Principle VII of VII

Unity

Shared identity moves people.

Unity is the most recently identified of the principles, and it is not a stronger form of liking. Liking runs on what we have in common. Unity runs on who we are together: family, nationality, faith, region, profession, the team we support. The distinction matters because a shared identity is not a similarity that has been noticed. It is a category that includes both people, and inside that category the other person's interests are treated, to a degree, as an extension of one's own. That is why unity produces behaviour that ordinary rapport does not, including help given at real cost and without calculation.

See how strongly I use it→Free · 16 questions

The Research

The football shirt experiment

Levine, Prosser, Evans and Reicher, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2005

Mark Levine and colleagues recruited committed Manchester United supporters at a British university, asked them questions designed to bring their identity as United fans to the front of their minds, then sent them across campus to another building. On the way, a man jogging past them slipped on a grass bank, fell, grabbed his ankle and cried out. He was working for the researchers, and he wore one of three shirts: a Manchester United shirt, a Liverpool shirt, or a plain unbranded sports top. Help depended heavily on the shirt. The injured man was far more likely to be helped when he wore the participant's own team colours than when he wore a rival's shirt or no team colours at all. The injury, the setting and the man were identical in every condition.

The Mechanism

Why it works

Shared identity changes the unit of self-interest. When someone is categorised as one of us, the boundary between their welfare and ours becomes partially permeable, and we act on their behalf in ways that are difficult to explain as an exchange. This is what separates unity from liking: liking makes a request more agreeable, whereas unity makes it less like a request at all. The second important property is that these categories are not fixed. Which identity is active at a given moment depends on what has been made salient, and a person who is an out-group member under one framing can be an in-group member under a wider one. Identity is therefore not only something that can be discovered. It is something that can be drawn more or less inclusively, and where the line falls determines who receives help.

Further Research

The finding most people miss

Levine, Prosser, Evans and Reicher, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2005

In a second experiment the researchers changed only what they made salient beforehand. Instead of prompting participants to think of themselves as Manchester United supporters, they prompted them to think of themselves as football fans, an identity that includes supporters of rival clubs. The rival shirt, which had attracted little help under the narrow framing, now attracted it. The plain shirt, which signalled no membership of the category at all, still did not. This is the most useful result in the literature on unity, because it shows the boundary is movable. Who counts as one of us is decided by which identity is active, and that can be shifted by how a situation is framed before anyone is asked for anything.

Where You Will See It

Unity, once you know to look.

Organisations

Language that positions colleagues inside one category, rather than as departments transacting with each other, changes how readily people absorb cost on each other's behalf.

Community and public campaigns

Appeals framed around a shared place or shared membership outperform appeals framed around need alone, because they address the reader as a member rather than as a donor.

Professional groups

Practitioners help other practitioners with a readiness that has little to do with personal acquaintance. The category is doing the work.

Conflict

Where two sides are locked into opposing identities, the productive move is usually to make a larger shared identity salient rather than to argue the point in dispute.

Common Misreadings

What unity is not.

“Unity is just strong liking.”: They are separate mechanisms. Liking asks whether I feel warmly toward you. Unity asks whether you are one of us, and the second question can be answered yes about someone you have never met and would not especially enjoy.
“Shared identity has to be built over years.”: Levine's second experiment shifted which identity was active with a short preliminary task. The category often already exists; what changes is which one is in play.
“Emphasising the group is always positive.”: Every in-group implies an out-group. The same framing that increases help inside the boundary reduces it outside, which is a cost that should be counted rather than assumed away.

How to Use It

Applying Unity honestly.

Identify the category you genuinely share, make it salient before the request rather than during it, and draw the boundary as widely as the truth allows.

The ethical line. Unity is the principle with the most serious potential for harm, because the mechanism that makes people generous toward insiders is the same one that makes them indifferent to outsiders. Used well, it widens the category: the framing that turns a rival into a fellow supporter, or a department into a colleague. Used badly, it narrows the category deliberately in order to licence treatment of whoever has been placed outside it. Anyone invoking a shared identity should be able to say honestly whether they are drawing the circle wider or drawing it tighter, and who is outside it as a result.

Dr. Robert Cialdini, who identified the seven principles of persuasion

Identified across four decades of peer-reviewed research by Dr. Robert Cialdini, seven million copies, forty-four languages.

The Other Six

They compound. Learn them together.

You know how it works. How well do you use it?

Unity is one of seven. Sixteen questions show which of them you lean on hardest, and name the one gap costing you the most.

Measure My Influence→

Go deeper · CCP Module 06

Want to master Unity, not just read about it?

The Cialdini® Certified Practitioner program gives Unity a full module: short videos with Dr. Cialdini, exercises on your own cases, and your personal Action Plan. 21 self-paced hours, and a certificate Dr. Cialdini signs.

$1,497One-time · self-paced

Explore the CCP