Hello, Jason Fladlien here from DailySeminar.com.  Today I’m going to discuss with you a leverage principle that you can use in marketing called commitment and consistency, the Cialdini principle from Dr. Cialdini when he wrote the book The Psychology and Influence of Persuasion.   It’s a doozy.  This is a really cool one that a lot of people underestimate the power of.  I don’t see it being used enough online.  It’s very, very, very powerful for persuading somebody to purchase something from you.

And to give you an idea of how powerful it is and why you want to learn this, let’s check out the Sherman experiment.  There was a doctor named Dr. Sherman.  He was a sociologist who devised this one little interesting experiment where he called randomly on local residents – I think he was in Bloomington, Indiana.  And this is what he did.

He asked these residents to predict what their answer would be if someone asked them to donate three hours of their time to the American Cancer Society.  And this is not something that a lot of people would jump for joy and do, “Ooh yeah, let me donate my time to the ACS, the American Cancer Society.”

But when they felt like there was no obligation for them to actually do this – they just had to predict their answer – very innocently they made a commitment.  And a certain amount of people who made that commitment that said, ”Yeah I think I would donate three hours of my time,” kind of said it whimsically or said it because they didn’t think they’d actually have to follow through on it because it was just a question.

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