The Subtle Science Of Persuasion

No matter what field of expertise you are in, I have no doubt the need to persuade other people features somewhere in your role. I thought, therefore that you might be interested in the theory of an article I recently read.

Persuasion itself is not as hard as it may seem according to American Psychologist Dr Robert Cialdini – it is a matter of pulling the appropriate trigger. The example he cites is the notices we have all seen in hotel bathrooms to reuse towels to protect the environment – our concerns about global warming are apparently enough to make us reuse towels at least once during our stay. But is this the limit of the effectiveness of the signs – could more people be persuaded to reuse their towels and more often – by use of a different message? An experiment was set up by American academics to assess this. They compared the results of the first notice against those of a different notice which stated that most guests in the hotel recycled their towels. The academics were amazed to see a leap of 26% in the numbers of guests reusing their towels. The experiment was taken one stage further by displaying a sign that said that most of the guests who stayed in that room recycled their towels and reuse rose by 33% compared to the first message.
This experiment demonstrates a theory called “social proof” – where we use other people’s behaviour as a guide to our own. Other persuasive strategies that Cialdini refers to are reciprocation – the powerful obligation we feel to return favours, authority – our willingness to defer to experts, consistency - the need to keep our actions in line with our values, scarcity – the less available a resource – the more we want it – hence the power of the advertising slogan “Buy now while stocks last”! Finally, liking – the more we like people the more we want to say yes to them.

Given that the business workplace could be considered as a place where we would want to persuade others to our way of thinking, the power to persuade is clearly a key skill. The power of these principles that Cialdini refers to is that they trigger deep-seated psychological mechanisms, which we follow to prevent us getting into danger. Social proofing is one of the most basic – if you were a fish it would better to follow the rest of your shoal to avoid ending up as another creature’s lunch!

These techniques are simple yet powerful – but don’t use unscrupulously as when they are employed as weapons any short term gains are most likely to be followed by short term losses.