The psychology of why eShare works so effectively

1. The Psychology of E-Share! Direct Response Platform
8/21/09
Shared E-Share! Offers Benefit from Social Proof
The E-Share! Platform enables and encourages online sharing of its offers. When an
offer is received from a friend rather than a company, both its acceptability and
desirability are strongly reinforced by social proof. People have a strong psychological
tendency – a genetic compulsion, in fact – to imitate others.1 The more similar a person
is to us, the more likely we are to imitate him or her.2
In his bestselling book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, psychologist Robert
Cialdini reviews many psychology studies that demonstrate that we “view a behavior as
more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”3
When an individual receives a E-Share! offer from a friend, not only will it better capture
his or her attention, it will carry with it clear social proof that sends a strong
subconscious message that sharing and using the offer is the appropriate thing to do.
Sharing a E-Share! Offer Subconsciously Becomes an Act of Commitment to the
Retailer
When a person shares an offer with a friend through the E-Share! Platform, he or she is
in a small way taking a public stand on behalf of the offer and the retailer. Psychological
research indicates that this small act of commitment can lead the individual to take
larger follow-on actions in support of the offer and retailer in order to stay consistent
with the original commitment.4 5 Should the value of the offer or retailer be questioned,
for instance, he or she will feel compelled to defend it. The individual will also be more
likely to use the offer.
Psychologists attribute the binding power of small commitments to a transformation in
the committer’s self-image that occurs during the act of commitment. In one of the
many studies of this phenomenon6, a volunteer asked residents of California to sign a
generic petition that favored “keeping California beautiful”, and naturally nearly
everyone did. Two weeks later, a different, unaffiliated volunteer asked these same
people for permission to erect a huge, ugly sign that read “DRIVE CAREFULLY” on their
lawns. Whereas people usually, and understandably, declined to put the sign on their
lawns, those who had been asked to sign the simple petition two weeks earlier were
three times more likely to accept, even though the two requests were completely
unrelated. It turns out that the small, easy act of signing a civic-minded petition makes
the signer think of him or herself as a more civic-minded person. When additional,
greater acts of public service are requested, the person is much more likely to agree in
order to stay consistent with this new self-image. This process happens subconsciously,

2. as no residents in the study recognized any connection between the petition and the
DRIVE CAREFULLY sign.
The commitment principle – that a small commitment compels a person to take larger
actions – has been effectively used in a variety of commercial contexts, including
telemarketing, door-to-door sales, and sweepstakes programs.7 The E-Share! Platform
leverages the commitment principle by enabling and encouraging individuals to take the
easy action of sharing an offer with a friend. Sharing an offer plants a small seed of
commitment, leading the sharer to identify more with both the retailer and the offer
without consciously realizing it.
Having to Earn Offers Makes Them Seem More Valuable
A consumer infers value in an item that is perceived to be scarce.8 One way to make an
item seem scarcer is to increase its cost.9 Coupons are known for being made freely and
abundantly available, if not forced upon individuals. This lack of scarcity causes them to
be perceived as cheap, which underlies the coupon stigma. Rather than giving its offers
away, E-Share! requires the individual to earn a coupon by answering a few questions of
the retailer’s choosing. This further reinforces the perceived value of the coupon. From
a psychological standpoint, individuals are more likely to desire the coupon, which have
to be earned, than traditional free offers.
Earning E-Share! Offers Creates Addictive Pleasure by Activating the Neural
Seeking System
According to neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, “seeking is the granddaddy of [neural]
systems”10. It is the mammalian motivational engine that gets us out of bed and drives
us to earn and discover. When this system is destroyed in the brains of lab rats, the rats
starve to death even while food is right in front of them because they have lost the will
to go get it. The fuel of the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine, whose
neural circuits “promote states of directed purpose.”11 In other words, the seeking
system is stimulated by the clear possibility of earning or finding something. And, as it
turns out, the system is more powerful than the reward system that kicks in when the
actual earning or finding occurs.12 Because of this, after obtaining something people are
often not satiated but instead driven to continue seeking more. From an evolutionary
standpoint, the fact that we are wired to constantly seek rather than settle for the first
reward makes sense.
The E-Share! Platform activates the seeking system by giving the individual a clear and
easy path to earn a succession of small rewards, which provides the sense of “directed
purpose” that releases dopamine in the brain. The seeking system is maximally
activated when the rewards are small and recurring, as opposed to one large reward
that is achieved only after sustained, long-term effort.13 This fact has been used to
explain the addictiveness of email, Facebook feeds, Twitter, texts and Google searches.14
The E-Share! offer activation process is similar to these addictively fun web activities in
that it offers the individual small, recurring awards as he or she earns offer after offer.

3. Because the seeking system is more powerful than the reward system, individuals will
have a psychological tendency to earn more offers rather than become satiated by
those they have already earned.
Having Earned a E-Share! Offer, the Recipient is Compelled by Loss Aversion to
Use It
Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring
gains. Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, than
gains.15 The individual who has received a E-Share! offer, then, will have a strong
psychological compulsion to use it rather than lose it.
In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely demonstrates loss aversion through the behavior of
MIT students playing a simply computer game.16 The game presents players with three
doors, each of which can be clicked to earn a random reward of between one and ten
cents. The students are given 100 clicks and are told to earn as much money as
possible. Although the rewards are random, one door tends to pay lower rewards than
the other two. After exploring all three doors for a bit, the MIT students quickly identify
the low-payoff door and avoid clicking it for the rest of the game. After establishing this
result, Ariely tweaked the game to make a door slowly disappear if it is not clicked. In
this version of the game, when the neglected low-payoff door begins to disappear, the
players click it simply to keep it available. This reduced their earnings by 15% on
average: they would have made more money if they could just let the door disappear.
Ariely tried several different approaches to getting the players to ignore the
disappearing, low-payoff door. He told players the exact monetary payoff of the doors.
He told them that they could “reincarnate” a disappeared door with one click. In all
cases the students continued to click the disappearing door in order to keep it available,
even though doing so led to a lower payoff. “Players just couldn't tolerate the idea of
the loss, and so they did whatever was necessary to prevent their doors from closing,
even though disappearance had no real consequences and could be easily reversed.”
Loss aversion is partially what compels people to overeat at buffets, go to a pre-paid
show that they no longer care to see, or use gift cards to buy something they don’t
really want. In all cases, an action is taken not because it is desirable but because
forgoing that action implies losing something. In these examples the power of loss
aversion is magnified by the sunken cost effect: not only is something being lost, but the
investment (in this case, money) to obtain the item is lost too.17 So while any offer with
an expiration date can benefit from loss aversion, E-Share! offers benefit significantly
more because they carry a sunk cost: the individual had to answer questions in order to
activate them. He or she will be doubly psychologically driven to use E-Share! offers in
order to avoid both losing the offer themselves and wasting the time and effort invested
in earning them.

4. 1
Richerson, P.J. and R. Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2
Hornstein, H.A., E. Fisch, and M. Holmes. “Influence of a Model’s Feeling About His Behavior and His Relevance as a
Comparison Other on Observers’ Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 10 (1968): 222-26.
3
Cialdini, Robert B. 2007. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
4
Moriarty, T. “Crime, Commitment, and the Responsive Bystander.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31
(1975): 370-76.
5
Sherman, S.J. “On the Self-Erasing Nature of Errors of Prediction.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39
(1980): 211-21.
6
Freedman, J.L and S.C. Fraser. “Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique.” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 4 (1966): 195-203
7
Cialdini, Robert B. 2007. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Chapter 3. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
8
Cialdini, R. B. (1993). Influence: Science and practice. New York: Harper Collins.
9
Weinschenk, Susan M. 2009. Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? New Riders Press.
10
Yoffe, Emily. “Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.”
Slate August 12, 2009.
11
Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University
Press
12
Zweig, Jason. “Your money and your brain: Humankind evolved to seek rewards and avoid risks but not to invest
wisely.” CNNMoney August 23 2007
13
Berridge, Kent C. and Robinson, Terry E. “What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or
incentive salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998): 309-369.
14
Yoffe, Emily. “Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.”
Slate August 12, 2009.
15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
16
Ariely, Dan. 2009. Predictably Irrational. Chapter 8. Harper.
17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion