I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

—James Joyce

Every year, Amazon ranks near or at the top of the wealthiest and best-performing companies in the world. Yet every year it gives each of its fulfillment-center employees, who helped the company reach these heights, an incentive of up to $5,000 to leave. The practice, in which employees receive a cash bonus if they quit, has left many observers mystified, as the costs of employee turnover are significant. Direct expenses associated with turnover of such employees—stemming from the recruitment, hiring, and training of replacements—can extend to 50 percent of the employee’s annual compensation package; plus, the costs escalate even further when indirect expenses are taken into account in the form of loss of institutional memory, productivity disruptions, and lowered morale of remaining team members.

How does Amazon justify its “Pay to Quit” program from a business standpoint? Spokesperson Melanie Etches is clear on the point: “We only want people working at Amazon who want to be here. In the long-run term, staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company.” So Amazon figures that providing unhappy, dissatisfied, or discouraged employees an attractive escape route will save money in terms of the proven higher health costs and lower productivity of such workers. I don’t doubt the logic. But I do doubt it is Amazon’s sole rationale for the program. A significant additional reason applies. I know of its potency from the results of behavioral-science research and from the fact that I have seen it, and still do see it, operating forcefully all around me.

Take, for example, the story of my neighbor Sara and her live-in boyfriend, Tim. After they met, they dated for a while and eventually moved in together. Things were never perfect for Sara. She wanted Tim to marry her and stop his heavy drinking; Tim resisted both ideas. After an especially contentious period, Sara broke off the relationship, and Tim moved out. Around the same time, an old boyfriend phoned her. They started seeing each other exclusively and quickly became engaged. They had gone so far as to set a wedding date and issue invitations, when Tim called. He had repented and wanted to move back in. When Sara told him her marriage plans, he begged her to change her mind; he wanted to be together with her as before. Sara refused, saying she didn’t want to live like that again. Tim even offered to marry her, but she still said she preferred the other boyfriend. Finally, Tim volunteered to quit drinking if she would only relent. Feeling that under those conditions, Tim had the edge, Sara decided to break her engagement, cancel the wedding, retract the invitations, and have Tim move back in with her.

Within a month, Tim informed Sara that he didn’t think he needed to stop drinking, because he now had it under control. A month later, he decided that they should “wait and see” before getting married. Two years have since passed; Tim and Sara continue to live together exactly as before. Tim still drinks, and there are still no marriage plans, yet Sara is more devoted to him than ever. She says that being forced to decide taught her that Tim really is number one in her heart. So after choosing Tim over her other boyfriend, Sara became happier, even though the conditions under which she had made her decision have never been consummated.

Note that Sara’s bolstered commitment came from making a hard personal choice for Tim. I believe it’s for the same reason that Amazon wants employees to make such a choice for it. The election to stay or leave in the face of an incentive to quit doesn’t serve only to identify disengaged workers, who, in a smoothly efficient process, weed themselves out. It also serves to solidify and even enhance the allegiance of those who, like Sara, opt to continue.

How can we be so sure that this latter outcome is part of the Pay to Quit program’s purpose? By paying attention not to what the company’s public-relations spokesperson, Ms. Etches, has to say on the matter but, rather, to what its founder, Jeff Bezos, says—a man whose business acumen had made him the world’s richest person. In a letter to shareholders, Mr. Bezos wrote that the program’s purpose was simply to encourage employees “to take a moment and think about what they really want.” He’s also pointed out that the headline of the annual proposal memo reads, “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” Thus, Mr. Bezos wants employees to think about leaving without choosing to do so, which is precisely what happens, as very few take the offer. In my view, it’s the resultant decision to stay that the program is primarily designed to foster, and for good reason: employee commitment is highly related to employee productivity.

Mr. Bezos’s keen understanding of human psychology is confirmed in a raft of studies of people’s willingness to believe in the greater validity of a difficult selection once made. I have a favorite. A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the horse track. Just after placing bets, they become much more sure of the correctness of their decision than they were immediately before laying down the bets. Of course, nothing about the horse’s chances actually shifts; it’s the same horse, on the same track, in the same field; but in the minds of those bettors, their confidence that they made the right choice improves significantly once the decision is finalized. Similarly, in the political arena, voters believe more strongly in their choice immediately after casting a ballot. In yet another domain, upon making an active, public decision to conserve energy or water, people become more devoted to the idea of conservation, develop more reasons to support it, and work harder to achieve it.

In general, the main reason for such swings in the direction of a choice has to do with another fundamental principle of social influence. Like the other principles, this one lies deep within us, directing our actions with quiet power. It is our desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already said or done. Once we make a choice or take a stand, we encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to think and behave consistently with that commitment. Moreover, those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our decision.¹

Streaming Along

Psychologists have long explored how the consistency principle guides human action. Indeed, prominent early theorists recognized the desire for consistency as a motivator of our behavior. But is it really strong enough to compel us to do what we ordinarily would not want to do? There is no question about it. The drive to be (and look) consistent constitutes a potent driving force, often causing us to act in ways contrary to our own best interest.

Consider what happened when researchers staged thefts on a New York City area beach to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to halt the crime. In the study, an accomplice of the researchers would put a beach blanket down five feet from the blanket of a randomly chosen individual—the experimental subject. After several minutes of relaxing on the blanket and listening to music from a portable radio, the accomplice would stand up and leave the blanket to stroll down the beach. Soon thereafter, a researcher, pretending to be a thief, would approach, grab the radio, and try to hurry away with it. Under normal conditions, subjects were reluctant to put themselves in harm’s way by challenging the thief—only four people did so in the twenty times the theft was staged. But when the same procedure was tried another twenty times with a slight twist, the results were drastically different. In these incidents, before leaving the blanket, the accomplice would simply ask the subject to please “watch my things,” something everyone agreed to do. Now, propelled by the rule of consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away.

To understand why consistency is so powerful a motive, we should recognize that in most circumstances, it is valued and adaptive. Inconsistency is commonly thought to be an undesirable personality trait. The person whose beliefs, words, and deeds don’t match is seen as confused, two-faced, even mentally ill. On the other side, a high degree of consistency is normally associated with personal and intellectual strength. It is the heart of logic, rationality, stability, and honesty. A quote attributed to the great British chemist Michael Faraday suggests the extent to which being consistent is approved—sometimes more than being right is. When asked after a lecture if he meant to imply that a hated academic rival was always wrong, Faraday glowered at the questioner and replied, “He’s not that consistent.”

Certainly, then, good personal consistency is highly valued in our culture—and well it should be. Most of the time, we are better off if our approach to things is well laced with consistency. Without it, our lives would be difficult, erratic, and disjointed.

The Quick Fix

Because it is typically in our best interests to be consistent, we fall into the habit of being automatically so, even in situations where it is not the sensible way to be. When it occurs unthinkingly, consistency can be disastrous. Nonetheless, even blind consistency has its attractions.

First, like most other forms of automatic responding, consistency offers a shortcut through the complexities of modern life. Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us an appealing luxury: we don’t have to think hard about the issue anymore. We don’t have to sift through the blizzard of information we encounter every day to identify relevant facts; we don’t have to expend the mental energy to weigh the pros and cons; we don’t have to make any further tough decisions. Instead, all we have to do when confronted with the issue is click on our consistency program, and we know just what to believe, say, or do. We need only believe, say, or do whatever is congruent with our earlier decision.

The allure of such a luxury is not to be minimized. It allows us a convenient, relatively effortless, and efficient method for dealing with the complexities of daily life that make severe demands on our mental energies and capacities. It is not hard to understand, then, why automatic consistency is a difficult reaction to curb. It offers a way to evade the rigors of continuing thought. With our consistency programs running, we can go about our business happily excused from having to think too much. And, as Sir Joshua Reynolds noted, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”

The Foolish Fortress

There is a second, more perverse attraction of mechanical consistency. Sometimes it is not the effort of hard, cognitive work that makes us shirk thoughtful activity but the harsh consequences of that activity. Sometimes it is the cursedly clear and unwelcome set of answers provided by straight thinking that makes us mental slackers. There are certain disturbing things we simply would rather not realize. Because it is a preprogrammed and mindless method of responding, automatic consistency can supply a safe hiding place from troubling realizations. Sealed within the fortress walls of rigid consistency, we can be impervious to the sieges of reason.

One night at an introductory lecture given by the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program, I witnessed an illustration of the way people hide inside the walls of consistency to protect themselves from the troublesome consequences of thought. The lecture itself was presided over by two earnest young men and was designed to recruit new members into the program. The men claimed the program offered a unique brand of meditation that would allow us to achieve all manner of desirable things, ranging from simple inner peace to more spectacular abilities—to fly and pass through walls, for example—at the program’s advanced (and more expensive) stages.

I had decided to attend the meeting to observe the kind of compliance tactics used in recruitment lectures of this sort and had brought along an interested friend, a university professor whose areas of specialization were statistics and symbolic logic. As the meeting progressed and the lecturers explained the theory behind TM, I noticed my logician friend becoming increasingly restless. Looking more and more pained and shifting about in his seat, he was finally unable to resist. When the leaders called for questions, he raised his hand and gently but surely demolished the presentation we had just heard. In less than two minutes, he pointed out precisely where and why the lecturers’ complex argument was contradictory, illogical, and unsupportable. The effect on the discussion leaders was devastating. After a confused silence, each attempted a weak reply only to halt midway to confer with his partner and finally to admit that my colleague’s points were good ones “requiring further study.”

More interesting to me was the effect upon the rest of the audience. At the end of the question period, the recruiters were faced with a crowd of audience members submitting their $75 down payments for admission to the TM program. Shrugging and chuckling to one another as they took in the payments, the recruiters betrayed signs of giddy bewilderment. After what appeared to have been an embarrassingly clear collapse of their presentation, the meeting had somehow turned into a success, generating inexplicably high levels of compliance from the audience. Although more than a bit puzzled, I chalked up the audience’s response to a failure to understand the logic of my colleague’s arguments. As it turned out, just the reverse was true.

Outside the lecture room after the meeting, we were approached by three members of the audience, each of whom had given a down payment immediately after the lecture. They wanted to know why we had come to the session. We explained and asked the same question of them. One was an aspiring actor who wanted desperately to succeed at his craft and had come to the meeting to learn if TM would allow him to achieve the necessary self-control to master the art; the recruiters assured him it would. The second described herself as a severe insomniac who hoped TM would provide her a way to relax and fall asleep easily at night. The third served as unofficial spokesman. He was failing his college courses because there wasn’t enough time to study. He had come to the meeting to find out if TM could help by training him to need fewer hours of sleep each night; the additional time could then be used for study. It is interesting to note that the recruiters informed him, as well as the insomniac, that TM techniques could solve their respective, though opposite, problems.

Still thinking the three must have signed up because they hadn’t understood the points made by my logician friend, I began to question them about aspects of his arguments. I found that they had understood his comments quite well, in fact, all too well. It was precisely the cogency of his claims that drove them to sign up for the program on the spot. The spokesman put it best: “Well, I wasn’t going to put down any money tonight because I’m really broke right now; I was going to wait until the next meeting. But when your buddy started talking, I knew I’d better give them my money now, or I’d go home, start thinking about what he said and never sign up.”

At once, things began to make sense. These were people with real problems, and they were desperately searching for a way to solve them. They were seekers who, if our discussion leaders were right, had found a potential solution in TM. Driven by their needs, they very much wanted to believe that TM was their answer. Now, in the form of my colleague, intrudes the voice of reason, showing the theory underlying their newfound solution to be unsound.

Panic! Something must be done at once before logic takes its toll and leaves them without hope once again. Quickly, quickly, walls against reason are needed, and it doesn’t matter that the fortress to be erected is a foolish one. “Quick, a hiding place from thought! Here, take this money. Whew, safe in the nick of time. No need to think about the issues any longer.” The decision has been made, and from now on the consistency program can be run whenever necessary: “TM? Certainly I think it will help me; certainly I expect to continue; certainly I believe in TM. I already put my money down for it, didn’t I?” Ah, the comforts of mindless consistency. “I’ll just rest right here for a while. It’s so much nicer than the worry and strain of that hard, hard search.”

Seek and Hide

If, as it appears, automatic consistency functions as a shield against thought, it should not be surprising that such consistency can be exploited by those who would prefer we respond to their requests without thinking. For the profiteers, whose interest will be served by an unthinking, mechanical reaction to their requests, our tendency for automatic consistency is a gold mine. So clever are they at arranging to have us run our consistency programs when it profits them that we seldom realize we have been taken. In fine jujitsu fashion, they structure their interactions with us so our need to be consistent leads directly to their benefit.

Certain large toy manufacturers use just such an approach to reduce a problem created by seasonal buying patterns. Of course, the boom time for toy companies occurs before and during the Christmas holiday season. Their problem is that toy sales then go into a terrible slump for the next couple of months. Their customers have already spent the amount in their toy budgets and are stiffly resistant to their children’s pleas for more.

The toy manufacturers are faced with a dilemma: how to keep sales high during the peak season and, at the same time, retain a healthy demand for toys in the immediately following months? The difficulty certainly doesn’t lie in motivating kids to want more toys after Christmas. The problem lies in motivating postholiday spent-out parents to buy another plaything for their already toy-glutted children. What could the toy companies do to produce that unlikely behavior? Some have tried greatly increased advertising campaigns, while others have reduced prices during the slack period, but neither of those standard sales devices has proved successful. Both tactics are costly and have been ineffective in increasing sales to desired levels. Parents are simply not in a toy-buying mood, and the influences of advertising or reduced expense are not enough to shake that stony resistance.

Certain large toy manufacturers think they have found a solution. It’s an ingenious one, involving no more than a normal advertising expense and an understanding of the powerful pull of the need for consistency. My first hint of the way the toy companies’ strategy worked came after I fell for it and then, in true patsy form, fell for it again.

It was January, and I was in the town’s largest toy store. After purchasing all too many gifts there for my son a month before, I had sworn not to enter that store or any like it for a long, long time. Yet there I was, not only in the diabolical place but also in the process of buying my son another expensive toy—a big, electric road-race set. In front of the road-race display, I happened to meet a former neighbor who was buying his son the same toy. The odd thing was that we almost never saw each other anymore. In fact, the last time had been a year earlier in the same store when we were both buying our sons an expensive post-Christmas gift—that time a robot that walked, talked, and laid waste to all before it. We laughed about our strange pattern of seeing each other only once a year at the same time, in the same place, while doing the same thing. Later that day, I mentioned the coincidence to a friend who, it turned out, had once worked in the toy business.

“No coincidence,” he said knowingly.

“What do you mean, ‘No coincidence’?”

“Look,” he said, “let me ask you a couple of questions about the road-race set you bought this year. First, did you promise your son that he’d get one for Christmas?”

“Well, yes, I did. Christopher had seen a bunch of ads for them on the Saturday-morning cartoon shows and said that was what he wanted for Christmas. I saw a couple of ads myself and it looked like fun, so I said, OK.”

“Strike one,” he announced. “Now for my second question. When you went to buy one, did you find all the stores sold out?”

“That’s right, I did! The stores said they’d ordered some but didn’t know when they’d get any more in. So I had to buy Christopher some other toys to make up for the road-race set. But how did you know?”

“Strike two,” he said. “Just let me ask one more question. Didn’t this same sort of thing happen the year before with the robot toy?”

“Wait a minute . . . you’re right. That’s just what happened. This is incredible. How did you know?”

“No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: they undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those toys sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That jacks up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”

“Where,” I said, beginning to seethe now, “they meet other parents they haven’t seen for a year, falling for the same trick, right?”

“Right. Uh, where are you going?”

“I’m going to take the road-race set right back to the store.” I was so angry I was nearly shouting.

“Wait. Think for a minute first. Why did you buy it this morning?”

“Because I didn’t want to let Christopher down and because I wanted to teach him that promises are to be lived up to.”

“Well, has any of that changed? Look, if you take his toy away now, he won’t understand why. He’ll just know that his father broke a promise to him. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said, sighing, “I guess not. So, you’re telling me the toy companies doubled their profits on me for the past two years, and I never even knew it; and now that I do, I’m still trapped—by my own words. So, what you’re really telling me is, ‘Strike three.’”

He nodded, “And you’re out.”

In the years since, I have observed a variety of parental toy-buying sprees similar to the one I experienced during that particular holiday season—for Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, Furbies, Xboxes, Wii consoles, Zhu Zhu Pets, Frozen Elsa dolls, PlayStation 5s, and the like. But, historically, the one that best fits the pattern is that of the Cabbage Patch Kids, $25 dolls that were promoted heavily during mid-1980s Christmas seasons but were woefully undersupplied to stores. Some of the consequences were a government false-advertising charge against the Kids’ maker for continuing to advertise dolls that were not available, frenzied groups of adults battling at toy outlets or paying up to $700 apiece at auction for dolls they had promised their children, and an annual $150 million in sales that extended well beyond the Christmas months. During the 1998 holiday season, the least available toy everyone wanted was the Furby, created by a division of toy giant Hasbro. When asked what frustrated, Furby-less parents should tell their kids, a Hasbro spokeswoman advised the kind of promise that has profited toy manufacturers for decades: tell the kids, “I’ll try, but if I can’t get it for you now, I’ll get it for you later.”²

Figure 7.1: No pain, no (ill-gotten) gain

Jason, the gamer in this cartoon, has gotten the tactic for holiday-gift success right, but, I think he’s gotten the reason for that success wrong. My own experience tells me that his parents will overcompensate with other gifts not so much to ease his pain but to ease their own pain at having to break their promise to him.

Commitment Is the Key

Once we realize that the power of consistency is formidable in directing human action, an important practical question immediately arises: How is that force engaged? What produces the click that activates the run of the powerful consistency program? Social psychologists think they know the answer: commitment. If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly aligned with the stand.

As we’ve already seen, social psychologists are not the only ones who understand the connection between commitment and consistency. Commitment strategies are aimed at us by compliance professionals of nearly every sort. Each of the strategies is intended to get us to take some action or make some statement that will trap us into later compliance through consistency pressures. Procedures designed to create commitments take various forms. Some are bluntly straightforward; others are among the most subtle compliance tactics we will encounter. On the blunt side, consider the approach of Jack Stanko, used-car sales manager for an Albuquerque auto dealership. While leading a session called “Used Car Merchandising” at a National Auto Dealers Association convention in San Francisco, he advised one hundred sales-hungry dealers as follows: “Put ’em on paper. Get the customer’s OK on paper. Control ’em. Ask ’em if they would buy the car right now if the price is right. Pin ’em down.” Obviously, Mr. Stanko—an expert in these matters—believes that the way to customer compliance is through commitments, which serve to “control ’em.”

Commitment practices involving substantially more finesse can be just as effective. Suppose you wanted to increase the number of people in your area who would agree to go door to door collecting donations for your favorite charity. You would be wise to study the approach taken by social psychologist Steven J. Sherman. He simply called a sample of Bloomington, Indiana, residents as part of a survey he was taking and asked them to predict what they would say if asked to spend three hours collecting money for the American Cancer Society. Of course, not wanting to seem uncharitable to the survey-taker or to themselves, many of these people said that they would volunteer. The consequence of this subtle commitment procedure was a 700 percent increase in volunteers when, a few days later, a representative of the American Cancer Society did call and ask for neighborhood canvassers.

Using the same strategy, but this time asking citizens to predict whether they would vote on Election Day, other researchers have been able to increase significantly the turnout at the polls among those called. Courtroom combatants appear to have adopted this practice of extracting a lofty initial commitment designed to spur future consistent behavior. When screening potential jurors before a trial, Jo-Ellen Demitrius, reputed to be the best consultant in the business of jury selection, asks an artful question: “If you were the only person who believed in my client’s innocence, could you withstand the pressure of the rest of the jury to change your mind?” How could any self-respecting prospective juror say no? And having made the public promise, how could any self-respecting selected juror repudiate it later?

Perhaps an even more crafty commitment technique has been developed by telephone solicitors for charity. Have you noticed that callers asking you to contribute to some cause or another these days seem to begin things by inquiring about your current health and well-being? “Hello, Mr./Ms. Targetperson,” they say. “How are you feeling this evening?,” or “How are you doing today?” The caller’s intent with this sort of introduction is not merely to seem friendly and caring. It is to get you to respond—as you normally do to such polite, superficial inquiries—with a polite, superficial comment of your own: “Just fine” or “Real good” or “Doing great, thanks.” Once you have publicly stated that all is well, it becomes much easier for the solicitor to corner you into aiding those for whom all is not well: “I’m glad to hear that because I’m calling to ask if you’d be willing to make a donation to help the unfortunate victims of . . .”

The theory behind this tactic is that people who have just asserted that they are doing/feeling fine—even as a routine part of a sociable exchange—will consequently find it awkward to appear stingy in the context of their own admittedly favorable circumstances. If all this sounds a bit far-fetched, consider the findings of consumer researcher Daniel Howard, who put the theory to the test. Residents of Dallas, Texas, were called on the phone and asked if they would agree to allow a representative of the Hunger Relief Committee to come to their homes to sell them cookies, the proceeds from which would be used to supply meals for the needy. When tried alone, that request (labeled the standard solicitation approach) produced only 18 percent agreement. However, if the caller initially asked, “How are you feeling this evening?” and waited for a reply before proceeding with the standard approach, several noteworthy things happened. First, of the 120 individuals called, most (108) gave the customary favorable reply (“Good,” “Fine,” “Real well,” etc.). Second, 32 percent of the people who got the “How are you feeling this evening?” question agreed to receive the cookie seller at their homes, nearly twice the success rate of the standard solicitation approach. Third, true to the consistency principle, almost everyone (89 percent) who agreed to such a visit did in fact make a cookie purchase when contacted at home.

There is still another behavioral arena, sexual infidelity, in which relatively small verbal commitments can make a substantial difference. Psychologists warn that cheating on a romantic partner is a source of great conflict, often leading to anger, pain, and termination of the relationship. They’ve also located an activity to help prevent the occurrence of this destructive sequence: prayer—not prayer in general, though, but of a particular kind. If one romantic partner agrees to say a brief prayer for the other’s well-being every day, he or she becomes less likely to be unfaithful during the period of time while doing so. After all, such behavior would be inconsistent with daily active commitments to the partner’s welfare.³

READER’S REPORT 7.1

From a sales trainer in Texas

The most powerful lesson I ever learned from your book was about commitment. Years ago, I trained people at a telemarketing center to sell insurance over the phone. Our main difficulty, however, was that we couldn’t actually SELL insurance over the phone; we could only quote a price and then direct the caller to the company office nearest their home. The problem was callers who committed to office appointments but didn’t show up.

I took a group of new training graduates and modified their sales approach from that used by other salespeople. They used the exact same “canned” presentation as the others but included an additional question at the end of the call. Instead of simply hanging up when the customer confirmed an appointment time, we instructed the salespeople to say, “I was wondering if you would tell me exactly why you’ve chosen to purchase your insurance with <our company>.”

I was initially just attempting to gather customer service information, but these new sales associates generated nearly 19 percent more sales than other new salespeople. When we integrated this question into everyone’s presentations, even the old pros generated over 10 percent more business than before. I didn’t fully understand why this worked before.

Author’s note: Although accidentally employed, this reader’s tactic was masterful because it didn’t simply commit customers to their choice; it also committed them to the reasons for their choice. And, as we’ve seen in chapter 1, people often behave for the sake of reasons (Bastardi & Shafir, 2000; Langer, 1989).

The tactic’s effectiveness fits with the account of an Atlanta-based acquaintance of mine who—despite following standard advice to describe fully all the good reasons he should be hired—was having no success in job interviews. To change this outcome, he began employing the consistency principle on his own behalf. After assuring evaluators he wanted to answer all their questions as fully as possible, he added, “But, before we start, I wonder if you could answer a question for me. I’m curious, what was it about my background that attracted you to my candidacy?” As a consequence, his evaluators heard themselves saying positive things about him and his qualifications, committing themselves to reasons to hire him before he had to make the case himself. He swears he has gotten three better jobs in a row by employing this technique.

Imprisonments, Self-Imposed

The question of what makes a commitment effective has numerous answers. A variety of factors affects the ability of a commitment to constrain future behavior. One large-scale program designed to produce compliance illustrates how several of the factors work. The remarkable thing about the program is that it was systematically employing these factors over a half-century ago, well before scientific research had identified them.

During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found themselves in prisoner-of-war camps run by the Chinese Communists. It became clear early in the conflict that the Chinese treated captives quite differently than did their allies, the North Koreans, who favored harsh punishment to gain compliance. Scrupulously avoiding brutality, the Red Chinese engaged in what they termed their “lenient policy,” which was, in reality, a concerted and sophisticated psychological assault on their captives.

After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively to determine what had occurred, in part because of the unsettling success of some aspects of the Chinese program. The Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in striking contrast to the behavior of American POWs in World War II. For this reason, among others, escape plans were quickly uncovered and the escapes themselves almost always unsuccessful. “When an escape did occur,” wrote psychologist Edgar Schein, a principal American investigator of the Chinese indoctrination program in Korea, “the Chinese usually recovered the man easily by offering a bag of rice to anyone turning him in.” In fact, nearly all American prisoners in the Chinese camps are said to have collaborated with the enemy in one way or another.

An examination of the prison-camp program shows that the Chinese relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures. Of course, the first problem facing the Chinese was to get any collaboration at all from the Americans. The prisoners had been trained to provide nothing but name, rank, and serial number. Short of physical brutalization, how could the captors hope to get such men to give military information, turn in fellow prisoners, or publicly denounce their country? The Chinese answer was elementary: start small and build.

For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist that they seemed inconsequential (such as “The United States is not perfect” and “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem”). Once these minor requests had been complied with, however, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related, yet more substantive, requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States was not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways he believed this was the case. Once he had so explained, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and sign his name to it. Later, he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you believe, isn’t it?” Still later, he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.

The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp but to other POW camps in North Korea as well as to American forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator,” having given aid and comfort to the enemy. Aware that he had written the essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his self-image to be consistent with the deed and with the “collaborator” label, which often resulted in even more extensive acts of collaboration. Thus, while “only a few men were able to avoid collaboration altogether,” according to Schein, “the majority collaborated at one time or another by doing things which seemed to them trivial but which the Chinese were able to turn to their own advantage. . . . This was particularly effective in eliciting confessions, self-criticism, and information during interrogation.”

Other groups of people interested in compliance are also aware of the usefulness and power of this approach. Charitable organizations, for instance, will often use progressively escalating commitments to induce individuals to perform major favors. The trivial first commitment of agreeing to be interviewed can begin a “momentum of compliance” that induces such later behaviors as organ or bone-marrow donations.

Figure 7.2: Start small and build.

Pigs like mud. But they don’t eat it. For that, escalating commitments seem needed.

© Paws. Used by permission.

Many business organizations employ this approach regularly as well. For the salesperson, the strategy is to obtain a large purchase by starting with a small one. Almost any small sale will do because the purpose of that small transaction is not profit, it’s commitment. Further purchases, even much larger ones, are expected to flow naturally from the commitment. An article in the trade magazine American Salesman put it succinctly:

The general idea is to pave the way for full-line distribution by starting with a small order. . . . Look at it this way—when a person has signed an order for your merchandise, even though the profit is so small it hardly compensates for the time and effort of making the call, he is no longer a prospect—he is a customer. (Green, 1965, p. 14)

The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique. Social scientists first became aware of its effectiveness when psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser published an astonishing data set. They reported the results of an experiment in which a researcher, posing as a volunteer worker, had gone door to door in a residential California neighborhood making a preposterous request of homeowners. The homeowners were asked to allow a public-service billboard to be installed on their front lawns. To get an idea of the way the sign would look, they were shown a photograph depicting an attractive house, the view of which was almost completely obscured by a large, poorly lettered sign reading Drive Carefully. Although the request was normally and understandably refused by the great majority of the residents in the area (only 17 percent complied), one particular group of people reacted quite favorably. A full 76 percent of them offered the use of their front yards.

The prime reason for their startling compliance was a small commitment to driver safety that they had made two weeks earlier. A different “volunteer worker” had come to their doors and asked them to accept and display a little three-inch-square sign that read Be a Safe Driver. It was such a trifling request that nearly all of them had agreed, but the effects of that request were striking. Because they had innocently complied with a trivial safe-driving request a couple of weeks before, these homeowners became remarkably willing to comply with another such request that was massive in size.

Freedman and Fraser didn’t stop there. They tried a slightly different procedure on another sample of homeowners. These people first received a request to sign a petition that favored “keeping California beautiful.” Of course, nearly everyone signed because state beauty, like efficiency in government or sound prenatal care, is one of those issues no one opposes. After waiting about two weeks, Freedman and Fraser sent a new “volunteer worker” to these same homes to ask the residents to allow the big Drive Carefully sign to be erected on their lawns. In some ways, the response of these homeowners was the most astounding of any in the study. Approximately half consented to the installation of the Drive Carefully billboard, even though the small commitment they had made weeks earlier was not to driver safety but to an entirely different public-service topic, state beautification.

At first, even Freedman and Fraser were bewildered by their findings. Why should the little act of signing a petition supporting state beautification cause people to be so willing to perform a different and much larger favor? After considering and discarding other explanations, the researchers came upon one that offered a solution to the puzzle: signing the beautification petition changed the view these people had of themselves. They saw themselves as public-spirited citizens who acted on their civic principles. When, two weeks later, they were asked to perform another public service by displaying the Drive Carefully sign, they complied in order to be consistent with their newly formed self-images. According to Freedman and Fraser:

What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.

Figure 7.3: Just sign on the plotted line.

Author’s note: Have you ever wondered what the groups that ask you to sign their petitions do with all the signatures they obtain? Most of the time, the groups use them for genuinely stated purposes, but often they don’t do anything with them, as the principal purpose of the petition may simply be to get the signers committed to the group’s position and, consequently, more willing to take future steps that are aligned with it.

Psychology professor Sue Frantz described witnessing a sinister version of the tactic on the streets of Paris, where tourists are approached by a scammer and asked to sign a petition “to support people who are deaf and mute.” Those who sign are then immediately asked to make a donation, which many do to stay consistent with the cause they’ve just endorsed. Because the operation is a scam, no donation goes to charity—only to the scammer. Worse, an accomplice of the petitioner observes where, in their pockets or bags, the tourists reach for their wallets and targets them for subsequent pickpocket theft.

iStock Photo

Freedman and Fraser’s findings tell us to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests because that agreement can influence our self-concepts. Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests but also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little favor we did earlier. It’s this second kind of influence concealed within small commitments that scares me.

It scares me enough that I am rarely willing to sign a petition anymore, even for a position I support. The action has the potential to influence not only my future behavior but also my self-image in ways I may not want. Further, once a person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit the new image.

Who among Freedman and Fraser’s homeowners would have thought the “volunteer worker” who asked them to sign a state-beautification petition was really interested in having them display a safe-driving billboard two weeks later? Who among them could have suspected their decision to display the billboard was largely a result of signing that petition? No one, I’d guess. If there were any regrets after the billboard went up, who could they conceivably hold responsible but themselves and their own damnably strong civic spirits? They probably never considered the guy with the “keeping California beautiful” petition and all that knowledge of social jujitsu.⁴

Hearts and Minds

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.

—C. S. Lewis

Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: you can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” and prisoners into “collaborators.” Once you’ve got a person’s self-image where you want it, that person should comply naturally with a whole range of requests aligned with this new self-view.

Not all commitments affect self-image equally, however. There are certain conditions that should be present for commitments to be most effective in this way: they should be active, public, effortful, and freely chosen. The major intent of the Chinese was not simply to extract information from their prisoners. It was to indoctrinate them, to change their perceptions of themselves, of their political system, of their country’s role in the war, and of communism. Dr. Henry Segal, chief of the neuropsychiatric evaluation team that examined returning POWs at the end of the Korean War, reported that war-related beliefs had been substantially shifted. Significant inroads had been made in the men’s political attitudes:

Many expressed antipathy toward the Chinese Communists but at the same time praised them for “the fine job they had done in China.” Others stated that “although communism won’t work in America, I think it’s a good thing for Asia.” (Segal, 1954, p. 360)

It appears that the real goal of the Chinese was to modify, at least for a time, the hearts and minds of their captives. If we measure their achievement in terms of “defection, disloyalty, changed attitudes and beliefs, poor discipline, poor morale, poor esprit, and doubts as to America’s role,” Segal concluded, “their efforts were highly successful.” Let’s examine more closely how they managed it.

The Magic Act

Our best evidence of people’s true feelings and beliefs comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what people are like look closely at their actions. People also use this evidence—their own behavior—to decide what they are like; it is a key source of information about their own beliefs, values, attitudes, and, crucially, what they want to do next. Online sites often want visitors to register by providing information about themselves. But 86 percent of users report that they sometimes quit the registration process because the form is too long or prying. What have site developers done to overcome this barrier without reducing the amount of information they get from customers? They’ve reduced the average number of fields of requested information on the form’s first page. Why? They want to give users the feeling of having started and finished the initial part of the process. As design consultant Diego Poza put it, “It doesn’t matter if the next page has more fields to fill out (it does), due to the principle of commitment and consistency, users are much more likely to follow through.” The available data have proved him right: Just reducing the number of first-page fields from four to three increases registration completions by 50 percent.

The rippling impact of behavior on self-concept and future behavior can be seen in research into the effect of active versus passive commitments. In one study, college students volunteered for an AIDS-education project in local schools. The researchers arranged for half to volunteer actively, by filling out a form stating that they wanted to participate. The other half volunteered passively, by failing to fill out a form stating that they didn’t want to participate. Three to four days later, when asked to begin their volunteer activity, the great majority (74 percent) who appeared for duty came from the ranks of those who had actively agreed. What’s more, those who volunteered actively were more likely to explain their decisions by implicating their personal values, preferences, and traits. In all, it seems that active commitments give us the kind of information we use to shape our self-image, which then shapes our future actions, which solidify the new self-image.

Understanding fully this route to altered self-concept, the Chinese set about arranging the prison-camp experience so their captives would consistently act in desired ways. Before long, the Chinese knew, these actions would begin to take their toll, causing the prisoners to change their views of themselves to fit with what they had done.

Writing was one sort of committing action that the Chinese urged incessantly upon the captives. It was never enough for prisoners to listen quietly or even agree verbally with the Chinese line; they were always pushed to write it down as well. Edgar Schein (1956) describes a standard indoctrination-session tactic of the Chinese:

A further technique was to have the man write out the question and then the [pro-Communist] answer. If he refused to write it voluntarily, he was asked to copy it from the notebooks, which must have seemed like a harmless enough concession. (p. 161)

Oh, those “harmless” concessions. We’ve already seen how apparently trifling commitments can lead to further consistent behavior. As a commitment device, a written declaration has great advantages. First, it provides physical evidence that an act has occurred. Once a prisoner wrote what the Chinese wanted, it was difficult for him to believe he had not done so. The opportunities to forget or to deny to himself what he had done were not available, as they are for purely spoken statements. No; there it was in his own handwriting, an irrevocably documented act driving him to make his beliefs and his self-image consistent with what he had undeniably done. Second, a written testament can be shown to others. Of course, that means it can be used to persuade those others. It can persuade them to change their attitudes in the direction of the statement. More importantly for the purpose of commitment, it can persuade them the author genuinely believes what was written.

People have a natural tendency to think a statement reflects the true attitude of the person who made it. What is surprising is that they continue to think so even when they know the person did not freely choose to make the statement. Some scientific evidence that this is the case comes from a study by psychologists Edward Jones and James Harris, who showed people an essay favorable to Fidel Castro and asked them to guess the true feelings of its author. Jones and Harris told some of these people that the author had chosen to write a pro-Castro essay; they told other people that the author had been required to write in favor of Castro. The strange thing was that even those who knew that the author had been assigned to do a pro-Castro essay guessed the writer liked Castro. It seems a statement of belief produces a click, run response in those who view it. Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, observers automatically assume someone who makes such a statement means it.

Think of the double-barreled effects on the self-image of a prisoner who wrote a pro-Chinese or anti-American statement. Not only was it a lasting personal reminder of his action, but it was likely to persuade those around him that it reflected his actual beliefs. As we saw in chapter 4, what those around us think is true of us importantly determines what we ourselves think. For example, one study found that a week after hearing they were considered charitable people by their neighbors, people gave much more money to a canvasser from the Multiple Sclerosis Association. Apparently the mere knowledge that others viewed them as charitable caused the individuals to make their actions congruent with that view.

A study in the fruit and vegetable section of a Swedish supermarket obtained a similar result. Customers in the section saw two separate bins of bananas, one labeled as ecologically grown and one without an ecological label. Under these circumstances, the ecological versions were chosen 32 percent of the time. Two additional samples of shoppers saw a sign between the two bins. For one sample, the sign that marketed the ecological bananas on price, “Ecological bananas are the same price as competing bananas,” increased the purchase rate to 46 percent. For the final sample of customers, the sign that marketed the ecological bananas by assigning the shoppers an environmentally friendly public image, “Hello Environmentalists, our ecological bananas are right here,” raised the purchase rate of ecological bananas to 51 percent.

Savvy politicians have long used the committing character of labels to great advantage. One of the best at it was former president of Egypt Anwar Sadat. Before international negotiations began, Sadat would assure his bargaining opponents that they and the citizens of their country were widely known for their cooperativeness and fairness. With this kind of flattery, he not only created positive feelings but also connected his opponent’s identities to a course of action that served his goals. According to master negotiator Henry Kissinger, Sadat was successful because he got others to act in his interests by giving them a reputation to uphold.

Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside, there is a pressure to bring self-image into line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure—a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others perceive us.

Because others see us as believing what we have written (even when we’ve had little choice in the matter), we experience a pull to bring self-image into line with the written statement. In Korea, several subtle devices were used to get prisoners to write, without direct coercion, what the Chinese wanted. For example, the Chinese knew many prisoners were anxious to let their families know they were alive. At the same time, the men knew their captors were censoring the mail and only some letters were being allowed out of camp. To ensure their own letters would be released, some prisoners began including in their messages peace appeals, claims of kind treatment, and statements sympathetic to communism. Their hope was the Chinese would want such letters to surface and would, therefore, allow their delivery. Of course, the Chinese were happy to cooperate because those letters served their interests marvelously. First, their worldwide propaganda effort benefited from the appearance of pro-Communist statements by American servicemen. Second, for purposes of prisoner indoctrination, the Chinese had, without raising a finger of physical force, gotten many men to go on record supporting the Communist cause.

A similar technique involved political-essay contests regularly held in camp. The prizes for winning were invariably small—a few cigarettes or a bit of fruit—but sufficiently scarce that they generated a lot of interest from the men. Usually the winning essay took a solidly pro-Communist stand . . . but not always. The Chinese were wise enough to realize that most prisoners would not enter a contest they thought they could win only by writing a Communist tract. Moreover, the Chinese were clever enough to know how to plant in captives small commitments to communism that could be nurtured into later bloom. So, occasionally, the winning essay was one that generally supported the United States but bowed once or twice to the Chinese view.

The effects of the strategy were exactly what the Chinese wanted. The men continued to participate voluntarily in the contests because they saw they could win with essays highly favorable to their own country. Perhaps without realizing it, though, they began shading their essays a bit toward communism in order to have a better chance of winning. The Chinese were ready to pounce on any concession to Communist dogma and to bring consistency pressures to bear upon it. In the case of a written declaration within a voluntary essay, they had a perfect commitment from which to build toward collaboration and conversion.

Other compliance professionals also know about the committing power of written statements. The enormously successful Amway corporation, for instance, has a way to spur their sales personnel to greater and greater accomplishments. Members of the staff are asked to set individual sales goals and commit themselves to those goals by personally recording them on paper:

One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim—and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.

If the Amway people have found “something magical about writing things down,” so have other business organizations. Some door-to-door sales companies used the magic of written commitments to battle the “cooling off” laws of many states. The laws are designed to allow customers a few days after agreeing to purchase an item to cancel the sale and receive a full refund. At first this legislation hurt the hard-sell companies deeply. Because they emphasize high-pressure tactics, their customers often bought, not because they wanted the products but because they were tricked or intimidated into the sale. When the laws went into effect, these customers began canceling in droves during the cooling-off period.

The companies quickly learned a simple trick that cut the number of such cancellations markedly. They had the customer, rather than the salesperson, fill out the sales agreement. According to the sales-training program of a prominent encyclopedia company, that personal commitment alone proved to be “a very important psychological aid in preventing customers from backing out of their contracts.” Like the Amway corporation, these organizations found that something special happens when people put their commitments on paper: they live up to what they write down.

Figure 7.4: Writing is believing.

This ad invites readers to participate in a sweepstakes by providing a handwritten message detailing the product’s favorable features.

Courtesy of Schieffelin & Co.

Another common way for businesses to cash in on the “magic” of written declarations occurs through the use of an innocent-looking promotional device. Growing up, I used to wonder why big companies such as Procter & Gamble and General Foods were always running 25-, 50-, or 100-words or less testimonial contests. They all seemed alike. A contestant was to compose a short personal statement beginning with the words, “I like [the product] because . . .” and go on to laud the features of whatever cake mix or floor wax happened to be at issue. The company judged the entries and awarded prizes to the winners. What puzzled me was what the companies got out of the deal. Often the contest required no purchase; anyone submitting an entry was eligible. Yet the companies appeared willing to incur the costs of contest after contest.

I am no longer puzzled. The purpose behind testimonial contests—to get as many people as possible to endorse a product—is akin to the purpose behind the political-essay contests in Korea: to get endorsements for Chinese communism. In both instances, the process is the same. Participants voluntarily write essays for attractive prizes they have only a small chance to win. They know that for an essay to have any chance of winning, it must include praise for the product. So they search for praiseworthy features, and they describe them in their essays. The result is hundreds of POWs in Korea or hundreds of thousands of people in America who testify in writing to the products’ appeal and who, consequently, experience the magical pull to believe what they have written.⁵

READER’S REPORT 7.2

From the creative director of a large international advertising agency

In the late 1990s, I asked Fred DeLuca, the founder and CEO of Subway restaurants, why he insisted in putting the prediction “10,000 stores by 2001” on the napkins in every single Subway. It didn’t seem to make sense, as I knew he was a long way from his goal, that consumers didn’t really care about his plan, and his franchisees were deeply troubled by the competition associated with such a goal. His answer was, “If I put my goals down in writing and make them known to the world, I’m committed to achieving them.” Needless to say, he not only has, he’s exceeded them.

Author’s note: As of January 1, 2021, Subway was on schedule to have 38,000 restaurants in 111 countries. So, as we will also see in the next section, written down and publicly made commitments can be used not only to influence others in desirable ways but to influence ourselves similarly.

The Public Eye

One reason written testaments are effective in bringing about genuine personal change is that they can so easily be made public. The prisoner experience in Korea showed the Chinese to be aware of an important psychological principle: public commitments tend to be lasting commitments. The Chinese constantly arranged to have pro-Communist statements of their captives seen by others. They were posted around camp, read by the author to a prisoner discussion group, or even read on a radio broadcast. As far as the Chinese were concerned, the more public the better.

Whenever one takes a stand visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person. Remember that earlier in this chapter I described how desirable good personal consistency is as a trait; how someone without it may be judged as fickle, uncertain, pliant, scatterbrained, or unstable; how someone with it is viewed as rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound? Thus, it’s hardly surprising that people try to avoid the look of inconsistency. For appearances’ sake, the more public a stand, the more reluctant we are to change it.

EBOX 7.1

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

By Alicia Morga

Owen Thomas wrote in an amazed tone in The New York Times recently how he managed to lose 83 pounds using a mobile app. He used MyFitnessPal. The developers of the app discovered that users who exposed their calorie counts to friends lost 50% more weight than a typical user.

It seems obvious that a social network can help you make a change, but it is less clear how. Many cite social proof—looking to others for how to behave—as influential, but what better explains transformation is commitment and consistency.

The more public our commitment, the more pressure we feel to act according to our commitment and therefore appear consistent. It can become a virtuous (or destructive) cycle as according to Robert Cialdini, “you can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image” and once you change a person’s self-image you can get that person to behave in accordance with that new image—anything that would be consistent with this new view of herself.

So want to change your life? Make a specific commitment, use social media to broadcast it and use the internal pressure you then feel to get you to follow through. This in turn should cause you to see yourself in a new way and therefore keep you continuing to follow through.

While Mr. Thomas’ experience demonstrates the power of this theory as applied to dieting, I see the possible applications everywhere. Like say struggling Hispanic high school students (they have the highest high school drop-out rate). Why not get them to publicly commit to going to college? Might more then go? There should be an app for that.

Author’s note: In this blog post, its author judges correctly that even though peer pressure was involved, the principle that produced desired change for Mr. Thomas was not social proof. It was commitment and consistency. What’s more, the effective commitment was public, which fits with research showing that commitments to weight-loss goals are increasingly successful—in both the short and long term—when they become increasingly public (Nyer & Dellande, 2010).

An illustration of the way public commitments can lead to consistent further action was provided in a famous experiment performed by two prominent social psychologists, Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard. The basic procedure was to have college students first estimate in their minds the length of lines they were shown. Then, one sample of the students had to commit publicly to their initial judgments by writing their estimates down, signing their names to them, and turning them in to the experimenter. A second sample also committed themselves to their first estimates, but did so privately by writing them down and then erasing them before anyone could see what they had written. A third set of students did not commit themselves to their initial estimates at all; they just kept the estimates in mind privately.

In these ways, Deutsch and Gerard cleverly arranged for some students to commit publicly, some privately, and some not at all, to their initial decisions. The researchers wanted to find out which of the three types of students would be most inclined to stick with their first judgments after receiving information that those judgments were incorrect. Therefore, all the students were given new evidence suggesting their initial estimates were wrong, and they were then given the chance to change their estimates.

The students who had never written down their first choices were the least loyal to those choices. When new evidence was presented that questioned the wisdom of decisions that had never left their heads, these students were the most influenced to change what they had viewed as the “correct” decision. Compared to the uncommitted students, those who had merely written their decisions for a moment were significantly less willing to change their minds when given the chance. Even though they had committed themselves under anonymous circumstances, the act of writing down their first judgments caused them to resist the influence of contradictory new data and to remain congruent with their preliminary choices. However, by far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitments had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.

This sort of stubbornness can occur even in situations in which accuracy should be more important than consistency. In one study, when six-or twelve-person experimental juries were deciding a close case, hung juries were significantly more frequent if the jurors had to express their opinions with a visible show of hands rather than by secret ballot. Once jurors had stated their initial views publicly, they were reluctant to allow themselves to change publicly. Should you ever find yourself the foreperson of a jury under these conditions, you could reduce the risk of a hung jury by choosing a secret rather than public balloting method.

The finding that we are truest to our decisions if we have bound ourselves to them publicly can be put to good use. Consider organizations dedicated to helping people rid themselves of bad habits. Many weight-reduction clinics, for instance, understand that often a person’s private decision to lose weight will be too weak to withstand the blandishments of bakery windows, wafting cooking scents, and pizza-delivery commercials. So they see to it that the decision is buttressed by the pillars of public commitment. They require clients to write down an immediate weight-loss goal and show that goal to as many friends, relatives, and neighbors as possible. Clinic operators report this simple technique frequently works where all else has failed.

Of course, there’s no need to pay a special clinic in order to engage a visible commitment as an ally. One San Diego woman described to me how she employed a public promise to help herself finally stop smoking. She bought a set of blank business cards and wrote on the back of each, “I promise you I’ll never smoke another cigarette.” She then gave a signed card to “all the people in my life I really wanted to respect me.” Whenever she felt a need to smoke thereafter, she said she’d think of how those people would think less of her if she broke her promise to them. She never had another smoke. These days, behavior-change apps linked to our social networks allow us employ this self-influence technique within a much larger set of friends than a few business cards could reach.⁶ See, for example, eBox 7.1.

READER’S REPORT 7.3

From a Canadian university professor

I just read a newspaper article on how a restaurant owner used public commitments to solve a big problem of “no-shows” (customers who don’t show up for their table reservations). I don’t know if he read your book or not first, but he did something that fits perfectly with the commitment/consistency principle you talk about. He told his receptionists to stop saying, “Please call us if you change your plans,” and to start asking, “Will you please call us if you change your plans?” and to wait for a response. His no-show rate immediately went from 30 percent to 10 percent. That’s a 67 percent drop.

Author’s note: What was it about this subtle shift that led to such a dramatic difference? For me, it was the receptionist’s request for (and pause for) the caller’s promise. By spurring patrons to make a public commitment, this approach increased the chance that they would follow through on it. By the way, the astute proprietor was Gordon Sinclair of Gordon’s restaurant in Chicago. eBox 7.2 provides the online version of this tactic.

EBOX 7.2

Author’s note: Today, restaurants are reducing reservation no-shows by asking customers to make active and public commitments online before the date of their reservation. Recently, my doctor’s office began doing the same, with one additional compliance-enhancing element. In the confirmation email, I was given a reason by the nurse for my active, public commitment: “By telling me if you can or cannot make it, you help make sure that all patients are getting the care they need.” When I inquired about the success of the online confirmation program, the doctor’s office manager told me it had reduced no-shows by 81 percent.

The Effort Extra

The evidence is clear: the more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater its ability to influence the attitudes and actions of the person who made it. We can find that evidence in settings as close by as our homes and schools or as far away as remote regions of the world.

Let’s begin nearer to home with the requirements of many localities for residents to separate their household trash for pro-environmental disposal. These requirements can differ in the effort needed for correct disposal. This is the case in Hangzhou, China, where the steps for proper separation and disposal are more arduous in some sections of the city than in others. After informing residents of the environmental benefits of proper disposal, researchers there wanted to see if residents who had to work harder to live up to environmental standards would become more committed to the environment in general, as shown by also taking the pro-environmental action of reducing their household electricity consumption. That’s what happened. Residents who had to work harder to support the environment via household-waste separation then worked harder to support the environment through electricity conservation. The results are important in indicating that deepening our commitment to a mission, in this case by increasing the effort required to further it, can inspire us to advance the mission in related ways.

More far-flung illustrations of the power of effortful commitments exist as well. There is a tribe in southern Africa, the Thonga, that requires each of its boys to go through an elaborate initiation ceremony before he can be counted a man. As in many other tribes, a Thonga boy endures a great deal before he is admitted to adult membership in the group. Anthropologists John W. M. Whiting, Richard Kluckhohn, and Albert Anthony described this three-month ordeal in brief but vivid terms:

When a boy is somewhere between 10 and 16 years of age, he is sent by his parents to “circumcision school,” which is held every 4 or 5 years. Here in company with his age-mates he undergoes severe hazing by the adult males of the society. The initiation begins when each boy runs the gauntlet between two rows of men who beat him with clubs. At the end of this experience he is stripped of his clothes and his hair is cut. He is next met by a man covered with lion manes and is seated upon a stone facing this “lion man.” Someone then strikes him from behind and when he turns his head to see who has struck him, his foreskin is seized and in two movements cut off by the “lion man.” Afterward he is secluded for three months in the “yard of mysteries,” where he can be seen only by the initiated.

During the course of his initiation, the boy undergoes six major trials: beatings, exposure to cold, thirst, eating of unsavory foods, punishment, and the threat of death. On the slightest pretext, he may be beaten by one of the newly initiated men, who is assigned to the task by the older men of the tribe. He sleeps without covering and suffers bitterly from the winter cold. He is forbidden to drink a drop of water during the whole three months. Meals are often made nauseating by the half-digested grass from the stomach of an antelope, which is poured over his food. If he is caught breaking any important rule governing the ceremony, he is severely punished. For example, in one of these punishments, sticks are placed between the fingers of the offender, then a strong man closes his hand around that of the novice, practically crushing his fingers. He is frightened into submission by being told that in former times boys who had tried to escape or who had revealed the secrets to women or to the uninitiated were hanged and their bodies burned to ashes. (p. 360)

On their face, these rites seem extraordinary and bizarre. Yet they are remarkably similar in principle and even in detail to the common initiation ceremonies of school fraternities. During the traditional “Hell Week” held yearly on college campuses, fraternity pledges must persevere through a variety of activities designed by older members to test the limits of physical exertion, psychological strain, and social embarrassment. At week’s end, the boys who have persisted through the ordeal are accepted for full group membership. Mostly, their tribulations have left them no more than greatly tired and a bit shaky, although sometimes the negative effects are much more serious.

It is interesting how closely the features of Hell Week tasks match those of tribal initiation rites. Recall that anthropologists identified six major trials to be endured by a Thonga initiate during his stay in the “yard of mysteries.” A scan of newspaper reports shows that each trial also has its place in the hazing rituals of Greek-letter societies:

Beatings. Fourteen-year-old Michael Kalogris spent three weeks in a Long Island hospital recovering from internal injuries suffered during a Hell Night initiation ceremony of his high school fraternity, Omega Gamma Delta. He had been administered the “atomic bomb” by his prospective brothers, who told him to hold his hands over his head and keep them there while they gathered around to slam fists into his stomach and back simultaneously and repeatedly.
Exposure to cold. On a winter night, Frederick Bronner, a California community-college student, was taken three thousand feet up and ten miles into the hills of a national forest by his prospective fraternity brothers. Left to find his way home wearing only a thin sweatshirt and slacks, Fat Freddy, as he was called, shivered in a frigid wind until he tumbled down a steep ravine, fracturing bones and injuring his head. Prevented by his injuries from going on, he huddled there against the cold until he died of exposure.
Thirst. Two Ohio State University freshmen found themselves in the “dungeon” of their prospective fraternity house after breaking the rule requiring all pledges to crawl into the dining area prior to Hell Week meals. Once locked in the house’s storage room, they were given only salty foods to eat for nearly two days. Nothing was provided for drinking purposes except a pair of plastic cups in which they could catch their own urine.
Eating of unsavory foods. At Kappa Sigma house on the campus of the University of Southern California, the eyes of eleven pledges bulged when they saw the sickening task before them. Eleven quarter-pound slabs of raw liver lay on a tray. Thick-cut and soaked in oil, each was to be swallowed whole, one to a boy. Gagging and choking repeatedly, young Richard Swanson failed three times to down his piece. Determined to succeed, he finally got the oil-soaked meat into his throat, where it lodged and, despite all efforts to remove it, killed him.
Punishment. In Wisconsin, a pledge who forgot one section of a ritual incantation to be memorized by all initiates was punished for his error. He was required to keep his feet under the rear legs of a folding chair while the heaviest of his fraternity brothers sat down and drank a beer. Although the pledge did not cry out during the punishment, a bone in each foot was broken.
Threats of death. A pledge of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity was taken to a beach area of New Jersey and told to dig his “own grave.” Seconds after he complied with orders to lie flat in the finished hole, the sides collapsed, suffocating him before his prospective fraternity brothers could dig him out.

There is another striking similarity between the initiation rites of tribal and fraternal societies: they will not die. Resisting all attempts to eliminate or suppress them, such hazing practices have been phenomenally resilient. Authorities, in the form of governments or university administrations, have tried threats, social pressures, legal actions, banishments, bribes, and bans to persuade groups to remove the hazards and humiliations from their initiation ceremonies. None has been successful. Oh, there may be a change while the authority is watching closely, but this is usually more apparent than real—the harsher trials occur under secret circumstances until the pressure is off and they can surface again.

On some college campuses, officials have tried to eliminate dangerous hazing practices by substituting a “Help Week” of civic service or by taking direct control of the initiation rituals. When such attempts are not slyly circumvented by fraternities, they are met with outright physical resistance. For example, in the aftermath of Richard Swanson’s choking death at USC, the university president issued new rules requiring all pledging activities be reviewed by school authorities before going into effect and adult advisers be present during initiation ceremonies. According to one national magazine, “The new ‘code’ set off a riot so violent city police and fire detachments were afraid to enter campus.”

Resigning themselves to the inevitable, other college representatives have given up on the possibility of abolishing the degradations of Hell Week. “If hazing is a universal human activity, and every bit of evidence points to this conclusion, you most likely won’t be able to ban it effectively. Refuse to allow it openly and it will go underground. You can’t ban sex, you can’t prohibit alcohol, and you probably can’t eliminate hazing!”

What is it about hazing practices that make them so precious to these societies? What could cause the groups to want to evade, undermine, or contest any effort to ban the degrading and perilous features of their initiation rights? Some have argued that the groups themselves are composed of psychological or social miscreants whose twisted needs demand that others be harmed and humiliated. The evidence does not support the view. Studies done on the personality traits of fraternity members, for instance, show them to be, if anything, slightly healthier than other college students in their psychological adjustment. Similarly, fraternities are known for their willingness to engage in beneficial community projects for the general social good. What they are not willing to do, however, is substitute these projects for their initiation ceremonies. One survey at the University of Washington found that of the fraternity chapters examined, most had a type of Help Week tradition but that this community service was in addition to Hell Week. In only one case was such service directly related to initiation procedures.

The picture that emerges of the perpetrators of hazing practices is of normal individuals who tend to be psychologically stable and socially concerned but who become aberrantly harsh as a group at only one time—immediately before the admission of new members to the society. The evidence points to the ceremony as culprit. There must be something about its rigors that is vital to the group. There must be some function to its harshness that the society will fight relentlessly to maintain. What?

In my view, the answer appeared in the results of a study little known outside of social psychology. A pair of researchers, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, decided to test their observation that “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” The real stroke of inspiration came in their choice of the initiation ceremony as the best place to examine this possibility. They found that college women who had to endure a severely embarrassing initiation ceremony in order to gain access to a sex-discussion group convinced themselves their new group and its discussions were extremely valuable, even though Aronson and Mills had rehearsed the other group members to be as “worthless and uninteresting” as possible. Different coeds who went through a much milder initiation ceremony or went through no initiation at all, were decidedly less positive about the “worthless” new group they had joined. Additional research showed the same results when coeds were required to endure pain rather than embarrassment to get into a group. The more electric shock a woman received as part of the initiation ceremony, the more she later persuaded herself that her new group and its activities were interesting, intelligent, and desirable.

READER’S REPORT 7.4

From Paola, an Italian graphics designer

I’d like to tell you of a case that happened to me last month. I was in London with my boyfriend, when we saw a tattoo studio sign claiming “the cheapest eyebrow piercings in London.” I was really frightened by the idea of the suffering but I decided to do it. After the emotion of the piercing, I almost fainted. I couldn’t move myself or open my eye. I felt so bad I just had the strength to say, “Hospital.” A doctor came and told me I would be OK. After 10 minutes, I felt better, but I assure you they were the worst 10 minutes of my life!

Then, I began to think about my parents. They wouldn’t be happy of what I did, and I thought to maybe take off the piercing jewelry ring. But I decided no, I suffered too much to remove it.

I am glad about that decision because now I am really happy to have this ring on my eyebrow.

Author’s note: Much like the young women in Aronson and Mills’s study, Paola has become happy with and committed to what she endured to obtain.

Now the harassments, the exertions, and even the beatings of initiation rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman with tears in his eyes, watching his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold ground of the “yard of mysteries” and the college sophomore punctuating his Hell Night paddling of his fraternity “little brother” with bursts of nervous laughter—these are not acts of sadism. They are acts of group survival. They function, oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believe in what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and trying initiation rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will greatly increase the chances of group cohesiveness and survival. Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies had the greatest group solidarity. Given Aronson and Mills’s demonstration that the severity of an initiation ceremony heightens the newcomer’s commitment to the group, it is hardly surprising that groups will oppose all attempts to eliminate this crucial link to their future strength.

Military groups and organizations are by no means exempt from these same processes. The agonies of “boot camp” initiations to the armed services are legendary and effective. The novelist William Styron testified to this effectiveness after recounting the misery of his own US Marine concentration-camp-like “training nightmare”:

There is no ex-Marine of my acquaintance . . . who does not view the training as a crucible out of which he emerged in some way more resilient, simply braver and better for the wear. (Styron, 1977, p. 3)⁷

The Inner Choice

Examination of such diverse activities as the indoctrination practices within Chinese-run prison camps in Korea and the initiation rituals of college fraternities provides some valuable information about commitment. It appears the commitments most effective in changing self-image and future behavior are those that are active, public, and effortful. However, there is another property of effective commitment more important than the other three combined. To understand what it is, we first need to solve a pair of puzzles in the actions of Communist interrogators and college fraternity brothers.

The first comes from the refusal of fraternity chapters to allow public-service activities to be part of their initiation ceremonies. Recall the University of Washington survey that found that fraternity community projects, though frequent, were nearly always separated from the membership-induction program. Why? If an effortful commitment is what fraternities are after in their initiation rites, surely they could structure enough distasteful and strenuous civic activities for their pledges; there is plenty of exertion and unpleasantness to be found in repairing the homes of the elderly, doing yard work at mental-health centers, and cleaning up roadside litter. Besides, community-spirited endeavors of this sort would do much to improve the highly unfavorable public and media image of fraternity Hell Week rites; one survey showed that for every positive newspaper story concerning Hell Week, there were five negative stories. If only for public-relations reasons, then, fraternities should want to incorporate community-service efforts into their initiation practices. But they don’t.

To examine the second puzzle, we need to return to the Chinese prison camps of Korea and the political-essay contests held for American captives. The Chinese wanted as many Americans as possible to enter these contests so, in the process, they might write comments favorable to the Communist view. If the idea was to attract large numbers of entrants, why were the prizes so small? A few extra cigarettes or a little fresh fruit were often all a contest winner could expect. In the setting, even these prizes were valuable; but, still, there were much larger rewards—warm clothing, special mail privileges, increased freedom of movement in camp—the Chinese could have used to increase the number of essay writers. Yet they chose to employ the smaller rather than larger, more motivating rewards.

Although the settings are quite different, the surveyed fraternities refused to allow civic activities into their initiation ceremonies for the same reason the Chinese withheld large prizes in favor of less powerful inducements: they wanted the participants to own what they had done. No excuses, no ways out were allowed. A pledge who suffered through an arduous hazing could not be given the chance to believe he did so for charitable purposes. A prisoner who salted his political essay with anti-American comments could not be permitted to shrug it off as motivated by a big reward. No, the fraternity chapters and Chinese Communists were playing for keeps. It was not enough to wring commitments out of their men; those men had to be made to take inner responsibility for their actions.

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressure. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform certain actions, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the acts. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to them. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment. In fact, large material rewards or threats may even reduce or “undermine” our sense of inner responsibility for an act, causing excessive reluctance to perform it when the reward is no longer present.

All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. Such pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with our wishes. However, if we want more than that, if we want our children to believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to continue to perform the desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pressures, we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner responsibility for the actions we want them to take. An experiment by social psychologist Jonathan Freedman gives us some hints about what to do and not to do in this regard.

Freedman wanted to see if he could prevent second-, third-, and fourth-grade boys from playing with a fascinating toy, just because he had said that it was wrong to do so some six weeks earlier. Anyone familiar with boys around the ages of seven to nine must realize the enormity of the task; but Freedman had a plan. If he could first get the boys to convince themselves that it was wrong to play with the forbidden toy, perhaps that belief would keep them from playing with it thereafter. The difficulty was making the boys believe it was wrong to amuse themselves with the toy—an expensive remote-controlled robot.

Freedman knew it would be easy enough to have a boy obey temporarily. All he had to do was threaten the boy with severe consequences should he be caught playing with the toy. As long as Freedman was nearby to deal out stiff punishment, he figured few boys would risk operating the robot. He was right. After showing a boy an array of five toys and warning, “It is wrong to play with the robot. If you play with the robot, I’ll be very angry and will have to do something about it,” Freedman left the room for a few minutes. During that time, the boy was observed secretly through a one-way mirror. Freedman tried this threat procedure on twenty-two different boys, and twenty-one of them never touched the robot while he was gone.

So a strong threat was successful while the boys thought they might be caught and punished. But Freedman had already guessed that. He was really interested in the effectiveness of the threat in guiding the boys’ behavior later, when he was no longer around. To find out what would happen then, he sent a young woman back to the boys’ school about six weeks after he had been there. She took the boys out of the class one at a time to participate in a study. Without ever mentioning any connection with Freedman, she escorted each boy back to the room containing the five toys and gave him a drawing test. While she was scoring the test, she told the boy he was free to play with any toy in the room. Of course, almost all the boys played with a toy. The interesting result was, of the boys who did so, 77 percent chose to play with the robot that had been forbidden to them earlier. Freedman’s severe threat, which had been so successful six weeks before, was almost totally unsuccessful when he was no longer able to back it up with punishment.

However, Freedman wasn’t finished. He changed his procedure slightly with a second sample of boys. These boys, too, were initially shown the array of five toys by Freedman and warned not to play with the robot because “It is wrong to play with the robot.” This time, Freedman provided no strong threat to frighten the boys into obedience. He simply left the room and observed through the one-way mirror to see if his instruction against playing with the forbidden toy was enough. It was. Just as with the other sample, only one of the twenty-two boys touched the robot during the short time Freedman was gone.

The real difference between the two samples of boys came six weeks later, when they had a chance to play with the toys while Freedman was no longer around. An astonishing thing happened with the boys who earlier had been given no strong threat against playing with the robot: when given the freedom to play with any toy they wished, most avoided the robot, even though it was by far the most attractive of the five toys available (the others were a cheap plastic submarine, a child’s baseball glove without a ball, an unloaded toy rifle, and a toy tractor). When these boys played with one of the five toys, only 33 percent chose the robot.

Something dramatic had happened to both groups of boys. For the first group, it was the severe threat they heard from Freedman to back up his statement that playing with the robot was “wrong.” It had been quite effective while Freedman could catch them violating his rule. Later, though, when he was no longer present to observe the boys’ behavior, his threat was impotent and his rule was ignored. It seems clear that the threat had not taught the boys that operating the robot was wrong, only that it was unwise to do so when the possibility of punishment existed.

For the other boys, the dramatic event had come from inside, not outside. Freedman had instructed them, too, that playing with the robot was wrong, but he had added no threat of punishment should they disobey him. There were two important results. First, Freedman’s instruction alone was enough to prevent the boys from operating the robot while he was briefly out of the room. Second, the boys took personal responsibility for their choices to stay away from the robot during that time. They decided they hadn’t played with it because they didn’t want to. After all, there were no strong punishments associated with the toy to explain their behavior otherwise. Thus, weeks later, when Freedman was nowhere around, they still ignored the robot because they had been changed inside to believe they did not want to play with it.

Adults facing the child-rearing experience can take a cue from the Freedman study. Suppose a couple wants to impress upon their daughter that lying is wrong. A strong, clear threat (“It’s bad to lie, honey, so if I catch you at it, I’ll tape your mouth shut”) might well be effective when the parents are present or when the girl thinks she can be discovered. However, it will not achieve the larger goal of convincing her that she does not want to lie because she thinks it’s wrong. To do that, the couple needs a subtler approach. They must give a reason strong enough to get her to be truthful most of the time but not so strong that she sees it as the obvious reason for her truthfulness.

It’s a tricky business because the barely sufficient reason changes from child to child. For one child, a simple appeal may be enough (“It’s bad to lie, honey, so I hope you won’t do it”); for another, it may be necessary to add a somewhat stronger reason (“. . . because if you do, I’ll be disappointed in you”); for a third child, a mild form of warning may be required as well (“. . . and I’ll probably have to do something I don’t want to do”). Wise parents will know which kind of reason will work on their own children. The important thing is to use a reason that initially produces the desired behavior and, at the same time, allows a child to take personal responsibility for the behavior. Thus, the less detectable outside pressure such a reason contains, the better. Selecting just the right reason is not an easy task for parents, but the effort should pay off. It is likely to mean the difference between short-lived compliance and long-term commitment. As Samuel Butler wrote more than three hundred years ago, “He who agrees against his will / Is of the same opinion still.”⁸

Growing Legs to Stand On

For a pair of reasons we have already considered, compliance professionals love commitments that produce inner change. First, the change is not specific to the situation where it initially occurred; it covers a whole range of related situations too. Second, the effects of the change are lasting. Once people have been induced to take actions that shift their self-images to that of, let’s say, public-spirited citizens, they are likely to be public spirited in a variety of other circumstances where their compliance may also be desired. And they are likely to continue their public-spirited behavior for as long as their new self-images hold.

There is yet another attraction in commitments that lead to inner change—they “grow their own legs.” There is no need for the compliance professional to undertake a costly and continuing effort to reinforce the change; the pressure for consistency will take care of that. After people come to view themselves as public spirited, they automatically begin to see things differently. They convince themselves it is the correct way to be and begin to pay attention to facts they hadn’t noticed before about the value of community service. They make themselves available to hear arguments they hadn’t yet heard favoring civic action and find such arguments more persuasive. In general, because of the need to be consistent within their system of beliefs, they assure themselves their choice to take public-spirited action was right. Important about this process of generating additional reasons to justify the commitment is that the reasons are new. Thus, even if the original reason for the civic-minded behavior were taken away, these newly discovered reasons alone may be enough to support their perceptions that they behaved correctly.

The advantage to an unscrupulous compliance professional is tremendous. Because we build new struts to undergird choices we have committed ourselves to, an exploiter can offer us an inducement for making such a choice. After the decision has been made, the individual can remove that inducement, knowing that our decision will probably stand on its own newly created legs. Car dealers frequently try to benefit from this process through a tactic they call “throwing a low-ball.” I first encountered it while posing as a sales trainee for a local Chevrolet dealership. After a week of basic instruction, I was allowed to watch the regular salespeople perform. One practice that caught my attention right away was the low-ball.

For certain customers, a good price, perhaps as much as $700 below competitors’ prices, is offered on a car. The good deal, however, is not genuine; the dealer never intends it to go through. Its only purpose is to cause prospects to decide to buy one of the dealership’s cars. Once the decision is made, a number of activities deepen the customer’s sense of personal commitment to the car—a fistful of purchase forms is filled out, extensive financing terms are arranged, sometimes the customer is encouraged to drive the car for a day before signing the contract, “so you can get the feel of it and show it around the neighborhood and at work.” During this time, the dealer knows, customers typically develop a range of new reasons to support their choice and justify the investments they have now made.

Then something happens. Occasionally an “error” in the calculations is discovered—maybe the salesperson forgot to add the cost of the navigation package, and if the buyer still requires it, $700 must be added to the price. To throw suspicion off themselves, some dealers let the bank handling the financing find the mistake. At other times, the deal is disallowed at the last moment when the salesperson checks with his or her boss, who cancels it because “the dealership would be losing money.” For only another $700 the car can be had, which, in the context of a multithousand-dollar deal, doesn’t seem too steep, because, as the salesperson emphasizes, the cost is equal to competitors’ and “This is the car you chose, right?”

Another, more insidious form of low-balling occurs when the salesperson makes an inflated trade-in offer on the prospect’s old car as part of the buy/trade package. The customer recognizes the offer as overly generous and jumps at the deal. Later, before the contract is signed, the used-car manager enters and says the salesperson’s estimate was $700 too high and reduces the trade-in allowance to its actual blue-book level. The customer, realizing that the reduced offer is the fair one, accepts it as appropriate and sometimes feels guilty about trying to take advantage of the salesperson’s high estimate. I once witnessed a woman provide an embarrassed apology to a salesman who had used this version of low-balling on her—this, while she was signing a new-car contract giving him a hefty commission. He looked hurt but managed a forgiving smile.

No matter which variety of low-balling is used, the sequence is the same: an advantage is offered that induces a favorable purchase decision. Then, sometime after the decision has been made, but before the bargain is sealed, the purchase advantage is deftly removed. It seems almost incredible that a customer would buy a car under these circumstances. Yet it works—not on everybody, of course, but it is effective enough to be a staple compliance procedure in many car showrooms. Automobile dealers have come to understand the ability of a personal commitment to build its own support system of new justifications for the commitment. Often these justifications provide so many strong legs for the decision to stand on that when the dealer pulls away only one leg, the original one, there is no collapse. The loss can be shrugged off by the customer who is consoled by the array of other reasons favoring the choice. It never occurs to the buyer that those additional reasons might never have existed had the choice not been made in the first place.

After watching the low-ball technique work so impressively in the car showroom, I decided to test its effectiveness in another setting, where I could see if the basic idea worked with a bit of a twist. That is, the car salespeople I observed threw the low-ball by proposing sweet deals, getting favorable decisions as a result, and then taking away the sweet part of the offers. If my thinking about the essence of the low-ball procedure was correct, it should be possible to get the tactic to work in a somewhat different way: I could offer a good deal, which would produce the crucial decisional commitment, and then I could add an unpleasant feature to the arrangement. Because the effect of the low-ball technique was to get an individual to stay with a deal, even after circumstances had changed to make it a poor one, the tactic should work whether a positive aspect of the deal was removed or a negative aspect was added.

To test this latter possibility, my colleagues John Cacioppo, Rod Bassett, John Miller, and I ran an experiment designed to get university students to agree to perform an unpleasant activity—to wake up very early to participate in a 7:00 a.m. study “on thinking processes.” When calling one sample of students, we immediately informed them of the 7:00 a.m. starting time. Only 24 percent were willing to participate. However, when calling a second sample of students, we threw a low-ball. We first asked if they wanted to participate in a study of thinking processes, and after they responded—56 percent of them positively—we mentioned the 7:00 a.m. start time and gave them the chance to change their minds. None did. What’s more, in keeping with their commitment to participate, 95 percent of the low-balled students did appear for the study at 7:00 a.m. as promised. I know this to be the case because I recruited two research assistants to conduct the thinking-processes experiment at that time and take the names of the students who appeared. (As an aside, there is no foundation to the rumor that in recruiting my research assistants for this task, I first asked if they wanted to administer a study on thinking processes and, after they agreed, informed them of the 7:00 a.m. starting time.)

The impressive thing about the low-ball tactic is its ability to make a person feel pleased with a poor choice. Those who have only poor choices to offer are especially fond of the technique. We can find them throwing low-balls in business, social, and personal situations. For instance, there’s my neighbor Tim, a true low-ball aficionado. Recall, he’s the one who, by promising to change his ways, got his girlfriend Sara to cancel her impending marriage to another man and take him back. Since her decision to choose Tim, Sara has become more devoted to him than ever, even though he has not fulfilled his promises. She explains this by saying that she has allowed herself to see all sorts of positive qualities in Tim she never recognized before.

I know full well that Sara is a low-ball victim. Just as I had watched buyers fall for the “give it and take it away later” strategy in the car showroom, I watched her fall for the same trick with Tim. For his part, Tim remains the guy he has always been. Because the new attractions Sara has discovered (or created) in him are real for her, she now seems satisfied with the same arrangement that was unacceptable before her enormous commitment. The decision to choose Tim, poor as it may have been objectively, has grown its own supports and appears to have made Sara satisfied. I have never mentioned to Sara what I know about low-balling. The reason for my silence is not that I think her better off in the dark on the issue. It’s just that I am confident that if I said a word, she would hate me for it and likely change nothing.

Standing Up for the Public Good

Depending on the motives of the person wishing to use them, any of the compliance techniques discussed in this book can be employed for good or for ill. Hence, the low-ball tactic can be used for more socially beneficial purposes than selling cars or reestablishing relationships with former lovers. For example, one research project done in Iowa, led by social psychologist Michael Pallak, showed how the low-ball procedure influenced homeowners to conserve energy. The project began at the start of the Iowa winter, when residents heating their homes with natural gas were contacted by an interviewer who gave them some energy-conservation tips and asked them to try to save fuel in the future. Although they agreed to try, when the researchers examined the utility records of these families after a month and again at winter’s end, no savings had occurred. The residents who had intended to make a conservation attempt used just as much natural gas as did a random sample of their neighbors who had not been contacted by an interviewer. Good intentions coupled with information about saving fuel were not enough to change habits.

Even before the project began, Pallak and his team had recognized that something more would be needed to shift long-standing energy-use patterns. So they tried a different procedure on a comparable sample of Iowa natural-gas users. These people, too, were contacted by an interviewer, who provided energy-saving hints and asked them to conserve, but for these families, the interviewer offered something else: those agreeing to save energy would have their names publicized in newspaper articles as public-spirited, fuel-conserving citizens. The effect was immediate. One month later, when the utility company checked their meters, homeowners in this sample had saved an average of 422 cubic feet of natural gas apiece. The chance to have their names in the paper had motivated them to substantial conservation efforts for a month.

Then the rug was pulled out. The researchers extracted the reason that had initially caused the people to save fuel. Each family that had been promised publicity received a letter saying it would not be possible to publicize its name after all.

At the end of the winter, the research team examined the letter’s effect on the families’ natural-gas usage. Did they return to their old, wasteful habits when the chance to be in the newspaper was removed? Hardly. For each of the remaining winter months, these families conserved more fuel than they had during the time they thought they would be publicly celebrated for it. They had managed 12.2 percent gas savings during the first month because they expected to see themselves lauded in the paper. However, after the letter arrived informing them to the contrary, they did not return to their previous energy-use levels; instead, they increased their savings to 15.5 percent for the rest of the winter.

Although we can’t be completely sure of such things, one explanation for their persistent behavior presents itself immediately. These people had been low-balled into a conservation commitment through a promise of newspaper publicity. Once made, the commitment started generating its own supports: the homeowners began acquiring new energy habits; began feeling good about their public-spirited efforts; began experiencing pride in their capacity for self-denial; and most important, began viewing themselves as conservation-minded. With these new reasons present to justify the commitment to less energy use, it is no wonder the commitment remained firm even after the original reason, newspaper publicity, had been kicked away (see figure 7.5).

Figure 7.5: The low-ball for the long term

In this illustration of the Iowa energy research, we can see how the original conservation effort rested on the promise of publicity (top). Before long, however, the energy commitment led to the sprouting of new self-generated supports, allowing the research team to throw its low-ball (middle). The consequence was a persisting level of conservation that stood firmly on its own legs after the initial publicity prop had been knocked down (bottom).

Strangely enough, though, when the publicity factor was no longer a possibility, these families did not merely maintain their fuel-saving effort, they heightened it. Any of a number of interpretations could be offered for that still stronger effort, but I have a favorite. In a way, the opportunity to receive newspaper publicity had prevented the homeowners from fully owning their commitment to conservation. Of all the reasons supporting the decision to try to save fuel, it was the only one that had come from the outside—the only one preventing homeowners from thinking they were conserving gas because they believed in it. So when the letter arrived canceling the publicity agreement, it removed the only impediment to these residents’ images of themselves as fully concerned, energy-conscious citizens. This unqualified, new self-image then pushed them to even greater heights of conservation. Much like Sara, they appeared to have become committed to a choice through an initial inducement and were still more dedicated to it after the inducement had been removed.⁹

Cueing Consistency: Reminders as Regenerators

There is an added advantage to commitment-based compliance procedures. Mere reminders of past commitments can spur individuals to act in accord with those earlier positions, stands, or actions. Bring the commitment back to top of mind, and the need for consistency takes over to align related responding once again. Let’s take a couple of examples from the field of medicine to illustrate the point.

Whenever I speak to health-care management groups about the influence process, I’ll ask the question “Which people in the system are most difficult to influence?” The answer is invariably and emphatically, “Physicians!” On the one hand, this circumstance seems as it should be. To get to their elevated positions in the health-care hierarchy, doctors go through years of training and practice, including medical-school specializations, internships, and residencies, that give them a great deal of information and experience on which to base their choices and make them understandably reluctant to be swayed from those choices. On the other hand, this kind of resistance can be problematic when physicians don’t adopt recommendations for changes that would benefit their patients. At the outset of their professional careers, most MDs take a version of the Hippocratic oath, which commits them to act principally for the welfare of their patients and, especially, to do them no harm.

So why don’t they wash their hands before examining a patient as often as they are supposed to? A hospital study offers insight into the matter. The researchers, Adam Grant and David Hofmann, noted that even though hand washing is strongly recommended before each patient examination, most physicians wash their hands less than half as often as the guidelines prescribe; what’s more, various interventions aimed at reducing the problem have proved ineffective, leaving patients at greater risk of infection. The reason for the problem isn’t that physicians have abandoned their commitment to patient safety or aren’t aware of its link to hand washing. It’s that upon entering an examination room, the link isn’t as high in consciousness as are all sorts of other factors, such as how the patient looks, what the attending nurse is saying, what the case notes show, and so on.

Grant and Hofmann thought they could remedy this regrettable situation by reminding physicians of their commitment to their patients and its connection to hand hygiene when they arrived to do an examination. The researchers simply placed distinctive signs above examination-room soap and gel dispensers that announced “Hand hygiene protects patients from catching diseases.” Those reminder signs increased soap and gel usage by 45 percent.

Another physician misstep involves the overprescription of antibiotic drugs, which is a growing health problem in the United States, contributing to the deaths of twenty-three thousand patients per year. As is the case for hand washing, several strategies for reducing the problem—education programs, electronic alerts, and payments—have had little effect. But a group of medical researchers have had remarkable success using a commitment-centered approach on physicians staffing a set of Los Angeles outpatient clinics. The doctors placed a poster in their examination rooms for a twelve-week period. For half of the MDs, the poster provided standard information to patients regarding antibiotic use. For the other half, it included, along with standard information, a photo of the doctor and a letter he or she signed pledging to avoid overprescription of antibiotics. During the remainder of the year, inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions actually increased by 21 percent for doctors exposed daily to the standard information posters. But those whose posters consistently reminded them of their personal commitments to reducing the problem cut inappropriate prescribing by 27 percent.

Reminders of existing commitments possess yet another bonus. They not only restore the commitment but also appear to strengthen it by augmenting one’s related self-image. Compared to consumers who had previously performed pro-environmental actions but were not reminded of them, those who did receive such reminders came to see themselves as more environmentally minded and then became uniquely more likely to purchase environmentally friendly versions of products—including light bulbs, paper towels, deodorants, and detergents. Thus, asking people to recall prior commitments to environmentalism isn’t just an easy way to stimulate consistent subsequent responding; it is also a particularly effective way, because such reminders intensify one’s self-image as an environmentalist.¹⁰

Defense

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Or, at least, so goes a frequently heard quotation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But what an odd thing to say. Looking around, it is obvious that internal consistency is a hallmark of logic and intellectual strength, while its lack characterizes the intellectually scattered and limited among us. What, then, could a thinker of Emerson’s caliber have meant when he assigned the trait of consistency to the small-minded? A look back to the original source of his statement, his essay “Self-Reliance,” makes it clear the problem lay not in Emerson but in the popularized version of what he said. Actually he wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For some obscure reason, a central distinction had been lost as the years eroded the accurate version of his assertion to mean something entirely different and, upon close inspection, entirely mistaken.

The distinction should not be lost on us, however, because it is crucial to the only effective defense I know against the levers of influence embodied in the combined factors of commitment and consistency. It is the awareness that although consistency is generally good—even vital—there is a foolish, rigid variety to be shunned. We need to be wary of the tendency to be automatically and unthinkingly consistent, for it lays us open to the maneuvers of those who want to exploit the mechanical commitment and consistency sequence for profit.

Since automatic consistency is so useful in allowing an economical and appropriate way of behaving most of the time, we can’t decide merely to eliminate it from our lives. The results would be disastrous. If, rather than streaming along in accordance with our prior decisions and deeds, we stopped to think through the merits of each new action before performing it, we would never have time to accomplish anything significant. We need even that dangerous, mechanical brand of consistency. The only way out of the dilemma is to know when such consistency is likely to lead to a poor choice. There are certain signals—two separate kinds of signals—to tip us off. We register each type in a different part of our bodies.

READER’S REPORT 7.5

From a college student in New Delhi, India

I am writing to you about an incident where the consistency principle compelled me to make a decision that I would not have made under ordinary circumstances. I had gone to the food court of a mall where I decided to buy a small glass of Coke.

“One glass of Coke, please,” I said to the salesman at the counter.

“Medium or Large?,” he asked me as he was billing another customer.

“I’ve already eaten enough. There is no way I could gulp down a large glass of Coke,” I thought to myself. “Medium,” I said confidently as I handed him the card for payment.

“Oh! Sorry,” said the salesperson with the impression of having made a genuine mistake. “Small or Medium?”

“Uhm, Medium,” I said in line with the consistency principle, took my drink and left so the next person could order, only to realize that I had been duped into buying the larger of the two options.

I was caught off guard, and to be consistent with my previously placed order, I blurted out “Medium,” without even processing the new information given to me.

A foolish consistency definitely seems to be the hobgoblin of little minds!

Author’s note: I think the reader, who seems to have considered herself little-minded in the situation, is being too hard on herself. When we are rushed or not able to think deeply about a choice, mechanical consistency is the norm (Fennis, Janssen, & Vohs, 2009).

Stomach Signs

The first signal is easy to recognize. It occurs right in the pit of our stomachs when we realize we are trapped into complying with a request we know we don’t want to perform. It’s happened to me a hundred times. An especially memorable instance took place on a summer evening when, as a young man well before I wrote this book, I answered my doorbell to find a stunning young woman dressed in shorts and a revealing halter top. I noticed, nonetheless, she was carrying a clipboard and was asking me to participate in a survey. Wanting to make a favorable impression, I agreed and, I do admit, stretched the truth in my interview answers to present myself in the most positive light. Our conversation went as follows:

Stunning Young Woman: Hello! I’m doing a survey on the entertainment habits of city residents, and I wonder if you could answer a few questions for me.

Cialdini: Do come in.

SYW: No, thank you. I’ll just stay right here and begin. How many times per week would you say you go out to dinner?

C: Oh, probably three, maybe four times a week. Whenever I can, really; I love fine restaurants.

SYW: How nice. And do you usually order wine with your dinner?

C: Only if it’s imported.

SYW: I see. What about movies? Do you go to the movies much?

C: The cinema? I can’t get enough of good films. I especially like the sophisticated kind with the words on the bottom of the screen. How about you? Do you like to see films?

SYW: Uh . . . yes, I do. But let’s get back to the interview. Do you go to many concerts?

C: Definitely. The symphonic stuff mostly, of course. But I do enjoy a quality pop group as well.

SYW: (writing rapidly). Great! Just one more question. What about touring performances by theatrical or ballet companies? Do you see them when they’re in town?

C: Ah, the ballet—the movement, the grace, the form—I love it. Mark me down as loving the ballet. See it every chance I get.

SYW: Fine. Just let me recheck my figures here for a moment, Mr. Cialdini.

C: Actually, it’s Dr. Cialdini. But that sounds so formal. Why don’t you call me Bob?

SYW: All right, Bob. From the information you’ve already given me, I’m pleased to say you could save up to $1,200 a year by joining Clubamerica! A small membership fee entitles you to discounts on most of the activities you’ve mentioned. Surely someone as socially vigorous as yourself would want to take advantage of the tremendous savings our company can offer on all the things you’ve already told me you do.

C (trapped like a rat): Well . . . uh . . . I . . . uh . . . I guess so.

I remember quite well feeling my stomach tighten as I stammered my agreement. It was a clear call to my brain, “Hey, you’re being taken here!” But I couldn’t see a way out. I had been cornered by my own words. To decline her offer at that point would have meant facing a pair of distasteful alternatives: If I tried to back out by protesting that I was not actually the man-about-town I had claimed to be, I would come off a liar; trying to refuse without that protest would make me come off a fool for not wanting to save $1,200. I bought the entertainment package, even though I knew I had been set up. The need to be consistent with what I had already said snared me.

No more, though. I listen to my stomach these days, and I have discovered a way to handle people who try to use the consistency principle on me. I just tell them exactly what they are doing. The tactic has become the perfect counterattack. Whenever my stomach tells me I would be a sucker to comply with a request merely because doing so would be consistent with some prior commitment I was tricked into, I relay that message to the requester. I don’t try to deny the importance of consistency; I just point out the absurdity of foolish consistency. Whether, in response, the requester shrinks away guiltily or retreats in bewilderment, I am content. I have won; an exploiter has lost.

I sometimes think about how it would be if that stunning young woman of years ago were to try to sell me an entertainment-club membership now. I have it all worked out. The entire interaction would be the same, except for the end:

SYW: . . . Surely someone as socially vigorous as yourself would want to take advantage of the tremendous savings our company can offer on all the things you’ve already told me you do.

C: Quite wrong. I recognize what has gone on here. I know that your story about doing a survey was just a pretext for getting people to tell you how often they go out and that, under those circumstances, there is a natural tendency to exaggerate. And I refuse to allow myself to be locked into a mechanical sequence of commitment and consistency when I know it’s wrongheaded. No click, run for me.

SYW: Huh?

C: Okay, let me put it this way: (1) It would be stupid of me to spend money on something I don’t want; (2) I have it on excellent authority, direct from my stomach, that I don’t want your entertainment plan; (3) therefore, if you still believe that I will buy it, you probably also still believe in the Tooth Fairy. Surely, someone as intelligent as you would be able to understand that.

SYW (trapped like a stunning young rat): Well . . . uh . . . I . . . uh . . . I guess so.

Heart-of-Hearts Signs

Stomachs are not especially perceptive or subtle organs. Only when it is obvious we are about to be conned are they likely to register and transmit that message. At other times, when it is not clear we are being taken, our stomachs may never catch on. Under those circumstances, we have to look elsewhere for a clue. The situation of my neighbor Sara provides a good illustration. She made an important commitment to Tim by canceling her marriage plans. The commitment has grown its own supports, so even though the original reasons for the commitment are gone, she remains in harmony with it. She has convinced herself with newly formed reasons that she did the right thing, so she stays with Tim. It is not difficult to see why there would be no tightening in Sara’s stomach as a result. Stomachs tell us when we think we are doing something wrong for us. Sara thinks no such thing. To her mind, she has chosen correctly and is behaving consistently with that choice.

Yet, unless I badly miss my guess, there is a part of Sara that recognizes her choice as a mistake and her current living arrangement as a brand of foolish consistency. Where, exactly, that part of Sara is located we can’t be sure, but our language does give it a name: heart of hearts. It is, by definition, the one place where we cannot fool ourselves. It is the place where none of our justifications, none of our rationalizations, penetrate. Sara has the truth there, although right now she can’t hear its signal clearly through the static of the new support apparatus she has erected.

If Sara has erred in her choice of Tim, how long can she go without recognizing it, without suffering a massive heart-of-hearts attack? There is no telling. One thing is certain: as time passes, the various alternatives to Tim are disappearing. She had better determine soon whether she is making a mistake.

Easier said than done, of course. She must answer an extremely intricate question: “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?” The problem lies in the “knowing what I now know” part of the question. Just what does she now know, accurately, about Tim? How much of what she thinks of him is the result of a desperate attempt to justify the commitment she made? She claims that since her decision to take him back, he cares for her more, is trying hard to stop his excessive drinking, and has learned to make a wonderful omelet. Having tasted a couple of his omelets, I have my doubts. The important issue, though, is whether she believes these things, not just intellectually—but in her heart of hearts.

There may be a little device Sara can use to find out how much of her current satisfaction with Tim is real and how much is foolish consistency. Psychological research indicates that we experience our feelings toward something a split second before we can intellectualize about it. I’d guess the message sent by the heart of hearts is a pure, basic feeling. Therefore, if we train ourselves to be attentive, we should register the feeling slightly before our cognitive apparatus engages. According to this approach, were Sara to ask herself the crucial “Would I make the same choice again?” question, she would be well advised to look for and trust the first flash of feeling she experienced in response. It would likely be the signal from her heart of hearts, slipping through undistorted just before the means by which she could fool herself streamed in.¹¹

I have begun using the same device myself whenever I even suspect I might be acting in a foolishly consistent manner. One time, for instance, I had stopped at the gas pump of a filling station advertising a price per gallon a couple of cents below the rate of other stations in the area; but with pump nozzle in hand, I noticed that the price listed on the pump was two cents higher than the display-sign price. When I mentioned the difference to a passing attendant, whom I later learned was the owner, he mumbled unconvincingly that the rates had changed a few days ago, but there hadn’t been time to correct the display. I tried to decide what to do. Some reasons for staying came to mind: “I do need gasoline”; “I am in sort of a hurry”; “I think I remember my car runs better on this brand of gas.”

I needed to determine whether those reasons were genuine or mere justifications for my decision to stop there. So I asked myself the crucial question, “Knowing what I know about the real price of this gasoline, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice again?” Concentrating on the first burst of impression I sensed, I received a clear and unqualified answer. I would have driven right past. I wouldn’t have even slowed down. I knew then that without the price advantage, those other reasons would not have brought me there. They hadn’t created the decision; the decision had created them.

That settled, there was another decision to be faced. Since I was already there holding the hose, wouldn’t it be better to use it than suffer the inconvenience of going elsewhere to pay the same price? Fortunately, the station attendant-owner came over and helped me make up my mind. He asked why I wasn’t pumping any gas. I told him I didn’t like the price discrepancy. “Listen,” he snarled, “nobody’s gonna tell me how to run my business. If you think I’m cheating you, just put that hose down right now and get off my property.” Already certain he was a cheat, I was happy to act consistently with my belief and his wishes. I dropped the hose on the spot and drove over it on my way to the closest exit. Sometimes consistency can be a marvelously rewarding thing.

Special Vulnerabilities

Are there particular kinds of people whose need to be consistent with what they’ve previously said and done makes them especially susceptible to the commitment tactics covered in this chapter? There are. To learn about the traits that characterize such individuals, it would be useful to examine a painful incident in the life of one of the most famous sports stars of our time.

The surrounding events, as laid out in an Associated Press news story at the time, appear puzzling. On March 1, 2005, golfing legend Jack Nicklaus’s seventeen-month-old grandson drowned in a hot-tub accident. One week later, a still-devastated Nicklaus brushed aside thoughts of future golf-related activities, including the upcoming Masters tournament, saying: “I think that, with what’s happened to us in our family, my time is going to be spent in much different ways. I have absolutely zero plans as it relates to the game of golf.” Yet, on the day of this statement, he made two remarkable exceptions: he gave a speech to a group of prospective members of a Florida golf club, and he played in a charity tournament hosted by longtime course rival Gary Player.

What was so powerful to have pulled Nicklaus away from his grieving family and into a pair of events that could only be seen as wholly inconsequential compared to the one he was living through? His answer was plain: “You make commitments,” he said, “and you’ve got to do them.” Although the small-time events themselves may have been unimportant in the grand scheme of things, his earlier-made agreements to take part in them were decidedly not—at least not to him. But why were Mr. Nicklaus’s commitments so . . . well . . . committing to him? Were there certain traits he possessed that impelled him toward this fierce form of consistency? Indeed, there were two: He was sixty-five years old and American.

AGE

It should come as no surprise that people with a particularly strong proclivity toward concordance in their attitudes and actions frequently fall victim to consistency-based influence tactics. My colleagues and I developed a scale to measure a person’s preference for consistency in his or her responding and found just that. Individuals who scored high on preference for consistency were especially likely to comply with a requester who used either the foot-in-the-door or the low-ball technique. In a follow-up study employing subjects from ages eighteen to eighty, we found that a preference for consistency increased with the years and that once beyond the age of fifty, people displayed the strongest inclination of all to remain consistent with their earlier commitments.

I believe this finding helps explain sixty-five-year-old Jack Nicklaus’s adherence to his earlier promises, even in the face of a family tragedy that would have given him an entirely understandable opt-out excuse. To be true to his traits, he needed to be consistent with those promises. I also believe the same finding can help explain why the perpetrators of fraud against older populations so often use commitment and consistency tactics to snare their prey. Take as evidence a noteworthy study done by the American Association of Retired Persons, which became concerned about the increasing incidence (and distressing success) of phone fraud attacks on its over-fifty membership. Along with investigators in twelve states, the organization became involved in a sting operation to uncover the tricks of phone scammers targeting the elderly. One result was a trove of transcribed audiotapes of conversations between scammers and their intended victims. An intensive examination of the tapes by researchers Anthony Pratkanis and Doug Shadel revealed widespread attempts by fraud artists to get—or sometimes just claim—an initial small commitment from a target and then to extract funds by holding the target accountable for it. Note how, in the following separate tape excerpts, the scammer uses the consistency principle like a bludgeon on people whose preference for personal consistency gives the principle formidable weight.

“No, we did not merely talk about it. You ordered it! You said yes. You said yes.”

“Well, you signed up for it last month; you don’t remember?”

“You gave us the commitment on it over three weeks ago.”

“I had a promise and a commitment from you last week.”

“You can’t buy a coin and renege on it five weeks later. You just can’t do that.”

INDIVIDUALISM

There is another factor besides age that may account for Jack Nicklaus’s strong need to remain consistent with his commitments. I hinted at such a factor earlier: he is an American, born and bred in the heartland (Ohio) of a nation famous for its devotion to the “cult of the individual.” In individualistic nations, such as the United States and those of Western Europe, the focus is on the self, whereas, in more collectivistic societies, the focus is on the group. Consequently, individualists decide what they should do in a situation by looking primarily at their own histories, opinions, and choices rather than at those of their peers, and such a decision-making style causes them to be highly vulnerable to influence tactics that use as leverage what a person has previously said or done.

To test the idea, my colleagues and I used a version of the foot-in-the-door technique on a set of students at my university; half were US-born and half were international students from less individualistic, Asian countries. We first asked all the students to participate in a twenty-minute online survey of “school and social relationships.” Then, a month later, we asked them to complete a forty-minute related survey on the same topic. Of those who completed the initial, twenty-minute survey, the more individualistic American students were more than twice as likely as the Asian students to agree to the forty-minute request too (21.6 percent versus 9.9 percent). Why? Because they, personally, had agreed to a prior, similar request; and individualists decide what they should do next on the basis of what they, personally, have done. Thus, members of individualistic societies—particularly older members—need to be alert to influence tactics that begin by requesting just a small step. Those small, cautious steps can lead to big, blind leaps.¹²

SUMMARY

Psychologists have long recognized a desire in most people to be and look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds. This tendency for consistency is fed from three sources. First, good personal consistency is highly valued by society. Second, aside from its effect on public image, generally consistent conduct provides a beneficial approach to daily life. Third, a consistent orientation affords a valuable shortcut through the complexity of modern existence. By being consistent with earlier decisions, one reduces the need to process all the relevant information in future similar situations; instead, one merely needs to recall the earlier decision and to respond consistently with it.
Within the realm of compliance, securing an initial commitment is the key. After making a commitment (that is, taking an action, stand, or position), people are more willing to agree to requests in keeping with the prior commitment. Thus, many compliance professionals try to induce people to take an initial position that is consistent with a behavior they will later request from these people. Not all commitments are equally effective in producing consistent future action. Commitments are most effective when they are active, public, effortful, and viewed as internally motivated (voluntary), because each of these elements changes self-image. The reason they do so is that each element gives us information about what we must truly believe.
Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating because they can “grow their own legs.” That is, people often add new reasons and justifications to support the wisdom of commitments they have already made. As a consequence, some commitments remain in effect long after the conditions that spurred them have changed. This phenomenon explains the effectiveness of certain deceptive compliance practices such as “throwing the low-ball.”
Another advantage of commitment-based tactics is that simple reminders of an earlier commitment can regenerate its ability to guide behavior, even in novel situations. In addition, reminders do more than restore the commitment’s vigor, they appear to intensify it by strengthening one’s related self-image.
To recognize and resist the undue influence of consistency pressures on our compliance decisions, we should listen for signals coming from two places within us: our stomachs and our heart of hearts. Stomach signs appear when we realize we are being pushed by commitment and consistency pressures to agree to requests we know we don’t want to perform. Under these circumstances, it is best to explain to the requester that such compliance would constitute a brand of foolish consistency in which we prefer not to engage. Heart-of-heart signs are different. They are best employed when it is not clear to us that an initial commitment was wrongheaded. Here, we should ask ourselves a crucial question: “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same commitment?” One informative answer may come as the first flash of feeling registered. Commitment and consistency tactics are likely to work especially well on members of individualistic societies, particularly those who are over fifty years old, who, hence, should be particularly wary of their use.

Chapter 7

Commitment and Consistency