whether to say yes or no to a requester, it is clear that we frequently
pay attention to but one piece of the relevant information in the situ-
ation. We have been exploring several of the most popular of the single
pieces of information that we use to prompt our compliance decisions.
They are the most popular prompts precisely because they are the most
reliable ones, those that normally point us toward the correct choice.
That is why we employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social
proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so often and so automatically in
making our compliance decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly re-
liable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes than no.
We are likely to use these lone cues when we don’t have the inclina-
tion, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete ana-
lysis of the situation. Where we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indiffer-
ent, distracted, or fatigued, we tend to focus on less of the information
available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we
often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-
evidence approach.^1 All this leads to a jarring insight: With the sophist-
icated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a
species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and
information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion
of the animals we long ago transcended.
John Stuart Mill, the British economist, political thinker, and philo-
sopher of science, died more than a hundred years ago. The year of his
death (1873) is important because he is reputed to have been the last
man to know everything there was to know in the world. Today, the
notion that one of us could be aware of all known facts is only laughable.
After eons of slow accumulation, human knowledge has snowballed
into an era of momentum-fed, multiplicative, monstrous expansion.
We now live in a world where most of the information is less than fifteen
years old. In certain fields of science alone (for example, physics),
knowledge is said to double every eight years. And the scientific inform-
ation explosion is not limited to such arcane arenas as molecular
chemistry or quantum physics but extends to everyday areas of know-
ledge where we strive to keep ourselves current—health, child devel-
opment, nutrition, and the like. What’s more, this rapid growth is likely
to continue, since 90 percent of all scientists who have ever lived are
working today.
Apart from the streaking advance of science, things are quickly
changing much closer to home. In his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler
provided early documentation of the unprecedented and increasing
rapidity of modern daily life: We travel more and faster; we relocate
more frequently to new residences, which are built and torn down more
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 207