Chapter 6
Scarcity
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
—G. K. Chesterton
A friend of mine, Sandy, is a highly successful marital-dispute-resolution attorney (read: divorce lawyer). Often she serves as a mediator between divorcing parties who want to come to agreement on the terms of their divorce without the enlarged time, trouble, and expense of a courtroom trial. Before one of Sandy’s mediations begins, partners are taken (along with their legal representatives) to separate rooms to avoid the face-reddening, vein-bulging shouting matches that can occur when the contestants are in the same physical space. Each side has already submitted a written proposal to Sandy, who shuttles between the two rooms seeking compromises to produce final terms both partners will sign. She claims the process calls more on her understanding of human psychology than of divorce law. That’s why she wondered if, as a psychologist, I could help with a frequently fatal deadlock that surfaces near the very end of many negotiations and is so resistant to compromise that it will sometimes torpedo the entire mediation process and send the couple into divorce court.
The issue on which the deadlock rests can be a major one, such as the terms of a custody and visitation agreement involving the children (or, fought with equivalent ferocity, the St. Bernard); it can also be relatively minor, such as the amount one person would have to pay to buy out the other’s portion of a vacation time-share contract. No matter, the combatants dig in their heels and refuse to budge in any meaningful way on this last piece of the agreement, stymying all further progress. I asked Sandy what she normally says to disputants in this situation. She answered that she takes the last offer on the issue from one room to the other, presents it, and says, “All you have to do is agree to this proposal, and we will have a deal.” I thought I recognized the problem and suggested a minor wording change to, “We have a deal. All you have to do is agree to this proposal.”
Several months later, at a party, Sandy walked up bearing a wide smile and told me the change had been amazingly successful. “It works every time,” she declared. Skeptical, I replied, “C’mon, every time?” She put her hand on my arm, and said, “Bob, every time.”
Although I remain skeptical about its 100 percent success rate—we’re talking about behavioral science here, not magic—I was certainly pleased with the effectiveness of my recommended change. Truthfully, though, I wasn’t surprised. I had made the suggestion because of two things I knew. One was my awareness of relevant work in behavioral science. For instance, I knew of a study of Florida State University students who, like most undergraduates when surveyed, rated the quality of their campus cafeteria food unsatisfactory. Nine days later, according to a second survey, they had changed their minds. Something had happened to make them like their cafeteria’s food significantly better than before. Interestingly, the event that caused them to shift their opinions had nothing to do with the quality of the food service, which had not changed a whit. On the day of the second survey, students had learned that because of a fire, they had lost the opportunity to eat at the cafeteria for the next two weeks.
The second relevant piece of knowledge came from an event I had witnessed on a local TV station around the time Sandy asked for assistance. It’s become a common sight: in the run-up to the first availability of a new generation of Apple iPhones, long lines of buyers wind around city blocks, some waiting all night in sleeping bags for store doors to open to rush in and get one of the prized phones. On the morning of the launch of the iPhone 5, one of my home city’s TV stations sent a reporter to cover the phenomenon. Approaching a woman who had arrived much earlier and was number twenty-three in the queue, the reporter asked how she had spent the many hours she’d been waiting and, specifically, whether she had spent some of that time socializing with those around her. She replied that a lot of time was taken up in conversations regarding the new features of the iPhone 5 and, also, in conversations about one another. In fact, she revealed she had started her wait as number twenty-five in line but had struck up a conversation during the night with number twenty-three—a woman who admired her $2,800 Louis Vuitton shoulder bag. Seizing the opportunity, the first woman proposed and concluded a trade: “My bag for your spot in line.” At the end of the woman’s pleased account, the understandably surprised interviewer stammered, “But . . . but . . . why?” and got a telling answer: “Because,” the new number twenty-three replied, “I heard that this store didn’t have a big supply, and I didn’t want to risk losing the chance to get one.”
Figure 6.1: An aye for an i
This man roars out his elation at scoring a new-generation iPhone—something he ensured by waiting all night to be number one in line for the Apple store to open.
Norbert von der Groeben/The Image Works
I remember her answer causing me to sit up straight when I heard it, because it fit perfectly with the results of long-standing research showing that especially under conditions of risk and uncertainty, people are intensely motivated to make choices designed to avoid losing something of value—to a much greater extent than choices designed to obtain that thing. Recognizing the uncertainty and risk of failing to secure a highly desired phone, our hopeful buyer number twenty-three confirmed the research and engineered a costly trade to avoid losing a hotly contested and highly desired phone. The general idea of “loss aversion”—that people are more driven by the prospect of losing an item of value than by the prospect of gaining it—is the centerpiece of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s prospect theory, which has been generally supported by studies done in multiple countries and in multiple domains such as business, the military, and professional sports. In the world of business, for example, research has found that managers weigh potential losses more heavily than potential gains in their decisions. The same is true in professional sports, where decision makers deliberate longer in situations involving possible losses than in those involving possible gains; as a result, golfers on the PGA tour spend more time and effort on putts designed to prevent losing a shot to par (avoiding bogies) than on those designed to gain a shot to par (getting birdies).
What was it about these two pieces of knowledge—(1) what scientific research told me about loss aversion and (2) how forcefully I had recently seen it work in an iPhone line—that spurred me to make my specific recommendation to Sandy? The wording change I proposed began by assigning to her clients possession of something they wanted, “We have a deal,” which they would lose if they failed to compromise. Contrast that with Sandy’s original approach, in which the desired deal was something only to be gained: “Agree to this proposal, and we will have a deal.” Knowing what I knew, the wording adjustment was an easy one for me to suggest.
READER’S REPORT 6.1
From a woman living in Upstate New York
One year I was shopping for Christmas gifts when I ran across a black dress that I liked for myself. I didn’t have the money for it because I was buying gifts for other people. I asked the store to please set it aside until I could return on Monday after school with my mom to show her the dress. The store said they couldn’t do that.
I went home and told my mom about it. She told me that if I liked the dress, she would loan me the money to get it until I could pay her back. After school on Monday, I went to the store only to find the dress was gone. Someone else had bought it. I didn’t know until Christmas morning that while I was in school my mom went to that store and bought the dress I had described to her. Although that Christmas was many years ago, I still remember it as one of my favorites because after first thinking that I’d lost that dress, it became a valued treasure for me to have.
Author’s note: It is worth asking what it is about the idea of loss that makes it so potent in human functioning. One prominent theory accounts for the primacy of loss over gain in evolutionary terms. If one has enough to survive, an increase in resources will be helpful but a decrease in those same resources could be fatal. Consequently, it would be adaptive to be especially sensitive to the possibility of loss (Haselton & Nettle, 2006).
Although the loathing of loss is a central feature of scarcity, it’s just one of the factors embedded within the principle, which makes a fuller tour worthwhile.
Scarcity: Less Is Best and Loss Is Worst
Almost everyone is vulnerable to the scarcity principle in some form. Collectors of everything from baseball cards to antiques are keenly aware of the principle’s influence in determining the worth of an item. As a rule, if an item is rare or becoming rare, it is viewed as more valuable. In fact, when a desirable item is rare or unavailable, consumers no longer base its fair price on perceived quality; instead, they base it on the item’s scarcity. When automobile manufacturers limit production of a new model, its worth goes up among potential buyers. Especially enlightening on the importance of scarcity in the collectibles market is the phenomenon of the “precious mistake.” Flawed items—a blurred stamp or double-struck coin—are sometimes the most valued of all. Thus, a stamp carrying a three-eyed likeness of George Washington is anatomically incorrect, aesthetically unappealing, and yet highly sought after. There is instructive irony here: imperfections that would otherwise make for rubbish make for prized possessions when they bring along an abiding scarcity.
The more I learn about the scarcity principle—that opportunities seem more valuable to us when they are less available—the more I have begun to notice its influence over a whole range of my own actions. I have 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.
Figure 6.2: Goosing (demand) by reducing (supply)
It’s not uncommon for retailers to announce the lack of an item to fuel future desire for it. The idea is satirized in an old song that mimicked the cries of a local fruit vendor who called out, “Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today.” When my grandmother used to sing the lyric to me, I never understood the logic of the vendor’s sales tactic. I do now. So, apparently, does Apple’s phone division, which is infamous for undersupplying its stores on the day of a launch.
WILEY @2020WILEY INK, LTD. Distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication
As we have seen, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. For instance, college students experienced much stronger emotions when asked to imagine losses as opposed to equally sized improvements in their romantic relationships; the same was true for their grade-point averages. In the United Kingdom, residents were 45 percent more likely to want to switch to a new energy provider if the change would prevent a loss on their bill as opposed to providing a saving. On tasks, people are more likely to cheat to avoid a loss than to obtain a gain, which can occur in more than just a monetary sense; in one study, team members were 82 percent more willing to cheat to avert a drop in status on the team than to experience an equivalent climb in status. Finally, compared to gains, losses have greater impact on attention (gaze), physiological arousal (heart rate and pupillary dilation), and brain activation (cortical stimulation).
Under conditions of risk and uncertainty, the threat of potential loss plays an especially powerful role in human decision-making. Health researchers Alexander Rothman and Peter Salovey have applied this insight to the medical arena, where individuals are frequently urged to undergo tests to detect existing illnesses (mammography procedures, HIV screenings, cancer self-examinations). Because such tests involve the risk that a disease will be found and the uncertainty that it will be cured, messages stressing potential losses are most effective. For example, pamphlets advising young women to check for breast cancer through self-examinations are significantly more successful if they state their case in terms of what stands to be lost rather than gained. Even our brains seem to have evolved to protect us against loss in that it is more difficult to short-circuit good decision-making strategies when considering a potential loss than it is when considering a potential a gain.1
Figure 6.3: Don’t lose to the loss (of vision).
The developers of this ad for a charity foundation that does good work by funding research into age-related macular degeneration were wise to seek to heighten the generosity of afflicted donors by providing free information about how to cope with the disorder (reciprocity) and by depicting moments not to be missed (loss aversion).
Courtesy of Foundation Fighting Blindness
Limited Numbers
With the scarcity principle operating so powerfully on the worth we assign things, it is natural that compliance professionals will do some similar operating of their own. Probably the most straightforward use of the scarcity principle occurs in the “limited number” tactic in which a customer is informed a certain product is in short supply that cannot be guaranteed to last long. When the impressively successful international trip and hotel booking site Booking.com first included online information about the limited number of a hotel’s rooms that were still available at a given price, purchases skyrocketed—to such heights that its customer-service team called the technology office to report what “must be a systems error.” There was no error; the increase came from the power of limited numbers to turn shoppers into buyers. During the time I was researching compliance strategies by infiltrating various organizations, I saw the limited-number tactic employed repeatedly in a range of situations: “There aren’t more than five convertibles with this engine left in the state. And when they’re gone, that’s it, ’cause we’re not making ’em anymore.” “This is one of only two unsold corner lots in the entire development. You wouldn’t want the other one; it’s got a nasty east-west sun exposure in summer.” “You may want to think seriously about buying more than one case today because production is backed way up and there’s no telling when we’ll get any more in.”
READER’S REPORT 6.2
From a woman living in Phoenix, Arizona
I have been using the scarcity principle at a resale shop called Bookman’s. They buy/trade used books, music, and toys. I had some characters from the 1990s Richard Scarry children’s TV series and I brought them to Bookman’s. But, they didn’t take any. Then I decided to bring each one there, by itself. Each time, they took it. I have now traded them all in. Scarcity principle!
My dad actually did the same thing on eBay with baseball team shot glasses. He bought a box of 24 for $35 total. Then he sold them individually on eBay. The first one sold for $35, covering his entire cost. He waited a while to offer the next, which sold for $26. He waited even longer and sold the next for $51. Then he got greedy and sold another too soon and only got $22. He learned his lesson. He still has several and is holding on to them to reestablish their scarcity.
Author’s note: The wisdom of offering abundant items for sale one at a time recognizes that abundance is the opposite of scarcity and, consequently, presenting an item in abundance reduces its perceived value.
Sometimes the limited-number information was true, sometimes wholly false. In each instance, however, the intent was to convince customers of an item’s scarcity and thereby increase its immediate value in their eyes. I developed a grudging admiration for the practitioners who made this simple device work in a multitude of ways and styles. I was most impressed with a particular version that extended the basic approach to its logical extreme by selling a piece of merchandise at its scarcest point—when it seemingly could no longer be had. The tactic was played to perfection in one appliance store I investigated, where 30 to 50 percent of the stock was regularly listed on sale. Suppose a couple in the store seemed moderately interested in a certain sale item. There are all sorts of cues that tip off such interest—a closer-than-normal examination of the appliance, a casual look at any instruction booklets associated with the appliance, and discussions held in front of the appliance. After observing the couple so engaged, a salesperson might approach and say, “I see you’re interested in this model here. But, unfortunately, I sold it to another couple not more than twenty minutes ago. And I believe it was our last one.”
The customers’ disappointment registers unmistakably. Because of its lost availability, the appliance suddenly becomes more attractive. Typically, one of the customers asks if there is any chance that an unsold model still exists in the store’s back room or warehouse or other location. “Well,” the salesperson allows, “that is possible, and I’d be willing to check. But do I understand that this is the model you want, and if I can get it for you at this price, you’ll take it?” Therein lies the beauty of the technique. In accord with the scarcity principle, the customers are asked to commit to buying the appliance when it looks least available and therefore most desirable. Many customers do agree to purchase at this singularly vulnerable time. Thus, when the salesperson (invariably) returns with the news that an additional supply of the appliance has been found, it is also with a pen and sales contract in hand. The information that the desired model is in good supply may actually make some customers find it less attractive again, although by then the business transaction has progressed too far for most people to back out. The purchase decision made and committed to publicly at an earlier point still holds. They buy.
When I speak to business groups about the scarcity principle, I stress the importance of avoiding the use of such tricks as providing false limited-number information. In response, I regularly get a version of the question “But what if we don’t have a limited supply of what we offer. What if we can deliver as much as the market demands? How can we use the power of scarcity?” The solution is to recognize that scarcity applies not only to the count of items but also to the traits or elements of the items. First, identify a feature of your product or service that is unique or so uncommon that it can’t be obtained elsewhere at the same price or at all. Then, market honestly on the basis of that feature and the attendant benefits that will be lost if it is missed. If the item doesn’t have a single such feature, it may well possess a unique combination of features that can’t be matched by competitors. In that case, the scarcity of that unique set of features can be marketed honestly.
Limited Time
The city of Mesa, Arizona, is a suburb in the Phoenix area where I live. Perhaps the most notable features of Mesa are its sizable Mormon population—next to Salt Lake City, the largest in the world—and a huge Mormon temple located on exquisitely kept grounds in the city’s center. Although I had appreciated the landscaping and architecture from a distance, I had never been interested enough in the temple to go inside, until the day I read a newspaper article that told of a special inner sector of Mormon temples to which no one has access but faithful members of the Church. Even potential converts must not see it; however, there is one exception to the rule. For a few days immediately after a temple is newly constructed, nonmembers are allowed to tour the entire structure, including the otherwise restricted section.
The newspaper story reported that the Mesa temple had been recently refurbished and the renovations had been extensive enough to classify it as “new” by church standards. Thus, for the next several days only, non-Mormon visitors could see the temple area traditionally banned to them. I remember well the effect this news had on me. I immediately resolved to take a tour. But when I phoned my friend Gus to ask if he wanted to come along, I came to understand something that changed my decision just as quickly.
After declining the invitation, Gus wondered why I seemed so intent on a visit. I was forced to admit that, no, I had never been inclined toward the idea of a temple tour before, that I had no questions about the Mormon religion I wanted answered, that I had no general interest in church architecture, and that I expected to find nothing more spectacular or stirring than what I might see at a number of other churches in the area. It became clear as I spoke that the special lure of the temple had a sole cause: if I did not experience the restricted sector soon, I would never again have the chance. Something that, on its own merits, held little appeal for me had become decidedly more attractive merely because it was rapidly becoming less available.
EBOX 6.1
In an impressive review of online-commercial-site experiments, a pair of researchers compiled the results of over 6,700 A/B tests, in which the same e-commerce site’s effectiveness was tested when it did or did not include one or another specific feature (Browne & Swarbrick-Jones, 2017). The twenty-nine features to be evaluated ranged from the purely technological (such as the presence or absence of a search function, a back-to-top button, and default settings) to the motivational (such as free delivery, product badging, and calls to action). At the end of their investigation, the researchers concluded, “The biggest winners from our analysis all have grounding in behavioural psychology.” Happily for readers of this book, aspects of each of the principles of influence we have covered so far appeared as the top-six most effective features:
Scarcity—highlighting items low in stock.
Social Proof—describing most popular and trending items.
Urgency—using time limits, often with a countdown timer.
Concessions—offering discounts for visitors to stay on the site.
Authority/Expertise—informing visitors of alternative products that are available.
Liking—including a welcoming message.
Author’s note: It’s telling that two of the top-three factors align with the two presentations of scarcity we have registered historically, since well before the beginnings of e-commerce—limited-number and limited-time appeals. Once again, we see that although the platforms on which influence principles are delivered may have changed radically, the impacts of the principles on human responses have not. It’s also instructive that the rankings of the two operationalizations of scarcity fit with other research indicating that, in general, limited-supply appeals are more effective than limited-time appeals (Aggarwal, Jun, & Huh, 2011). In an upcoming section on competition, we’ll learn why.
This tendency to want something more as time is fading is harnessed commercially by the “deadline” tactic, in which some official time limit is placed on the customer’s opportunity to get what the compliance professional is offering. As a result, people frequently find themselves acquiring what they don’t much favor simply because the time to do so is dwindling. The adept merchandiser makes this tendency pay off by arranging and publicizing customer deadlines that generate interest where none may have existed before. Concentrated instances of this approach often occur in movie advertising. In fact, I recently noticed that one theater owner, with remarkable singleness of purpose, had managed to invoke the scarcity principle three separate times in just five words of copy: “Exclusive, limited engagement ends soon!”
A variant of the deadline tactic is much favored by some face-to-face, high-pressure sellers because it carries the ultimate decision deadline: right now. Customers are often told that unless they make an immediate decision to buy, they will have to purchase the item at a higher price later or they won’t be able to purchase it at all. A prospective health-club member or automobile buyer might learn that the deal offered by the salesperson is good for that one time only; should the customer leave the premises, the deal is off. One large child-portrait photography company urges parents to buy as many poses and copies as they can afford because “stocking limitations force us to burn the unsold pictures of your children within 24 hours.” A door-to-door magazine solicitor might say that salespeople are in the customer’s area for just a day; after that, they, and the customer’s chance to buy their magazine package, will be long gone.
An in-home vacuum-cleaner-sales operation I infiltrated instructed its sales trainees to claim: “I have so many other people to see that I have the time to visit a family only once. It’s company policy that, even if you decide later that you want this machine, I can’t come back and sell it to you.” This, of course, is nonsense; the company and its representatives are in the business of making sales, and any customer who called for another visit would be accommodated gladly. As the company’s sales manager impressed on his trainees, the true purpose of the “can’t come back” claim has nothing to do with reducing overburdened sales schedules. It is to “keep the prospects from taking the time to think the deal over by scaring them into believing they can’t have it later, which makes them want it now.”2
Figure 6.4: The Urgency Urge
SWINDLED
By Peter Kerr
New York Times
NEW YORK-Daniel Gulban doesn’t remember how his life savings disappeared.
He remembers the smooth voice of a salesman on the telephone. He remembers dreaming of a fortune in oil and silver futures. But to this day, the 81-year-old retired utility worker does not understand how swindlers convinced him to part with $18,000.
“I just wanted to better my life in my waning days,” said Gulban, a resident of Holder, FL. “But when I found out the truth, I couldn’t eat or sleep. I lost 30 pounds. I still can’t believe I would do anything like that.”
Gulban was the victim of what law enforcement officials call a “boiler-room operation,” a ruse that often involves dozens of fast-talking telephone salesmen crammed into a small room where they call thousands of customers each day. The companies snare hundreds of millions of dollars each year from unsuspecting customers, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation, which issued a report on the subject last year.
“They use an impressive Wall Street address, lies and deception to get individuals to sink their money into various glamorous-sounding schemes,” said Robert Abrams, the New York State Attorney General, who has pursued more than a dozen boiler-room cases in the past four years. “The victims are sometimes persuaded to invest the savings of a lifetime.”
Orestes J. Mihaly, the New York Assistant Attorney General in charge of the bureau of investor protection and securities, said the companies often operate in three stages. First, Mihaly said, comes the “opening call,” in which a salesman identifies himself as representing a company with an impressive-sounding name and address. He will simply ask the potential customer to receive the company’s literature.
A second call involves a sales pitch, Mihaly said. The salesman first describes the great profits to be made and then tells the customer that it is no longer possible to invest. The third call gives the customer a chance to get in on the deal, he said, and is offered with a great deal of urgency.
“The idea is to dangle a carrot in front of the buyer’s face and then take it away.” Mihaly said. “The aim is to get someone to buy it quickly, without thinking too much about it.” Sometimes, Mihaly said, the salesman will be out of breath on the third call and will tell the customer that he “just came off the trading floor.”
Such tactics convinced Gulban to part with his life savings. A stranger called him repeatedly and convinced Gulban to wire $1,756 to New York to purchase silver, Gulban said. After another series of telephone calls the salesman cajoled Gulban into wiring more than $6,000 for crude oil. He eventually wired an additional $9,740, but his profits never arrived.
“My heart sank,” Gulban recalled, “I was not greedy. I just hoped I would see better days.” Gulban never recouped his losses.
Author’s note: Look at how the scarcity principle was employed during the second and third calls to cause Mr. Gulban to “buy quickly without thinking too much about it.” Click, run (hurriedly).
© 1983 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.
Psychological Reactance
The evidence, then, is clear. Compliance practitioners’ reliance on scarcity as a lever of influence is frequent, wide-ranging, systematic, and diverse. Whenever this is the case, we can be assured that the principle involved has notable power in directing human action. With the scarcity principle, that power comes from two major sources. The first is familiar. Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts. The weakness is, as before, an enlightened one. We know that things that are difficult to get are typically better than those that are easy to get. As such, we can often use an item’s limited availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its higher quality, which we don’t want to lose. Thus, one reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is, by following it, we are usually and efficiently right.
In addition, there’s a unique, secondary source of power within the scarcity principle: as opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms. And we hate to lose the freedoms we already have; what’s more this is principally true of important freedoms. This desire to preserve our established, important prerogatives is the centerpiece of psychological reactance theory, developed by psychologist Jack Brehm to explain the human response to the loss of personal control. According to the theory, when free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us want them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than before. Therefore, when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than we did before.
As simple as the kernel of the theory seems, its shoots and roots curl extensively through much of the social environment. From the garden of young love to the jungle of armed revolution to the fruits of the marketplace, an impressive amount of our behavior can be explained by examining the tendrils of psychological reactance. Before beginning such an examination, though, it would be helpful to determine when people first show the desire to fight against restrictions of their freedoms.
Young Reactance: Playthings and Heartstrings
Child psychologists have traced the tendency to the age of two—a time identified as a problem by parents and widely known to them as the “terrible twos.” Most parents attest to seeing more contrary behavior in their children around this period. Two-year-olds seem masters of the art of resistance to outside pressure. Tell them one thing, they do the opposite; give them one toy, they want another; pick them up against their will, they wriggle and squirm to be put down; put them down against their will, they claw and struggle to be carried.
One Virginia-based study nicely captured the style of terrible twos among boys who averaged twenty-four months in age. The boys accompanied their mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys. The toys were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent Plexiglas barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of the boys, the Plexiglas sheet was only a foot high—forming no real barrier to the toy behind it, because the boys could easily reach over the top. For the other boys, however, the Plexiglas was two feet high, effectively blocking their access to one toy unless they went around the barrier. The researchers wanted to see how quickly the toddlers would make contact with the toys under these conditions. Their findings were clear-cut. When the barrier was too short to restrict access to the toy behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one behind it. When the barrier was high enough to be a true obstacle, though, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it three times faster than with the unobstructed toy. In all, the boys in this study demonstrated the classic terrible-twos response to a limitation of their freedom—outright defiance.
Why should psychological reactance emerge at the age of two? There’s a crucial change most children undergo around this time. It is when they first come to see themselves as individuals. No longer do they view themselves as mere extensions of the social milieu but rather as identifiable, singular, and separate beings. This developing concept of autonomy brings with it the concept of freedom. An independent being is one with choices; a child with the newfound realization that he or she is such a being will want to explore the length and breadth of the options.
Perhaps we should be neither surprised nor distressed, then, when our two-year-olds strain incessantly against our will. They have come to a recent and exhilarating perspective of themselves as freestanding human entities. Vital questions of choice, rights, and control now need to be asked and answered within their small minds. The tendency to fight for every liberty and against every restriction might be best understood, then, as a quest for information. By testing severely the limits of their freedoms (and, coincidentally, the patience of their parents), the children are discovering where in their worlds they can expect to be controlled and where they can expect to be in control. As we will see later, it is the wise parent who provides highly consistent information.
Although the terrible twos may be the most noticeable age of psychological reactance, we show the strong tendency to react against restrictions on our freedoms of action throughout our lives. One other age does stand out, however, as a time when this tendency takes an especially rebellious form: the teenage years. As an old adage advises, “If you really want to get something done, you’ve got three options: do it yourself, pay top dollar, or forbid your teenagers to do it.” Like the twos, this period is characterized by an emerging sense of individuality. For teenagers, the emergence is out of the role of child, with all of its attendant parental control, and into the role of adult, with all of its attendant rights and duties. Not surprisingly, adolescents focus less on the duties than on the rights they feel they have as young adults. Not surprisingly, again, imposing traditional parental authority at these times is often counterproductive; teenagers will sneak, scheme, and fight to resist such attempts at control.
Nothing illustrates the boomerang quality of parental pressure on adolescent behavior quite as clearly as a phenomenon known as the Romeo and Juliet effect. As we know, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet were the ill-fated Shakespearean characters whose love was doomed by a feud between their families. Defying all parental attempts to keep them apart, the teenagers, whom Shakespeare scholars place at around fifteen and thirteen years of age, won lasting union in their tragic act of twin suicide—an ultimate assertion of free will.
The intensity of the couple’s feelings and actions has always been a source of wonderment and puzzlement to observers of the play. How could such inordinate devotion develop so quickly in a pair so young? A romantic might suggest rare and perfect love. A behavioral scientist, though, might point to the role of parental interference and the psychological reactance it can produce. Perhaps the passion of Romeo and Juliet was not initially so consuming that it transcended the extensive barriers erected by the families. Perhaps, instead, it was fueled to a white heat by the placement of those barriers. Could it be that had the youngsters been left to their own devices, their inflamed devotion would have amounted to no more than a flicker of puppy love?
Because the play is a work of fiction, such questions are, of course, hypothetical and any answer speculative. However, it is possible to ask and answer with more certainty similar questions about modern-day Romeos and Juliets. Do couples suffering parental interference react by committing themselves more firmly to the partnership and falling more deeply in love? According to a study done with 140 Colorado teenage couples, that is exactly what they do. The researchers in the study found that although parental interference was linked to some problems in the relationship—the partners viewed one another more critically and reported a greater number of negative behaviors in the other—the interference also made the pair feel greater love and desire for marriage. During the course of the study, as parental interference intensified, so did the love experience. When the interference weakened, romantic feelings cooled.
READER’S REPORT 6.3
From a woman living in Blacksburg, Virginia
Last Christmas I met a 27-year-old man. I was 19. Although he really wasn’t my type, I went out with him—probably because it was a status thing to date an older man—but I really didn’t become interested in him until my folks expressed their concern about his age. The more they got on my case about it, the more in love I became. It only lasted five months, but this was about four months longer than it would have lasted if my parents hadn’t said anything.
Author’s note: Although Romeo and Juliet have long since departed, it appears the Romeo and Juliet effect is alive and well and making regular appearances in places such as Blacksburg, Virginia.
Adult Reactance: Guns and Suds
For twos and teens, then, psychological reactance flows across the broad surface of experience, always turbulent and forceful. For most of the rest of us, the pool of reactant energy lies quiet and covered, erupting geyser-like only on occasion. Still, these eruptions manifest themselves in a variety of fascinating ways that are of interest not only to students of human behavior but also to lawmakers and policymakers. For instance, supermarket shoppers were most likely to sign a petition favoring federal price controls after they had been informed that a federal official had opposed distribution of the petition. Officials with the power to punish rule violators were more likely to do so on the violators’ birthdays, and this was especially so when violators used their birthday status to plead for leniency. Why? Because the officials felt their freedom to decide on punishment was restricted by this circumstance—a classic reactance reaction.
Then, there’s the odd case of Kennesaw, Georgia, the town that enacted a law requiring every adult resident to own a gun and ammunition, under penalty of six months in jail and a $200 fine. All the features of the Kennesaw gun law make it a prime target for psychological reactance. The freedom (not to own a gun) that the law restricted is an important, long-standing one to which most American citizens feel entitled. Furthermore, the law was passed by the Kennesaw City Council with a minimum of public input. Reactance theory would predict that under these circumstances, few of the adults in the town of 5,400 would obey. Yet newspaper reports testified that three to four weeks after passage of the law, firearms sales in Kennesaw were—no pun intended—booming.
How are we to make sense of this apparent contradiction of the reactance principle? By looking a bit closer at those who were buying Kennesaw’s guns. Interviews with Kennesaw store owners revealed that the gun buyers were not town residents at all but visitors—many of them lured by publicity to purchase their initial guns in Kennesaw. Donna Green, proprietor of a shop described in one newspaper article as a virtual “grocery store of firearms,” summed it up: “Business is great. But they’re almost all being bought up by people from out of town. We’ve only had two or three local people buy a gun to comply with the law.” After passage of the law, then, gun buying had become a frequent activity in Kennesaw, but not among those it was intended to cover; they were massively noncompliant. Only those individuals whose freedom in the matter had not been restricted by the law had the inclination to live by it.
A similar situation arose a decade earlier, several hundred miles south of Kennesaw, when, to protect the environment, Dade County (Miami), Florida, imposed an antiphosphate ordinance prohibiting the use—and possession!—of laundry or cleaning products containing phosphates. A study done to determine the social impact of the law discovered two parallel reactions on the part of Miami residents. First, many Miamians turned to smuggling. Sometimes with neighbors and friends in large “soap caravans,” they drove to nearby counties to load up on phosphate detergents. Hoarding quickly developed, and in the rush of obsession that frequently characterizes hoarders, families boasted of having twenty-year supplies of phosphate cleaners.
The second reaction to the law was more subtle and more general than the deliberate defiance of the smugglers and hoarders. Spurred by the tendency to want what they could no longer have, the majority of Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before. Compared to Tampa residents, who were not affected by the Dade County ordinance, the citizens of Miami rated phosphate detergents gentler, more effective in cold water, better whiteners and fresheners, and more powerful on stains. After passage of the law, they even came to believe phosphate detergents poured more easily.
This sort of response is typical of individuals who have lost an established freedom, and recognizing that is crucial to understanding how psychological reactance and the principle of scarcity work. When something becomes less available, our freedom to have it is limited, and we experience an increased desire for it. We rarely recognize, however, that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is we want it. To make sense of our heightened desire for the item, we begin to assign it positive qualities. In the case of the Dade County antiphosphate law—and in other instances of newly restricted availability—assuming a cause-and-effect relationship between desire and merit is a faulty supposition. Phosphate detergents clean, whiten, and pour no better after they are banned than they do before. We just assume they do because we find we desire them more.
Censorship
The tendency to want what is banned, and, therefore, presume it more worthwhile, is not confined to commodities such as laundry soap; it also extends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information increasingly affects access to wealth and power, it is important to understand how we typically react to attempts to censor or constrain our access to information. Although much evidence exists concerning our reactions to observing various kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography, radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence on our reactions to the censoring of this material. Fortunately, the results of the relatively few studies that have been done on censorship are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to banned information is to want to receive the information and to become more favorable toward it than we were before the ban.
The intriguing finding within the effects of censored information on an audience is not that audience members want to have the information more than before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, the students became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with the position by arranging to have their message restricted.
The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship. Perhaps the authors of the US Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they may have been trying to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.
Of course, political ideas are not the only kind susceptible to restriction. Access to sexually oriented material is also frequently limited. Although not as sensational as the occasional police crackdown on adult bookstores and theaters, regular pressure is applied by parents’ and citizens’ groups to censor the sexual content of educational material ranging from sex-education and -hygiene texts to school library books. Both sides in the struggle seem well-intentioned, and the issues are not simple, as they involve such matters as morality, art, parental control over the schools, and freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.
From a purely psychological point of view, however, those favoring strict censorship may wish to examine closely the results of a study done on Purdue University undergraduates. The students were shown advertisements for a novel. For half, the ads included the statement “a book for adults only, restricted to those 21 years and over”; the other half of the students read of no such age restriction. When the researchers later asked the students to indicate their feelings toward the book, they discovered the same pair of reactions we have noted with other bans: students who learned of the age restriction wanted to read the book more and believed they would like it more than did those who thought their access to the book was unfettered.
Those who support the official banning of sexually relevant materials from school curricula have the avowed goal of reducing society’s orientation, especially of its youth, toward eroticism. In light of the Purdue study and in the context of other research on the effects of imposed restraints, one must wonder whether official censorship as a means may not be antithetical to the goal. If we are to believe the implications of the research, then censorship is likely to increase the desire of students for sexual material and, consequently, to cause them to view themselves as the kind of individuals who like such material.
The term official censorship usually makes us think of bans on political or sexually explicit material, yet there is another common sort of official censorship we don’t think of in the same way, probably because it occurs after the fact. Often in a jury trial, a piece of evidence or testimony will be introduced, only to be ruled inadmissible by the presiding judge, who may then admonish jurors to disregard that evidence. From this perspective, the judge may be viewed as a censor, though the form of the censorship is odd. The presentation of the information to the jury is not banned—too late for that—it’s the jury’s use of the information that is banned. How effective are such instructions from a judge? Is it possible that for jury members who feel it is their right to consider all the available information, declarations of inadmissibility may actually cause psychological reactance, leading the jurors to use the evidence to a greater extent? Research demonstrates that this is often precisely what happens.
The realization that we value limited information allows us to apply the scarcity principle to realms beyond material commodities. The principle works for messages, communications, and knowledge too. Taking this perspective, we can see that information may not have to be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce. According to the principle, we will find a piece of information more persuasive if we think that we can’t get it elsewhere. The strongest support I know for this idea—that exclusive information is more persuasive information—comes from an experiment done by a student of mine who was also a successful businessman, the owner of a beef-importing company. At the time, he had returned to school to get advanced training in marketing. After we talked in my office one day about scarcity and exclusivity of information, he decided to do a study using his sales staff.
The company’s customers—buyers for supermarkets and other retail food outlets—were called on the phone as usual by a salesperson and asked for a purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standard sales presentation before being asked for their orders. Another set of customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that the supply of imported beef was likely to be scarce in upcoming months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and the information about a scarce supply of beef; however, they also learned that the scarce-supply news was not generally available information—it had come, they were told, from certain exclusive contacts the company had. Thus, the customers who received this last sales presentation learned that the availability of the product was limited, and so, too, was the news concerning it: Not only was the beef scarce, but the information that the beef was scarce . . . was scarce—the scarcity double whammy.
The results of the experiment quickly became apparent when company salespeople began to urge the owner to buy more beef because there wasn’t enough in the inventory to keep up with all the orders they were receiving. Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much. The real boost in sales, however, occurred among the customers who heard of the impending scarcity via “exclusive” information. They purchased six times the amount that the customers who received only the standard sales pitch did. Apparently, the fact that the news about the scarcity information was itself scarce made it especially persuasive.3
Reactance Reduction
When people encounter a piece of information, they immediately become less likely to accept it if they view it as part of an effort to persuade them. For one reason, they experience reactance, feeling that the persuasive appeal is an attempt to reduce their freedom to decide on their own. Thus, all would-be persuaders requesting audience members to make a change must win the battle over this reactant response. Sometimes they try to overpower it by providing evidence that, despite any reluctance, change is the right move to make. They might do so by including information that the recipient should feel obligated to the persuader from a past favor (reciprocity) or is a nice person who deserves agreement (liking) or that many others have made the change (social proof) or that experts recommend it (authority) or that the opportunity to take action is dwindling (scarcity).
As well, there is a second way to prevail over reactant feelings that doesn’t involve outmuscling them with more powerful motivations—but wins the battle, instead, by reducing the strength of the reactant feelings. A good example is the communicator who, early on, mentions a drawback to the suggested change. Not only does that maneuver increase the communicator’s credibility, but it gives recipients information on both sides of the choice, positive and negative, and thus reduces their perception of being pushed in only one direction.
One influence tactic has been developed specifically to reinstate recipients’ freedom to choose when they are targets of an influence attempt. It’s called the “But you are free” technique, and it operates by emphasizing a request-recipient’s freedom to say no. In a set of forty-two separate experiments, adding to a request the words “But you are free to decline/refuse/say no” or a similar phrase, such as “Of course, do as you wish,” significantly increased compliance. Moreover, this was the case for a wide variety of requests: making contributions to a tsunami-relief fund, participating in an unpaid survey (whether in person, on the phone, or by mail), giving bus fare to a passerby on the street, purchasing food from a door-to-door solicitor, and even agreeing to sort and record one’s household trash for a month. Finally, the impact of the freedom-reestablishing wording was considerable, often more than doubling the success of a standard request that didn’t include the crucial phrase.4
Optimal Conditions
Much like the other effective levers of influence, the scarcity principle is more effective at some times than others. An important practical defense, then, is to find out when scarcity works best on us. A great deal can be learned from an experiment devised by social psychologist Stephen Worchel and his colleagues. The basic procedure used by Worchel’s team was simple: participants in a consumer preference study were given a chocolate-chip cookie from a jar and asked to taste and rate its quality. For half of the raters, the jar contained ten cookies; for the other half, it contained just two. As we might expect from the scarcity principle, when the cookie was one of only two available, it was evaluated more favorably than when it was one of ten. The cookie in short supply was rated as more desirable to eat in the future, more attractive as a consumer item, and more costly than the identical cookie in abundant supply.
I have a hunch the Coca-Cola Company wished it had known of these findings when, in 1985, it began a historic blunder that Time magazine called “the marketing fiasco of the decade.” On April 23 of that year, the company decided to pull their traditional formula for Coke off the market and replace it with New Coke. It was the day the syrup hit the fan. In the words of one news report: “The Coca-Cola Company failed to foresee the sheer frustration and fury its action would create. From Bangor to Burbank, from Detroit to Dallas, tens of thousands of Coke lovers rose up as one to revile the taste of the New Coke and demand their old Coke back.”
My favorite example of the combined outrage and yearning produced by the loss of the old Coke comes from the story of a retired Seattle investor named Gay Mullins, who became something of a national celebrity by establishing a society called the Old Cola Drinkers of America, a widespread group of people who worked tirelessly to get the traditional formula back on the market by using any civil, judicial, or legislative means available to them. For instance, Mr. Mullins threatened a class-action lawsuit against the Coca-Cola Company to make the old recipe public; he distributed anti–New Coke buttons and T-shirts by the thousands; he set up a hotline where angry citizens could vent their rage and register their feelings. And it did not matter to him that in two separate blind taste tests, he preferred the New Coke to the old. Isn’t that interesting; the thing Mr. Mullins liked more was less valuable to him than the thing he was being denied.
It’s worth noting that even after giving in to customer demands and bringing the old Coke back to the shelves, company officials were stung and somewhat bewildered by what had hit them. As Donald Keough, then president of the company, said: “It’s a wonderful American mystery, a lovely American enigma. And you can’t measure it any more than you can measure love, pride, or patriotism.” Here’s where I’d disagree with Mr. Keough. First of all, it’s no mystery, not if you understand the psychology of the scarcity principle. Especially when a product is as wrapped up in a person’s history and traditions as Coca-Cola has always been in this country, that person is going to want it more as it becomes unavailable. Second, this urge is something that can be measured. In fact, I think the Coca-Cola Company had measured it in their own market research prior to making their infamous decision to change, but that they didn’t see it there because they weren’t looking for it the way a detective of the principles of influence would.
The purse holders within the Coca-Cola Company are no penny pinchers when it comes to marketing research; they are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars—and more—to assure they analyze the market correctly for a new product. In their decision to switch to the New Coke, they were no different. From 1981 to 1984, they carefully tested the new and old formulas in taste tests involving nearly two hundred thousand people in twenty-five cities. What they found in their blind taste tests was a clear preference, 55 percent to 45 percent, for the New Coke over the old. However, some of the tests were not conducted with unmarked samples; in those tests, the participants were told which was the old and which was the New Coke beforehand. Under those conditions, the preference for the New Coke increased by an additional 6 percent.
You might say: “That’s strange. How does that fit with the fact that people expressed a decided preference for the old Coke when the company finally introduced the New Coke?” The only way it fits is by applying the principle of scarcity to the puzzle: during the taste tests, it was the New Coke that was unavailable to people for purchase, so when they knew which sample was which, they showed an especially strong preference for what they couldn’t otherwise have. But, later, when the company replaced the traditional recipe with the new one, now it was the old Coke that people couldn’t have and, it became the favorite.
My point is that the 6 percent increase in preference for the New Coke was right there in the company’s research when they looked at the difference between blind taste-test results and identified taste-test results, but they interpreted it incorrectly. They said to themselves, “Oh, good, this means that when people know they’re getting something new, their desire for it will shoot up.” But, in fact, what that 6 percent increase really meant was that when people know what they can’t have, their desire for it will shoot up.
Although this pattern of results provides a rather striking validation of the scarcity principle, it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Once again, we see a less available item is more desired and valued. The real worth of looking back to the cookie study comes from two additional findings. Let’s take them one at a time.
New Scarcity: Costlier Cookies and Civil Conflict
The first of these noteworthy results involved a small variation in the experiment’s basic procedure. Rather than rating the cookies under conditions of constant scarcity, some participants were first given a jar of ten cookies that was then replaced by a jar of two. Thus, before taking a bite, certain of the participants saw their abundant supply of cookies reduced to a scarce supply. Other participants, however, knew only scarcity of supply from the onset, as the number of cookies in their jars was left at two. With this procedure, the researchers were seeking to answer a question about types of scarcity: Do we value more those things that have become recently less available or those things that have always been scarce? In the cookie experiment, the answer was plain. The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.
The idea that newly experienced scarcity is the more powerful kind applies to situations well beyond the bounds of the cookie study. For example, behavioral scientists have determined that such scarcity is a primary cause of political turmoil and violence. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this argument is James C. Davies, who states that revolutions are more likely to occur when a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal in those conditions. Thus, it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people—those who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things—who are especially likely to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them. For instance, at the time of the American Revolution, colonists had the highest standard of living and the lowest taxes in the Western world. According to historian Thomas Fleming, it wasn’t until the British sought to reduce this widespread prosperity (by levying taxes) that the Americans revolted.
Davies has gathered persuasive evidence for his novel thesis from a range of revolutions, revolts, and internal wars, including the French, Russian, and Egyptian revolutions, as well as such domestic uprisings as Dorr’s Rebellion in nineteenth-century Rhode Island, the American Civil War, and the urban Black riots of the 1960s. In each case, a time of increasing well-being preceded a tight cluster of reversals that burst into violence.
The racial conflict in America’s cities during the mid-1960s offers a case in point. At the time, it was not uncommon to hear the question “Why now?” It didn’t seem to make sense that within their three-hundred-year history, most of which had been spent in servitude and much of the rest in privation, American Blacks would choose the socially progressive sixties as the time to revolt. Indeed, as Davies points out, the two decades after the start of World War II had brought dramatic political and economic gains to the Black population. In 1940, Blacks faced stringent legal restrictions in such areas as housing, transportation, and education; moreover, even when the amount of education was the same, the average Black family earned only a bit more than half the amount its counterpart White family earned. Fifteen years later, much had changed. Federal laws had struck down as unacceptable formal and informal attempts to segregate Blacks in schools, public places, housing, and employment settings. Economic advances had been made, too; Black family income had risen from 56 to 80 percent of that of a comparably educated White family.
Then, according to Davies’s analysis of social conditions, this rapid progress was stymied by events that soured the heady optimism of previous years. First, political and legal change proved substantially easier than social change to enact. Despite all the progressive legislation of the 1940s and 1950s, Blacks perceived that most neighborhoods, jobs, and schools remained segregated. Thus, the Washington-based victories came to feel like defeats at home. For example, in the four years following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to integrate all public schools, Blacks were the targets of 530 acts of violence (including direct intimidation of children and parents, bombings, and burnings) designed to prevent school integration. The violence generated the perception of another sort of setback in progress. For the first time since well before World War II, when lynchings were terrifyingly frequent, Blacks experienced heightened concerns about the basic safety of their families. The new violence was not limited to the education issue. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations of the time were regularly confronted by hostile crowds—and police.
Still another type of downturn occurred within the economic progress of the Black populace. In 1962, the income of a Black family had slid back to 74 percent of that of a similarly educated White family. By Davies’s argument, the most illuminating aspect of this 74 percent figure is not that it represented a long-term increase in prosperity from prewar levels, but that it represented a recent decline from the flush levels of the mid-1950s. In 1963 came the Birmingham riots and, in staccato succession, scores of violent demonstrations, building toward the major upheavals of Watts, Newark, and Detroit.
In keeping with a distinct historical pattern of revolution, Blacks in the United States were more rebellious when their prolonged progress was somewhat curtailed than they were before it began. The pattern offers a valuable lesson for governments: when it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is, in so doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before. Should these now established freedoms become less available, there will be an especially hot variety of hell to pay.
We can look, two decades later, to events in the former Soviet Union for evidence that this basic rule holds across cultures. After decades of repression, then president Mikhail Gorbachev began granting Soviet citizens new liberties, privileges, and choices via the twin polices of glasnost and perestroika. Alarmed by the direction their nation was taking, a small group of government, military, and KGB officials staged a coup, placing Gorbachev under house arrest and announcing on August 19, 1991, that they had assumed power and were moving to reinstate the old order. Most of the world imagined that the Soviet people, known for their characteristic acquiescence to subjugation, would passively yield as they had always done. Time magazine editor Lance Morrow described his own reaction similarly: “At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: Of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were an aberration; now we are back to fatal normality.”
But these were not to be normal times. For one thing, Gorbachev had not governed in the tradition of the czars or Stalin or any of the line of oppressive postwar rulers who had not allowed even a breath of freedom to the masses. He had ceded them certain rights and choices. And when these now established freedoms were threatened, the people lashed out. Within hours of the junta’s announcement, thousands were in the streets erecting barricades, confronting armed troops, surrounding tanks, and defying curfews. The uprising was so swift, so massive, so unitary in its opposition to any retreat from the gains of glasnost that after only three riotous days, the astonished officials relented, surrendering their power and pleading for mercy from Chairman Gorbachev. Had they been students of history—or of psychology—the failed plotters would not have been so surprised by the tidal wave of popular resistance that swallowed their coup. From the vantage point of either discipline, they could have learned an invariant lesson: freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.
The lesson applies to the politics of family as well as country. The parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically invites rebellion by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the child. The parent who only sometimes prohibits between-meal sweets may create the freedom to have such snacks. At that point, enforcing the rule becomes a much more difficult and explosive matter because the child is no longer merely lacking a never-possessed right but is losing an established one. As we have seen in the case of political freedoms and (especially pertinent to the present discussion) chocolate-chip cookies, people see a thing as more desirable when it recently has become less available than when it has been scarce all along. We should not be surprised, then, that research shows parents who enforce and discipline inconsistently produce characteristically rebellious children.5
Figure 6.5: Tanks, but no tanks.
Incensed by the news that then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had been replaced in favor of plotters planning to cancel the newly instituted freedoms, Moscow residents confronted the tanks, defied the coup, and won the day.
Boris Yurchenko, Associated Press
READER’S REPORT 6.4
From an investment manager in New York
I recently read a story in the Wall Street Journal that illustrates the scarcity principle and how people want whatever is taken away from them. The article described how Procter & Gamble tried an experiment in upstate New York by eliminating all savings coupons for their products and replacing the coupons with lower everyday prices. This produced a big consumer revolt (with boycotts, protests, and a firestorm of complaints) even though Procter & Gamble’s data showed that only 2 percent of coupons are used and, on average during the no-coupon experiment, consumers paid the same for P&G products with less inconvenience. According to the article the revolt happened because of something that P&G didn’t recognize, “Coupons, to many people, are practically an inalienable right.” It is amazing how strongly people react when you try to take things away, even if they never use them.
Author’s note: Although Procter & Gamble executives may have been perplexed by this seemingly irrational consumer response, they inadvertently contributed to it. Discount coupons have been part of the American scene for over a century, and P&G had actively “couponed” its products for decades, thereby helping to establish coupons as something consumers had a right to expect. And it’s always the long-established rights that people battle most ferociously to preserve.
Competition for Scarce Resources: Foolish Fury
Let’s look back to the cookie study for another insight into the way we react to scarcity. We’ve already seen from the results of the study that scarce cookies were rated higher than were abundant cookies, and those that were newly scarce were rated higher still. Staying with the newly scarce cookies now, we find certain cookies were the highest rated of all—those that became less available because of a demand for them.
Remember that in the experiment, participants who experienced new scarcity had been given a jar of ten cookies that was then replaced with a jar of only two. Actually, the researchers created this scarcity in two ways. Certain participants were told some of their cookies had to be given away to other raters in order to supply the demand for them in the study. Another set of participants was told their allotment had to be reduced because the researcher had made a mistake and given them the wrong jar initially. The results showed that those whose cookies became scarce through the process of social demand liked them significantly more than did those whose cookies became scarce by mistake. In fact, the cookies made less available through social demand were rated the most desirable of any in the study.
This finding highlights the importance of competition in the pursuit of limited resources. Not only do we want the same item more when it is scarce, but we want it most when we are in competition for it. Advertisers often try to exploit this tendency in us. In their ads, we learn that “popular demand” for an item is so great we must “hurry to buy”; we see a crowd pressing against the doors of a store before the start of a sale; we watch a flock of hands quickly deplete a supermarket shelf of a product. There is more to such images than the idea of ordinary social proof. The message is not just that the product is good because other people think so but also that we are in direct competition with those people for it.
Figure 6.6: Rivalry branches out.
As is clear from this cartoon, rivalry for a limited resource doesn’t take a holiday.
Kirkman & Scott; Creators Syndicate
The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerful motivating properties. The ardor of an indifferent lover surges with the appearance of a rival. It is often for reasons of strategy, therefore, that romantic partners reveal (or invent) the attentions of a new admirer. Salespeople are taught to play the same game with indecisive customers. For example, a real-estate agent who is trying to sell a house to a fence-sitting prospect sometimes calls the prospect with news of another potential buyer who has seen the house, liked it, and is scheduled to return the following day to discuss terms. When wholly fabricated, the new bidder is commonly described as an outsider with plenty of money: Favorites are “an out-of-state investor buying for tax purposes” and “a physician and his wife moving into town.” The tactic, called in some circles “goosing ’em off the fence,” can work devastatingly well. The thought of losing out to a rival frequently turns a buyer from hesitant to zealous.
There is something almost physical about the desire to have a contested item. Shoppers at big closeout or bargain sales report being caught up emotionally in the event. Charged by the crush of competitors, they swarm and struggle to claim merchandise they would otherwise disdain. Such behavior brings to mind the “feeding frenzy” phenomenon of wild, indiscriminate eating among animal groups. Commercial fishermen exploit the phenomenon by throwing a quantity of loose bait to large schools of certain fish. Soon the water is a roiling expanse of thrashing fins and snapping mouths competing for the food. At this point, the fishermen save time and money by dropping unbaited lines into the water, since the crazed fish will bite ferociously at anything, including bare metal hooks.
There is a noticeable parallel between the ways that commercial fishermen and department stores generate a competitive fury among those they wish to hook. To attract and arouse the catch, fishermen scatter some loose bait called chum. For similar purposes, department stores holding a bargain sale toss out a few especially good deals on prominently advertised items called loss leaders. If the bait—of either form—has done its job, a large and eager crowd forms to snap it up. Soon, in the rush to score, the group becomes agitated, nearly blinded, by the adversarial nature of the situation. Human beings and fish alike lose perspective on what they want and begin striking at whatever is being contested. One wonders whether the tuna flapping on a dry deck with only a bare hook in its mouth shares the what-hit-me bewilderment of the shopper arriving home with a load of department-store bilge.
Figure 6.7: Contagious competitiveness
A disgruntled employee steps through the aftermath of a closeout sporting-shoe sale, where customers are reported to have “gone wild, grabbing and struggling with one another over shoes whose sizes they had sometimes not yet seen.”
UPI
Lest we believe the competition-for-limited-resources fever occurs only in such unsophisticated forms of life as tuna and bargain-basement shoppers, we should examine the story behind a remarkable purchase decision made by Barry Diller, who was vice president for prime-time programming of the American Broadcasting Company and who went on to head Paramount Pictures and the Fox Television Network. He agreed to pay $3.3 million for a single TV showing of the movie The Poseidon Adventure. The figure is noteworthy in that it greatly exceeded the highest price ever before paid for a one-time movie showing—$2 million for Patton. In fact, the payment was so excessive that ABC figured to lose $1 million on the Poseidon showing. As the NBC vice president for special programs, Bill Storke, declared at the time, “There’s no way they can get their money back, no way at all.”
How could an astute and experienced businessman such as Diller go for a deal that would produce an expected loss of $1 million? The answer may lie in a second noteworthy aspect of the sale: it was the first time that a motion picture had been offered to the networks in an open-bid auction. Never before had the networks been forced to battle for a scarce resource in quite this way. The novel idea of a competitive auction was the brainchild of the movie’s flamboyant producer, Irwin Allen, and 20th Century Fox vice president, William Self, who must have been ecstatic about the outcome. How can we be sure that it was the auction format that generated the spectacular sales price rather than the blockbuster quality of the movie itself?
Some comments from auction participants provide impressive evidence. First came a statement from the victor, Barry Diller, intended to set future policy for his network. In language sounding as if it could have escaped only from between clenched teeth, he said, “ABC has decided regarding its policy for the future that it would never again enter into an auction situation.” Even more instructive are the remarks of Diller’s rival, Robert Wood, then president of CBS Television, who nearly lost his head and outbid his competitors at ABC and NBC:
We were very rational at the start. We priced the movie out, in terms of what it could bring in for us, then allowed a certain value on top of that for exploitation.
But then the bidding started. ABC opened with $2 million. I came back with $2.4. ABC went $2.8. And the fever of the thing caught us. Like a guy who had lost his mind, I kept bidding. Finally, I went to $3.2; and there came a moment when I said to myself, “Good grief, if I get it, what the heck am I going to do with it?” When ABC finally topped me, my main feeling was relief.
It’s been very educational. (MacKenzie, 1974, p. 4)
According to interviewer Bob MacKenzie, when Wood said, “It’s been very educational,” he was smiling. We can be sure that when ABC’s Diller vowed “never again,” he was not smiling. Both men had learned a lesson from the “Great Poseidon Auction.” The reason both could not smile as a consequence was that, for one, there had been a $1 million tuition charge.
Fortunately, there is a valuable but drastically less expensive lesson here for us too. It is instructive to note that the smiling man was the one who had lost the highly sought-after prize. As a general rule, when the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust—in the present case, open competition for a scarce resource. As the TV executives learned, extreme caution is advised whenever we encounter the devilish construction of scarcity plus rivalry.6
The Distinctiveness Distinction
Because those around us value scarce resources, we prefer to be seen as possessing features that make us special. This is true at some times more than others. One is when we are in an amorous frame of mind. In a situation with romantic possibilities, we want to differentiate ourselves so as to attract the interest of potential partners—for example, by exhibiting greater creativity. When in such a mood, we even prefer to visit places that allow us to stand out. Along with fellow researchers, I helped design an advertisement urging people to visit the San Francisco Museum of Art, which included the name and a photo of the museum. When the ad also featured the phrase “Stand Out from the Crowd,” the intention to visit the museum by viewers of the ad skyrocketed; however, this was the case only if they had just seen a clip from a romantic movie. If they hadn’t been exposed to the romance-rousing clip, the idea of visiting the (Stand Out from the Crowd) museum was not as attractive.
Another context where we feel a strong need to express our uniqueness is in matters of taste. We normally shift our beliefs and opinions to conform to others’, which we do as a way to be correct. When it comes to issues of taste, though, in clothing, hairstyles, scents, food, music and the like, there is a countervailing motivation to distance from the crowd for reasons of distinctiveness. But even in matters of taste, group pressures can be strong, especially from an in-group. One study examined what members of such groups do to balance the desire to conform against the desire to demonstrate their individuality. If the majority of our in-group favors a brand of an item we are likely to do the same—while simultaneously differentiating ourselves along a visible dimension, such as the item’s color. Leaders would be well advised to take this desire for uniqueness into account when ensuring that all team members conform to core work goals, by also ensuring that members aren’t made to do so in exactly the same way.
Leaders should take as illustration what happened with yet another individuality-enhancing factor—an earned symbol of distinction—when a well-meaning leader removed its distinctiveness. On June 14, 2001, almost all US soldiers changed their standard field headgear to the black berets previously worn only by US Army Rangers, an elite contingent of specially trained combat troops. In a move designed to boost army morale, the change had been ordered by US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki to unify the troops and serve as “a symbol of army excellence.” There is no evidence that it did anything of the sort among the thousands of affected soldiers who merely received a black beret. Instead, it incited denunciations from current and former Rangers, who felt robbed of the earned exclusivity the beret represented. As one Ranger, Lieutenant Michelle Hyer, expressed: “This is a travesty. The black berets are something the Rangers and special operations people worked hard for to separate themselves. Now . . . it won’t mean anything to wear the beret anymore.”
The general’s order was misguided in a pair of ways, both instructive about how markers of distinction operate. The pride associated with the black beret came from its exclusivity. By making it no longer exclusive, its value—even as a symbol—had little effect on the self-regard of the many thousands who received it. But among those who had earned the beret’s special significance, the loss of exclusivity stung deeply and ignited a firestorm of criticism. What could General Shinseki do to resolve the problem? He couldn’t simply rescind his order; he had committed himself too emphatically and too publicly to the beret’s value to army-wide solidarity and esprit de corps. Plus, forced retreat is rarely a good look for generals.
His solution was inspired. He allowed the Rangers to select another color of beret, besides black, to designate membership in their elite group. They selected buckskin tan, a hue that would be unique to Ranger berets (and that they still wear proudly today). Brilliant. As he had aimed, Shinseki got to bestow black berets on the great majority of his troops, who liked the flattering new style; in addition, the Rangers got to retain their distinctiveness within the larger change. Double brilliant.7
Defense
It is easy enough to feel properly warned against scarcity pressures, but it is substantially more difficult to act on that warning. Part of the problem is that our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think. When we watch as something we want becomes less available, a physical agitation sets in. Especially in those cases involving direct competition, the blood comes up, the focus narrows, and emotions rise. As this visceral current advances, the cognitive, rational side recedes. In the rush of arousal, it is difficult to be calm and studied in our approach. As CBS TV president Robert Wood commented in the wake of his Poseidon adventure: “You get caught up in the mania of the thing, the acceleration of it. Logic goes right out the window.”
Here’s our predicament, then: knowing the causes and workings of scarcity pressures may not be sufficient to protect us from them because knowing is a cognitive act, and cognitive processes are suppressed by our emotional reaction to scarcity pressures. In fact, this may be the reason for the great effectiveness of scarcity tactics. When they are employed properly, our first line of defense against foolish behavior, a thoughtful analysis, becomes less likely.
If, because of brain-clouding arousal and singlemindedness, we can’t rely on our knowledge of the scarcity principle to stimulate properly cautious behavior, what can we use? Perhaps, in fine jujitsu style, we can use the arousal itself as our prime cue. In this way, we can turn the enemy’s strength to our advantage. Rather than relying on a considered, cognitive analysis of the entire situation, we might well tune ourselves to just the internal, visceral sweep for our warning. By learning to flag the experience of heightening arousal in a compliance situation, we can alert ourselves to the possibility of scarcity tactics there and to the need for caution.
Suppose, however, we accomplish this trick of using the rising tide of arousal as a signal to calm ourselves and proceed with care. What then? Is there any other piece of information we can use to help make a proper decision in the face of scarcity? After all, merely recognizing that we ought to move carefully doesn’t tell us the direction in which to move; it only provides the necessary context for a thoughtful decision.
Fortunately, there is information available on which we can base thoughtful decisions about scarce items. It comes, once again, from the chocolate-chip-cookie study, where the researchers uncovered something that seems strange but rings true regarding scarcity. Even though the scarce cookies were rated as significantly more desirable, they were not rated as any better-tasting than the abundant cookies. So, despite the increased yearning that scarcity caused (the raters said they wanted to have more of the scarce cookies in the future and would pay a greater price for them), it did not make the cookies taste one bit better.
Therein lies an important insight. The joy is not in the experiencing of a scarce commodity but in the possessing of it. It is important that we not confuse the two. Whenever we confront scarcity pressures surrounding some item, we must also confront the question of what it is we want from the item. If the answer is that we want the thing for the social, economic, or psychological benefits of possessing something rare, then, fine; scarcity pressures will give us a good indication of how much we should want to pay for it—the less available it is, the more valuable to us it will be. However, often we don’t want a thing for the pure sake of owning it. We want it, instead, for its utility value; we want to eat it or drink it or touch it or hear it or drive it or otherwise use it. In such cases, it is vital to remember that scarce things do not taste or feel or sound or ride or work any better because of their limited availability.
Although this point is simple, it can often escape us when we experience the heightened desirability that scarce items possess. I can cite a family example. My brother Richard supported himself through school by employing a compliance trick that cashed in handsomely on the tendency of most people to miss that simple point. In fact, his tactic was so effective in this regard that he had to work only a few hours each weekend, leaving the rest of the time free for his studies.
Richard sold cars, but not from a showroom or a car lot. He would buy a couple of used cars sold privately through the newspaper on one weekend, and adding nothing but soap and water, sell them at a decided profit through the newspaper on the following weekend. To do this, he had to know three things. First, he had to know enough about cars to buy those that were offered for sale at the bottom of their blue-book price range but could be legitimately resold for a higher price. Second, once he got the car, he had to know how to write a newspaper ad that would stimulate substantial buyer interest. Third, once a buyer arrived, he had to know how to use the scarcity principle to generate more desire for the car than it perhaps deserved. Richard knew how to do all three. For our purposes, we need to examine his craft with just the third.
For a car he had purchased on the prior weekend, he would place an ad in the Sunday paper. Because he knew how to write a good ad, he usually received an array of calls from potential buyers on Sunday morning. Each prospect who was interested enough to want to see the car was given an appointment time—the same appointment time. So, if three people were scheduled, they were all scheduled for, say, 2:00 p.m. that afternoon. This device of simultaneous scheduling paved the way for later compliance by creating an atmosphere of competition for a limited resource.
Typically, the first prospect to arrive would begin a studied examination of the car and would engage in standard car-buying behavior, such as pointing out any blemishes or deficiencies and asking if the price were negotiable. The psychology of the situation changed radically, however, when the second buyer drove up. The availability of the car to either prospect suddenly became limited by the presence of the other. Often the earlier arrival, inadvertently stoking the sense of rivalry, would assert his right to primary consideration. “Just a minute now, I was here first.” If he didn’t assert that right, Richard would do it for him. Addressing the second buyer, he would say: “Excuse me, but this other gentleman was here before you. So, can I ask you to wait on the other side of the driveway for a few minutes until he’s finished looking at the car? Then, if he decides he doesn’t want it, or if he can’t make up his mind, I’ll show it to you.”
Richard claims it was possible to watch the agitation grow on the first buyer’s face. His leisurely assessment of the car’s pros and cons had suddenly become a now-or-never, limited-time-only rush to decision over a contested resource. If he didn’t decide for the car—at Richard’s asking price—in the next few minutes, he might lose it for good to that . . . that . . . lurking newcomer over there. The second buyer would be equally agitated by the combination of rivalry and restricted availability. He would pace about the periphery of things, visibly straining to get at this suddenly more desirable hunk of metal. Should 2:00 p.m.-appointment number one fail to buy or even fail to decide quickly enough, 2:00 p.m.-appointment number two was ready to pounce.
If these conditions alone were not enough to secure a favorable purchase decision immediately, the trap snapped securely shut as soon as the third 2:00 p.m. appointment arrived on the scene. According to Richard, stacked-up competition was usually too much for the first prospect to bear. He would end the pressure quickly by either agreeing to Richard’s price or by leaving abruptly. In the latter instance, the second arrival would strike at the chance to buy out of a sense of relief coupled with a new feeling of rivalry with that . . . that . . . lurking newcomer over there.
All those buyers who contributed to my brother’s college education failed to recognize a fundamental fact about their purchases: the increased desire spurring them to buy had little to do with the car’s merits. The failure of recognition occurred for two reasons. First, the situation Richard arranged produced an emotional reaction that made it difficult for them to think straight. Second, as a consequence, they never stopped to think that the reason they wanted the car in the first place was to use it, not merely to have it. The competition-for-a-scarce-resource pressures Richard applied affected only their desire to have the car in the sense of possessing it. Those pressures did not affect the value of the car in terms of the real purpose for which they had wanted it.
READER’S REPORT 6.5
From a woman living in Poland
A few weeks ago I was a victim of the techniques you write about. I was quite shocked because I am not a type of person who is easy to convince and I had just read Influence so I was really sensitive to those strategies.
There was a little tasting in the supermarket. Nice girl offered me a glass of beverage. I tasted it and it wasn’t bad. Then she asked me if I liked it. After I answered yes, she proposed to me to buy four tins of this drink (the principle of consistency—I liked it, therefore I should buy it—and the rule of reciprocity—she first gave me something for free). But, I wasn’t so naïve and refused to do it. This saleswoman didn’t give up, however. She said, “Maybe only one tin?” (using the rejection-then-retreat tactic). But, I didn’t give up either.
Then she said this drink was imported from Brazil and she didn’t know if it would be available at the supermarket in the future. The rule of scarcity worked and I bought a tin. When I drank this at home the flavor still was okay but not great. Fortunately, most of the salespersons are not so patient and persistent.
Author’s note: Isn’t it interesting that even though this reader knew about the principle of scarcity, it still got her to purchase something she really didn’t want. To have armed herself optimally against it, she needed to remind herself that, like the scarce cookies, the scarce beverage wouldn’t taste any better. And it didn’t.
Should we find ourselves beset by scarcity pressures in a compliance situation, then, our best response would occur in a two-stage sequence. As soon as we feel the tide of emotional arousal that flows from scarcity influences, we should use it as a signal to stop short. Panicky, feverish reactions have no place in wise compliance decisions. We need to calm ourselves and regain a rational perspective. Once that is done, we can move to the second stage by asking ourselves why we want the item under consideration. If the answer is that we want it primarily for the purpose of owning it, then we should use its availability to help gauge how much we would want to spend for it. However, if the answer is that we want it primarily for its function (that is, we want something good to drive or drink or eat), then we must remember that the item under consideration will function equally well whether scarce or plentiful. Quite simply, we need to recall that the scarce cookies weren’t any tastier.8
SUMMARY
- According to the scarcity principle, people assign more value to opportunities that are less available. The use of this principle for profit can be seen in such compliance techniques as the “limited number” and “deadline” tactics, wherein practitioners try to convince us that if we don’t act now, we will lose something of value. This engages the human tendency for loss aversion—that people are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.
- The scarcity principle holds for two reasons. First, because things difficult to attain are typically more valuable, the availability of an item or experience can serve as a shortcut cue to its quality; and, because of loss aversion, we will be motivated to avoid losing something of high quality. Second, as things become less accessible, we lose freedoms. According to psychological reactance theory, we respond to the loss of freedoms by wanting to have them (along with the goods and services connected to them) more than before.
- As a motivator, psychological reactance is present throughout the great majority of the life span. However, it is especially evident at a pair of ages: the terrible twos and the teenage years. Both of these times are characterized by an emerging sense of individuality, which brings to prominence issues of control, rights, and freedoms. Consequently, individuals at these ages are especially averse to restrictions.
- In addition to its effect on the valuation of commodities, the scarcity principle also applies to the way information is evaluated. The act of limiting access to a message causes individuals to want to receive it and to become more favorable to it. In the case of censorship, the effect of greater favorability toward a restricted message occurs even before the message has been received. In addition, messages are more effective if perceived as containing exclusive (scarce) information.
- The scarcity principle is most likely to hold under two optimizing conditions. First, scarce items are heightened in value when they are newly scarce. That is, we value those things that have recently become restricted more than we do those that were restricted all along. Second, we are most attracted to scarce resources when we compete with others for them.
- It is difficult to steel ourselves cognitively against scarcity pressures because they have an emotion-arousing quality that makes thinking difficult. In defense, we might try to be alert to a rush of arousal in situations involving scarcity. Once alerted, we can take steps to calm the arousal and assess the merits of the opportunity in terms of why we want it.