Influence

Ch.8 UNITY: Instructively, the closer the friendship (and the accompanying sense of unity), the stronger the influence of our friends' behaviors on our own. In a massive political-election experiment involving sixty-one million people, a Facebook message urging them to vote was most successful if it included photographs of Facebook friends who had already voted and, critically, one of the photos was of a close friend.

Ch.8 UNITY: "Macy's Fashion Director allows users to create an outfit and then collect opinions and votes from friends about buying the outfit. Using Fashion Director, Macy's was able to double its Facebook 'fans' to 1.8 million, and increase sales by 30% during the time it was launched. Levi's Friends Store creates personalized stores made up of items that friends like. The Store attracted more than 30,000 fans when it launched, and allowed Levi's to increase its social reach to over 9 million fans. The Friends Store has a 15% higher sales rate and a 50% higher average order value."

Ch.8 UNITY: "We" relationships are not those that allow people to say, "Oh, that person is like us." They are the ones that allow people to say, "Oh, that person is one of us." The unity rule of influence can thus be worded: People are inclined to say yes to someone they consider one of them. The experience of unity is not about simple similarities (although those can work, too, via the liking principle). It's about identities, shared identities. It's about tribe-like categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: Reminders of existing commitments possess yet another bo-nus. They not only restore the commitment but also appear to strengthen it by augmenting one's related self-image. Compared to consumers who had previously performed pro-environmental actions but were not reminded of them, those who did receive such reminders came to see themselves as more environmentally minded and then became uniquely more likely to purchase environmentally friendly versions of products—including light bulbs, paper towels, deodorants, and detergents. Thus, asking people to recall prior commitments to environmentalism isn't just an easy way to stimulate consistent subsequent responding; it is also a particularly effective way, because such reminders intensify one's self-image as an environmentalist.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: I ran an experiment designed to get university students to agree to perform an unpleasant activity—to wake up very early to participate in a 7:00 a.m. study "on thinking processes." When calling one sample of students, we immediately informed them of the 7:00 a.m. starting time. Only 24 percent were willing to participate. However, when calling a second sample of students, we threw a low-ball. We first asked if they wanted to participate in a study of thinking processes, and after they responded—56 percent of them positively—we mentioned the 7:00 a.m. start time and gave them the chance to change their minds. None did. What's more, in keeping with their commitment to participate, 95 percent of the low-balled students did appear for the study at 7:00 a.m. as promised.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: Owen Thomas wrote in an amazea tone in The New York Times recently how he managed to lose 83 pounds using a mobile app. He used MyFitnessPal. The developers of the app discovered that users who exposed their calorie counts to friends lost 50% more weight than a typical user. It seems obvious that a social network can help you make a change, but it is less clear how. Many cite social proof-looking to others for how to behave as influential, but what better explains transformation is commitment and consistency. The more public our commitment, the more pressure we feel to act according to our commitment and therefore appear consistent.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: In the late 1990s, I asked Fred DeLuca, the founder and CEO of Subway restaurants, why he insisted in putting the prediction "10,000 stores by 2001" on the napkins in every single Subway. It didn't seem to make sense, as I knew he was a long way from his goal, that consumers didn't really care about his plan, and his franchi. sees were deeply troubled by the competition associated with such a goal. His answer was, "If I put my goals down in writing and make them known to the world, I'm committed to achieving them." Needless to say, he not only has, he's exceeded them.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you've got something for which to aim—and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You'll be off and running.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: Savvy politicians have long used the committing character of labels to great advantage. One of the best at it was former president of Egypt Anwar Sadat. Before international negotiations began, Sadat would assure his bargaining opponents that they and the citizens of their country were widely known for their cooperativeness and fairness. With this kind of flattery, he not only created positive feelings but also connected his opponent's identities to a course of action that served his goals. According to master negotiator Henry Kissinger, Sadat was successful because he got others to act in his interests by giving them a reputation to uphold.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: Online sites often want visitors to register by providing information about themselves. But 86 percent of users report that they sometimes quit the registration process because the form is too long or prying. What have site developers done to overcome this barrier without reducing the amount of information they get from cus-tomers? They've reduced the average number of fields of requested information on the form's first page. Why? They want to give users the feeling of having started and finished the initial part of the process. As design consultant Diego Poza put it, "It doesn't matter if the next page has more fields to fill out (it does), due to the principle of commitment and consistency, users are much more likely to follow through." The available data have proved him right: Just reducing the number of first-page fields from four to three increases registration completions by 50 percent.

Ch.7 COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY: Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: you can use small commitments to manipulate a person's self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into "public servants," prospects into "customers," and prisoners into "collaborators." Once you've got a person's self-image where you want it, that person should comply naturally with a whole range of requests aligned with this new self-view.