“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 that they
doubled their profit 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.”
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 whirr
of the powerful consistency tape? 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 consistent 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 compli-
ance through consistency pressures. Procedures designed to create
commitment take various forms. Some are fairly straightforward; others
are among the most subtle compliance tactics we will encounter.
For instance, 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 sly commitment procedure was a 700 percent in-
crease in volunteers when, a few days later, a representative of the
American Cancer Society did call and ask for neighborhood canvassers.
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 51