SOCIAL INFLUENCE BOOK SUMMARY
Ch. 1. Weapons of Influence
Fixed-action patterns = The behaviours comprising these patterns occur in virtually the same
fashion and in the same order every time.
- When a situation calls for mothering, a maternal behaviour “tape” gets played.
- “Click” and the appropriate tape is activated; “whirr” and out rolls the standard
sequence of behaviours.
Activated by a trigger feature = It is not the rival as a whole that is the trigger for a
territorial defence “tape”, but a specific feature.
- Often just one tiny aspect of the totality.
Sometimes a shade of colour can be the trigger feature.
A male robin will attack a clump of robin red breast feathers placed there, while it
will ignore a perfect replica of another male robin without red breast feathers.
Two things to realise about trigger features with animals
1. The automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well most of the
time (it takes a trickster, such as a scientist to make the robin respond incorrect)
2. Humans, too, have our pre-programmed “tapes” and, although they usually work to
our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into playing the
tapes at the wrong times.
Example of human trigger features given by the book: When we ask someone to do us a
favour, we will be more successful if we provide a reason.
- People simply like to have reasons.
- The word “because” triggers an automatic compliance response even when people
were given no subsequent reason to comply.
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine before you because I
have to make some copies?” (94% allowed you to go first)
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine before you because I
am in a hurry” (93% allowed you to go first)
“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the copy machine before you?” (only
60% allowed you to go first)
Example of a (sometimes) wrong trigger feature: Expensive = good
- People who are unsure of an item’s quality (such as people on a vacation) often use
this stereotype.
- Price as trigger feature for quality (“you get what you pay for”)
- Normally, this is true so when you have not much knowledge about certain jewellery
for instance, you rely on the old standby feature of cost to rate the jewellery.
Betting the odds shortcut = instead of stacking all the odds in your favour by trying to
master each feature that indicates, for instance, the worth of some kind of jewellery, you are
counting on just one – the one that you know to normally be associated with the quality of
any item; the price.
, - In the long run, over all the past and future situations, betting those shortcut odds
may represent the most rational approach possible.
- We need shortcuts, because we cannot recognise and analyse all the aspects in each
person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. So, we use stereotypes
and rules of thumb to classify things according to key features, which cause us to
react without thinking.
Judgmental heuristics = shortcuts that allow for simplified thinking that works well most of
the time (like the expensive = good example) but leaves us open to occasional, costly
mistakes.
- Tendency in our society to accept (without thinking) the statements and directions of
individuals who appear to be authorities on the topic.
“If an expert said so, it must be true”.
Controlled responding = the tendency to react on the basis of a thorough analysis of all of
the information.
- When an issue is important to us, we resist the seductive luxury of registering and
reacting to just a single trigger feature of the available information.
The form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even
on many personally relevant topics.
- Sometimes the issues may be so complicated, the time so tight, the distractions so
intrusive, etc. that we are in no cognitive condition to operate mindfully.
So, then again, we have to take the shortcut.
As most of us are unaware about our automatic behaviour patterns, they make us terribly
vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.
- Mimics = group of organisms that copy the trigger features of other animals in an
attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behaviour tapes at
the wrong time.
Example of female firefly signalling hostile males that they are ready to mate with
them, while they will eat those males if they come closer.
Difference between humans and nonhumans is that our automatic tapes usually
develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.
- With humans, we also have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own
automatic responding.
Expensive = good is often used by people who charge high prices for products
because they know it will attract people.
When not initially successful, you can mark the article as “reduced” and sell it to
bargain-hunters.
Just as in Jujitsu, profiteers can commission the power of automatic influence that exist
naturally around us against their targets while exerting little personal force.
- They manipulate without the appearance of manipulation.
,Contrast principle = affects the way we see the difference between two things that are
presented after each other.
- If the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more
different than it actually is.
- If we lift a light object first and the lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second
object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one.
- If we talk to someone attractive at a party and are then joined by someone
unattractive, the second will strike us as less attractive than he or she actually is.
- It does not only work, but it is also virtually undetectable.
Those who employ it can cash in on its influence without any appearance of
having structured the situation in their favour.
Clothing stores selling their higher priced products to you first, and then try to sell
the somewhat cheaper products because their price then seems significantly
smaller.
Contrarily, selling a cheap item first and then an expensive one makes the
expensive one look significantly more expensive.
Ch. 7 Instant Influence
Primitive automaticity
Very often when we make a decision about someone or something, we don’t use all of the
relevant information.
- Instead, we only use a single highly representative piece of the total (just like the
trigger feature).
- An isolated piece of information, even though it normally guides us correctly, can
lead us to clearly stupid mistakes that leave us looking silly or worse.
However, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut.
- For the sake of efficiency, we must sometimes retreat from the time-consuming,
sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more automatic,
primitive, single-feature type of responding.
- We are likely to use lone cues when we don’t have the time, energy, or cognitive
resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation.
- When rushed, stressed, uncertain or fatigued, we focus less on the information
available to us.
- Example: FBI’s infamously misguided assault on Branch Davidian Church in Waco,
Texas.
The FBI had such an intelligence overload that they just fell back on past practice,
and since they didn’t have any experience with religion, they treated it like a
standard barricade. Outcome: more than 80 sect members died in an act of faith
and fear-fuelled self-immolation.
Modern automaticity
Nowadays, apart from the streaking advances of science, things are quickly changing much
closer to home as well.
, - We travel more and faster, we relocate more frequently to new residences, we
contact more people and have shorter relationships with them, we are faced with an
array of choices among styles and products that were unheard of last year and may
well be obsolete or forgotten by next year.
Novelty, diversity, and acceleration are prime descriptors of civilised existence.
- With further developments in telecommunications and computer technology, access
to staggering amounts of information is falling within the reach of individual citizens
(into the average home).
- Macrae (1972) already predicted that people would be able to delve through
unimaginable increased amounts of information through computers.
Shortcuts shall be sacred
Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process
information is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the abundance of change,
choice, and challenge that is characteristic of modern life.
- When making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a fully considered analysis
of the total situation.
- Unlike lower animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient,
we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.
There is no problem with the shortcut approach of narrowed attention and automatic
responding. However, the problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy
cues to guide us poorly, to lead us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions.
- Trickery of certain compliance practitioners, who seek to profit from the mindless
and mechanical nature of shortcut responding.
Our most used shortcut is that, according to the principle of social proof, we often decide to
do what other people like us are doing.
- An advertiser who allows us to effectively use this efficient strategy is hardly our
antagonist.
- The enemy is an advertiser who seeks to create an image of popularity for a brand of
toothpaste by, say, constructing a series of staged “unrehearsed interview”
commercials in which an array of actors posing as ordinary citizens praise the
product.
Ch. 4 Social Proof: Truths are us
Why do people use canned laughter with TV shows while their potential watchers don’t
really like it and their actors find it personally insulting?
Research experiments have found that the use of canned merriment causes an audience
to laugh longer and more often (+ it is most effective for poor jokes).
Why does canned laughter work on us the way it does?
- Even though canned laughter is easily recognisable, it still works on us.
