Robert Cialdini's book Influence is the classic text for teaching the art and science of persuasion to students of all kinds and of all ages -- in psychology, marketing, organizational behavior, and political science, and that is just for starters. I've used it to teach groups ranging from undergraduates to CEOs. It is the best place to learn about the psychology of how to persuade people to do what you want them to do AND how to defend yourself against people who are trying to persuade you to do things that you don't want to do. It is filled with great stories and is one of the best translations of research into practice that I've ever seen -- the only thing I've seen in recent years in the same league is the Heath's masterpiece Made to Stick.
I've been assigning Influence to my organizational behavior students for about 20 years, and when I run into a former student, many will admit that they don't remember much from my class, but they nearly always bring up Cialdlini's book and how useful it has been in careers ranging from sales, to politics, to practicing law, to medicine, and on and on. Mark Twain once said something like a classic is a book that everyone talks about, but no one reads. Influence defies that truism -- people continue to read it and use it.
I was thinking about Cialdini because it is the start of college football season. I am not an especially avid football fan, although I do root vaguely for the Cal Bears (Stanford is my employer, but Cal is my alma mater). My wife and I were in downtown Palo Alto on Saturday night, and I was pretty surprised to see that - although there had just been a Stanford game with UCLA a few hours earlier, played about a mile away, I was seeing few people wearing Stanford colors. There were a lot of UCLA colors. That wasn't a surprise because there were thousands of their fans in town for the game. What surprised me, however, was that I was seeing as at least as many people in downtown Palo Alto wearing Cal colors as Stanford colors (note that Cal is about 50 miles from Palo Alto, and Palo Alto is clearly Stanford territory).
It all seemed a little weird until I remembered the study conducted by Cialdini and five other colleagues in 1976: Stanford had lost that day (walloped by UCLA, 45 to 17) and Cal had won an exciting game (beating Tennessee 45 to 31). Cialdini did years of research on impression management and persuasion before he wrote his wonderful book. And although most social psychologists do all their work in the laboratory where they have full experimental control, but a lot less realism, Cialdini has always been very imaginative about finding ways to study people in "real" settings.
The study is called "Basking in Reflected Glory: 3 (Football) Field Studies." It was published in 1976 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Cialdini wanted to show that when people are associated with a winner, even in most tangential ways, they take steps to "bask" in the reflected glory and when they are linked to a loser, they take steps to distance themselves. Cialdini did this brilliant thing of -- rather than just asking students at football schools how they felt about their teams and so on -- he recruited other colleagues who taught large introduction to psychology classes at six other "big time" football schools (Cialdini was at Ohio State at the time, a school that takes its football very seriously). On the Monday after each game during the football season, these psychology professors simply counted the percentage of students in their seven classes who wearing their school's logo and colors to class.
There was a very strong effect. When their football team had won, students were far more likely to wear school colors to Monday's psychology class than when their team had lost. Moreover, an added twist was that the bigger the margin of their team's victory, the greater the percentage of students who showed-up wearing school colors and logos. Cialdini and his colleagues also did some cool follow-up studies showing that students were far
more likely to use the word "we" when describing their team's victory than when talking about their team's defeat. As I once heard Cialdini put it at a Stanford talk, 'Fans say "We are #1" after a victory, but say "they sucked" after a defeat.
This research, to me, not only shows the power of the "basking in reflected glory " phenomenon, where people try to claim status by their (objectively very weak) association with a winner. It shows, following my earlier post on the dangers of quantitative evidence, that a simple count can be very powerful when the researchers does it in a context where the numbers matter. So, counting the number of Cal colors and logos that people are wearing to class over at UC Berkeley this morning means something; and the comparison between Cal and Stanford psychology classes will mean something once school starts at Stanford in a few weeks. Unlike the man that Steinbeck complained about who pulled a dead, evil smelling fish out of a jar to get an accurate count of the number of spines, but in doing so recorded many lies, Cialdini's simple counts do reveal many truths about the phenomenon he is studying.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of Cialdini's research, since Cal won on Saturday, see the logo to the left. Go Bears! We're #1! And all that.
Comments