Why You fell Hard for Mary Kay - Compliance Tricks
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"Someone commented, "I know we talk about brain washing here, and cult dynamics, but honestly I still haven't read a good reason why this worked on me and how it still works on women who normally would NOT be so compliant."The simple answer is, because you are human and you are hardwired to take shortcuts in decision processes, and also hardwired to react to certain influences.
You can overcome the wired effects, but you have to be aware of what triggers them."
This is the standard Cialdini "click-whirr" decision making model, which stands in contrast to use model of reasonable decision making: the standard disclosure of material facts and reasoned decision making prevents us from making bad decisions.
There is a lot that regulators could learn from the Cialdini model, and I want to expand on the resources that Lazy Gardens points to her article.
"An excellent website explains how we are influenced, how influence is exploited, and how to defend against being exploited. It's too complex to explain in a blog post, but it's too important to pass up. Bookmark this post and read the links at your leisure.The site The Lucifer Effect is by Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who ran the infamous "Stanford prison experiment ." "The enduring interest in the Stanford Prison Experiment over many decades comes, I think, from the experiment's startling revelation of "transformation of character"--of good people suddenly becoming perpetrators of evil as guards or pathologically passive as prisoners in response to situational forces acting on them."
(By way of commentary, having read Zimbardo's book, the "startling transformation of character" is not startling at all - the participants were actively encouraged to play out their roles to the hilt, and they did.)
There is a good set of links at Zimbardo's site about resisting influence.
But I want to focus on one particular link, to Anthony Pratkanis.
What is missing from Zimbardo's discussion of Pratkanis is the latter's unique and original contribution of the con criminal's use of a "phantom dream" or "phantom goal".
Here is Pratkanis discussing how psuedo sciences compliance techniques work:
"Holy cow, why do people spend $3.95 a minute to talk on the telephone with a 'psychic' who has never foretold the future?""Holy cow, why do people believe that an all-uncooked vegan diet is natural and therefore nutritious?"
"Holy cow, why would two state troopers chase the planet Venus across state lines thinking it was an alien spacecraft?"
"Holy cow, why do people spend millions of dollars each year on subliminal tapes that just don't work?"
I will describe how a social psychologist answers the holy cow question. Social psychology is the study of social influence__how human beings and their institutions influence and affect each other. For the past seven decades, social psychologists have been developing theories of social influence and have been testing the effectiveness of various persuasion tactics in their.
It is my thesis that many persuasion tactics discovered by social psychologists are used every day, perhaps not totally consciously, by the promoters of pseudoscience.
To see how these tactics can be used to sell flimflam, let's pretend for a moment that we wish to have our very own pseudoscience.
Here are nine common propaganda tactics that should result in success.
1. Create a Phantom
The first thing we need to do is to create a phantom __ an unavailable goal that looks real and possible; it looks as if it might be obtained with just the right effort, just the right belief, or just the right amount of money, but in reality it can't be obtained."
This is the critical pitch in all con criminal's arsenal - once they know enough about you, or you have self-selected yourself, the magic of the phantom dream takes over. Much like the fantasy rides at DisneyLand or some other theme park, we can be persuaded to act as if the false is real - relatively easily.
