Behavioral Psychology

Psychology Of The High Pressure Sales Situation

By  | 

Why is the high pressure sales situation so effective in spite of the fact that people loathe being subjected to it? Actually through the lens of behavioral psychology it’s precisely because they loathe being subjected to it that it works so well. They are being negatively reinforced, and the way to escape the aversive stimuli embedded within these negative reinforcements is to buy the product!

In this sense we see that from the perspective of the high pressure salesperson the product is of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is eliciting a behavior though the use of reinforcements. The salesperson in a high pressure situation is the trainer and you are the witless organism coming under stimulus control.

A common negative reinforcement utilized is creating a sense of urgency. If you don’t buy the product now you might miss out on the special price. Or maybe you’re told there are a limited number of items in stock. Regardless, the strategy makes use of your inbuilt loss aversion. It’s not the intrinsic features of the product that compels you to buy it, it’s trying to escape from aversive stimuli that compels you to buy it.

Another common negative reinforcement utilized is instilling guilt or other unwanted emotions. It becomes clear that if you don’t buy the product you’re disrespecting the salesperson, or going back on an implicit agreement, or stealing valuable time without giving anything back in return. You might feel intimated or bullied.  Again, buying the product is not actually about wanting to buy the product but about eliminating these aversive feelings through the behavior of buying the product.

When you think in these behavioral terms you’ll never allow yourself to be taken advantage of in a high pressure sales situation again. These people are not your friends, they don’t have your best interests at heart, they don’t care about you, they only care about getting a commission. If they did care about you they wouldn’t use unpleasant aversive stimuli to try to elicit unthinking behavior. They’re basically turning you into a rat in a maze who gets shocked for going down any passageway except for the desired one. And by buying a product under such environmental contingencies you are actually positively reinforcing these people to continue using the same harmful tactics on others. A way to flip the script and become the trainer yourself in order to do your part in discouraging these tactics is to use extinction. Once you’ve established that you’re in a high pressure sales situation, that the conversation is about trying to elicit a behavior right now through the use of negative reinforcement, take up an inordinate amount of this person’s time without ever buying anything.

Related posts:

  1. Dealing With Rejection From a behavioral point of view when someone rejects you what they are actually rejecting is a constellation of behaviors. Conversely when they accept you what they are accepting is a constellation of behaviors. One of the reasons rejection hurts is because most of us don’t view it that way. Whether someone has known us […]...
  2. The Slow Fade If you’ve dated enough people you’re familiar with the slow fade, either because you’ve used it yourself or had it used on you. From the behavioral psychology point of view the the slow fade utilizes extinction to achieve the desired result, whereas just coming out and saying you want to break up utilizes negative reinforcement. […]...
  3. Understanding Behavioral Reinforcements Reinforcements are not the same thing as stimuli, which confuses a lot of students. The common misconception of behavioral psychology is that it centers around the stimulus-response paradigm, like how we startle when we hear a really loud sound, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of behavioral psychology. The essential factor to […]...
  4. Disappointment As A Motivator Disappointment is queued off from getting a worse than hoped for result. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is why some people, in the face of disappointment, feel an inexorable pull to rise above and get better results while others lay down and give up. From the behavioral psychology point of view it comes down […]...
  5. Stimulus-Response Man When writers defame, denigrate, discount, and diminish behavioral psychology they’ll talk about the S-R Man, meaning the Stimulus-Response Man. They’ll say that it’s an oversimplified view of human nature, that it could be true for fruit flies but that humans are much more than a set of responses to various stimuli in the environment, much […]...
  6. Motivation When Striking Out On Your Own If you’re thinking about striking out on your own in some endeavor and are hoping for the same sort of support, encouragement, and structure that you got at school or even at work you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Very few people will try to help you or hurt you, motivate you or discourage you, […]...
  7. Karma If you understand behavioral psychology you are in a good position to understand the mechanics of Karma. The concept of Karma in most Indian spiritual traditions is actually quite practical and just recognizes cause and effect. While there are always groups in any religion that attribute everything that happens to a higher source, most Buddhists […]...
  8. Level Of Reinforcement Matters Let’s say that you’re training a puppy and you use corporal punishment to try to elicit behaviors. Quite apart from any moral or ethical objections to this training method, what you’re doing is setting the bar very, very high for what the puppy will interpret as an adequate reinforcement to elicit the desired response. A […]...
  9. Persistence and Schedules of Reinforcement It seems like a mystery how some people persevere over long periods of time despite infrequent external rewards like recognition or money while others quit at the first sign of trouble even though things were going really well. We’ll say “He has  lot of willpower” or “Persistence pays off” or “He just didn’t have what […]...
  10. Difference Between Obsession And Dedication The thoughts inside the skin and the observable behavior outside of it can appear quite similar in instances of dedication and instances of obsession even though existentially speaking these two life orientations are worlds apart. So talking about the difference between obsession and dedication actually helps us highlight what we see as the inherent deficiency […]...
  11. Peer Pressure And Low Self-Esteem The lower the self-esteem the higher the susceptibility to peer pressure. This is because when self-esteem is low there’s a strongly felt need, though often barely conscious or even unconscious, to receive validation and to avoid ridicule from external sources, specifically authority figures and peers. The validation is meant to fill up the psychic space […]...
  12. The Strange Situation There was an experiment devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970’s that has shown itself to be a reliable way to assess attachment styles between infants and their primary caregivers. This method is called the Strange Situation Protocol. It is quite Freudian in the respect that it places heavy emphasis on interactions between child and […]...
  13. End On A High Note Good animal trainers know to end sessions on a high note. The way they accomplish this trick is by cuing the animal to perform a behavior that has already been mastered and therefore usually doesn’t garner a positive reinforcement, but this time it does receive praise and a treat. In this way, no matter how […]...
  14. Deficit Psychology Versus Growth Psychology Many Western psychologists perpetuate the same cognitive bias in the therapeutic situation that the general population perpetuates in the wider sphere of life, and this is not only that minimizing the various problems responsible for dysfunction should be the focus of time effort but that upon the minimization of those problems the therapeutic alliance should […]...
  15. Under Pressure Just like you only find out what your muscles are really capable of under physical exertion, sometimes you can only find out who you really are and what you are really capable of in trying times where you feel pushed to your mental and emotional limits. These moments don’t come around often but when you […]...
  16. Peer Pressure Help Peer pressure is that coercive force that people use to try to make you behave in a way you might not be comfortable with. The psychological reason it’s so effective is that at the most fundamental level saying no implies exclusion from the group, and with exclusion existential isolation comes into clear relief, an unbearable […]...
  17. Getting High Just To Get By One of the factors that delineates recreational drug use from addiction is that addicts cease trying to move from normal functioning into the altered state, but start from a sense of deficit and are trying to reach that baseline state of existence with the aid of their drug of choice. A shift happens where they […]...
  18. Power From On High In every religion the same situation unfolds, which is that a priestly caste arises and begins to act as intermediary between gods and adherents. This caste becomes highly concerned with crystallizing all aspects of the religion, attempting to halt the organic and natural evolution of thought and practice that spawned that religion in the first […]...
  19. Meaning From On High The common belief is that it can’t be meaningful unless it’s given from on high, as a commandment or sanction from a godlike presence. But this sort of relationship to the metaphysical is a projection of relationships to authority figures in the real world,  relationships of dependence relied upon to guide thoughts and actions. In […]...
  20. High Standard Of Living And Existential Vacuum There’s a powerful societal expectation that increasing material wealth is the key to happiness and fulfillment. But we only need look around us to see the fallacy of this notion. In the West most people enjoy a standard of living beyond what previous generations could have imagined but they’re not happy. If you think that […]...
Related Items