THE “REASON WHY”
In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (rev. ed., Collins Business, 1998), Robert Cialdini, Ph.D., discusses an experiment conducted by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer in which she demonstrated that people like to have a reason for doing something. Her experiment was simple. People were waiting in line to use a copy machine at a library. Langer’s colleague asked those waiting if she could go ahead of them, saying, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” Interestingly, 94 percent of those asked complied. Note the word because, which introduced a reason for the request.
The experiment was repeated with a new group. This time Langer’s colleague said, “Excuse me, I ...
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