newspaper read by many of the audience members they fully expected
to influence. Claque, whirr.What Sauton and Porcher realized about the mechanical way that
we abide by the principle of social proof is understood as well by a
variety of today’s exploiters. They see no need to hide the manufactured
nature of the social evidence they provide—witness the amateurish
quality of the average TV laugh track. They seem almost smug in the
recognition of our predicament: Either we must allow them to fool us
or we must abandon the precious automatic pilots that make us so
vulnerable to their tricks. But in their certainty that they have us trapped,
such exploiters have made a crucial mistake. The laxity with which they
construct phony social evidence gives us a way to fight back.
Because automatic pilots can be engaged and disengaged at will, we
can cruise along trusting in the course steered by the principle of social
proof until we recognize that a piece of inaccurate data is being used.
Then we can take the controls, make the necessary correction for the
misinformation, and reset the automatic pilot. The transparency of the
rigged social proof we get these days provides us with exactly the cue
we need for knowing when to perform this simple maneuver. With no
more cost than a bit of vigilance for plainly counterfeit social evidence,
then, we can protect ourselves nicely.
Let’s take an example. A bit earlier, we noted the proliferation of av-
erage-person-on-the-street ads, in which a number of ordinary people
speak glowingly of a product, often without knowing that their words
are being recorded. As would be expected according to the principle
of social proof, these testimonials from “average people like you and
me” make for quite effective advertising campaigns. They have always
included one relatively subtle kind of distortion: We hear only from
those who like the product; as a result, we get an understandably biased
picture of the amount of social support for it. More recently, though, a
cruder and more unethical sort of falsification has been introduced.
Commercial producers often don’t bother to get genuine testimonials.
They merely hire actors to play the roles of average people testifying
in an unrehearsed fashion to an interviewer. It is amazing how bald-
faced these “unrehearsed interview” commercials can be. The situations
are obviously staged, the participants are clearly actors, and the dialogue
is unmistakably prewritten.
Dave Barry
Knight Ridder News Service
Recently I was watching TV, and a commercial came on, and the an-
nouncer, in a tone of voice usually reserved for major developments in
120 / Influence