of “compliance practitioners” to mislead people by triggering their subconscious

Reciprocation Tendency.

 

Carrying out this experiment, Cialdini caused his “compliance practitioners” to

wander around his campus and ask strangers to supervise a bunch of juvenile

delinquents on a trip to a zoo. Because this happed on a campus, one person in

six out of a large sample actually agreed to do this. After accumulating this

one-in-six statistic, Cialdini changed his procedure. His practitioners next

wandered around the campus asking strangers to devote a big chunk of time every

week for two years to the supervision of juvenile delinquents. This ridiculous

request got him a one hundred percent rejection rate. But the practitioner had a

follow-up question: “Will you at least spend one afternoon taking juvenile

delinquents to a zoo?” This raised Cialdini’s former acceptance rate of 1/6 to

1/2—a tripling.

 

What Cialdini’s “compliance practitioners” had done was make a small concession,

which was reciprocated by a small concession from the other side. This

subconscious reciprocation of a concession by Cialdini’s experimental subjects

actually caused a much increased percentage of them to end up irrationally

agreeing to go to a zoo with juvenile delinquents. Now, a professor who can

invent an experiment like that, which so powerfully demonstrates something so

important, deserves much recognition in the wider world, which he indeed got to

the credit of many universities that learned a great deal from Cialdini.

 

Why is Reciprocation Tendency so important? Well, consider the folly of having