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Abusing the Social Impulse For Profit
Jun. 24th, 2013 10:58 pmI was walking to the Commercial/Broadway Skytrain today and didn't make it past the gauntlet. The gauntlet being the assorted panhandlers, hucksters and pollsters that inhabit the bridge over the Grandview Cut, where the station is built. A young woman is there with a clipboard and she managed to get my attention. Like an idiot, I let her.
There's a behavior that annoys me that I'm seeing more and more. Salespeople use it all the time now, especially if they work at mall kiosks that have a lot of foot traffic that goes by. It depends on there being a base level of social expectation in society. The young woman was using this method good and hard. I didn't follow the script though.
She started by asking my name. I didn't give it, instead saying she needed to make her pitch first. So she goes on to tell me about a charity. She asked lots of leading questions - questions designed to get me involved in a positive conversation about the charity. She described successful stories of the charity. She guesses (correctly) that I'm in favour of gender equality, education and democracy, and appeals to that sense of justice. She got into my personal space, looked me in the eye and smiled a lot. If her hands weren't occupied, I'm sure she'd have been repeatedly touching my arm.
It's simple really, it's feigned friendliness to draw you in so they have a greater chance of succeeding with their sales pitch. It depends on people responding properly, politely. I think it's ultimately going to hurt us all. We're engaged in a sort of behavior one-upmanship where salespeople are more and more aggressive and their marks become more and more callous to calls for help from strangers under the belief that those people are trying to trick them. It drives us all to be more rude and isolated from each other.
Now I don't deny that it works - if it didn't work, it wouldn't be used. And that doesn't mean that it has to work with everyone - it only has to work over a population, not the individuals in the population.
As an aside, when I was the social outcast as a child, this sort of behavior was used on me to make the bullying worse. Someone socially popular would "befriend" me, usually to get some kind of information out of me (that would be used against me) or to place me in a situation where I could be isolated or attacked. I fell for it a lot. I fell for it when I knew better, such is the desperate desire to be part of the group.
What that means is I'm hyper-alert to the tactic, and when I twig to it, I react very negatively to it. That's not to say that other people don't have a negative reaction to it, or that they're not alert to it when it happens, just that I, personally, have good reasons for reacting the way I do. I'm positive that plenty of the people reading this will agree with me about it without having to be a traumatic lesson from childhood.
Getting back to the young woman, she finally twigged to the fact that my not following the script was deliberate rather than me being obtuse.
"Now what could you buy me for $1.20?"
I don't respond. I am thinking that I'd rather not buy her anything at all.
"Um. pardon?", she asks when she interprets my failure to respond as her not hearing what I said. "So what could you buy me for $1.20?"
I dig my heels in, look her straight in the eye and don't say anything.
"Could you buy a... doughnut for $1.20?"
Another awkward moment passes.
"Um. I'm getting the feeling you're not interested in this charity."
Finally, I respond. "Quite the contrary, the charity seems reasonable. It's your approach that I don't like."
She's taken aback. "May I ask why?"
"Because this whole time you've been talking like you want to get to know me better, but what you really want is my money. That's dishonest. You've done it by feigning friendliness to get close to me and that's creepy. and it's all unnecessary - the charity speaks for itself and doesn't need you to trick me into supporting it. But now I'm in the awkward position of liking the cause, but not wanting to reward your methods."
Let's say the situation was somewhat reversed. Let's say I encountered this woman in a nightclub and I used all of the same tactics on her in an attempt to pick her up. I'd be rightly judged as a creepy PUA type who depended on the fact that people are socialized not to be confrontational to succeed.
I compromised by asking for how I could look it up later rather than sign my name to a form that would obligate me to donating over and over again.
It's hours later now and it still bothers me. First, I has overly critical to a front-line worker who was just doing her job. She didn't know she was stepping into my drama. It also bothers me that I care about that - that I'm worried about the feelings of someone who was trying to emotionally manipulate me. It makes me simultaneously guilty and angry. Finally, it depresses me to recognize that building this sort of emotional armour comes with a terrible cost - I'm bitter and paranoid. In this case, reasonably so, but how many people have I turned away because I've assumed the worst from them?
There's a behavior that annoys me that I'm seeing more and more. Salespeople use it all the time now, especially if they work at mall kiosks that have a lot of foot traffic that goes by. It depends on there being a base level of social expectation in society. The young woman was using this method good and hard. I didn't follow the script though.
She started by asking my name. I didn't give it, instead saying she needed to make her pitch first. So she goes on to tell me about a charity. She asked lots of leading questions - questions designed to get me involved in a positive conversation about the charity. She described successful stories of the charity. She guesses (correctly) that I'm in favour of gender equality, education and democracy, and appeals to that sense of justice. She got into my personal space, looked me in the eye and smiled a lot. If her hands weren't occupied, I'm sure she'd have been repeatedly touching my arm.
It's simple really, it's feigned friendliness to draw you in so they have a greater chance of succeeding with their sales pitch. It depends on people responding properly, politely. I think it's ultimately going to hurt us all. We're engaged in a sort of behavior one-upmanship where salespeople are more and more aggressive and their marks become more and more callous to calls for help from strangers under the belief that those people are trying to trick them. It drives us all to be more rude and isolated from each other.
Now I don't deny that it works - if it didn't work, it wouldn't be used. And that doesn't mean that it has to work with everyone - it only has to work over a population, not the individuals in the population.
As an aside, when I was the social outcast as a child, this sort of behavior was used on me to make the bullying worse. Someone socially popular would "befriend" me, usually to get some kind of information out of me (that would be used against me) or to place me in a situation where I could be isolated or attacked. I fell for it a lot. I fell for it when I knew better, such is the desperate desire to be part of the group.
What that means is I'm hyper-alert to the tactic, and when I twig to it, I react very negatively to it. That's not to say that other people don't have a negative reaction to it, or that they're not alert to it when it happens, just that I, personally, have good reasons for reacting the way I do. I'm positive that plenty of the people reading this will agree with me about it without having to be a traumatic lesson from childhood.
Getting back to the young woman, she finally twigged to the fact that my not following the script was deliberate rather than me being obtuse.
"Now what could you buy me for $1.20?"
I don't respond. I am thinking that I'd rather not buy her anything at all.
"Um. pardon?", she asks when she interprets my failure to respond as her not hearing what I said. "So what could you buy me for $1.20?"
I dig my heels in, look her straight in the eye and don't say anything.
"Could you buy a... doughnut for $1.20?"
Another awkward moment passes.
"Um. I'm getting the feeling you're not interested in this charity."
Finally, I respond. "Quite the contrary, the charity seems reasonable. It's your approach that I don't like."
She's taken aback. "May I ask why?"
"Because this whole time you've been talking like you want to get to know me better, but what you really want is my money. That's dishonest. You've done it by feigning friendliness to get close to me and that's creepy. and it's all unnecessary - the charity speaks for itself and doesn't need you to trick me into supporting it. But now I'm in the awkward position of liking the cause, but not wanting to reward your methods."
Let's say the situation was somewhat reversed. Let's say I encountered this woman in a nightclub and I used all of the same tactics on her in an attempt to pick her up. I'd be rightly judged as a creepy PUA type who depended on the fact that people are socialized not to be confrontational to succeed.
I compromised by asking for how I could look it up later rather than sign my name to a form that would obligate me to donating over and over again.
It's hours later now and it still bothers me. First, I has overly critical to a front-line worker who was just doing her job. She didn't know she was stepping into my drama. It also bothers me that I care about that - that I'm worried about the feelings of someone who was trying to emotionally manipulate me. It makes me simultaneously guilty and angry. Finally, it depresses me to recognize that building this sort of emotional armour comes with a terrible cost - I'm bitter and paranoid. In this case, reasonably so, but how many people have I turned away because I've assumed the worst from them?
