Principles of Psychology to Know and Watch Out For
To live happier healthier lives requires us to understand what the research says about getting along with others and keeping our minds free from propaganda
NEWSMENTORSHIPMENTAL HEALTHWORKPLACEECONOMICSRELATIONSHIPS
The Bay Staters Team
8/5/20269 min read
We exist under the thumb of strategic psychology at nearly every moment of our lives.
And for those of us who aspire to a world that is more prosperous, fair, and healthy, it is important to study these principles to understand our relationships, economy, and political system.
In his seminal work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini provides us working principles that can profoundly reshape our understanding of human behavior. As an overview, he invites us to understand our own behavior as fundamentally similar to the behavior of animals.
Mother turkeys will only feed chicks that chirp loudly for food and robins will become territorial based on certain visual cues. In many ways, we are no different. And ancient neural networks are controlling our lives in subtle ways.
Let’s start with the positive principles that can help us better cooperate with others.
Positive: Always Give a “Because”
Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer found that people are always more successful at having their asks fulfilled if they offer a “because.” That word alone increased compliance with an ask to skip a line to a Xerox machine by 34% compared to those who merely asked. Perhaps even more surprising: the specific “because” did not matter as long as that specific word was used. Who knew that “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” would have so much power.
This knowledge can be useful not only in persuading people to do something within your family and friendship. It can also be beneficial within organizations and careers too. For example, while you are under no moral obligation per se to explain why you are taking time off at work, setting a boundary, or teaching your kid a rule you would like them to follow it can be helpful to share a simple “why” to build goodwill.
For example, if you are choosing to take personal days you may mention in your request email something along the lines of “I would like to request off April 4th to April 7th because I am spending quality time with my family to be rested and renewed.” Similarly, if you need more time to fulfill a commitment to someone else a “because” can strengthen a relationship and keep dialog open and honest. For example, you may want to ask someone for more time by saying “I would like a few more days to do X because some family challenges came up unexpectedly this last week and I want to make sure I am helping out with X from the best place I can.”
Positive: Be Expensive with Your Time and Energy
Make sure that you are placing the appropriate price on your services, skills, and talents instead of offering them for “free.” This is because our psychology is hardwired to see objects or services with a higher price as having more value.
The book makes the example of a tourist store in Arizona that was having trouble selling high-quality turquoise jewelry. In order to get them off the shelf at a loss, the store tried moving them to a better location and pushing them with staff but those strategies did not work. Finally, the owner asked the staff to mark them half off. However, the staff accidentally misread “½” as an ask to double the price, which led the turquoise jewelry to fly off the shelf.
Similarly, when an auto repair shop mailed coupons with an error that actually applied no discount, they saw the same increase in sales compared to those with a steep discount. People use prices and apparent incentives like coupons as a shortcut to assess both value and “deals,” respectively.
So, for example, let’s say that hypothetically, your small business or organization is looking to bring more people into your fold through events and you want them to be accessible for everyone. You may want to avoid calling everything “free,” even if there is no charge to joining your programs because you now know that people value services and merchandise more without that framing.
Similarly, you may want to be more selective with how you offer your time to others knowing that it does not necessarily make someone have more respect for your time if it’s “free.” Ultimately, this psychological principle calls on us to set healthy boundaries in our lives and expect reciprocity or at the very least signal to people that your time does have a cost and trade off.
Positive: Make Your Comparisons Impactful When Weighing Options
Most decisions are not made in a vacuum but rather in comparison to a portfolio of options. This means that sequencing particular sales decisions can make an option that looks mediocre on its own seem incredibly appealing compared to other alternatives.
The book makes the example of a real estate agent who shows families low-value, run-down homes that are relatively expensive before showing them normal properties that are reasonably priced. This makes them seem like a far better deal by comparison to the alternatives. As another example, new car salesmen will often sequence and suggest sales for add-ons like a nice radio after they have already negotiated a much larger sale, say $15,000, for a new car. This serves to make the cost of the add-ons seem almost trivial in comparison to the new car’s price. Here is a work-related application:
Assuming always that you are acting in good faith but have your own unique interests in a project being pursued in a particular way, you may want to use sequencing to influence your supervisor’s choices. For example, your team maybe considering a department reorganization in which Scenario C is your preferred option of ABCDE.
You may want to present the worst or most painful options, say A and B, before C so that C looks good by comparison. If you have flexibility in when to review these plans, you will want to group C and put somewhat appealing alternatives that you do not want like D and E together on another day if possible. Make your preference stand out!
Of course, this principle like many of psychology is value neutral and can be used for bad as we’ll discuss later in this article. It’s important to always prioritize honesty and dignity in all your relationships.
Positive: Build Relationships with Reciprocal Energy
As humans, our societies have primed us for generations to return favors that we give to others as a mechanism to build trust in our communities. While this principle is not always honored, it very often is and can serve as a way for us to improve our workplace strategy as well.
Very small favors, like giving someone a Coca Cola, can prime people to understand your position more favorably or give back to you in subtle ways too because people feel an obligation to give back.
Note that this can also border on manipulation if it’s not done from a place of sincere intention. This is utilized highly effectively by Krishna religious devotees who will often give people a copy of the Bhagavad Gita or flowers as a gift, which is a strong enough heuristic to motivate many people to give even if they do not like the look or feel of the religious devotees.
This also has larger political implications as well. President Johnson was a master at calling in small favors that he had provided to other politicians during his time in the senate to pass major legislative reforms during his time in office. This practice of trading votes or support for priorities is known as “logrolling” and allows for major deals to be made between respective parties in government or at a corporation.
To use this principle for good, we are called on to use it as a way to conserve our energy. Invest your time in people and organizations who are loyal to the reciprocity principle. When they see you giving, they look for ways to give back to you too and acknowledge your contributions. Doing so may set yourself up to achieve strategic victories of your own when it comes time to ask for them to support something they may have otherwise been indifferent to or even opposed to.
This also has implications for giving gifts. For example, giving “superiors” especially in a workplace hierarchy is often a bad strategy, except in rare circumstances, because it can undermine presumed roles of power. It makes the boss, in this case, seem like they are not the provider in the relationship.
However, consider making thoughtful gifts a part of your career or organizing who are on a similar hierarchical level as you or “down the totem pole.”Little things like covering lunch or giving a thoughtful gift that you obtained on vacation can mean a lot to someone later on. Be mindful that too many gifts, unwanted gifts, or gifts of too large of magnitude may trigger people’s natural propensity for reciprocity but still make people feel profoundly uncomfortable or even resentful.
A variation of the reciprocity principle is to ask someone to do something major and then ask them to do something much smaller. For example, a Boy Scout trying to fundraise for his camping troop may ask you to buy $5 tickets to the circus. Yet when you decline, he may then frame his follow up request as a way to make up for any guilt or unfulfilled desire to help that you had from his first request. You may then be primed to buy a few $1 chocolate bars from him in the follow up request.
As far as work is concerned, this raises the strategy of having smaller back up requests to plan ahead if your main request for a particular project’s budget, staffing needs, or flexibility are declined. This can increase your acceptance rate of the make-up request by a factor of three. That is, along with your initial request, does not seem too extreme, according to research.
So again, we see that reciprocality has a positive side and negative side, and this lesson calls on us to use the good and recognize this strategy when it is deployed in a manipulative way.
Negative: “Firehosing” False Information
In order to inoculate ourselves from systems and people who exploit others, it’s also important to understand how psychology is deployed for control.
One profound vulnerability of our human psychology is known colloquially as “fire hosing.” This principle tells us that if someone is exposed to the same message again, and again, and again, and again, and again they start to believe it is true or more plausible.
Authoritarian regimes throughout history have utilized this to great effect, swamping the media ecosystem and public dialogue with a message that creates a scapegoat out of vulnerable groups or repeating claims about their own glory that have no relationship to reality.
It does not matter whether we have a Ph.D. in psychology. We are all vulnerable to this, and many times we don’t even realize that many of our own beliefs, large and small, have been created by simply hearing the same thing over and over again.
This “firehose” of a false belief can be benign: so-called “old wives tales” like “don’t touch injured baby birds or get close because their moms will never come back to them” (not true- very nuanced depending on the species of animal). They can also be quite sinister: a colleague belittling and attacking a colleague in the workplace by constantly highlighting a so-called fault in their work even if the reality is that their performance is normal or even stellar.
Negative: Manipulating Opinions with Choice Framing
Another classic example of psychology weaponized as control is choice framing, in which a person is deceptively told (or it is repeated over and over again) that they only have two choices in a situation.
The entire two-party U.S. political system is built off of this manipulation. “If you don’t vote for X, then Y will win. You have only two choices.” Now the irony of this psychological manipulation is that, at the scale of propaganda that people fall for at the level of a nation state, this logic can be incredibly tempting or self-fulfilling. If everyone else is going to think or act that way, it can be tempting for us to adopt that view.
But the reality is often that you have many different choices - if not in candidates then your own individual actions. Many fundamental changes to the American political system, like the creation of social security for the retired and disabled were born of times of upheaval when people were gravitating toward non-establishment figures and threatening to turn the whole system upside down.
Many fruitful technologies and social processes were born of people in a community simply going to fix their own problems instead of expecting a political system to change. A few classic examples include the Black Panthers serving free food to Oakland Kids, a strategy that the federal government copied to create the national school lunch program to maintain its own legitimacy. Another is that neighbors, from Cincinnati to Roanoke, simply started their own ambulances for emergency transport to the hospital when they felt that police patty-wagons (the predecessor) were unresponsive or discriminatory.
And this principle goes beyond politics too. You don’t have to be a nerd or a jock. You can be both or neither at all. You don’t have to be all in on a cause to care about it. You can do things with passion and love part-time.
Our identities and the actions available to us are never a monolith. And identifying when that paradigm is being used to cow us into a particular action or divide us can help us live happier, healthier, and more informed lives.
In summary, our minds are incredible but vulnerable instruments.
And understanding how these principles work can help us immunize ourselves to those who wish to do us harm and help us work together with others better.
