Are You a Cheap Date?
All of us have our price, or so we are told. In our defence, we would like to believe that our price, what we would trade our integrity for, is so high that our sell out would be understandable.
Few of us would accept that our integrity might be had for a few pence, or other cheap tricks.
But the famous social psychologist, Leon Festinger, showed over 50 years ago just how easily we can be bought.
In a remarkable experiment, Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, concluded that
"In short, when an [participant] was induced, by offer of reward, to say something contrary to his private opinion, this private opinion tended to change so as to correspond more closely with what he had said. The greater the reward offered (beyond what was necessary to elicit the behavior) the smaller was the effect."
The full experiment can be read here, and the following is my summary.
- A participant is asked to perform a boring job, as part of an experiment.
- After the boring job is completed, the participant is hired at either $1 or $20 to explain the task to another participant.
- In both cases, the participant is asked to describe the boring job as exciting to the next "participant", who is an actor.
- The participant is then asked, after convincing the actor, how boring the job was, whether the experiment was scientifically useful, etc.
- Those participants who were paid a $1 lied on the survey, describing the boring job as moderately interesting, an experiment of value; those who were bribed $20 felt no need to describe the boring jobs as anything other than dull, with no scientific value.
When I speculate on what I would have done in these circumstances, I find myself being bought for the $1 bribe, too. At the $1 hire, I can see myself lying, but not at the $20 hire. [Recall that this experiment was first done in 1959.] Social psychologists have found this to be a very robust result, having performed the experiment under numerous conditions.
The implications of Festinger and Carlsmith's work are relevant today. Pay for post would seem to entail massive hypocrisy, given the small amounts paid to individuals to blog about "wonderful" consumer goods. We might expect the project to collapse under its own weight, but Festinger and Carlsmith would have argued that the small payments would effectively bring about a change in the blogger's opinion.
Public consumer groups have worried about the use of "shills" by large consumer companies in either word of mouth or buzz marketing. One group, several years ago, contacted the FTC.
"We are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate that shills are not disclosing that they are shills," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. "We've done some deceptive advertising complaints with FTC, and have talked with many audiences over the years about the deception involved in buzz marketing."
But there would be no deception involved, at least from the participants point of view, if they are given small samples and asked to say something about them.
Here is a description of one the companies involved, from the Boston Globe, two years ago.
"Agents aren't paid for their work, but they can collect reward points by participating in campaigns, which are redeemable for goodies, such as an iPod. They're not obligated to be positive in what they say about a new coffee-maker or a business book, but they are expected to file a report with BzzAgent letting the firm know what they've been up to.
Bzzagent is still going strong, and we aren't going to see the end to word of mouth marketing anytime soon.
