I is for Influence by Rob Yeung

Author:Rob Yeung [Yeung, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230763463
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

How many tickets would you want to buy from him? Not many, I’d guess. You’ve not exchanged a single word with him. Actually, the only time you even heard him speak was when he was being tetchy and unhelpful on the secretary’s phone.

The scenario I just described was more or less the basic set-up for Dennis Regan’s experiment. Each time a true participant turned up, he was paired up with John, who was – surprise, surprise – secretly an accomplice hired by Regan to play the part of another participant. Regan was interested in whether participants’ dislike or like for John influenced the number of tickets they were willing to buy from him.

Half of the true participants got to meet ‘nasty John’ who sneered his way through the call on the secretary’s phone. The other half met a much more pleasant version of John. When ‘nice John’ answered the phone, he listened to the caller and explained in a friendly tone that he was sorry, but he didn’t work in the building and didn’t know where the secretary was.

When Regan tallied up the number of raffle tickets that participants were willing to buy, he found that participants bought significantly more tickets from ‘nice John’ than ‘nasty John’. Not exactly a groundbreaking result, is it? That accords with what we would expect, that we are more open to persuasion by people we like. But that was only the start of the experiment.

With another two groups of participants, Regan again asked John to play both the nice and nasty roles. But this time he also gave the participants a breather halfway through rating the paintings. During the break, the experimenter announced that he needed to get something from his office, leaving the two participants alone.

During the unexpected lull in the experiment, John slipped out of the room and returned with two bottles of Coca-Cola. He said to the true participant: ‘I asked the experimenter if I could get myself a Coke, and he said it was OK, so I bought one for you too.’

Then, as before, John slipped each participant his hand-scrawled note, explaining that he was trying to shift enough raffle tickets to win a prize.

To summarise then, there were actually four conditions in the experiment:

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