42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

Persuading others to do things your way isn't as hard as it may seem. According to an American psychology professor, it's simply a question of pulling the right triggers.

You've probably seen those notes in hotel bathrooms that ask you to reuse towels to protect the environment.

Most of us are concerned about global warming, so it makes sense to play the green card when persuading us to save on laundry.

Sure enough, the signs work. According to the big hotel chains, the majority of guests do indeed reuse their towels at least once during their stay. But are they as persuasive as they might be? Could the signs be more effective? Could they somehow be made to convince even more people to recycle their towels?

US academics set up an experiment to find out. They compared response to the environmental message with the response to cards that simply stated that the majority of people in that hotel recycled their towels.

Much to the academics' amazement, telling guests how other guests in the hotel had behaved caused towel reuse to leap by 26 per cent. But that's not all. When they made the message even more specific, informing guests that "most people who had stayed in that room, recycled their towels," reuse rose by 33 per cent compared to the environmental message.

The experiment demonstrates the power of what is known as 'social proof' – using other people's behaviour as a guide to our own, says Doctor Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University. "It shows the power of social norms, that other people's behaviours are a powerful source of social influence – even though they repeatedly deny it, and that harnessing social proof can pay big dividends in your attempts to persuade others," he says.

Given that the workplace can be thought of as a forum for attempts to persuade your workforce, colleagues, bosses, clients, financiers and suppliers to do what you want, the power to persuade is clearly a key business skill.

The good news is that Dr Cialdini co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion thinks, as the title of his book suggests, that persuasion is a science not an art. This means that even persuasive lightweights can radically improve their ability to influence others by adopting the right strategies.

Social proof is just one of six techniques Dr Cialdini identifies "as the universal principles of social influence," or key triggers upon which we can base effective persuasive strategies.

The others are: reciprocation – the powerful sense of obligation we feel to return favours; authority – our willingness to defer to experts; consistency – the need we feel for our actions to be in keeping with our values; scarcity – the less available a resource, the more we want it; and liking – the more we like people the more we want to say yes to them.

These principles apply whether we are talking to our children or our boss, whether we are addressing dozens of employees or advertising to millions of consumers.

Their power, says Dr Cialdini, comes from the fact that they trigger deep-seated psychological survival mechanisms. "We are social beings and over millions of years we have evolved various decision-making shortcuts to protect us in a dangerous world," he says. "Social proof is one of the most basic. Even before we were human, when we were fish it would generally be advisable to follow the shoal – otherwise you were more likely to end up as a snack for some predator."

So we tend to do what others do. And the more closely their situation resembles ours, the more likely we are to imitate them. Dr Cialdini applies this insight to a wide range of situations. "Teachers trying to convince a pupil to behave would be better off soliciting comments on the benefits of good behaviour, not from the front row, but from students most similar to the target," he says.

In the commercial arena, social proof makes marketing campaigns using testimonials an effective form of persuasion. And these tend to be more powerful the greater the similarity between the person giving the testimonial and the people it is aimed at.

One of the most remarkable things about these techniques is just how simple they can be. For instance, one researcher wanted to find out about the persuasive power of the word 'because'. He set up an experiment in a photocopying shop where someone asked if they could jump the queue with the question, "Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?" A neighbourly 64 per cent of people complied.

But when the queue jumper provided a reason – "May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush" – compliance jumped by nearly half to 94 per cent. What's more, it didn't seem to matter what reason was given. Even the nonsensical request "May I use the Xerox machine because I want to make copies," generated the same level of compliance.

'Because' gets its persuasive power from another mental short cut, says Dr Cialdini. "It is the continually reinforced association over the course of our lives between 'because' and the good rationales that usually follow that makes people act on it without even thinking. But they will only take that short cut when the request is small."

Most of the techniques described in the book will sound familiar to anyone who has ever been exposed to advertising and direct marketing – that's all of us. For instance, we all instantly recognise the much-used phrase "Hurry now while stocks last" as a scarcity strategy.

This is because Dr Cialdini didn't invent the techniques – he observed them during three years of undercover research in what he calls "the persuasive industries". He explains, "I took jobs in lobbying firms, advertising agencies and law firms to see what techniques they were using and what emotional levers they were pulling".

What Dr Cialdini has done is show scientifically which of the persuasive methods work, how well they work and perhaps most importantly, he has provided a theoretical framework for why they work.

Of course these aren't the only persuasion techniques. And mastering them doesn't mean you get what you want every time. "They just improve your odds of success," says Dr Cialdini.

The techniques described are undoubtedly powerful. But Dr Cialdini warns against unscrupulous use. "When these tools are used as weapons by artificially importing them into situations in which they don't naturally exist, the evidence is that short-term gains will almost invariably be followed by long-term losses."