Get more people to come to your degree recital

Everyone knows that people will come to your recital if not for the music, for sure because of the food at the reception after the recital. Right?


In the book Sway, authors Ori and Rom Brafman cite the following studies:

• In 1993, the Swiss government needed to find a town where to leave potential nuclear waste. Two towns were being considered. Researchers talked to a group of the community and asked them if they would accept the nuclear waste to be in their town. Of course, people weren't fan of the idea, but because they felt it was the right thing to do, 50.8 percent of people agreed to it. Then, the researchers asked another group of the community if they would accept if they were to be paid $2,175 per year and per person. That time, only 24.6 percent of people agreed, even after the money got increased to $4,350! 
• For another study, researchers asked a group of students to take a fake version of the GMAT and to do the best they could. Parallel to this, researchers asked another group of students to take the same fake test, and told the students that they would be paid 2.5 cents for every right answer. It turned out that the students being paid didn't even answer all the questions, while the other students did because they wanted to help out the researchers!

What the researchers realized is that people approach a situation in two complete different ways: either from a genuine point of view, or from a self-interest point of view. If you offer someone an incentive, it diminishes the genuine motivation of people.

So if you ask people to come to your recital and imply that they should because of the reception, you actually change their thinking from: "I really like this person and I want to support them and be there for them" to "is it worth it for me to loose two hours of my time to only get some free food in the end?"

Share