Money

Hey everyone!

If you’ve ever encountered a salesperson, you’ve no doubt experienced the use of compliance techniques: ways of making people agree to a request without holding power over them. Many of these were defined by Robert Cialdini over his years of field and laboratory research, and ultimately compiled into his 2007 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Recently, I found myself in a situation that involved a few compliance techniques. One is the door-in-the-face technique. According to Cialdini (1975), this technique involves making an extreme request that will be turned down, in order to make the pre-planned follow-up request seem more appealing than it would without having the previous request to which to compare it. For example, you could ask someone to donate a thousand dollars to your cause, and then “back down” to twenty. You’ll receive considerably more donations than if you just asked for twenty dollars at the start.

Not all compliance techniques were defined by Cialdini, however. The other technique relevant to my experience is the exploitation of the norm of reciprocity. When someone gives you something, you typically feel guilty and seek to assuage that guilt by returning the favor to the person (Gouldner, 1960). Almost everyone feels this way. Salespeople can take advantage of this social norm by giving their mark something small and then inducing feelings of guilt until he or she concedes to buy the product.

Someone used both of these techniques on me a few weeks ago, while I was filling up at a gas station before going home for Spring Break. My friends had written something on my car’s rear windshield earlier that day, and I started to clean it off while my car was filling up.

Suddenly, a woman approached me, seeming to come from nowhere. She said hi and introduced herself and asked me where I was headed. Instead of being paranoid, I was more confused by her overly friendly demeanor. At first thought I knew her from somewhere. But then she offered to demonstrate her fancy cleaning product on my graffiti-ed windshield, and I figured out her intent.

While I’d already read about some of Cialdini’s techniques before, I had no idea about the norm of compliance. So although I knew that she wanted me to buy something, I didn’t know the real mechanism that “free samples” worked: By cleaning my windshield, I would feel compelled to buy her cleaning product. And it cleaned amazingly, far better than my scrubbing with the cheap gas station scrubber! It also included some sort of fancy hydrophobic wax coating. I could use it on my whole car. Plus, they’d donate fifty cents to some non-Susan B. Komen breast cancer charity (though I knew that these donations all occur at the salesperson’s initial purchase and were thus donated regardless of whether the salesperson sold their product). I valued it at about ten bucks.

She asked if I wanted to buy it, and I immediately said no. She laughed and said, “You haven’t even asked the price.” So I asked the price, and she said I could get two cans for $50 or one for $30. I laughed aloud and said no. She was unfazed, and said I could get one for $20 or two for $35. This was the second step of the door-in-the-face technique, making the follow-up offer. I still rejected her, and she walked away.

I went to get in my car, and then she came back with renewed energy. She put both cans of the product into my hands, and said I could take both for $20, or one for $15. Well, I could buy both for twenty bucks since I valued a can at ten, but I didn’t realistically expect to use both. So I offered her ten bucks for just one. She happily took it, which made me wonder just how little she paid for the cans to begin with.

Maybe I was taken advantage of, but I did get a half decent cleaner out of it at a fairly reasonable price.

Now if only I had the time to use it…

I’m a bit over my word limit, so I’ll skip explaining the song today. It should speak for itself. Rush – “Subdivisions”

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Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.

Cialdini, R. B., Vincent, J. E., Lewis, S. K., Catalan, J., Wheeler, D., & Darby, B. L. (1975). Reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The door-in-the-face technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 206–215.

Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25, 161–178.

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