evening?” (and waited for a response before proceeding) or with the
statement “I hope you are feeling well this evening” and then proceeded
to the standard solicitation approach. Despite the fact that the caller
started each type of interaction with a warm and friendly comment,
the “How are you feeling” technique was, by far, superior to its rival
(33 percent vs. 15 percent compliance), because it alone drew an exploit-
able public commitment from its targets. Note that the commitment
was able to get twice as much compliance from those targets even
though at the time it occurred it must have seemed to them an altogether
inconsequential reply to an altogether superficial question—yet another
fine example of social jujitsu at work.
The question of what makes a commitment effective has a number
of answers. A variety of factors affect the ability of a commitment to
constrain our future behavior. One large-scale program designed to
produce compliance illustrates nicely how several of the factors work.
The remarkable thing about this program is that it was systematically
employing these factors decades ago, well before scientific research had
identified them.
During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found
themselves in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps run by the Chinese Com-
munists. It became clear early in the conflict that the Chinese treated
captives quite differently than did their allies, the North Koreans, who
favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance. Specifically
avoiding the appearance of brutality, the Red Chinese engaged in what
they termed their “lenient policy,” which was in reality a concerted and
sophisticated psychological assault on their captives. After the war,
American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively
to determine what had occurred. The intensive psychological investig-
ation took place, in part, because of the unsettling success of some as-
pects of the Chinese program. For example, the Chinese were very ef-
fective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in striking con-
trast to the behavior of American POWs in World War II. For this
reason, among others, escape plans were quickly uncovered and the
escape attempts themselves almost always unsuccessful. “When an es-
cape did occur,” wrote Dr. Edgar Schein, a principal American invest-
igator of the Chinese indoctrination program in Korea, “the Chinese
usually recovered the man easily by offering a bag of rice to anyone
turning him in.” In fact, nearly all American prisoners in the Chinese
camps are said to have collaborated with the enemy in one form or an-
other.^2
An examination of the Chinese prison-camp program shows that its
personnel relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures to
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 53