Transcription
In the last three years, I have probably read over a hundred books. Among those books, there are only a few that I have read twice because I found them interesting.
Today's book summary is about one of those books. It is called *Influence* by Robert Cialdini. It is the number one book in the world when it comes to psychology of persuasion, and the author, Robert Cialdini, is the Godfather of ethical persuasion.
If you are currently struggling at your business or your job and looking for ways to improve, then watch this video or check out the book itself in the description. I'm sure you will find some valuable tips that will help you a lot.
In this video, I will summarize four key lessons and explain how you can apply them ethically. It doesn't matter if you need to persuade a client, a business partner, your boss, or your parents; these principles will help you. Okay, enough for the intro. Let's move on.
Principle number one: Reciprocity.
If someone buys you lunch, you feel obligated to buy them lunch next time. If someone helps you out, you also feel like helping back. If someone buys a gift on your birthday, you feel like doing the same, right? Simply put, the reciprocity principle tells us to repay others when they do something for us.
For example, in the restaurant, when the waitress just gave a mint candy along with the bill, people tipped three percent more than usual. Tips increased to 14 percent when two candies were given—quite a significant increase. But that is not all! Tips went up to 20 percent when the waitress gave one candy and then unexpectedly turned around and said, "For you nice people, here is one more candy!" People who received the additional candy and the compliment felt like they had to reciprocate by giving a higher tip.
Reciprocity is almost in our genes, and we can't stop ourselves from helping or giving back if someone does a favor or buys a gift for us. Even tiny favors or gifts can make the other side give back multiple times more.
For example, sometimes I go shopping with my three-year-old daughter, and some stores give balloons to kids in the entrance. I've noticed that whenever my daughter gets a balloon, I feel like spending more and coming back to that store again. That balloon does not have much value, but still counts as a gift, plus it made my daughter smile and get excited. And guess what? If you make my daughter smile, I will make sure to return that favor tenfold.
If you want to apply the reciprocity principle successfully, then you must include one of these three elements. Element number one: The favor or the gift you are giving should be customized according to the person.
Let me ask you this: How many of you have given a pen or notebook to your customers with your company name on it? I'm sorry, but that is the wrong name. If you get a pen with a company name, that pen will probably end up with other pens in your room or in the trash. But now imagine that you get a pen that has your name on it. That pen will probably always be in your pocket, and every time when you use it, you'll remember the company or the person who gave it to you.
I have a relative who is in his last year of his Bachelor's studies. He is a straight-A student, and he is almost being admired by all of his professors. A few days ago, he shared a picture with me. It was a picture of a pen that had two names ingrained; one was his name, but I couldn't recognize the second one. When I asked what it was all about, he said that he did well in one of his classes, and the professor gave him the pen. The pen had his name and the name of the professor written on it. You had to see how happy and proud he was! He treated that pen with so much care that you would think that it was made of gold. I'm sure that he will always use that pen and remember that professor.
You're probably thinking that this isn't possible to customize the gifts in your company because you have thousands of clients. Well, yes, it is difficult to do it on a big scale, but you probably have VIP clients, right? You can do it with them. For example, airlines have first-class clients, restaurants have loyal visitors, hotels have clients who always stay in the most expensive suites. Your business has VIP customers as well, and their numbers probably aren't that high. So, do it with them, especially since their numbers aren't that high, plus they bring you the biggest profit.
Element number two is that the gift or favor you are doing must be unexpected. For example, the mint experiment with waitresses that I talked about at the beginning has some elements of unexpectedness. People didn't expect the waitress to return back and give one more mint.
Finally, the third element is that a gift must be meaningful for the person. Let's say you have a client who always pays the invoices late. Next time when you send an invoice, try to attach some kind of small gift that he might find meaningful. For example, if the person is an art lover, then some form of art as a gift would be great.
Reciprocity is one of the principles that has helped me tremendously in growing my business. Here is how: It does not matter what your business or job is; we all need help from others who are more successful than us. And it's not easy to persuade someone to help you who is on a much higher level than you.
And you know what most people do when they ask for help from such people? They say, "Okay, here is the list of 10 people who can help me. Let me go and ask each of them, and one of them will probably be kind enough to help me." Unfortunately, most of the time it doesn't work, especially if the person has a higher position, higher income, higher reputation, or higher number of subscribers.
So, what is the correct way of asking for help? Well, the correct way is to apply the reciprocity principle and see how you can help them first. If you can help them with something first, they will in return try to help you as well. So, you should not look at a group of people and say, "Which one of these 10 people can help me?" Instead, you should say, "Which one of these 10 people can I help so that they would in return be happy to help me?" You should spend most of your time trying to identify how you can help the person from whom you need help, especially if you can identify their pain points. In other words, if you can identify the problems and offer a solution, then you have a very high chance of getting help from them.
Every day I receive at least five emails asking me to help them with this or that. I rarely see someone who comes and offers me help first. For example, this channel that you are watching right now exists in over 13 different languages, and I have used the reciprocity principle when I was launching every single one of them. Whenever I wanted to launch a new channel, I always first found a channel I could help in some way who would in return be happy to help me to promote my new channel. This is how I have launched every single channel.
If you try to apply this technique, please keep one thing in mind: Never try to trick people into helping you. Meaning, don't offer help or don't buy gifts for the sake of tricking them into helping you. I have seen people doing it to me, and honestly, you can see through it. The goal here is to genuinely try to help someone who would in return be happy to help you because you showed interest and helped them first.
The world we live in is not perfect; there will always be people who are going to offer you some favors or gifts in order to get you to do something for them. Try to say no to this kind of favor. You have to distinguish between people who are genuinely trying to help you and those who are simply trying to trick you into doing something for them. You are socially obligated to return a genuine favor with another favor. You're not obligated to return a trick with a favor.
For example, in negotiations, when one side makes a compromise, it is viewed almost like a favor. A compromise on one side usually triggers the other side into making their own compromise. It's another form of reciprocity. This is why savvy negotiators often start with extreme demands. When they make a compromise from that starting position, then the other side often feels obligated to make their own compromise. So, the strategy is to make a big request first, then retreat to a smaller request, and the smaller request is usually what they really wanted in the first place. The author calls this the "request then retreat" strategy. If you are in negotiation and someone makes a huge request and then slowly retreats, then I hope you already know what is going on here.
Before I move on to the second principle, I would like to give you one more tip about the reciprocity principle. This has probably happened to you a lot: You help someone with something, and then they thank you, and you respond by saying something like, "No worries, it wasn't a big deal. I didn't do much." Why are you doing that? Why are you throwing away your favors? You actually did something extra; you went out of your way; you spent your time or money. So, why are you throwing it away?
By doing a favor, you activate the reciprocity principle so that in the future that person would be willing to return your favor. But when you devalue your favor, you deactivate the reciprocity principle, and the person doesn't feel obliged to help you in the future. So, what should you do next time when someone thanks you for something? Well, simply thank the person back and say, "If the roles were reversed, I'm sure you would do the same for me," or, "This is what friends or colleagues do for each other." Such a response keeps the favor active in their mind, and next time when there is an opportunity, the person will make sure that your favor is returned.
Principle number two: Liking.
This principle simply means that we are much more likely to say yes to a request from a person whom we like, or we are much more likely to buy something from a person whom we like. But what does it take for one person to like another? It turns out that there are three important factors:
Number one: We like people who are similar to us.
Number two: We like people who compliment us.
Number three: And we like people who cooperate with us.
Let's start with similarity. We like people who are similar to us, who have similar hobbies, similar taste for music, similar character, etc. For example, in one negotiation experiment, researchers asked two groups of people to negotiate and reach a deal. In the first group, people were told, "Time is money, so start the negotiation right away." However, in the second group, before the negotiation, they were asked to spend some time with each other and identify similarities they share in common. In the first group, 55 percent of people reached an agreement. However, in the second group, where people spent time identifying similarities, had a 90 percent success rate in reaching an agreement.
So, how can you apply this knowledge? If you are going to a meeting with an important business partner for the first time, try to find genuine similarities between you two and talk about them. And if there are some areas where you can make a genuine compliment, then do it.
This brings me to the second reason that makes us like one another, and that is compliments. We humans love compliments. In fact, we love it so much that we don't differentiate between true compliments and false ones. Compliments don't have to be genuine or accurate for us to get affected by them. We get a compliment, and we just melt right there. Research shows that false compliments almost create the same positive effect on us as a true compliment.
For example, I am not a detail-oriented person. I am good at seeing the big picture and creating the vision, but I'm quite bad when it comes to details, and I'm aware of this. But once, somehow, I noticed a small detail on our project that everyone missed and pointed it out to my colleagues at work. One of my colleagues complimented me on this and said, "It's great to have such a detail-oriented person in our team!" I knew that I was not a detail-oriented person, but still that compliment felt great and made me like him more. Still to this day, I remember that colleague and the moment he complimented me. Of course, he was not trying to manipulate me with compliments; he truly thought that I was good at it, but I knew that wasn't the case.
This is a human weakness, and some people will abuse it and give you false compliments to get you to like them. And once you like them, you are much more likely to say yes to their future request. So, be aware of this weakness, and if you find yourself liking a salesperson after one hour of meeting, then understand what is going on and don't let that influence your decision.
And if you would like to apply it to others, then do it genuinely. Do some research on the internet, find genuine similarities and genuine compliments, and bring them up during conversation. For example, for similarity, you can say, "Oh, I noticed that you like playing soccer. I play it as well. How often do you play?" And in the case of compliments, if you notice the person always replies emails quickly, you can compliment on that. In this way, not just the person will like you, you will also like the person.
The author says that you liking the person is more important than the person liking you. Why? Well, just think about it: Yes, you like doing business with the person you like; this is obvious. But when you know that the person also likes you, then you trust him much more because you know that he is willing to fight for your interests and willing to go the extra step for you.
Principle number three: Commitment and Consistency.
This means we usually want to be consistent with what we have done and said in the past. Unfortunately, this human tendency can lead us down the path of foolish consistency. For example, you've probably supported an idea or an opinion just because you had supported it in the past, even though you don't believe in it anymore. You still keep defending it because you don't want to appear inconsistent.
We hate being inconsistent. Just think how you feel toward a friend who never keeps his promises or never does what he promises to do. You probably don't want anything to do with him or her, right?
Once we commit to something, we humans want to see consistency in ourselves and also in others. For example, imagine you are hanging out with friends, and one of them publicly says that he really likes how reliable you are and how good you are at keeping secrets. Everyone around agrees with his opinion. Now, even if you are not that good at keeping secrets, from that point on, you will do everything you can in order to appear as a person who can keep secrets because you don't want to lose that status and appear inconsistent.
For example, one study found that if people agreed to put a small "drive carefully" sticker in their home window, then two weeks later they were more than four times likely to agree to put a large sign with the same message in their front lawn. Agreeing with the small request made them feel an obligation to agree to the much larger request.
Commitment is especially powerful if it is done publicly, voluntarily, actively (meaning the person either says it out loud or in writing), and finally, if the commitment requires some effort from the person.
I'm sure at this point you are wondering how you can apply all this knowledge in real life. So, here are a few examples and tips.
Let's say you present a very important idea to your boss or to your colleagues, and during the presentation, they nod their heads, but you're not sure if they will really commit to it or not. Obviously, you can't say to your boss, "Hey, do you promise that you will actually do it?" But what you can do is send him an email summarizing everything you discussed and ask him to confirm if what you summarized reflects what you just agreed in the meeting. If he replies, then that confirmation email is a commitment from his side. The best part is that it is done publicly in front of others.
Another example: If you have a goal, then announcing it to others publicly can make you stick to that goal. To make the commitment toward that goal even stronger, you can prepare some calendar and put it on a wall and put a cross every day you stick to your goal. For example, if you want to exercise or diet for 30 days, then setting a calendar or a board on a wall can be quite powerful because:
Number one: On some level, it is done publicly (at least family members can see it).
Number two: It requires some effort from you to prepare the board.
Number three: It is written.
And finally, number four: It was done voluntarily by you.
Such a board actually activates all four elements of the commitment and consistency principle that I just mentioned above. Once you start putting a few crosses, you will not want to have empty boxes there; you will want to be consistent. Every cross you make is going to be a commitment to yourself. Every cross will be a commitment toward the type of person you want to become.
To make a commitment effective, you need to start small and build on it. For example, if your goal is to start reading one hour a day, every day, then you shouldn't start with reading one hour a day. You should start with one minute a day, and it's totally fine if you spend the first 30 days just reading one minute because at the beginning it is not about the number of pages you read; it is about the commitment.
Let me tell you a personal story to explain why you need to start small or make the first step very easy if you want someone to commit to helping you. When I was in university, I wanted to research a topic for my thesis, and I was looking for a professor to supervise me. So, I prepared a very nice and detailed email describing every aspect of the research and added as much info as I could. I spent almost three days preparing the email and sent it to several professors. One week passed with no response. Two weeks passed, still no single response. One month passed, and still nothing. I got quite discouraged and stopped being interested in the research for almost four months.
But one day, I read this book and realized what I had done wrong with my email. When I looked at the email again, I realized that in order to reply to that email, the professor needed to spend at least 20 minutes reading, analyzing, and writing the response email. You probably know that most professors are busy, and if you are also a busy person, you know well that when you see a task that requires a lot of your attention and time, you say, "I'll get to that later." And that is probably what happened to my email. They said, "I will get to it later," and that later never came. My email got buried somewhere in their inbox.
So, I decided to send one more email, but this time I described everything in two sentences and asked a simple yes or no question. This time I got a response from the majority of them because replying a yes or no to an email only takes a few seconds. And most importantly, by replying, they were committing to respond to my future emails. After all, if you say yes to someone, you feel obligated to respond to their second or third request, even if it takes 30 minutes, right? And that is exactly what happened to me.
Before I explain how you can defend yourself from people who use commitment tactics for evil purposes, I would like to give you one final example showing how one restaurant manager used it successfully. If you understand the restaurant business a little bit, you know that many times people who make reservations don't actually show up, which is quite bad for the restaurant because you reserve the table, buy ingredients according to the number of reservations, and if they don't show up, as a restaurant owner, you lose quite some money. So, one restaurant manager decided to use the commitment principle to reduce the number of cancellations.
Normally, when people called for a reservation, the receptionist would say, "If you decide to cancel or change your reservation, please give us a call." And as you guessed, the majority of them didn't show up and didn't give a call either. This manager asked the receptionist to ask the question a little bit differently. Instead of saying, "If you decide to cancel or change your reservation, please give us a call," now she said, "If you decide to cancel or change your reservation, will you please give us a call?" As you can see, the difference is very small. Instead of saying, "Please give us a call," she said, "Will you please give us a call?" Even though the difference was small, the number of people who showed up increased dramatically because when the receptionist asked, "Will you please give us a call?" the person calling actually thought about it and made a conscious commitment. Once they said yes, they felt committed, and that is why the majority of them showed up or they gave a call about a cancellation.
The commitment principle is often used by salespeople and others to get you into doing something. For example, a salesperson offers an advantage so that the person makes a purchase decision; then the purchase advantage is removed. The person has made the decision and wants to remain consistent. To recognize such manipulative situations, we should listen for signals coming from two places within us: our stomachs and our heart. Stomach signs appear when we realize that we are being pushed to agree to a request that we don't want. Heart signs are quite reliable when it is not clear to us if an initial commitment was correct or not. Here, we should ask ourselves a crucial question: "Knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time, would I make the same commitment?" If the answer is no, then you are better off just to walk away.
Principle number four: Social Proof.
This principle states that we decide what is correct based on what other people think is correct. If lots of other people are doing something, then it must be correct. For example, when you buy a book or some other product, you probably check the reviews, right? This is the simplest example of social proof.
This principle is especially powerful under two conditions:
First, when we are uncertain. For example, you see a bunch of people running towards you for some reason; you'll probably join them instead of continuing your walk in that direction, right?
Second, yes, we copy others, but we don't just copy any random group of people. We copy others who are similar to us or who are in similar situations like us. So, keep these two keywords in mind: uncertainty and similarity. You will soon see how powerful they are and how they can help you earn thousands of extra dollars in your business by simply changing a few words.
For example, the UK government was trying to get the delinquent taxpayers to pay taxes on time. First, they sent a letter by threatening them with certain sanctions. This produced 67 percent compliance. Then they added one small sentence to the letter that said, "The great majority of UK citizens pay taxes on time. Please do so." This time, compliance increased to 74 percent—quite a good amount of increase. But we are not done yet! Here is the most interesting part: They made one more small change to the previous sentence. This time, the letter said, "The great majority of UK citizens in your town pay taxes on time. Please do so." Compliance immediately went up to 83 percent. By simply changing a few sentences, the UK government made billions of pounds—not bad, right?
I will soon explain what this experiment means for you and how you can apply it to your business in life, but first, let me tell you about one more experiment because it shows how powerful the social proof principle is even across borders. A Chinese restaurant in Beijing put asterisks next to certain dishes on the menu which said, "These are our most popular dishes." And guess what? Those items were ordered 13 to 20 percent more.
You probably have seen restaurants who say things like "Chef's Choice," but we all know what that means, right? It means it is probably the leftovers from yesterday. But on the other hand, when we know that most people who visit this particular restaurant choose certain items, then we feel like this is the right choice to make. When we go to a restaurant, most of us are uncertain what to choose from the menu, and as I mentioned earlier, when we are uncertain, we look at what others have done who were in similar situations like this.
Now, how can you apply this knowledge to your business or to your job? If you or your company is selling something, then it means you already have a certain product, service, or payment package that is selected most of the time by your clients. So, next time when you have a new client, just mention this fact. For example, "The majority of first-year students buy this computer from us," "The majority of small business owners like you choose this payment plan," or "The majority of our new clients choose this financial product," etc.
When people are making a decision, they want to know what others have done who are in a similar situation, and by simply mentioning what is already true, existing, or happening, you are giving them a guideline to follow. You're not tricking them or misleading them; you're simply stating what is true. If most of your new clients choose a particular product when they are starting out, and over the years you have seen that they have been quite happy with that choice, then there is nothing unethical in mentioning it to your new clients.
I would like to say a few words about protecting yourself from this principle because sometimes it can really harm you. For example, many traffic accidents happen because a few drivers in the front start changing lanes, and the rest of the drivers coming behind start doing the same. They think that if others do it, then they should be okay. Sometimes even a large group of people can do nonsense things. This phenomenon even has a special name called pluralistic ignorance. That is why before you follow the crowd, ask yourself if this really makes sense to you. If not, then don't do it, despite the fact of how many are doing it.
Crowds can also not act in certain ways that don't make sense. For example, sometimes you see someone in the street needing help, but no one approaches, thinking that someone else will do it. Everyone thinks that someone else will do it, and no one actually does anything. This is why if you have an emergency situation on the street, don't address the crowd by screaming, "Help me!" or "Call the police!" Identify an individual and make a request. For example, "You in the red t-shirt, call the police!" "You in the white hat, call the ambulance!" etc.
The same principle applies when you send an email to a group of people for a request. Don't just send an email to all the people in the company or in the department saying, "Hello everyone, can one of you please help me with my project?" You'll probably not get a response because everyone will think that someone else will do it. Identify the best fitting individual and make your request.
This is it for this video. If you liked this book summary, then I think you will definitely enjoy the summary of a book called *Predictably Irrational* by Dan Ariely. You will probably see it on your screen now. Thanks for watching!