Have you ever bought something from a door-to-door salesperson, or donated money to someone soliciting funds for a charitable cause, only later to wonder why you willingly forked over your hard-earned money for something you didn't want or didn't care about?
I have, and I always kick myself for getting suckered.
How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do? That's the question Robert B. Cialdini asked himself after falling victim to a huckster's influence one time too many. But instead of shrugging his shoulders, this professor of psychology decided to study the phenomenon and find out if there is a set of common techniques used to convince people to hand over their money or time against their better judgment. And he discovered that indeed there was, and wrote a book about it called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
The book covers the six methods used to influence people to do things that aren't necessarily in their best interest. They are:
1. Reciprocity — People tend to return favors out of a sense of obligation. Influencers exploit this by extending a small favor (buying them a Coke from a vending machine) in order to get a bigger favor back (having you buy a car from them).
2. Scarcity — When people are made to believe something is rare ("a limited time offer!"), they will desire it more. In Influence, Cialdini writes about an Indian jewelry store that attempted to get rid of a line of jewelry by lowering the price. Nobody bought it even though the store lowered the price again and again. But when a new salesperson misread the price tags and told customers that the jewelry cost 10 times as much, the items quickly sold out.
3. Liking — People like other people who are members of their "tribe." Influencers seek to find common interests with their victims, tell jokes, and pay compliments. Flattery, Cialdini found, will get you everywhere.
4. Authority — Influencers who convince their clients, customers, or marks that they are authorities or experts can gain control over them. That's why they hang diplomas (not always genuine) and pictures of themselves posing with famous people on their walls.
5. Social proof — People are herd animals. They copy each other. When a magazine salesman came to my door a few years ago, he showed me a stack of subscriptions cards that "people in the neighborhood" had filled out. He pointed out that most people bought subscriptions to three different magazines. Fortunately I had recently read Cialdini's book and I knew he was using the "social proof" technique. I didn't buy anything. (And I'll bet most of the subscription cards were fake.)
6. Commitment/consistency — People like to behave in a consistent manner. Cialdini recounts a personal experience he once had with a young woman with a clipboard who approached him and asked him if he was a patron of the arts. He said yes. She then said she was selling membership to a club that offered discounts to different kinds of artistic events. Cialdini wrote, "I bought the entertainment package, even though I knew I had been set up. The need to be consistent with what I had already said snared me."
Influence is a user's manual for survival in a hard-sell, high-pressure society. Filled with lucid examples and colorful anecdotes, Influence is not only profoundly insightful, it's a lot of fun to read.
Mark Frauenfelder Credit.com contributor, editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular site Boing Boing, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online. He covers creative DIY projects and how-tos that will help you make the most of your money.
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So he used a bunch of anecdotes to explain behavior that has already been explained and for which frameworks were constructed decades, centuries, and even millenia ago?
I’m not impressed. I’m not ripping your review, mind you, you highlight the book wonderfully. I just don’t see how his generalizations based on anecdotes trump what those of us who study persuasion in the communication realm (going back to Aristotle) have known from the beginning.
>>I just don’t see how his generalizations based on anecdotes trump what those of us who study persuasion in the communication realm (going back to Aristotle) have known from the beginning.
Because Cialdini wrote a fun, readable book about it, and you didn’t.
I was lucky enough to take a marketing class taught by a former grad student of Cialdini and it was fantastic! Yes, the broad outline may seem like common sense, but it’s really interesting to see how these principles are used and misused by many different businesses and organizations.
I’m a young artist/entrepreneur and the notes from that class (largely based off the book) are my business bible!
Edan so its like your post, touching all 6 points. But the 7th motive; selfless/selfish. cyoa.
Interestingly, this was the first (and only) class I took at business school where we ever talked seriously about ethics. Tools aren’t inherently good or evil, it depends on who is using them.
For example, here is my favorite ad campaign from from that class:http://www.girleffect.org/
Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (Cialdini, et al.) is essentially a repackaging of these concepts, but I found it much more readable.
It definitely makes me look on things differently and realize that knowingly or unknowingly, we’re constantly being manipulated. Everyone should read one of those two books.
This book sounds an awful lot like Robert Levine’s “The Power of Persuasion,” which was originally published in 2003. I mean, it sounds like the same book.
The article Defend Yourself Against High-Pressure Defend Yourself Against High-Pressure is really impressive,,,It definitely makes me look on things differently and realize that knowingly or unknowingly, we�re constantly being manipulated. Everyone should read one of those two books.