There is a particular type of person who often proves most difficult to persuade.
Why that is, I’ll explain later, in the hope that you will no longer make this common mistake.
Welcome, great you’re back. I compliment you on your commitment to learning and not wanting to waste your time on inefficient communication any longer when there is a science that helps you to make it easier for people to say yes to your requests. In my very first episode, I explained to you how, through a certain dynamic, students were facing expulsion from school and how some of them…
were 514% more successful in achieving their goals and therefore not being expelled from school. The reason for the success of this one group in the study was a strategy connected to the more optimal use of the principle of consistency, which is what we’re diving into today.
they saw donations made increase by 65.2%. In episode 8, where I and Dr Chris Phelps, the CEO of the Cialdini Institute as my guest, he revealed some strategies linked to the principle of consistency. One of those strategies involved the asking of one additional question on the patient intake form, which produced a
increase in ‘case acceptance’, which is what dentists call it when the patient says, “Yes, I will do what you suggest”. Case acceptance as a result of this one question increased by 33.5% across all his dental clinics.
To say that the principle of consistency is powerful would be an understatement. It is a principle that can have a massive effect on our motivation to act, and comes from a power or pressure within us. Consistency also has a considerable dark side. It can be used to manipulate us and to see us talk ourselves stuck. It is also
responsible for people sticking their heads in the sand despite new information and see them continue to perform actions or maintain alliances that don’t match their values or interests.
The principle of consistency is a force for good and bad. But on top of that, I would argue that it is the principle of consistency that is one that even those with formal training still get wrong sometimes. Why that is, I’ll explain later, in the hope that you will no longer make this common mistake.
This is an episode not to be missed. If you have missed any of those previous episodes where I shared nuggets of persuasion gold about consistency, it would help you to stop wasting time, resources and competitive advantage due to ineffective communication if you went back and listened to those and any other episodes that you might have missed, especially those among the first 15.
Kids know how this works. I’m not sure who teaches them, maybe it’s their mothers, but my daughter came up to me well before she was 10. “Papa, you love me, don’t you?” “Yes, of course I love you, monkey. Altijd”. Which is Dutch for always. “Would you do anything for me, papa?” “Of course, princess, anything”. And then of course I was asked to help rearrange your bedroom furniture or go bicycle riding with her, even though we had just been…
or play a game. Maybe you’ve had a mate ask you if you felt that you were, you know, if you were an adventurous person, which most people would answer with, “Yes, I’m an adventurous kind of person”. And then they tell you about the camping trip or the hike that they’re doing in a few weeks and ask if you want to go with them. It is much harder to say no when you’ve just put your foot in it, self-proclaiming that you are adventurous.
Why is this? Why does this work on us? Within our societies we tie great importance to people being consistent with what they say. If someone says they’ll do one thing and then do something totally different, we quickly label that person as unreliable, inconsistent, deceptive, untrustworthy or liability. Because we judge other people this way.
And because we don’t want other people to label us like this, we experience an internal pressure to make sure that we stay consistent with the past actions, decisions and statements that we’ve made. Interestingly, we also do that to ourselves when nobody else is aware of the decisions we’ve made in the past, which is another reason that consistency can backfire on us.
Because our world is so overloaded with information and decisions that we need to make, our brains are always looking for ways to simplify our daily workload. We expand on that in episode 2, the Science of Human Decision-Making. Because the principle of consistency offers such a wonderful shortcut to a line of decision making that we deemed appropriate in the past, it is a great time saver
to just blindly make decisions that are consistent with our past viewpoints. And this happens to people of all ages and in different situations. Let’s imagine that at some point in the past you’ve made a decision about what you believe is good and what is harmful to your body.
Perhaps at the time you invested a certain amount of time and research into formulating your opinion on the topic. Or perhaps you listened to the reasonings of other people on the topic. This could be related to the type of food that you eat, the water that you drink, which could come from the tap, out of a plastic bottle or a particular type of water filter. You may have even made decisions that placing a wireless device on your body is absolutely harmless.
Things like a smart watch or a ring that analyses your sleep patterns or having a phone in your pocket or against the side of your head during calls. You could then be confronted with a friend, a family member, a therapist, a doctor or news article saying that your choice of water or use of wireless devices poses a potential or serious health burden.
You could then invest time to research these claims and find out about what tap water contains and how that can influence health, the pH of tap water, and how this doesn’t reduce your body’s acidity. You can investigate the threat of microplastics from plastic bottles. You can investigate the thousands of peer-reviewed studies on the effects of non-ionising wireless radiation.
You could investigate if putting a cell phone in your pocket has serious impacts on your fertility or health. Or if placing a phone against the side of your head really does increase chance of brain cancer.
Just so you know, radio frequency radiation was classified by IARC, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization, as a possible carcinogen class 2b back in 2011. Class 2b is the same classification that exhaust fumes are in.
We may also feel that we we may lose face with others who we’ve shared our past decisions and viewpoints with. As a result, we don’t investigate the new information that has come to light and we stick to our old ways.
When we decide to get romantically involved with a person, and later very undesirable or violent personality traits appear, it can be the principle of consistency that sees us not re-evaluate our decision and instead we try to stick it out. Even if, had we known about these personality traits at the beginning, we would have never gotten involved with them. The same thing is true for
support that you’ve shown for a political party, a politician or a country. You could have decided to vote for a political party because they represented certain values and attitudes and their actions have aligned with you and your values in the past.
Being confronted with actions by this political party, which you find highly objectionable, you may choose not to change your vote in the next election. Or even voice your objections. Because investigating policies and track records of other political parties takes a fair bit of time. And because you might fear losing face with other people in your life who know about your commitments to the now objectionable
political party. And so you choose not to investigate and not to change your alliances. The same thing can go for countries that we think favourably of. If we have done so openly for many years, it can be difficult, even in the face of that country perpetrating atrocities, to take our support and alliance away.
There is a little mental strategy we can use on ourselves to free us from the shackles of the principle of consistency.
By realising that a wise and responsible person can change their opinions and alliances in the face of new information, we can free ourselves from the principle of consistency and the power that it has over us. You can justify your new decisions to others with minimal backlash by explaining that new information has come to light
which does not align with your core values, and that clearly you need to stay consistent with them. Hereby demonstrating that you have morals and principles, and are very much so, still consistent and trustworthy.
I’m happy to dive into the dark side of persuasion and teach you some important self-defense techniques to protect you and your family, but it doesn’t really fit in this business growth theme that this podcast has. If we get enough requests from you to do episodes on the dark side, I can be persuaded.
So why not leave a nice testimonial or review and at the end of it mention that you’d like me to expand on the dark side of persuasion. But for now, let us circle back to the positive and ethical use of the principle of consistency.
Let’s start with an example that may prove itself very valuable in selling and negotiations. Negotiations can apply to other things other than just a business setting. It may apply to discussions with a superior or staff member, a government department, your neighbor or your children.
People may have a whole range of values that they use to base their decisions on, and what you are proposing may align perfectly with those values. But because they have not actively, publicly and voluntarily expressed those values or opinions to you, you could be wasting a powerful source of influence and lose successes unnecessarily.
By arranging the right questions to ask early in your interactions, you can create opportunity for your audience to publicly reveal what their opinions and values are. What is important to them? When it is then time to present your proposal, which you have genuinely and ethically aligned with what is important to them, it is a lot
harder for them to say no to you when your proposal does align with what they said was important to them.
As I mentioned, in episode 8 where I interviewed Dr Chris Phelps, the CEO of the Cialdini Institute, he shared with our audience a single question that was added to the patient intake form in his dental clinics. A single question activated the principle of consistency. And as a result, patients agreeing with the proposed treatment went up by 33.5% across
all his clinics. If you and your team are not formally trained in the science of persuasion, how can you be sure that powerful questions like these are not missed in your procedures with your clients or with your team members?
33.5% more people saying yes, doing what you requested of them. That is a lot of
business or cooperation that you can be missing out on. If you’ve missed episode eight, or you can’t recall what the question was, I suggest you head back to episode eight and find out. Or better yet, book a discovery call with me and let’s find out how we can work to help educate you and your team and build those application skills.
writing down their study goals alone was not enough. When they wrote them down, signed it, made copies and handed it out to their classmates, the impact was nothing short of astronomical.
In fact, not using this ethical approach to help students to achieve their goals resulted in detrimental losses to those who were just by chance, allocated to one of the different groups that received different experimental instructions. And most of them were expelled from school, impacting the rest of their lives. With the Canadian Cancer Association,
a simple acceptance of a lapel pin and their agreement to wear the lapel pin for a week leading up to the collection period of the Cancer Association led to the recovery of a staggering amount of donations that would have been lost with the usual approach of just turning up and asking for a donation.
Whether online or in real life, we sometimes want people to do work or perform an action or a behaviour which takes a considerable amount of time or effort. Well, in real life, you could monitor their actions and you would be able to change your approach if your audience didn’t perform this action. In an online environment, this is very different. No one is there to monitor what is going on.
And if the visitor of the website decides to not begin the action, the one that you were hoping for, they can just leave. And the only thing that’s left is a record of another failed conversion. So how do we fix this? How do we increase the chances dramatically that people start and complete the entire task?
A good example can be found on the websites of an increasing number of companies now. And especially those in the insurance industry seem to have adopted the following strategy because it works very well and reduces dramatically the losses suffered as a result of people not starting or finishing the behaviour. When we are interested in new insurance or perhaps considering changing insurance company.
The insurance company needs to collect a large amount of data to be able to give us a quote based on our specific situation and history. When potential insurance clients are faced with a list of 30 or 40 questions related to their motor vehicle, business, home, life, the task seems daunting and too many will unnecessarily never start to fill out the required data
or stop before finishing it. We can dramatically increase the amount of people filling out these sorts of data gathering forms by not showing or telling them the number of questions involved. Instead, we could start with just the first two or three questions and then provide a next button to move them to the next stage. Two or three questions
does not seem daunting at all, and many more people will start this process. After having clicked the next button, the next two or three questions are asked. A large percentage of people will also continue to fill out these questions without much thought or concern.
and that also applies online. Behavioural science is a powerful tool when we use it in an online environment. While many web developers understand the concept of A-B testing, the vast majority have no training in human behaviour and waste their clients’ and especially time because it takes months to work out if the changes that they
hoped would produce an improvement actually does, does nothing or does the opposite.
Website alterations based on behavioural science are far more likely to produce results and it can quickly identify online strategies that are doomed to underperform and which are still created every day by web developers that don’t know anything about the science. A more attractive looking website is likely to produce an improvement in results
because it portrays more professionalism and a feeling of quality over an older, outdated looking website. But pretty alone fails to implement the many ethical strategies for a website to communicate its message as persuasive as it can be. And many possible conversions are wasted.
I work with companies and web developers to quickly identify what is working against them and help them to incorporate simple yet powerful improvements based on behavioural science.
And then I will not forget to tell you about that most commonly made mistake when it comes to consistency.
There is a particular type of person who often proves most difficult to persuade. And it is the very successful businessman or woman or the company CEO. These individuals have achieved their success by often trusting their own gut feeling, instincts, insights and their inner voice. And much less so the opinions of others.
All the type of information that would activate the principles of persuasion, and would be very persuasive to others, may be less effective with a successful business person or CEO. Social proof, for example, is the opinions of other people, which they might not value as highly. The same thing goes
for when it comes to you establishing your authority on the topic that you’re talking to them about. They might not really attach that much value to you being an authority. So the question needs to be asked. Which principle of persuasion has the biggest chance to be effective with those type of people? And that would be the principle of consistency.
Does your sales team know why this is?
It’s because the principle of consistency is linked to our audience’s own opinions and past actions. Simply put, the the principle of consistency helps you to have them convince themselves. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? They like listening to themselves, their own opinions and gut feelings.
So let questions and comments aimed at activating the principle of consistency in them prompt them to do so.
I can’t cover here the many strategies and dynamics and subtle nuances for the principle of consistency, which we of course do cover in formal training. But you can implement the ideas that I have given you in this session and apply a little bit more science to what it is you’re doing.
[chapter time="28:01" title="The Most Commonly Made Mistake with Consistency" thumb="https://ethicalpersuasion.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ep14-frame13.jpg"]I owe you one more thing that I mentioned I’d share with you. And that is that common mistake that those with limited knowledge or application skill make all too often when it comes to the principle of consistency. And it is this. People make the mistake of thinking that the principle of consistency is activated by them being consistent themselves. They think
that by them acting consistently, by making sure that they do what they say they do, or by consistently following up, or consistently sending newsletters, that that will persuade someone else.
It is a good idea to act consistently. Because, as I explained, people worry about you if you don’t act in a consistent manner. But that doesn’t activate the principle of consistency in the other person. For it to act as a shortcut for system one in the brain of the person that you’re hoping to convince, they need to feel that internal pressure
that the choice in front of them is logically consistent with what they have done or said in the past. None of that has to do with how you act. So please remember, the principle of consistency is never about you. It is about the person you wanting to be more persuasive with.
Fortune 500 companies have been quietly profiting from for years. Social influence or ethical persuasion is a life skill which is widely recognised as a much critical and urgent skill to be developed. Like it was in the 2025 report of the World Economic Forum, where they placed it as the third most urgent skill to be developed.
