we like to think that we make up our own minds that we make our own choices about how we spend our time and money what we watch and wear how we think about the issues of the day but the truth is we are influenced into these choices in ways large and small and often invisible some of this influence may be harmless even fun and some of it isn't harmless at all that's right you make a really provocative but resonant argument that a lot of behaviors are copycat behaviors including workplace or school shootings terrorist attacks product tampering what should media Outlets do about those events you may say their coverage is dangerous they say it's their duty to cover it intensely why are you more right than they are because of that last word intensely they give us the news they're invaluable for that the problem is when they sensationalize it for ratings that bothers me because the actions described are contagious we're seeing it right now with shootings just a cluster of them one after another after another because people are learning from the news what other Disturbed people do to resolve their issues Our Guest today is among the world's experts on the power of influence my name is Robert cialdini I'm a behavioral scientist with a specialty in Persuasion science cialdini spent decades as a professor at Arizona State University where he now enjoys an Emeritus standing I have become just as busy as I ever was my wife says how do you know that sheldini has retired he doesn't have to deal with those pesky paychecks any longer years and years and years ago cialdini realized that he was as he puts it a patsy for as long as I can recall he once wrote I had been an easy Mark for the pitches of Peddlers fundraisers and operators of one sort or another and so in the early 1980s he embarked on a research project he decided to learn the tricks of these sales people and other influencers jaldini was already a professor by now and this new research would certainly have academic value but his primary goal was to help the rest of us consumers voters regular tax paying laypeople because through their taxes and contributions to universities they had paid for me to do that research I had found some things out but I wasn't communicating it to them I always say that if experimental social psychology had been a business it would have been famous for great research and development units but it wouldn't have had a shipping department but in this case cialdini did ship in the form of a book he wrote about this research it was called influence the psychology of persuasion it was published in 1984. it sold only a few thousand copies but Word of Mouth grew after three years it became a New York Times bestseller and then it kept selling and kept selling and kept selling compound influence as of today sold roughly 5 million copies in 44 languages just last year chaldini says the book sold nearly 300 000 copies there is a good chance you have read influence if not it's a good chance you should among the readers are many regular people consumers like chaldini himself who no longer want to be exploited but the book also became a blueprint for profiteers and others who wish to exploit the powerful psychological effects he identified cialdini like a character in some ancient fairy tale has found himself advising both sides of the bargaining table now he has released a new and aggressively Expanded Edition of his book here he is reading an excerpt there are some people who know very well where the levers of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want the secret to their effectiveness lies in the way they structure their requests the way they arm themselves with one or another of the levers of influence that exist in the social environment to do so may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and launches one of our automatic Behavior programs I'm curious whether this addition is to some degree amea culpa for having given unscrupulous users a Bible to become even more unscrupulous I wouldn't use Mia culpa all information can be used for good or ill but if I were to limit myself only to the information that couldn't be used properly there would be no information one of the creators of the atomic bomb Robert Oppenheimer was apparently tortured for most of his life about that ethical conundrum of needing to help invent this instrument of war to end World War II while creating a new instrument of war that we're obviously still dealing with my sense is that's not a good parallel to you correct is a different level of unfortunate circumstances we shouldn't downgrade the level of influence that your book has had I could imagine many despots in dictators have read it so what I try to do is emphasize the ethical uses to make it difficult for people to try to use it in untoward ways the new edition of influence does indeed emphasize the ethics of persuasion it's also 200 Pages longer than the original and includes a slew of recent findings from behavioral and Social Psychology the original book explained what chaldini called the six levers of influence for instance social proof the idea that if you simply see a lot of people like yourself doing something you are more likely to do it too that's the idea we were discussing earlier about the contagion of mass shootings social proof may also dictate whether you'll wear a face mask or listen to a given podcast the new edition of influence adds a seventh lever which cialdini calls Unity this idea is especially interesting at a moment in which the us at least seems less unified than it has in a long time meanwhile the allegedly retired chaldini still runs a consulting firm whose clients include Microsoft Coca-Cola and Pfizer and so today on this edition of the Freakonomics radio book club we are getting our own consultation free of charge our master class in the science of persuasion begins right after this foreign [Music] Bud radio this is Freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the Hidden Side of Everything here's your host Stephen Dubner [Music] as soon as Robert cialdini started the research that would eventually become his book influence he realized that the professional persuaders he wanted to learn from wouldn't divulge their secrets if he simply asked them not only did I get turned down but everything I read told me that these organizations they don't want their competitors to know and sometimes they don't want their customers to know what they're doing so he decided to go undercover and join these firms himself he posed as a trainee named Rob Calder what kind of industries did chaldini infiltrate back in these days there were door-to-door sales people for encyclopedias and nutritional supplements and so on so we did that we did insurance we did cars we did portrait photography and advertising firms just to clarify chaldini is using the Royal we here he did this research on his own there were people whose businesses to get us to contribute to a particular cause there were armed service recruiters and corporate recruiters there were PR people I even studied cult recruiters how long a period was this in Toto about two and a half years but to be honest I had everything I needed in six months because what I found after that was pretty much the same thing just in a broader range of instances that must have persuaded you that the principles were in fact principles yes yeah these were the seven that kept coming up in all of the training programs I infiltrated and what this allows us is we don't have to carry around a long compendium of these things have you ever seen these lists of Behavioral Science biases there's like a hundred of them well no they're just seven we can handle seven here is chaldini reading from the introduction to the new edition of influence [Music] organized around the seven principles reciprocation liking social proof Authority scarcity commitment and consistency and unity each principle is examined as to its ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic mindless compliance from people a willingness to say yes without thinking first you write throughout the book that automaticity automatic responses is key to influence that you want people to make a decision without thinking about it why is that we live in the most information overloaded stimulus saturated environment that's ever existed so we need to be able to make our choices based on shortcut decisions is this person truly an authority is there real scarcity here do I really like this person those are the triggers that normally steer us correctly into saying yes and so if we can extract those from the massive information then we're able to be both efficient and effective in our choices so chaldini had identified these seven psychological principles during a couple years of undercover work as a trainee in different Industries before writing the book however he faced a dilemma I felt professionally required to get their informed consent and I thought what could I do because all the gain was going to be mine all the loss was going to be there if they just let me use everything I learned and so I thought well I'll use the principle of reciprocity on them the one that says people want to give back to those who have given to them so when I exited the group I would say to the trainer look I'm not who I said I was I'm not looking for a job in your organization my name isn't Rob Calder I'm really writing a book on the influence process and I want to learn from the pros like you and I'll tell you what I'm going to do whether you say yes or no I'm going to send you a pre-publication copy of my book so that you will learn everything I've learned before your competitors do that worked for a percentage of the people but not all of them it wasn't until I did something I didn't even recognize was a principle of influence they said what you're writing a book and I would say yes I'm a university Professor my area of expertise is persuasion and social influence and I came to you to learn at your knee essentially because I think you have the information I need and they would say you're a college professor and we're your teacher and they'd puff up their chests and say of course you can use the material you are good you are good I didn't even know I was doing it I was just being honest with them and I assigned them the role of teacher well teachers don't hoard information teachers distribute it so did anyone give you a blanket no Stephen 100 compliance cialdini had also wanted to get a job as a waiter in a restaurant since that's such an obviously Hands-On way to influence what a consumer will buy I couldn't get a job as a waiter I just didn't have the experience for it but I did get a job as a busboy and I could watch one particular waiter Vincent whose proceeds outstripped everybody else's by a lot he would change his strategy from situation to situation if it's a couple on a date he would be imperious and try to intimidate the young man into spending a lot if it was a married couple he would be cordial and friendly he would use the liking principle speaking to both people if it was a family he was actually a little clownish he would speak to the kids and entertain them and so on but here was his real masterpiece for large groups he would ask the first person for an order usually a woman and no matter what she ordered he would frown lean down so everyone could hear and say that's really not as good tonight as it normally is and then he'd recommend something slightly less expensive from the menu this this and this are really good tonight so what he did was to say I'm being so honest with you I'm willing to recommend something that will give me less of a tip then when he returned at the end he would say would you like me to recommend a dessert wine or a dessert and people would all look at each other and say of course Vincent you know what's good here and you have our interests at heart and they would spend on wine and dessert the story of Vincent one reason I found it so appealing is because it shows how important it is to a read people and B be flexible exactly this is why when people ask me so Dr cialdini which of the principles is the most powerful I tell them the single most effective influence tactic is not to have a single influence tactic what's the difference between influence and manipulation doesn't isn't the former often contain a lot of the latter yeah and the big difference is whether the principles of influence are employed by pointing to them where they naturally exist versus manufacturing or counterfeiting them in the book you tell the story of your brother when you were much younger that he would buy and resell used cars and his big trick was to tell all the prospective buyers to come view the car at the same time so he'd have everybody come Sunday at 2PM to create a sense of demand or false scarcity so I don't know if it's manipulative but it's a little bit on the dishonest side it's entirely dishonest he was benefiting from a false narrative that he constructed of scarcity and competition for the same resource is your brother still alive and well I hope he is so what does he think when he reads that story about himself in your book he's proud of it okay I'd like to go through the seven levers let's start with reciprocation reciprocation is the rule that is installed in all of us in every human culture that says we are obligated to give back to others the form of behavior they've first given to us can you give an example where the power of reciprocity is used in a nefarious or at least a pronouncedly selfish way one has to do with the use of gifts to prescribing Physicians from pharmaceutical companies there's very strong evidence that shows that if those companies give gifts as small as pizza for the office staff those Physicians prescribe that Pharmaceuticals drugs more the same is true for legislators so let's say that you are Consulting now for a pharmaceutical firm who wants to use the principles of influence to their gain but they also want to use them ethically and they say Bob for years we've done exactly what you say one shouldn't do which is use the principle of reciprocity in a kind of shady way we give these doctors Fancy free trips and we expect them to prescribe our drugs and lo and behold they do what do you tell them I tell them to give them non-material gifts that will benefit all concerned for example you can put together a white paper for them on a particular topic information they might not have had without your research team but then I think white paper versus Caribbean vacation and that's a hard sell no well Caribbean vacation that's rare it doesn't have to be Caribbean vacation it could be something like lunch [Music] foreign this is a key point in chaldini's argument these levers of influence are so powerful that even a small action can produce a relatively large response just how powerful is the pull of reciprocity here is another passage from the book [Music] take for instance the account of a student of mine concerning a day she remembers rulefully about one year ago I couldn't start my car and as I was sitting there a guy in the parking lot came over and eventually jump started the car I said thanks and he said you're welcome as he was leaving I said that if he ever needed a favor to stop by about a month later the guy knocked on my door and asked to borrow my car for two hours as his was in the shop I felt somewhat obligated but uncertain since the car was pretty new and he looked very young later I found out that he was underage and had no insurance anyway I lent him the car he totaled it all right let's talk about the second lever of influence now what you call liking first of all I have to say you are incredibly likable well thank you you're welcome if you've always been this way or did you apply these principles to yourself I grew up in an entirely Italian family and are predominantly polish neighborhood in a historically German City Milwaukee in an otherwise rural state and it influenced my interest in the influence process because whenever I would move from one domain to another the codes of conduct changed the things that people most resonated to in the presentation of an idea or a request would shift according to the norms and histories of those particular groups and I recognized immediately oh how you modulate your approach will modulate your success depending on your understanding of the situation and the audience likableness was in their so I probably was reinforced for it you write that it is much easier to sell something or to persuade someone if they like you which makes perfect sense but how do you make someone like you one is point to genuine similarities that you share the other is praise because first of all people like those who are like them and secondly they like those who like them and say so [Music] car sales people for example are trained to look for evidence of such things while examining a customer's trade-in if there's camping gear in the trunk the sales people 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 they hope the rain will hold off until they can play the 18 holes they've scheduled for the next day [Music] in 1920 the psychologist Edward L Thorndike conducted a study of Military Officers he asked them to rate their subordinates on qualities including leadership ability intelligence their physical attributes and so on Thorndike found that a positive rating in one category physical attractiveness for instance or even just height seemed to correlate with a high rating in seemingly unrelated qualities like intelligence this would come to be known as the halo effect it can work both ways amplifying negative or positive attributes and it plays a big role in chaldini's liking principle in his book he cites research by The Economist Daniel hammermesh who estimated that over the course of one's career being attractive earns a worker an extra 230 thousand dollars here's another excerpt from influence [Music] a study of a Canadian federal election found attractive candidates received more than two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones follow-up research demonstrated voters did not realize their bias in fact 73 percent of Canadian voters surveyed denied in the strongest possible terms that their votes had been influenced by physical appearance only 14 percent even allowed for the remote possibility of such influence other experiments have demonstrated that attractive people are more likely to obtain help when in need and are more persuasive in changing the opinions of an audience the third lever of influence in the book is social proof we are more likely to say yes to a proposal or a recommendation if we have evidence that a lot of others like us have been doing so the power of social proof is so substantial that people who watch a presidential debate on TV are said to be significantly swayed by the magnitude and direction of the Applause at the live event this is not at all a recent phenomenon as chaldini writes in influence [Music] [Laughter] there is a phenomenon called clacking said to have begun in 1820 by a pair of Paris opera house habituas named sotong and Porsche the men were more than Opera goers though they were businessmen whose product was Applause and they knew how to structure social proof to incite it organizing their business under the title la siron de success drama tea they lease themselves and their employees to singers and Opera managers who wish to be assured of an appreciative audience response so effective were Sultan and crochet in stimulating genuine audience reaction with their rigged reactions that before long Clacks usually consisting of a leader shift declock and several individual clock coolers had become an established and persistent tradition throughout the world of Opera as clacking grew and developed its practitioners offered an array of styles and strengths the plurus chosen for her ability to weep On Cue the be sure who called beasts repeat and Encore in ecstatic tones and the reor selected for the Infectious quality of his laugh when I'm reading you writing about social proof my mind goes to a lot of the negatives I think about Nazi Germany how one gets caught up in seeing one's neighbors bosses Etc buying into a philosophy in a politics that turned out to be horrible can you counter with some big upsides of our adherence to our appetite for social proof sure let's take a study done in Japan in the covid-19 pandemic where they looked at the willingness of a Japanese citizen to wear a mask and they looked at a variety of possible reasons the their perception of the severity of the disease the perception that they were susceptible to it the perception that the people around them would be susceptible to it none of those made any difference the only one that made any difference was the number of people they saw wearing masks it would seem like the internet is made for fabricating social proof how big of a problem do you see that being big big problem because it's very difficult for us to check on the validity of that information but here's how we're dealing with it on those review sites that we check before we make a purchase the average number of stars that most lead to a purchase is not five it is a sweet spot of between 4.2 and 4.7 stars because five is just too good to be true it's too good to be true talk for a moment about the relationship between social proof and suicide I was shocked at the research about the rising car and plane crashes after widely reported suicide what you see is that front page suicides not only produce an increase in subsequent suicides within a week of the publication they also produce an increase in accidental deaths car accidents and plane crashes how could that possibly be well it turns out that a lot of the people who cause those car crashes and plane crashes are committing secret suicide they're seeing other distressed people like them ending it all and they follow suit and they cover it for reasons having to do with insurance or shame for their families Bob tell me how people who read about social proof and the power of social proof how they can do it wrong what's the big mistake that communicators might make there's a big mistake that public service communicators make with regard to social proof they tell us that so many people are drinking and driving so many teenagers are committing suicide so many people are choosing not to be vaccinated and what that does is to legitimize that choice out of social proof If a lot of people are doing it it must be the right thing to do I had a graduate student who was coming to work with me from California and he and his fiancee the woman he described as the single most honest person he had ever known in his life she wouldn't borrow a paper clip that she didn't return they decided Well let's go see the Petrified Forest in northern Arizona on our way to work with chaldini and they were standing in front of a sign at the entrance that said so many people are stealing petrified wood and crystals that the forest is endangered some kind of language like that and my graduate student while he was still reading the sign felt this elbow in his ribs and his invariably honest fiance said we better get ours too before it's all gone so that tells you about the power of social proof something that would turn this honest woman into an environmental Criminal let's pretend that we are about to go into an ad break on this show and my desire is to keep listeners from abandoning US during the commercial break I'm not very good at influencing people at least I don't think I am but you are so could you take over for a second and tell the listener whatever you need to tell them to stick around and come back I'm going to tell you which principle of influences utilization that had been kept secret until recently may have saved the World by ending the Cuban Missile Crisis [Music] did I not tell you that chaldini is good that secret story is coming up after the break in the meantime I'd like to invite you to follow the other podcasts in the Freakonomics radio network no stupid questions people I mostly admire and sudir breaks the internet if you need a little encouragement to check them out we have hired some good old-fashioned French quackers [Applause] we will be right back foreign you get the sense that the world has finally caught up to Robert cialdini the author of the classic book influence the power of persuasion today there is an entire class of people who openly seek to be called influencers so their intentions aren't hidden but how does it work what makes someone a success at influencing others whether they're trying to sell you more stuff you don't need or convince you that their cause is the right cause that is where chaldini comes in he exposes the psychological factors that lead to persuasion in his new Expanded Edition of influence he describes seven principles or levers that essentially bewitch our rational minds and lead us to comply without a second thought we've already covered three of these levers reciprocation likability and social proof the remaining four are Authority scarcity commitment and consistency and unity but before we hear about them let's get back to the Cliffhanger chaldini left us with before the break about the Cuban Missile Crisis as it turns out there was a hidden element to those crisis negotiations I learned of it recently when there was a release of information that had been kept secret for years many of your listeners Stephen may not have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis I did as a teenager the world trembled in fear because of a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev being the leaders over the existence of nuclear weapons that had been sent to Cuba by the Soviet Union and pointed at the United States Kennedy issued an ultimatum to Khrushchev you have to get out of Cuba there were already Soviet ships coursing to Cuba with more missiles Kennedy said we're going to blockade those Khrushchev said that's an act of War they were staring each other down steel a-eyed until one of them blinked and the story we heard was that Khrushchev was the one who blinked it was Kennedy's steadfast refusal to compromise one wit that caused Khrushchev to take his missiles home but that is not what actually happened what JFK did was propose a reciprocal resolution he said we'll remove our missiles from Turkey if you'll remove those from Cuba so it was the process of reciprocation not being a hard ass that did it and yet it was being tough and unyielding that got all the play you're right that Kennedy made it a condition of the final agreement that the missile trade-off be kept secret he didn't want to be seen as conceding anything to the Soviets that's right and that view by the way is said to have influenced other leaders including Lyndon Johnson in the way that he approached Vietnam afterwards you're saying that Johnson didn't know even Johnson didn't know it was kept from him [Music] let's talk about Authority a bit now let's say I buy myself a long white lab coat and walk into a hospital and tell a certified nurse assistant that a particular patient needs to get a bunch of estrogen right now what happens there was a study that was very close to that someone called the nurses in various Wards of hospitals and claimed to be a doctor on the staff who the nurse had never met and ordered the nurse to give a double dose of estrogen to a patient they're not supposed to take these orders by phone the dose was twice the maximum dose that was on the bottle of estrogen but 95 of them were on their way to give the drug to this patient before they were interrupted by a researcher who said wait don't do that that research was in the U.S correct yes and the researchers concluded that one would think there would be multiple intelligences operating to decide whether to give this amount of drug or not but it turns out that because of the principle of authority and the difference that the nurses were giving to the Physicians there was only one such intelligence function it's interesting a nurse is a trained intelligent professional who in the case that you write about is essentially unthinkingly following an Authority's directive that's a pretty heightened example of how we often as you point out just don't want to think for ourselves can you expand on that a little bit the degree to which most of us want to be on autopilot for almost all of our decisions thinking is hard work especially in a environment of such Challenge and change and overload so it is simpler and easier to use our shortcuts most of the time if they're well founded they steer us correctly but some percentage of the time they steer us very poorly it seems to me that at least in the U.S the pull of the authority figure generally has waned over the past half century or so I would narrow it to the last 15 years because of the internet and we can get authoritative pieces of information by looking at what our peers are doing and so what is true for an authority that is somebody who knows all the ins and outs may not be true for me sites like TripAdvisor they don't involve travel writers anymore and the same with restaurants Yelp it's about people like me on the other hand allegiance to Authority is what has historically made civilization work yeah it has because they typically had Superior knowledge I would ask myself two questions when we get a piece of evidence from an authority figure is this person truly an authority in the domain he or she is commenting on and secondly can I expect this authority to be even-handed in presenting this information or is there self-interest that might be confounding the picture about scarcity for a bit the the notion that people really want what they can't easily get you right that this is largely driven by something called Psychological reactants what is that so the theory of reactance which was developed by a social psychologist named Jack brim says that we all cherish our freedoms and when we encounter anything that reduces or diminishes our freedom to choose we react against that pressure we push back against it and very often do the opposite even if we didn't even really want that other thing so much yeah a young woman from Blacksburg Virginia said you know this reactants thing that you described it really helps me understand something that happened to me last year I was 19 and I started dating a guy who was 26. well my parents didn't like this and they kept pushing me to break up with him and the more they pushed the more I fought against them and the more in love I fell with this man even though he was not my type and she said it only lasted about six months but it was five months longer than it should have lasted if I had just looked at the situation objectively but this pressure kept me there so you're saying Romeo and Juliet would have just been a fling had the montagues and the capulets not hated each other exactly and pressured them to stay away from each other Shakespeare Scholars pitched them at 15 and 13 years old that would have been Puppy Love without their parents I love the story you tell about the new Coke and the old Coke vis-a-vis scarcity there was a time when the Coca-Cola Company simply decided to remove from the shelves their classic Coke formula the thing that they had spent decades and decades promoting and getting us associated with and then they just supplanted it with this new Coke formula which their three years worth of taste tests showed what's preferred by most of their customers what they didn't recognize is taking away people's freedoms to have something that was so positively associated with their histories and their childhoods was a big mistake and there was this big revolution against it that ultimately forced Coke to restore the old formula now in their taste test data they had a piece of evidence that should have shown them that this was the case some of the taste tests were done blind you got about 55 preferring the new Coke there were others that were labeled this is your traditional and this is the new Coke and now you get another six percentage points favoring the new Coke how do you explain then that when you gave people the new Coke properly labeled they were against it when Coke pulled the old Coke formula and replaced it with the new the one they couldn't get was the old Coke it's scarcity you want what you can't have what do you think of companies that create an artificial scarcity essentially by limiting the amount of production they engage in let's say it's a t-shirt a sneaker a luxury watch they could make a million a year they choose instead to make ten thousand a year and charge 100 times what it might go for on the market as a mass Market item do you think that's manipulation a clever application of the scarcity lever manipulation they're not pointing to something that is rare or unique and is dwindling they are creating those circumstances just like my brother created the situation with three people contending for the same car at the same time when I was reading your chapter on scarcity it made me wonder if it helps explain to some degree conspiracy theories in other words the information that conspiracy theorists adhere to isn't widely available and therefore I can imagine my appetite for it becomes that much more intense it sounds right because indeed you are in possession of limited information and as a consequence feel that you have something that other people don't have which of course enhances its value but also you feel like and now we're talking about the principle of unity you have a camaraderie with those individuals who all believe this here is chaldini reading another passage from the new edition of influence [Music] the more I learn about the scarcity principle the more I have begun to notice its influence over a whole range of my own actions I've been known to interrupt an interesting face-to-face conversation to answer the Ring of a caller in such a situation the caller possesses a compelling feature that my face-to-face partner does not potential unavailability if I don't take the call I might miss it and the information it carries for good never mind that the first conversation may be highly engaging or important much more than I could expect of an average phone call with each unanswered ring the phone interaction becomes less retrievable for that reason and for that moment I want it more than the other conversation the sixth lever you discuss is called commitment and consistency now when I see that for some reason my mind turns to politics so let me ask you this Donald Trump acquired what strikes me as a type and magnitude of influence that is perhaps without precedent at least In Our Lifetime what did he do so differently and well well if you remember in his various rallies he would say turn the cameras around look at this audience he was so Savvy about the rule of social proof when people didn't know him very well and now I'm going to give you a reason that is going to I think reveal my political views on this why have people stayed with Donald Trump overall these times where there are consequential missteps there's an old literature in Persuasion science and cognitive dissonance it says if people have made a choice that resulted in a negative consequence the more negative the consequence the less likely they are to believe it was a mistake so what you just described in economic terms would be usually called the sunk cost fallacy how well does your version of that and the economist's version of that intersect it does intersect because of the principle of commitment and consistency consistency is characteristic of a lot of strengths you say what you believe and you do what you say you don't come off as irresolute or wishy-washy or confused the downside is if you've made a commitment then you want to stay with it because of that initial action even when the circumstances no longer warrant that choice I am curious how the principle of commitment and consistency plays out in geopolitics if you were called in to help the U.S refine its position in regard to China or Iran or one of its other Rivals what would you advise I'll give you a couple of examples the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a master negotiator even under circumstances where he was objectively at a disadvantage for example when he was having to negotiate with Israel after The Six Day War in which Israel was Superior what Sadat would do is give his opponent a reputation to live up to he would say to the Israelis I'm so glad that we're able to negotiate on this and that you are my bargaining partner because everybody knows how important Equanimity and fairness is to the Jewish community and they would then behave that way this happened to me by the way when a previous book that I wrote called persuasion the first five thousand copies of the book were printed poorly the pagination was wrong my editor told me what happened and he said I hate when something like this happens to good guys like you and you know what I heard myself say Stephen it's okay it's okay you know what happens to everybody I became the good guy my newspaper carrier goes by my door every morning in his car and he throws the morning newspaper and 75 of the time he gets it in the center of the driveway and every year he includes a little envelope around Christmas time I'm supposed to put a check in there as a tip which I always do but this year after I read the research I put a little note in the envelope thank you for being so conscientious in getting my newspaper in the center of the driveway so it doesn't get wet from the watering systems on either side and did that improve his aim Stephen 100 percent and here now from the book influence is one more example of the power of commitment and consistency in one study when six or twelve person experimental juries were deciding on a close case hung juries were significantly more frequent if the jurors had to express their opinions with a visible show of hands rather than by secret ballot once jurors had stated their initial views publicly they were reluctant to allow themselves to change publicly should you ever find yourself the four person of a jury under these conditions you could reduce the risk of a hung jury by choosing a secret rather than public balloting method okay so Unity is the brand new chapter the brand new lever in this Edition what led you to edit it was the building evidence within Behavioral Science of the power of social identities to drive people's behavior the groups with which they felt they shared an identity and the lengths to which people would go to promote and protect those within their wee groups I could see the tribalism that was emerging in our society and it seemed to me oh I missed this one I had always thought of it as something that was an accelerator of the other principles if you know somebody inside your group gave you a scarcity appeal or a social proof appeal or an authority you'd be no no this one stands alone I'm curious if your research has anything to say about family estrangement because an astonishingly large number of people have an estrangement within their families we often don't like our fellow family members but we still feel a connection to them we still feel bonded with them by virtue of the unity group that a family constitutes let's say I have a friend at work who is much more like me we like the same authors we like the same musical artists we like the same ethnic food and I have a brother who is the opposite of me on all of those things and we're out on a boat fishing and they fall in and there's only one life preserver there's no question who gets it my brother so it's the difference between me being able to say to my in-group members you know Stephen is like us versus Stephen is one of us if I can say that all influence barriers come down for you inside that group and here is one last passage from Robert cialdini's influence on the power of unity [Music] in the United States citizens agreed to participate in a survey to a greater extent if it emanated from a home State University Amazon product buyers were more likely to follow the recommendation of a reviewer who lives in the same state people greatly overestimate the role of their home States in U.S history readers of a news story about a military fatality in Afghanistan became more opposed to the war there upon learning the fallen soldier was from their own state all right Bob how do you think you did today persuading people to read your book well you know I don't know ask about it because I'm the book of appeared was 14 years ago and I'm concerned that this new set of insights and features people will say oh you know I have that book or I read that book or I read about it and won't appreciate that it's quite different now is your sharing your trepidation like that part of your attempt to influence you know I suppose it could be if in the process I got people to say you know I would feel the same way we're alike in that [Music] was Robert cialdini and this was the Freakonomics radio book club his book is called influence the psychology of persuasion we were discussing the new and Expanded Edition which has just been published by the way we have just started a separate podcast feed for the Freakonomics radio book club which includes all the episodes we've published to date and will include all future episodes most of your friends are probably going to subscribe right away also a lot of University professors and other Eggheads have already declared the Freakonomics radio book club to be an excellent idea that you won't want to miss out on but hurry this offer won't last long coming up next time on Freakonomics radio we are more than one year into the great work from home experiment how do you like it so far I hate it is that a universal sentiment no it's not it was a story of being happy and working harder in some cities see this change as a big opportunity they offer ten thousand dollars to each remote worker who would move to Tulsa and stay there at least for a year that's next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too [Music] Freakonomics radio is produced by Stitcher and renbud radio and it is part of the Freakonomics radio network which also includes no stupid questions people I mostly admire and sudir breaks the internet we can be reached at radio freakonomics.com this episode was produced by Brent Katz our staff also includes Allison craiglow Greg Griffin Joel Meyer Tricia bobita Mark McCluskey Zach Lipinski married Duke Rebecca Lee Douglas Morgan Levy Emma Terrell lyric bowditch Jasmine Klinger and Jacob Clementi our theme song is Mr Fortune by The Hitchhikers the other music for this episode was composed by Luis Guerra Michael riola and Stephen Ulrich you can get the entire Archive of Freakonomics radio on any podcast app if you'd like to read a transcript or the show notes bets at freakonomics.com as always thanks for listening [Music] this is fun you know that movie My Dinner with Andre I do yeah this is my dinner with Stephen the Freakonomics Radio Network [Music]