thirteen thousand dollars. It appears, then, that even proper, official
censorship in a courtroom setting creates problems for the censor. We
react to information restriction there, as usual, by valuing the banned
information more than ever.^11
The realization that we value limited information allows us to apply
the scarcity principle to realms beyond material commodities. The
principle works for messages, communications, and knowledge, too.
Taking this perspective, we can see that information may not have to
be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce. According
to the scarcity principle, then, we will find a piece of information more
persuasive if we think we can’t get it elsewhere. This idea that exclusive
information is more persuasive information is central to the thinking
of two psychologists, Timothy Brock and Howard Fromkin, who have
developed a “commodity theory” analysis of persuasion.^12
The strongest support I know for Brock and Fromkin’s theory comes
from a small experiment done by a student of mine. At the time, the
student was also a successful businessman, the owner of a beef-import-
ing company, who had returned to school to get advanced training in
marketing. After we talked in my office one day about scarcity and ex-
clusivity of information, he decided to do a study using his sales staff.
The company’s customers—buyers for supermarkets or other retail
food outlets—were phoned as usual by a salesperson and asked for a
purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standard
sales presentation before being asked for their orders. Another set of
customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that
the supply of imported beef was likely to be scarce in the upcoming
months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and
the information about a scarce supply of beef, too; however, they also
learned that the scarce-supply news was not generally available inform-
ation—it had come, they were told, from certain exclusive contacts that
the company had. Thus the customers who received this last sales
presentation learned that not only was the availability of the product
limited, so also was the news concerning it—the scarcity double
whammy.
The results of the experiment quickly become apparent when the
company salespeople began to urge the owner to buy more beef because
there wasn’t enough in the inventory to keep up with all the orders
they were receiving. Compared to the customers who got only the
standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity
of beef bought more than twice as much. But the real boost in sales oc-
curred among the customers who heard of the impending scarcity via
“exclusive” information. They purchased six times the amount that the
customers who received only the standard sales pitch did. Apparently
192 / Influence