Egotistic trap as a social influence technique

ABSTRACT

Two experiments tested the effectiveness of an egotistic trap, a social influence technique based on the premise that people agree to requests that align with their desirable qualities. In the first experiment, people were asked to participate in a survey-based study. In the control conditions (standard request), approx. 32.7% said yes. Yet, when it was mentioned that intelligent individuals were sought after and the subject appeared intelligent, the percentage became 52.4%. The second experiment aimed to persuade car owners to have their cars inspected at an official service station. Of the participants, 56.7% agreed in the standard conditions. However, when the phrase ‘studies show that sensible customers have their cars inspected at official service stations’ was included, it became 71.7%.

KEYWORDS:

• Egotistic Trap
• persuasion
• request formulation

Introduction

Since the 1960s, social psychologists have been conducting experimental studies on the effectiveness of all sorts of techniques used for gaining compliance with various requests. At that time, Freedman and Fraser (1966) demonstrated that people were more willing to act on a difficult request if they were first asked to fulfill a similar but significantly easier request. While Wallace and Sadalla (1966) demonstrated that a subject’s compliance toward requests was increased if the subject experienced the feeling of shame or guilt. Since then, a great number of social influence techniques and their underlying psychological mechanisms have been discussed in the literature on psychology (see: Pratkanis, 2007; Dolinski, 2016; Cialdini, 2021, for an extensive review). In this article, we are presenting the concept of a new social influence technique, never before described in the literature on psychology, referred to as egotistic trap, as well as two empirical studies designed to test its effectiveness.

This technique is based on the fact that some of the most important and common social motivations in people are: their drive for achieving and maintaining a positive self-assessment (e.g., Alicke & Sedikides, 2009; Coffey & Warren, 2020) as well as presenting, effectively, themselves to their social surrounding as competent and ethical individuals (e.g., Gross et al., 2021; Hart et al., 2020).

At its core, the egotistic trap technique consists in formulating a request and simultaneously suggesting that people characterized by certain qualities (commonly desirable ones, e.g., high intelligence or a sensible approach to decision making) usually agree to grant similar requests. This way, the subject faces a specific situation. In order to be perceived as someone who displays such qualities, they should agree to act on the request they have been approached with.

The literature on psychology discusses a few social influence techniques that take advantage of people’s desire to protect/improve their self-esteem as well as their tendency to present themselves to others as competent and moral individuals. The induction of hypocrisy is probably the best known and the most researched technique of this kind. Once we make the subject realize that their actions are inconsistent with their opinions and values, they will modify their behavior in such a manner as to reduce this inconsistency (e.g., Dickerson et al., 1992; Fointiat, 2004). The expert snare technique, first described by Pratkanis and Uriel (2011), is also closely related to the notion of hypocrisy. Upon hearing that they must be an expert in a given field, an individual often agrees to act on a nonsensical request only because, as an expert, they should know that this request is well founded. Researchers have demonstrated, e.g., that a surfer coming out of the water with his surfboard under his arm, when complemented by an experimenter on his surfing skills and being an expert on surfing, will be willing to sign a nonsensical petition regarding the introduction of a law that would make it mandatory for novice surfers to use boards that are painted yellow and bear purple polka dots. There is also a technique that takes advantage of our tendency to rely on a favorable self-presentation in front of those whose opinion, for certain reasons, matters to us. In the experiment conducted by Rind and Benjamin (1994), a teenager approached men enjoying their coffee in a shopping mall and offered them lottery tickets while saying that income generated from their sale would be used to support a charitable organization. If there were only men sitting at the table, they would rarely decide to buy the tickets. However, they were significantly more willing to purchase them if a woman accompanied them. Clearly, purchasing a lottery ticket was perceived as a good opportunity to show one’s sensitivity and to present oneself as someone who gladly supports charity and those less fortunate.

Egotistic trap differs from the above-mentioned techniques. It is not implied to the subject that they are behaving inconsistently with their own norms and values, as is the case when induction of hypocrisy is applied. What is more, the subject is not being told, directly, that they are an expert in a certain field (which the subsequently formulated request pertains to), as is the case when the expert snare technique is being used and the request is not being formulated in the presence of the person the subject would like to make a very positive impression on, which is what the technique based on our tendency toward favorable self-presentation consists of. In the case of the egotistic trap technique, the objective is to formulate our request in such a manner as to make the subject believe that people characterized by a particular, socially positive, quality usually agree to act on similar requests. If the subject were to refuse to grant the request, they would be, indirectly, admitting that they lack said quality. What you will find below is a detailed description of the essence of the egotistic trap technique.

The egotistic trap technique

When, in the evening, a parent says to their child, who is a few years old, ‘at this time of the day, well-behaved children brush their teeth and go to bed,’ the message is not just ‘brush your teeth and go to bed.’ The parent is also saying, ‘if you consider yourself a well-behaved child, prove it and act as well-behaved children do.’ Two or three years later, the same child will learn that a real boy scout is not afraid of spending a night in a tent in the middle of a dark forest and that a real buddy is always loyal to his best friend. Adults are also exposed to similarly constructed persuasive messages. During services, priests of different denominations tell their congregation members that a true Christian/Muslim/Jew, etc., should never act in this way or that he should always do ‘this in another situation.’ Therefore, if you consider yourself a good Christian, Muslim, Jew, or a good follower of another religion, you should act in a particular fashion. Otherwise, you are not, truly, a follower of ‘this’ religion. In other, non-religious situations, we may learn from our male friends that a true soccer fan wears his fan scarf not only when his team wins but also when it loses, while our female friends will tell us that a good and carrying mother always makes sure her children have some food or a warm beverage before they leave for school. While browsing the Internet, we will learn that a 21st-century patriot pays their taxes and votes in presidential elections and that a responsible citizen is someone who segregates their waste carefully and saves water.

Social influence techniques are actions designed to increase the probability of people acting on a request or accepting a proposition or an offer. It can be assumed that if, while formulating our request or a proposition, we add a comment suggesting that people characterized by a certain important and explicitly positive quality usually agree to act on this request or accept this proposition, we will increase the probability of its acceptance. This is because the subject will be faced with a situation referred to as an egotistic trap. If they refuse to act on the request, they will be perceived as someone who lacks said positive quality. If they agree to act on it, they will prove they have it.

In the first of our experiments, the egotistic trap was related to the use of the term ‘intelligence.’ As most people believe they are intelligent (e.g., Alicke et al., 1997; Zell et al., 2020) and since the belief in our intellectual competencies is a crucial element of our global self-esteem (e.g., Arens et al., 2013; Geng & Tao, 2013), we assumed that mentioning this particular quality in the context of the request being formulated will increase the chances for its fulfillment.

Study 1

Method

The study was conducted by 133 students aged 18–48 (92 women and 41 men). A student conducting the study approached an adult, unaccompanied individual standing at a bus or a tram stop and, depending on the experimental conditions, addressed this person with a certain message.

In the control conditions, the student said:

Excuse me, I am a university student, and I need to conduct a study to get credit for one of my courses. Could you please help me? The thing is that I need to have this questionnaire filled out: it contains 142 questions. Would you agree to fill it out?

Whereas in the experimental conditions, the request was phrased differently:

Excuse me, I am a university student, and I need to conduct a study to get credit for one of my courses. Could you please help me? The thing is that I need to have this questionnaire filled out: it contains 142 questions. We need to elicit answers from intelligent persons, and you simply appear to be one of them. Would you agree to fill it out?

Our assumption was that an equal number of males and females would take part in the study in both conditions (i.e., in the control and the experimental conditions). However, we did not formulate (due to lack of any grounds for doing so) any expectations as to potential differences between the sexes.

The experimenter would address a lone man, who appeared to be an adult (i.e., over 18), and formulate the request specific for the control conditions. Then, the experimenter would walk away from the bus/tram stop and would return after a few minutes to address an apparently adult woman with the same utterance. Next, the experimenter would, again, walk away and then return after a few minutes to address another man standing at the stop with the utterance specific for the experimental conditions. Subsequently, the experimenter would leave the stop for a few minutes in order to return and address a woman with the utterance described above in the experimental conditions. The next subject would be a man exposed to control conditions, then a woman exposed to control conditions, then a man exposed to experimental conditions and so on. Each time, we made sure the subject did not witness the previous interaction between the experimenter and another subject.

When the person refused to fill out the questionnaire, the experimenter thanked them, said goodbye, and walked away. When the subject agreed to participate in the study (and perhaps asked about details, e.g., when was the study scheduled for), the experimenter explained that at that point, the intention was only to assess the percentage of people who would agree to participate in the study, thanked the subject for their willingness to participate, said goodbye and walked away.

The number of participants, i.e., 1051, was determined in advance with the help of G_Power software. The large sample volume resulted from the fact that there were no presumptions as to the knowledge of the effect size (we assumed low effect size of .1). As no similar studies had been conducted before, we decided to include a large number of subjects in our sample to be able to observe even a small effect. At the same time, we wanted to ensure a high level of power and thus we set it at .90.

Our sample included 532 women and 532 men.

The ethics committee of SWPS University, Faculty of Psychology in Wrocław, approved the study (04/P/01/2020).

Results

In the control conditions, 174 individuals out of 532 subjects agreed to participate in the survey, representing a compliance rate of approximately 32.7%. In the experimental conditions, 279 individuals out of 532 subjects agreed to participate in the study, representing a compliance rate of approximately 52.4%. The difference between the two conditions was characterized by a statistical significance (χ² = 42.381; p < 0.00001; odds ratio = 2.02, 95% CI (1,57–2.59).

Discussion of Study 1

The pattern of results was consistent with our expectations. When we mentioned that we were looking for intelligent individuals and that our interlocutor appeared to be just that, they were significantly more willing to act on our request, i.e., to participate in the survey. As we had presumed, the subjects behaved this way in the egotistic trap conditions because if they had refused to participate in the study, they would have, at least implicitly, admitted that they were not intelligent. To be fair, we must state that there are other alternative interpretations of our results. First and foremost, we feel flattered when we are told that we appear to be intelligent, which increases our yielding disposition toward a request (Hendrick et al., 1972; Pratkanis, 2007). Another interpretation refers to the reciprocity rule (Cialdini, 2021; Uehara, 1995). If someone describes us as an intelligent person in the course of a conversation, we may consider it a polite gesture that should be returned – in this particular case, by acting on the request. Another explanation could be that we might have aroused certain expectations in the subjects regarding the nature of the task they would be asked to perform. Since the questions are intended for intelligent people, they must be interesting. Thus, the study is worth taking part in.

This vagueness made us conduct another study designed to disprove the above-mentioned alternative interpretations. This time, we decided to associate the egotistic trap with a quality that could be considered sensible when making important decisions. Unlike the case of Study 1, this time, the subjects were not (even implicitly) referred to as sensible and were not told that they appeared to be sensible.

Study 2

Method

In this experiment, we persuaded owners of a certain Japanese car to have a post-warranty inspection that would be carried out at the official service station. Drivers generally have to have their cars inspected at the official service station throughout the warranty period (in this case within three years after the purchase of the car); if this is not done, the warranty would be void. Still, many car owners choose to have their cars inspected at independent repair shops once the warranty period has expired as these shops offer significantly lower prices for both services and spare parts.

Needless to say, this situation is not exactly optimal from the perspective of an official car dealership, which in this case will likely be the first choice of its customers for inspection services. Therefore, when the time for an inspection is approaching, an employee of the car dealership calls the car owner and offers to make an appointment at the official service station.

We wanted to see if using the egotistic trap in the course of the conversation makes car owners more willing to use the services of the official service station. Considering the fact that in Study 1 we obtained an odds ratio = 2.02 (transferred into Cohen’s d = .420) and that Study 2 would be conducted in two conditions (control vs. egotistic trap), we assumed the following parameters to determine the sufficient number of subjects: effect size: Cohen’s d = .30; p level =.05; power =.90 while achieving the suggested N = 117. Therefore, we assumed that 60 individuals would be tested in each condition. The individuals who received a call from an employee of the car dealership and were offered to have their cars inspected were alternately assigned to the control or experimental conditions. Most of the subjects were men (72).

In the control conditions, the car dealership employee (a woman) called the customer, introduced herself by stating her first and last name, said which car dealership she represented, informed the customer that the date for an annual inspection of their car was approaching and asked if they would like to have their car inspected at the official service station of the car dealership. If the customer said no, the woman thanked them for their time and ended the call. If the respondent said yes, an appointment was made for a convenient date.

In the experimental conditions, the course of the telephone conversation was almost identical, but right after the question regarding the annual car inspection, the car dealership employee added the following phrase: ‘Studies show that sensible customers have their cars inspected at official service stations.’

The ethics committee of SWPS University, Faculty of Psychology in Wrocław approved the study (04/E/01/2022). The entire study procedure was pre-registered - https://osf.io/t9p5x

Results

In the control conditions, 25 out of 60 subjects, i.e., 41.7%, agreed to have their cars inspected at the official service station with the standard course of the conversation. In the experimental conditions, when the participants were told that sensible customers had their cars inspected at official service stations, 43 out of 60 subjects agreed to accept the offer, i.e., 71.7%. The difference in terms of the compliance rate for both conditions is characterized by a statistical significance: χ² = 11.00, p < .0001, odds ratio = 3.54, 95% CI (1,65–7.58).

The pattern of results for the actual appearance at the official service station was analogous, i.e., in the control conditions, 5 out of 25 individuals, who had previously made their appointments, did not come at the specified date and time but two of them rescheduled and ultimately came to the service station. In the experimental conditions, 6 individuals failed to turn up for their appointments but 3 of those 6 persons rescheduled and ultimately came to have their cars inspected.¹⁾ And so, taking into account the actual behavior of the subjects (i.e., their appearance at the service station for inspection), 22 out of 60 individuals (36.66%) came to have their cars inspected in the control conditions and as many as 40 out of 60 (66.66%) in the experimental conditions. The difference is statistically significant: χ² = 10.81, p < .0002, odds ratio = 3.45, 95% CI (1,63–7.32).

Discussion of Study 2

The results of Study 2 were consistent with our expectations. In the condition where the subjects heard a casually added statement to the effect that sensible people had their cars inspected at official service stations, they were much more willing to make an appointment for a car inspection at an establishment where services were expensive but were most likely performed in a professional manner using original spare parts. The same pattern of results was recorded with reference to actually coming to the service station for inspection. It should be added that this time, the egotistic trap was related not to the subject’s high intelligence (as in the case of Study 1) but to being sensible, which helps one make good decisions. However, from a certain perspective, the crucial detail is that the subject was only told that sensible people had their cars inspected at official service stations. They were not told that they were (or appeared to be) sensible. Therefore, their consent to take the car dealership offer cannot be interpreted as a reaction to flattery or as a response resulting from the reciprocity rule. Additionally, the very procedure of the experiment excludes the third alternative interpretation mentioned in the discussion section for experiment No. 1, i.e., the subject’s expectations as to the fact that the activity being proposed should be cognitively interesting.

General discussion

The concept of the egotistic trap social influence technique presented herein, never before described in the literature on psychology, together with descriptions of two empirical studies documenting its effectiveness, shall enrich the knowledge of psychology both in the area of social influence as well as the area of social behaviors related to the need of protecting/strengthening one’s self-esteem. Both experiments demonstrated that the egotistic trap technique is very effective.

According to the results, if a request or a proposition includes a comment suggesting that people who display an important and positive quality usually agree to act on the request or accept the proposition, the chances for the request being granted increase significantly. This is because if the subject refuses to act on the request, they will admit that they lack said positive quality. In our first experiment, the positive quality was intelligence, whereas, in the second experiment, it was one’s sensible approach to making decisions. The scenario of Study 2 enabled us to exclude alternative interpretations of the results of Study 1. At the same time, with reference to Study 2, one might point to another mechanism that could, potentially, be considered an underlying reason behind the obtained results. This mechanism could be the descriptive social norm. After all, the subjects were told that other people had their cars serviced at the official service station. Previous psychological studies demonstrate that people are willing to do what – according to the information they are given – the majority of other people do (e.g., Goldstein et al., 2008; Nolan et al., 2008). As far as our studies are concerned, though, it would be difficult to speak of referring to the consensus. This is because our subjects were not told that the majority of drivers behaved in this manner. What is more, the objective data (i.e., the results recorded in the control group) indicates that it is clearly less than half of drivers who choose this option. More importantly, referring to the descriptive norm does not explain the results of our Study 1. Therefore, both of our studies are mutually complementary in the sense that they enable rejecting certain interpretations and, at the same time, they point to the egotistic mechanism as the basis for the effectiveness of the tested technique.

However, the following important question arises: are we dealing with the need to protect/strengthen the private or the public self-esteem? It should be noted that while in Study 1 we were dealing with a face-to-face interaction between the experimenter and the subject, the subjects were contacted over the phone in the case of Study 2. One might justifiably assume that the need for self-presentation is stronger in face-to-face contact conditions than in the case of a phone conversation with a person we will most likely never meet in person. Even though fairly large differences between experimental and control conditions were noted in both experiments, they were even more prominent in Study 2. This suggests that it was the need to protect/strengthen the private self-esteem that was the underlying mechanism behind the effectiveness of the tested technique. In order to determine if this is actually the case, it would be necessary to conduct more studies, where self-esteem would be measured both in individuals acting on a request and refusing to do so both in control and experimental conditions.

Another interesting direction of future studies could pertain to individual differences. It could be assumed that the egotistic trap technique should be effective when used on people with high self-esteem. In their case, refusal to act on a request, entailing the risk of admitting that they lack a socially important and positive quality, would pose a threat to said high self-esteem. At the same time, in the case of people characterized by low self-esteem, refusal to grant requests presented in the context of the egotistic trap technique would be in line with their previous opinion on themselves. In the case of such individuals, this technique should be less effective or simply ineffective.

However, it is difficult to employ a field study paradigm in the case of studies devoted to identifying whether the given technique is associated with defending private or public self-assessment as well as studies devoted to determining personality traits that make people particularly susceptible to this technique. The very few successful attempts at conducting such studies (Cialdini et al., 1995; Cantarero et al., 2017; Maksim & Śpiewak, 2023) demonstrate that in such cases, it is necessary to overcome very serious issues of a methodological and/or a purely technical nature.

Still, it would be possible and advisable to conduct a cross-cultural field study designed to compare the effectiveness of the egotistic trap technique in both the individualistic and the collectivist culture. If our assumptions are correct in that the technique presented herein has egotistic basis, it should be less effective, or perhaps even completely ineffective, in the collectivist culture, where egotistic needs are reduced, as compared to the individualistic culture (e.g., Marcus & Kitayama, 2010). Such findings would also form a valid argument to support the thesis, according to which the egotistic trap technique is not based on the descriptive social norms mechanism.

Two important features of the egotistic trap social influence technique presented in this article should be emphasized. First, it is exceptionally effective. In the first experiment, it resulted in an increase in the compliance rate on the part of the subjects from 32.7% to 52.4%, whereas in the second experiment, the compliance rate increased from close to 37% to almost 67%. In the first of our experiments, the odds ratio was 2.02, whereas in the second one the figure was 3.54 for consenting to making an appointment at the service station and 3.45 for actually appearing for service on the scheduled date. These figures should be compared to the results of the meta-analysis regarding the most popular and most widely empirically tested social influence technique, namely foot-in-the-door. In its meta-analysis, Burger (1999) factored in all available studies in which, in the experimental conditions, subjects first complied with the initial (easy) request and were then asked to comply with another, difficult request; whereas in the control conditions, subjects were asked to comply with the difficult request straight away. As Burger obtained an odds ratio of 1.47, i.e., significantly below the result obtained in our studies presented herein, the author spoke of ‘large differences between FITD and control conditions’ (p. 309). Taking the above into account, it seems that referring to the egotistic trap as a highly effective technique is fully justified.

Second, the egotistic trap is very easy to apply. Many social influence techniques require designing complex and often time-consuming interactions (see: Cialdini, 2021; Dolinski, 2016; Dolinski & Grzyb, 2023; Pratkanis, 2007, for review). In the case of the egotistic trap technique, all you need is a short phrase included in the wording of a request or a proposition.

In both experiments, we referred to two different personality traits: intelligence in the first study and sensibility in the second study. Further empirical studies of the egotistic trap technique should be focused on examining its effectiveness with reference to other qualities/traits. From the cognitive perspective, it would be particularly interesting to refer to typical qualities of people who agree to act on requests or accept propositions that are not clearly positive while addressing someone making such a request or proposition. For example, it would be interesting to see the reactions of people who are told that in such situations, consent is usually granted by risk-takers or people who go to bed late.

Note

1. The process of collecting data regarding the driver’s appearance at the service station was terminated 30 days from the date of the conversation with the given driver.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank students from “Introduction to social psychology” group (year 2019) for their assistance in Study 1 and Edyta Futoma for her assistance in Study 2 as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable input and critical remarks regarding the original version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data from both studies are publicly accessible at the following addresses: Study 1: https://osf.io/ps26k and Study 2: https://osf.io/ubq73