Book summary Social Influence 2022-2023
BOOK SUMMARY
INFLUENCE: SCIENCE AND PRACTICE
INTERNATIONAL EDITION (5TH EDITION)
Table of Content
Week 1...................................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 – Weapons of Influence.....................................................................................................2
Chapter 7 – Instant Influence: Primitive Consent for an Automatic Age............................................4
Week 2 & 3.............................................................................................................................................5
Chapter 4 – Social Proof: Truths are us...............................................................................................5
Week 4.................................................................................................................................................14
Chapter 3 - Commitment and Consistency.......................................................................................14
Week 5.................................................................................................................................................22
Chapter 2 - Reciprocation.................................................................................................................22
Chapter 5 - Liking..............................................................................................................................28
Week 6.................................................................................................................................................33
Chapter 8 - Scarcity...........................................................................................................................34
Week 7.................................................................................................................................................37
Chapter 6 - Authority........................................................................................................................37
WEEK 1
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CHAPTER 1 – WEAPONS OF INFLUENCE
A mother turkey only cares for chicks that make a specific “cheep-cheep” sound. If the chick doesn’t make that
noise, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it. A natural enemy of turkeys is the polecat; the mother turkey
will even attack a stuffed polecat as a defence. However, if the polecat makes a “cheep-cheep” noise (like the
turkey chicks), the mother will care for it the same way it would care for its own chicks.
This is something called a fixed-action pattern. These patterns can involve intricate sequences of behavior,
such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of these patterns is that the behaviors
comprising them occur in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the
patterns were recorded on tapes within the animals. When a situation calls for courtship, a courtship tape gets
played; when a situation calls for mothering, a maternal behavior tape gets played.
The most interesting aspect of all this is the way the tapes are activated. When an animal acts to defend its
territory for instance, it is the intrusion of another animal of the same species that cues the territorial-defense
tape of rigid vigilance, threat, and, if need be, combat behaviors; however, there is a quirk in the system. It is
not the rival as a whole that is the trigger; it is, rather, some specific feature, the trigger feature. Often the
trigger feature will be just one tiny aspect of the totality that is the approaching intruder.
Before we enjoy too smugly the ease with which trigger features can trick lower animals into reacting in ways
wholly inappropriate to the situation, we should realize two things. First, the automatic, fixed-action patterns
of these animals work very well most of the time. For example, because only normal, healthy turkey chicks
make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that
single cheep-cheep noise. By reacting to just that one stimulus, the average mother turkey will nearly always
behave correctly. It takes a trickster like a scientist to make her tapelike response seem silly. The second
important thing to understand is that we, too, have our pre-programmed tapes; and, although they usually
work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into playing the tapes at the wrong
times.
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more
successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer (1978)
demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying
machine: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” The effectiveness
of this request plus-reason was nearly total: 94 percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line.
Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I
use the Xerox machine?” Under those circumstances only 60 percent of those asked complied. In a third
condition, Langer again used the word ‘because’, but this time without adding a real reason for compliance,
simply restating the obvious: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to
make some copies?” The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason,
no new information was added to justify their compliance. Just as the cheep-cheep sound of turkey chicks
triggered an automatic mothering response from mother turkeys, even when it emanated from a stuffed
polecat, so the word because triggered an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects, even when
they were given no subsequent reason to comply.
Although some of Langer’s additional findings show that there are many situations in which human behavior
does not work in a mechanical, tape-activated way, she and many other researchers are convinced that most of
the time it does.
Automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much human action, because in many cases, it is the most
efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily
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complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex that has ever existed on this planet. To
deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person,
event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we
must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and
then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is present. Sometimes the
behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and
trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there is really no other choice.
Psychologists have recently uncovered a number of mental shortcuts that we employ in making our everyday
judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts allow for simplified thinking that works well most of
the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes. The tendency to respond mechanically to one piece
of information in a situation (i.e. use a heuristic) is what we have been calling automatic or click, whirr
responding; the tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of the information can be referred
to as controlled responding.
Quite a lot of laboratory research has shown that people are more likely to deal with information in a
controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are
likely to use the easier click, whirr approach.
It appears that when it comes to the dangerous business of click, whirr responding, we give ourselves a safety
net: We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available
information when an issue is important to us. However, sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time
so tight, the distractions so intrusive, the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we
are in no cognitive condition to operate mindfully (recall that earlier we learned that people are likely to
respond in a controlled, thoughtful fashion only when they have both the desire and the ability to do so!). In
that case: important topic or not, we have to take the shortcut.
It is odd that despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little
about our automatic behavior patterns. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their
properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work. In the animal kingdom,
there is a group of organisms often termed as mimics. They copy the trigger features of other animals in an
attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior tapes at the wrong times. The mimics
then exploit this altogether inappropriate action for their own benefit.
We too have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the
mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, however, our automatic tapes usually develop from
psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept. Although they vary in their force, some of
these principles possess a tremendous ability to direct human action. We have been subjected to them from
such an early point in our lives, and they have moved us about so pervasively since then, that you and I rarely
perceive their power. In the eyes of others, though, each such principle is a detectable and ready weapon, a
weapon of automatic influence. The profiteers can commission the power of these weapons for use against
their targets while exerting little personal force. This last feature of the process gives the profiteers an
enormous additional benefit—the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation
An example is the contrast principle: simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend
to see it as more different than it actually is. Be assured that the nice little weapon of influence provided by the
contrast principle does not go unexploited. The great advantage of this principle is not only that it works but
also that it is virtually undetectable. Those who employ it can cash in on its influence without any appearance
of having structured the situation in their favour. For example, it is much more profitable for salespeople to
present the expensive item first; to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle and will also
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cause the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with
an expensive one will make the expensive item seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable
consequence for most sales organizations.
CHAPTER 7 – INSTANT INFLUENCE: PRIMITIVE CONSENT FOR AN AUTOMATIC AGE
Very often when we make a decision about someone or something we don’t use all of the relevant available
information. We use, instead, only a single, highly representative piece of the total. An isolated piece of
information, even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly stupid mistakes—mistakes
that, when exploited by clever others, leave us looking silly or worse.
Despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that accompanies a reliance on a single feature of the available
data, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut. This shortcut can be compared to
the automatic responding of lower animals, whose elaborate behavior patterns could be triggered by the
presence of a lone stimulus feature (like the cheep-cheep of turkey chicks). The system is usually very efficient.
We have explored several of the most popular of the single pieces of information that we use to prompt our
compliance decisions. They are the most popular prompts precisely because they are the most reliable ones,
those that normally point us toward the correct choice. That is why we employ the factors of reciprocation,
consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so often and so automatically in making our compliance
decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly reliable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes instead of no.
We are likely to use these lone cues when we don’t have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to
undertake a complete analysis of the situation. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often
revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach. All this leads to an
unnerving insight: With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species,
we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal
with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.
Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information is likely to
be increasingly inadequate to handle the abundance of change, choice, and challenge that is characteristic of
modern life. More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of lower animals—with a mental
apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment.
Unlike the lower animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our
own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world. The consequence of our new deficiency is the
same as that of the animals’ long-standing one: when making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a
fully considered analysis of the total situation. In response to this “paralysis of analysis,” we will revert
increasingly to a focus on a single, usually reliable feature of the situation.
When those single features are truly reliable, there is nothing inherently wrong with the shortcut approach of
narrowed attention and automatic responding to a particular piece of information. The problem comes when
something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead us to erroneous actions and
wrongheaded decisions. As we have seen, one such cause is the trickery of certain compliance practitioners,
who seek to profit from the mindless and mechanical nature of shortcut responding. If, as it seems, the
frequency of shortcut responding is increasing with the pace and form of modern life, we can be sure that the
frequency of this trickery is destined to increase as well.
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