’t change.
• Writing your goals down is effective because of commitment
• Low balling: first make an attractive offer, make customer sign papers, try out the new car, …, customer becomes committed. Then, restore the original price (claim that there was a mistake or that you forgot to add something), customer still follows through.

momentum of commitment:

• Progressively escalating commitments until asking for a big favor. After committing to something, people change their self image.
• e.g. after signing a petition they see themselves as having civic principles and are more likely to agree to bigger civic requests. After committing to a small request, they become in their own eyes the kind of person who does X (consistency). Most petitions don’t go anywhere, the goal is to make you more likely to take future steps aligned with it

Defense: ask yourself “knowing what I know now, if I could go back, would I make the same commitment?”

Unity

• Tribalism is in human nature : the self and in-group are overlapping in our brain circuitry
• The self is deeply tied to your in group. Rooting for people who resemble you feels like rooting for yourself. You want to show others than you are better

Examples of in-groups:

• (ethnicity) In NBA, officials call fewer fouls against players from their own race. The bias is so large that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.
• (ethnicity) Madoff and Ponzi stole from their peers because they had their trust
• (ethnicity) Fiscal misconduct by an adviser is twice as likely to be copied by another adviser if they share the same ethnicity.
• in college, a student’s weekly alcohol intake, frequency of drinking and alcohol related problems most conform to the levels of his or her best friend
• Contagious yawning is directly related to the degree of personal attachment between the two persons
• Buffet’s line to shareholders: “I will tell you what I would say to my family today if they asked me about Berkshire’s future” (increases confidence, treats the shareholder as in-group)
• children who observe their parents open their homes to strangers are more likely to help others later on. Observation of parental especially maternal caregiving leads to kinship like conduct. How to do this? Invite your child’s friend over for play date and sleepover. The key is to not afford them visitor guest status. The family’s children should see the visitor as treated like one of them. The visitor should receive the same treatments (chores, teachings, laundry). Include them in the family routine
• Localism: unity enhanced by spatial proximity (neighbors, hometown, state)

Synchronicity and music:

• Synchronicity can be achieved by doing the same actions together. E.g. a study of people listening to same / different beats while tapping showed that those who tapped together later exhibited stronger bonds.

• Acting together: unity gained through dances, rituals, songs, marches. Extends loyalty and sacrifice outside family unit. Coordination creates unity (marching in the military, music)

• The effect of music is related to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 (intuitive) vs system 2 (logical). It’s hard to think hard about an occurrence while experiencing it emotionally and vice versa. Music associated with system 1. 80% of songs talk about romance. It’s important to match sales pitch to the person’s type of thinking (emotions vs reason).

• Music should only be used to advertise familiar, feelings based products (snacks, body scents) in an emotional context. For utility products like software or safety equipment, music undercuts the effectiveness.

• Suffering together:

  • Heinrich Heimler commanded the protection of Jewish judge Ernst Hess who was wounded with him in the Somme offensive.

  • Shakespeare in Henry V: “for he today that sheds his blood with me, shall be my brother”

  • Social function of negative emotions: a society hit by a collective trauma becomes more united to adapt the next threat

Creation and advice:

• the IKEA effect: people who have built items themselves come to see their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts’ creations
• Co-creation: building something together results in elevated liking and self sacrificial support
• “We all admire the wisdom of those who have come to us for advice” - Ben Franklin

Shared enemy and mutual identity:

• Reminder of mutual identity: Jews and Arabs who read about high level of genetic identity become more supportive of peace.
• Remind your partner of your identity as a couple. “do this for us” works better than “do this for me” (shared self)
• Shared enemy: white and black Americans see each other as less distinct after reading statements regarding Islamic terrorists. Same for Jews and Arabs after reading about their shared susceptibility to cancer.
• constituents of groups often justify prejudice to another one by dehumanizing its members. This can be countered with evidence of elemental human emotion experienced similarly.
• Connections forged from common enemies, shared identity, similar emotional responses are not as potent as establishing family-like relationships. Those connections run counter to the powerful Darwinian pressures in competing for resources. They shrink especially in the presence of a threat.

Side note on f-commerce (commerce in friendship groups; a subset of e-commerce)

“According to social-media software-provider Awareness, which consults with major brands, the profits from online f-commerce can be great. Consider what Awareness reported regarding the f-commerce efforts of a pair of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, Macy's and Lev's: "Macy's Fashion Director allows users to create an outfit and then collect opinions and votes from friends about buying the outfit. Using Fashion Director, Macy's was able to double its Facebook 'fans to 1.8 million, and increase sales by 30% during the time it was launched. Levi's Friends Store creates personalized stores made up of items that friends like. The Store attracted more than 30,000 fans when it launched, and allowed Levi's to increase its social reach to over 9 million fans. The Friends Store has a 15% higher sales rate and a 50% higher average order value." Author's note: I am particularly taken with the evidence from Levis Friends Store, as its influence doesn't come from friends who say they like the styles that the Store's members have chosen. Rather, it comes from knowledge of the existing style preferences of friends, which then increases purchases of those styles.”

Daniel Kahneman’s “focusing illusion” (seemingly unrelated to unity?):

• people presume that if they are paying attention to a particular thing, it warrants their interest. At times we can believe something is important not because of its inherent significance but instead because some other factor has drawn our attention to that aspect. E.g. the media coverage of 9/11 prior to its anniversary spiked the “importance” score of the event in a survey about US history.
• In an A/B test, an online furniture store directed half of its traffic to a landing page that focused on an image of soft fluffy clouds before viewing the store items. They rated the furniture’s comfort as a more important factor for them. The other half rated price as more important.