This is the third part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation; Part 2 covered the principle of commitment and consistency.

Social Proof

Birds of a feather, flock together. Or so we’ve been told. In other words, we like to be around people like us and we like to be like them. We also look to others for cues as to how to act. This explains a famous incident in New York where 38 witnesses heard a woman’s scream for help and did nothing. The failure of others to respond is a clue to us that the situation is not serious, we don’t need to respond either. Unfortunately, that cue, often reliable, cost the woman her life in this case. It turns out that you’re much better off if one person sees you being attacked or sees smoke coming from under a door than if a crowd of people do. If you do find yourself in a bad situation and there’s a crowd, use the word "help", look someone in the eye, point at that person and say "You, sir, in the red shirt, please help." General pleas to a crowd tend to go unanswered until one person responds, then the social proof works in the other direction and others will jump in to help.

The effects of social proof go beyond what I would have guessed. For example, in the months after a highly publicized suicide, the rate of airplane and automobile fatalities goes up significantly. This has been observed over long periods in large numbers and with numerous controls. Furthermore, if it’s a murder-suicide, it is more likely for multi-passenger airplane and multiple vehicle automobile fatalities to occur. If it’s a simple suicide, it correlated with single-victim crashes. After adding in numerous controls to the data, researchers were forced to conclude that these increased crashes were secret suicides. In a similar vein, after a heavyweight boxing championship bout, murder rates briefly rise around the country.

Back to how this is typically employed specifically to influence you, Cialdini looks at laugh tracks. Everyone polled says he or she hates canned laughter soundtracks on television shows. And yet, research shows that even though the canned laughter is obviously fake and we say we hate it, we find shows funnier if they include a laugh track because our subconscious mind can’t escape the fact that "others" are laughing so it must be funny. Similarly testimonials, even when it is obviously not a "natural" unsolicited testimonial, influences our decision to buy (and someday I have to tell the story of the Hansen’s soda lady trying to elicit a testimonial from me. I didn’t end up famous).

There are some crazy variations on the influence of social proof. For example, in a study by Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Polytechnic University, the researchers created two conditions: one where people heard several people express a given opinion once each and one where one person expressed an opinion several times. It turns out, that in both cases, respondents judged opinions to be popular based on the number of times they had heard the opinion, but did not adjust for the fact that in some cases it was actually an opinion expressed repeatedly by one person [1]. So strangely, we sometimes perceive social proof when what we’re really seeing is one persistent loudmouth. That’s a good lesson if you really want to get something done in your community, but it’s not so good if someone just has a big enough budget to broadcast that message at you 12 times per day.

How to Say No. First, remind yourself that the testimonial you’re seeing is quite possibly faked. Large numbers of review sites on the web are laden with fake reviews. If you don’t have a reason to trust the testimonial, don’t. Second, don’t assume that if a lot of people are doing something, they must have information that you don’t (that’s not a person in a diabetic coma who needs help, but a drunk sleeping it off in the gutter). I must say, I don’t think Cialdini has read Kierkegaard, because he grappled with this question over 150 years ago with his famous ruminations on Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that this was a solitary and unjustifiable act. Kierkegaard believed that only "the crowd" could have executed Christ and that if each person had had to face Christ alone, one at a time, he would never have been crucified. Kierkegaard argued that truth is subjectivity, not objectivity and that when you side with the crowd, you cannot know if your decisions are moral
or true. It doesn’t make them immoral, it’s just that you don’t know. So Kierkegaard’s philosophy implies a simple question: what would I do if I had to make this decision with nobody else around? What would I do if everyone else were doing the opposite of what they are doing now? In other words, if everyone wanted to honor Christ, would I still vote to crucify? If everyone was rushing around in a panic because there was smoke coming from under a door, would I calmly walk past? Are my actions conditioned by the crowd, or by my sense of what I should do in this situation? I think Cialdini finds it impractical to pose such questions every minute of the day and that may be why he doesn’t invoke Kierkegaard. I cite Kierkegaard because I like to pretend I’ve actually read Kierkegaard instead of just heard about him on Jeopardy. Don’t tell Alex Trebeck.

[1]"Everyone Agrees", but Melinda Warner, Scientific American Mind, Aug/Sept 2007 (vol. 18, no. 4), p. 13.

This is the second part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation.

Commitment and Consistency

We like to be consistent and honor our commitments. As with reciprocity, under normal social circumstances, these are good traits, but they can be used against us. The famous experiment in this vein was the one where a research accomplice goes to the beach, lays down a blanket and puts out some personal items, including a radio. The accomplice then goes away. A few minutes later, another accomplice comes up and "steals" the radio. The experiment varies between two conditions. In one condition, the original accomplice gets up and leaves without saying anything. In the other condition, that orginal person specifically asks someone to watch his or her stuff. In the first case, four in twenty times the second accomplice could "steal" the radio without challenge. In the second condition, the "thief" was stopped and challenged nineteen out of twenty times. So the challenge rate went from 20% to 95% (p. 59). In other words, people had an overwhelming desire to be consistent with
their prior commitment.

These techniques can be remarkably subtle. For example, when a telemarketer calls it makes a huge difference whether that person says "How are you feeling tonight?" and gets an answer or says "I hope you’re feeling well tonight". The difference is that in the first case, the target has committed publicly to having a good evening (because the response is typically Fine, thanks"). Having publicly committed to doing "fine", it is very hard for the target to shirk on giving money to the earthquake victims in wherever who are so unfine and so in need of help. In the case where the caller simply says "I hope you’re feeling well this evening" no such commitment was extracted and the response rate was less than half (15 vs 33 percent) what it was when the caller asks a question.

Or how about this one. Toy companies advertise items in the runup to Christmas that they have no intention of stocking in sufficient numbers to meet demand. The unwitting parent commits to the present for the pleading child. Since the gift isn’t available, dad buys something of equivalent value for Christmas. But two months later, well there’s that item miraculously on sale. Dad goes and buys it because he feels a commitment to his kid. The toy companies know this and use this technique to prop up sales in January and February.

Companies use essay contests to make you feel good about them. Something as simple as copying out a message in your own handwriting can make you want to follow through on all the nice things you’ve said about that company. Public utilities have gotten people to save lots of energy simply by getting people to commit to saving energy.

It turns out that internalizing the commitment is key. When utilities hold a contest and say that those who save a certain amount of energy will be recognized, people do cut down on energy usage. But when they then call to renege and say the contest is cancelled, it turns out that energy usage falls even further. It seems that this is because people are actually less motivated when they feel they’re doing it for external reasons, and more motivated when they feel they are doing it for themselves. Being the kind of person who likes to be energy efficient is more powerful than being the kind of person who will reduce electricity usage in order to save $5.

There’s one further usage of the commitment and consistency principle that is worth noting. I’ve been taken in by subtler forms of this on many occasions. It’s called the lowball. Essentially, your sleazy used car salesman offers you a price that he knows he can’t really honor. You agree. When it comes time to sign the final papers, the accounting department finds an arithematic "error" or the sales manager notes an "error" in the trade-in value and the salesman sheepishly fesses up to his "mistake". But here’s the thing, you’ve committed to buying the car, and at this point it’s psychologically hard to turn that around, and you buy it anyway, rather than going down the street to where they have it for real at the initial price the salesman offered. The subtler version that takes me in is deciding to buy something that’s on sale. But then I drag my feet and miss the sale. Two months later, I miraculously own it anyway.

How to Say No. When we get caught in these situations, we typically know in our gut that we’ve been had. If the spidey sense starts tingling, ask yourself a simple question: "Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision as if I had not committed myself?" So in other words, ask yourself, "If I had not shaken the hand of the sleazy used car salesman on the deal, would I buy the car at this price?" "If I had never seen that Marmot Precip jacket on sale, would I still be buying it today at full price?" The key here is to focus in on how you feel in the microsecond after you pose the question, before the rationalizations kick in. That is when you’re most honest with yourself or, as Cialdini says (p. 110): "Accumulating psychological evidence indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualize it."

The cover of Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is adorned with a quote that says "For marketers, this book is among the most important books written in the last ten years." That’s probably true, but it’s a little troubling that there is no quote that says "For consumers, this book is among the most important books written in the last then years." In many ways, Cialdini is writing for consumers, not marketers. Each chapter discusses a "weapon of influence", the way it is used against us and finish with a subsection called "How to Say No" (to this particular "weapon of influence"). I think every reader will recognize each weapon, will feel that you already know that is used against you, and will eventually think of a situation where, even with that knowledge, you got sucked in.

Read how we get sucked into reciprocal relationships unknowingly » »

Allow me to vent… I know that there are whole sites devoted to this, but I don’t have rights there and I need to get this off my chest

Not Bad Really

I’m testing Office 2007 Home Edition. Some things I like. In general, I like the interface and find that but for a few incredibly annoying things, I could really appreciate this. In fact, it’s the best version of Office so far in my opinion, but that does not, of course, mean that I’m happy;-) People complain about the size of the Ribbon, which is sort of your command center in Word, but I find that if you take some time to set things up, you almost never need to expose it. For example, I create a Quick Styles set for each document template (always use styles, never direct formatting, right?) and the right-click context menu then has pretty much everything I need and most days I can leave the Ribbon minimized for 95% of the time. So for me, it’s a cleaner, more compact interface than older versions of Word and most actions take at least one fewer keystroke or click than in Word 2000. It’s much much smarter at putting the right things in the right-click context menu.

A Fitting Companion to Vista

Still, to me it is at the same time the Office equivalent of Vista. That is to say, the improvements in interface are offset by just absolutely abysmal stability and quality control at every level. It looks great. There are some nice, ehttp://raisedbyturtles.org/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=233&type=image&TB_iframe=trueven beautiful interface enhancements. But deep down, some things are just plain broken. Like I say, a fitting companion for Vista.

Whenever I use a Microsoft product, I wonder if they just don’t do any unit testing at all or what (unit testing is where every time you design a part of a program, you also design a program to test all possible options).

So What’s Pissing Me Off Today?

So the things driving me nuts right now are:

1. Improper language handling in footnotes. Most things in my computer are in English and I have an American keyboard, but I write a lot in French (a lot as in I’m writing my fifth 400+ page book). I also use a lot of footnote (a lot as in the book I’m working on currently has 2227 footnotes). So I set my computer locale as English (US) and the document language as French. But every time I create a footnote, it switches to English. I say switches, because it actually briefly shows in French, but after a second or two switches to English. So I decided to go nuclear: I went into the Word Options —> General —> Language and changed the Primary Editing Language to French. No luck. I went in and changed the Footnote Text style to explicitly use French. No luck. So far, nothing I’ve tried has allowed me to create a footnote in French. Even in a French document, with my primary editing language set to French and the Footnote style set to French, when I create a footnote, it’s in English and I have to manually change it to French. Nice work guys. I haven’t seen anywhere else that mentions this problem.
2. Proofing Tools Hell. When I tell Word not to check spelling and grammar in this document, turn off autocorrect, and tell it not to check spelling as I type, why does it insist on running the proofing tools anyway half the time? Why does it occasionally and without rhyme or reason that I can see insist on highlighting the occasional spelling error anyway? This is an edition of an old document — 80% of the words are not in the dictionary. The only way I have gotten this to really quit happening, is to disable proofing tools altogether for all documents. Obviously I don’t want that. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere.
3. Proofing Tools Hell 2. But wait, that’s not all! Why, after all these years, is Word still incapable of letting me keep the proofing tools on in a document with a "too many spelling errors"? My document has footnotes that include archaic terms and proper names. Because there are a lot of those, I can’t have it check spelling errors at all because it has some maximum number of spelling errors that it can check and every important document I’ve ever written exceeds that number. Come on! If I want to use proofing tools, I would have to run spell check and laboriously tell Word to ignore the thousands of words it doesn’t know. Just highlight the mispellings and let me scan for the ones I want to correct. This is a known problem in all versions of Word since at least Word 2000 and that Microsoft sees no need to fix.
4. 

   Empty Document Pane in Word 2007

   The Phantom Window. A new one with Word 2007 and, I believe, only happens on my Vista machine (or is it the XP machine?). Word has the bad habit of opening an “empty” window when I open a document, but when I close the empty window, it closes the document. For example, when I launch Word it shows me a blank document by default. So then I go to the Recent Documents menu and click on the most recent document. It opens the document in one window, and leaves an empty window. This can also happen if I double-click on a Word file — it opens one window with the file and another empty window. I do not mean, by the way, a window with a blank document. I mean a completely non-functional window with no document of any sort whatsoever. Fortunately, this is intermittent so I can open and close Word until it opens correctly. Alternatively, I can open a document in the empty window and then close it. If, however, I simply try to close the empty window without opening a second document in it, Word closes entirely, include the document I’m trying to open. I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere on the net, but no solutions posted.
5. Phantom Footnotes when Track Changes is on. I had a footnote, which I deleted. Sort of. The number disappeared and the footnote disappeared, but it still counts. So, assuming this was note 3, the notes are now numbered 1,2,4. So I tried to use find and replace and find the mark and delete it. Word 2007 won’t find it. But if I go to References —> Next Footnote, it stops at the phantom note. So I cut and pasted the text into a new document to see what would happen. The phantom note disappears. So I cut and pasted the text in the original document. Unfortunately, the footnote counter doesn’t disappear, so now the notes in the original document are numbered 1,2,5. Great. It turns out, this is quite a simple fix — it’s caused because I’m tracking changes and Word does not update footnote numbers (and many other field code-based numbers) until changes are either accepted or rejected. This makes sense in the “Final with markup” view but is damn confusing in the “Final” view that is supposed to be, uh, the Final view.
6. Large Document Handling. This is a shame. One of the main reason our workgroup quit using Wordperfect was because it was so cumbersome with large documents. With WP, you pretty much had to divide a large document into subdocuments and then assemble it from a Master document when you wanted to generate an index, cross-references and so on. Since we have a massive index and hundreds of cross-references (possibly thousands), this was just too much of a hassle (plus WP was unstable and kept corrupting our files and creating "holes" in the middle causing data loss). Word 2000 shined here. Indexing was logical, flexible and accessible via search and replace in a way that neither WordPerfect nor Open Office could match. We left Wordperfect primarily because of the stability issues, but after a serious look at Open Office, we chose Word 2000 because of how well it handled indexing and cross-references and how well it worked with large documents. Lately, with two large documents open, I feel like I’m back in the 1980s. With a relatively fast dual-core processor and 3GB of memory, things draw to a standstill. I click on a point in the text and literally go make a cup of tea while I wait for Word 2007 to decide it’s ready to accept input. It’s pretty strange — everything goes along fast and nice, but then things begin to bog down until I simply have to close all instances of Word and start back up. Meanwhile, the CPU is not running hard and there seems to be system memory left. Other applications open quickly and run quickly while this is happening. If I let it sit for 15 minutes or so, it seems to sort itself out too. I’ve tried turning off background saves and some other things that supposedly slow Word down, but no luck. It’s still terribly slow compared to Word 2000.
7. Interoperability with Other Versions of Office. I’m not a MS hater. I don’t dislike them any more than I dislike Google or Apple. That is to say, I think they are all aggressive companies who have used every advantage and all their available resources to shut out competition whereever possible. Traditionally, MS had the most resources and was the most successful at this strategy. Now Google seems to have taken over. Apple, with its totally closed, proprietary systems, has tried just as hard as the others, but with less success. Okay. But if there is one thing I hate about MS, it’s that you can’t run multiple versions of their programs at the same time. If you want to keep Word 2000 and Word 2007 on the same machine, prepare for Hell. It will effectively want to run an install program every time you use Word 2007 if you had the poor judgment to run Word 2000 since the last time you ran 2007. Want to run Internet Explorer 7 and 8 on the same machine? Forget it. The only way to really do this with MS products is to run virtual machines using VMWare or some such with each machine having it’s own browser and version of Office. Would it really be so hard to let me run multiple versions? I might have a good reason to do so, like the fact that you broke large document handling in your new version!

Okay, I have that off my chest. I’m sure MS is listening.
Microsoft has been working on its reputation a lot lately, but honestly, the number one thing they could do for their reputation is add six months to the testing cycle and do multiple public beta tests and not release until they’ve fixed the bugs. Aarrgggghhh.

I love Smartwool. I’m actually wearing a Smartwool shirt and Smartwool socks right now. If Smartwool wanted me to write a testimonial, all they would have to do is ask, to say “Hey, we want some killer testimonials for our website, will you help us out?” That’s not what they did.
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