Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition

Robert best summarizes the premise of his book: "Although there are thousands of different tactics that compliance practitioners employ to produce yes, the majority fall within six basic categories. Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and, in so doing, gives the tactics their power. The book is organized around these six principles, one to a chapter. The principles--consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity--are each discussed in terms of their function in the society and in terms of how their enormous force can be commissioned by a compliance professional who deftly incorporates them into requests for purchases, donations, concessions, votes, assent, etc."Below are key excerpts from this book that I found particularly insightful:1- "The impressive aspect of the rule for reciprocation and the sense of obligation that goes with it is its pervasiveness in human culture. It is so widespread that after intensive study, sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner can report that there is no human society that does not subscribe to the rule. And within each society it seems pervasive also; it permeates exchanges of every kind."2- "The reciprocation rule brings about mutual concession in two ways. The first is obvious. It pressures the recipient of an already made concession to respond in kind. The second, while not so obvious, is pivotally important. Just as in the case of favors, gifts. or aid, the obligation to reciprocate a concession encourages the creation of socially desirable arrangements by ensuring that anyone seeking to start such an arrangement will not be exploited."3- "Certainly, then, good personal consistency is highly valued in our culture. And well it should be. It provides us with a reasonable and gainful orientation to the world. Most of the time we will be better off if our approach to things is well laced with consistency. Without it our lives would be difficult, erratic, and disjointed. But because it is so typically in our best interests to be consistent, we easily fall into the habit of being automatically so, even in situations where it is not the sensible way to be. When it occurs unthinkingly, consistency can be disastrous."4- "Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside, there is a pressure to bring self-image into line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure--a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others perceive us."5- "The tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it normally works quite well. As a rule, we will make fewer mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than contrary to it. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right tiling to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its major strength and its major weakness. Like the other weapons of influence, it provides a convenient shortcut for determining how to behave but, at the same time, makes one who use the shortcut vulnerable to the attacks of profiteers who lie in wait along its path."6- "These results suggest an important qualification of the principle of social proof. We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves."7- "Few people would be surprised to learn that, as a rule, we most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like. What might be startling to note, however, is that this simple rule is used in hundreds of ways by total strangers to get us to comply with their requests."8- "Compliance professionals are forever attempting to establish that we and they are working for the same goals, that we must "pull together" for mutual benefit, that they are, in essence, our teammates."9- "This paradox is, of course, the same one that attends all I major weapons of influence. In this instance, once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience. The simultaneous blessing and bane of such blind obedience is its mechanical character. We don't have to think; therefore, we don't. Although such mindless obedience leads us to appropriate action in the great majority of cases, there will be conspicuous exceptions--because we are reacting rather than thinking."10- "The evidence, then, is clear. Compliance practitioners' reliance on scarcity as a weapon of influence is frequent, wide-ranging, systematic, and diverse...The first is familiar. Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts. The weakness is, as before, an enlightened one. In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item's availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality. Thus, one reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is that, by following it, we are usually and efficiently right.In addition, there is a unique, secondary source of power within the scarcity principle: As opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms; and we hate to lose the freedoms we already have."11- "Very often in making a decision about someone or something, we don't use all the relevant available information; we use, instead, only a single, highly representative piece of the total. And an isolated piece of information, even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly stupid mistakes--mistakes that, when exploited by clever others, leave us looking silly or worse."12- "We are likely to use these lone cues when we don't have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation. Where we are rushed, stressed. uncertain, indifferent, distracted, or fatigued, we tend to focus on less of the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach. All this leads to a jarring insight: With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we g ago transcended."

I know it was in college but this book legit changed my life. I bought a new copy just to reread it and gift to friends. Strongly recommend.

Influence is a book about compliance and manipulation in general. The book offers detailed answers to two main questions 1/ what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And 2/ which techniques most effectively use these factors to generate compliance? Besides, there are many interesting, every-day sort of questions, that are posed and answered in the book. Just to mention a few:# Why should the voting of a Jury member secret while the Jury is discussing a case?# Why does a commitment made in public or by writing have such a powerful effect on the person who makes it?# Why do we need to shout help and ask for specifics when we really need help?# Why people commit more suicides after listening about suicides or disasters in the media?# Which factors cause a person to like another person?# Why do some people associate themselves so closely to their sport team that if their team is consistently losing they feel as losers as well?# Which tricks do car sellers play to trick us to buy something right here right now?# Why a TV commercial with a renowned actor playing a doctor selling pills has the same power as if he was a real doctor?After studying all the tactics used by sales people, and the myriad techniques they use to manipulate, Cialdini came with six basic weapons of influence, each one governed by a psychological anchor or shortcut in human behaviour: 1/Consistency, 2/ reciprocation, 3/ social proof, 4/ authority, 5/ liking, and 6/ scarcity. Each of them is analysed in an individual chapter, where we are shown the psychological shortcut that produces automatic auto-pilot reactions that are used by manipulators, why these anchors sit comfortably in the human psyche from an Evolutionary Psychology and Sociology point of view, and in which precise ways they work, work better and can be enhanced or downplayed. Examples from many lab tests, natural psychology tests, scientific bibliography and Cialdini's own personal life are used to explain these mechanisms with simplicity.Cialdini wants normal people, no matter we are a seller or not, to understand how our psyche works, because the trickster can be tricked and our psyche works using mechanisms that can be exploited and manipulated easily against us by anybody, for good and for evil. This is not a book on how to use or manipulate people and isn't directed to marketers or sellers specifically. A good part of Cialdini's work was done by infiltrating training programs from sales people and Cialdini mostly address the majority of people who don't use compliance techniques. However, he doesn't hold a grudge, nor want us to, against "compliance practioners" as he calls them (sales operators, fund-raisers, charities street workers, recruiters, advertisers, real-estate and travel agents, among others) are just people using the knowledge of our psyche without lying or masquerading anything. When they do, Cialdini advices war: "I he proper targets for counteraggression are only those individuals who falsify, counterfeit, or misrepresent the evidence that naturally cues our shortcut responses (...) The real treachery, and the thing we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make their profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts.""Influence" is an useful book, not only to be learn and be aware of the tricks that compliance professionals play on us, but also of the ways people use them in our private lives to get something from us even if it is just approval, lack of a reprimand, or just sex. Most importantly the section "How to say no" in each chapter tell us, exactly, what to do or how to recognise the manipulators, the psychological anchors discussed in the chapter, and how to respond and react so our decision is o-u-r decision.The book reads well, in simple English and is very entertaining and easy to understand.You will certainly get a few aha! moments as you can put into perspective what happened while booking a time with your hairdresser, your beauty salon, dealing with a charity worker that stops you in the street with a compliment, while a shop attendant shows you different stuff, dealing with a travel agent, dealing with your Real Estate agent, or while certain TV ads that do not make sense rationally but do make sense, totally, to your subconscious.There are too many people including quotes in their books, but the ones Cialdini uses at the beginning of each chapter are spot on, as they summarise each chapter to perfection.SOME CRITIQUE>>> Cialdini is a bit reiterative at times, goes for pages unnecessarily, and although I loved most of the examples that Cialdini mentions, there are too many and he could have cut a few without the book losing interest or quality.>>> Probably because the book was written in the 1980s, some stuff is really well-known nowadays and doesn't need of long explanations, or won't surprise anybody. I would say that people with a basic degree of education would not be saying what what what?! when reading about the bystander factor, the halo effect and the good cop-bad cop dynamics, or that our titles are something that can be used to trick people and that people who don't have them will attach to those to get a bit of the spark.>>> The book has not aged well with regards to a few points:1/ Some contextual facts that were common in the 80s are are no longer in use, or even legal in some parts of the world, like door-to-door sales. We live in the world of the Internet, online stores, publicity everywhere we look at, constant spam and marketing on networking sites, and the use of our private meta-data by corporations to sell us things or know what we want to buy. I would have loved seeing an analysis on how the shortcuts presented in this book have morphed to adjust to the needs of the online world and market, if some of these shortcuts are now more prominent than others, and if new shortcuts have been added to the six mentioned here.2/ The bibliography used and referenced is still mostly from the 70s and 80s, with a few additions from the 90s. It would have been great adding a modern bibliography in a "further reading" sort of chapter when the book was revised.3/ The use of some vocabulary is no longer OK. Referring to primitive cultures is no longer acceptable or accepted without discussion and calling animals infrahumans it is an anthropocentric adjective that doesn't connect with the reality of the environment and the planet we live in. I would call a shark or alligator a suprahuman!4/ Some social practices have changed dramatically in the last decades, even though Cialdini thought that they would not as they have a function in the human psyche. Well, it seems no longer. For example the hell-week practices in Universities, which were in decline in my University before I entered mine and banned when I was in. They might be alive in the American Fraternity Societies, but there is something called Open University that works quite well, is everywhere and expanding, and people don't need to be part of a group or enter any building that often. The world is quite different nowadays more than people in the 80s would have imagined.RENDERING FOR KINDLEThe book has a word index at the end, but it is not linked in the Kindle edition of the book. The author advises using the search tool to find them. Well, Kindle's search tool is not the most accurate sensitive sort of search tool. Kindle books should be sold cheaper if indexes or features that were in the hard-copies are not available in the electronic edition.IN SHORTThis is a great reading overall, informative, entertaining and useful for our daily life, to notice things to stop us from buying something we don't want to buy right now or just not to act in a way that feels is not you but we are being pushed into and is not in our best interest. Entertaining and eye-opening this might be a bible for manipulators, but also a bible to counter-attack those who want to bend our will for their own benefit. We should learn about how influence works because automated stereotyped behaviour works better now than in the 80s, as the pace of modern life is faster and more stressful, and we have less time and energy to pause and think for a second to ask ourselves what we really want. This being the case, we can be manipulated more easily today than 30 years ago.