Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior (24 page)

As you’ll learn in the next chapter, a perceived sense of freedom is a powerful principle that has other persuasion applications. The next chapter explains a few other strategies you can use to take advantage of that principle to trigger even more momentum from your target.

CHAPTER 13

Motivate Through Limitations

Do
not
read this chapter. Skip directly to the next chapter, and don’t
ever
come back to read this chapter.

What are you doing? Why are you still reading when I deliberately told you to skip to the next chapter? What’s the psychological force behind your motivation? There are two main forces that are guiding your behavior right now:

1. Your curiosity became aroused when I tried to stop you from reading further.
   
2. I limited your autonomy and freedom, which caused you to actively fight that limitation.
   

This chapter will teach you how to use the second reason to boost your persuasion. Specifically, you’ll learn why limiting someone’s freedom can become a powerful motivator, and you’ll learn clever strategies to use that concept to further drive your target’s momentum.

THE POWER OF LIMITATIONS

You’re eating dinner with your family when it suddenly appears. Right in front of you appears the most marvelous entity that your mere human eyes have ever witnessed. It’s magnificent. It’s majestic. It’s, dare I say, beautiful. It’s the very last slice of pizza.

Part of you wonders how that slice became so valuable within such a short period of time. But that part of you quickly gets shoved aside by the part of you that simply
needs to have it
. There’s no time to question your motive; you have more important things to worry about, like the other vultures sitting around the table.

But you can’t appear
too
hasty. You need to plan your strike carefully. As you casually quicken your eating pace to finish your current slice, you discreetly shift your gaze toward your sister, the person that you perceive to pose the greatest threat. Through your peripheral vision—a type of vision that you
need
to use in such dire circumstances—you see her eyeing the last slice. Uh-oh. Time to move fast.

You start to scarf down the remainder of your slice, but it’s becoming too late. In what seems to be slow motion, your sister reaches her hand toward the middle of the table, picks up that last slice, and brings it back to her own plate. Ugh. You failed.

Oh well. You resolve your dissonance by reminding yourself that you already ate 4 slices and that you’re completely stuffed anyway.

WHY ARE LIMITATIONS SO POWERFUL?

So, why
did
that slice of pizza become valuable when it was the last slice? Or for that matter, why does
any
piece of food—whether it’s a box of chocolates or a bin of cookies—become more valuable when there’s only one piece left? This section will explain three principles behind that phenomenon: psychological reactance, loss aversion, and commodity theory.

Psychological Reactance.
To understand the answer behind the pizza phenomenon, it’ll help if you recognize how it’s similar to the first illustration in this chapter where I asked you to immediately skip to the next chapter.

In both illustrations, one of your freedoms was limited. In the opening example, I limited your freedom to read this chapter; in the second example, I limited your freedom to eat pizza. Do you see the common outcome? Whenever a freedom becomes limited, we react. Literally. It’s called
psychological reactance
(Brehm, 1966). When we perceive a particular freedom becoming restricted, we feel a natural tendency to maintain or recapture that freedom.

Have you ever wondered why some teenagers, after being told by their parents that they can’t date a specific person, want to date that person even more? When teenagers perceive their parents to be controlling their behavior, they’re more likely to engage in psychological reactance by touting the infamous, “You can’t control me! I can make my own decisions!” Indeed, reactance can explain why teenagers constantly battle their controlling parents and why warning labels on violent television programs actually increase viewership (Bushman & Stack, 1996).

Like most principles in this book, psychological reactance is so strong that it can exert its influence on a nonconscious level. To demonstrate, place yourself in the shoes of participants in a clever experiment (Chartrand, Dalton, & Fitzsimons, 2007). Think of people in your life that you perceive to be very controlling. Now, among that list of controlling people, choose one person who typically wants you to work hard and one person who typically wants you to have fun.

Researchers in that experiment subtly extracted that information from students so that they could examine how they would perform on an intellectual task after being subliminally exposed to those names. Remarkably, even though participants weren’t able to consciously notice the names of those controlling people, they still engaged in psychological reactance. People performed significantly worse on the intellectual task when they were primed with the name that they associated with working hard, whereas people performed significantly better when they were primed with the name that they associated with having fun. Psychological reactance is so strong that it occurs automatically and outside of our conscious awareness.

Loss Aversion.
I hate to spring this upon you, but you need to make a life-or-death decision right now. There’s a spreading disease that can potentially kill 600 people, and you need to choose between two prevention programs:

• Program A:
  A total of 200 people will be saved.
  
• Program B:
  There is a 33% chance that all 600 people will be saved, but there is a 67% chance that nobody will be saved.
  

When presented with those two hypothetical options, most people chose Program A because the idea of saving 200 people seemed very promising (whereas gambling with people’s lives seemed too risky).

But let’s change the programs a bit. Forget Program A and B. Pretend you never even read them. Instead, imagine that you needed to choose between the following two options:

• Program C:
  A total of 400 people will die.
  
• Program D:
  There is a 33% chance that nobody will die, but there is a 67% chance that 600 people will die.
  

Which option would you choose? Like most people, you probably felt compelled to choose Program D, which is exactly what most people chose in the original experiment (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981).

But there’s something interesting about those programs. Did you notice that the second set of programs was exactly the same as the first? Program A is identical to Program C, and Program B is identical to Program D; the only difference was the wording of the programs and the emphasis on saving versus losing lives.

Since those two sets of programs were exactly the same, why did the results flip when people were presented with the set second of options? The answer: the pressure to avoid a loss overpowers the pressure to achieve a gain (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991).

We all feel an instinctive urge to avoid losses, including the loss of an opportunity. When there’s only one slice of pizza remaining, we feel an increased pressure to seize that last slice before we lose the opportunity. Instead of viewing the slice of pizza through a lens of freedom (such as through psychological reactance), loss aversion views that pizza scenario in terms of a possible lost opportunity, a similar idea but a distinction nonetheless.

Commodity Theory.
In the pizza anecdote, there was a third factor that compelled you to want that last slice: commodity theory (Brock, 1968). This theory proposes that people place higher value on something when it’s perceived to be limited and unavailable, compared to when it’s plentiful and abundant.

A group of researchers applied the same pizza concept to chocolate chip cookies. When people were presented with a jar containing two cookies, they rated the taste of the cookies higher than a group of people who were given a jar containing ten of those cookies (Worchel, Lee, & Adewole, 1975). Not only were you more compelled to take the last slice of pizza, but this principle suggests that you might have also enjoyed it more.

Commodity theory is so robust that it applies to other contexts besides food. In addition to the commonly cited “drunk goggles” reason, commodity theory can explain why men in bars tend to find women more attractive as the night progresses (Madey et al., 1996). At the beginning of the night, the opportunity to score a date is promising, but as the night wears on, that opportunity gradually shrinks. As the end of the night gets even closer, that opportunity becomes even more limited, which causes men to find the remaining women more attractive.

PERSUASION STRATEGY: MOTIVATE THROUGH LIMITATIONS

To summarize the chapter so far, there are three ways in which limitations influence perception and behavior:

1. When we perceive a freedom becoming limited, we feel an urge to engage in psychological reactance to reclaim that freedom (e.g., when our freedom to eat pizza becomes limited, we feel a stronger desire to reclaim that freedom by eating pizza).
   
2. We are psychologically wired to avoid loss; when an opportunity is becoming limited, we feel a pressure to seize that opportunity to avoid losing it (e.g., when our opportunity to eat pizza is diminishing, we feel compelled to seize that last slice).
   
3. When we perceive something to be limited, scarce, or unavailable, we place higher value on the item in question (e.g., a slice of pizza becomes more valuable when it is the only slice left).
   

Albeit similar, psychological reactance, loss aversion, and commodity theory can explain why limitations are so powerful. Now that you understand these principles, the next section will explain how you can use them to drive more momentum from your target.

Limit Their Options.
The previous chapter described how allowing your target to choose an incentive can help spark intrinsic motivation because it promotes their freedom. Although the previous chapter described choice as a good thing, choice can become a detriment when there are
too many
options from which to choose. Popularized by Barry Schwartz (2004), this
paradox of choice
can lead to two negative outcomes: (1) people are less satisfied with their decision, or (2) people avoid deciding altogether.

Take a look at the following two sets of options:

Set 1

Option A

Option B

Option C

Set 2

Option A

Option B

Option C

Option D

Option E

Option F

Option G

Option H

Option I

Option J

Those options could represent anything (e.g., different brands of jeans that a clothing store sells, number of houses that a real estate broker shows a client). For the sake of the example, imagine that each set represents different mutual funds that an investment firm offers its customers. As you can see, one firm offers a limited number of options (Set 1), whereas another firm offers a plethora of options (Set 2). The remainder of this section will use this hypothetical example to explain the two negative outcomes that can occur with too many options.

Outcome 1: Lower Satisfaction with Decision.
There are two main reasons why offering too many options can cause people to feel less satisfied with their final decision.

First, when you increase the number of options, you also increase people’s expectations for the quality of the final option. When the number of options surpasses a certain point, people’s heightened expectations may become an extreme anchor point that triggers a contrast effect and causes the final option to seem below average (Diehl & Lamberton, 2008).

The second reason stems from loss aversion. Take a look at the following two gambling situations:

1. There is a 90% chance you will win $10, but there is a 10% chance you will win nothing.
   
2. There is a 90% chance you will win $1 million, but there is a 10% chance you will win nothing.
   

In both situations, the loss is the same: you win nothing. Since each loss is exactly the same, any rational human being should feel exactly the same with each loss. But it’s crystal clear that those losses would result in very different feelings; you’d probably forget the $10 loss immediately, but the $1 million loss will drive you crazy.

How does that relate to presenting options? You should first recognize that, typically, any option naturally offers unique benefits and drawbacks compared to other options. In our mutual fund example, some mutual funds would offer certain benefits that aren’t offered in other funds, and vice versa. Due to these natural tradeoffs, any option that you choose must naturally forgo certain benefits that are offered only in other funds. Your dissatisfaction enters the equation once you recognize that, when you make your decision, you’re
losing
some benefits that are only offered in other funds.