Influence: Science and Practice (35 page)

   The importance of the Pennsylvania data (Stewart, 1980) is that it suggests that the argument for surgery as a means of rehabilitation may be faulty. Making ugly criminals more attractive may not reduce the chances that they will commit another crime; it may only reduce their chances of being sent to jail for it.

Other experiments have demonstrated that attractive people are more likely to obtain help when in need (Benson, Karabenic, & Lerner, 1976) and are more persuasive in changing the opinions of an audience (Chaiken, 1979). Here, too, both sexes respond in the same way. In the Benson et al. study on helping, for instance, the better-looking men and women received aid more often, even from members of their own sex. A major exception to this rule might be expected to occur, of course, if the attractive person is viewed as a direct competitor, especially a romantic rival. Short of this qualification, though, it is apparent that good-looking people enjoy an enormous social advantage in our culture. They are better liked, more persuasive, more frequently helped, and seen as possessing more desirable personality traits and greater intellectual capacities. It appears that the social benefits of good looks begin to accumulate quite early. Research on elementary school children shows that adults view aggressive acts as less naughty when performed by an attractive child (Dion, 1972) and that teachers presume good-looking children to be more intelligent than their less attractive classmates (Ritts, Patterson, & Tubbs, 1992).

It is hardly any wonder, then, that the halo of physical attractiveness is regularly exploited by compliance professionals. Because we like attractive people, and because we tend to comply with those we like, it makes sense that sales training programs include grooming hints, fashionable clothiers select their floor staffs from among the good-looking candidates, and con men and women are attractive.
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Have you ever noticed that despite their good looks, many attractive people don’t seem to share the positive impressions of their personalities and abilities that observers have? Research has not only confirmed the tenuous and inconsistent relationship between attractiveness and self-esteem (see Adams, 1977), it has also offered a possible explanation. One set of authors has produced evidence suggesting that good-looking people are aware that other people’s positive evaluations of them are not based on their actual traits and abilities but are often caused by an attractiveness “halo” (Major, Carrington, & Carnevale, 1984). Consequently, many attractive people who are exposed to this confusing information may be left with an uncertain self-concept.

Similarity

What if physical appearance is not much at issue? After all, most people possess average looks. Are there other factors that can be used to produce liking? As both researchers and compliance professionals know, there are several, and one of the most influential is similarity.

We like people who are similar to us
(Burger et al., 2004). This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. Consequently, those who want us to like them so that we will comply with them can accomplish that purpose by appearing similar to us in a wide variety of ways.

Dress is a good example. Several studies have demonstrated that we are more likely to help those who dress like us. In one study, done in the early 1970s when young people tended to dress in either “hippie” or “straight” fashion, experimenters donned hippie or straight attire and asked college students on campus for a dime to make a phone call. When the experimenter was dressed in the same way as the student, the request was granted in more than two-thirds of the instances; when the student and requester were dissimilarly dressed, the dime was provided less than half the time (Emswiller, Deaux, & Willits, 1971). Another experiment showed how automatic our positive response to similar others can be. Marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found to be more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester
and
to do so without bothering to read it first (Suedfeld, Bochner, & Matas, 1971).
Click
,
whirr
.

Another way requesters can manipulate similarity to increase liking and compliance is to claim that they have backgrounds and interests similar to ours. Car salespeople, for example, are trained to look for evidence of such things while examining a customer’s trade-in. If there is camping gear in the trunk, the salespeople might mention, later on, how they love to get away from the city whenever they can; if there are golf balls on the back seat, they might remark that they hope the rain will hold off until they can play the eighteen holes they scheduled for later in the day; if they notice that the car was purchased out of state, they might ask where a customer is from and report—with surprise—that they (or their spouse) were born there, too.

As trivial as these similarities may seem, they appear to work (Burger et al., 2004). One researcher who examined the sales records of insurance companies found that customers were more likely to buy insurance when a salesperson was like them in age, religion, politics, and cigarette-smoking habits (Evans, 1963). Another researcher was able to significantly increase the percentage of people who responded to a mailed survey by changing one small feature of the request: On a cover letter, he modified the name of the survey-taker to be similar to that of the survey recipient. Thus, Robert Greer received the survey from a survey center official named Bob Gregar while Cynthia Johnston received hers from a survey center official named Cindy Johanson. In two separate studies, adding this little bit of similarity to the exchange nearly doubled survey compliance (Garner, 2005). These seemingly minor commonalties can affect decisions that go well beyond whose insurance to purchase or whose survey to complete, reaching all the way to the choice of a marriage partner (Jones et al., 2004). They can even affect the decision of whose life to save. When asked to rank-order a waiting list of patients suffering from kidney disorder as to their deservingness for the next available treatment, people chose those whose political party preference matched their own (Furnham, 1996).

Because even small similarities can be effective in producing a positive response to another and because a veneer of similarity can be so easily manufactured, I would advise special caution in the presence of requesters who claim to be “just like you.”
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Indeed, it would be wise these days to be careful around salespeople who just
seem
to be just like you. Many sales training programs now urge trainees to “mirror and match” the customer’s body posture, mood, and verbal style, as similarities along each of these dimensions have been shown to lead to positive results (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Locke & Horowitz, 1990; van Baaren et al., 2003).

³
Additional work suggests yet another reason for caution when dealing with similar requesters: we typically underestimate the degree to which similarity affects our liking for another (Gonzales, Davis, Loney, Lukens, & Junghans, 1983).

Compliments

Actor McLean Stevenson once described how his wife tricked him into marriage: “She said she liked me.” Although designed for a laugh, the remark is as instructive as it is humorous. The information that someone fancies us can be a bewitchingly effective device for producing return liking and willing compliance (Berscheid & Walster, 1978; Howard, Gengler, & Jain, 1995, 1997). So, often when people flatter us or claim affinity for us, they want something from us.

Remember Joe Girard, the world’s “greatest car salesman,” who says the secret of his success was getting customers to like him? He did something that, on the face of it, seems foolish and costly. Each month he sent every one of his more than 13,000 former customers a holiday greeting card containing a printed message. The holiday greeting card changed from month to month (Happy New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving, and so on), but the message printed on the face of the card never varied. It read, “I like you.” As Joe explained it, “There’s nothing else on the card, nothin’ but my name. I’m just telling ’em that I like ’em.”

“I like you.” It came in the mail every year, 12 times a year, like clockwork. “I like you,” on a printed card that went to 13,000 other people, too. Could a statement of liking so impersonal, obviously designed to sell cars, really work?: Joe Girard thought so, and a man as successful as he was at what he did deserves our attention. Joe understood an important fact about human nature: we are phenomenal suckers for flattery. Although there are limits to our gullibility—especially when we can be sure that the flatterer is trying to manipulate us—we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it.

Cheep Real Estate
The potent influence of similarity on sales is something compliance professionals have long understood.
The Penguin Leunig, © 1983, by Michael Leunig, published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

READER’S REPORT 5.2
From an MBA Student in Arizona

While I was working in Boston, one of my coworkers, Chris, was always trying to push work onto my overcrowded desk. I’m normally pretty good at resisting these types of attempts. But Chris was fantastic at complimenting me before he’d request my assistance. He’d start by saying, “I heard you did a fantastic job with the such-and-such project, and I have a similar one I am hoping you can help me with.” Or, “Since you are so expert in X, could you help me out by putting together this assignment?” I never really cared much for Chris. However, in those few seconds, I always changed my mind, thinking that maybe he was a nice guy after all; and, then, I’d usually give in to his request for help.

Author’s note:
Chris was more than just a flatterer. He structured his praise to give the reader a reputation to live up to. In so doing, he combined a potent element of the Liking principle with the force of the Consistency principle.

An experiment done on a group of men in North Carolina shows how helpless we can be in the face of praise. The men in the study received comments about themselves from another person who needed a favor from them. Some of the men got only positive comments, some got only negative comments, and some got a mixture of good and bad. There were three interesting findings. First, the evaluator who provided only praise was liked best by the men. Second, this tendency held true even when the men fully realized that the flatterer stood to gain from their liking him. Finally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true (Drachman, deCarufel, & Insko, 1978).

Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.
Click
,
whirr
. When seen in this light, the expense of printing and mailing well over 150,000 “I like you” cards each year seems neither as foolish nor as costly as before.

Contact and Cooperation

For the most part, we like things that are familiar to us (Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000). To prove the point to yourself, try a little experiment. Get the negative of an old photograph that shows a front view of your face and have it developed into a pair of pictures—one that shows you as you actually look and one that shows a reverse image (so that the right and left sides of your face are interchanged). Now decide which version of your face you like better and ask a good friend to make the choice, too. If you are at all like the group of Milwaukee women on whom this procedure was tried, you should notice something odd: Your friend will prefer the true print, but you will prefer the reverse image. Why? Because you
both
will be responding favorably to the more familiar face—your friend to the one the world sees and you to the transposed one you find in the mirror every day (Mita, Dermer, & Knight, 1977).

Because of its effect on liking, familiarity plays a role in decisions about all sorts of things, including the politicians we elect (Grush, 1980; Grush, McKeough, & Ahlering, 1978). It appears that in an election booth voters often choose a candidate merely because the name seems familiar. In one controversial Ohio election a few years ago, a man given little chance of winning the state attorney-general race swept to victory when, shortly before the election, he changed his name to Brown—a family name of much Ohio political tradition.

How could such a thing happen? The answer lies partially in the unconscious way that familiarity affects liking. Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past. For example, in one experiment, the faces of several individuals were flashed on a screen so quickly that, later on, the subjects who were exposed to the faces in this manner couldn’t recall having seen any of them before. Yet, the more frequently a person’s face was flashed on the screen, the more these subjects came to like that person when they met in a subsequent interaction. And because greater liking leads to greater social influence, these subjects were also more persuaded by the opinion statements of the individuals whose faces had appeared on the screen most frequently (Bornstein, Leone, & Galley, 1987). A similar effect occurred in a study of online advertising. Banner ads for a camera were flashed five times, twenty times, or not at all at the top of an article participants read. The more frequently the ad appeared, the more the participants came to like the camera, even though they were not aware of seeing the ads for it (Fang, 2007).