That stands to reason. In most other professions, the quality of your work has little to do with Freud or Piaget; you don't need to understand how the human brain works to successfully patch up an appendectomy, build a house or even win a lawsuit. But in marketing, your competitive advantage is "getting" the human brain.
Early advertisers knew this intuitively, but it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that psychology and marketing officially got hitched. So much so that in 1957 Vance Packard would write "the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry."
A couple of decades later, one psychologist - Robert Cialdini - would catalog advertising's methods of persuasion into his influential book "Influence," breaking them down into six themes: reciprocation, commitment, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity.
A couple of weeks ago I posted on the force of "reciprocation" and how it could be used and misused in the effort to strengthen democracy. This week I plan to pick off each of Cialdini's other five persuaders and ask the same question: knowing that we're susceptible to this type of influence, how can we leverage its force for the good of democracy while dampening its negative effects?
Cialdini's second influence - "commitment" or "consistency" - is one we can all probably recognize. Let's say you're in a conversation with a group when someone states an opinion and you casually nod your head. Then someone turns to you and says "oh, why do you agree?" You may not have even been conscious of nodding, but now you're on record as agreeing, so what do you do? Most of will go along with our head's nod and make up some reasons of why we agree. Then, a funny thing will happen: we'll believe our reasons. And most of the time we won't even be aware that we may not have agreed in the first place.
This is the funny force of commitment and consistency. Cialdini calls it "our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done." Once we've made a "commitment" to an idea, a cause or a person we have a strong hankering to stick to it.
That will be obvious for big "commitments" like a marriage proposal or starting a new job. But what's surprising is how powerful little commitments can be.
Freedman and Fraser were two psychologists that tested the power of such small commitments in the 60's. They wanted to see if they could get California homeowners to place large, garish "Drive Carefully" signs on their lawns. Most (that is 83%) who were approached by friendly canvassers understandably refused the eye-sores. But if residents had been asked two weeks earlier to display a small three-inch "please be a safe driver" sign (which most did) then, remarkably, 76% would later agree to the gargantuan signs. Even more surprising to the researchers was that if homeowners had been asked earlier to sign a "keep California beautiful" petition, half would later agree to the plant the hulking signs on their manicured lawns.
What was going on? Freedman and Fraser figured that by first taking the three-inch drive safely sign or signing the beautification petition, residents began to think of themselves as people who cared about safe driving or, more broadly as in the petition case, as "public spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles." When later asked to make a large civic sacrifice, those residents rose to the task because, after all, that's what a civic minded person would do.
Some psychologists have come to understand this "commitment" principle as a by-product of "cognitive dissonance." If you're like me, you use that term to describe moments when you experience two contradictory phenomena, but that's not what the professionals mean by it. In the psych world, "cognitive dissonance" is the experience of doing something that is not in line with what you believe. So if you consider yourself an honest person, but you find yourself lying to your friend, or if you're on a strict no-sweets diet and you sneak a late night brownie, you will experience cognitive dissonance. It is, apparently, an uncomfortable sensation - so much so that people will squirm until they relieve the dissonance in one of two ways, either by changing their behavior or by changing their mind. You can probably guess which way people usually go. Instead of going back to your friend and coming clean or finding a new way to keep you from cheating on your diet, you - like most - will more likely explain to yourself why it was okay to lie in that instance or tell yourself "it's okay if I cheat once in a while." Changing your mind, after all, is easier than changing your behavior.
In many ways this goes completely against how we imagine we live our lives. Most of us think "I decide what I believe or what I want and then I act accordingly." But psychologists tell us we may, in fact, act first and then decide what we believe based on our actions.
This commitment instinct happens whether or not we're the only ones who know we're being consistent. But if others are watching what we say and do, we become even more dogged in our consistency. Two other psychologists, Deutsch and Gerard, tested the difference between private and public consistency by asking three groups to "commit" to a estimate (the length of a line). One group picked a number in their head, and a second group privately wrote down the number, while the third publicly posted their guess. Next, all three groups were given more information about the line and asked to reassess their answers. Even though they had kept their guess "private," those that simply wrote down their guess were less likely to change their first answer than those who kept their guesses in their head. The "act" of writing, it seems, was enough to trigger the force of commitment. But those who went public with their answers were by far the least likely to change their first estimate. Even in the light of convincing information that they were wrong, the pull to appear consistent won out.
Our bent toward consistency is probably, all in all, a good thing. If none of us followed through with our commitments and we all changed our minds with the least whim, the world would be a scarily unpredictable place. Likewise, if we couldn't depend on our earlier beliefs but had to re-think our stance on every issue or decision, the world would come to a standstill as we all stood lost in deep thought. But as Emerson famously phrased, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Sticking with consistency for consistency's sake can lead us down treacherous paths.
Marketers aren't the only ones who know the power of manipulating minds through commitment. The Chinese during the Korean war, according to Cialdini, were masters of converting American POWs into communist supporters; by getting US soldiers to make even the smallest concessions (that "the United States is not perfect") and to copy out pro-Chinese sentences, they were able to slowly nudge the GIs into feeling more favorably about their captors. Back at home, activists use similar techniques to pull in new converts, as Ziad Munson describes in "The Making of Pro-life Activists."
But it doesn't take a skilled manipulator to make consistency a "hobgoblin." We'll lock ourselves into foolish consistencies without much assistance. Nowhere else is that more true than in politics.
There's a good reason why political campaigns only bother seeking out the votes of independents. They all know that when it comes to casting votes, the vast majority of us will vote for the party we voted for last election - which is probably the same party we voted for when we first visited the polls after our 18th birthday. People not only don't change their party; we rarely change our views. As touched on above, that's partly a time saver (rethinking your position takes work), but it's also because how we voted before tells us what we believe and who we are. Those are things we don't change easily.
And it's probably why campaigns don't bother with non-voters. Unlike the California residents mentioned above, non-voters probably think of themselves as decidedly not civic minded. You don't have to just convince them to vote for you, you have to convince them that they are people who vote.
But just as consistency can shackle us to our stubborn ways, like the skilled influencers above, we can also use the commitment principle to inch us toward more "democratic" ways.
As the Chinese wardens showed us, getting someone to abandon their beliefs and consider other points of view does not happen over night. In the US today, we're not going to get die hard pro-lifers to agree right off the bat that abortion should be a woman's choice, just like adamant pro-choicers are unlikely to agree that abortions should be restricted. You'll need to take baby steps, so to speak. This is obvious. But what might be less apparent is how small those baby steps need to be. Instead of starting off by trying to convince pro-lifers that maybe sometimes abortions are okay, you may want to start off by getting them to agree pro-choice activists are humans who share some similar concerns. That step may get them to commit to the idea that they can listen to pro-choicers even though they don't agree with them. Then you open the doors to possible conversation.
You could even get non-voters to the polls, using similar tactics to the "drive safely" study. Instead of encouraging people to vote, campaigns might get more mileage by asking residents to sign petitions to improve their community. That simple act of signing may flip the "i'm a civic minded person" switch and be the thing that gets them walking to the voting booth the following Tuesday.
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