A CANADIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL COUPLE STUDY FINDS SOMETHING INTERESTING ABOUT PEOPLE AT THE RACE TRACK: Immediately after placing a bet, they were much more confident about their horse’s chances of winning than they were before making the bet. The odds had completely changed; it was the same horse, on the same track, in the same field; but in the minds of the bettors, their prospects had improved significantly after they had bought their tickets. While a little confusing at first glance, the reason for this dramatic change has to do with a common weapon of social influence. Like other weapons of influence, it resides deep within us, guiding our actions with a silent force. It is simply our almost obsessive desire to be (and appear to be) consistent with what we have already committed to. Once we have made a decision or position, we are subject to personal and interpersonal pressures to behave in a manner consistent with that commitment.
Such pressure will cause us to respond in a way that justifies our previous decision. Take the gamblers at the experimental track. Thirty seconds before depositing their money, they are hesitant and uncertain; thirty seconds after the fact, they are significantly more optimistic and confident. The act of making the final decision, in this case, to buy a ticket - has become the critical factor. Once the position is taken, the need for consistency drives these people to align what they feel and believe with what they have done. They simply convince themselves that they made the right decision and undoubtedly feel better. Before we see this self-deception as something unique to racetrack regulars, we should look at the story of my neighbor Sara and her boyfriend, Tim. They met at the hospital where he worked as an X-ray technician and she as a nutritionist. They dated for a while, even after Tim lost his job, and eventually moved in together.
Things were never perfect for Sara: she wanted Tim to marry her and to stop drinking excessively; Tim rejected both ideas. After a very difficult period of conflict, Sara broke up and Tim moved out. At the same time, Sara's old boyfriend came back into town after years away and called her. They began seeing each other socially and quickly became serious enough to plan a wedding. They were at the point of setting a date and sending out invitations when Tim called. He had repented and wanted to come back. When Sara told him about her wedding plans, he begged her to change her mind; he wanted to be with her like before. But Sara refused, saying she didn't want to live like this anymore. Tim even offered to marry her, but she said she liked her other boyfriend better. Finally, Tim offered to stop drinking if she gave in. Feeling that under such conditions Tim had the upper hand, Sara decided to break off the engagement, cancel the wedding, withdraw. she invited him back and let Tim come back to live with her.
After a month, Tim told Sara that he thought he shouldn't stop drinking; a month later, he decided they should "wait and see" before getting married. Two years passed; Tim and Sara continued living together exactly as they had before. While he was drinking, there were no plans for marriage, but Sara was more devoted to Tim than ever. She said she was forced to choose whether Tim was really number one in her heart. So, after choosing Tim over her other boyfriends, Sara felt happier with him, even though the conditions under which she made the decision were never met. Of course, horse bettors are not alone in their willingness to believe in the truth of difficult choices that have been made. In fact, all of us from time to time deceive ourselves in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have done or decided.
Psychologists have long understood the power of the coherence principle to guide human action. Leading theorists such as Leon-Festinger, Fritz Hieder, and Theodore Newcomb have seen the desire for consistency as a primary motivation for our behavior. But is this trend-44 / Influence? consistency really powerful enough to force ourselves to do things we normally wouldn’t want to do? There’s no doubt about it. The drive for (and the appearance of) consistency is a powerful tool of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests.
Take, as an example, what happened when psychologist Thomas Moriarty staged a robbery on a New York beach to see if bystanders would risk personal injury to stop the crime. In the study, a research accomplice placed a beach blanket five feet from the blanket of a randomly selected individual: the experimental subject. After spending a few minutes on the blanket relaxing and listening to music from a portable radio, the accomplice would get up and put the blanket down to walk along the beach. A few minutes later, a second investigator, posing as the thief, would walk up, grab the radio, and try to make off with it. As one might expect, under normal conditions, the subjects were extremely reluctant to put themselves in danger by challenging the thief; only four did so in the twenty robberies he had organized. But when the same procedure was tried twenty more times, with a slight twist, the results were very different. In this incident, before the walk, the accomplice had simply asked the subjects to “take care of my stuff,” which each agreed to do. Now, prompted by the rule of consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became true vigilantes, pursuing and stopping the thief, demanding explanations, and often physically restraining the thief or ripping off his radio.
To understand why consistency is such a powerful reason, it is important to realize that in most circumstances, consistency is evaluated and adjusted. Incoherence is generally considered an undesirable personality trait. A person whose beliefs, words, and actions do not match may be seen as indecisive, confused, duplicitous, or even mentally ill. On the other hand, a high degree of consistency is usually associated with personal and intellectual strength. It is the heart of logic, rationality, stability, and honesty. A quote attributed to the great English chemist Michael Faraday illustrates the extent to which consistency is approved, sometimes more than fair. When asked after a lecture whether he meant to imply that a hated academic rival was always wrong, Faraday frowned at the questioner and replied, "That is inconsistent."
Therefore, of course, good personal consistency is highly valued in our culture. And so it should be. It gives us a rational and profitable orientation to the world. Most of the time we would be better off if our approach to things was well-knit with consistency. Without it, our lives would be difficult, disorganized and disconnected. Roberto B. Cialdini Doctor / 45
But because it’s generally in our best interest to be consistent, we can easily fall into the habit of being consistent automatically, even in situations where it doesn’t make sense. When it happens without thinking, consistency can be disastrous. But blind consistency has its charms, too. First, like most other forms of autoresponder, it offers a shortcut through the hectic pace of modern life. Once we’ve decided on a topic, stubborn consistency affords us a very appealing luxury: we don’t have to think about it much anymore.
We don’t have to sift through the storm of information we encounter every day, identify relevant facts; we don’t have to expend mental energy weighing pros and cons; we don’t have to make any deeper decisions. Instead, all we have to do when faced with a problem is turn on our consistency tape, buzzing and knowing exactly what to believe, say, or do. We only have to believe, say, or do what is consistent with our previous decisions. The appeal of such a luxury should not be underestimated. It allows us a convenient, relatively simple, and efficient method for dealing with the complexities of everyday life that tax our mental energy and faculties. It is not hard to see why automatic coherence is such a difficult response to control. It offers us a way to avoid the rigors of constant thinking. And as Sir Joshua Reynolds has pointed out, “There is no way that one would not do to avoid the real work of thinking.” With our consistency tape running, then, we can go about our business happily freed from the pain of having to think too much. There is also a second, more sinister appeal of mechanical consistency. Sometimes it is not the effort and cognitive effort that makes us avoid reflective activity, but the harsh consequences of that activity. Sometimes it is the series of very obvious and undesirable answers that direct thinking provides that make us mentally lazy.
There are some disturbing things we would rather not be aware of. Because it is an irrational and programmed response, automatic consistency can provide a safe haven from this disturbing spectacle. Closed within the walls of a fortress of rigid consistency, we can become immune to the siege of reason. One evening, at an introductory lecture given by a Transcendental Meditation (TM) program, I witnessed a beautiful illustration of how people hide behind the walls of consistency to protect themselves from the consequences of troublesome thinking. The conference itself was chaired by two serious young men and was designed to recruit new members to the program.
The event claimed to teach a unique brand of meditation that would allow us to achieve all sorts of things we desire, from simple inner peace to the most spectacular flying and wall-climbing skills in the more advanced (and more expensive) stages of the program. He had decided to attend the meeting to observe the kind of approval tactics used in recruiting for these conferences and had brought along an interested friend, a university professor whose field