TURKEY mothers are good mothers. They are loving, watchful and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning and huddling their young beneath them. But there is something odd about how they identify their chicks – they go by their ‘cheep-cheep’ sound.
Other features, such as the chicks’ smell, touch or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the cheep-cheep noise, its mother will care for it. If not, the mother will ignore it – or sometimes kill it.
The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviourist MW Fox in an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat.
For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is greeted with squawking, pecking and clawing rage. The experiments found that a stuffed polecat, when drawn by a string to a mother turkey, suffered an immediate and furious attack. But when the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the cheep-cheep sound of a baby turkey, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.
….’Influence, Science and Practice’, Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology at Arizona State University
Don’t know how much of it is true, I might have fallen into the trap of accepting authority without verification.
Sales and marketing tap into human instincts to increase their success percentages. A successful use of the right triggers can double the success ratio in some cases.
To protect yourself against those unconscious human triggers being used against your conscious mind, you must be able to detect its use and be able to turn off your automatic response.
Exercise
In fighting, we have some default set of reactions that comes instinctly – trained or not. It is important for us to understand what they are and what it means to our fight plan. Put some effort into thinking through the topic and try to come up with a list of instinctive responses and implications.