685b8c2c-2ec6-40e1-9caa-7ed0886ee25f by Jia Jiang

Author:Jia Jiang
Language: eng
Format: epub

In some cases, they might be right. But I had been rejected many times in Austin—sometimes when it was least expected, like when I’d tried handing out the $5 bills. But now here I was in New York, making a request that

offered no benefit to anyone, and everyone I’d approached had agreed to pose for a picture.

At first glance, this made no sense. But after revisiting the videos, I saw one glaring difference between the New York photo request and the Austin money giveaway. In New York, I’d told each of those strangers on the sidewalk why I was asking them to pose with me in a photo—I wanted to include people, not just landmarks, in my photo. I hadn’t left it to them to fill in the blanks when it came to my motivation. As a result, they responded positively, even though the request was outside the normal social behavior they were used to seeing every day.

I had begun to realize that asking people why after receiving a rejection helped me understand their reasoning and sometimes turn a no into a yes—

or into an even more interesting offer. Now I was finding that explaining my why up front had a similar effect. I wasn’t the first one to notice this.

In 1978, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment that revealed this very point. In the experiment, she approached people waiting to use a copy machine, asking them if she could cut in front of them to make copies herself. She wanted to see if the way that she worded the request had an effect on their response. When she said, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?,” 60 percent of people allowed her to go ahead of them. When she added her reason, asking, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?,” her yes rate increased to 94 percent. In her third variation, she also gave a reason, but purposely designed it to be ridiculous: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”

Shockingly, the number of people who accepted her request stayed about the same at 93 percent.

Langer’s experiment—dubbed “The Copy Machine”—became a landmark study in psychology. It demonstrates that people’s responses to a request are deeply influenced by knowing there is a reason behind it, no matter what that reason is. Everything I experienced during my rejection journey reinforced this. When I gave people a reason for my request, however far-fetched, I was far more likely to get a yes.

But lots of people miss this step—including me. Looking back, I’m amazed at how often I didn’t offer a reason for my request, usually because

I assumed the other person already knew it or wouldn’t want to know it.

Sometimes, I was so deeply embedded in what I was requesting that it didn’t even occur to me that I needed to walk someone through my enthusiasm. Other times, revealing my rationale made me feel too vulnerable.

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