Oddly, the nurse, and the patient, did not question this order as the nurse asked the patient to roll over to receive the drops right where the nurse had thought they were supposed to go [students quickly figure out what the nurse did]. In another, more chilling, example Hofling, et al.
Nearly all participants honked at the cheap car. When Doob and Gross asked college students what they would have done, they consistently underestimated the time it would take them to honk at the luxury car.
Male students were the most inaccurate, stating that they would honk more quickly at the more prestigious car. As with liking, we seem unaware of the power of authority in changing our behavior. But this can be circumvented and co-opted by marketers by having the expert or ad offer a small argument against their best interest.
For example, ads for burglar alarms sometimes use a thief as the spokesperson. That is, the authority must possess expertise and possess it in an area relevant to the decision at hand. Second, the authority should not have a reason to mislead you.
A true authority should have informed, unbiased opinions to be truly trusted. They all: a demonstrate the effect of authority influence on human behavior. Which of the below is not one of those questions? It involves: a arguing earnestly for the virtues of their product. What happened? I use two: the well-known Beanie Baby phenomenon and my own personal run-in with scarcity.
Anyone in here collect Beanies? Often, the class has a collector or two that are willing to wax eloquent about the phenomenon. Ty, Inc. They are admittedly cute stuffed animals. Why would they retire Beanie Babies? I put up an slide with the price list.
Anyone know a valuable Beanie? This one is special because it is a direct demonstration of the power that Ty, Inc. Billionaire Bear was the employee Christmas bonus a year or two ago. Each employee got 2. Ty is printing money! By this point, someone in class has inevitably raised the good point that a posted price list on the Internet is not a particularly reputable source.
I make slides of a few, choice examples. Ebay had thousands of Beanies for auction. The funny thing about scarcity is that from the outside, people falling for scarcity look ridiculous. I wear the jacket to class on the day we start to talk about scarcity. Why Do I Like You? Let Me List the Reasons. Conditioning and Association. Authority: Directed Deference. The Power of Authority Pressure. The Allures and Dangers of Blind Obedience. Connotation Not Content. Scarcity: The Rule of the Few.
Psychological Reactance. Optimal Conditions. Primitive Automaticity. Modern Automaticity. Shortcuts Shall Be Sacred. Share a link to All Resources. Instructor Resources. Discipline Resources. Instructors, you may still place orders with your bookstore. About the Author s. Previous editions. Influence: Science and Practice, 4th Edition.
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On-line Supplement. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work.
To understand fully the nature of our vulnerability, let us take another glance at the work of the ethologists. It turns out that these animal behaviorists with their recorded cheep-cheeps and their clumps of colored breast feathers are not the only ones who have discovered how to activate the behavior tapes of various species.
One group of organisms, often termed mimics, copy the trigger features of other animals in an attempt to trick these animals into mistakenly playing the right behavior tapes at the wrong times. The mimics then exploit this altogether inappropriate action for their own benefit.
Take, for example, the deadly trick played by the killer females of one genus of firefly Photuris on the males of another firefly genus Photinus. Understandably, the Photinus males scrupulously avoid contact with the bloodthirsty Photuris females.
However, through centuries of natural selection, the Photuris female hunters have located a weakness in their prey-a special blinking courtship code by which members of the victims' species tell one another they are ready to mate. By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship tapes cause them to fly mechanically into death's, not love's, embrace Lloyd, By adopting certain critical features of useful hormones or nutrients, these clever bacteria and viruses can gain entry into a healthy host cell.
The result is that the healthy cell eagerly and naively 6Apparently, the tendency of males to be bamboozled by powerful mating signals extends to humans.
Two University of Vienna biologists, Astrid Juette and Karl Grammer secretly exposed young men to airborne chemicals called copulins that mimic human vaginal scents. The men then rated the attractiveness of women's faces. We too have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, however, our automatic tapes usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.
Although they vary in their force, some of these principles possess a tremendous ability to direct human action. We have been subjected to them from such an early point in our lives, and they have moved us about so pervasively since then, that you and I rarely perceive their power. In the eyes of others, though, each such principle is a detectable and ready weapon, a weapon of automatic influence. There are some people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want.
They go from social encounter to social encounter, requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling. The secret of their effectiveness lies in the way that they structure their requests, the way that they arm themselves with one or another of the weapons of influence that exist in the social environment.
To do this may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and sets rolling one of our automatic behavior tapes. Trust the human profiteers to learn quickly exactly how to benefit from our tendency to respond mechanically according to these principles. Remember my friend the jewelry store owner? Now during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially.
She claims that this is marvelously cost-effective. When it works on the unsuspecting vacationers-as it frequently does-it results in an enormous profit margin. Culturist and author Leo Rosten gives the example of the Drubeck brothers, Sid and Harry, who owned a men's tailor shop in Rosten's neighborhood in the S. Whenever Sid had a new customer trying on suits in front of the shop's three-sided mirror, he would admit to a hearing problem and repeatedly request that the man speak more loudly to him.
Once the customer had 7As exploitative as these creatures seem, they are topped in this respect by an insect known as the rove beetle. By using a variety of triggers involving smell and touch, the rove beetles get two species of ants to protect, groom, and feed them as larvae and to harbor them for the winter as adults. Responding mechanically to the beetles' trick trigger features, the ants treat the beetles as though they were fellow ants. Inside the ant nests, the beetles respond to their hosts' hospitality by eating ant eggs and young; yet they are never harmed Holldobler, Once more Harry would reply, "Forty-two dollars.
Instead, she would exploit the power inherent in such naturally present principles as gravity, leverage, momentum, and inertia. If she knows how and where to engage the action of these principles she can easily defeat a physically stronger rival. And so it is for the exploiters of the weapons of automatic influence that exist naturally around us. The profiteers can commission the power of these weapons for use against their targets while exerting little personal force.
This last feature of the process gives the profiteers an enormous additional benefit-the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation. Even the victims themselves tend to see their compliance as a result of the action of natural forces rather than the designs of the person who profits from that compliance.
An example is in order. There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is. So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one.
The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions besides weight. If we are talking to a very attractive individual at a party and are then joined by an unattractive individual, the second will strike us as less attractive than he or she actually is. Each student takes a turn sitting in front of three pails of water-one cold, one at room temperature, and one hot.
After placing one hand in the cold water and one in the hot water, the 8Some researchers warn that the unrealistically attractive people portrayed in the popular media actors, actresses, models may cause us to be less satisfied with the looks of the genuinely available romantic possibilities around us.
Goldberg, The look of amused bewilderment that immediately registers tells the story: Even though both hands are in the same bucket, the hand that has been in the cold water feels as if it is now in hot water, while the one that was in the hot water feels as if it is now in cold water.
The point is that the same thing-in this instance, roomtemperature water-can be made to seem very different depending on the nature of the event that precedes it. Be assured that the nice little weapon of influence provided by the contrast principle does not go unexploited.
The great advantage of this principle is not only that it works but also that it is virtually undetectable Tormala 8 : Petty, Those who employ it can cash in on its influence without any appearance of having structured the situation in their favor. Retail clothiers are a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men's store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money?
Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend much more on the purchase of a sweater; but the clothiers know better.
They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. The same principle applies to a man who wishes to buy the accessories shirt, shoes, belt to go along with his new suit. Contrary to the commonsense view, the evidence supports the contrast principle prediction.
It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first; to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle and will also cause the principle to work actively against them.
Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will make the expensive item seem even more costly as a result-hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
Clever use of perceptual contrast is by no means confined to clothiers. See Figure 1. I came across a technique that engaged the contrast principle while I Dear Mother and Dad, Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before.
I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now.
Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnt-out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him.
It's really a basement room, but it it's kind of cute. He is a very fine boy, and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven't set the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child.
The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our premarital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him.
I know that you will welcome him into our family with open arms. He is kind and, although not well educated, he is ambitious. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend.
However, I am getting a "0" in American History and an "F" in Chemistry, and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. To "learn the ropes," I accompanied a salesman on a weekend of showing houses to prospective home buyers.
The salesman-we can call him Phil-was to give me tips to help me through my break-in period. One thing I quickly noticed was that whenever Phil began showing a new set of customers potential buys, he would start with a couple of undesirable houses.
I asked him about it, and he laughed. They were what he called "setup" properties. The company maintained a run-down house or two on its lists at inflated prices. These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but only to be shown to them, so that the genuine properties in the company's inventory would benefit from the comparison.
Not all the sales staff made use of the setup houses, but Phil did. He said he liked to watch his prospects' "eyes light up" when he showed the places he really wanted to sell them after they had seen the rundown houses.
In the wake of a many-thousand-dollar deal, the hundred or so dollars extra for a nicety like an upgraded CD player seems almost trivial in comparison.
The same will be true of the added expense of accessories like tinted windows, better tires, or special trim that the dealer might suggest in sequence. Of course, this exaggerated amount was a joke. It was supposed to make people laugh.
It did. I was reading your book at the time, and I realized that, although he got his laugh, according to the contrast principle, he screwed up. That was an expensive laugh. Under those circum- stances, I'm pretty sure he would have secured his laugh and his volunteers.
As veteran car buyers can attest, many a budget-sized final price figure has ballooned out of proportion from the addition of all those seemingly little options. While the customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master. Summary III III III Ethologists, researchers who study animal behavior in the natural environment, have noticed that among many animal species behavior often occurs in rigid and mechanical patterns.
Called fixed-action patterns, these mechanical behavior sequences are noteworthy in their similarity to certain automatic click, whirr responding by humans. For both humans and subhumans, the automatic behavior patterns tend to be triggered by a single feature of the relevant information in the situation. This single feature, or trigger feature, can often prove very valuable by allowing an individual to decide on a correct course of action without having to analyze carefully and completely each of the other pieces of information in the situation.
The advantage of such shortcut responding lies in its efficiency and economy; by reacting automatically to a usually informative trigger feature, an individual preserves crucial time, energy, and mental capacity.
The disadvantage of such responding lies in its vulnerability to silly and costly mistakes; by reacting to only a piece of the available information even a normally predictive piece , an individual increases the chances of error, especially when responding in an automatic, mindless fashion. The chances of error increase even further when other individuals seek to profit by arranging through manipulation of trigger features to stimulate a desired behavior at inappropriate times. Much of the compliance process wherein one person is spurred to comply with another person's request can be understood in terms of a human tendency for automatic, shortcut responding.
Most individuals in our culture have developed a set of trigger features for compliance, that is, a set of specific pieces of information that normally tell us when compliance with a request is likely to be correct and beneficial.
Each of these trigger features for compliance can be used like a weapon of influence to stimulate people to agree to requests. Study Questions Content Mastery 1. What are fixed-action patterns among animals? How are they similar to some types of human functioning? How are they different? What makes automatic responding in humans so attractive? So dangerous? The charity request card in Figure 1. Explain why, according to the contrast principle, placing the smallest donation figure between two larger figures is an effective tactic to prompt more and larger donations.
What points do the following quotes make about the dangers of click-whirr responding? How does the photograph that opens this chapter reflect the topic of the chapter?
Your generous contribution makes research possible to reach our goal of a crabgrass-free world. Please join us and make your donation payable to the Society for the Prevention of Crabgrass. A return envelope has been provided for your convenience! Yes, I want to further the Society's efforts for a crabgrass-free world. He sent Christmas cards to a sample of perfect strangers.
Although he expected some reaction, the response he received was amazing-holiday cards addressed to him came pouring back from people who had never met nor heard of him. The great majority of those who returned cards never inquired into the identity of the unknown professor. While small in scope, this study shows the action of one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us-the rule of reciprocation.
The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours.
By virtue of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favors, gifts, invitations, and the like. So typical is it for indebtedness to accompany the receipt of such things that a phrase like "much obliged" has become a synonym for "thank you," not only in the English language but in others as well such as with the Portuguese term "obrigado". The future reach of the obligation is nicely connoted in a Japanese word for thank you, "sumimasen," which means "this will not end" in its literal form.
The impressive aspect of reciprocation with its accompanying sense of obligation is its pervasiveness in human culture. It is so widespread that, after intensive study, Alvin Gouldner , along with other sociologists, report that all human societies subscribe to the rule. Indeed, it may well be that a developed system of indebtedness flowing from the rule of reciprocation is a unique property of human culture.
The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey ascribes the essence of what makes us human to the reciprocity system. Cultural anthropologists view this "web of indebtedness" as a unique adaptive mechanism of human beings, allowing for the division of labor, the exchange of diverse forms of goods and different services, and 'Certain societies have formalized the rule into ritual. Consider for example the Vartan Bhanji, an institutionalized custom of gift exchange common to parts of Pakistan and India.
In commenting upon the Vartan Bhanji, Gouldner remarks: It is Thus, on the occasion of a marriage, departing guests are given gifts of sweets. In weighing them out, the hostess may say, "These five are yours," meaning "These are a repayment for what you formerly gave me," and then she adds an extra measure, saying, "These are mine. It is a sense of future obligation that is critical to produce social advances of the sort described by Tiger and Fox. A widely shared and strongly held feeling of future obligation made an enormous difference in human social evolution because it meant that one person could give something for example, food, energy, care to another with confidence that the gift was not being lost.
For the first time in evolutionary history, one individual could give away any of a variety of resources without actually giving them away. The result was the lowering of the natural inhibitions against transactions that must be begun by one person's providing personal resources to another.
Sophisticated and coordinated systems of aid, gift giving, defense, and trade became possible, bringing immense benefits to the societies that possessed them. With such clearly adaptive consequences for the culture, it is not surprising that the rule for reciprocation is so deeply implanted in us by the process of socialization we all undergo. Although obligations extend into the future, their span is not unlimited.
Especially for relatively small favors, the desire to repay seems to fade with time Burger et aI. But, when gifts are of the truly notable and memorable sort, they can be remarkably long-lived. In , Ethiopia could justly lay claim to the greatest suffering and privation in the world. Its economy was in ruin. Its food supply had been ravaged by years of drought and internal war. Its inhabitants were dying by the thousands from disease and starvation.
I remember my feeling of amazement, though, when a brief newspaper item I was reading insisted that the aid had gone in the opposite direction. Native officials of the Ethiopian Red Cross had decided to send the money to help the victims of that year's earthquakes in Mexico City. It is both a personal bane and a professional blessing that whenever I am confused by some aspect of human behavior, I feel driven to investigate further.
In this instance, I was able to track down a fuller account of the story. Fortunately, a journalist who had been as bewildered as I by the Ethiopians' actions had asked for an explanation. The answer he received offered eloquent validation of the reciprocity rule: Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent to Mexico because, in , Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia when it was invaded by Italy "Ethiopian Red Cross," So informed, I remained awed, but I was no longer puzzled.
The need to reciprocate had transcended great cultural differences, long distances, acute famine, many years, and immediate self-interest.
Quite simply, a half-century later, against all countervailing forces, obligation triumphed. On May 27, , a Washington, DC-based governrnent official named Christiaan Kroner spoke to a news reporter with unconcealed pride in the governmental action that had followed the Hurricane Katrina disaster, detailing how "pumps, ships, helicopters, engineers, and humanitarian relief" had been sent both rapidly and adeptly to the flooded city of New Orleans and to many other sites of the calamity Hunter, Say what?
In the face of widespread recognition of the Federal government's scandalously delayed and monstrously inept reaction to the tragedy, how could he possibly make such a statement? For example, at the time of his claim, the government's vaunted Road Home program designed to aid Louisiana homeowners still hadn't delivered funds to 80 percent of those requesting assistance, even though nearly eighteen months had past.
Could it be that Mr. Kroner is even more shameless than most politicians are reputed to be? It turns out not. In fact, he was wholly justified in feeling gratified by his government's efforts because he was not an official of the United States; instead, he was the Dutch ambassador to the United States, and he was speaking of the remarkable assistance rendered to the Katrina-racked American Gulf Coast by the Netherlands.
But, with that matter resolved, an equally puzzling question arises: Why the Netherlands? Other countries had offered aid in the aftermath of the storm. But none had come close to matching the immediate and ongoing commitment of the Dutch to the region. Indeed, Mr. Kroner went on to assure the flood victims that his government would be with them for the long term, stating that "everything we can do and everything Louisiana wants us to do, we are ready to do.
Kroner also suggested one telling reason for this extraordinary willingness to help: The Netherlands owed it to New Orleans-for more than half a century. On January 31, an unrelenting gale pushed fierce North Sea waters across a quarter-million acres of his country, leveling dikes, levees, and thousands of homes while killing 2, residents. Soon thereafter, Dutch officials requested and received aid and technical assistance from their counterparts in New Orleans, which resulted in the construction of a new system of water pumps that have since protected the country from similarly destructive floods.
One wonders why it seems that the same levels of support for New Orleans provided by officials of a foreign government never came from the city's own national government. Perhaps the officials of that government didn't think they owed New Orleans enough. If so, those officials would be safe to expect that the residents of New Orleans now think they owe little to government-as voters, volunteers, contributors, and, most regrettably, even as law abiding citizens.
As the poet W. More generally, it can be said that the rule for reciprocation assures that, whether the fruit of our actions is sweet or bitter, we reap what we sow. Each of us has been taught to live up to the rule, and each of us knows the social sanctions and derision applied to anyone who violates it. Because there is a general distaste for those who take and make no effort to give in return, we will often go to great lengths to avoid being considered a moocher, ingrate, or freeloader.
It is to those lengths that we will often be taken and, in the process, be "taken" by individuals who stand to gain from our indebtedness. To understand how the rule of reciprocation can be exploited by one who recognizes it as the weapon of influence it certainly is, we might closely examine an experiment conducted by psychologist Dennis Regan A subject who participated in the study rated, along with another subject, the quality of some paintings as part of an experiment on "art appreciation.
Regan's assistant. For our purposes, the experiment took place under two different conditions. In some cases, Joe did a small, unsolicited favor for the true subject. During a short rest period, Joe left the room for a couple of minutes and returned with two bottles of Coca-Cola, one for the subject and one for himself, saying "I asked him [the experimenter] if I could get myself a Coke, and he said it was OK, so I bought one for you, too.
In all other respects, however, Joe behaved identically. Later on, after the paintings had all been rated and the experimenter had momentarily left the room, Joe asked the subject to do him a favor. Joe's request was for the subject to buy some raffle tickets at 25 cents apiece: "Any would help, the more the better.
Without question, Joe was more successful in selling his raffle tickets to the subjects who had received his earlier favor. Apparently feeling that they owed him something, these subjects bought twice as many tickets as the subjects who had not been given the prior favor.
Although the Regan study represents a fairly simple demonstration of the workings of the rule of reciprocation, it illustrates several important characteristics of the rule that, upon further consideration, help us to understand how it may be profitably used. The Rule Is Overpowering One of the reasons reciprocation can be used so effectively as a device for gaining another's compliance is its power.
The rule possesses awesome strength, often producing a yes response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would have surely been refused. Some evidence of how the rule's force can overpower the influence of other factors that normally determine compliance with a request can be seen in a second result of the Regan study.
Besides his interest in the impact of the reciprocity rule on compliance, Regan was also investigating how liking for a person affects the tendency to comply with that person's request.
To measure how liking toward Joe affected the subjects' decisions to buy his raffle tickets, Regan had them fill out several rating scales indicating how much they had liked Joe. He then compared their liking responses with the number of tickets they had purchased from Joe. There was a significant tendency for subjects to buy more raffle tickets from Joe the more they liked him.
This alone is hardly a startling finding, since most of us would have guessed that people are more willing to do a favor for someone they like. The interesting finding of the Regan experiment, however, was that the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out in the condition under which subjects had been given a Coke by Joe.
For those who owed him a favor, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. The subjects who indicated that they disliked Joe bought just as many of his tickets as did those who indicated that they liked him.
The rule for reciprocity was so strong that it simply overwhelmed the influence of a factor-liking for the requester-that normally affects the decision to comply. Think of the implications. People we might ordinarily dislike-unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations-can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us with a small favor prior to their requests.
Let's take a recent historical example. The Hare Krishna Society is an Eastern religious sect with centuries-old roots traceable to the Indian city of Calcutta. While pulling out of my parking spot, my car slid on some ice and ended up stuck down a small ravine. It was late, cold, and dark; and everyone from my office had left. But, an employee from another department came by and towed me clear. About two weeks later, because I worked on personnel matters, I became aware that this same employee was being "written up" for a serious violation of company policy.
The economic growth was funded through a variety of activities, the principal and most visible of which was society members' requests for donations from passersby in public places. During the early history of the group in this country, the solicitation for contributions was attempted in a fashion memorable for anyone who saw it. Groups of Krishna devotees-often with shaved heads, and wearing ill-fitting robes, leg wrappings, beads, and bells-would canvass a city street, chanting and bobbing in unison while begging for funds.
Although highly effective as an attention-getting technique, this practice did not work especially well for fund-raising. The average American considered the Krishnas weird, to say the least, and was reluctant to provide money to support them. It quickly became clear to the society that it had a considerable publicrelations problem. The people being asked for contributions did not like the way the members looked, dressed, or acted. Had the society been an ordinary commercial organization, the solution would have been simple-change the things the public does not like.
The Krishnas are a religious organization, however, and the way members look, dress, and act is partially tied to religious factors. Since religious factors are typically resistant to change because of worldly considerations, the Krishna leadership was faced with a real dilemma. On the one hand were beliefs, modes of dress, and hairstyles that had religious significance.
On the other, and threatening the organization's financial welfare, were the less-than-positive feelings of the American public toward these things. What's a sect to do? They switched to a fund-raising tactic that made it unnecessary for their targets to have positive feelings toward the fundraisers. They began to employ a donation-request procedure that engaged the rule for reciprocation, which, as demonstrated by the Regan study, was strong enough to overcome dislike for the requester.
The new strategy still involved the solicitation of contributions in public places with much pedestrian traffic airports were a favorite , but, before a donation was requested, the target person was given a "gift"-a book usually the Bhagavad Gita , the Back to Godhead magazine of the society, or, in the most cost-effective version, a flower. The unsuspecting passersby who suddenly found flowers pressed into their hands or pinned to their jackets were under no circumstances allowed to give them back, even if they asserted that they did not want them.
Only after the Krishna member had thus brought the force of the reciprocation rule to bear on the situation was the target asked to provide a contribution to the society. This benefactor-before-beggar strategy was wildly successful for the Hare Krishna Society, producing large-scale economic gains and funding, the ownership of temples, businesses, houses, and property in centers in the United States and abroad.
Kriss Krishna Taking disguise to its limits but still employing the reciprocity rule as an ally. After once falling victim to their tactic, many travelers became alert to the presence of robed Krishna Society solicitors in airports and train stations, adjusting their paths to avoid an encounter and preparing beforehand to ward off a solicitor's "gift. In North America, nearly 30 percent of their temples have been closed for economic reasons, and the number of devotees staffing the remaining temples has plummeted from a high of 5, to an estimated Other types of organizations have also learned to employ the power of a small gift to spur actions that would have been otherwise withheld.
In general, business operators have found that, after accepting a gift, customers are willing to purchase products and services they would have otherwise declined Gruner, It appears that the give-and-take of social interaction is recognized well before adulthood.
One fifth-grade language teacher wrote to me about a test she gives her students on the proper use of the past, present, and future tenses. Politics Politics is another arena in which the power of the reciprocity rule shows itself.
Reciprocation tactics appear at every level: II At the top, elected officials engage in "logrolling" and the exchange of favors that makes politics the place of strange bedfellows, indeed. The out-ofcharacter vote of one of our elected representatives on a bill or measure can often be understood as a favor returned to the bill's sponsor. Political analysts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson's success in getting so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration.
Even members of Congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the proposals were voting for them. As president, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.
Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him. Much the same may be said about the first-term legislation record of Washington outsider Bill Clinton.
Even with legitimate political contributions, the stockpiling of obligations often underlies the stated purpose of supporting a favorite candidate.
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