Compliance is the act of responding in accordance with the explicit or implicit wishes of someone else. Compliance is fun when you consider it in the context of asking someone out on a date, listening to your teacher, or making the sale. Human nature is idiosyncratic, and compliance is no exception. Consider the study in which people asking to cut in line were much more successful if they tacked an empty reason onto their request: “Can I cut in line?” was much less successful than “Can I cut in line because I want to make copies?”

So why does this happen? Because we have precious limited mental resources and can’t afford to spend the time considering every decision rationally; therefore, we automatically subconsciously make decisions based on salient features of the current stimulus. In normal words, we make shortcuts based on limited information. Tricky scientists were able to make mother turkeys to act nurturing towards weird stuffed animals that made a pre-recorded “cheep cheep” sound because turkeys have an instinctive imprint to act maternally towards things that go “cheep cheep”. The bird goes “cheep cheep”, the mother turkey’s brain goes “click, whirr”, and preprogrammed behavior ensues. Whodathunkit, humans are much the same way, except we have different triggers to make us go “click, whirr”. They are:

Reciprocity
Commitment and Consistency
Social Proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity

Reciprocity

When someone does something for us, we feel compelled to return the favor. This likely evolved so we could offer resources to people in need without actually losing them. If someone gives you a gift, you might feel obligated to him and later be more compliant than usual. One interesting property of reciprocity is that if someone makes a concession from an initial position towards you, you feel like you must make a concession from your position, towards them. This only applies when their first position is a reasonable one: otherwise, the concession-pattern is not activated.

Example: Boy Scout asks you to buy tickets to their Saturday night circus. You say no thanks. Boy Scout says, “Okay, please buy a chocolate bar”. You are more likely to agree.

Commitment and Consistency

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Now, there is much to be said for acting lest you be faced by “paralysis by analysis”, but we are more inclined towards rational decisions if we can change our decision based on updated information. However, this is not valued in our culture. Remember how John Kerry was demonized as a “flip-flopper”?

The way consistency applies is through our social identity. We always act in ways consistent with our identity, and indeed we may only see options available to us that are consistent with continuing to shape the way we see ourselves. We receive way too much information to consider all of it, so we tend to selectively process bits that conform to prior expectations.

The best way to get someone to comply with something in the long-term is to get them to own it: punishment/reward is a great way to shape behavior if a taskmaster is always present, but “intrinsic” motivation yields continued performance in the long run.

One other way that consistency is important is when decisions are made. Once you make a decision, you will start to rationalize reasons for it. Even if the original impetus for your decision no longer holds, your decision will rest on the legs provided by your rationalization-mechanism. Watch out.

Example: citizens who were asked to place a very small sign asking driver’s to be safe were much more likely to sign a petition for saving the environment. The act of agreeing to place a sign in their driveway shifted their self-image towards someone who is socially conscious.

Social Proof

Thinking for ourselves is difficult; we often make decisions based on the actions of others. Canned laughter in TV shows and the unfortunate Werther effect are both testaments to the principle of social proof. “Social proof” is the scientific term for the herd mentality. It is in times of personal uncertainty when social proof is most potent; when you are feeling unsure, you’re going to follow others.

The underlying principle: if other people like it, it’s probably good. “The Wisdom of Crowds” is often correct, so it makes sense for us to base many decisions on others’ opinions. Unfortunately, it also makes us easily manipulable by marketers. Pirate celebrity Maddox nails this when he says  “The amount of forced enthusiasm you have for a commercial product is directly proportional to how big of an asshole you are”, and shows us a picture of “The Kashi cereal ‘Satisfaction Squad’”

(Maddox’s book seems awesome.)

One other example I’d like to give, just because of how powerful it is, is how when social outcast schoolchildren were shown a series of videos depicting a child going up to join a group of children, and then being happily accepted by the group, later became some of the most outgoing children in school. Social learning is a potent force, and we most effectively learn from people similar to us (our peers).

One more note: social proof is very similar to social contagion, which is an extremely powerful force that you can wield to your benefit. I’ll write more on this soon.

Liking

We are more likely to be compliant with someone whom we like. Various factors affect liking, including

• physical attractiveness
• similarity (remember this from the Games Criminals Play post?)
• compliments
• contact and cooperation: The more we are exposed to something, the more we like it. Also, if we need to cooperate with someone to achieve a mutually rewarding goal, we start to like them.
• conditioning: exposing someone to pleasurable feelings in your presence will make them like you, because they automatically associate you with the pleasurable feeling. See this post for more information on the neural mechanics of this phenomenon (scroll until you see the pictures).

I’m going to elaborate on contact and cooperation because this example from Cialdini’s Influence is so incredible and socially relevant. In classrooms, the traditional teacher-calls-on-student model is broken. Smart children raise their hands so they can get the teacher’s approval for being smart. But if a child gets the answer wrong, he will begin to resent the child who later chimes in with the correct answer. Et cetera. However, in the cooperative learning model, when students are each given discrete bits of information and forced to work together in order to assemble all of the information for the big test, cooperation ensues, students build self-esteem, and they like each other more.

Authority

We blindly follow people in positions of authority, and we have since the days of the Old Testament (Abraham goes to murder his son because “God told him to” but then stops not out of moral reproach but because an Angel told him to stop). Hospitals have a medication error rate in the neighborhood of 10%, mostly because nurses blindly follow doctors’ orders. Titles, clothing, and status (e.g., fancy automobiles) are indicators of authority that affect compliance levels.

Scarcity

We value things that are scarce. Things that are expensive or scarce send a social signal that “this thing is valuable! We should stock up on it!” Now, two important notes on scarcity:

• We most value scarce objects after we have already been exposed to them. We value 2 cookies much more highly if we first had 10 cookies, and then 8 were taken away, than if we only had 2 cookies from the start. (But we still value 2 cookies more than we value 10 cookies).
• Scarcity is even more powerful when experienced in the context of social competition: we value scarce things even more if other people want them, too (if the 8 cookies that were taken away were given to other people). This also ties into social proof.

A few scary studies about scarcity:

1)   Revolution is most likely subsequent to scarcity following an extended bout of prosperity; c.f. Russia in 1991 and the civil rights movement in 1962 (household wages of black families increased steadily in the 20^th century, but in the 1960s they started to decline. Then the civil rights movement became huge.)

2)   Banning an idea can make it automatically accepted! Students at a college were more accepting of co-ed dorms after a speech favoring them had been banned.

3)   Merchants advised of a future beef shortage were likely to purchase twice as much beef as merchants who were not informed; merchants who were informed of a beef shortage, and told that they were the only ones getting this information purchased six times as much beef.

Conclusion

How do we prevent getting manipulated like this? The good news is that compliance tactics are rarely effective on someone who doesn’t desire something at all. But learning is the first step. The next step is to consider ways in the past we have been duped by these mechanisms. Actually, do that later tonight… I don’t want you to associate the inevitable negative emotions (sorry) with my blog! Finally, we should practice mindfulness and awareness in the moment so we know when we are getting emotional/heated, and then learn to see this as a trigger for us to disengage, take some deep breaths, and try to be rational and consider our long-term intentions. Maybe I’ll even work on a fun Flash game where you can practice and internalize the principles! Feel free to email me if you want to collaborate on that.

If you want to learn more information about all these phenomena, you should read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. It’s available from Amazon for $12.47.

P. S. I have written up two additional posts on the application of these principles; one on sales and another on dating/”playing the game” to win.

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