Could it be that “Influence” has been translated into Japanese? Could it be required reading for realtors?
I’ve been reading Robert Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” and it makes me feel sooooooo foolish 🙂
How many little triggers are there that set us to doing things, sometimes that we want/need/should do?
But how many are there that we are unaware of? that lead us off into the ‘land to be fleeced’? or at least into the land of susceptibility?
I was cringing when I read the passage about the realtors using ‘dump houses’ to set clients up for the houses they really wanted to sell.
Why was I cringing?
Because I recently bought a house, in Japan, and this technique may have very well been in play . . .
Our realtor was showing us houses we requested to see. We were looking for a new house, a certain size (two small but growing boys after all need a little room, so their parents don’t eat them 🙂
One day we asked him to show us a house, that wasn’t new, and next thing we know he calls and says there’s a house a little like what we’re in the market for and he can show it to us.
The house was 5 years old, and still occupied, which kept us from running for the car within 5 minutes of arriving.
I’m sure we weren’t that good at hiding our disappointment, and our agent helped us out of there fairly quickly. When we arrived at our car, he said there was another house not too far away, a little older, but that we might as well look at since we were in the neighborhood.
We looked at it, we loved it, we bought it.
It looked great then. (fact is, it looks great now despite the fact that we’re living in it and I’m not the yard master or best gardener in the neighborhood).
I still wonder though if this wasn’t a classic, show them something pricey and crappy first, then show them the thing you really want them to buy and it will look so much better.
In any case, I’m still happy we bought the house. Would we have been so easy to persuade to buy a 15 year old house after looking at only new houses? I think not 🙂