The Psychology Trick You’re Probably Already Falling For…

In this video, we explore the intriguing concept of the “ego trap”—an influence technique that leverages the idea that people are more likely to agree when it affirms their positive qualities. We examine the recent study “Egotistic Trap as a Social Influence Technique” by Dolinski, Grzyb, and Kulesza (2023), which provides a detailed analysis of this approach.

The study highlights just how powerful this technique can be: In one experiment, 52.4% of participants agreed to take part in a survey when they were told it was aimed at intelligent people—a significant increase compared to 32.7% in the control group. In another experiment, the willingness to have cars inspected at official workshops rose from 56.7% to 71.7% when participants were told, “reasonable customers have their cars officially inspected.”  There’s also an alternative version of the ego trap that might be even more effective…

When employees experience discrimination, harassment or bullying in the workplace, it can lead to anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances and other health problems. Furthermore, it can also cause employees to lose confidence in their abilities and self-esteem, which affects their performance and engagement.

Aside from the individual impact, poor treatment in the workplace can also lead to a problematic work climate and high levels of employee turnover. Employees who have experienced workplace abuse often become internally disengaged and may feel compelled to leave the company.

But how big is the problem? How often do psychological and physical assaults take place in the workplace? A gigantic new meta-analysis (Dhanani et al., 2021) provides hard numbers, and the researchers even calculate the financial cost to our society…

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Studies (small sample only):

Cortina, L. M., Rabelo, V. C., & Holland, K. J. (2018). Beyond blaming the victim: Toward a more progressive understanding of workplace mistreatment. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 11(1), 81-100.

Dhanani, L. Y., LaPalme, M. L., & Joseph, D. L. (2021). How prevalent is workplace mistreatment? A meta‐analytic investigation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(8), 1082-1098.

Han, S., Harold, C. M., Oh, I. S., Kim, J. K., & Agolli, A. (2022). A meta‐analysis integrating 20 years of workplace incivility research: Antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 43(3), 497-523.

McCord, M. A., Joseph, D. L., Dhanani, L. Y., & Beus, J. M. (2018). A meta-analysis of sex and race differences in perceived workplace mistreatment. Journal of applied psychology, 103(2), 137.

Vranjes, I., & Lyubykh, Z. (2021). Workplace mistreatment: A review and agenda for research. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management.

Yao, J., Lim, S., Guo, C. Y., Ou, A. Y., & Ng, J. W. X. (2022). Experienced incivility in the workplace: A meta-analytical review of its construct validity and nomological network. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(2), 193.

Zhou, Y., Mistry, T. G., Kim, W. G., & Cobanoglu, C. (2021). Workplace mistreatment in the hospitality and tourism industry: a systematic literature review and future research suggestions. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 49, 309-320.

By now, almost everyone has understood: We pay for the free use of services like Facebook, Tiktok, Google and Co. with our personal data. But what can the big tech companies do with this data? In a groundbreaking study researchers at Stanford University were able to provide a (somewhat creepy) answer: it is easy to predict the most important personality traits (including the Big Five: openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism) using only Facebook likes (Youyou et al., 2015).

The results of this study show that Facebook Likes are a valuable source for predicting personality traits and that machine learning models are capable of predicting these traits with high accuracy (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). However, there are also ethical concerns about privacy and the possibility that this technology could be abused (keyword: Cambridge Analytica).

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Studies (small sample only):

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5802-5805.

Markovikj, D., Gievska, S., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2013). Mining facebook data for predictive personality modeling. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 23-26).

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2017). Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 114(48), 12714-12719.

Matz, S., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Nave, G. (2017). Psychological framing as an effective approach to real-life persuasive communication. ACR North American Advances.

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2018). Reply to Eckles et al.: Facebook’s optimization algorithms are highly unlikely to explain the effects of psychological targeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(23), E5256-E5257.

Matz, S., & Kosinski, M. (2019). Using consumers’ digital footprints for more persuasive mass communication. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 11(2), 18-23.

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2018). Reply to Sharp et al.: Psychological targeting produces robust effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(34), E7891-E7891.

Youyou, W., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2015). Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1036-1040.

Benjamin Franklin not only entered the history books as one of the founding fathers of the USA, but is also mentioned in many psychology textbooks. His ingeniously simple method of turning an opposing politician into one of his closest allies and friends received a lot of attention, especially from social psychologists. But does the Benjamin Franklin method really work? Or can the Benjamin Franklin effect not be proven in empirical studies…?

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Studies and books:

Jecker, J., & Landy, D. (1969). Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour. Human relations, 22(4), 371-378.

Burck, E. (2016). New psychology of influence: exploring manipulation. BoD Books on Demand.

Burck, E. (2019). The manipulated brain: psychology of unconscious influence. BoD Books on Demand.

Can Donald Trump’s success (partly) be explained by the psychological Mere Exposure Effect? Will there be more Donald Trumps in the future? Or can we protect ourselves against this unconscious psychological effect?