Why is it so difficult to pull out of a social engagement you have already committed to going to? Why is it so difficult for you to change your opinion even when there is strong evidence that you are wrong? Why is it so hard to leave a relationship you know isn’t quite right for you? Why do you gradually move towards doing something you would have been much less likely to do if it was flat out offered to you?
The answer to all of these questions is the principle of commitment and consistency. In master persuader, Robert Cialdini’s, words: “It is, quite simply, our desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done”. Once we decide on an opinion or course of action we will want to continue to think or act consistently with that initial decision. We want to appear consistent to both ourselves and to other people.
Similar to the other principles of influence this is a way our minds try and minimise cognitive load. If we had to weigh up every decision and think about its validity before acting we would be exhausted by the time we leave the house. However, if we put this effort into making a decision once and then act consistently with that decision in future a lot less effort is required; our decision making process speeds up considerably.
This load reducing and speed increasing heuristic isn’t without drawbacks. Once we have made our initial decision on an opinion it is very difficult to change our mind and go back on what we have said. This is due to our innate wish to remain consistent with ourselves. We also strive to make sure we remain consistent in the view of other people. This comes back to the evolutionary advantage being a trustworthy, reliable and consistent person gave us. In our ancestor’s times, tribes and the beginning of societies were formed relying heavily on trust. If you were deemed to be a trustworthy and reliable person you would be seen as a better mate, would produce more offspring and so consistent behaviour is selected for. As with all evolutionarily beneficial traits, the desire to remain consistent in our acts remains an essential part of our psychology. If we have publicly committed to an opinion we are very reluctant to then publicly renounce that opinion.
As with all quirks of our psychology, marketers and salespeople have found ways to use our bias for consistency against us. Through getting us to first commit to small actions and decisions, they can reduce our resistance to bigger actions and decisions down the line. We will explore this in depth later on but first, let’s look into the psychological underpinnings of this principle.
Small steps, big mountain
Think about a time you made a big decision, let’s say the decision to buy a new, expensive, item. Chances are you spent days or weeks leading up to it making lots of smaller decisions, perhaps without even realising. You will have decided that you are in need of the item, you would have decided to look into the price of the item, you would have decided on the brand of the item you prefer and so on. These smaller decisions brought you closer and closer to deciding on actually buying the item until the gap remaining to buy it felt like it wasn’t too big of a decision at all.
You can liken this big decision to reaching the summit of a large mountain and the small decisions to steps. From the bottom, it looks insurmountable and something you would never be able to climb. However, through many small, low effort steps you are able to reach the top. Each of these small steps can be likened to a small change of opinion or an action taken leading up to you buying a product or making a decision. The more of these small steps you take the harder it is to look down and consider wasting all of the effort already put in by abandoning the climb. If I have put this much effort into getting to where I am it must be worthwhile. In this way, you can end up making a big decision that you never would have if you had considered making it in one fell swoop.
This feeling of looking down at the steps already taken and considering calling off the climb is known as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance arises when you are faced with something which conflicts with or is at odds with, your current beliefs. This conflict is uncomfortable and increases cognitive load. The brain’s answer to the conflicting information is either to ignore it or bend it to fit your current worldview. Looking at the next step you are about to take and considering not taking it will provoke a feeling of dissonance. You have already started this journey and so believe this mountain is a good one to climb, thinking about not taking the next step is dissonant with your current worldview and causes discomfort. We tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, meaning we will create evidence that it is in fact a good mountain to climb and therefore the easier decision is to take the next step.
The Chinese method
Another fairly extreme example comes from Chinese prisoners of war camps during the Korean war. Once an American soldier was captured the aim was to get them to come round to the Chinese way of thinking, the ideology of communism, and eventually defect. They could have attempted this through torture and threat but this had failed previously to create committed converts. What they did was much more subtle and enabled the captives to believe they had come to support the Chinese by their own volition.
First, they started by getting the captives to copy out pro-communist statements. This is a tiny concession and most prisoners would have done this with little resistance. This was the first step in creating a new belief. Next, they were given tests where they were rewarded for pro-communist answers, again, so what? The prisoners didn’t have to believe what they wrote. Then there were competitions for writing political essays supporting the Chinese cause with small prizes such as a pack of cigarettes.
The captives were eager to send letters to people back home and the Chinese were more than willing to let them as long as there was some pro Chinese sentiment contained within. Once the captives had sent these letters they had committed publicly to defending communism. Without lifting a finger the Chinese had managed to get a large number of American soldiers, at least on the surface, to be pro-communist and send letters to this effect to their friends and family back home. It would now be psychologically difficult for these captives to feel as strongly against communism, and the Chinese, as they did previously. A huge proportion of American soldiers ended up collaborating with the Chinese communists in some form, some even defecting to act as spies for the Chinese. There is at least one documented case of an American prisoner of war deciding to remain in China after the war.
Christmas tricks
Persuasion experts are very aware of our inbuilt urge to remain consistent and are more than happy to take advantage of it. An example Cialdini gives is how shops con shoppers into buying toys after the busy Christmas period when there is normally a lull. Naturally, shops want to keep sales going into January.
A way the crafty persuaders did this was to advertise a certain toy heavily before Christmas, children would see it and pester their parents to get it for them. The parents acquiesced either publicly to the children or internally to themselves but when they went to the shops the toy had all sold out. They now had to get a replacement toy for Christmas and not the specific toy that they had agreed to buy. The child would have likely been satisfied by this other toy but in the parent's mind there was dissonance as they had agreed to buy the advertised toy. Christmas then passed and a new advert came on television saying that the toy was back in stock. What did the parents do? They were reminded of the inconsistency in their minds, which most likely surfaced through a feeling of guilt, of agreeing to buy the toy and having been unable to. A large proportion of parents rushed to the shops in order to purchase the toy. So what made the toy sell out before Christmas? Was it just the rush to buy the toy? No, the toy companies deliberately undersupplied shops with the toys in order to induce this effect. The head of a leading toy company said of one of these toy ‘shortages’: “I’ll try, but if I can’t get it for you now, I’ll get it for you later”.
Another principle of influence, scarcity, which I will be addressing in a future article, is probably also at play here but a large factor for this technique’s success would have been the internal and external commitment the parent made to buy their child a specific toy.
Hazing at IKEA
Another side of this heuristic is that people put more value in things or opinions they have had to go through some sort of hardship or effort to attain. An example of this, detailed in a paper by researchers from Harvard Business School, is the IKEA effect: ‘The increase in valuation of self made products”.
If you spend an afternoon struggling away building a bookshelf, you will put more value in this than one that came preassembled. If you have committed to spending an afternoon, and probably getting frustrated by, building this bookshelf, in order to justify the effort in your mind you consider this bookshelf high value. Why would you have put this much effort in if this bookshelf isn’t worth anything? You have spent a lot of time and effort ‘climbing the mountain’ and so to justify this expense to yourself you put more value into the bookshelf.
Climbing the app mountain
Marketers and salespeople in the modern times, consciously or without realising, manipulate this heuristic into getting us to buy, and remain committed, to things we otherwise may not be interested in. As mentioned above, when you publicly commit to something, whether an opinion, person, or product, you will be inclined to remain consistent with this commitment.
Companies often offer some form of deal or discount if you share their app/product with a friend. This is a successful way of gaining customers through social proof (which I will discuss in a later article); the people the app is shared with will likely trust the sharer and be more willing to sign up. It is also a good way of increasing loyalty to the product of the person sharing. If they have shared the app then they have publicly committed to using it and being an advocate of it. As we saw above it is very hard to withstand the dissonance created when you go back on a publicly held opinion and so the customer’s opinion of the app or product will increase each time they share it.
Free trials work in a similar way. Companies give users a free trial of a product, say for a month, the user gets used to using the app/service and at the end of the free trial feels fairly committed to it. They start by asking for very small commitments, i.e signing up for a free trial; you think “Why not? All they have is my email and I get a month of use for free”. Next, they might ask you to pay for certain small parts of the service; you think “Why not? I want to get the best out of my trial and I may as well pay this negligible amount of money to try this feature out”. At the end of the month, you may be offered a discount month and you think “Why not? This is a very small price to pay and there are a few more things I want to try out.”. Then at the end of the month, you have taken all of these small steps which seemed very unimportant but now there is only a small distance from the step you are currently on and committing to the full price monthly fee. One of the essences of this principle of influence is the small steps the influencer gets you to make which build and build until it’s much easier to get you to make the decision they want.
Contrast the likelihood of a person who has gone through the above process and one who is straight up faced with the full monthly fee from the start. Who do you think is more likely to pay the fee? This is why this principle is so effective, each small step you take, whether an action or just a change of opinion, makes it more likely you will take the next one. Your mind doesn’t need to weigh up all the pros and cons, it just remembers you took the last step, wants to act consistently and reduce cognitive load, so decides that you may as well take the next step.
The principle works similarly in the gamification of apps and websites. People get continued reinforcement of how much they have used the app, each point they score is a small step towards commitment, and so get a clear picture of how much time and effort they have put in, hence highlighting their commitment. In order to remain consistent in their mind and to explain the time spent using the app, they come to the conclusion that it must have been a worthwhile use of their time. If they are ‘competing’ against friends then it is also apparent to their friends how much time and effort they have spent on the app and therefore multiplies the commitment effect.
Another good way of increasing loyalty to something is to get someone to publicly or internally commit to a positive viewpoint. They have given their support and so in the future will find it hard to act in contradiction to their initial opinion. Consider the effect of someone giving a positive review of your app or product. If you can get someone to leave a positive review then they have committed both internally and publicly to supporting your product. It will create dissonance if they were to later contradict this opinion and so by leaving a review they will have gone further up the mountain of supporting your product and will be more likely to spend money on it and evangelise about it in the future. This of course works both ways, if they leave a bad review they will also be committing to that opinion so having an actually good product, as always, is of utmost importance.
Similar to leaving a review, another way people commit to a favourable opinion is through the sharing of an app or product with a friend. Apps like Monzo, Chip and many others offer decent incentives for sharing their product with your friends. By sharing the product you are publicly vouching for it and putting your support behind it. The more you share it, the stronger your support of the app will get. It will create great dissonance to think of the app in a bad light, you want to remain consistent that you are helping your friend out and so the app must be good. A point here is that if the incentive is too attractive then your mind will likely realise that that is the sole reason you are sharing the app and not just because it is a decent app. The incentive should be just enough to push people into sharing an app they already believe in and genuinely think their friends would benefit from.
Head in the clouds
The extensive qualifications and training that Amazon web services (AWS) offer and requires is a good modern example of how the commitment and consistency heuristic helps to build loyalty to a tool. AWS is a cloud platform that allows users to host websites and provides pretty much every tool needed to host a website and many other things. It is a very complicated piece of software and so requires a lot of training to use. AWS themselves offer a variety of training courses and examinations. This training is fairly expensive and requires a large amount of effort to get through, if you complete an examination you will want to justify that money and effort to yourself. How do you do that? By being a vocal proponent of AWS and maintaining the opinion that it is the best cloud platform.
This is a genius marketing/persuasion tactic by Amazon. People pay to train in the software you are offering, you not only get the money from the training but also end up with a trainee who is devoted to your platform and in order to remain consistent with their actions and opinions will evangelise about it. It is unclear that this is a conscious tactic by Amazon, and certainly not a unique one, but it definitely works.
Out of the six principles considered in these articles, this is one of the most powerful. In persuading you into what seems like tiny actions and changes of opinion, someone can manipulate you into doing something you never would have dreamed of if they had asked you outright at the start.
Staying consistent today
Hopefully, the mechanics of this principle of influence are clear and you can see how professional marketers and salespeople could use it to increase sales of their products.
As mentioned earlier, a good way of increasing loyalty to something is to get someone to publicly or internally commit to a positive viewpoint. They have given their support and so in the future will find it hard to act in contradiction to their initial opinion. Consider the effect of someone giving a positive review of your app or product. If you can get someone to leave a positive review of your product then they have committed both internally and publicly to supporting your product. It will create dissonance if they were to later contradict this opinion and so by leaving a review they will have gone further up the mountain of supporting your product and will be more likely to spend money on it and evangelise about it in the future. This of course works both ways, if they leave a bad review they will also be committing to that opinion so having an actually good product, as always, is of utmost importance.
Similar to leaving a review, another way people commit to a favourable opinion is through the sharing of an app or product with a friend. Apps like Monzo, Chip and many others offer decent incentives for sharing their product with your friends. By sharing the product you are publicly vouching for it and putting your support behind it. The more you share it, the stronger your support of the app will get. It will create great dissonance to think of the app in a bad light, you want to remain consistent that you are helping your friend out and so the app must be good. A point here is that if the incentive is too attractive then your mind will likely realise that that is the sole reason you are sharing the app and not just because it is a decent app. The incentive should be just enough to push people into sharing an app they already believe in and genuinely think their friends would benefit from.
The answers to the questions posed at the beginning of the article are hopefully now clearer. Why is it hard to pull out of a social engagement? You have committed both to yourself and publicly that you are going and want to remain consistent with yourself and your friends and so experience dissonance when trying to go back on that commitment. Why is it so hard to change your opinion even when there is strong evidence opposing it? Same as above, you have committed to this opinion both personally and, more than likely, publicly. You have spent years thinking this, so it would evoke a large amount of dissonance if you consider you have been wrong all this time and so you bend the evidence to fit your opinion or just ignore it entirely. Why is it so hard to leave a relationship that’s wrong for you? Once again to reduce the dissonance created by considering you may have spent years in this relationship you delude yourself into thinking it’s not that bad. Why do you end up doing something you would never normally consider doing? You will have taken many, seemingly, small steps leading up to the act. Each a small bend of your ethics, each committing you to a position you wouldn’t normally occupy. In the end, the final step seems just as small and to reduce dissonance you comply.
A lot of the tactics and methods derived from this principle appear to be commonsense and companies will have likely included these features in apps with little thought as to why they work how they do. The sooner you understand your mind’s shortcuts and biases, the sooner you can start identifying whether the action you are taking is one you would make if left to your own devices. At this point, you can start ‘defending’ against these principles. If you are aware of how important each small step up the mountain is you are less likely to get to the top unwittingly.
