50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon Page B

unfortunate victims of some disaster or disease, we can’t very well suddenly turn mean and grumpy and refuse others who are in a bad way. To be consistent, we feel compelled to offer a donation.
    Marketers know that if you get someone to offer a small commitment, you have their self-image in your hands. This is why some unscrupulous car dealers offer an initially very low price for a car, which gets us into the showroom, but later, with all the extras, it doesn’t turn out to be such a low price at all. Yet by this stage we feel committed to the purchase. Another trick is for salespeople to get customers to fill out an order form or sales agreement themselves, dramatically reducing the chances of them changing their mind. Public commitments are a strong force.
    Cialdini notes Emerson’s famous quote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Especially when you are marketed to, remember your natural tendency to be consistent and you will find it easier to back out of deals that really aren’t that good. Go with your gut feeling about the worth of something before you feel the pressure of consistency—and before you make an initial commitment.
Social proof
    Why is canned laughter still added to the recordings of television comedy shows, even when the creative people who make the shows feel insulted by it and most viewers say they don’t like it? Because research shows that viewers find the gags funnier when they hear other people laughing, even if the laughter isn’t real.
    Human beings need the “social proof” of other people doing something first before they feel comfortable doing it themselves. Cialdini provides a very dark example, the famous case of Catherine Genovese, a woman who was murdered in the street in Queens, New York City in 1964. Despite the fact that her assailant attacked her three times over the course of half an hour before finally killing her, despite the sound of screams and scuffles, and incredibly even though 38 people saw what was happening, no one stopped to intervene. Was this just a case of the heartlessness of New Yorkers? Possibly, although the witnesses seemed shocked themselves that they had done nothing. Finally an answer emerged. It seemed that everyone thought
someone else
would do something, and so no one did anything. A person in dire straits, Cialdini notes, has a greater chance of getting help if only one person is around, rather than a number of people. In a crowd or in a city street, ifpeople see that no one has gone to someone’s aid, they feel disinclined to help. We need “social proof” before we act.
    Before it became a common notion, Cialdini discussed the idea of “copy-cat” suicides. The most famous case of social proof in relation to suicide was the ghastly Jonestown, Guyana incident in 1978, when 910 members of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple cult took their lives by drinking from vats of poisoned soft drink. How was it possible that so many died so willingly? Most of the cult members had been recruited in San Francisco, and Cialdini suggests that the isolation of being in a foreign country contributed to the natural human tendency to “do what others like us are doing.”
    On a lighter note, advertising and marketing are often built around our need for social proof. Often our unwillingness to use a product until plenty of other people are is a useful way of knowing if something is good or not (a shortcut), but marketers get around this easily. Consider the use of “testimonials,” which, even when done by actors, still have the ability to influence our buying decisions.
Not missing out
    G. K. Chesterton said, “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” It is human nature to value something more when it is scarce. In fact, we are more motivated by the thought of losing something than we are by gaining something of equal value in its place.