Modern influence: Introduction

Every waking moment of every day we are making decisions. Some small, some large and some life-changing. Every decision we make has a motivation behind it. It could be something we’re conscious of or something we’re not. It could be what we consider a rational motivation or it could be an irrational one. It could be a ‘good’ reason or a ‘bad’ reason. Nevertheless, whenever we act there is something pushing us toward that action.

Have you ever stopped and wondered why you just bought the thing you had for lunch? Why did you choose that specific flavour of crisps? Why did you go for that specific brand once you decided on a flavour? Are they the crisps you always buy? Is there a sale on? Does the colour of the pack look appealing? Is the copy on the pack particularly enticing? Is it because they are perceived as the healthy choice?

Every day you make thousands of decisions like this. How often do you know, or even question, the ‘real’ reason behind the choices you make?

As a result of millennia of evolution, our brains have been programmed to make decisions and create the reasons behind them as quickly as possible. If it took us several minutes to decide whether the tiger in front of us was friendly or not then we would have died out as a species a long time ago. If we took every possible factor into account when buying our packet of crisps we would starve to death before making a decision. To speed up these decisions we have developed various heuristics, mental shortcuts, in order to decide and act with as little effort as possible.

These days, more than ever before, these shortcuts are necessary because of the sheer volume of stimuli we are subjected to every moment of our lives. We are designed to look for a few key pieces of information in a scenario and then act accordingly. Most of the time these shortcuts are beneficial to us. However, occasionally, they work to our disadvantage and lead us to make decisions that are detrimental.

Robert Cialdini, a professor of Psychology and Marketing, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, sets out and explores six key principles of influence. In a series of articles, I will be using these principles as a starting point to explore the psychology and evolutionary background behind why we make some of the decisions we do and why we are drawn to the products we are. I will be applying Cialdini's principles to the modern-day, relating the concepts and psychology we explore to building more engaging products. Before I dive into these principles let’s have a look at the underlying psychology behind why we make the decisions we do.

Professional reason creators

There are a lot of people spending a lot of money on trying to push us towards certain decisions and certain actions. The aim of marketing and advertising is to provide us with a reason for buying a certain product, using our mental shortcuts, whether they realise it or not, to get us to buy their product.

A very simple example of this was highlighted by David Aaker, a marketing and brand strategy researcher. He noticed that a brand of whiskey, Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey, had managed to go from a struggling brand to a hugely successful one almost overnight. Yet the product hadn’t changed. The reason for the increase in sales was that the company raised the price significantly above that of its competitors. People saw the high price, often an indicator of good quality, took the mental shortcut that this must be a high-quality product and leapt to buy it.

Why do you consider some of the items you own to be more desirable than others? Some of it will be down to general quality but a large part of their personal value will be because of the amount you paid for them. It takes a lot less effort to decide that expensive equals good than it does to compare and contrast the pros and cons of every other product on the market.

Angry fish

Building on the mental shortcut concept I mentioned earlier there is the idea of a ‘click whirr’ response to stimuli. We are conditioned to act in a certain way in response to certain triggers. When a certain cue or trigger is presented to us we are mentally compelled to act in a specific way. More often than not, these trigger responses are predictable. If you understand them and can identify when they come into play they can be manipulated.

The ‘click whirr’ comes from the idea that these automatic trigger response can be thought of as tapes in our mind (remember the noise of old fashioned tapes when they are started). We are presented with a stimulus which corresponds to one of our tapes, the presence of the stimuli presses play on the tape and ‘click whirr’ we respond to the stimuli in a programmed, predictable manner. These ‘click whirr’ responses aren’t limited to human psychology; in the field of Ethology (the study of animal behaviour) these kinds of automatic, instinctive responses to stimuli are called Fixed Action Patterns.

Most animal behaviour is the result of these Fixed Action Patterns. Without the conscious ability to examine an input, a certain stimulus will almost always result in a certain response. Humans have an added layer of conscious thought with which we can assess stimuli and decide on an action. However, in many circumstances, this has proven inadequate at eliminating the effect of our inbuilt fixed action patterns. In fact, a lot of our conscious thought process revolves around justifying the behaviour our fixed action patterns have led us to exhibit after the fact.

The male Stickleback provides a great example of a fixed action pattern. During mating season a male Stickleback’s belly turns red; this acts as a triggering stimulus to other male Sticklebacks. In response to seeing a red belly in their territory the fish become aggressive and will fight the intruder. Normally, this is the desired response; having a rival male in its territory is not something a Stickleback wants nor will be good for its selection as a mate. A biologist named Nickolaas Tinberger showed that presenting only one very specific stimulus to the fish can manipulate the response into one that is less desirable.

Tinberger found that during mating season a male Stickleback will attack anything vaguely resembling a fish with a red belly. The fish ignored realistic-looking Stickleback models without red bellies whilst attacking wooden models that did have red bellies. All the fish is programmed to look for is a red belly. They see a red belly and they attack. It is much more costly to spend time assessing various other stimuli to see whether this intruder is a threat than it is to attack the wrong thing. They err on the side of caution and attack anything with a red belly. A specific stimulus triggers a specific response.

Attacking another fish with a red belly is usually the desired behaviour for the Stickleback, attacking a wooden model with a red belly is not. Manipulating stimuli, therefore, can result in forcing a behaviour that is not desirable or efficient. Marketers and influencers use exactly the same principle, manipulating human stimuli every day.

To us, the high price of the Chivas Regal whiskey is the red belly. We see the high price of the whiskey, ignoring its other qualities, and our innate response is to perceive it as high quality. This is directly equivalent to how the Stickleback sees the red belly, ignores any other qualities (like whether it’s actually a fish) and its innate response is to perceive it as an aggressor.

Provide a stimulus, provoke a response.

We have little oversight of what happens in our subconscious mind so the decisions we make seem to be perfectly rational and a product of our conscious decisions. All marketers and advertisers need to do is stir one of these action patterns in our subconscious, we will rationalise the urge we get to act, consciously rationalise the decision and then act.

Who moved my hand?

One of the pioneering researchers into human consciousness named Benjamin Libet asked participants to move their hand at any given moment and tried to determine at which point the decision to move the hand was made in their brains. Participants were wired up so Libet could see the signals sent by their brains before, during and after they had made the decision to move their hand. He then asked them to move their hand whenever they felt like it. He found that, as expected, there was a spike in brain activity about 200 milliseconds before the action was made; this was what the subject considered the decision point. The surprising result of the experiment was that there was another spike of brain activity approx. 400 milliseconds before the initial conscious decision. This was an activity that occurred before the participant felt they decided to move their hand.

The theory is that the unconscious mind decided to move the wrist without the participant’s conscious mind being aware. Then, shortly after the conscious mind gets wind of the decision, the person consciously decides to move their hand. What we can learn from Libet’s findings is that it is often our subconscious mind which makes a decision and our conscious mind then rationalises the decision trying to make out like it was a conscious choice all along.

Advertisers and marketers try to capitalise on the knowledge that our buying decisions come from deep in our subconscious. They realise that in order to get us to buy a product they need to stir these subconscious urges and we will likely buy their product. A massive part of influence and persuasion is working on activating these subconscious urges. They use the six principles of influence I will be walking you through, whether knowingly or not, in order to activate fixed action patterns we have developed through millennia of evolution. Once these urges have been successfully activated they know it is a matter of time before our conscious mind concedes and a conscious decision is made to buy their products or carry out the action they want from us.

Different systems

Another way to look at our decision-making process is through the lens of Daniel Kahneman’s system thinking. The two systems of thinking Kahneman outlines in his book Thinking Fast and Slow can go some way to explaining why our mind often takes the ‘shortcut’ and ‘click whirrs’ into action. Kahneman divides our decision-making process into two rough systems: system one is the automatic system which is almost like autopilot and can be thought of as our subconscious mind, and system two is the system that is activated when we are really required to think about a problem/stimuli and can be thought of as our conscious mind. Say, for example, you were given two squares and had to identify which was larger. If they were vastly different in size then you would use system one and, without really thinking, point to the larger square. If they were more similar in size then you would need to use system two and think more critically about which is bigger.

When presented with a certain stimuli system one will be activated and without any conscious thought you will be presented with an urge to act, sometimes you will act without system two even being ‘notified’ or coming into action. Usually though, this ‘urge’ or compulsion to act will be surfaced to system two, the thoughtful, conscious part of the brain, and it will then be rationalised and acted upon, in a similar way to how the people in Libet’s experiments decided to move their hands.

Who is in control?

This idea that the conscious mind is not in full control has been discussed throughout history. Plato, through his dialogues with Socrates, talked of the allegory of the charioteer. He describes the human mind as if it is a charioteer pulled by two winged horses. The charioteer represents the ‘rational’ conscious part of the mind, one of the horses represents the pull of moral or ‘good’ impulses and the other horse represents irrational passions and desires. The idea is that although the charioteer has some control, in the end it is the horses that decide the way the mind goes, with the charioteer left trying to control them. We could imagine in this scenario that when the charioteer is pulled off course he would then rationalise that that was really the way he wanted to go in the first place.

Sigmund Freud’s idea of the human psyche contains three distinct parts: id, ego and superego. The ego is the ‘conscious’ part of the psyche, the id is the primitive, instinctive part of the unconscious mind and the superego is the moralising part of the subconscious which takes into account the values and morals of the society you live in and surfaces these moralising urges to the conscious ego. Again, Freud comes to the conclusion that it is not the conscious part of us that is responsible for most of the decisions we make.

Being unaware of the true reasons and origins for our actions may have been evolutionarily beneficial for us as a species. In Alchemy, Rory Sutherland outlines an example using an animal, an idea originally put forward by biologist Robert Trivers. When a hare is being chased by a predator it runs from it in a random zig-zag pattern. If the hare is consciously aware of when it will pivot, the next direction it will take, it could give off cues to its assailant. If the next change of direction remains unknown even to the hare then it gives it the best chance of getting away from whatever is chasing it. The hypothesis is that the hares that don’t know which direction they will go next will survive longer and reproduce more; being unaware of the reason for a decision is an evolutionary advantage. This is speculation and not immediately applicable to human behaviour but is food for thought. Could the role our subconscious plays in forming urges and creating reasons to act without our conscious awareness of the true reasons be a result of it being evolutionarily desirable?

How to lead the horse?

Cialdini’s principles of influence often rely on us using our system one thinking. The brain finds it much easier to use system one and come up with a decision with little effort, so often will take one of these shortcuts to come up with a response. This again goes back to what I mentioned earlier. If the brain weighed up all the factors of a tiger being present in our immediate surroundings and entered system two thinking, then it would take too long for us to decide to flee and humans would have died out millennia ago. Instead we experience a stimulus, we remain in system one thinking, our action patterns ‘click whirr’ into effect, our bodies experience a fight or flight response and we flee.

Influence the horses and you take the charioteer where you want them to go. As professional persuaders know: these horses are predictable. There are specific things the horses will respond to. The task of influencers is to identify what these things are and use them to achieve their aims.

The principles

The 6 principles of influence I will be covering in future posts are as follows:

• Reciprocity: the principle that we are inclined to return favours to people who have done a favour for us in the past.
• Commitment and consistency: the principle that we are inclined to act consistently with our previous actions and keep to our commitments.
• Social proof: the principle that we are inclined to look to others as to how to act and will often act with the pack.
• Authority: the principle that we are inclined to go along with what authority figures tell us to do, i.e take what they say as gospel.
• Liking: the principle that we are more inclined to go along with what people who we like say and ask us to do.
• Scarcity: the principle that we often want things more when we perceive them as scarce.

You can see most of these in action by looking back at the buying crisps example. Reciprocity: have you received a free sample of that specific kind of crisp before? Commitment and consistency: Is this the type you always buy? Social proof: is this the type your friends like or have you just seen several people choose the same flavour? Authority: has some form of authority, such as a Dr on an advert told you these are the healthy option? Liking: is the brand advertised by a well known and liked celebrity figure? Scarcity: is there a limited time sale on?

No matter how small, every decision we make can be, and is, affected by these 6 main principles. As the amount of information we are subjected to on a daily basis continues to rise our brains will be forced to rely more and more on these shortcuts/heuristics in order to not become overwhelmed. The people who understand the shortcuts will be able to massively improve the concentration given to their product. This series will not only be helpful to people who are looking to start using some of these principles to improve their sales/app downloads/website visits it is also incredibly important that each of us as consumers have at least a basic understanding of the tactics used and the psychology behind them as only then will you be able to ‘defend’ against them.

In each article, I will be delving into detail into each of these principles and giving examples of how they are used/how they could be used in the mediums of the modern times, i.e apps and websites. Some of the examples I go through will be fairly common sense and you likely wouldn’t need a theoretical reason why to use them, my aim is to delve a bit deeper into the psychology of why these things work.

You can read as many books on marketing and sales as you like and each will provide novel ‘tactics’ and ways of influencing people. How much more powerful it is if you understand the underlying psychology behind why these methods work. Once you understand what influences humans on a deeper level then you won’t need these books. You will be able to understand sales and marketing on a level which lies behind the surface of every marketing, sales, growth hacking, gamifying, user engagement tactic or method. You will start to understand why you, and every other human, make the decisions you do.