I is for Influence: The new science of persuasion

CHAPTER ONE

the wisdom of crowds

‘When people are free to do as they please,

they usually imitate each other.’

Eric Hoffer

At around the same time as James Vicary was conning the world with his subliminal advertising, a respectable professor of psychology named Solomon Asch was also deceiving people in his own way. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1950s, Asch demonstrated that individuals’ actions were unduly swayed by the behaviour of the people around them. For over half a century, his studies have been interpreted as evidence that we smother our intentions and conform to peer pressure in order to be accepted. However, the advent of brain imaging technology in the last handful of years has uncovered that the truth may be even more startling: social pressures may change not only how we behave, but how we see the world itself.

Born in 1907, Solomon Asch grew up in Warsaw in Poland but moved to the United States in 1920, where he was drawn to the study of human behaviour and became a professor at the prestigious Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. When the rise of Nazism in Germany ignited the Second World War and led to the occupation of Poland, he took a very personal interest in understanding how such hateful ideologies had managed to sweep across not only his homeland but so much of Europe. He felt driven to ask: was there something fundamentally wrong with the German people or could Nazism have happened even in the heart of the US?

In his most famous experiment, he invited college students to participate in a psychological experiment on visual judgement. Imagine for a moment that you’re one of these student volunteers. You arrive at a classroom to find six other students there with you. The researcher, a pipe-smoking gentleman with receding white hair and quizzical eyebrows, allows you all to sit down before he begins. With the merest hint of an Eastern European accent, he asks you and the rest of the group to settle in a row of chairs facing him.

The researcher explains that he will hold up two large white cards. One card will have a single black line on it; the second card will have three lines on it. Your task is simple enough: you must pick which of the three lines (marked 1, 2 or 3) is identical to the single line in length.

During each round, the researcher says that he will show the group different pairs of cards and, without conferring, everyone must call out their answers in turn, starting with the person on his right and ending with the person on his left. Finding yourself sat on his far left, you will be the last person in the group to speak.

The researcher turns over the first pair of cards. Looking at the two cards, you’re certain it’s line 3 that matches the single line. Indeed, the other subjects in the experiment call out, ‘Three,’ unanimously. When it gets to your turn, you confidently say, ‘Three,’ as well.

On the second round, everyone agrees this time that the match is with line number 2. Despite some initial apprehension about taking part in a psychological experiment, you relax a little.

On the third round, you think the matching line is number 1. However, the first person in the group says, ‘Two.’ You turn to look at him but the next person also says, ‘Two,’ and so does the third person. You look back at the lines and scrutinise them carefully to make sure that you didn’t make a mistake. Squinting at the lines and flicking your eyes back and forth, you’re not quite so certain now. Maybe it is one of the other lines after all?

By the time it’s your turn to speak, you’re feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Sure, you initially thought it was line number 1, but all six of the other people in the room have said they think it’s line 2. All eyes are on you. Will you trust what you thought was the right answer and say, ‘One’ or go with the crowd and say, ‘Two’?

In Asch’s rather devious original study, what subjects didn’t know was that there was only one real participant every time: the one who was last to answer. All of the other members of the group were accomplices who had been instructed beforehand to give unanimously incorrect answers during specified rounds of the experiment.

Nowadays it’s common knowledge that research investigators – especially pesky psychologists like me – often deceive experimental subjects in the interests of science. Being savvy citizens of the twenty-first century, you and I would probably suspect that we’re being hoodwinked under similar circumstances. But back in the 1950s, only a handful of subjects suspected that the rest of the group was colluding together.

Removing those few subjects from his data, Asch found that 75 per cent of the remaining, unsuspecting participants bowed to majority rule and, in seeming defiance of their senses, called out the incorrect line at least once. By comparison, when subjects were allowed to match the lines without the presence of the other alleged subjects, they made mistakes less than 1 per cent of the time.⁴

Many commentators have interpreted Asch’s findings as evidence that people are weak-willed and unable to speak the truth in the face of unanimous peer pressure. In the context of the Second World War, some observers opined that maybe the people of Germany were not remarkable for having let Nazism spread. Faced with such strong social forces, even the most questioning and morally observant individuals – in any nation – may perhaps have found it almost impossible to resist the majority view.

In our own lives, most of us have at times found it easier to conform and go along with the group’s judgement than to stand out as a lone dissenter. When five of your friends all want to dine at the new Italian restaurant in town, it seems churlish to declare that you ate Italian two days ago and that you’re craving Mexican. Instead you smile and agree that Italian would be great too. Or when your boss and seven colleagues stridently agree that the company should open an office on the other side of the city, you may decide to keep your reservations to yourself rather than risk being labelled a naysayer.

Asked individually, we may state one preference. But when everyone else seems to be heading in a particular direction, it doesn’t always pay to speak up. We sometimes go along with the crowd to avoid their scorn or gain their favour.

Even when we believe that a behaviour or practice is wrong, we’re more likely to go along with it simply because others do. But other recent studies suggest that there’s more to the tale. Something else more complex is going on. It’s not just that we suppress what we want to say in order to avoid kicking up a fuss. No, it seems that social pressures can affect not only our public behaviour, but our attitudes and private beliefs too.

Social sways in private tastes

What kind of music do you like? Perhaps you love The Beatles, Elvis Presley, U2, or Madonna. Or maybe you prefer The Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, or Lady Gaga? Whatever you think of such artists, you can’t deny that they’ve sold a lot of records. But were they talented and their songs so sublime that success was inevitable or were they … lucky?

The search for an answer tells us something about the risks of working in the music industry, of trying to turn new artists into superstars. More importantly for us though, it also tells us something rather fundamental about how people make decisions about what they like or dislike.

Matthew Salganik, a young sociologist with round features and round, wire-rimmed glasses who lists New York-based rapper Jay-Z amongst his favourite artists, is something of an authority in the field of online social research. Early on in his career,while a graduate student at Columbia University, he conducted an ingenious experiment, recruiting over 14,000 participants from a teen-interest social networking website to listen to up to 48 new songs from previously unheard-of artists.⁵ Visitors arriving at his website were invited to rate the songs from 1 star (‘I hate it’) to 5 stars (‘I love it’), with the ratings published to help other users decide what to listen to. In return, the visitors were allowed to download the songs for free.

However, participants weren’t told that they were being directed not to the same website, but to one of eight nearly identical portals. Each of the websites operated in its own self-contained bubble, with its visitors listening to songs, rating and downloading them, and producing unique league tables, charts of what was hot or not.

Within the space of a couple of months, the researchers found that entirely different songs became hits in each of the eight online worlds. Hits and misses couldn’t be predicted. For example, the rock/Motown song ‘Out of the Woods’ by the band Shipwreck Union could be the most downloaded track on one website, but come 37th out of 48 on another. The track ‘Miseries and Miracles’ by the guitar collective A Blinding Silence could be top of the pops in one online world, but placed 43rd out of 48 elsewhere, and so on.

Witnessing these results, Salganik and his collaborators concluded that visitors to each website were heavily influenced by what earlier visitors had enjoyed and rated. New visitors didn’t tend to make their own independent assessments of what was good or not; they simply went with the crowd, choosing to download and rate what was already popular.

The implications for the musical landscape as we know it are startling. Artists such as The Beatles and Lady Gaga should be deliriously grateful for their success. Salganik’s research suggests that their remarkable triumphs involved more than a smattering of luck. When such acts accrued some initial popularity, other people probably followed the crowd, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of success begetting further success, which exploded into the musical phenomena that we know. At the other end of the spectrum, struggling artists and their record labels can take solace from the fact it’s not lack of talent or the quality of their music that may be holding them back, but simply not being in front of the right numbers of people at the right time.

What does the experiment say about the exercise of influence in the real world? Salganik’s work suggests that even our personal tastes are formed much more through social influence than we generally believe. While Solomon Asch forced his participants to call out their answers in front of other people, Matthew Salganik allowed his participants to visit his websites with complete anonymity. Even though website visitors were free to rate songs however they wished, the reality was that they didn’t. They were influenced more by popularity than any perceptions of inherent song quality.

Of course most of us believe that we’re independent-minded consumers; we all think that we like the songs and artists we listen to because they’re good. We can defend our song and band choices, citing perhaps clever lyrics, the arrangement of melodies and harmonies, or the ways they’ve been choreographed and produced. Whether we’re talking about our musical tastes or other consumer decisions – such as the dishes we order at a restaurant, the films we choose to watch, or even the cars we buy – most of us would disagree strongly with the suggestion that we simply follow the crowd. However, research by people like Salganik suggests that we’re wrong.

Halfway across the world in China, for example, applied economist Hongbin Cai persuaded the owners of a restaurant chain in Beijing to participate in an experiment looking at the effects of information about popularity on diners’ orders. Across the chain of 13 restaurants, some patrons were seated at a table with a plastic plaque listing the five best-selling dishes at that particular location. Other patrons were given a plastic plaque listing five randomly chosen dishes, on the pretext that these were the restaurant’s recommendations. In a third, control condition, patrons were given no further information when placing their orders. All customers were also given the restaurant’s full menu, listing dozens and dozens of dishes.

Analysing the bills for a rather impressive 12,895 tables, Cai and a fellow researcher found that the information that a particular dish was amongst the top five dishes ordered by others boosted sales of the dish by an average of between 13 and 20 per cent. However, giving customers information about the restaurant’s alleged recommendations didn’t increase sales of those dishes as compared with the third, control condition.

As patrons ignored the restaurant’s recommendations, it clearly wasn’t just the plaque that led to the uplift in sales of certain dishes. Customers were only swayed by the knowledge that other people in the same restaurant had also eaten certain dishes. The patrons were free to choose whatever they liked from the main menu, but it seems that their individual dining choices – their personal tastes – were influenced by their awareness of what was popular.

Additionally, customers seated at the tables with the additional list of best-sellers were statistically more likely to say that they were ‘very satisfied’ with their dining experience than customers in the other two groups. In other words, the mere knowledge about the most popular dishes eaten by total strangers seemed to enhance customers’ enjoyment.⁶

In study after study, we see repeatedly that people are swayed by knowledge of what’s popular. Individuals tend to follow the people around them even when making private decisions about their health and wealth; they tag along in a herd-like fashion in everything from choosing health insurance⁷ and pension plans⁸ to stock-market investments.⁹ Surveying the mass of research, we can only reach one conclusion: the somewhat unpalatable truth is that both our public tastes and private choices are in fact quietly shaped by social forces, by the reviews and recommendations of the people around us, by mere popularity.

Adopting persuasive language

Whatever the ways in which you’re trying to modify people’s behaviour, you might be shrewd to tap into the power of collective influence. Perhaps you’re trying to get people to behave in a more environmentally conscious manner. You may be trying to get a group of people – or maybe just one specific person – to drink less alcohol, eat less saturated fat, or slap on more sunscreen. Or maybe you’re simply trying to get customers to buy your goods and services. If you have genuine facts that something is already popular with other people, make sure you convey that message to your target audience.

Think about the kind of language that advertisers use. They tell us that a product is the ‘top seller’, or the ‘fastest-growing’. Even simply reporting that ‘most people’ or ‘countless others’ either do something or don’t do something else can be a motivator. I saw a recent advert saying that ‘the majority of people who expressed a preference said they preferred our [product]’. Ker-ching! I’m sure their sales went up.

But you don’t have to be a major advertiser to harness the might of collective influence. Say you work as a physiotherapist treating people for knee pain. There’s research showing that the majority of patients who expressed a preference said they preferred physiotherapy over surgery.¹⁰ If you’re a physiotherapist looking to boost the number of patients you treat, simply telling people that honest fact may be enough to convince more patients to seek your services rather than those of a surgeon.

I heard a story about a teacher who fortuitously learned how to pacify trouble-makers in his class. Rather than simply pointing out the undesirable behaviour, he pointed out the fact that everyone else in the class was not participating: ‘Peter, you’ll notice that there are 19 other students in the class all sitting quietly and waiting to learn. Are you going to disrupt the lesson for your 19 classmates or are you going to stop playing silly games and join in with the rest of the class?’

In trying to coax elderly relatives to take their medication, some people may say, ‘You should take your medication.’ However, a more effective approach may be to argue, ‘Most people with the same condition take this medication. Perhaps you should too.’

Crowd pressure in the real world

Here’s a poster campaign that caught my eye many times in recent months. This was an unavoidable campaign supported both by the office of the Mayor of London as well as Transport for London, the organisation that oversees all of the capital’s buses, trains, trams, and even river boats as well as the London Underground.

Can you see why the poster works? By saying that 99 per cent of young Londoners do not commit serious violence, the poster is saying that the vast, vast majority of youths in the capital get along with each other and are responsible members of society. Without having to spell it out, the implicit message is that if you’re one of the tiny minority who considers violence acceptable, you must be a loser, a freak, a strange outlier to be shunned – certainly not one of the in-crowd no matter how cool and tough you might have thought you were.

By tapping into people’s unsuspecting inclinations to follow the herd, it’s an inordinately powerful social message. I think it’s going to be a startlingly effective campaign.

Of course savvy marketing executives have long appreciated that we tend to follow the lead of others, even total strangers. The fashion retailer Topshop recently summoned news crews to report on the dozens of customers thronging outside their flagship London store. The customers had been lining up for hours, waiting for the doors to open so they could get to the new clothing range designed by Kate Moss. The moment the news broadcasts went out, the crowds got larger and larger.

Every Christmas, toy retailers warn parents that demand for the latest must-have toys and gadgets is likely to outstrip supply. For years, I used to wonder how manufacturers could fail to keep up with demand in producing enough Nintendo Wiis, Sony PlayStations or whatever else was hot that December. But nowadays, I strongly suspect that these are simply marketing tactics: telling us that everyone else is buying one is designed to make us covet one too.

Even highly sophisticated customers fall into the trap. In 1995, business consultants Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema published a business strategy book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, which received unflattering reviews. However, the wealthy authors organised a secret campaign to buy 50,000 copies of their book from stores across the US. The authors orchestrated it so that they bought the books from stores whose sales were monitored by the New York Times best-seller list, ensuring that the book leapt into the chart. Once on the prestigious list, the book gained its own momentum, riding high in the chart for 15 weeks. Seeing it on the best-seller list, new customers assumed that the book was a good one and bought it, ensuring that the book stayed on the best-seller list, which brought it to the attention of yet more book-buying customers.¹¹

When it comes to the way our brains work, it seems we can’t help it. When we see other people behaving in a certain way, we really are more likely to follow their lead – even when they’re doing something stupid or even illegal. We think: ‘If lots of people are doing it, then I probably should do too.’ If we were equivocal about something beforehand, the mere knowledge that other people are doing it may be enough to change our minds and behaviour.

The invisibility of social influence

You probably accept the argument that many people are guided in their decisions and behaviour by the deeds of other people. But perhaps you feel that you’re different, stronger. You may not believe that you are so impressionable or vulnerable as to be affected by what other people are saying or doing. Thing is: scarcely anyone believes that they are influenced by information about what other people are doing.

One of the most exciting areas in which the psychology of collective influence is being used is the promotion of environmentally responsible behaviour. In an intriguing study published in 2008, University of Arkansas social scientist Jessica Nolan and her colleagues decided to look at the relationships between people’s stated attitudes towards energy conservation and their actual behaviour. She began by asking residents in California four questions about their motivations for cutting their energy consumption:

Indicating the strength of their preferences on a series of rating scales, the survey respondents said that the protection of the environment was the most crucial factor (b), followed by the benefits to society (c), and then the fact that it saves money (a). The awareness that other people are doing it (d) was rated the least significant reason for trying to conserve energy.

Now that’s what residents said was important. However, would people change their behaviour, their actual energy consumption, when presented with such arguments? Nolan and the team decided to find out by sending one of four different messages about energy conservation to several hundred households in San Marcos, a perpetually sunny district of southern California.

Remember that respondents said that the protection of the environment was the most essential reason they might cut their energy use (as in question (b) above). So some of the households received messages highlighting that energy conservation protected the environment:

Protect the Environment by Conserving Energy. Summer is here and the time is right for reducing greenhouse gases. How can you protect the environment this summer? By using fans instead of air conditioning! Why? According to researchers at Cal State San Marcos, you can prevent the release of up to 262 lbs of greenhouse gases per month by using fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool this summer! Using fans instead of air conditioning – The Environmental Choice.

Two further notes explained either that people should reduce their energy usage because it benefited society (question (c) above) or because it saved them money personally (question (a)). A fourth message encouraged people to conserve energy simply because other people were doing it (question (d)):

Join Your Neighbours in Conserving Energy. Summer is here and most people in your community are finding ways to conserve energy at home. How are San Marcos residents like you conserving this summer? By using fans instead of air conditioning! Why? In a recent survey of households in your community, researchers at Cal State San Marcos found that 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer. Using fans instead of air conditioning – Your Community’s Popular Choice!

In order to monitor which of the four messages was the most effective at actually reducing energy usage, the investigators asked for permission to read homeowners’ electricity meters. You’ll recall from the initial survey that people said that they didn’t care whether others conserved energy. They said that the fact other people were reducing their energy usage was the least important reason for trying to do the same. However, the results proved them wrong. The message encouraging energy conservation simply because most people in the area were doing it turned out to be the most effective.¹² Again, as we’ve seen in study after study, the news that other people were doing something was enough to modify people’s private habits. More than that though, it also showed that people are remarkably unaware of the power of social information. People simply don’t believe that their attitudes and behaviour are affected by knowledge about what other people are doing.

Danger, danger!

The knowledge about what other people are doing can steer people’s behaviour in undesirable directions too. Consider the predicament faced by Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Visitors were warned that taking pieces of the irreplaceable petrified wood was an act of theft. All over the park, prominent signs announced:

Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.

Can you see how the signs were failing to prevent further theft? The park administrators estimated that around 3 per cent of visitors were taking pieces of the precious wood home with them. With many tens of thousands of visitors every month, the seemingly insignificant acts were adding up to the tune of over a ton of wood a month.

Step forward Robert Cialdini, a seasoned researcher from the nearby Arizona State University, who offered to bring the psychology of social persuasion into play. The wily social scientist first gained permission from park officials to place surreptitiously marked pieces of petrified wood along certain popular visitor paths to see how many of them disappeared into visitors’ bags and pockets. Then, on consecutive weekends, he put up two entirely different versions of the sign.

The first sign