Peer Influence Positive and Negatives in Management in MarketingSummarized by Will Phillips This talks about some extraordinarily powerful and simple ways to influence your staff and your customer’s behavior. It is based on an MIT S loan Management Review article called Applying (and resisting) Peer Influence published in the winter of 2008. This article talks about how our decisions and behavior is influenced by other people and that we are usually totally unaware of the influence. NO MEANS YES It all began with an observation in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona which loses more than a ton of a petrified wood each month because of thefts. To prevent this vandalism the park instituted a deterrence program with the number of signs to make visitors aware of past thievery. The signs read, “Your heritage is being vandalized everyday by theft loses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year mostly a small piece at a time.” A management graduate student visited the park with his fiancé, a woman he described as someone who would never take a paperclip from the office without returning it. He was astonished when after reading the sign complaining of petrified wood vandalism, she said to him, “We better get ours now.” What would motivate a law abiding woman to thievery and think of depleting this national treasure? The answer has to do with a critical mistake that the park officials and all managers make when trying to change human behavior. By alerting people to the problem and the scale of the loss, they inadvertently trigger the precise opposite behavior. Since so may people are doing it, it must be okay. Some would say this is an example of the law of attraction. An experiment was done in the Petrified Forest. In different areas, two different types of signs were in placed. One was the exact same as the park service had been using and it depicted the scene showing several different thieves in action to highlight the prevalence of the behavior. The second sign, in a separate location urged visitors also not to take the wood, but depicted only a lone thief. The results were unequivocal: visitors who passed group sign were more than twice as likely to steal wood. THE LAW OF ATTRACTIONTalk a lot about theft and theft increases. In businesses when managers call attention to such problems as supply room theft by depicting how regularly and frequently it occurs, it has no impact or increases theft. Several years ago, the IRS announced they were going to strengthen the penalties for tax evasion because so many citizens were cheating on their returns. In the following year, tax fraud actually increased. Managerial efforts to stop the problem by calling attention to its prevalence cannot only be ineffective but can be counter productive.

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