“Chris, you can swim,” I said excitedly. “You can swim!”
“Yes,” he responded casually, “I learned how today.”
“This is terrific! This is just terrific,” I burbled, gesturing expansively
to convey my enthusiasm. “But how come you didn’t need your plastic
ring today?”
Looking somewhat embarrassed because his father seemed to be
raving while inexplicably soaking his socks in a small puddle and
waving his shoes around, Chris explained: “Well, I’m three years old,
and Tommy is three years old. And Tommy can swim without a ring,
so that means I can too.”
I could have kicked myself. Of course, it would be to little Tommy,
not to a six-foot-two-inch graduate student, that Chris would look for
the most relevant information about what he could or should do. Had
I been more thoughtful about solving Chris’s swimming problem, I
could have employed Tommy’s good example earlier and, perhaps,
have saved myself a couple of frustrating months. I could have simply
noted at the day camp that Tommy was a swimmer and then arranged
with his parents for the boys to spend a weekend afternoon swimming
in our pool. My guess is that Chris’s plastic ring would have been
abandoned by the end of the day.^11
Any factor that can spur 70 percent of New Yorkers to return a wallet
(or can reduce the likelihood that kids will take up smoking or will fear
a dentist visit) must be considered impressive. Yet research findings of
this sort offer just a hint of the immense impact that the conduct of
similar others has on human behavior. Other, more powerful examples
exist. To my mind, the most telling illustration of this impact starts with
a seemingly nonsensical statistic: After a suicide has made front-page
news, airplanes—private planes, corporate jets, airliners—begin falling
out of the sky at an alarming rate.
For example, it has been shown that immediately following certain
kinds of highly publicized suicide stories, the number of people who
die in commercial-airline crashes increases by 1,000 percent! Even more
alarming: The increase is not limited to airplane deaths. The number
of automobile fatalities shoots up as well.^12 What could possibly be
responsible?
One explanation suggests itself immediately: The same social condi-
tions that cause some people to commit suicide cause others to die acci-
dentally. For instance, certain individuals, the suicide-prone, may react
to stressful societal events (economic downturns, rising crime rates,
international tensions) by ending it all. But others will react differently
to these same events; they might become angry or impatient or nervous
or distracted. To the degree that such people operate (or service) the
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 109