Why Influence Principles Do Not Transfer to Your Situation

Introduction: Confirmed in an Experiment, and Reproducible by You

Summaries of the principles set out in Influence, and worked examples of applying them, are already well documented. What this article takes up is what comes after that. Why is it precisely the people who understand the principles accurately who cannot reproduce them in the field?

Most take that result as insufficient practice: the grasp was shallow, the delivery was clumsy, the repetitions were too few. Before settling on that reading, one variable is worth checking.

Here is the conclusion first. Confirmed under laboratory conditions and reproducible in your situation are two different claims. And the habit of treating them as one is what produces, over and over, the experience of studying without changing.

The Principles Themselves Are Not the Problem

Let this be clear at the outset. The six principles organised by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity — describe tendencies of influence confirmed repeatedly in experiments [Cialdini, 1984]. Receive something and you want to return it. Having stated a position, you become less likely to contradict it. What many others are choosing becomes easier to choose.

These are not arbitrary inventions. What deserves scrutiny is not the principles but how they are read.

What an experiment establishes is a bounded claim: holding other conditions equal, adding this factor tips responses in this direction. In practitioner language that regularly becomes the unconditional claim that using the principle moves people. The clause about holding conditions equal has quietly dropped out.

Effective Styles Reverse According to Situation

How large is that missing clause? Organisational behaviour has a body of work addressing exactly this.

The contingency theory advanced by the psychologist Fred Fiedler showed that effectiveness in leading is not settled by style alone [Fiedler, 1967]. The situations in which a directive, controlling style works and those in which a participative, collaborative style works are clearly distinct.

Where relations are good, the task is clearly structured, and positional authority is strong, one style performs. Let any of those conditions break down and the same style becomes counterproductive, while a different one produces the better outcome.

Good practice, in other words, is not a particular form but the pairing of form with situation. To extract the form, discard the situational variable, and declare this is the correct answer is a method that never got off the ground.

Why “Works Every Time” Is the Preferred Packaging

Bookshelves nonetheless fill with the laws of successful people and the habits of excellent leaders.

One reason is that situation is complex and resists description. Spelling out relational quality, task structure, and the strength of authority for each reader’s own setting is laborious. Follow these twenty-one laws and results follow can ignore situation entirely, and is therefore easy to apply, easy to teach, and easy to sell. Omitting the complicated conditions trades accuracy for transmissibility.

The second effect shows up in how failure gets read. When the laws are practised and nothing results, almost nobody says the laws were bounded knowledge applicable to particular situations. Instead the outcome is processed as the reader’s own insufficiency: not thorough enough, not deeply understood.

Absolutise the laws with the situational lens removed, and every instance of the laws failing is collected as evidence of the practitioner’s immaturity rather than of the laws’ limits.

How Was the Law Constructed in the First Place?

Go back a step further and the construction itself carries a distortion.

Many leadership books are built the same way. Select several companies that grew, or executives whose names are known. Extract what they share in how they speak and decide. Compile the commonalities as the conditions of an excellent leader. The form of induction is intact.

But the people gathered are, from the outset, only those who succeeded. Assemble ten and two or three shared habits will always appear. The problem is that the procedure cannot distinguish a cause of the outcome from a feature that happened to be common among those who happened to succeed. The comparison group — people with the same habits who did not arrive — is not in the sample.

Finding that group is laborious, and it does not sell. A loud voice produced the success stays in memory; ninety per cent of loud-voiced people produced nothing does not become material for a talk.

There is also the third factor generating both the technique and the outcome. Where a market is expanding, a business grows despite rough judgement, and the sense of growth lends natural force to how someone speaks. In that case forceful command is not the cause of the result but a second result produced by a shared cause. The pull toward attributing organisational outcomes to an individual is examined in can charisma be learned?.

Read Them as a Detector Rather Than a Prescription

Does it follow that studying the principles is pointless? It does not. Change the direction of the reading and the same knowledge does entirely different work.

Read the six principles as a prescription for what you should do, and you execute with the situational variable missing; nothing reproduces. Read the same principles as a detector for what is currently being done to you, and the picture changes.

Raise anxiety first, then sell hope immediately after. Arrange the markers of authority, then make the proposal. Show that many others have chosen, then press for a decision. Read the order of the language and what is happening becomes legible. As an instrument for noticing an attempt to work on you, the knowledge is extremely effective.

The re-reading has a second effect. You become able to notice the moment you begin using the same order on someone else. The detector works identically in both directions.

In Summary: What Is Missing Is Not Your Repetitions

Studying the principles of influence and failing to reproduce them is not a matter of shallow understanding or too little practice. The conditions the experiment held in place do not hold in your setting.

Effective styles reverse with situation. Many of the laws were extracted from a sample of the successful alone. In some cases market and circumstance generated both the technique and the outcome. Restore those variables to view and it is the premise — that more precision will eventually make it work — that gives way.

The knowledge itself need not be discarded. Stop using it as a prescription and hold it as a detector. Once what is working on you becomes visible, it becomes possible to step quietly out of the question of which technique to study next.

The design of relationships is taken up in leadership in a community and sensemaking and leadership; the framing of skill as the thing to raise, in communication skill rises and the work still spins.

References

Academic works and originals

• Cialdini, R. B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) — the six principles of influence in social psychology
• Fiedler, F. E. A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness (1967) McGraw-Hill

Academic papers

• Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. “The Romance of Leadership” (1985) Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1)