Influence summary

Has anyone ever given you something on the street, like a flower or a free sample of something? Do waiters at restaurants occasionally bring complimentary sweets along with your bill?

As innocent as these gestures may seem, they are actually relatively simple tricks to influence your behavior. You see, the first psychological principle of persuasion is the rule of reciprocation: we feel obliged to return favors.

Just as we desire to pay back favors, when we’re negotiating with someone and they make a concession, we’ll feel obliged to reciprocate it. This is known as the rejection-then-retreat strategy.

The author experienced this first-hand when a Boy Scout approached him on the street, wishing to sell him tickets to the annual Boy Scout circus.

“For a limited time only!” “Last chance!” “Sale ends in two days!”

There’s a reason advertisers often emphasize that a sale won’t last forever: according to the scarcity principle, when something is hard to obtain, it makes us more inclined to buy it. We humans see opportunities as more valuable if their availability is limited, and this seems to be because we just plain hate missing out.

You know the old adage that people only want what they can’t have? Well, there is some truth to it. Parents, for example, often observe this phenomenon in their children: a toy will immediately become far more attractive if a child is expressly forbidden from playing with it.

This effect is prevalent in the adult world too, and it is why censorship is such a double-edged sword: when information is banned, it is perceived as more valuable than if it were freely available.

Imagine you’re lying on the beach, enjoying a well-deserved day off. It’s a hot day, and you long for a refreshing dip in the water. But what are you going to do with your wallet and keys? Hide them? Or ask a neighboring sun-worshipper to keep an eye on them?

A study by psychologist Thomas Moriarty shows that asking someone is probably a better idea than you think.

From tribes in Africa to college fraternities in the United States, when a new member is being inducted into a group, initiation rituals commonly involve pain and degradation, sometimes even death. And efforts to curb the brutal practices always meet with dogged resistance. But why is that?

Quite simply, the groups engaging in these rituals know that if people go through a lot of trouble to attain something, they tend to value it more. The effort needed to achieve membership makes the members more committed to the group.

Have you ever wondered why sitcoms often have laugh tracks?

In fact, research indicates laugh tracks will make us laugh longer and more often, especially at bad jokes.

As we’ve just seen, people tend to look to others for guidance as to how to behave. And this tendency is strongest when the person observed is similar to ourselves, an effect that can be seen in how susceptible teenagers are to the opinions and fashion choices of their peers.

Our tendency to emulate others also produces a rather grim statistic: when a suicide is highly publicized in the media, the number of people who die in airplane- and car-crashes increases dramatically in the following week.

Have you ever been to a Tupperware party? If you go, be sure to appreciate the skill with which the business model leverages the power of compliance tricks. From reciprocity, where every attendant gets some kind of gift before the buying begins, to social proof, where each purchase made strengthens the view that similar people are also buying the product, the concept is masterfully crafted.

But perhaps the greatest trick is that the invitation for the party has not come from the Tupperware presenter, but rather someone whom every invitee likes: a friend.

From birth, we’re taught to always obey figures of authority, be they teachers, doctors or police officers. Unfortunately, this tendency to comply with authority is so ingrained and powerful that we don’t bother to think or challenge perceived authority figures before obeying them.

Renowned psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study in the 1960s showing that volunteers would administer potentially lethal electric shocks to others simply because they were told to do so by an authority figure. Although no one was harmed, the experimenters were surprised by the results.