Guest post: Turkeys

In his article, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” Robert Cialdini claims two major premises, first that the brain is a wondrously complex and powerful device but still woefully unprepared to assimilate and process all the available information in a timely manner. His second premise is that the way modern society works is the cause of this problem.

Cialdini starts his article with a perplexing question from a friend of his. The friend wondered why some jewelry she was trying to sell would not sell at a reasonable price but when the price was accidentally doubled, it flew off the shelves.

In order to explain this phenomenon he brings up research regarding the behavior of mother turkeys. He states that turkeys will only nourish their young if the child makes the typical baby turkey noise of “cheep cheep.” This correlation is so strong that if the child does not make this sound then the mother will completely ignore it or even kill it.

Given this information, scientists wondered if the turkey would try to mother another animal making that noise. They decided to stick a recording of the young turkeys in a stuffed bobcat and surprisingly enough, the turkey took it under her wing as if it were her own young. Then they shut off the recording and the turkey seemed to realize it was a bobcat and began to flap and peck at it furiously.

Why does the turkey have such a strong reaction to what is in actuality poor information? Cialdini states that the brain of a turkey is incapable of sifting through the entirety of the stimuli that it comes in contact with every day and so, has conditioned itself with a few routine behaviors to carry out given a specific trigger. The cheep cheep of the young turkeys triggers the mothering routine in the older turkeys and mostly works out well. The end result of these programs is that the healthy young who make the noise are nourished while the weak or sick ones are not. Cialdini claims that the human brain works much the same way and that humans respond to the same kinds of triggers that the turkeys do.

In the case of Cialdini’s friend, the customers knew little to nothing about the jewelry being sold but did have past experience purchasing other items which had taught them that higher price means better quality. Thus they operated on incomplete information like the turkeys and came out losing.