It is ...notable that the system painstakingly prevents the total elimination of outstanding obligations. Thus, on the occasion of a marriage, departing guests are given gifts of sweets. In weighing them out, the hostess may say, 'These five are yours,' meaning 'These are a repayment for what you formerly gave me,' and then she adds an extra measure, saying, 'These are mine.' On the next occasion, she will receive these back along with an additional measure which she later returns, and so on.
3. The quote is from Leakey and Lewin (1978).
4. For a fuller discussion, see Tiger and Fox (1971).
5. The experiment is reported formally in Regan (1971).
6. The statement appears in Mauss (1954).
7. Surprise is an effective compliance producer in its own right. People who are surprised by a request will often comply because they are momentarily unsure of themselves and, consequently, influenced easily. For example, the social psychologists Stanley Milgram and John Sabini (1975) have shown that people riding on the New York subway were twice as likely to give up their seats to a person who surprised them with the request 'Excuse me. May I have your seat?' than to one who forewarned them first by mentioning to a fellow passenger that he was thinking of asking for someone's seat (56 percent vs. 28 percent).
8. It is interesting that a cross-cultural study has shown that those who break the reciprocity rule in the reverse direction—by giving without allowing the recipient an opportunity to repay—are also disliked for it. This result was found to hold for each of the three nationalities investigated—Americans, Swedes, and Japanese. See Gergen et al.
(1975) for an account of the study.
9. The Pittsburgh study was done by Greenberg and Shapiro. The data on women's sexual obligations were collected by George, Gournic, and McAfee (1988).
10. To convince ourselves that this result was no fluke, we conducted two more experiments testing the effectiveness of the rejection-then-retreat trick. Both showed results similar to the first experiment. See Cialdini et al. (1975) for the details of all three.
11. The Israeli study was conducted in 1979 by Schwartzwald, Raz, and Zvibel.
12. The
13. The source for the quotes is Magruder (1974).
14.
15. Another way of gauging the effectiveness of a request technique is to examine the bottom-line proportion of individuals who, after being asked, complied with the request. Using such a measure, the rejection- then-retreat procedure was more than four times more effective than the procedure of asking for the smaller request only. See Miller et al.
(1976) for a complete description of the study.
16. The blood-donation study was reported by Cialdini and Ascani
(1976).
17. The UCLA study was performed by Benton, Kelley, and Liebling in 1972.
18. A variety of other business operations use the no-cost information offer extensively. Pest-exterminator companies, for instance, have found that most people who agree to a free home examination give the extermination job to the examining company, provided they are convinced that it is needed. They apparently feel an obligation to give their business to the firm that rendered the initial, complimentary service. Knowing that such customers are unlikely to comparisonshop for this reason, unscrupulous pest-control operators will take advantage of the situation by citing higher-than-competitive prices for work commissioned in this way.
CHAPTER 3 (PAGES 57-113)
1. The racetrack study was done twice, with the same results, by Knox and Inkster (1968). See Rosenfeld, Kennedy, and Giacalone (1986) for evidence that the tendency to believe more strongly in choices, once made, applies to guesses in a lottery game, too.
2. It is important to note that the collaboration was not always intentional. The American investigators defined collaboration as 'any kind of behavior which helped the enemy,' and it thus included such diverse activities as signing peace petitions, running errands, making radio appeals, accepting special favors, making false confessions, informing on fellow prisoners, or divulging military information.
3. The Schein quote comes from his 1956 article 'The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War: A Study of Attempted Brainwashing.'
4. See Greene (1965) for the source of this advice.
5. Freedman and Fraser published their data in the
6. The quote comes from Freedman and Fraser (1966).
7. See Segal (1954) for the article from which this quote originates.
8. See Jones and Harris (1967).
9. It is noteworthy that the housewives in this study (Kraut, 1973) heard that they were considered charitable at least a full week before they were asked to donate to the Multiple Sclerosis Association.
10. From 'How to Begin Retailing,' Amway Corporation.
11. See Deutsch and Gerard (1955) and Kerr and MacCoun (1985) for the details of these studies.
12. From Whiting, Kluckhohn, and Anthony (1958).
13. From Gordon and Gordon (1963).
14. The survey was conducted by Walker (1967).
15. The electric-shock experiment was published seven years after the Aronson and Mills (1959) study by Gerard and Mathewson (1966).
16. Young (1965) conducted this research.
17. The robot study is reported fully in Freedman (1965).
18. The reader who wishes stronger evidence for the action of the lowball tactic than my subjective observations in the car showroom may refer to articles that attest to its effectiveness under controlled, experimental conditions: Cialdini et al. (1978), Burger and Petty (1981), Brownstein and Katzev (1985), and Joule (1987).
19. A formal report of the energy-conservation project appears in Pallak et al. (1980).
20. It is not altogether unusual for even some of our most familiar quotations to be truncated by time in ways that greatly modify their character. For example, it is not
21. See Zajonc (1980) for a summary of this evidence.
22. This is not to say that what we feel about an issue is always different from or always to be trusted more than what we think about it. However, the data are clear that our emotions and beliefs often do not point in the same direction. Therefore, in situations involving a decisional commitment likely to have generated supporting rationalizations, feelings may well provide the truer counsel. This would be especially so when, as in the question of Sara's happiness, the fundamental issue at hand concerns an emotion (Wilson, 1989).
CHAPTER 4 (PAGES 114-166)
1. The general evidence regarding the facilitative effect of canned laughter on responses to humor comes from such studies as Smyth and Fuller (1972), Fuller and Sheehy-Skeffinton (1974), and Nosanchuk and Lightstone the last of which contains the indication that canned laughter is most effective for poor material.
2. The researchers who infiltrated the Graham Crusade and who provided the quote are Altheide and Johnson (1977).
3. See Bandura, Grusec, and Menlove (1967) and Bandura and Men-love (1968) for full descriptions of the dog-phobia treatment.
Any reader who doubts that the seeming appropriateness of an action is importantly influenced by the number of others performing it might try a small experiment. Stand on a busy sidewalk, pick out an empty spot in the sky or on a tall building, and stare at it for a full minute. Very little will happen around you during that time— most people will walk past without glancing up, and virtually no one will stop to stare with you. Now, on the next
