The Exchanges

Q Sure. Look, if, if somebody gives you a gift or maybe does you a favor, is there a balance in the sense of obligation that we feel we need to repay? Or is there like almost an interest, a mental interest that we, uh, we ascribe to, uh, returning that favor. So we have to do more.

A No, uh, we are obligated to give back at the same level, but if the only thing we can do is to give back at a higher level, we will, to avoid the burden of feeling like a cheater, like a free rider, like a taker, an ingrate. So, If somebody buys us lunch, so we say, okay, next time it's on me, right? But between that time, if this says, this person says, I'm in a bind, can you drive over to where I am and jump my battery for me, right? We have to say yes, because this person just did us a favor. While we're in that state of obligation, we will go even higher. Although most of the time we can cancel the, uh, the obligation simply by giving what they gave us a nice lunch.

AI assessment note: “we are obligated to give back at the same level, but if the only thing”

Q he said, the small big, the exploration of the smallest things that you can do to make the biggest impact. And man, he wasn't kidding. This conversation is jam-packed with practical advice that will make you more persuasive and less susceptible to manipulation. It's time to listen and learn. Before we dive into the seven factors that make us more persuasive, can you explain the difference between influence and manipulation?

A Yeah, and I think it has to do with those seven factors. Those are the things that lend themselves to assent, because they normally counsel people correctly to move in a particular direction. So, for example, one of them is authority. If the experts are saying that something is a good idea, then we're probably well advised to follow the authority, um, influence. If a lot of people like Us are moving in that direction. There's a trend for it. That probably also lets us know that that's a shortcut to making a good decision. So there are these seven such principles. And for me, influence involves pointing to them where they naturally exist. That is, informing people into assent by simply raising the profile of that principle in one way or another in your communication. Manipulation involves the fabrication or manufacture of those principles, the counterfeiting them. Of them. In a situation where somebody lies with statistics in order to get you to believe that a lot of people are doing this or believing this thing that you want them to. Or, uh, presenting someone as an authority on the topic who's not truly an authority, is a celebrity or something like that. That's not an authority. That's something else. And so, it's when you Recognize that those particular levers of influence are effective, and co-opt them to your behalf, rather than simply uncovering them for the audience memb…

AI assessment note: “influence involves pointing to them where they naturally exist... Manipulation involves the fabrication”

Q I love that example, and I, at the power of this particular effect is undeniable. Not everybody has great intent. How do we defend ourselves against this?

A Yes. I think what we have to do is recognize that we can't just, in a blanket kind of way, reject The gifts and favors and services that may be very well intentioned for us, right, by people who would like to, you know, increase our outcomes in a particular situation. What we have to do is recognize that when those people do that, And then use that as a lever to get something much larger from us. We have to reframe what they gave us as no longer a gift to be reciprocated, but a trick, a device, an artifice. Designed to get our compliance with a much larger request where they will come out much far ahead in the bargain. We have to make that little change, and then here's where the rule for reciprocity comes in, because I studied a group that would get people to make appointments with them to check out their fire safety issues at home, right? And somebody would come in and give them a, a home fire extinguisher, and then would give them a bunch of, uh, reasons to buy a particular kind of very expensive heat activated fire alarm system that they were representing, right? So they weren't really there to give us the information about fire safety. They were there to sell this outrageously overpriced system. And what I Say to people in this situation is, look, as soon as you see that what, that the game was, don't treat the fire alarms, the, the, the fire extinguisher that you got as a…

AI assessment note: “We have to reframe what they gave us as no longer a gift... but a trick”

Q I like that. Moving on to social proof, which is the third principle in the book. Uh, why is popularity so effective?

A I saw a quote about popularity and, and how people are using popularity on internet and on, in various ways, and this particular humorist said, popularity is all the rage these days. Here's the point. Popularity, that is a version of social proof, which says one way or We can reduce our uncertainty of what we should do in a situation. When we're uncertain, we don't look inside ourselves for the answer. All we see is the lack of confidence. So we look outside, and one place we look is to what the people around us, like us, have been doing, or are currently doing in a particular situation. Are we getting a lot of people going to this new restaurant, buying this new piece of software? If so, that Is a shortcut I can use to reduce my uncertainty about the fact that that will probably be a good choice for me if a lot of people are doing it and, uh, are rating it positively with those star ratings and so on. That's a way I can reduce my uncertainty because they've already beta tested this thing for me. That's why it's so popular to choose popularity. As a indicator of a good choice. There was a study done in Beijing, China that, that, that I love. It shows you the cross-cultural reach of this. So in Beijing, researchers arranged with the managers of a string of restaurants to To put a little asterisk on certain items of the menu that people got when they were to order. Those items th…

AI assessment note: “We can reduce our uncertainty of what we should do in a situation.”

Q Let's talk about authority. Is there a difference between being an authority and being in authority?

A There is. And we can have a lot of evidence of somebody who's in charge directing those who are working or operating beneath them. To do something, coerce them, or threaten them, uh, with some kind of form of, uh, penalty if they don't, uh, move in a particular direction, because I'm the boss. Playing the I'm the boss card, that has costs. People don't like being pushed. They don't like being pressured, even by somebody who's in authority over them. Very often what they do is they find a way to finesse the system and, uh, get around the, uh, the directive. Because what that's about for me is not influence as much as it is power. That's about power. Yes, and we can wield power, but there are costs of it. That's from being in authority. What we are recommending as a way to be influential is being an authority, somebody who knows a lot about the topic, someone who's a true expert on the matter, to the extent that we can harness that principle by Having testimonials from legitimately highly knowledgeable experts that speak to our idea or our product or service, that's going to work. I know that when Bose Acoustics, uh, we were working with them, when they added, uh, to, uh, an ad for a product that they had called the Bose Wave Music System, uh, A line of testifiers, uh, right at the start of the ad, all over to the, to the left, just as you read the ad, and up at the top, they saw…

AI assessment note: “There is. And we can have a lot of evidence of somebody who's in charge”

Q Yeah, it works both ways, right? The, the second principle in your book is liking, which is we prefer to say yes to people that we like. What are sort of the main variables that carry a lot of the weight to whether we like somebody or not?

A There are really two Major variables that we can influence. One is similarity. We like people who are like us. So one thing we can do is to point to commonalities that genuinely exist. If we point to a genuine comparability that exists, Between us and the other, other individual, that person feels a greater rapport with us. Oh, you're a runner? I'm a runner. You're, uh, uh, an only child? I'm an only child. Okay, now there's a, a bond between us, and those people will feel more, more poor with us, and want to do business with us, if those are genuinely there. So, uh, for example, there was one study that was done between negotiators who were bargaining over email, And, you know, email is the most bloodless communication device we have ever devised, and as a result, they were stymied in their negotiations, deadlocked, so that in 30% of the instances, both sides walked away with nothing. The other half We're told, before you begin the negotiation by email, send some information about yourself to the other negotiator, your negotiating partner. What your hobbies are, what your interests are, where you grew up, where you went to school, what your major was in college, you know, these kinds of things. In that case, Stymied negotiations went from 30% to six percent. When the researchers analyzed the data, it wasn't the amount of personalizing information that had been sent across, it …

AI assessment note: “There are really two Major variables that we can influence. One is similarity.”

Q Uh, I want to, again, talk about how to defend against that, but before we get there, my favorite example from the book, I think, was Joe Girard. Can you tell us about him and how he used this?

A Yeah. Joe Girard, he was the world's greatest salesperson, according to the Guinness Book of Records, for like 12 years in a row. He sold automobiles, Chevrolets, from a dealership in Detroit, in the Detroit area. He sold an average of six Cars and trucks a day, every day that he worked. How did he do it? Well, one of the things that he says that he did that was so important is for everybody who ever bought a car from him. Every month, they would receive a greeting card for him, depending on the holiday that month. Happy New Year, uh, you know, whatever it was, the Fourth of July, whatever the month was, and then you opened it up, and it's, it said one thing inside card. I like you, Joe Girard. Now, that man was, Use the liking principle. We like people who like us. The second thing that we can use besides similarity is genuine compliments that people give us. Praise, right? Well, that we give to others, right? And if we do that honestly, and Joe was a people person, he liked everybody, so he wasn't lying by saying, I like you. Just having that message, you would think, 12 times a year, every year, automatically, this thing comes. No. For Joe Girard, he said, that was important, to let people know that I liked him. So, it's not just that we like people who are like us, We like people who do like us and say so.

AI assessment note: “Joe Girard, he was the world's greatest salesperson... Use the liking principle.”

Q It can be a very effective tool for good. It can also be used against us. How do we defend against social proof?

A So what we have to do, let's take, uh, online reviews, right? We have to check out the character of those reviews. It turns out there's particular things that allow us to know when the review is phony. Do they use a lot of personal stories? That means they're not giving you Evidence of the features of the product or service because they don't really know. They've just been hired to get, do they use a lot of verbs rather than nouns for the same reason? It's, they're telling us what they were doing and how they were operating and how they were feeling about it rather than what the product really was, right? So we can look to that But also, there was a great study that looked at which star rating on a product review was most likely to produce a conversion from a prospect to a customer. It wasn't a five-point rating. It was a range between 4.2 and 4.7. People were on to the tricksters who were loading their evaluations with all of these positive things. So if it was below 4.2, people say, well, maybe this isn't such a great product. If it was above 4.7, they got suspicious. So what we have actually is a constant struggle between the Product review sites who have algorithms to try to weed out the phony reviews and the tricksters who are trying to outflank the various ways to protect, to prevent them. And it's, it's an ongoing battle, but there are a couple of things we can do. And h…

AI assessment note: “there's particular things that allow us to know when the review is phony”

Q And when there's testimonials by authority figures or were those testimonials just average people?

A They were testimonials by authorities, legitimate experts on audition and electronic components, audio components, and so on. Now, here's the thing that we did help them with. Originally, when the marketing department structured that ad, those testimonials were at the bottom, and look at all of the people who agree with what we've just said here about this. By moving them to the top, the authority aura that they provide is infused on into every word of that ad, As people are experiencing it, why would you throw that honest lever of influence away at the top? So what I always recommend to people who are using testimonials, and this can include, by the way, as you inferred, they can also include testimonials from similar others, because remember, we want to follow the lead of people like us, right? So you've got peers who Or you have experts. In either case, they need to go at the top so that you have been informed ahead of time that others, experts, or peers have reduced your uncertainty of whether to believe the information that's going to come next.

AI assessment note: “They were testimonials by authorities, legitimate experts on audition and electronic components”

Q Well, that goes to commitment and consistency, which we'll talk about a bit later, but is there a contrast at play there too? Because now you've taken it from a large commitment to a much smaller commitment, which feels more manageable.

A That's a very perceptive point. There's not only is there the effect of making concession that needs to be reciprocated. Oh, you made a concession to me. I'll make a concession in return. It's that you've made a contrast between the larger Favor, two years, every six weeks, to just once, and this one now seems smaller. So we tested for that in the study, and we found that if we include the contrast in our presentation, you can go anywhere from giving six months for, for two years, every six weeks for two years, or you could just give to tomorrow. That doesn't produce the effect to the same degree. You have to get them to say no to So you can retreat and then spur a retreat in return.

AI assessment note: “It's that you've made a contrast between the larger Favor”

Q One of the interesting things for me about commitment and consistency is we sort of hide inside the walls of our own thinking. How do we, how do we defend against this? Not only when other people are using it, but how do we defend ourselves from just constantly escalating and being held to opinions that may be no longer valid?

A Man, this is a good question, and I'm going to answer it by first saying how we do this with people who we would like to change in our direction, who have already made a commitment to something else, to another product or a service, or an idea. Right now, we've got a lot of people who are resisting health information about, well, right, How do we change that? We can't say, well, you know, when you made that decision, it was the wrong choice. You were just making a wrong choice. Uh, you are, you're not a good decision maker. People don't want to hear that. That's going to get their back up and they say, I, I still stand by this decision. What you have to say is at the time that you made that choice in the information environment, that may have well been a good choice for you, but Here's a new piece of information that we didn't have back then. As a good decision maker, people take into account all the information. So you're a good decision. And we can get people on board from that commitment that they had made by saying, okay, now let's reevaluate because there's a new piece of information I can give you on this topic. And this is what I think I'm going to ask us to do ourselves. That when we encounter a new piece of information, Relative to a decision or a choice that we've made, you know, and that we get a chance to change, we need to say, if I knew this when I first made my c…

AI assessment note: “we need to say, if I knew this when I first made my choice”

Q And there's different types of things that we can give, um, gifts come to mind, maybe concessions in a negotiation. What are, what are the other types that we, um, can think of when reciprocation is at play?

A So for example, you're right about, uh, concessions. There's research to show. If we walk up to people and say, listen, would you be a long-term blood donor and give a unit of blood Every six weeks for the next two years. Very large request, right? Starting off, everybody said, no, I don't even know where I'll be in two years. I can't make that. And we said, oh, well then, would you give one unit tomorrow during the local blood drive in your neighborhood? We go from 33% of people who agree to give the next day, right, if that's the only thing we ask them, to 55%. If we retreat to that, We make a concession. Oh, so you can't do the two-year thing that we would most like, but would you do this one thing? So now we go from 33% to 55% compliance. And by the way, we staff the, the blood services organization. We have observers there. They show up. It's not just that they say, no, oh yeah, sure, I'll do that, because they want to get us away. No, they show up.

AI assessment note: “So for example, you're right about, uh, concessions. There's research to show.”