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- [00:01]
Phil Agnew
Today's guest on Nudge is a world leading expert in the science of influence. He's lectured about persuasion at Columbia, Arizona State and Stanford University. His books have sold more than 7 million copies and in his foundational book, the Psychology of Persuasion, he identified six key principles which explain why people say yes. Today we're focusing in on one of those principles.
- [00:27]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
It's another one of those deeply installed features of the human condition.
- [00:34]
Phil Agnew
Today you'll hear why Trader Joe's tells every member of staff to smile, how some waiters persuade you to leave bigger tips, the key results from 6700 Online A B tests and why you probably prefer a version of your face that nobody actually sees. All of that coming up. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's the perfect example. Morehouse College, a liberal arts college in Atlanta, needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. But with a massive 900 page website, even the smallest updates took 30 minutes for them to publish. But then they found Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools and Breeze helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time. The results 30% more page views and visitors now spend 27% more time on their site. If you're ready for growth like this, visit HubSpot.com today on nudge. I am delighted to speak with Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the books Influence, Pre Suasion and the Small Big. Cialdini is known by many as the Godfather of Influence.
- [01:46]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Well, I'm a behavioral scientist and all my life I've studied the process of influence and persuasion.
- [01:53]
Phil Agnew
One of these principles is what Cialdini calls liking. Here he is explaining the liking principle.
- [01:59]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
We prefer to do business with to interact with those we like and who like us. I think that's even more important. If someone can show us levels of approval or estimation toward us, we want to do business with that person. We're safe there. We're dealing with someone who likes us. We've protected our flanks against miscommunications, discommunication, various kinds of fraud or trickery. No, no, this is somebody who likes me. They're going to treat me well as a consequence.
- [02:40]
Phil Agnew
This sounds self explanatory. The more we like someone, the more likely we are to do business with them. But what most of us don't realise about this likability principle is that it doesn't just make people feel at ease. No, a likable person will also appear more believable and seem more trustworthy in 2001, researchers Nicholson from Stenson University, Florida, and compose and seti, who are researchers from Clarkson University, New York, examined how a sales representative's likability shapes a buyer's perception of trust. Their study asked 238 business owners and general managers to rate the likability and trustworthiness of the sales reps from their primary supplier. The findings were clear. Likability strongly predicted trust. The more a buyer liked the rep, the more trustworthy they believed that person to be. A likable salesperson is seen as more trustworthy, and if this likeable salesperson instructs you to purchase a more expensive option because you trust them, you'll be more likely to agree.
- [03:45]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
What you find is A lot of companies will show you approval as you enter their shop or business. Trader Joe's here in the United States is one of these. Those employees are trained to be personable, to be warm, and to greet customers with a smile. The same is true for Walmart. They hire people, they pay people to be greeters, and they're trained in the same way to welcome those folks in. It's a form of approval. I see it all the time. And the idea of welcoming them with a smile is not to be underestimated.
- [04:34]
Phil Agnew
Joanna Stanley and Richard Shotton recruited 161 participants to test this idea. Does a friendly greeting change perceptions of the brand? So these 161 participants were told a story about visiting a restaurant. At the end, Shotton and Stanley asked how likely it was that the owner paid their tax on time. The twist in this experiment was that half of the people in the study were told that the owner had welcomed them in a friendly manner and the other half were told that the owner had behaved sullenly. Even though likability isn't correlated at all with paying taxes, it did influence participants perceptions. People were 37% more likely to think the owner would pay their tax on time when they behaved in a friendly way compared to when they exhibited more standoffish behaviour. Now, as a Brit, I haven't visited Trader Joe's, but intrigued by Cialdini's point, I researched their staff and I found this widely popular YouTube video with a quarter of a million views that documents why Trader Joe's is so successful and the main reason, according to the video, was the staff.
- [05:43]
Trader Joe's Employee (Unnamed)
Starting with the friendly staff, I just talked to six different Trader Joe's employees inside, each one of them nicer than the last. Summary points were that Trader Joe's is extremely picky in its hiring process to choose folks who are exceptionally nice and have a customer first attitude.
- [05:57]
Phil Agnew
In his book Influence, Cialdini details how if we receive a positive comment, we'll be far more likely to succumb to a persuasion attempt. This experiment was conducted on a group of men in North Carolina. Cialdini writes that the men received comments about themselves from another person who needed a favour from them. Some of the men only got positive comments, some of them only got negative comments, and some got a mixture of good and bad. There were three interesting findings. First, the person who needed the favour, who in this experiment was called the evaluator. Well, when this person only provided praise, they were liked best. Second, this tendency held true even when the men fully realized that the evaluator stood to gain from their liking of him. Finally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking for the evaluator when they were untrue as when they were true. This 1978 study proved that we are suckers for compliments, even if those compliments aren't true.
- [07:00]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
There was a guy was watching on a podcast, he was a researcher and he said, you know, I've done research into companies that have a receptionist at the door. When you come in, you meet this reception. It can be a gym, it can be a Pilates studio, it can be a financial services organization. And we ask customers, what's the thing you most want to see from that person behind the desk? It's not competence, it's not expertise, It's a smile. That's what I want first. I want to be welcomed warmly.
- [07:42]
Phil Agnew
Cialdini cites compelling evidence for this in his book. He shares a 2002 study titled Sweetening the Till. Great title and a really good study. Here, waiters in a real world restaurant were encouraged to do one of four actions to customers who were about to pay. Some just handed over the bill. That was the control. Another group of waiters gave a free mint with the bill that increased tips compared to the control by 3%. Another group were told to give two mints with the bill that actually increased tips by 14%. And then a final group of waiters gave one mint and the bill. And then the server would walk away and then they would turn around and they would say, actually, for you nice people, here's an extra mint. So a classic compliment aimed to increase liking, and it increased tips by 23% compared to the control. A friendly compliment translated into a significant increase in tips. Now, you might think this just works in the States. It doesn't. It works everywhere. Two Polish researchers in 2016 replicated this study in Krakow, Poland, in a restaurant with many international tourists. To prove this wasn't just something that works in the U.S. they asked Polish waiters to leave a small gift of chewing gum with the bill. And among the guests of multiple nationalities, this was people from Czech Republic, England, Germany, Russia, Spain and Ukraine. The average tip percentage was 10.5% in the control. That went up to 14.1% when the free gift was given as well.
- [09:10]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Okay, now how do you do that online? Turns out there was a study of 6700 commercial websites and they did AB tests where they looked at 29 separate features that you could put in or take out and look and examine the impact on conversions.
- [09:33]
Phil Agnew
The two researchers, Brown and Schwarbrick Jones, ran this study in 2017. Each E commerce site was tested on if it had one of 29 features, for example, whether it had a search function that'd be one feature, a back to top button, free delivery or calls to action.
- [09:50]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Here was one that significantly increased conversions. Was there a welcoming statement on the landing page? Welcome to our site. We're so glad you're here with us. Significantly more conversions before they read one word of the offers there, it wasn't the merits of the thing, it was the warmth of the exchange before they got to the offer.
- [10:21]
Phil Agnew
At the end of their investigation, the researchers concluded that, and I quote here, the biggest winners from our analysis all have grounding in behavioral psychology. And Cialdini is right. A welcome message which introduces users to the site had a 64% chance of increasing revenue per visitor. Out of the 29 different factors, it was the sixth most effective. Now I do want to highlight that five other elements were more effective at boosting revenue. Top was scarcity. So that's where you highlight that some items are low in stock. Cialdini and I will talk about that on a later podcast. The next was Social Proof, which is where you showcase popular and trending items. Cialdini and I also talk about that on a future podcast as well. Third was urgency, using time limits to promote an action. And this was almost always a countdown timer, so this is like a variant of scarcity. Fourth was abandonment treatments, which aimed to persuade users not to leave the site after they had filled their cart. And fifth was product recommendations, where an alternative product is recommended to returning users. So the welcome message isn't the best treatment, but it did come out ahead of several other treatments, including, I think, quite interestingly, free delivery and Pop ups, which I find quite surprising. I've always seen them as quite effective. But the welcome message outperformed them. This 2017 study proved that we are influenced by kindness and a friendly welcome message can nudge users to spend more.
- [11:45]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
What are the things that are part of the human condition and have been installed in us from childhood or even through evolution? Right. That these are the most. I used to say primitive. I don't want to say primitive anymore. That's a. There's a name. These are the most primal features of our decisions and choices in persuasion and social influence.
- [12:15]
Phil Agnew
Some of the first studies on liking were conducted way back in the 1930s by the psychologist Gregory Razran. He coined a very interesting term. He called it the luncheon technique. And this is where he basically found that participants in his studies became fonder of the people and the things they experienced while they were eating lunch. Specifically in his study, participants were presented with some political statements that they had rated once before. At the end of the experiment, Razran found that only the statements shown while the food was served had seen an increase in improvement. So if you had traditionally said that you didn't like a democrat politician and then you were eating food, you would actually be more likely to like that politician while you were eating the food.
- [12:59]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
There's a glow of positivity around the fact that they've just been their hunger, they're not hungry right now, they're happy. And that happiness extends to those in their environment.
- [13:12]
Phil Agnew
And there's a 2011 study titled Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions, which proves this nicely.
- [13:19]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Judges, for example, will give lighter sentences to defendants after lunch. They're happier, they're more satisfied, they're content to a greater extent. Amazing.
- [13:33]
Phil Agnew
The researchers analysed 1112 rulings from eight Israeli judges over 50 days in a 10 month period. They found that judges were far more favourable right after lunch. Defendants had a 65% chance of walking free in the session after lunch. But that favourable ruling would gradually drop throughout the afternoon, falling occasionally on some days to zero percent at the end of the day. The liking principle makes us more likely to tip at a restaurant. A welcome message on a website makes us more likely to buy online, and even a fake compliment makes us more helpful. And Cialdini says all of this works because the liking principle is fundamental to our psychology.
- [14:13]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Go deep, go to the earliest installations of levers of influence and everybody wins, because those are the things that normally steer people correctly.
- [14:26]
Phil Agnew
In his book, Cialdini goes on to link the liking principle with what I think is one of the most important lessons for modern day marketers. It is an evidence backed lesson that I think every marketer needs to learn and I'll cover it after this quick break. Content Is Profit, hosted by Louise and Fonzie Camejo, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Content Is Profit is the podcast I'd love to recommend today because it shares the secrets and strategies behind what the hosts call a frictionless sale. Louise and Fonsi talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics and bring in special guests to bring you all the information you need to turn your content into profit. Back in December they recorded with a YouTuber who reached 76,000 subscribers in just a year to learn how go and listen to Content Is Profit. Wherever you get your podcasts, every idea starts with a spark, that moment of inspiration that fuels brilliant strategy. But what if you could find it instantly? Meet Agent Spark, your human Insights assistant from gwi. It delivers fast data backed audience intel so you can get inspired, sharpen your thinking and build campaigns around real consumer behavior. And you'll receive fresh insights in seconds so you can validate hunches on your target audience and make smarter decisions. Backed by rock solid data ready to spark your next big idea? See it in action@gwi.com spark hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew and my guest Dr. Robert Cialdini. Now in his book, Cialdini links liking with another concept. It's a small chapter in the book, but one that I think is incredibly important. He writes how for the most part, we like things that are familiar to us. To prove the point to yourself, try a little experiment. Take a selfie that shows a front view of your face and print it. Then go back to the selfie on your phone and edit it to show a reverse image so that the right and left sides of your face are interchanged. Print that. Also, you'll have a pair of pictures. One that shows how you actually look, that's the second one. And one that shows the reverse image. That's the first one. Now decide which version of your face you like better and ask a good friend to make the choice too. I did exactly this. I took a selfie and I much preferred the first image, the reversed image of my face. But when I showed these two images to my wife, she preferred the second. So that's me. I'm going to show you two images. You've got to say which one you prefer. This is the first image this is the second image. Which do you prefer out of the two? The first or the second? I feel like they're the same but reversed. Oh, yeah, but which do you prefer? Maybe that one, but the second one? Yeah. What? Why? I don't know. There's no reason. Just maybe that's the way that I normally see you. Well, that's actually it, yeah.
- [17:42]
Dr. Robert Cialdini
Yeah.
- [17:44]
Phil Agnew
Well, I prefer the first one because that's what you see. Yeah. Interesting. Cialini shares that this simple experiment was conducted on a much larger group. It was conducted on a group of Milwaukee women and the exact same thing happened with them. Close friends and family prefer the true image, but the Milwaukee women preferred the reverse image. Why? Well, it's because we respond favorably to the more familiar face. And your friends and family? My wife, she sees the real one, but I see the one transposed in the mirror every day, so I prefer that. The researchers titled this study Reverse Facial Images and the Mere Exposure Hypothesis. And mere exposure, I think, is a key principle that marketers need to remember if they want to benefit from from liking. Now, I've spoken about mere exposure before on the podcast, but for those new or those who need a refresher, the phenomenon was first publicised by Polish psychologist Robert Zajonx. His 1969 study found that if you're more exposed to a stimulus like an ad, an idea or a name, the warmer you will feel towards it, and the warmer you feel towards it, the more likely you are to believe it's true. He coined the term the mere exposure effect. To prove his point, he created two adverts and displayed them in two widely read campus newspapers in Michigan University where he was working. The ads featured Turkish words and very few Michigan students spoke Turkish. So almost every viewer who saw these ads were totally unfamiliar with these words and basically found them to be meaningless. He then asked over 1,100 students to rate 12 unfamiliar Turkish words. Specifically, he said, we would like you to give us an impression of each of these words. Of course, we realise that you could not reasonably guess the exact meanings. It would be sufficient for our purposes, however, if you simply estimate whether a particular word means something good or something bad. Some of the words were the ones that had been publicised on the ads on these newspapers around the campus. Other words were brand new. The students had never seen them before, and it turns out the students dramatically preferred the words they'd seen before. They rated them as 9.5% better or good words if they had been exposed to them before. Noella Walsh, who writes about this phenomenon in her book Tune in puts it simply. She says, we vote for the politician, select the dentist, pick a movie, order a wine or buy a brand that sounds familiar and towards which we have developed an inexpensive, inexplicable warmth, even if it's not the best choice in influence. Cialdini links this with marketing. He writes, often we don't realise our attitude towards something has been influenced by the number of times we've been exposed to it. For example, in a study on online advertising, banner ads for a camera were flashed 5 times or 20 times, or not at all on the top of an article participants were reading. The more frequently the ad appeared, the more participants came to like the camera, even though they were not aware of seeing the ads for it. The implications for marketers, I think, are quite obvious. Generating favorable views for your brand, product and service is surprisingly easy. Expose your customer to your message repeatedly. And I think there's a very important lesson from that 2007 study on Banner ads. And I think it's a lesson that most marketers forget. See, when I tell marketers about this mere exposure effect, they agree with it, but they assume there's a limit. They think mere exposure works, but only up until a point. Eventually, customers will bore of my message, eventually they'll tire out of the exposure and eventually it'll wear out. But that's not really what that 2007 study found. In fact, they found that exposing website visitors to the Same banner ad 20 times didn't wear out the effect at all. Instead, seeing the ad 20 times made the viewers more favourable than those who saw it five times. I think as marketers, we overestimate how salient and impactful our message is. We think that we can't possibly say the same things 20 times. Surely customers will get bored. And yet, for customers, our brands and products are a tiny part of their daily lives. They hardly pay attention to any message and repeat exposure is absolutely necessary. All too often, we change our key message, our branding, our design and our campaigns because we think customers have got bored. What the mere exposure effect suggests is that it's rarely the case. In reality, customers need to be exposed to your campaigns far more than you'd expect. The more we see something, the more familiar it becomes. The more familiar it becomes, the more we like it. The more we like it, the more we buy it. And this works with brands, but it also works with people. In 1987, researcher Bornstein gathered a group of participants in a dark room. Here, several faces flashed up on screen so quickly that the Participants exposed to the faces of couldn't actually recall having seen them. So they flash a face that sort of blinds them in the eye and then they show them the same face again. They say, have you seen this face or this face? And they can't accurately recall it. Yet the more frequently a person's face was flashed up on screen, the more these subjects came to like that person when they actually met them in a subsequent interaction. Cialdini writes that seeing the face more times led to greater social influence. He says the subjects were also more persuaded by the opinion statements of the individuals whose faces that have appeared on screen most frequently. Essentially, they liked him far more. To finish, I want to share a story that I first wrote about in the Nudge newsletter. It's about Thomas Edison and the first light bulb. Now, Edison originally struggled to sell the first electric light bulb. It sounds crazy today, we know how wonderful they are. But he struggled to sell it. People were scared of new technology, but Edison knew something quite smart. He instinctively knew that people were scared of inventions that they weren't familiar with. So to ease this fear, he leveraged the mirror exposure effect and he made the light bulb seem more familiar. Specifically, he mimicked the common gas lighting of the time. So he altered his electric lights to make them a similar brightness to gas lamps. He also ran electric cables underground, even though he didn't need to. This was to replicate what gas pipes did. But my favourite addition Edison made was that he added light shades. Now, light shades are necessary on a gas light and it's to stop them flickering or going out in a draft. But they're unnecessary for electric bulbs. Electric bulbs don't need light shades. They won't go out if there's a breeze. And yet this worked. It made people more familiar with them. It made them look more normal and made the electric light bulb more successful. So the light shades you see on your table lamp today are there because of mere exposure. They didn't need those shades. And yet Edison chose to replicate this largely irrelevant feature to benefit from the mirror exposure effect. He replicated how the traditional gas glass lights looked, making 19th century buyers more familiar with the look. And because the light bulb looked more familiar, they liked it more. And because they liked it more, they were more likely to buy the light that is probably lighting the room you're in right now. If you are in a room looks the way it does due to the mere exposure effect. And that is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. Massive thank you to the absolutely fantastic Dr. Robert Cialdini. For joining me again on today's episode of Of Nudge. Not only do I highly recommend Cialdini's books, I also recommend the training he does with the Cialdini institute. Head to cialdini.com that's cialdini.com to learn more about his training. We've covered two important principles on the show today, liking and the mirror exposure effect. Now, I imagine many of you listening will want to apply these principles to your work. You won't just want to hear about the mirror exposure effect. You'll want advice and evidence that you can use to apply it in your day job. Well, if you do, then you might be interested in the Nudge Vaults, my new product. It is a database of 452 insights I've spent the last six years collecting. In there you will find 28 insights specifically about mere exposure and liking. And you'll find 60 different ideas for those 28 insights explaining how you can apply those principles. I gave Jacob Harris, the marketing lead lead at Good Gym, access to the Nudge vaults and asked him to use the vaults to improve his marketing. Here's what he said after using it.
- [25:49]
Jacob Harris
The Nudge vaults were incredibly helpful. To be honest, having access to something like that was great. I think having had some time with it, now I just use it as a sounding board more than anything. It's quite confidence inspiring to write something up and then just think, oh, maybe I'll just check that against something.
- [26:10]
Phil Agnew
I just.
- [26:11]
Jacob Harris
Let me just check that against some science. So it's been, yeah, really invaluable.
- [26:15]
Phil Agnew
If you're interested in learning more, go to nudgepodcast.comvaults that is nudgepodcast.comvaults. or click the link in the show notes if you're not ready to buy, you can preview 50 of the insights for free today at no cost with no strings attached. And believe me, I will keep mentioning the vaults on these podcasts because the more I do, the more you'll like it. All right folks, that is all for me today. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.