Using the word “because” can significantly increase the likelihood of someone agreeing to your sales proposition, or indeed any other request you make of them.
To illustrate the power of the word ‘because’, the following scenario is a study carried out by Ellen Langer in 1977, who experimented with it many times in different situations and always got the same result.
There’s a line of students at a photocopier machine in the university library. Another student tries to push in the queue to photocopy her notes, saying
“May I use the Xerox machine?”
The people already in the queue tell her:
“No way, there’s a queue here, you have to wait”.
Then the experimenter tells the queue jumper to say:
“May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush”.
When she says “because…” everyone else lets her go first.
Even more ridiculous was when the student used the nonsense reason:
“May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make copies.”
But the rest of the people in the queue still stood aside and let her go first, even though they were all in the line to make copies too.
The word ‘because’ is very powerful indeed!