Hello, Jason Fladlien here from DailySeminar.com, and today I’m going to discuss with you the law of reciprocity. It is one of the laws of psychological influence of persuasion.
It really is cool because it can get people to do things that are in their best interest and actually increase their satisfaction based on at least the scientific studies and motivate them to take action on your offers and purchase them.
And so I’ll tell you why you want to use the law of reciprocity with an example here. I call this the Coke experiment. This was a psychology experiment done in the 60s or 70s, I think, in Cornell. And basically it worked like this:
The subject — he had to rate the quality of paintings. So the subject came in — the test subject in this case — he thought he was rating art appreciation. He thought he was part of an art appreciation study, when really he didn’t understand he was actually part of a study on the law of reciprocity and how it affects people and their decisions they make.
And so supposedly the subject, he comes in to rate the quality of the paintings which is inconsequential to the study. And there’s an assistant to the study of the professor performing the experiment, who’s posing as a fellow subject so there’s two subjects at a time. One of them’s the actual subject, and one is really the assistant who’s trained to do certain things to see how the subject responds.