Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion

By starting with an extreme request sure to be rejected, a requester can then profitably retreat to a smaller request (the one desired all along), which is likely to be accepted because it appears to be a concession.

It seems it was not the whole series of words but the first one, because, that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word because and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some ... See more

The second important thing to understand is that we, too, have our preset programs, and although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into running the right programs at the wrong times.

Because of the increasing tendency for cognitive overload in our society, the prevalence of shortcut decision-making is likely to increase proportionately. Compliance professionals who infuse their requests with one or another of the levers of influence are more likely to be successful. The use of these levers by practitioners is not necessarily ex... See more

Research shows that messages are more likely to be successful if recipients can first be made to feel positively toward the messenger.

It is possible to defend ourselves against the detrimental effects of authority influence by asking two questions: Is this authority truly an expert? and How truthful can we expect this expert to be? The first directs our attention away from symbols and toward evidence for authority status. The second advises us to consider not just the expert’s kn... See more

One favorite and profitable tactic of certain compliance professionals is to give something before asking for a return favor. The exploitability of the tactic is due to three characteristics of the rule of reciprocation. First, the rule is extremely powerful, often overwhelming the influence of other factors that normally determine compliance with ... See more

They wanted to see if, instead, they could just give the dishes a label that would do the trick. Although they found a label that worked particularly well, they were surprised it wasn’t one they’d thought to use previously for this purpose, such as “Specialty of the house” or “Our chef’s recommendation for tonight.” Rather, the label merely describ... See more

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.