Роберт Чалдини

“Well, if it is your feeling that a fine set of encyclopedias is not right for you at this time, perhaps you could help me by giving me the names of some others who might wish to take advantage of our company’s great offer. What would be the names of some of these people you know?”

. Perhaps we can avoid a confrontation with the rule by refusing to allow the requester to commission its force against us in the first place

They hadn’t created the decision; the decision had created them

The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct. The group’s assignment was clear; since the physical evidence could not be changed, the social evidence had to be. Convince and ye shall be convinced!6

that, for the emergency victim, the idea of “safety in numbers” may often be completely wrong. It might be that someone in need of emergency aid would have a better chance of survival if a single bystander, rather than a crowd, was present. To test this unusual thesis, Darley, Latané, their students and colleagues performed a systematic and impressive program of research that produced a clear set of findings. Their basic procedure was to stage emergency events that were observed either by a single individual or by a group of people. They then recorded the number of times the emergency victim received help under those circumstances.
In their first experiment, a New York college student who appeared to be having an epileptic seizure received help 85 percent of the time when there was a single bystander present but only 31 percent of the time with five bystanders present. With almost all the single bystanders helping, it becomes difficult to argue that ours is “The Cold Society”
where no one cares for suffering others. Obviously it was something about the presence of other bystanders that reduced helping to shameful levels.
Other studies have examined the importance of social proof in causing widespread witness “apathy.” They have done so by planting within a group of witnesses to a possible emergency people who are rehearsed to act as if no emergency were occurring. For instance, in another New York—based experiment, 75 percent of lone individuals who observed smoke seeping from under a door reported the leak; however, when similar leaks were observed by three-person groups, the smoke was reported only 38 percent of the time. The smallest number of bystanders took action, though, when the three-person groups

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves

Martin, Goldstein, & Cialdini (2014) for a description of fifty small things that make a big impact on human behavior.

Rather than doing what I’d been taught to do all my life and dismissing the favor—falsely—as too trivial to worry about (I really did prefer the aisle seat), I said, “Oh, I’m sure you’d do the same for me.” He assured me I was right.

Rather than doing what I’d been taught to do all my life and dismissing the favor—falsely—as too trivial to worry about (I really did prefer the aisle seat), I said, “Oh, I’m sure you’d do the same for me.” He assured me I was right.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason.