I know full well that Sara is a lowball victim. Just as sure as I had
watched buyers fall for the give-it-and-take-it-away-later strategy in
the car showroom, I watched her fall for the same trick with Tim. For
his part, Tim remains the guy he has always been. But because the new
attractions Sara has discovered (or created) in him are quite real for her,
she now seems satisfied with the same arrangement that was unaccept-
able before her enormous commitment. The decision to choose Tim,
poor as it may have been objectively, has grown its own supports and
appears to have made Sara genuinely happy. I have never mentioned
to Sara what I know about lowballing. The reason for my silence is not
that I think her better off in the dark on the issue. As a general guiding
principle, more information is always better than less information. It’s
just that, if I said a word, I am confident she would hate me for it.
Depending on the motives of the person wishing to use them, any of
the compliance techniques discussed in this book can be employed for
good or for ill. It should not be surprising, then, that the lowball tactic
can be used for more socially beneficial purposes than selling new cars
or reestablishing relationships with former lovers. One research project
done in Iowa, for example, shows how the lowball procedure can influ-
ence homeowners to conserve energy.^19 The project, headed by Dr.
Michael Pallak, began at the start of the Iowa winter when residents
who heated their homes with natural gas were contacted by an inter-
viewer. The interviewer gave them some energy-conservation tips and
asked them to try to save fuel in the future. Although they all agreed
to try, when the researchers examined the utility records of these fam-
ilies after a month and again at winter’s end, it was clear that no real
savings had occurred. The residents who had promised to make a
conservation attempt used just as much natural gas as a random sample
of their neighbors who had not been contacted by an interviewer. Just
good intentions coupled with information about saving fuel, then, were
not enough to change habits.
Even before the project began, Pallak and his research team had re-
cognized that something more would be needed to shift long-standing
energy patterns. So they tried a slightly different procedure on a com-
parable sample of Iowa natural-gas users. These people, too, were
contacted by an interviewer, who provided energy-saving hints and
asked them to conserve. But for these families, the interviewer offered
something else: Those residents agreeing to save energy would have
their names publicized in newspaper articles as public-spirited, fuel-
conserving citizens. The effect was immediate. One month later, when
the utility companies checked their meters, the homeowners in this
sample had saved an average of 422 cubic feet of natural gas apiece.
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 77