This is an insight of indepth, priceless information focused primarily on influence psychology. This guide aims to divulge the techniques you need to harness to truly manipulate and persuade people (if you’re a nasty, manipulative person STOP READING THIS NOW!). And if you’re smart you’ll be able to twist these examples, creating your own methods, making it even easier to get what you want. Everything documented is real, and has been tested and recorded over hundreds of years by the most renowned psychologists ever to set foot on Earth. You will be able to pick this up quicky and easily, as I have excluded any self important, protentious waffle.

The Urge to Get More for Less

People want to get the most and pay the least for their choices. The manipulators goal is usually to produce a distinct, automatic compliance from people, so they say yes without thinking first.

We all have our own pre programmed routines which usually work to our benefit. However, if someone activates the right trigger mechanism, they can be played at the wrong times, getting us to say yes in situations that we usually would not. And psychologists with indepth studies, taken place over several decades, have begun to indentify these blindly automated reponses in humans, as well as many other species.

This Harvard Social Psychologist Discovered

If we ask someone to do us a favour we will be more successful if we use the word because.
“Can I use the phone ‘because’ I really need to make a call” would get a better response than “Can I use the phone”. And strangely enough, it was the word ‘because’ that actually activated the trigger for our automatic response to comply.

Steriotyping

A Jewellery shop owner could not sell her stock, so in a written message, she asked her assistant to put the stock up for sale for 1/2 price for the next day. However, her assistant misread the 1/2 as a 2, and due to the owners terrible handwriting, put the stock for up for two times the original asking price. And to her complete surprise, when the owner had returned the next day, the stock had sold out completely. The reason the stock sold was because well-off holiday makers were mistakenly using steriotyping as a buying guide, thinking that expensive jewellery had to be the best quality jewellery; and that is where they were wrong. In the example just mentioned, price was the trigger for the automated response to buy.

Steriotyping is a short cut that we, as humans use to assess specific conditions. Steriotyping is essential, of course because we don’t have the time to look deeply enough in to every tiny detail before we make decisions. A lot of the time we need to make decisions quickly. Sometimes mistakes are made, just like the customers made the mistake in the example above with the expensive jewellery. But other times steriotyping can be a very effective tool and save us large amounts of time.

Our automatic response patterns work so well that it is a human weakness and makes us exceptionally vulnerable to people who know exactly what triggers to activate to exploit them. And if you are lucky you know about them, they are weapons of influence which you can use to your advantage, manipulating people without the appearance of manipulation.

Triggers and automatic responses stem from psychological principles and steriotypes.

Contrast

When two very different items are shown to us one after another, our senses will perceive the second as a lot more different than it actually is in reality. So if you were to first of all feast your eyes on a hot super model, but straight afterwards try it with a woman of average attactiveness, you’ll perceive the average woman as a lot less attractive than she actually is. Not only does this work with women, but it works with lots of things. And it works with all of your five senses, not just sight. For example, psychophysics students are asked to sit infront of three bowls of water; one hot, one cold, and one luke warm. They are then asked to place their left hand in the hot bowl, right in the cold bowl, and hold them there for a bit. A few minutes after this, they put both hands in to the luke warm water, and to their suprise they feel very different temperatures, even though there hands are in the same bowl.

Cashing in exploiting the contrast principle
Clever salesmen know to present the very expensive items first, because after buying a £1000 suit, an extra shirt for £75, or even a snazzy belt for £60 doesn’t seem so excessive, does it?

Real estate companies use setup properties (tatty looking houses for sale at high prices) to show clients before they reveal the house they really want to sell, so that it looks better by contrast.

Salesmen in shops present the most expensive item to you first. And next, when they show you the more reasonably priced item, it will be seen as more appealing, and this is all due to the contrast principle.

Reciprocation
We as human beings within this culture and society, feel obliged to kindly repay what a person has provided us with. Those who do not repay are negatively labeled, because we disrepect those who continuously take, without any sort of reciprocation. Please keep in mind that the rule of reciprocation is a very powerful tool in influence psychology, overwhelming people with it’s strength, and if used correctly, causing them to comply. Or in other words, if we often do free favours for friends and colleagues, the more indebted they will feel towards us, and the more we will benefit in the long term, twisting the rule of reciprocation for our own benefits.

As a marketing tactic, offering a free sample to potential clients is highly effective because the free sample is a gift, and because of this it can engage the reciprocity rule. This hidden persuasive techinique creates the illusion that the sample is only intended to inform the customer, but we now know they are employing illusive persuasion tactics which are proven to be extremely effective.

A handfull successful companies use a method in where they provide their customers with a taster box including quite a variety of their products. They then leave the taster products with them for a week or so, then come back to collect it. It is on their return when they ask the customer if they would like to buy any of those particular products, and the vast majority say yes.

There was a German soldier whose job was to cross no mans land and make his way in to the enemy trenches and capture the enemy soldiers for interrogation. It was one day when he successfully made his way to the trenches, he surprised a lone soldier who was eating bread at the time and was very easy to disarm. To his surprise, the enemy soldier gave him some of the bread. So affected was the German soldier he could not finish the mission, capturing the enemy.

The reciprocation rule can be exploited, so that it can bring about very unequal results. The first person offers a free gift, and the person repaying feels obligated to return the favour, which is usually substantially larger, in the form of money or a donation of some kind.

This tactic is slightly off beat from the reciprocation rule, and really concerns the contrast principle mentioned earlier. But if I want you to do me a favour, I would first ask for a giant favour, (which I know you will decline) and then after you have rejected this, I would ask you to do the slightly smaller, or the real favour. And if you are somewhat crafty, and do it this way, the person is a lot more likely to accept.

Let us now look at an example where a webmaster is selling a subscription to his website. First of all he could offer a years subscription for £1100, and we know that people are very likey going to reject the first offer. But once they have rejected this offer, the user will be shown a new, better, less expensive offer, where they can pay for only one month for a price of £100.

Consistency and Commitment
This weapon of influence pertains to our, as humans, almost obsessive desire to act consistently with any commitments we make. So once we have thought a particular scenario through very carefully, taken a stand, and made a decsion which is our final verdict, we feel under enormous interpersonal and social pressure to remain committed with our choice. If we were not consistent once when have made our choice, we appear as indecisive and not confident in our own decisions. And we know that people like this are also socially negatively labeled i.e weak, wussy, wet wipe, wimp, sissy or maybe gimp. No need to go on, you get the point. But a person who has a high degree of consistency is seen as posessing strenghth, both personally and intellectually.

Our society and culture values people who demonstrate consistency and commitment.

To study this influence weapon, Psychologist Thomas Moriarty faked thefts on a beach, testing if any members of the public would help the victimised. There were two actors working for Moriarty, one posed as a victim, and one as the theif. For the first part of the study, the victim would sit near a members of the public, listening to his sterio and reading, and keeping all his nearby in a bag. But it was when he went off for a swim, the theif would appear and start stealing all of the victims belongings whilst he was swimming, and then made a run for it. And out of 20 people studied, only 4 tried to help.

But when the same study was done, Moriarty encorporated the consistency rule, ensuring the victim asked each member of the public to “please watch my things” before he went off swimming. And the results changed dramatically because 19 out of 20 people were transformed in to ruthless protectors of the mans belongings, shouting fiercly at the theif, and even threatening to physically harm him if he was to continue with his actions. And all this surprising behaviour was all due to the power of the consistency rule.

Supposedly, toy stores advertise understocked items prior to christmas, so parents promise their kids special toys way before christmas. But when the parents find no stock available when christmas falls, they replace the promised toys with subsititutes, costing the same price. But when christmas is passed, mummy and daddy have already made their promise of the special toys to their child, and so desparate to be consistent with their promises, they buy it for them after christmas, because that is when the new stock arrives. This is a tactic that companies use to boost sales for just after christmas, because it is for the two months just after that all sales plummet.

A tactic used by charity telephone canvassers, is that they begin their phone calls with “Hi, how are you feeling today?”, and the person called usually responds with “good” or “very good today” or “wonderful thankyou”. This gives the canvasser the oppourtunity to jump in with “As you’re feeling so good today, would you kindly volunteer to help those people less fortunate than yourself?” If this tactic is used, the percentage of compliance increases dramatically.

Get Your Foot in the Door

Now for a salesman selling BULK stock, he needs to apply the committment rule to his advantage. He can do this do this by attempting to sell a much smaller bulk package to the prospective customer, but once they have signed, made the purchase, and bought it, they might not realise it, but they are already your customer. And it’s all due to the committment which they have already made without consciously being aware of it. Furthermore, much larger transactions are likely to follow from your “new” customer.

So take extra care when agreeing to favours and making committments, because if you do so without thinking, it can lead on to lots more favours and committments which just happen to be connected to the original.

Your Goals

When settings goals, first decide upon what you really desire to acheive, and as soon as you know, write them down on paper, immediately and clearly. Once you have written them down, you have then made a real committment, and your newly chosen goals will be all that more important to you. The important part here is that there is something very magical about the committment rule and writing down goals. It makes you more committed to them, and makes them a lot more meaningful to you. I think it’s because you conjure up thousands of ideas in your brain over the years, but the second one goes down on paper it is then real, created by yourself, and very distinct from the others.

Public Committment

If someone committes publicly to something it makes them even more devoted, and desperate to stick with their original choice. For example, and study showed that hung juries are more common if there was a visible show of hands, as apposed to a secret vote where they were not required to publicly committ.

Take a look at five brutal male initiation rituals from around the
world.

The army is no exception from these rigerous training regimes; we’ve all see the films; when soldiers go through the hardcore military selection process, they are pushed hard, both mentally and phsically; sometimes to breaking point. Not all of them make it through, but the few that do certainly feel a sense of accomplishment, and with no doubt, value their achievment very highly; a lot more highly that they would if the training was easy.

The point here is that people who suffer to obtain something value it more highly than those who attain the same thing with minimal effort.

Smart marketers know that in order to get you purchase big, they require you to make the smaller committments beforehand. Once you have made these prior committments, (even if they are tiny), the consistency rule states that you are a lot more inclined to make the big purchase.

So take some time to think about what you have read today, and I hope you have learned a great deal, and will come back sometime to read more of my blog.