Just as we desire to pay back favors, when we’re negotiating with someone and they make a concession, we’ll feel obliged to reciprocate it. This is known as the rejection-then-retreat strategy.

The author experienced this first-hand when a Boy Scout approached him on the street, wishing to sell him tickets to the annual Boy Scout circus.

The author

When uncertain, we look for social proof.

ourtroom research indicates that juries are also influenced by “censored” information. It has long been known that when juries know that an insurance company will pay the bill, they tend to award larger damages to plaintiffs. Interestingly though, they award even higher damages if they are expressly told by the judge to ignore the fact that the

To protect ourselves against likability manipulation, a good step is to ask ourselves whether we have come to like someone or something unusually strongly in a short time. If so, this could be due to some form of manipulation, and alarm bells should ring.

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

In an experiment to study this phenomenon, a researcher asked people queueing up to use a copy machine whether she could skip the line. She found that if she gave a reason – “May I skip the line because I’m in a rush?” – 94 percent of people complied with her request.

If she gave no reason, only 60 percent complied.

But, fascinatingly, if she gave a

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.

if we hear about something while eating delicious food, we tend to associate the matter in question with the positive feelings elicited by the food.

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