Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (12 page)

Before the person in the 1st position answers, you immediately recognize that B is the correct answer. You might even think that the researcher is crazy for asking such a simple question. That’s why when the 1st person answers “C”, you’re caught off guard. Oh well. You’re not too worried because you’re confident that the person in the 2nd position will recognize that B is the correct answer.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. When the 2nd person confirms “C”, your small worry quickly turns to panic. What do you do now? Did you miss something? You scrutinize the lines again trying to spot something that you might have missed, but time is running out. Before you have time to rethink your answer, people seated in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th position all answer with a resounding “C.” Uh-oh. It’s now your turn. What would you do in this situation? Would you stick with your original answer, B? According to the results of the experiment, you probably wouldn’t.

In the actual study, the person seated in the 6th position was the only true participant in the study; everyone else was a confederate hired by Asch. The confederates were instructed to give incorrect answers to put social pressure on the person seated in the 6th position, and that social pressure was more powerful than many researchers had estimated. Despite a painfully obvious answer, an astonishing 76 percent of people conformed and gave the same incorrect answer to the question. The next section will expand on this psychological force and explain two reasons why it’s so powerful.

WHY IS SOCIAL PRESSURE SO POWERFUL?

This section will describe the two main reasons why we succumb to social pressure: informational influence and normative influence.

Informational Influence.
First, we sometimes conform to the beliefs and behavior of others because we come to believe that our own beliefs are incorrect. If the crowd’s opinion contradicts our own opinion, then we start to question the accuracy of our own belief, a tendency that becomes even stronger when the correct answer is ambiguous.

Unlike Asch’s experiment where the answer was obvious (which triggered normative influence, to be explained next), situations that don’t offer a clear and definitive answer will trigger informational influence because we come to distrust our own belief.

Consider another classic experiment on conformity where the answer was more ambiguous. In the 1930s, Muzafer Sherif (1936) examined the influence of social pressure on people’s perception of the autokinetic effect, an optical illusion where a small light
seems
to move if the surrounding environment is completely dark (a stationary light in darkness will seem to move because there’s no reference point that people can use to keep track of it).

In the experiment, people were placed alone in a dark room, where a small light was presented 15 feet in front of them. The light flashed for two seconds, and people were asked to estimate how far it moved (even though it didn’t actually move). The estimates varied widely when people made those estimates alone.

But something interesting happened when people were put in groups of three to make their verbal estimate. When people announced their estimates in groups, the estimates gradually converged over trials. For example, the estimate of the first flash may have elicited answers of 1 inch, 3 inches, and 8 inches from the three people. The estimates of the second flash, however, would have elicited estimates of 2 inches, 3 inches, and 5 inches. Likewise, the estimate of the third flash would show an even greater convergence of perhaps 3 inches, 3 inches, and 4 inches. With each new trial, the estimates from the three people always converged toward an average estimate.

When the answer to a question is unclear or ambiguous, people conform because they’re unsure of the correct answer. Upon hearing other people’s estimates of the movement of light, people started to question the accuracy of their own estimate, and so they gradually adjusted their estimates to more closely match the estimates from the other people.

How can we be sure that people changed their internal belief about the light movement and that they didn’t just give a new estimate to avoid appearing deviant? People were retested alone after the group trials, and their estimates remained near the same converged level that was produced in the group trial (Sherif, 1936). Although informational influence occurs when an answer is unclear or ambiguous, it’s replaced by normative influence when the answer is more obvious.

Normative Influence.
Perhaps even more powerful than informational influence is normative influence, the pressure to conform to avoid certain social consequences.

Unlike people in Sherif’s experiment, people in Asch’s experiment with the lines gave an answer that was different from their internal belief not because they distrusted their belief but because they felt pressure to avoid appearing deviant.

In a follow-up experiment, people were told that they arrived late and that they should only write their answer, rather than publicly declare it like the other participants. Despite the exact same conditions, people didn’t conform when they were asked to only write their answer because their deviance remained undetected by the others (Asch, 1956). Therefore, not only do we conform to other people due to an internal change in our belief (informational influence), but we can also conform to avoid appearing deviant, which can often lead to social rejection.

Why is social rejection so powerful? From a biological perspective, researchers have recently found that social rejection and physical pain share the same “neural circuitry” (the anterior cingulate cortex) (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). Social rejection is so powerful because it’s literally painful.

Pfft, yeah right
, you may be thinking.
If social rejection was physically painful, then I could just pop a Tylenol and feel better
. Well . . . yeah . . . you can. Because social rejection shares the same brain circuitry as physical pain, Tylenol has been found to ease the painful feelings that can result from social rejection (Dewall et al., 2010).

HOW POWERFUL IS SOCIAL PRESSURE?

Before explaining the specific persuasion strategies, I want to first explain the dangers of determining our behavior based on the behavior of others. Though it doesn’t relate directly to persuasion, this section is extremely important. So if you were only half-paying attention . . .
wake up!

Her name was Kitty Genovese. On March 13, 1964, she was brutally raped and stabbed to death in Queens, New York. What made her death particularly tragic is that it occurred in public. With people nearby. With
many
people nearby. Despite her shrilling cries for help—screams that lasted for 20 minutes—not a single person among the 38 bystanders called the police until 45 minutes later. The police arrived moments after that call, but they were a few minutes too late. Kitty died shortly after they arrived.

How could something so terrible occur in public? Were the bystanders cold and heartless individuals, or was there some psychological force involved? Those questions led a pair of social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, to explore the latter possibility (Darley & Latané, 1968).

Imagine that you just arrived to participate in a study, and the experimenter explains that you’ll be talking to other participants about personal issues via an intercom (because the topics were personal, the intercom would help preserve anonymity). The experimenter even says that he won’t be listening over the intercom because he wants to spark genuine conversation, so he mentions that he will only listen to the recording later. But to help keep the conversations organized, only one person will be able to speak into the intercom at a given moment. When someone is done talking, they can then press a button to give another person control of the microphone.

So there you are. You’re seated in your own private room, waiting for the other participants to join you over the intercom (for this trial, you’re told that you’ll only be talking with one other person). Once the other participant joins you, you both start talking about some personal issues. At some point in the discussion, the other person embarrassingly admits that he found it difficult to adjust to college life because he experiences occasional seizures. Albeit interesting and heartfelt, that statement doesn’t really faze you until a specific moment later in the discussion.

After the two of you have been talking for a while, the other person is in the middle of talking when he says:

I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody . . . I-uh-I’ve got a-a one of the-er-sei er-cr-things coming on [choking sounds] . . . I’m gonna die-er-er-I’m . . . gonna die-er-help-er-er-seizure-er-[chokes, then quiet] (Darley & Latané, 1968, p. 379)

Gulp. Being the only person aware of this potential seizure, what would you do? Would you go find help? Of course you would. And that’s what happened in the experiment. When people knew that they were the only person aware of the seizure, nearly everyone immediately left the room to seek help.

But something dangerously interesting happened when people believed that more participants were part of the intercom discussion. In addition to testing 2-person discussions, the researchers sometimes played recordings of other people over the intercom to make it seem like other people were participating in the discussion. Some people were led to believe that they were participating in groups of either 3 or 6 people. What the researchers found shed light on the tragedy with Kitty Genovese.

When people believed that the discussions included more people, their likelihood of helping dropped dramatically. When people believed that they were the only person speaking to the seizure-prone participant, 85 percent of people left immediately to seek help. However, that percentage dropped to 62 percent in 3-person groups, and it dropped even further to 31 percent in 6-person groups. With more people present, the less people felt the need to actively seek help. We would rather listen to someone having a terrible seizure than to seek help.

Why are we so heartless? It’s not that we’re heartless, but rather, it’s because we succumb to two main psychological forces that lower our tendency to help when there are more people present:

• Diffusion of Responsibility.
  In the experiment with the supposed seizure, nearly everyone sprung to action when they believed that they were the only person aware of the seizure because all responsibility rested on their shoulders. When they believed that more people were part of the discussion, however, responsibility was diffused across those people. With more people present, the less responsibility each individual felt because they assumed that someone else would seek help. With the 38 bystanders near Kitty Genovese’s death, they could all hear the rape and murder from inside their apartments, but no one sprung to action and called 911 because they falsely assumed that everyone else had already called.
  
• Audience Inhibition Effect.
  This second explanation stems from a potential embarrassment if we respond to a false “emergency.” If someone in the seizure study sought help and the person wasn’t actually having a seizure, then that would have felt somewhat embarrassing. People feel inclined not to seek help when a situation is ambiguous so that they can avoid a potential embarrassment. It’s truly mind-boggling how a miniscule moment of embarrassment could stand in the way of saving someone’s life.
  

If you remember anything from reading this book, remember this section. The advice in this section could help save your life or the life of someone else. And that’s why I wanted to share it before moving on to the other strategies.

Do
not
succumb to social pressure when it comes to helping people.
Always
be an active bystander, even if a situation seems ambiguous. If someone appears to be in trouble, don’t diffuse the responsibility to other people. Realize that people are looking to
you
to determine how they should be acting, so if you don’t act, other people will be less likely to act. If you see someone lying on the side of a hallway, don’t assume that she’s sleeping because everyone else keeps walking by. Stop to make sure that she’s okay before moving on.

Or if you’re ever in trouble yourself, don’t make a general plea for help. A general plea will only cause people to diffuse the responsibility. If you’re in desperate need of help, you should: (1) directly point to someone so that you destroy her cloud of anonymity within the crowd, and (2) give her a specific and direct request, such as to call 911. This strategy is the proper way to “persuade” someone to help you when the circumstances are dire.

PERSUASION STRATEGY: EMPHASIZE SOCIAL NORMS

Now that you know the important information surrounding social pressure, how can you use it to persuade other people? This section will describe a few clever techniques to exert that type of social pressure on your target.

Point Norms in the Desired Direction.
One great benefit about using social norms for persuasion is that a norm can change depending on the situation. If you’re in a library where everyone is talking loudly—a behavior that contradicts the typical norm of being quiet—you might assume that the norm in that particular library is more rowdy, and so you would feel less pressure to maintain the norm of talking quietly.