Cialdini raamat
uct, often without knowing that their words are being recorded. As would be
expected according to the principle of social proof, these testimonials from "aver-
age people like you and me" make for quite effective advertising campaigns. They
have always included a relatively subtle kind of distortion: We hear only from those
who like the product; as a result, we get an understandably biased picture of the
amount of social support for it. More recently, though, a cruder and more unethi-
cal sort of falsification has been introduced. Commercial producers often don't
bother to get genuine testimonials. They merely hire actors to play the roles of av-
erage people testifying in an unrehearsed fashion to an interviewer. It is amazing
how bald-faced these "unrehearsed interview" commercials can be. (See the exam-
ple in Figure 4.4.) The situations are obviously staged, the participants are clearly
actors, and the dialogue is unmistakably prewritten.
annaabi.ee 
