The Influence Expert: 7 Ways to Get People to Do What You Want (Even When They Don't Want To)

now here's the one thing that the newest research shows when they ask us to give them input on this new generation or their the the shape of their new products and so on we are typically asked for our opinion on this can you give us your opinion on this that's a mistake when you ask for an opinion you get a critic if instead of asking for someone's opinion where you want their buy-in with you on some idea or outline or blueprint you've got for a new uh initiative if you ask for their advice on it

you get a partner and the research shows instead of asking for opinion or feedback or your expectations about this new product or service you ask for your advice ask people for their advice on it not only are they more favorable to your idea they give you better input more constructive reasons because they're of you they want you to be a success they're your partner in this [Music] bob welcome to the show well thank you shane i'm glad to be with you before we dive into the seven factors that make us more persuasive can you explain

the difference between influence and manipulation yeah and i think it has to do with those seven factors those are the things that lend themselves to ascent because they normally counsel people correctly to move in a particular direction so for example one of them is authority if the experts are saying that something is a good idea then we're probably well advised to follow the authority uh influence if a lot of people like us are moving in that direction there's a trend for it that probably also lets us know that that's a shortcut to making a good

decision so there are these seven such principles and for me influence involves pointing to them where they naturally exist that is informing people into ascent by simply raising the profile of that principle in one way or another in your communication manipulation involves the fabrication or manufacture of those principles the counterfeiting them of them in a situation where somebody lies with statistics in order to get you to believe that a lot of people are doing this or believing this thing that you want them to or presenting someone as an authority on the topic who's not truly

an authority is a celebrity or something like that that's not an authority that's something else and so it's when you recognize that those particular levers of influence are effective and co-op them into your to your behalf rather than simply uncovering them for the audience member which i think is not just ethical i think it's commendable to provide that kind of information to people that kind of education to people that that's a great um opening to the the conversation let's dive into the principles and start with reciprocation so um the first principle i talk about is

very an early one in the socialization process in all human societies we are trained to live by a particular rule the rule of reciprocation that says we are obligated to give back to others who have first given to us right that's the way that the society best functions and allows people the freedom to give first with the knowledge that they're not giving something away i mean for the first time in evolutionary history all these species besides us never had the concept of future obligation to return what has been provided to them but when we have

that rule in place it allows us the freedom to give resources attention care and so on to others with the recognition we're not losing it that person is obligated to give back to us when we need something it's a fair exchange it's a great system so we give first and i love a new study that was done not even published yet was done in mcdonald's um actually in the countries of colombia and brazil where researchers inc in fact my colleague steve martin who runs our office in uk and was commissioned to do this study in

south america did a study where for a week every family that came into the mcdonald's locations the children got a balloon from the mcdonald's management half of them got the balloon as the family was leaving as a nice thank you for their uh you know for for for coming into mcdonald's and and and uh purchasing pro uh food the other half got the balloon each kid got the balloon as they entered those families bought 25 percent more food because they had been given something first first is the key first means it's not the usual behavioral

um model that we use in business which says if you buy my product if you sign my contract right i promise i will give to you the very best service or merits of of the offer that i can i can provide that means the customer has to go first this is saying something else we have to go first we give value in some way easily the the way to do it that's least costly is to give information to people about things that will uh improve their outcomes in any given situation white papers tips about the

top three things to do to improve their outcomes and something not based on our product or service if it's designed to tell them how to buy us or why they should then it's seen as a device not a gift not a not a favor if we do that people are now readied to give back to us so the rule for reciprocation that's the first i have a friend who who summarizes this as go positive go first go positive go first that's right so why is it we don't do more of that i think people are

afraid they don't recognize the power of this rule and they're afraid that by going first and giving resources giving time giving attention giving samples and so on people might they might just be losing that they're not cognizant of the fact that there's such a strong rule in every human culture that says you're not you must not take without giving in return they really don't register the power of that rule but it is formidable and there's different types of things that we can give and gifts come to mind maybe concessions in a negotiation what are what

are the other types that we can think of when reciprocation is at play so for example you're right about uh concessions there's research to show if uh and we've done some research if we walk up to people and say listen um would you be a long-term blood donor and give a unit of blood every six weeks for the next two years a very large request right a starting off everybody said no i don't even know or i'll be in two years i can't make that and we said oh well then would you give one unit

tomorrow during the local blood drive in your neighborhood we go from 33 of people who agree to give a um the next day right if that's the only thing we ask them to 55 if we retreat to that we make a concession oh so you can't do the two-year thing that we would most like but would you do this one thing so now we go from 33 to 55 compliance and by the way we man the we staff the the blood services organization we have observers there they show up it's not just that they say

no oh yeah sure i'll do that because they want to get us away no they show up well that goes to commitment and consistency which we'll talk about a bit later but is there a contrast at play there too because you now you've taken it from a large commitment to a much smaller commitment which feels more manageable that's a very perceptive point there's not only is there the effect of making concession that needs to be reciprocated oh you made a concession to me i'll make a concession in return it's that you've made a contrast between

the larger favor two years every six weeks to just once and this one now seems smaller so we tested for that in the study and we found that in fact if we just say if we we include the contrast in our presentation we have you can go anywhere from giving six months for for two years every six weeks for two years or you could just give to tomorrow that doesn't produce the effect to the same degree you have to get them to say no so you can retreat to that thing and then spur a retreat

in return sure uh is there a look if if somebody gives you a gift or maybe does you a favor is there a balance in the sense of obligation that we feel we need to repay or is there like almost an interest a mental interest that we uh we ascribe to returning that favor so we have to do more no my sense is we are obligated to give back at the same level but if the only thing we can do is to give back at a higher level we will to avoid the burden of feeling

like a cheater like a free rider right like a taker an in-grade so if somebody uh does us you know buys us lunch and uh so we say okay next time it's on me right but between that time if this says this person says i'm in a bind can you drive over to where i am and jump my battery for me right we have to say yes because this person just did us a favor while we're in that state of obligation we will go even higher although most of the time we can cancel the uh

the obligation simply by giving what they gave us a nice lunch is there a time span associated with this like after a couple weeks does it wear off or is it more potent at the start or how do we think about that there is a time frame associated with this people are more willing to say yes to a request for something in return the closer to the favor we've provided however when they have given us very large favors those things stay in our consciousness and years later we will be willing to give back to them

they those big memorable favors stay solid but the smaller ones they tend to fade away over time are there sort of ideal operating conditions like when this works even better well that that's one of them certainly that proximate uh to the cause uh but also when what we have given to them is tailored to their needs their preferences their current challenges under those circumstances we now have a we now have a more muscular version of the sense of obligation i'll give you an example again we can do it at a at a fast food restaurant

right researchers did a study people came in and one-third of them just went to the um to the counter and ordered their food another third of them came in and were given a very attractive key ring with a beautiful um medallion on it right and those people then by the management oh thank you for coming to mcdonald's here's a uh a gift for you right they they they then bought 12 percent more food you get a gift there was a third group they came in and they were given a small cup of yogurt as a

thank you right for coming in now any economist would say they were fools to do that because now people don't need to buy as much food right they bought 24 more food because why do you go to a restaurant because you're hungry if you give people something they need that's high in their goal hierarchy they're going to be most willing to give back to you at a higher level sure that makes a lot of sense um i'm trying to think one of the examples from your book that i really liked maybe you can illuminate this

for us was the cuban missile crisis yes you tell us about that you weren't alive during the cuban missile crisis it occurred in the early 1960s when the president of the united states was then john kennedy and the leader of the soviet union was khrushchev and it was determined by u.s intelligence that russian ships had brought to cuba icbm missiles nuclear had missiles that were installed and pointed at the united states 90 miles away what kennedy did was to demand that khrushchev removed those missiles and there were russian ships steaming for cuba at the time

that were carrying more and kennedy said we're going to blockade those ships and chris just said that's an act of war if you do that you're gonna you're gonna torch set off a war not any war a nuclear war between the two greatest nuclear powers at the time that was estimated to kill a third of humanity right and during that time the two leaders were locked in this stair off contest and both of them were uh just adamant about their positions and finally because kennedy was so adamant and strong-willed and resolute in this khrushchev blinked

and he removed his missiles right that was the story that we all heard in the history books and that i learned about when i was alive at the time it turns out that there was a secret deal that was made between kennedy and khrushchev it was a reciprocal concessions deal that's kennedy said if you will remove your missiles from cuba we'll remove ours from turkey that are pointed at you right but don't tell anybody about it because if politically if i was seen as as compromising with yielding in any way to our uh natural enemy

at that time our global enemy at the time it would ruin my political aspirations for reelection right so khrushchev was promised promised yes okay i won't say anything it wasn't until recently that this information was revealed at the at the kennedy library the after it was embargoed for all those years it finally came up and scholars have said no it wasn't this hard line that won the day the hard line was the thing that risked the world the thing that saved the world was reciprocal concession and it got buried right and it's regrettable because the

image that a lot of world leaders got from this never compromise never give in just be strong and you if you are strong enough you will win it was exactly the wrong thing that's not what happened at all it was the rule for reciprocation that one that won the day i love that example and i at the power of this particular effect is undeniable not everybody has great intent how do we defend ourselves against this i think what we have to do is recognize that we can't just in a blanket kind of way reject the

gifts and favors and services that may be very well intentioned for us right by people who would like to you know increase our outcomes in a particular situation what we have to do is recognize that when those people do that and then use that as a lever to get something much larger from us we have to re-frame what they gave us as no longer a gift to be reciprocated but a trick a device an artifice designed to get our compliance with a much larger request where they will come out much far ahead in the bargain

we have to make that little change and then here's where the rule for reciprocity uh comes in because i studied a group that would get people to make appointments with them uh to check out their fire safety uh issues at home right and somebody would come in and give them a home fire extinguisher and then would give them a bunch of uh reasons to buy a particular kind a very expensive heat activated fire alarm system that they were representing so they weren't really there to give us the information about fire safety they were there to

sell this outrageously overpriced system and what i say to people in this situation is look here's what as soon as you see that what that the game was don't treat the fire alarms the the the fire extinguisher that you got as a gift treat it as a trick right treated as a as an attempt to exploit you and if that's the case show them the door and keep the fire extinguisher because by the rule of reciprocation exploiter should be exploited yeah it works both ways yeah the the second principle in your book is liking which

is we prefer to say yes to people that we like what are sort of the main variables that carry a lot of the weight to whether we like somebody or not there are really two major variables that we can influence one is similarity we like people who are like us so one thing we can do is to point to commonalities that genuinely exist remember you ask that insightful question what's the difference between influence and manipulation if we point to a genuine comparability that exists between us and the other other individual right that person feels a

greater rapport with us oh you're a runner i'm a runner you're uh uh an only child i'm an only child you know okay now there's a a bond between us and those people will feel more uh more poor with us and want to do business with us if those are genuinely there so for example there was one study that was done between negotiators who were bargaining over email and you know email is the most bloodless uh communication device we have ever devised and as a result they they were stymied in their negotiations deadlocked so that

in 30 of the instances both sides walked away with nothing there was no mutually agreeable uh beneficial compromise for both sides they just left the scene that was for half of the negotiators the other half we're told before you begin the negotiation by email send some information about yourself to the other negotiator your negotiating partner what your hobbies are what your interests are where you grew up where you went to school what your major was in college you know these kinds of things and in that case stymied negotiations went from thirty percent to six percent

now here's the key i think when the researchers analyzed the data it wasn't the amount of personalizing information that had been sent across it was how many commonalities were in those accounts if they if there were a lot of commonality similarities they got the most concessions they right the key was the parallel so the implication is clear for us we now have a tool that we never had before the internet that allows us to know some things about the people that we are going to interact with and hoping to to influence in our direction it's

not proprietary information people give us that information on social on social media and linkedin and so on we can find that and where we find genuine commonalities we can just raise those to the surface before we begin are there sort of uh i have the same question for all of them but are there ideal operating conditions or set of circumstances when this works even better for the the the liking principle for the liking principle well it it does when we have had some kind of situation in which we've been excluded from an interaction or we

felt our our um our feelings were hurt by somebody a friend or something then we're really looking for people are really looking for that connection that friendship uh association so that that can be the case uh as well uh i wanna again talk about how to defend against that but before we get there that my favorite example from the book i think was joe girard can you tell us about him and how he used this joe girard was amazing he was the world's greatest salesperson according to the guinness book of records for like 12 years

in a row he sold automobiles chevrolets from a dealership in uh detroit in the detroit area and he sold an average of of i think it was six cars and trucks a day every day that he worked now some people if they sell six in a week that's a banner you know he sold him six a day for years how did he do it well one of the things that he says that he did that was so important for everybody who ever bought a car from him every month they would receive a greeting card for

him depending on the holiday that month happy new year uh happy valentine's day happy uh uh you know whatever it was fourth of july whatever the month was and then you opened it up and it's it said one thing inside the car card i like you joe gerard now that man use the liking principle that we like people who like us right so this is compliments it's not just similarity this the second thing that we can use besides similarity is genuine compliments that people give us praise that we give to others and if we do

that honestly and joe was a people person he liked everybody so he wasn't lying by saying i like you just having that message you would think 12 times a year every year automatically this thing comes no for joe girard he said that was important to let people know that i liked him so it's not just that we like people who are like us we like people who do like us and say so how do we defend against this how do we go about neutralizing the effect of liking somebody suppose you're in a car showroom right

not joe gerard's but uh you're gonna buy a new car right here's what the most uh effective sales people have been taught to do before they ever show you the car they're going to give you something they're going to give you a bottle of mineral water they're going to give you a cup of coffee or tea or a soft drink they're going to compliment you on your decision to come in at this time of the month maybe even compliment you on your choices of colors schemes and accessories associated with the car they're going to tell

you oh so here we are in uh minnesota and uh were you born in minnesota well yes i was me too i'm a minnesotan and i'm you know where were you born i was born in well i'm born in minnesota but my wife is from texas my wife is from texas they'll claim these similarities right and you will find yourself liking that salesperson more than is warranted by an interaction with somebody for 30 minutes if you find yourself unliking you find yourself liking somebody inordinately step back from the situation and say wait a minute what

has that person been doing that would cause me to like him or her right so much within 30 oh yeah they gave me that uh that coke they they they complimented me they told me that they live in the same they're from the same area as me they're similar to right and then you have to separate the salesperson from the car because you have to recognize i'm going to be driving that toyota off the lot not the person yeah it doesn't matter how much i like the sales person i would be driving the car so

you you have to make your choice based on the features the the favorable features of the deal not of the person who's offering you the deal i like that um moving on to social proof which is the third principle in the book uh why is popularity so effective you know there's a i saw a quote about uh popularity and and how people are using uh popularity on the internet and on you know in various ways and this particular uh humor has said popularity is all the rage these days yeah here's the point popularity that is

a version of social proof which says one way we can reduce our uncertainty of what we should do in a situation when we're uncertain we don't look inside ourselves for the answer all we see is the lack of confidence so we look outside and one place we look is to what the people around us like us have been doing or are currently doing in a particular situation are we getting a lot of people going to this new restaurant you know buying this new piece of software if so that is a shortcut i can use to

reduce my uncertainty about the fact that that will probably be a good choice for me if a lot of people are doing it and uh are rating it positively with those star ratings and so on and that's a way i can reduce my uncertainty because they've already beta tested this thing for me they've done okay i can choose so that's why it's so popular to choose popularity as a indicator of a good choice there was a study done in beijing china that that that i love it shows you the cross-cultural reach of this so in

beijing researchers arranged with the managers of a string of restaurants to put a little asterisk on certain items of the menu that people got when they uh were to order what did the and those items that got the asterisk then became purchased 13 to 20 percent more frequently so what did the asterisk represent it wasn't what we normally see when there are little asterisks next to items on the menu like this is a specialty of the house or this is what our chef recommends for this evening if you've read any of those kitchen confidential books

you know that the chef's special for this evening it was what was left over from the bank before has to be gotten rid of right okay no the asterisk said if you go down and read what it stood for this is one of our most popular items and each one became 13 to 20 percent more popular for its popularity yeah there's one little you have to read the footnotes on this study that was published on this research to see one more little feature of all of this that helps explain your or answer your question why

is popularity so valuable for us and it is that if you look at the various demographic groups that came into the restaurant males females young people older people business people uh you know leisure uh patrons who just came in neighborhood patrons and so on they all were influenced by the asterisk but there was one group that was far more influenced than anyone else first time visitors the ones who were most uncertain they could look to [Music] the choices of others in that restaurant to reduce their uncertainty about what to buy sure i think that that's

a really good point right so uncertainty makes us more vulnerable to it i think there's a couple of other nuances to this that i find really interesting one is um feasibility right so if we see other people doing something we feel like we can do it too especially i would imagine if we identify as part of that tribe or that person is similar to us in fact i once worked for a company as the chief scientist that sent messages to the customers of local power companies about how much energy they were using relative to their

comparable neighbors neighbors who had similar sized homes similar air conditioning and heating units and so on and that information caused those people who were using more energy than their neighbors to dramatically reduce their energy and i think one reason is what you said it's that well if my neighbors like me can do it that means i can do it it means it's feasible it's practicable i can do it too i i can tell you something that is remarkable about this company it was called old power it's since been purchased by uh oracle as a result

of this all power has is responsible for 30 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that have not been released into the environment because people have reduced their energy conservation by just knowing what their comparable neighbors are doing and saying well then i can do that it can be a very effective tool for good it can also be used against us how do we defend against social proof yeah for people like making up online reviews or telling us you know other it's more popular than it is yeah so what we have to do is so what we

have to do with let's take uh online reviews right we have to check out the character of those reviews it turns out there's particular things that allow us to know when the review is phony do they do they use a lot of personal stories that means they're not giving you evidence of the features of the product or service because they don't really know they've just been hired to get right all right do they use a lot of uh verbs rather than nouns for the same reason it's they're telling us what they were doing and how

they were operating and how they were feeling about it rather than what the product really was right uh those those kinds of things um and so we can look to that but also there was a great study that looked at which star rating on a product review was most likely to produce a conversion from a prospect to a customer it wasn't a five-point rating it was a range between 4.2 and 4.7 people were on to the tricksters who were loading their um evaluations with all of these positive things so if it was below 4.2 people

say well maybe this isn't such a great product if it was above 4.7 they got suspicious so what we have actually is a constant struggle between the product review sites who have algorithms to try to weed out the phony uh reviews and and excuse me the tricksters who are trying to out flank the the uh the cos the the uh the various ways to protect to prevent them and it's it's an ongoing battle but there are a couple of things we can do and here's the thing that i i keep recommending in the response to

your question what can we do about this so for example there are instances in which uh news accounts tell us of companies that were caught providing phony information about their about their products uh i mean their popularity or about their market share or about their ratings and so on whenever we see one of those we need to go on their site and go on every site of our social media and say so look these people were cheaters don't go back to them look they've been caught cheating don't do business with them we have to penalize

those people who do the manipulation that you were asking about earlier we can't just let's say well i'm not going to do business with them we have to really penalize them at their bottom line level in order to reduce this tendency to to manipulate let's talk about authority is there a difference between being an authority and being in authority there is and we can have a lot of evidence of somebody who's in charge directing those who are working or operating beneath them to do something coerce them or threaten them with some kind of form of

penalty if they don't uh move in a particular direction because i'm the boss playing the i'm the boss card that has costs people don't like being pushed they don't like being pressured even by somebody who's in authority over them very often what they do is they find a way to finesse the system and get around the uh the directive because what that's about for me is not influence as much as it is power that's about power yes and we can wield power but there are costs of it that's from being an authority excuse me in

authority what we are recommending as a way to be influential is being an authority somebody who knows a lot about the topic someone who's a true expert who is authoritative on the matter and those to the extent that we can harness that principle by having testimonials from legitimately highly knowledgeable experts that speak to our idea or our product or service that's going to work um i know that when bose acoustics uh we were working with them when they added uh to an ad for a product that they had called the bose wave music system us

a line of testifiers right at the start of the ad all over to the to the left just as you read the ad and up at the top they saw all these testifiers it increased purchases by 15 of that product we know that it was that ad that did it because the increase occurred only to the phone number that was in the ad it didn't occur in the shops people walking in and by no it was to that phone number and when there's testimonials by authority figures or were those testimonials just average people this is

a great comment they they were testimonials by authorities people who were legitimate experts on audition and electronic components audio components and so on now here's the thing that we did help them with originally when the marketing department structured that ad those testimonials were at the bottom and look at all of the people who agree with what we've just said here about this wrong by moving them to the top now the authority aura that they provide is infused on into every word of that ad as people are experiencing it why would you throw that honest lever

of influence away by making it at not giving it it's due at the top so what i always recommend to people who are using testimonials and this can include by the way as you uh inferred they can also include testimonials from similar others because remember we want to follow the lead of people like us right so you've got peers that can be testifiers or you have experts in either case they need to go at the top so that you have been informed ahead of time that others experts or peers have reduced your uncertainty of whether

to believe the information that's going to come next how do we defend ourselves against this against authority yeah we're on the authority principle it is to to ask ourselves two questions when we see an authority uh test testimonial one is to say is this person truly an expert on in this matter what does matthew mcconaughey really know about chrysler's yeah he's driving and he's telling us how a great chrysler wait a minute he's just amazing right what's that right there was a great uh set of tv commercials that began with an actor who played a

doctor on tv who began by saying i'm not a doctor but i play a doctor on tv right that ad sold all kinds of pain reliever right or it was cos cough syrup if we had thought about it and said wait a minute before i believe this person let me ask is this person an expert on this topic no so that should un-hook the expert um uh influence from my mind on this that's the first thing but sometimes we will have people who are genuine experts recommending something then we have to ask a second question

is there a reason for this person to be recommending this product or service other than its merits is this person hired yeah does this person get products for doing this what a lot of influencers get they get products and income from those products that they advocate on air so we have to once again unhook their perceived authority here if they truly are you know there are makeup consultants and so on they all do this and they say we love this particular kind all right they might have authority but whether they're acting in the unbiased independent

way is another question we should ask ourselves and if we see that they're not unhook the perception that this person uh should be followed because of that expertise let's talk about the scarcity principle we prefer people want more of those things they can have less of let's put it that way we find that those items that are rare scarce dwindling and availability are more attractive to us we want those things more of those things we can have less of and we all know that um there's a an acronym called fomo fear of missing out that

we've all heard about that's a big problem a big reason why scarcity works the idea that if something is rare or scarce or dwindling in availability it means we might not get it we might miss it fear of missing out we might miss out on this thing right and we hate that idea there's a concept called loss aversion that daniel kahneman who won the nobel prize in economics a few years ago demonstrated that the idea of losing something of a particular value is twice as powerful on human psychology as the idea of gaining that very

same thing [Music] so when we present an idea to people that has all kinds of benefits and advantages that we can genuinely point to we should not just coach it in terms of this is what you'll be able to gain by choosing our product we should also honestly be able to say and this is something you don't want to lose right those advantages you don't want to forgo those benefits that will resonate more powerfully remember we were talking about that bose ad that i was mentioned that if you put uh is that the one where

you did the hear what you're missing or yes so we also before we even did that with bose on that same project the first generation of that ad was very unsuccessful for boats at the top of the of the ad was the word new and then after that there was all kinds of information about new features new elegance new simplicity new all these this information and it wasn't being very well received by the bose purchasers so we asked them we said look don't change the whole ad change what you say at the top of the

ad the word new says uncertain it says there isn't any evidence about this yet there isn't any feedback that i can see from my neighbors or friends at the office who've tried it or you know it's it's brand new i'm gonna i'm gonna wait what we did was to change the word new to hear what you've been missing the idea of missing out says no time for waiting no no i have to get this i don't want to miss it i don't want to miss out on this great thing right okay that change produced a

45 increase in sales then if the bose marketing department added testimonials they produced a 15 greater increase to 60 percent increase from the initial generation of that ad so it was both of those things together the idea of loss is what people really want to avoid now i don't know how many of the your your followers are uh online uh operators so most of us have a lot of online uh profile but there was a study of 6 700 e-commerce sites and a b tests that were done for various components inside those sites and some

of them were like economic like does the site have free delivery some were technological does the site have a search function some were um psycho psychological does every appeal end with a call to action then they read they they had 29 of those the top six were all principles of social influence and the top one was was scarcity of supply we only have a certain number of these with this feature or at this price it was the top a b test that produced conversion from prospect to customer second was social proof look at all the

people who've already done this we've gotten this kind of message and by the way there's a new research that shows that there's a particularly powerful form of social proof that isn't just a large number of people have done this but there's a trend to that number it used to be that last year we had uh 30 market share six months ago it was 35. now it's 40 that's more powerful than just saying 40 percent because people project growing that's right people project the function of the trend into the future so social proof was number two

with evidence like that of a large market share or popularity or trends and number three was scarcity of time that is limited time offers this offer is only good for this week whatever the time was those three were the most powerful approaches so scarcity was two of the top three now i'm going to suggest there's something else that we can do that in powers the scarcity principle and it doesn't require scarcity of suppliers or time limits and that is uniqueness of what we offer if we have something a feature that none of our rivals can

match that's where we go because people will want it if they can't get it anywhere else now a lot of times because of the homogenation of the way things are manufactured and offered these days a lot of times there it isn't one thing that separates you from anybody else in the market but it could be a suite of things a particular combination of features that only you provide go there go there that's what people don't want to lose by going somewhere else let's talk about commitment and consistency principle this is the one that says people

want to be consistent with what they have already said or done especially in public as a consequence right if we can ask people to take a small step in our direction voluntarily but see look here is the could you do this take a small step they will now be significantly more likely to take a larger step that is congruent with what they have already done because people want to be consistent within their behavior and they want to be seen as consistent so here's a good study in that regard it was study done in um chicago

um with a restaurant owner named gordon sinclair it's a famous restaurant called gordon's there in chicago and he's since retired but while he was operating he had a problem no shows people who would call yeah right they make a a a a a reservation and that then they just wouldn't show up and they wouldn't call ahead to cancel and it was as he had uh 30 percent uh no-shows okay so he walked around and and saw what his saw what his receptionist would say to people when she took a booking she would say thank you

for calling gordon's right please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation we've heard that many times he asked her to change two words and to say will you please call if you have to change or cancel your reservation and then he asked her to pause and have people fill that moment and they all said of course sure glad to and that was their commitment and no shows dropped by 67 immediately and never went up because he had gotten them to make an active public voluntary commitment to something and now they're going to

live up to it to a greater degree so here's an implication i think for anybody like a manager anytime you're running a meeting and you've given members of your team tasks to perform and complete before the next meeting come back with those don't let anybody out of that room until you ask the question will you be able to complete this by our next meeting and pause if the answer is no that's actually good for a manager to know that means okay then i have to give this person more time or more resources or maybe even

some help with it right but if the answer is yes you have now significantly increased the likelihood that that person will come with a properly completed task to the meeting because you've asked them and they have made an active public voluntary commitment to doing so one of the interesting things for me about commitment and consistency is we sort of hide inside the walls of our own thinking how do we how do we defend against this not only when other people are using it but how do we defend ourselves from just constantly escalating and being held

to opinions that may be no longer valid man this is a good question and i'm gonna answer it by first saying how we do this with people who we would like to change in our direction who have already made a commitment to something else to another product or a service or an idea right i mean right now we've got a lot of people uh who are resisting the health information about well right how do we change that we can't say well you know when you made that decision it was the wrong choice you were just

making a wrong choice uh you are you're not a good decision maker people want to hear that that's going to get their back up and they say i i still stand by this decision what you have to say is at the time that you made that choice in the information environment that may have well been a good choice for you but here's a new piece of information that we didn't have back then as a good decision maker people take into account all the information so you're a good decision and we can get people unmoored from

that commitment that they had made by saying okay now let's reevaluate because there's a new piece of information i can give you on this topic that we didn't have back there wasn't part of the information environment and this is what i think i'm going to ask us to do ourselves that when we encounter a new piece of information relative to a decision or a choice that we've made and you know and that we get a chance to change right we need to say if i knew this when i first made my choice if that was

part of this would i have made the same choice or would this have had us enough weight to move me right and my guess is a lot of times that would allow us to say yeah i you know i want to take into account all of the information including the information that i didn't have back then there's so many other questions i want to ask and uh we have to cover unity and then i have a whole host of other questions so let's talk about unity which is the the new one that you've added to

the book the seventh principle what is it how does it work it works for a communicator in the following way if that communicator can arrange for us to see him or her as one of us that is as someone who shares an identity with them in some kind of important way right like a tribal identity it can be a tri yes tribal identity but it can be something uh le i'll give you an example of a study that was done on a college campus researchers asked a young woman college-aged woman to stand on a heavily

trafficked part of campus and ask people to donate to a good cause i think it was the united way and she was getting some contributions if she said before she made the request one thing right which was i'm a student here too would you give the united way donations went up 400 percent i'm one of you i'm one of you i'm of you i'm not just like you in style or preferences or those are things no i'm of you then people will say yes i used this a while ago on uh in my own life

when it turned out i i was writing a a grant application to get funding for a long three-year program of research and it was due the next day it had to be sent in to the funding office the next day and uh i'm reading over it you know making sure everything is right and i had a came to a paragraph that said uh made a particular claim and i realized i really didn't have convincing evidence for that claim but i knew that a colleague of mine in the psychology department where i was working at the

time had done a study the year before and had collected the data that were relevant to this and he had it in his archives so i i sent him an email and let's call him tim that's not his real name i sent him an email uh saying tim i'm in this bind i have this grant due tomorrow and uh i i don't really have the evidence but i know you have the evidence for this one point that's crucial i'm going to call you uh to get uh to talk about how i could you get that

from you in the form that i need to put it into this grant application well tim is known as an irascible sour negative kind of guy in my department so when i called him he said hello bob i know why you're calling and the answer is no look i can't be responsible for your poor time management skills bob you're a busy man i'm a busy man i have things to do today that also have time uh uh constraints so the answer is no all right so before i read this research on how people say yes

to those inside their we groups what i call we groups the groups that they would label as we right i would have said come on tim i really need this i've got this this deadline tomorrow and it's a grant applicant i had he had already said no to that yeah so here's what i said you know tim we've been in the same psychology department now for 12 years i really need this and shane i had the information that afternoon of course i just located us honestly pointing to a common membership in something that was a

shared identity for us so i i think that's something we can do whenever we have long-term relationships they can be commercial relationships they can pers be personal relationships they can be friendships of one sort or another if we have somebody that we would like to move in our direction on something we should start out by saying you know we've been together now uh for this many years and i really and i have a favor for you i wonder if you'd be and the fact that we're now in the same unit yeah inclines them to say

yes it's very powerful let's switch gears here a little bit um what makes warren buffett so successful at influencing thank you for listening to the first part of this episode i don't want you missing out on the rest if you're interested in hearing the complete version you'll want to become a member head to fs.blog tribe we cover what makes warren buffett so influential how to ace your next interview what to say when you do someone a favor how to protect yourself against cognitive biases who uses compliance tactics online the best structuring online sales pages and

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