This article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest provides a dramatic illustration of the gap that can exist between attitude change and behavior change. Its authors meta-analyzed the results of 224 programs for the primary prevention of sexual violence and concluded that although these programs succeeded in changing men’s attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge in a positive direction, they failed to produce reductions in victimization or perpetration.

An example of the influence of descriptive norms on hotel guests’ compliance with requests to re-use towels rather than have them changed every day can be found in this study that compared three kinds of phrasings on the request cards. Cards that emphasized the high percentage of guests who re-use their towels resulted in the highest rates of compliance.

The importance of attribution in everyday life is exemplified by a recent article on political tribalism. It presents the results of experimental research showing that people tend to evaluate political statements and actions more positively if attributed to a politician they support than to one they do not support. A shorter summary of this research and the impact of political tribalism can be found here.

Descriptive norms can be seen operating when street performers, cocktail lounge pianists, coat-check attendants, baristas, and others who work for tips “seed” their tip containers with bills in the amounts they hope their customers will contribute. The idea is that if a pianist’s tip jar already holds a few five-dollar bills, and maybe even a ten, listeners are led to assume that these are normal tip amounts and might thus be more likely to contribute similar amounts themselves.

The human tendency to obey the orders of legitimate authority figures has been exploited by pranksters who have influenced unsuspecting people to engage in outrageous and potentially dangerous or harmful behavior. For example, in April 2016, employees of California and Oklahoma fast-food restaurants broke out all their stores’ windows after callers claiming to be fire department officials ordered them to ventilate supposedly deadly levels of carbon monoxide. Orders from a caller posing as a Boston police detective led four restaurant managers there to strip-search their employees for evidence of criminal activity. In other cases, residents of a special needs school were given unnecessary electric shock treatments on the telephoned orders of a hoaxer, and hospital nurses obeyed medical treatment orders given by a teenager who claimed to be a doctor. A summary of such cases, and the details of one in 2004 that led to a criminal trial for the caller are available in this news story. A much more elaborate description of this hoax, its perpetrator, and its horrific impact on some of its targets is presented in a three-episode series on Netflix.

A short video found here illustrates the power of words to influence the behavior of others, in this case, to create empathy and generosity.

Here are examples of how the foot-in-the-door influence strategy is used by creative, self-serving scammers. The first one is based on Sue Frantz’s experiences in Paris a few years ago and can be found in longer form here.

“In the petition scam, the thief approaches a likely mark with a clipboard in hand and asks, “Do you speak English?” When the mark says, “Yes,” the thief asks something like, “Would you sign this petition to support people who are deaf and mute?” When the mark says they are indeed willing, the thief hands over the clipboard and a pen. After the mark signs, the thief asks for a donation to support the cause. The money “donated” does not go to a cause other than the thief’s own.”

Here is another version, also from Paris, this time experienced by one of the authors of the Examples compendium:

Arriving at the top of Montmartre, he was approached by two women who purported to be deaf and mute. One of them pushed a clipboard into his hands and pointed to a page of English text stating that they were collecting money to help deaf people. Being a generous sort, he handed over five Euros, at which point the other woman, looking annoyed, lifted the clipboard page to reveal a table that informed him that the “minimum” donation is 10 Euros. Embarrassed at having failed to see this foot-in-the-door scam coming, he took back the five Euro note as if to exchange it for a ten, then informed the women in rather obscene French idiom that he was on to their game. They must have miraculously recovered their hearing at that point because they reacted with shock and hurried off to find a new mark.

In an experiment, men and women in adjoining rooms participated in “get acquainted” conversations over an intercom system. Before the conversations took place, the men were shown a photograph of the woman who was supposedly their conversation partner. Some saw a photo of an obese woman while others saw a woman of normal weight, but the photos were unrelated to the women in the next room. Independent judges who had not seen any of the research participants listened to recordings of the conversations and made ratings of the women’s behavior and personality traits. The women who had talked to men who thought they were of normal weight were rated as more articulate, lively, interesting, exciting, and fun to be with than were the women whose conversation partner thought they were obese. These results suggested that when men thought they were talking to a woman of normal weight, they were more friendly and engaging than when talking to a woman who they thought was obese, and that these differences in the men’s behavior drew correspondingly different behavior from the women.

[Reference: Snyder, M., & Haugen, J. A. (1995). Why does behavioral confirmation occur? A functional perspective on the role of the target. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 963–974.]