As we’ve just seen, people tend to look to others for guidance as to how to behave. And this tendency is strongest when the person observed is similar to ourselves, an effect that can be seen in how susceptible teenagers are to the opinions and fashion choices of their peers.

Our tendency to emulate others also produces a rather grim statistic: when

Turkey mothers are wonderful parents: loving, protective and nurturing of their young.

However, look a little more closely and you’ll see that this tenderness hangs by a single thread. If a chick emits the distinctive “cheep-cheep” sound, the mother will care for it lovingly. But if the chick does not, the mother will ignore or even kill it!

The

In the 1970s, the Krishna organization in the United States also used this tactic to great effect. They gifted flowers to passersby on the street and, though generally annoyed, people often made donations to the organization to satisfy their need to reciprocate the gift of the flower.

So there we have it, the methods experts use to influence you. Knowing these six fundamental principles of persuasion – reciprocation, scarcity, consistency, social proof, liking and authority – will hopefully help you protect yourself against them.

People who are similar to us can greatly influence our choices.

Compliance professionals like salespeople can use, for example, the lowball trick to try to generate inner change in us. A car dealer might make such an astoundingly cheap offer on a car that we immediately decide to buy it. The dealer knows full well that, during the test drive, we will then independently construct several other reasons to buy the

We comply with people we like, and it is easy for some people to make us like them.

Have you ever been to a Tupperware party? If you go, be sure to appreciate the skill with which the business model leverages the power of compliance tricks. From reciprocity, where every attendant gets some kind of gift before the buying begins, to social proof,

From tribes in Africa to college fraternities in the United States, when a new member is being inducted into a group, initiation rituals commonly involve pain and degradation, sometimes even death. And efforts to curb the brutal practices always meet with dogged resistance. But why is that?

Quite simply, the groups engaging in these rituals know

For example, after the Korean War, Chinese interrogators got American prisoners of war to collaborate using this tactic. First, they asked them to make very small concessions such as writing and signing innocuous statements like “America is not perfect.”

But then, when these statements were read publicly across the prison camp, the prisoner was