Commitment

The Devil’s Advocate™ Go Premium Sir Humphrey demonstrates the power of commitment to Bernard, yesterday In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Documented in Robert Cialdini’s seminal book on persuasion techniques, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, one of the six is commitment. Lead your counterpart up the garden path with a series of leading questions, at the end of which, like poor old Bernard, he has no choice but to give you the answer you want — unless he wants to flat-out contradict himself, or mount a sophisticated, complicated and quite confrontational reverse-ferret.

Is this a legitimate technique? Depends. On one hand, it is easy and tempting to use it for nefarious ends. Will you ever believe an opinion poll you read again? On the other, if you want to achieve an outcome — and let’s face it, friends, all but the most passive aggressive of us generally do — and you have the choice between doing this the easy way or the hard way, wouldn’t you take the easy way?

It may be logical to present matters in a dry, dispassionate and infinitely particularised way, but it isn’t, as Rory Sutherland would say, psycho-logical.