Assignment on

Science of Persuasion; Principle of liking and principle of

reciprocity

Submitted by
Fauzia Akter
ID: 2022-1-95-114

Submitted to
Kohinoor Biswas
Assistant Professor
Department of Business Administration
East West University
I gave three practical examples for each of the principles of persuasion mentioned above
from your personal observation or experience below.

Reciprocity

Example 1: An employee (one of my relatives) was an IT employee in the office. He was having
trouble implementing an unique algorithm for a product in his office based on CSE. The
employee was failing repeatedly and at one point thought it was impossible to implement the
feature. While at it, his confidence dropped dramatically. This situation was going on for over
two weeks. It went to the point that people in the upper hierarchy were noticing it. This made the
employee’s confidence more at stake. He shared the situation with his boss and talked about the
frustration. The boss told him to drop what he was doing and join him for a smoke.
The discussion started very normally and gradually the boss was trying to understand the
problem and issues.. After some time the boss told the employee the impact of the feature: how
the uniqueness of the feature will be praised by the customer and how satisfactory it will be to
implement such a feature practically in the feature. Also how famous will be the idea.. He also
spoke about the level of confidence gained after successfully implementing the feature. Then the
boss told the employee his(employee) previous works in the company and how he was so
successful in the development of unique features in previous works, and showed some related
demonstrations.
This talk raised the confidence level of the employee back to his feet and he implemented the
unique algorithm successfully afterwards.

Example 2:
One of my elder cousins back in 2016, joined an office as a junior developer, his pay was low as
he was only a junior developer. His boss was kind of a lonely and unmarried man and always
very serious about new employees. The boss used to say that new/fresh employees need to learn
to work within the office with the seniors rather than alone. This way is faster and more
effective. He always said that specially fresh graduates have to learn within the office from
scratch. He used to spend a good amount of time with the new employees and give them proper
attention and behave as a mentor. Eventually my cousin started to learn to work very fast and
became very good at his job. He was grateful to have a generous boss like him. After 3 to 4
months my cousin got another job invitation from another company and they were ready to pay
more than the current job. In that situation he could definitely use some more money/pay. But my
cousin felt that he should not switch his job. When we asked him why, he answered that his boss
is very friendly and generous and taught him his work well and helped him a lot so he feels
grateful and does not want to switch his current job for now or at least for another year. This was
a situation where the boss is the stronger party and really helpful to his employees and this
creates the persuasion and leads to loyalty of his employees that they hesitated to leave the job
and eventually stayed.

Example 3: I live in an apartment in a big building where there is a party who planned an annual
tour in winter for the families of the building. There are more than 120 apartments and the
owner's sister also lives in one of them. Basically she and her family organize the annual tour.
Not to mention that a big amount of money is involved in this event. They first arrange voting
for the shortlisted places to visit. But unfortunately very few families join in the tour with the
planner committee every year. But this year the committee offered free breakfast for all three
days in the tour for the members with a 20% discount on hotel payment. And also promised to
arrange raffle draws and gifts for all. The free breakfast offer got a very good response. And this
year a significant number of people registered for the annual picnic. Personally I don't think it’s a
good deal to get free breakfast for three days because there will be a bunch of almost unknown
people with us all the time ( as I am a new member in the building). But still i also have decided
to give it a shot specially we will get to know each other better in this tour and will be familiar to
the society and not left alone.So for these reasons and other including offers got us to think about
the annual group picnic one more time. As a result I decided to join the annual building society
picnic 2023. I think this might be another example of reciprocity.

Liking

Example 1:This is a sweet and childish event from my past school life. While i was in school,
class seven. I was 3rd in my class that year, section A. Also in section B there was another girl
who was also 3rd in her section. We both were competing to be 2nd in our own section, in this
situation we should not have any rivalry, or at least I did not have rivalry against her because we
were not in the same section, but weirdly enough that girl always envied me and sometimes
talked and spread negative things about me, that is why I kind of disliked her the whole year, but
things turned differently at the end of the year, during the annual programme I performed a song
and afterwards for that performance, I was praised by many. She also came and praised me that I
can be a good singer someday, I have got potential of being a good singer someday and said
other good things like that. She also added that she started learning harmonium and did not know
I played harmonium. I asked which teacher did you hire? (as It was a small town and we knew
all the Ostads in the town) And surprisingly it turned out our song teacher (ostad) was the same
person. We talked for a while and started to get to know each other better. This small incident
made us friends and from that day we became good friends. Still now we are friends. We meet
while we both are in town and laugh at our childishness from the past.

Example 2: Another example about liking will be about my husband, He has played guitar since
his university life. He had a band with some of his friends in his university. Once he had an
argument with his guitarist/band mate friend over the quality of music of a particular band. It was
a not so serious conversation to other people but it was serious to my husband and his friend as
they shared the same musical group: they felt that the alignment of their musical tastes played a
vital role in the performance of the band. The argument went a bit strong and there was a cold
relationship between two of them.

It went to a point that it was uncomfortable between those two not only during band sessions but
also other times as they shared a common group of friends. The situation continued for about a
week. Then my husband‘s guitar started malfunctioning. His friend heard this and he also had
the equipment to fix the guitar. My husband didn’t ask for his friend’s help because of the bad
blood. Understanding the situation, his friend came forward to resolve this. He went to my
husband‘s room with the fixing tools and offered to fix his guitar. After this event the
relationship between them became normal again and they continued their musical journey
together.

Example 3: This is a personal experience of liking that I am about to share. A few years back I
joined a gym beside where I live. The gym provided weight loss courses for those who were
interested. They used to assign a group of people based on their age, height and weight. I was
new at the gym. The first day I heard about the skim and I decided to join the course. But it was
beneficial if we paired up with another person before starting the course.As I was new there so I
did not know any of them, but I was really determined to lose weight and find a partner also. So
later I went to the gym early and started to chat with other girls, and it turned out one of the girls
was similar to my age, weight and the amount of weight she wanted to lose also she had some
weight losing experience herself. Also she was searching for a partner just like me. Then I
mentioned that I study BBA in East West University, it turned out she was also in my
department. So I definitely became very happy and excited instantly and started sharing our
goals in the weight loss journey and saying good things about each other. We became good
friends before we even noticed. Afterwards she paired with me in the course and helped me a lot
and we successfully lost weight in the given timeline and hit our goal.

N.B. Word count 1527 words