law students graduate, and go out in the world representing clients in

negotiations, not knowing the nature of the subconscious processes of the mind

as exhibited in Cialdini’s experiment. Yet such folly was prevalent in the law

schools of the world for decades, in fact, generations. The correct name for

that is educational malpractice. The law schools didn’t know, or care to teach,

what Sam Walton so well knew.

 

The importance and power of reciprocate-favor tendency was also demonstrated in

Cialdini’s explanation of the foolish decision of the attorney general of the

United States to authorize the Watergate burglary. There, an aggressive

subordinate made some extreme proposal for advancing Republican interests

through use of some combination of whores and a gigantic yacht. When this

ridiculous request was rejected, the subordinate backed off, in gracious

concession, to merely asking for consent to a burglary, and the attorney general

went along. Cialdini believes that subconscious Reciprocation Tendency thus

became one important cause of the resignation of a United States president in

the Watergate debacle, and so do I. Reciprocation Tendency subtly causes many

extreme and dangerous consequences, not just on rare occasions but pretty much

all the time.

 

Man’s belief in reciprocate-favor tendency, following eons of his practicing it,

has done some queer and bad things in religions. The ritualized murder of the

Phoenicians and the Aztecs, in which they sacrificed human victims to their

gods, was a particularly egregious example. And we should not forget that as

late as the Punic Wars, the civilized Romans, out of fear of defeat, returned in