Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion [Book Review]
Last 3 months have been an exciting journey for me reading this book which reveals about how have the compliance professionals [so called Marketeers] have influenced my mind to benefit them. The book also helps us understand the ways you can influence others if you want them to accept your decisions.
This book has plenty of applications like
- It can help you in defending yourself from Influence of marketing professionals.
- It can help you in taking a right decision to as many people as possible.
- It can be used to design & craft such products which will be widely accepted by users. This book is an excellent prologue if you are interested in studying Product Design or User Experience Design.
The book has been written by Robert B. Cialdini who is an expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion.
In this article, I am going to briefly explain the most important principles which you all should remember to use or defend when someone tries to influence you. I will be using the exact insightful examples given in the book which would help you to relate to each principle with some existing incident in your own life.
First Principle the book explains is the — “Contrast Principle”
This principle explains that when you do 2 things in succession, the outcome of the first thing always influences your second thing. A simple day to day experiment from the book, anyone can do to verify is — Take three pails of water, one cold, one at room temperature and one hot. After placing your one hand in the cold water & one hand in the hot water for 1 minute, please put your hand in the lukewarm water simultaneously. Amusingly even though your both the hands are in the same bucket but, the hand which was in cold water feels if it is now in hot water, and the one which was in hot water feels its like in cold.
This is a common psychological principle which can be used in Design very effectively. A nice precise article to read upon that is —
Second Principle in the book is — “Reciprocation”, The Old Give and Take…
This principle means that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. This is by far, the most universal & widely used method of influence I have seen around the Globe in all communities. Also, this principle has been used since eternity as the archeologist Richard Leakey tells: “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food & their skills in an honoured network of obligation.”
In order to understand its underpinnings let us see a practice used by the famous Hare Krishna/ISKCON society for fund raising. In the 80’s or 90’s, many people from this society used to be standing in public places & would quickly greet passerby with a small flower like Rose as a gift and in most cases passerby fail to return it as the solicitor says it is a ‘Gift’ from our side. This is a perfect example of rule of reciprocation. Now that the passerby has received a gift so he is indebted to the Krishna’s volunteer. Now the volunteer would quickly ask for a donation and in most of the cases the passerby would not deny and give something.
Another important application of this principle is being used by giving concession to anyone which also can make a person indebted to you & work as perfect to receive compliance from that person. Door to door salesman are given special training to use this concept. The salesman first try to sell something very expensive to the customer which they know the customer will never buy. When the customer refuses, they give them the concession to at least buy something inexpensive & small which they actually wanted to sell. The customer does not know about this & in most cases would go ahead & buy it. This is a smart way of selling or getting compliance, so whenever you bargain in the market with a shopkeeper you can also try out this concept.
Also, always be aware of other people using this with you and avoid getting into the trap. The best way to reply to someone’s favour is -
Never say “You’r welcome” to someone’s “Thank You” but say “No problem, I know you would have done the same for me if I were you.”. This will save you from being the reciprocity principle. — Robert B. Cialdini
Rule of Reciprocation can be used in many ways in User Experience. The system with which a user is interacting should always provide some benefit or advantage to the user so that he is indebted to return the favour if the system asks for any Feedback or Premium Subscription to be done. Few followup links on the same are:
Third Principle is “Commitment and Consistency”
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. — Leonardo Da Vinci
People have a general desire to appear consistent in their behaviour. People generally also value consistency in others. If someone has committed to something, he will take it to be a simpler way to influence in decision making in order to become consistent.
An experiment done by some renowned psychologists on the beach helped to confirm this principle. An experimenter after laying down on a beach with a radio & some clothes went away for a few minutes with many other people laying nearby. In two different instances, the results were very drastically different which confirm the principle of commitment. In one instance the experimenter asked other people to look after his belongings & in the other he did not ask anything. When another experimenter, posing as a thief tried to steal the radio & clothes, the second set of people completely ignored but the first set of people who had committed to the first experimenter reported & took some action to save the belongings. This is startling to know that just getting some verbal commitment from people can influence them to act on something.
It is rightly said I guess that “If we write down our Goals & Ambitions we are more likely to follow them & take actions to achieve them”.
In user experience, this principle has been used to drive definite sales through the concept of Wishlist on numerous e-commerce sites, one of the starting ones being Amazon. Any customer is more likely to buy a product if he has committed by adding it to their wish list.
Fourth Principle is “Social Proof”
This principle states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find what other people think is correct.
This is why we always behave the same way as most of the people are doing. This is also popularly known as the Herd mentality. We view a behaviour as more correct in a given situation to the degree what we see others performing it. With this reason, we drive fast on a certain stretch if others are driving fast without even caring to know the limit, or laughing at a joke in a party if everyone is laughing although the joke might be nothing funny.
This principle has been used & is being used by advertisers in ads with words like “largest selling” or “fastest growing” which inadvertently sells us their product in our minds. A classic example of social proof offered by Cialdini is the effectiveness of canned laughter in enabling an audience to find jokes funnier and to laugh more. Even slightly funny material is considered more humorous by an audience when the material is presented with canned laughter.
Social Proof can very easily be used in our User Experience design to drive more engagement. We should always highlight the positive feedback of other users on the products so that it can act as a weapon of influence on other users for their acceptance. Few important links to dig deeper about this phenomenon are:
Fifth Principle is “Liking”
We always will like to buy a product if one of our friends, or our favourite celebrity or our favourite sportsperson will recommend us, isn’t it. This is called the principle of “Liking”. Almost anything we do in life we prefer doing with people we like and enjoy being around. This is the reason you find great movie stars used in advertisements to endorse & selling anything because they can easily be liked by the consumers.
The psychology researchers have found extensive examples on this principle & a popular one being of the Guinness World Record holder Joe Girard, who has record of being ‘greatest car salesman’ selling Chevrolets. He used to find the perfect salesman which customer would like & the perfect price which customer was looking for. Robert B. Cialdini mentions 5 factors which can help someone like you:
- Physical attractiveness — Good looks suggest other favorable traits, i.e. honesty, humor, trustworthiness
- Similarity — We like people similar to us in terms of interests, opinions, personality, background, etc.
- Compliments — We love to receive praises, and tend to like those who give it.
- Contact and Cooperation — We feel a sense of commonality when working with others to fulfil a common goal.
- Conditioning and Association — We like looking at models, and thus become more favourable towards the cars behind them.
User Experience is all about creating an aura of likeliness for the user with your product or service. If the user really likes your interface or product, he will surely prefer to use it over its alternatives. Here I am adding few links which derive some applications from this principle into the field of Design:
Sixth Principle is “Authority”
As Humans we have always been taught to respect & obey authoritative figures & personalities like our Elders, Teachers, Mentors etc. Authority is an important element in human survival. An accepted structure of authority and a chain of command offers human societies enormous advantages. This has shaped ur subconscious responses to requests for compliance & influence.
Rober B. Cialdini describes the infamous Milgram experiment, in which subjects believed they were inflicting increasingly high levels of electric shock on an actor, even though he was screaming for them to stop. The subjects were extremely uncomfortable with what they were doing, but they continued to shock the subject because the researcher urged them to do so. Milgram concluded from this experiment that humans possess an “extreme willingness … to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority.”
In the book it is mentioned, the principle of Authority along with principle of liking can be used in any advertisement to have someone recognised from any field to be used to sell any product. The human mind regards authority to be irrespective of the context in which that advertisement would be. Few links for further reading are:
Seventh Principle is “Scarcity”
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. — G.K. Chesterton
You must have seen a message on most of the travelling websites trying to book air ticket — “Very few tickets left”. Even after few days, the same message would be there. This message actually represent’s the scarcity principle & helps these website create an urgency in the mind of the customers to buy the product.
The price of collectibles is also decided based on its scarcity, as a rule more the rare any item, it will be more expensive. It is also a psychology principle that, the item in question becomes more attractive to us if we think we can’t have it. Compliance professionals have been using this concept for creating an artificial scarcity of things/products to earn profits.
We should always think before buying anything about its utility & not about its scarcity. If a thing is no use for us, it will be the same even it is present in plenty or very rare. This principle is used in public auctions, to get a good price of a product which couldn’t be sold otherwise. When your competitors make a bid, the competition makes it more scarce & you tend to like it more & will be willing to pay more for it even though it might not be worth it.
Design concepts can leverage this psychological principle to influence potential customers in making quick decisions. A lot of e-commerce websites show how many viewers are viewing a product & its limited quantity to ignite an emotion of competition & willingness to possess that item.
Few good links to shed more light upon this are:
Conclusion & Book Recommendation
I would conclude that is book is an amazing read for anyone who is trying to understand & answer his questions as to why compliance professionals are able to sell you their ideas. Also, if you are inquisitive about Human Psychology and want to learn about numerous experiments & researches, this book contains plenty of them.
Any person who is looking to start a career with User Experience Research or Design should also read this book, because in my opinion this defines the foundational principles of reaching out to your users through your designs or products. It is all about understanding how your User’s think and would perceive your design or the product.
