Has anyone read Cialdini's book on Influence? He has a section dedicated to explaining how the Watergate idiocy came about. It's thanks to the return concession rule or the door-in-the-face technique or what Cialdini refers to as the rejection-then-retreat rule.
Basically, according to Cialdini, what happened was that Mitchell and his associates were manipulated by Liddy's abuse of such a technique and that they had to give in to allowing him to execute some plan, no matter how absurd, because they felt too much psychological pressure to utterly reject what he proposed.
It started out first with Liddy proposing to the council a much more grandiose plan of not only attempting to bug one of the Watergate offices but to also kidnap, assault, and use call-girls to entrap the Democratic politicans. When the council refused to allow Liddy to go through with such a plan, Liddy proposed a less complicated version, which was also rejected.
Some time later, he came up with a third plan, this one was much simpler and only involved bugging the office. This time, the council ended up accepting despite the stupidity of it all (despite their good judgement and all). One of the council members even said, in hindsight, it was stupid of them to agree to such an operation, given that it was guaranteed that Nixon would've won the next elections anyway.
So what happened exactly? Like I said before, they were manipulated through an abuse of one of the principles of social psychology.
According to the door-in-the-face technique, if you request a favor or an agreement or whatever from someone, and he rejects it, he is very likely to agree to your next request should you make a concession and ask for a smaller favor instead. This is because seeing you concede to a smaller request makes him feel guilty if he doesn't make his own concession as well. So he ends up complying with your second request.
So when Liddy "conceded" to a relatively small proposition, and unaware of the psychological factors going on, the committee had no real choice but to let him have his way eventually just so they could relieve the psychological pressure by conceding as well.
Interesting analysis from Cialdini. Share your thoughts.
