Influence: Science and Practice (16 page)

¹
It is important to note that the collaboration was not always intentional. The American investigators defined collaboration as “any kind of behavior which helped the enemy,” and it thus included such diverse activities as signing peace petitions, running errands, making radio appeals, accepting special favors, making false confessions, informing on fellow prisoners, divulging military information, etc.

READER’S REPORT 3.1
From a Sales Trainer in Texas

The most powerful lesson I ever learned from your book was about commitment. Years ago, I trained people at a telemarketing center to sell insurance over the phone. Our main difficulty, however, was that we couldn’t actually SELL insurance over the phone; we could only create a quote and then direct the caller to the company office nearest their home. The problem was callers who committed to office appointments but didn’t show up.

I took a group of new training graduates and modified their sales approach from that used by other salespeople. They used the exact same “canned” presentation as the others but included an additional question at the end of the call. Instead of simply hanging up when the customer confirmed an appointment time, we instructed the salespeople to say, “I was wondering if you would tell me exactly why you’ve chosen to purchase your insurance with .”

I was initially just attempting to gather customer service information, but these new sales associates generated nearly 19% more sales than other new salespeople. When we integrated this question into everyone’s presentations, even the old pros generated over 10% more business than before. I didn’t fully understand why this worked before.

Author’s note:
Although accidentally employed, this reader’s tactic was masterful because it didn’t simply commit customers to their choice; it also committed them to the reasons for their choice. And, as we’ve seen in
Chapter 1
, people often behave for the sake of reasons (Bastardi & Shafir, 2000; Langer, 1989).

An examination of the prison-camp program shows that the Chinese relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures to gain the desired compliance from their captives. Of course, the first problem facing the Chinese was to find a way to get any collaboration at all from the Americans. These prisoners had been trained to provide nothing but name, rank, and serial number. Short of physical brutalization, how could the captors hope to get such men to give military information, turn in fellow prisoners, or publicly denounce their country? The Chinese answer was elementary: Start small and build.

For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements that were so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist that they seemed inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). Once these minor requests had been complied with, however, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related, yet more substantive, requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States was not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later, he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.

The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp but to other POW camps in North Korea as well as to American forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator,” having given aid and comfort to the enemy. Aware that he had written the essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his self-image to be consistent with the deed and with the new “collaborator” label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration. Thus, while “only a few men were able to avoid collaboration altogether,” according to Schein, “the majority collaborated at one time or another by doing things which seemed to them trivial but which the Chinese were able to turn to their own advantage. . . . This was particularly effective in eliciting confessions, self-criticism, and information during interrogation” (1956).

Other groups of people interested in compliance are also aware of the usefulness and power of this approach. Charitable organizations, for instance, will often use progressively escalating commitments to induce individuals to perform major favors. Research has shown that such trivial first commitments as agreeing to be interviewed can begin a “momentum of compliance” that induces such later behaviors as organ or bone marrow donations (Carducci, Deuser, Bauer, Large, & Ramaekers, 1989; Schwartz, 1970).

Many business organizations employ this approach regularly as well. For the salesperson, the strategy is to obtain a large purchase by starting with a small one. Almost any small sale will do because the purpose of that small transaction is not profit, it is commitment. Further purchases, even much larger ones, are expected to flow naturally from the commitment. An article in the trade magazine
American Salesman
put it succinctly:

Start Small and Build U.S. Acres
©
Paws. Used By Permission.

The general idea is to pave the way for full-line distribution by starting with a small order. . . . Look at it this way—when a person has signed an order for your merchandise, even though the profit is so small it hardly compensates for the time and effort of making the call, he is no longer a prospect—he is a customer. (Green, 1965, p. 14)

The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique. Social scientists first became aware of its effectiveness in 1966 when psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser published an astonishing set of data. They reported the results of an experiment in which a researcher, posing as a volunteer worker, had gone door to door in a residential California neighborhood making a preposterous request of homeowners. The homeowners were asked to allow a public-service billboard to be installed on their front lawns. To get an idea of the way the sign would look, they were shown a photograph depicting an attractive house, the view of which was almost completely obscured by a very large, poorly lettered sign reading DRIVE CAREFULLY. Although the request was normally and understandably refused by the great majority of the residents in the area (only 17 percent complied), one particular group of people reacted quite favorably. A full 76 percent of them offered the use of their front yards.

The prime reason for their startling compliance has to do with something that had happened to them about two weeks earlier: They had made a small commitment to driver safety. A different “volunteer worker” had come to their doors and asked them to accept and display a little three-inch-square sign that read BE A SAFE DRIVER. It was such a trifling request that nearly all of them had agreed to it, but the effects of that request were enormous. Because they had innocently complied with a trivial safe-driving request a couple of weeks before, these homeowners became remarkably willing to comply with another such request that was massive in size.

Freedman and Fraser didn’t stop there. They tried a slightly different procedure on another sample of homeowners. These people first received a request to sign a petition that favored “keeping California beautiful.” Of course, nearly everyone signed since state beauty, like efficiency in government or sound prenatal care, is one of those issues no one opposes. After waiting about two weeks, Freedman and Fraser sent a new “volunteer worker” to these same homes to ask the residents to allow the big DRIVE CAREFULLY sign to be erected on their lawns. In some ways, the response of these homeowners was the most astounding of any in the study. Approximately half of these people consented to the installation of the DRIVE CAREFULLY billboard, even though the small commitment they had made weeks earlier was not to driver safety but to an entirely different public-service topic, state beautification.

At first, even Freedman and Fraser were bewildered by their findings. Why should the little act of signing a petition supporting state beautification cause people to be so willing to perform a different and much larger favor? After considering and discarding other explanations, Freedman and Fraser came upon one that offered a solution to the puzzle: Signing the beautification petition changed the view these people had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles. When, two weeks later, they were asked to perform another public service by displaying the DRIVE CAREFULLY sign, they complied in order to be consistent with their newly formed self-images. According to Freedman and Fraser:

What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes. (p. 201)

What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests, because that agreement can influence our self-concepts (Burger & Caldwell, 2003). Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier. It’s this second, general kind of influence concealed within small commitments that scares me.

Just Sign on the Plotted Line
Have you ever wondered what the groups that ask you to sign their petitions do with all the signatures they obtain? Often they don’t do anything with them, as the principal purpose of the petition may simply be to get the signers committed to the group’s position and, consequently, more willing to take future steps that are consistent with it.

It scares me enough that I am rarely willing to sign a petition anymore, even for a position I support. Such an action has the potential to influence not only my future behavior but also my self-image in ways I may not want. Further, once a person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image.

Who among Freedman and Fraser’s homeowners would have thought that the “volunteer worker” who asked them to sign a state beautification petition was really interested in having them display a safe-driving billboard two weeks later? Who among them could have suspected that their decision to display the billboard was largely a result of signing the petition? No one, I’d guess. If there were any regrets after the billboard went up, who could they conceivably hold responsible but
themselves
and their own damnably strong civic spirits? They probably never even considered the guy with the “keeping California beautiful” petition and all that knowledge of social jujitsu.

Hearts and Minds

Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” Once you’ve got a person’s self-image where you want it, that person should comply
naturally
with a whole range of requests that are consistent with this new self-view.

Not all commitments affect self-image, however. There are certain conditions that should be present for a commitment to be effective in this way: they should be active, public, effortful, and freely chosen. The major intent of the Chinese was not simply to extract information from their prisoners. It was to indoctrinate them, to change their attitudes and perceptions of themselves, of their political system, of their country’s role in the war, and of communism. Dr. Henry Segal, chief of the neuropsychiatric evaluation team that examined returning POWs at the end of the Korean War, reported that war-related beliefs had been substantially shifted. Significant inroads had been made in the political attitudes of the men: