Thinking Across Cialdiniâs Influence and Jeff Walkerâs Launch to See How Online Marketing Formulas Using âSocial Triggersâ and âMental Triggersâ Can Perpetuate Rape Culture
Dr. Robert Cialdini writes about reciprocity in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. He calls it one of the six persuasion principles.
Hereâs reciprocity, in a nutshell:Â
You share, I share. You offer, I reciprocate. Fairness for all!
As Cialdini sketches it out, reciprocity doesnât operate at the conscious level. Instead, itâs a deep, subconscious drive. As I understand it, itâs our human communal instinct. It unconsciously tips us towards towards keeping relationship harmonious and power dynamics mutual and equitable.
So when someone gives you an unasked for gift, you instinctually want to reciprocate in some way. Reciprocity is ingrained so deeply into us that it's often automatic.
I'm talking about it like it's a concept, but it's a practice, and it's not something you have to conscious choose to do or rehearse.
So to me, reciprocity is fundamentally about justice. Itâs one of our justice instincts.
And the thing about reciprocity is that itâs a sequence and it's automatic. Reflexive.
If someone offers us a gift, we feel compelled to accept it and compelled to reciprocate.
If we either refuse the gift or fail to reciprocate, we feel deeply uncomfortable.
The reason? We've violated a social contract.
Our human social programming insists -- on a subterranean, psychological level deep within us -- that we participate in this sequence once it's activated.
That's why sometimes, instinctively, we want to refuse certain offerings or gifts.
Because we don't want to be drawn into this particular dynamic with this particular person.
Still, the instinct and compulsion towards reciprocity is so ingrained and so fundamentally human, that even when our other other instincts are insisting we don't engage with a particular person, we hesitate to say no.
We hesitate to opt out of reciprocity because it's viscerally uncomfortable.
Even if we don't want the gift, we'll accept it to avoid the visceral discomfort that comes with violating our social programming.
I'm saying social programming like it's nefarious, but again: reciprocity is about justice.
It's a lever we've developed as communal animals to keep things fair and harmonious.
That's why it feels so bad - awful - to deviate from it.
Some People Know That and Seek to Systematically Exploit It
Some people -- like pretty much any entrepreneur or online marketer enthusing about 'mental triggers' or 'social triggers' -- talk about reciprocity like it's an engine or mental programming: once it's activated, the fairness dominoes automatically fall into sequence. The task for these folks, then, is to figure out how to initiate that sequence so that your instinct towards reciprocity results in them extracting what they want out of you.
Thatâs why a whole segment of online marketers are staunch champions of sales funnels that they call âsocial triggersâ.
 (Cialdini maps these out as persuasion principles; Jeff Walker, in Launch, his influential book about online marketing, appears to adapt/pervert Cialdiniâs work and calls them âmental triggersâ; thereâs now a large and more diffuse body of work about online marketing that calls them âsocial triggersâ.)
The people Cialdini calls "compliance professionals" strive to activate these persuasion sequences - our human, social programming towards cooperation, justice and harmony - in us in order to get us to comply with their interests and agenda.
Compliance professionals are marketers, sales people, politicians, pick up artists, activists, parents, me.
Anyone with an interest in changing people's minds or getting people to say yes and comply is a compliance professional.
We are all compliance professionals.
But some of us are predators and use persuasion to feed our pleasure and profits at the expense of other people and the social good.
When it comes to reciprocity, a justice lever, some of us deliberately activate the need to reciprocate in order to disproportionately advantage ourselves over other people.
We are being taught, by champions of âsocial triggersâ, to use the human instinct and social programming towards justice  to construct an asymmetrical and unjust transaction.
And this gross abuse of our social justice programming is ubiquitous, online.
Jeff Walker, the author of Launch and a "online marketing guru", for example, appears to take the six principles of persuasion mapped out by Cialdini and embed them in his launch sequence - and, arguably, his model is the foundation of most online marketing including the business models of many (most?) significant Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brands.
Walker argues that reciprocity is a powerful "mental trigger" and therefore if you want to be successful as online entrepreneur, you need to activate it in your marketing.
Here's how you do it: offer lots of free content, instruction and gifts, including a bribe to sign up to your email list, and people will eventually feel obliged to reciprocate by buying your product.
If you Google big name marketing gurus + Cialdini, you will find lots and lots of people praising his insights about persuasion and bragging about how they successfully apply these social triggers in their marketing.
Cialdini says that he wrote his book in order to counter exploitative marketing.
He wanted us to read the book and realize how marketers and sales people were triggering these sequences in us - and, when it was dishonest or disadvantaging us, push back. Argue. Write letters protesting certain techniques and campaigns. Boycott. Unsubscribe.
Cialdini says he is a proponent of ethical marketing.
In my understanding of his work, he wants us to be conscious of how people try to manipulate us to serve their ends without respect for our well-being or the social good.
He worked as a consultant for a chain of hotels, for example, who wanted to reduce costs and environmental impact by asking guests to reuse their towels. They experimented with different methods. The rule of reciprocity suggests that in order to get guests to do a favour like this, the hotel needed to offer a gift first. To accomplish this first-offer that triggers the reciprocity sequence, the hotel made a donation to an environmental organization and then put a card in each room saying, roughly, we're committed to reducing our environmental footprint by using less water, electricity and detergent. As a testament to our commitment, we made a donation to an environmental org and could you do us a favour? Please reuse your towels as it helps us saves money and recoup the cost of that donation. Plus it's good for our world!
Guests started reusing their towels at a significantly higher rate. The hotel made the first offer: the donation. The guests reciprocated with a gift of their own: they reused their towels.
No doubt the hotel saved more money than they donated.
But, arguably, the guests were not disadvantaged by this low-risk transaction anda social good - environmental preservation - was served.
The reciprocity sequence, which is meant to regulate social interactions and tilt them towards justice and the social good, was consistent and achieved its intent.
Reciprocity can be used in daily interactions and marketing to achieve positive ends. Persuasion is not inherently evil.
But when people are crowing about using reciprocity to trigger unconscious obligations that primarily and disproportionately serve their interests without due consideration for the other party and which is inconsistent with the impact and social good - justice! - then that is a sign they are exploiters and predators and they need to be countered.
Which is what Cialdini preaches: Resist. Boycott.
When someone offers you a gift to initiate a sales sequence, it is essential that resist your own compunction to reciprocate and carefully assess whether the outcome serves both of you.
As Cialdini explains, when a compliance profession is attempting to oblige you into a transaction that is inequitable, it is essential that you reframe the "gift".
REFRAME: This is not a gift, it is sales collateral.
It's no different than a brochure or a business card.
If you accept it, you are not obliged to counter with a favour of your own because it is not a favour, it is a trigger.
Exploitative compliance professionals are trying to force you to receive.
They know that once you receive a gift you will be triggered - compelled, viscerally, by your deep social programming and tendency towards justice - to offer your own gift in return.
This is what sexual predators and romantic con-men do, too.
They love-bomb. They offer so much time, attention, affection and gifts that their prey - women and girls - eventually feel obliged to reciprocate and give the exploiter what he has been grooming them to provide.
Obliged isn't quite the right word. It's deeper and more visceral than obligation.
Exploitative compliance professionals in marketing, sales and politics try to force you to receive so you are compelled to reciprocate in a way that disproportionately serves them.
Sexual predators, romantic con-men and pick-up artists try to force girls and women to receive so we are compelled to reciprocate.
Force you to receive.
This is what we need to scan for and counter.
Once you receive, you are in a sequence in which you will feel compelled to reciprocate.
Now let me bring this home to coaches and thinkers working in the realm of divine femininity or in feminine leadership or for whom femininity is one of their personal touchstones.
Where I'm going with this might be very, very hard to hear.
It may go to the center of your work and beliefs.
When it comes to constructing women as innately receptive, and coaching women to be more receptive, this very teaching and its impact may not advance the cause of feminism, justice or women's empowerment.
It may actually undermine it.
Because the voice of culture often works through us without our consent.
Please, stay with me as I connect the dots.
On The Dangers of Preaching Receptivity to Women When We Live in A Predatory, Misogynist Culture
When some people talk about the essential or divine nature of women, they often say one of the characteristics of femininity is being receptive.
In the broadest caricature of this way of thinking about of masculinity and femininity, men do and women receive.
In other words, heterosexual men trigger the reciprocity sequence in heterosexual women.
Men offer a gift so that women will reciprocate.
In this broad interpretation of femininity, to be a woman is to be receptive.
(This is why there's so much work being done to coach women into being open to receiving, to being receptive.)
To receive means being obliged - compelled by reciprocity AKA our deep social programming towards justice - to reciprocate.
And this equivalence - femininity means being receptive - means that when men offer women a gift, women are obliged to reciprocate whether they wanted that gift or not.
Consent and desire are irrelevant.
Entitlement and automatic obligation govern this sequence.
This is rape culture.
If we construct one gender as innate receivers who are then obliged to reciprocate once the reciprocity sequence has been initiated, then men are entitled to extract offerings from women.
They initiate. We receive and reciprocate whether we want to or not.
Smile! Looking goooooood, girl. Do you have a boyfriend? Why are you being so rude, I'm trying to give you a compliment. But I bought you dinner.
I believe it's essential for the safety and dignity of girls and women that we interrupt the association of being receptive with femininity and femininity with women.
When we counsel women and girls to be receptive, when we tell them that's who they uniquely are, their role in our culture and their source of feminine power, then we train them to comply with reciprocity sequences designed to harm them.
Let's return for a moment to the principle of reciprocity. Do Cialdini and Walker et al say that reciprocity only works on women, because women are innately receptive?
No.
They say it works on everyone and given the success of online marketers, this seems to be true.
All humans are receptive.
Receptive is not the same thing as feminine and feminine is not the same thing as women.
 I see something in my daily work with femmes and women entrepreneurs that I do think we need to unpack, and I suspect that's the work of many of the helpers and healers reading this -- including many coaches doing teaching women to âreceiveâ.
I see it in myself when I have trouble asking to be adequately compensated for my services.
I see it in many -- if not most -- of the entrepreneurs I work with.
We under-earn because we have been conditioned to be uncomfortable negotiating -- and, thanks to a culture that consistently and constantly devalues us, perhaps fundamentally uncertain about the value we're contributing.
Not because we have individually defective mindsets but because that's the system we were born into and collectively socialized to perform.
In an economic system that needs us to work for less than our value (and ideally, free)  in order to create comfort and profits for others, we are trained to be uncompensated or under-compensated labourers in families and organizations.
So yes, we do need to interrupt that mindset and self-advocate for compensation of all kinds -- attention, care, respect, love, safety, money.
If this is the impact we're trying to create, perhaps we should reframe the womenâs empowerment conversation & coaching away from 'receptivity' and 'being able to receive' towards one that emphasizes self-advocating, negotiation and compensation.
(I'm talking to myself too: I often use the language of 'being able to receive' when I urging people to promote their work and services.
But it's a short-cut that's not only NOT helping, it might be doing harm.
When I do this, I'm using language and frame we're already familiar with rather than doing the work to truly unpack it and paradigm-shift it, together.)
Conditioning women to be more receptive in a dangerous culture that exploits that instinct and teaching women entrepreneurs to use and abuse the reciprocity trigger in their sales funnels fundamentally supports rape culture.
Girls and women in our culture are already marked as prey and so many of us - too many of us - have experienced gender-based violence and violation that often starts with a deliberate, malicious triggering of reciprocity.
Coaching girls and women to be more receptive puts more of us at risk.
Being the target of exploitative transactions triggered by an abuse of reciprocity is unpleasant and dehumanizing for anyone but is especially familiar to and awful for trauma survivors.
Maybe that's why I viscerally recoil when I see online marketers exhorting people to evoke reciprocity and shower people with free gifts in order to extract sales.
If there is no fairness and conscious choice and social good achieved by the transaction then it feels like grooming to me.
Itâs also why I feel that womenâs empowerment entrepreneurs who use Walkerâs launch marketing and partner with him to promote his products may ultimately working against the cause of womenâs liberation rather than for it.
And that's why, like Cialdini, I want us to understand how those levers and sequences are being deliberately triggered in us and have the skills to recognized and resist them when they are exploitative.
I also want entrepreneurs, especially those who sell to women and marginalized peoples, to be very conscious and careful about how they use reciprocity in their marketing and sales - especially when they are high-risk transactions.
As Dr. Michelle Mazur, who taught persuasion at the university level, explained to me:
The six principles [of persuasion] do have a benefit to us. They help us make decisions quickly in low risk situations. Imagine if you had to go to the grocery store and thoughtfully choose which brand of coffee buy. It would suck the life out of you and you'd be mentally exhausted after each trip to the grocery store. The real issue is that people are using these principles in HIGH risk situations (big investments). [emphasis mine; from an email correspondence]
IF you're initiating a sequence that is low-risk, serves everybody in the transaction and the social good of harmony and fairness, then you're in integrity with the principle of reciprocity which is fundamentally about justice.
This is how reciprocity is supposed to function and there is no shame in that game.
IF you're triggering a reciprocity sequence to automatically oblige someone into buying a high-risk, high-priced product that may or may not and in most cases will not work for them but will DEFINITELY work for you or you're telling a woman to smile so she'll start to obey and serve you, well then, the outcome is exploitation.
Even if we say we're doing it in the name of women's empowerment.
When we coach vulnerable populations to be more receptive and open to receiving in a world that is fundamentally hostile to their safety, we (inadvertently) put them at risk. Even when what we're coaches trying to do positive things like increase the amount of wealth and love in their life.
When we use reciprocity in high-risk transactions to disadvantage people, especially marginalized peoples, we are undermining rather creating the conditions of collective empowerment.
When we use reciprocity to disadvantage the people acting in good faith with us and whom we claim to serve, we are contributing to the degradation of justice in our culture.
And I am not buying that from anyone.
