Influence: Science and Practice (4 page)

Sometimes the behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there is really no other choice. Without these features we would stand frozen—cataloging, appraising, and calibrating—as the time for action sped by and away. From all indications, we will be relying on these stereotypes to an even greater extent in the future. As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to depend increasingly on our shortcuts to handle them all.
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Take, by way of illustration, the case (Zimmatore, 1983) of the automatic, mindless consumer response to a standard trigger for buying in our society—the discount coupon. A tire company found that mailed-out coupons which, because of a printing error, offered no savings to recipients produced just as much customer response as did the error-free coupons that offered substantial savings.

Psychologists have recently uncovered a number of mental shortcuts that we employ in making our everyday judgments (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Todd & Gigerenzer, 2007). Termed
judgmental heuristics
, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes. Especially relevant to this book are those heuristics that tell us when to believe or do what we are told. Consider, for example, the shortcut rule that goes, “If an expert said so, it must be true.” As we will see in
Chapter 6
, there is an unsettling tendency in our society to accept unthinkingly the statements and
directions of individuals who appear to be authorities on the topic. That is, rather than thinking about an expert’s arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert’s status as “expert.” This tendency to respond mechanically to one piece of information in a situation is what we have been calling automatic or
click
,
whirr
responding; the tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of the information can be referred to as
controlled responding
(Chaiken & Trope, 1999).

Quite a lot of laboratory research has shown that people are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are likely to use the easier
click
,
whirr
approach (Epley & Gilovich, 2006; Petty & Wegener, 1999). For instance, in one study (Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981), students at the University of Missouri listened to a recorded speech that supported the idea of requiring all seniors to pass comprehensive examinations before they would be allowed to graduate. The issue affected some of them personally, because they were told that the exams could go into effect in the next year—before they had the chance to graduate. Of course, this news made them want to analyze the arguments carefully. However, for other subjects in the study, the issue had little personal importance—because they were told that the exams would not begin until long after they had graduated; consequently,
they had no strong need to carefully consider the argument’s validity. The study’s results were quite straightforward: Those subjects with no personal stake in the topic were primarily persuaded by the speaker’s expertise in the field of education; they used the “If an expert said so, it must be true” rule, paying little attention to the strength of the speaker’s arguments. Those subjects for whom the issue mattered personally, on the other hand, ignored the speaker’s expertise and were persuaded primarily by the quality of the speaker’s arguments.

Expensive = Good (Taste)
© The New Yorker Collection 1986, by Gahan Wilson, from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved
.

So, it appears that when it comes to the dangerous business of
click
,
whirr
responding, we give ourselves a safety net: We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when an issue is important to us. No doubt this is often the case (Leippe & Elkin, 1987). Yet, I am not fully comforted. Recall that earlier we learned that people are likely to respond in a controlled, thoughtful fashion only when they have both the desire
and
the ability to do so. I have recently become impressed by evidence suggesting that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics (Cohen, 1978; Milgram, 1970). That is, sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so intrusive, the emotional arousal so strong, or the mental fatigue so deep that we are in no cognitive condition to operate mindfully. Important topic or not, we have to take the shortcut.
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It’s instructive that even though we often don’t take a complex approach to personally important topics, we wish our advisors—our physicians, accountants, lawyers, and brokers—to do precisely that for us (Kahn & Baron, 1995). When feeling overwhelmed by a complicated and consequential choice, we still want a fully considered, point-by-point analysis of it—an analysis we may not be able to achieve except, ironically enough, through a shortcut: reliance on an expert.

Perhaps nowhere is this last point driven home more dramatically than in the life-and-death consequences of a phenomenon that airline industry officials have labeled
Captainitis
(Foushee, 1984). Accident investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration have noted that, frequently, an obvious error made by a flight captain was not corrected by the other crew members and resulted in a crash. It seems that, despite the clear and strong personal importance of the issues, the crew members were using the shortcut “If an expert says so, it must be true” rule in failing to attend or respond to the captain’s disastrous mistake (Harper, Kidera, & Cullen, 1971).

An account by Thomas Watson, Jr., the former chairman of IBM, offers graphic evidence of the phenomenon. During World War II, he was assigned to investigate plane crashes in which high-ranking officers were killed or injured. One case involved a famous air force general named Uzal Ent whose copilot got sick before a flight. Ent was assigned a replacement who felt honored to be flying alongside the legendary general. During takeoff, Ent began singing to himself, nodding in time to a song in his head. The new copilot interpreted the gesture as a signal to him to lift the wheels. Even though they were going much too slowly to fly, he raised the
landing gear, causing the plane to drop immediately onto its belly. In the wreck, a propeller blade sliced into Ent’s back, severing his spine and rendering him a paraplegic. Watson (1990) described the copilot’s explanation for his action:

When I took the copilot’s testimony, I asked him, “If you knew the plane wasn’t going to fly, why did you put the gear up?”

    
He said, “I thought the general wanted me to.” He was stupid. (p. 117)

Stupid? In that singular set of circumstances, yes. Understandable? In the shortcut-demanding maze of modern life, also yes.

The Profiteers

It is odd that despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns. Perhaps that is so precisely because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who
does
know how they work.

To understand fully the nature of our vulnerability, let us take another glance at the work of the ethologists. It turns out that these animal behaviorists with their recorded cheep-cheeps and their clumps of colored breast feathers are not the only ones who have discovered how to activate the behavior tapes of various species. One group of organisms, often termed
mimics
, copy the trigger features of other animals in an attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior tapes at the wrong times. The mimics then exploit this altogether inappropriate action for their own benefit.

Take, for example, the deadly trick played by the killer females of one genus of firefly (
Photuris
) on the males of another firefly genus (
Photinus
). Understandably, the
Photinus
males scrupulously avoid contact with the bloodthirsty
Photuris
females. However, through centuries of natural selection, the
Photuris
female hunters have located a weakness in their prey—a special blinking courtship code by which members of the victims’ species tell one another they are ready to mate. By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship tapes cause them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace (Lloyd, 1965).
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Apparently, the tendency of males to be bamboozled by powerful mating signals extends to humans. Two University of Vienna biologists, Astrid Juette and Karl Grammer secretly exposed young men to airborne chemicals (called copulins) that mimic human vaginal scents. The men then rated the attractiveness of women’s faces. Exposure to the copulins increased the judged attractiveness of all the women and masked the genuine physical attractiveness differences among them (“For Women,” 1999).

In the struggle for survival, nearly every form of life has its mimics—right down to some of the most primitive pathogens. By adopting certain critical features of useful hormones or nutrients, these clever bacteria and viruses can gain entry into a healthy host cell. The result is that the healthy cell eagerly and naively
sweeps into itself the causes of such diseases as rabies, mononucleosis, and the common cold (Goodenough, 1991).
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It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a strong but sad parallel in the human jungle. We too have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, however, our automatic tapes usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept. Although they vary in their force, some of these principles possess a tremendous ability to direct human action. We have been subjected to them from such an early point in our lives, and they have moved us about so pervasively since then, that you and I rarely perceive their power. In the eyes of others, though, each such principle is a detectable and ready weapon, a weapon of automatic influence.

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As exploitative as these creatures seem, they are topped in this respect by an insect known as the rove beetle. By using a variety of triggers involving smell and touch, the rove beetles get two species of ants to protect, groom, and feed them as larvae and to harbor them for the winter as adults. Responding mechanically to the beetles’ trick trigger features, the ants treat the beetles as though they were fellow ants. Inside the ant nests, the beetles respond to their hosts’ hospitality by eating ant eggs and young; yet they are never harmed (Holldobler, 1971).

There are some people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter, requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling. The secret of their effectiveness lies in the way that they structure their requests, the way that they arm themselves with one or another of the weapons of influence that exist in the social environment. To do this may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and sets rolling one of our automatic behavior tapes. Trust the human profiteers to learn quickly exactly how to benefit from our tendency to respond mechanically according to these principles.

Remember my friend the jewelry store owner? Although she benefited by accident the first time, it did not take her long to begin exploiting the expensive = good stereotype regularly and intentionally. Now during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially. She claims that this is marvelously cost-effective. When it works on the unsuspecting vacationers—as it frequently does—it results in an enormous profit margin.