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 occurred 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 the fact that the news carrying the scarcity of information was itself scarce made it especially persuasive.
OPTIMAL CONDITIONS
Much like the other effective weapons of influence, the scarcity principle is more effective at some times than at other times. An important practical problem, then, is to find out when scarcity works best on us. A great deal can be learned in this regard from an experiment devised by social psychologist Stephen Worchel. The basic procedure used by Worchel and his research team was simple: Participants in a consumerpreference study were given a chocolate-chip cookie from a jar and asked to taste and rate its quality. For half of the raters, the jar contained ten cookies; for the other half, it contained just two. As we might expect from the scarcity principle, when the cookie was one of the only two available, it was rated more favorably than when it was one of ten. The cookie in short supply was rated as more desirable to eat in the future, more attractive as a consumer item, and more costly than the identical cookie in abundant supply.
Although this pattern of results provides a rather striking validation of the scarcity principle, it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. Once again, we see that a less-available item is more desired and valued. The real worth of the cookie study comes from two additional findings. Let's take them one at a time, as each deserves a thorough consideration.
The first of these noteworthy results involved a small variation in the experiment's basic procedure. Rather than rating the cookies under conditions of constant scarcity, some participants were first given a jar of ten cookies that was then replaced by a jar of two cookies. Thus, before taking a bite, certain of the participants saw their abundant supply of cookies reduced to a scarce supply. Other participants, however, knew only scarcity of supply from the outset, since the number of cookies in their jars was left at two. With this procedure, the researchers were seeking to answer a question about types of scarcity: Do we value more those things that have recently become less available to us, or those things that have always been scarce? In the cookie experiment, the answer was plain. The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.
The idea that newly experienced scarcity is the more powerful kind applies to situations well beyond the bounds of the cookie study. For example, social scientists have determined that such scarcity is a primary cause of political turmoil and violence. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this argument is James C. Davies, who states that we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal in those conditions. Thus it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people— who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things—who are especially liable to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them.
Davies has gathered persuasive evidence for his novel thesis from a range of revolutions, revolts, and internal wars, including the French, Russian, and Egyptian revolutions as well as such domestic uprisings as Dorr's Rebellion in nineteenth-century Rhode Island, the American Civil War, and the urban black riots of the 1960s. In each case, a time of increasing well-being preceded a tight cluster of reversals that burst into violence.
The racial conflict in America's cities during the mid-1960s represents a case in point that many of us can recall. At the time, it was not uncommon to hear the question, 'Why now?' It didn't seem to make sense that within their three-hundred-year history, most of which had been spent in servitude and much of the rest in privation, American blacks would choose the socially progressive sixties in which to revolt. Indeed, as Davies points out, the two decades after the start of World War II had brought dramatic political and economic gains to the black population. In 1940, blacks faced stringent legal restrictions in such areas as housing, transportation, and education; moreover, even with the same amount of education, the average black family earned only a bit more than half of its counterpart white family. Fifteen years later, much had changed. Federal legislation had struck down as unacceptable formal and informal attempts to segregate blacks in schools, public places, housing, and employment settings. Large economic advances had been made, too; black family income had risen from 56 percent to 80 percent of that of a comparably educated white family.
But then, according to Davies's analysis of social conditions, this rapid progress was stymied by events that soured the heady optimism of previous years. First, political and legal change proved substantially easier to enact than social change. Despite all the progressive legislation of the forties and fifties, blacks perceived that most neighborhoods, jobs, and schools remained segregated. Thus the Washington-based victories came to feel like defeats at home. For example, in the four years following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision to integrate all public schools, blacks were the targets of 530 acts of violence (direct intimidation of black children and parents, bombings, and burnings) designed to prevent school integration. This violence generated the perception of another sort of setback in black progress. For the first time since well before World War II, when lynchings had occurred at an average rate of seventy-eight per year, blacks had to be concerned about the basic safety of their families. The new violence was not limited to the education issue, either. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations of the time were frequently confronted by hostile crowds—and police.
Still another type of downturn occurred—in pocketbook prog-ress. In 1962, the income of a black family had slid back to 74 percent of that of a similarly educated white family. By Davies's argument, the most illuminating aspect of this 74 percent figure is not that it represented a long-term increase in prosperity from pre-1940s levels but that it represented a short-term decline from the flush mid-1950s levels. In the next year came the Birmingham riots and, in staccato succession, scores of violent demonstrations, building toward the major upheavals of Watts, Newark, and Detroit.
In keeping with a distinct historical pattern of revolution, blacks in the United States were more rebellious when their prolonged progress was curtailed somewhat than they were before it began. This pattern offers a valuable lesson for would-be rulers: When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is that, in so doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before. And should these now
We can look to much more recent events in the former Soviet Union for evidence that this basic rule still holds. After decades of repression, Mikhail Gorbachev began granting the Soviet populace new liberties, privileges, and choices via the twin policies of glasnost and perestroika. Alarmed by the direction their nation was taking, a small group of government, military, and KGB officials staged a coup, placing Gorbachev under house arrest and announcing on August 19, 1991, that they had assumed power and were moving to reinstate the old order. Most of the world imagined that the Soviet people, known for their characteristic acquiescence to subjugation, would passively yield as they had always done.
But these were not to be normal times. For one thing, Gorbachev had not governed in the tradition of the czars or Stalin or any of the line of oppressive postwar rulers who had not allowed even a breath of freedom to the masses. He had ceded them certain rights and choices. And when these now-established freedoms were threatened, the people lashed out the way a dog would if someone tried taking a fresh bone from its mouth. Within hours of the junta's announcement, thousands were in the streets, erecting barricades, confronting armed troops, surrounding tanks, and defying curfews. The uprising was so swift, so massive, so unitary in its opposition to any retreat from the gains of glasnost that after only three riotous days, the astonished officials relented, surrendering their power and pleading for mercy from President Gorbachev. Had they been students of history—or of psychology—the failed plotters would not have been so surprised by the tidal wave of popular resistance that swallowed their coup. From the vantage point of either discipline, they could have learned an invariant lesson:
