order to increase our compliance can accomplish that purpose by ap-
pearing similar to us in any of a wide variety of ways.
Dress is a good example. Several studies have demonstrated that we
are more likely to help those who dress like us. In one study, done in
the early 1970s when young people tended to dress either in “hippie”
or “straight” fashion, experimenters donned hippie or straight attire
and asked college students on campus for a dime to make a phone call.
When the experimenter was dressed in the same way as the student,
the request was granted in more than two thirds of the instances; but
when the student and requester were dissimilarly dressed, the dime
was provided less than half the time. Another experiment shows how
automatic our positive response to similar others can be. Marchers in
an antiwar demonstration were found to be not only more likely to sign
the petition of a similarly dressed requester, but also to do so without
bothering to read it first. Click, whirr.^6
Another way requesters can manipulate similarity to increase liking
and compliance is to claim that they have backgrounds and interests
similar to ours. Car salesmen, for example, are trained to look for
evidence of such things while examining the customer’s trade-in. If
there is camping gear in the trunk, the salesman might mention, later
on, how he loves to get away from the city whenever he can; if there
are golf balls on the back seat, he might remark that he hopes the rain
will hold off until he can play the eighteen holes he has scheduled for
later in the day; if he notices that the car was purchased out of state, he
might ask where the customer is from and report—with surprise—that
he (or his wife) was born there, too.
As trivial as these similarities may seem, they appear to work. One
researcher who examined the sales records of insurance companies
found that customers were more likely to buy insurance when the
salesperson was like them in such areas as age, religion, politics, and
cigarette-smoking habits. Because even small similarities can be effective
in producing a positive response to another and because a veneer of
similarity can be so easily manufactured, I would advise special caution
in the presence of requesters who claim to be “just like you.” Indeed,
it would be wise these days to be careful around salespeople who just
seem to be just like you. Many sales training programs now urge trainees
to “mirror and match” the customer’s body posture, mood, and verbal
style, as similarities along each of these dimensions have been shown
to lead to positive results.^7
Compliments
Actor McLean Stevenson once described how his wife tricked him into
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 131