A “because” that explains nothing persuades 93% of people

Tomorrow you are going to ask for something small. To cut into the cash machine queue, to get a colleague to swap your afternoon shift, to be allowed to put two sheets through the printer ahead of somebody else's fifty. Ask flat out and six in ten will say yes; add a "because" that informs them of nothing and it is 93%, exactly the same as if you had a real reason.

In 1978 the psychologist Ellen Langer, of Harvard University, published with Arthur Blank and Benzion Chanowitz a field experiment in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association. The setting was a photocopier in the library of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Someone from the team sat at a table with a view of the machine and, when a person arrived and put their papers down, approached them just before they dropped in the coin. A hundred and twenty adults went through the filter: 68 men and 52 women, each approached once, with a minimum of five minutes between subjects.

The request was one of these three, word for word:

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?"

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?"

"Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I'm in a rush?"

Read the second one again. "Because I have to make copies" informs you of nothing: you are standing at a photocopier with papers in your hand, you cannot possibly have come for anything else. It is a hollow reason, a container with no content. And it worked exactly as well as the real one.

With no reason, 60% of people gave up their turn. With the hollow reason, 93%. With the genuine reason — "I'm in a rush" — 94%. One point between the true explanation and the one that explains nothing, and thirty-three points between asking with any old excuse and asking flat out.

The experiment had a second half that gets told far less often. The researchers ran the three sentences again with the price of the favour raised: twenty pages instead of five. A favour that is no longer a gesture, that really costs you a wait. The numbers collapsed and reshuffled: no reason, 24%; hollow reason, 24% exactly, the same; genuine reason, 42%.

What measured the price of the favour was not the number of pages in the abstract but the comparison. If the person approached had more sheets than the one asking, the favour counted as small; if fewer, as large. And half the sessions were run by someone who did not know the hypothesis, so as not to push without meaning to.

Langer gave it a name: mindless behaviour, the autopilot of social scripts. It is not stupidity or bad faith; it is that a scene repeated a thousand times gets settled by the shape of the sentences and not by their meaning. The same paper checked it in writing too, with internal office memos: a memo that looks the way a memo is supposed to look gets obeyed without being read properly. The content only comes into play when obeying costs something.

The science of this did not end in 1978. In 1985 Valerie Folkes ran the paradigm again in the same journal and in two of her three studies failed to reproduce Langer's results. What she did find is finer and more usable: people grant less when the reason sounds like a controllable whim — "because I don't want to wait" — than when it sounds like something outside the asker's control. They listen just enough to punish you if your reason gives you away.

So, tomorrow, three concrete instructions. When you ask for something cheap, give a reason even if it seems obvious: "because it's only two sheets", "because it's a payment and they close at two"; it costs you nothing and it works. When you ask for something that genuinely costs, don't bother with filler: give the motive that does not depend on your taste, the one that explains why you cannot wait rather than why you would rather not. And when the one asking is someone else, run the test in reverse: cover the first half of the sentence and see whether the second half adds a fact. If it adds nothing, you are giving up your turn for a single word, and that can cost you twenty pages.