Excerpt: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

What one word can you start using today to increase your persuasiveness by more than fifty percent?
Which item of stationery can dramatically increase people's responses to your requests?
How can you win over your rivals by inconveniencing them?

Hone your influencing skills.

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
By Noah J. Goldstein, PhD and Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini, PhD
Publication Date: June 10, 2008


From the Introduction:

There's an old joke told by the nightclub comic Henny Youngman, who referred to his accommodations from the previous night by saying, "What a hotel! The towels were so big and fluffy I could hardly close my suitcase."

Over the last few years, the moral dilemma facing hotel guests has changed. These days, the question of whether to remove the towels from their room has been replaced by the question of whether to reuse the towels during the course of their stay. With the increasing adoption of environmental programs by hotels, more and more travelers are being asked to reuse their towels to help conserve environmental resources, save energy, and reduce the amount of detergent-related pollutants released into the environment. In most cases, this request comes in the form of cards placed in guests' bathrooms -- cards that provide some surprising insights into the remarkable science of persuasion.

A survey of the persuasive messages conveyed by dozens of request cards from a wide variety of hotels around the globe reveals that these cards most commonly attempt to encourage towel recycling efforts by focusing guests almost exclusively on the importance of environmental protection. In other words, guests are almost invariably informed that reusing their towels will conserve natural resources and help spare the environment from further depletion, disruption, and corruption. To further draw guests' attention to the impact of towel recycling on the environment, this information is often accompanied by various eye-catching, environment- related pictures in the background, ranging from rainbows to raindrops to rainforests...to reindeer.

This persuasion strategy generally seems to be an effective one. For example, one of the largest manufacturers of these signs, whose messages focus entirely on the importance of environmental protection, reports that the majority of hotel guests who have the opportunity to participate in these programs do reuse their towels at least once during their stay. But could the results be improved?