Influence: Science and Practice (52 page)

It is difficult to steel ourselves cognitively against scarcity pressures because they have an emotion-arousing quality that makes thinking difficult. In defense, we might try to be alert to a rush of arousal in situations involving scarcity. Once alerted, we can take steps to calm the arousal and assess the merits of the opportunity in terms of why we want it.

Study Questions

Content Mastery

1. What is the relationship between the scarcity principle and Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance?
   
2. What makes the terrible twos and the teenage years especially susceptible to reactance effects?
   
3. How might modern social science explain the deaths of Shakespeare’s famous characters, Romeo and Juliet?
   
4. What are the standard reactions of a potential audience to banned information?
   
5. What does the chocolate chip cookies study by Worchel, Lee, and Adewole (1975) indicate about the circumstances that maximize the effects of the scarcity principle?
   

Critical Thinking

1. As a metal, silver has always been both useful and rare. To which of these qualities do you think Xenophon was referring (in 355
   BC
   ) when he wrote: “No one has ever possessed so much silver as to want no more. If a man finds himself with a huge amount of it, he takes as much pleasure in burying the surplus as in using it.”
   
2. Ovid said, “Easy things nobody wants, but what is forbidden is tempting.” Explain his meaning in psychological terms.
   
3. Recall my brother Richard’s approach to selling used cars. He never lied to anyone, yet some of his friends accused him of questionable ethics. What do you think? Was his technique ethically acceptable or objectionable? Why?
   
4. For more than a decade, the major message of a massive advertising campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes was that modern women “have come a long way” from the old days when they were required by social norms to be subdued, proper, and obedient. No longer, implied these ads, should a woman have to feel bound by chauvinistic and outmoded constraints on her independence. No matter what your view of the basic message, use your knowledge of psychological reactance to help explain the following fact: During the lengthy duration of this campaign, the percentage of cigarette smokers rose in only one U.S. demographic group—teenage women.
   
5. How does the ad that opens this chapter reflect the topic of the chapter?
   

Chapter 8
Instant Influence
Primitive Consent for an Automatic Age

Every day in every way, I’m getting better.

—Emilé Coué

Every day in every way, I’m getting busier.

—Robert Cialdini

B
ACK IN THE 1960S A MAN NAMED JOE PYNE HOSTED A RATHER
remarkable TV talk show that was syndicated from California. The program was made distinctive by Pyne’s caustic and confrontational style with his guests—for the most part, a collection of exposure-hungry entertainers, would-be celebrities, and representatives of fringe political or social organizations. The host’s abrasive approach was designed to provoke his guests into arguments, to fluster them into embarrassing admissions, and generally to make them look foolish. It was not uncommon for Pyne to introduce a visitor and launch immediately into an attack on the individual’s beliefs, talent, or appearance. Some people claimed that Pyne’s acid personal style was partially caused by a leg amputation that had embittered him to life; others said, no, he was just vituperative by nature.

One evening rock musician Frank Zappa was a guest on the show. This was at a time in the 1960s when very long hair on men was still unusual and controversial. As soon as Zappa had been introduced and seated, the following exchange occurred:

Pyne:
I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
Zappa:
I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

Primitive Automaticity

Aside from containing what may be my favorite ad-lib, the dialogue between Pyne and Zappa illustrates a fundamental theme of this book: Very often when we make a decision about someone or something we don’t use all of the relevant available information. We use, instead, only a single, highly representative piece of the total. An isolated piece of information, even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly stupid mistakes—mistakes that, when exploited by clever others, leave us looking silly or worse.

At the same time, a complicating companion theme has been present throughout this book: Despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that accompanies a reliance on a single feature of the available data, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut. Recall that early in
Chapter 1
, we compared this shortcut to the automatic responding of lower animals, whose elaborate behavior patterns could be triggered by the presence of a lone stimulus feature—a cheep-cheep sound, a shade of red breast feather, or a specific sequence of light flashes. The reason these lower animals must often rely on such solitary stimulus features of their environments is their restricted mental capacity. Their small brains cannot begin to register and process all of the relevant information in their environments. So these species have evolved special sensitivities to certain aspects of the information. Because those selected aspects of information are normally enough to cue a correct response, the system is usually very efficient: Whenever a mother turkey hears cheep, cheep,
click, whirr
, out rolls the proper maternal behavior in a mechanical
fashion that conserves much of her limited brainpower for dealing with the other situations and choices she must face in her day.

We, of course, have vastly more effective brain mechanisms than do mother turkeys, or any other animal group, for that matter. We are unchallenged in the ability to take into account a multitude of relevant facts and, consequently, to make good decisions. Indeed, it is this information-processing advantage over other species that has helped make us the dominant form of life on the planet.

Still, we have our capacity limitations, too; and, 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. For instance, in deciding whether to say yes or no to a requester, we frequently pay attention to a single piece of the relevant information in the situation. In preceding chapters, we have explored several of the most popular of the single pieces of information that we use to prompt our compliance decisions. They are the most popular prompts precisely because they are the most reliable ones, those that normally point us toward the correct choice. That is why we employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so often and so automatically in making our compliance decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly reliable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes instead of no.

We are likely to use these lone cues when we don’t have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation. When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted, or fatigued, we tend to focus on less of the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach.
¹
All this leads to an unnerving insight: With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.

¹
For evidence of such perceptual and decisional narrowing, see Albarracin & Wyer (2001); Bodenhausen (1990); Chajut & Algom (2003); Easterbrook (1959); Gilbert and Osborne (1989); Hockey and Hamilton (1970); Keinan (1987); Kruglanski and Freund (1983); Mackworth (1965); Milgram (1970); Paulus, Martin, and Murphy (1992); Sengupta & Johar (2001); Tversky and Kahneman (1974); and Webster, Richter, and Kruglansk (1996).

Sometimes the consequences can be calamitous. Remember the FBI’s infamously misguided assault on Branch Davidian Church headquarters in Waco, Texas? According to an analysis by U.S. Justice Department consultants, during the FBI’s 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian’s compound, the agency collected so much information that it had to ignore the vast majority of it. Said Professor Robert Louden, one of the Justice Department’s consultants, “The FBI had such an intelligence information 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” (“Overload of Advice,” 1993). The disastrous outcome was that, when the FBI finally attacked, more than 80 sect members died in an act of faith- and fear-fueled self-immolation.

Modern Automaticity

John Stuart Mill, the British economist, political thinker, and philosopher of science, died over 135 years ago. The year of his death (1873) is important because he is reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know in the world. Today, the notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is laughable. After eons of slow accumulation, human knowledge has snowballed into an era of momentum-fed, multiplicative, monstrous expansion. We now live in a world where most of the information is less than 15 years old. In certain fields of science alone (physics, for example), knowledge is said to double every eight years. The scientific information explosion is not limited to such arcane arenas as molecular chemistry or quantum physics, but extends to everyday areas of knowledge where we strive to keep ourselves current—health, child development, nutrition. What’s more, this rapid growth is likely to continue, since researchers are pumping their newest findings into an estimated 400,000 scientific journals worldwide.

Apart from the streaking advance of science, things are quickly changing much closer to home. According to yearly Gallup polls, the issues rated as most important on the public agenda are becoming more diverse and are surviving on that agenda for a shorter time. In addition, we travel more and faster; we relocate more frequently to new residences, which are built and torn down more quickly; we contact more people and have shorter relationships with them; in the supermarket, car showroom, and shopping mall, 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, transience, diversity, and acceleration are acknowledged as prime descriptors of civilized existence.

This avalanche of information and choices is made possible by burgeoning technological progress. Leading the way are developments in our ability to collect, store, retrieve, and communicate information. At first, the fruits of such advances were limited to large organizations—government agencies or powerful corporations. With further developments in telecommunications and computer technology, access to such staggering amounts of information is falling within the reach of individual citizens. Extensive cable and satellite systems provide one route for that information into the average home.

The other major route is the personal computer. In 1972, Norman Macrae, an editor of The
Economist
, speculated prophetically about a time in the future:

The prospect is, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was ever available to the human brain of even an Einstein. (Macrae, 1972)