Best predictor of break-up & Zeigarnik effect
Principles of Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, Part-5
1.1. Increase persuasion by refocusing attention:
When Harvard Business School economist Felix Oberholzer-Gee approached people waiting in line at several different venues and offered them money to let him cut in, he recognized that a purely economics-based model would predict that the more cash he offered, the more people would agree to the exchange. And that’s what he found: half of everyone offered $1 let him cut in line; 65 percent did so if offered them $3, and acceptance rates jumped to 75 percent and 76 percent when he proposed the larger sums of $5 and $10. According to classical economic theory, which enshrines financial self interest as the primary cause of human behavior, those greater incentives convinced people to take the deal for their own fiscal betterment. How could any observer to the transaction doubt it? The highly visible incentives caused the obtained effects due to their direct links to personal monetary gain, right? Nothing surprising occurred here, right? Well, right, except for an additional finding that challenges all this thinking: almost no one took the money.
There is a hidden factor: an obligation people feel to help those in need. The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behavioral scientists sometimes call the norm of social responsibility. It states that we should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their need. in general, the more someone needs our help, the more obligated we feel to provide it, the more guilty we feel if we don’t provide it. “If this guy is willing to pay a lot to jump ahead of me, he must really need to get to the front fast.”
1.2. Best predictor of break-up:
There’s no secret that prominent sexual stimuli can commandeer human attention from other (sometimes all other) matters. Advertisers and marketers know it and use it in their commercial appeals. In Advertising Age magazine’s list of the top hundred ad campaigns of the twentieth century, only eight employed sexuality in the copy or imagery. Why so few? Although responses to sexual content can be strong, they are not unconditional. Using sex to sell a product works only for items that people frequently buy for sexually related purposes. Cosmetics (lipstick, hair color), body scents (perfume, cologne), and formfitting clothing (jeans, swimwear) fall into this category. Soft drinks, laundry detergents, and kitchen appliances do not, despite the occasionally misguided efforts of advertisers who don’t appreciate the point.
There’s a wider lesson here, as well, that goes beyond the domain of advertising. In any situation, people are dramatically more likely to pay attention to and be influenced by stimuli that fit the goal they have for that situation. Just within the realm of sexual stimuli, studies have found that straight, sexually aroused males and females spent more time gazing at photos of members of the opposite sex who were especially attractive. This inclination seems natural and hardly newsworthy. The surprise was that the tendency appeared only if the gazers were in the market for a romantic/sexual relationship. Individuals who weren’t looking for a new partner didn’t spend any more time locked on to the photos of good looking possibilities than average-looking ones. There is a strong connection, then, between a person’s current romantic/sexual goals and that person’s tendency to pay concentrated attention to even highly attractive others.
In a survey, college students in a romantic partnership were asked a series of standard questions that normally predict the stability of relationships: questions about how much in love they were with their partner, how satisfied they were with the relationship, how long they wanted to be in the relationship, and so on. In addition, the survey included some new questions for the participants that inquired into attentional factors such as how much they noticed and were distracted by good-looking members of the opposite sex. Two months after the survey, the participants were recontacted and asked if their relationships had remained intact or had ended.
Remarkably, the best indicator of a breakup was not how much love they felt for their partner two months earlier or how satisfied they were with their relationship at that time or even how long they had wanted it to last. It was how much they were regularly aware of and attentive to the hotties around them back then. These findings cast doubt on the time-worn defense of spouses accused of developing a roving eye—“Hey, I know I’m on a diet, but there’s no harm in reading the menu”—as there might well be harm ahead. In our relationships, then, we might want to be sensitive to any sustained upswing in our partner’s (or our own) attentiveness to attractive alternatives, as it might well offer an early signal of a partnership in peril.
1.3. Zeigarnik effect.
First, on a task that we feel committed to performing, we will remember all sorts of elements of it better if we have not yet had the chance to finish because our attention will remain drawn to it.
Second, if we are engaged in such a task and are interrupted or pulled away, we’ll feel a discomforting, gnawing desire to get back to it. That desire—which also pushes us to return to incomplete narratives, unresolved problems, unanswered questions, and unachieved goals—reflects a craving for cognitive closure.
Perhaps even more bewildering at first glance are findings regarding college women’s attraction to certain good-looking young men. The women participated in an experiment in which they knew that attractive male students (whose photographs and biographies they could see) had been asked to evaluate them on the basis of their Facebook information. The researchers wanted to know which of these male raters the women, in turn, would prefer at a later time. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the guys who had rated them the highest. Instead, it was the men whose ratings remained yet unknown to the women.
During the experiment, the men who kept popping up in the women’s minds were those whose ratings hadn’t been revealed, confirming the researchers’ view that when an important outcome is unknown to people, “they can hardly think of anything else.” And because, as we know, regular attention to something makes it seem more worthy of attention, the women’s repeated refocusing on those guys made them appear the most attractive.
Reference:
Based on Book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade