59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (8 page)

An understanding of the diffusion of responsibility may also help you to persuade people in other situations. For example, when trying to get people to help you via e-mail, do not send your message to an entire group. When people see that an e-mail has been sent to lots of others, the same diffusion effect can arise, with everyone thinking that it is everyone else’s responsibility to
respond.
³⁰
To increase the chances of getting people to help, send the message to each person individually.

   
EVERY PENNY HELPS

Is it possible to increase the amount donated to good causes by creating the perfect “donation box”? To find out, I teamed up with Borders bookstores and conducted a weeklong secret study. Participating stores were sent four donation boxes. The boxes were identical in shape and size, and all advertised the same charity—the National Literacy Trust. Each carried one of four messages that psychologists believed would be effective: “Please give generously,” “Every penny helps,” “Every dollar helps,” and “You can make a difference.” Managers were asked to place each box at one of four randomly selected registers and monitor the amount collected at each location.

Did our different messages make an impact on the cash donated to charity? Yes. At the end of the experiment, the four types of boxes contained very different amounts of money. “Every penny helps” worked best, accounting for an impressive 62 percent of all contributions, while “Every dollar helps” trailed, with just 7 percent of the total take. Why should such a small change have such a big effect? According to work by psychologist Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University,
³¹
many people are concerned that putting a very small amount of money into a box will make them look cheap, and so they end up giving nothing at all. “Every penny helps” legitimates, and therefore encourages, the smallest of contributions. In contrast, “Every dollar helps” has the reverse effect—people who would have contributed less are suddenly concerned that their donation will appear paltry, and so they end up giving nothing at all.

In another part of the experiment we varied the color of the boxes and discovered that red was by far the most effective, perhaps because it elicits a sense of urgency. Interestingly, large variations in donations emerged between regions.

All told, the results show that donation boxes can become up to 200 percent more effective by being painted red and labeled “Every penny counts.”

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF SCRATCHING BACKS

According to the Bible, it is better to give than to receive. This notion is also supported by research into the psychology of persuasion, albeit in ways that might not have been intended by the Good Book.

In December 1970 psychologists Phillip Kunz and Michael Woolcott conducted perhaps the simplest social psychology experiment ever.
³²
Over the course of a couple of weeks, they popped some Christmas cards in the mail. However, Kunz and Woolcott did not send the cards to their friends, family, or colleagues; instead they randomly selected the recipients’ names and addresses from a local telephone directory. The two intrepid researchers, interested in the psychology of reciprocity, wondered whether the act of receiving a greeting card from a total stranger would be enough to persuade people to send a card back. The answer was a resounding yes. Kunz and Woolcott quickly received cards from the majority of those on their random list of complete strangers.

The principle of reciprocity has been explored by those interested in the science of persuasion. Perhaps not surprisingly,
the work hasn’t tended to focus on persuading strangers to send Christmas cards. Instead, it has examined whether the same technique also influences more important aspects of people’s behavior.

In the 1970s psychologist Dennis Regan invited people to help out with an experiment exploring aesthetics and art. Willing volunteers were asked to come to an exhibition one at a time and were told that on arrival they would be met by another participant. Together, they would then have to rate each of the paintings being shown.
³³
Now, if you take part in a social psychology experiment and are asked to meet another participant, you can bet your bottom dollar that your newfound friend is actually working for the experimenter. True to form, this was the case in Regan’s study. The stooge had been given very careful instructions. When accompanying the genuine participants around the gallery, he was suddenly to become thirsty and head toward the free-drinks table. He would return refreshed, but half of the time he would be empty-handed; the other half of the time he would carry a bottle of cola that he had picked up for the genuine participant.

Now, if you take part in a psychology experiment, and your fellow “participant” helps you in any way at all, you can bet that you are just moments away from being asked a favor. Again, Regan didn’t break with tradition. After all the paintings had been rated, the stooge turned to the genuine participant, explained that he was selling raffle tickets and had only a handful left. They were 25 cents each, and if he sold the last few tickets he would win a $50 prize. He asked them to contribute: “Any would help, the more the better.”

Even though the cola had not actually cost the stooge anything, it had a large impact on participants’ behavior, with those in the “I picked this bottle up for you” group buying
twice as many raffle tickets as those who did not receive the cola.

Several other studies have also illustrated how apparently spontaneous favors can elicit a powerful need to reciprocate. In one especially elegant and effective experiment, psychologist David Strohmetz and his colleagues arranged for waiters to hand customers their checks with or without candy, and examined the impact on tipping.
³⁴
In the control group, diners were unlucky enough to receive their checks without any sweets at all. A second group was given a single piece of candy with their bills. This simple gesture of kindness resulted in a measly 3 percent increase in tips compared to the control group. A third group received two sweets each and, again compared to the control group, gave 14 percent larger tips. Not bad. However, here comes the really clever part. In the fourth and final group, the waiters were asked to present the check to customers along with one piece of candy each, then, just as they were turning away from the table, reach into their pocket and quickly hand everyone a second piece. In terms of candy per customer, everyone ended up with exactly the same number of candies as those in the third group. But psychologically speaking, this was very, very different. The waiter had just done the customers an unnecessary and nice favor, and because of that, tips increased by an impressive 23 percent.

Why do these kinds of small favors produce such big results?

According to sociologists, there are only a handful of rules that are absolutely central to the well-being of any society. These rules have been found in almost every culture and help to ensure the smooth running of communal living. Perhaps the best known of these is “Don’t kill other people simply for the fun of it,” closely followed by “Try not to have sex with members of your close family, or their pets.” Even though a
minority of people struggle to adhere to these rules, it is obvious why both of them help keep society together. There are, however, several other rules that operate at a more subconscious level but are nevertheless equally vital for group welfare. The notion of reciprocation is perhaps the most important of these.

In order to keep society in one piece, people have to work together and help one another. However, some people will always give more than they take, so how do you know whom to help and whom to ignore? A key part of making this complex decision involves a surprisingly simple rule of thumb: you help those who have helped you. In other words, I scratch your back and you scratch mine. That way, we both have our backs scratched and all is well with the world. If every occasion of reciprocation were this instant and equal, there would be very little room for the exploitation that fascinates those who study the psychology of persuasion. Thankfully, from a researcher’s point of view, the real world of back-scratching is a little more complex. If I scratch your back, it says that I like and trust you and that I am a nice person deserving of your help when the time comes. These factors combine to create a potent force that often results in people giving me significantly more than they receive from me. In the art gallery experiment, the bottle of soda was free, but it nevertheless persuaded people to put their hands in their pockets and buy raffle tickets. In the restaurant experiment, the extra candy was worth a few pennies, but it caused people to leave a significantly larger tip.

We like people who help us, and we help people we like. However, for favors, it is surprising how little it takes for us to like a person and how much we give on the basis of so little. It seems that if you want to help yourself, you need to help others first.

IN 59 SECONDS

A large body of research has shown that doing a favor for someone often results in their giving significantly more in return. So does that mean that all favors will result in especially giving and helpful behavior? Additional research has revealed that there are several subtle factors that influence when favors are most effective.

Favors have their strongest effect when they occur between people who don’t know each other very well, and when they are small but thoughtful. When people go to a great deal of effort to help someone else, the recipient can often feel an uncomfortable pressure to reciprocate. In a sense, by giving too much at the beginning, one person places the other in a difficult position because the law of reciprocity states that the recipient has to give even more in return. Motivation is also important, as recipients can often experience a drop in self-esteem if they think they are being helped because they are believed not to have the ability to be successful by themselves
³⁵
or if they attribute the favor to an ulterior motive.
³⁶
So, for maximum persuasion, remember: save your favors for strangers, it really is the thought that counts, and the favor has to appear to come from the heart, not the head.

The degree of reciprocity may depend to some extent on cultural factors. In one study by Michael Morris and his colleagues at Columbia Business School, people from different countries were asked about the factors that influenced whether they would assist a colleague who asked for help.
³⁷
Americans were heavily influenced by the reciprocity rule (“Has this person helped me in the past?”), Germans were more concerned about whether their actions would be consistent with company rules, the Spanish were driven more by basic rules of friendship and liking, and the Chinese were swayed by the status of the coworker.

Finally, if you want to get maximum return for your investment,
ask for the return favor quickly. Francis Flynn from Stanford University surveyed employees in the customer-service department of a major U.S. airline, and found that favors have their greatest power immediately after they have been granted.
³⁸
It seems that if you leave it too long, people either forget what happened or convince themselves that they didn’t really need the help in the first place.

NEVER LOSE YOUR WALLET AGAIN

A few weeks ago I lost my wallet. I panicked, then calmed down, then carefully retraced my steps and failed to find the wallet, then panicked again, then calmed down again, and finally set about canceling my credit cards. Unfortunately, I never saw my wallet again. However, on the upside, I now have a nice new wallet that is far superior to my old worn-out one. I am very eager that my new wallet and I don’t permanently part company, so I wondered what I could put into my new wallet to maximize the chances of its being returned if lost.

It turns out that I am not the first person to think about what might encourage someone to return a lost wallet. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers interested in the psychology of helping carried out several studies in which they secretly dropped wallets on busy streets and then monitored the return rates. Perhaps the most prolific of these wallet droppers was psychologist Harvey Hornstein from Columbia University.

Hornstein spent years systematically studying some of the factors that influence the return rates of wallets. In one study, for example, he examined whether people would be more likely to return a wallet if it elicited positive, rather than negative,
feelings.
³⁹
Like many of Hornstein’s studies, this experiment involved creating a rather unusual scenario giving the impression that the wallet had been lost not once but twice. According to this scenario, the original owner had lost his wallet, and then someone else had found it, attached a short note, and placed it in an envelope addressed to the original owner. However, on the way to the mailbox, the well-intentioned finder had inadvertently dropped the envelope on the street and thus lost the wallet a second time. Those who unknowingly took part in Hornstein’s experiment came across an unsealed envelope containing a wallet with a note wrapped around it and had to decide whether to post the envelope back to the original owner. Half of the notes sounded very positive (“It has been a pleasure to help someone … and really has been no problem at all”), while the others were far more negative (“I was quite annoyed at having to return it and hope you appreciate the effort I have gone through”). The difference in wording had a significant impact on people’s behavior, with almost 40 percent of the wallets with positive notes being returned versus just 12 percent of those with negative notes.