Influence

Summary

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini is a groundbreaking book that explores the psychological principles behind how people are persuaded.

Cialdini, a social psychologist, identifies six key principles of influence that explain why people say "yes" and how these principles can be used to influence others' decisions and behavior.

The book draws on extensive research and real-world examples to show how these principles are used in marketing, negotiations, and everyday interactions and aims to prepare it's readers to better confront the world of manipulation that they live in.

The 6 principles:

• reciprocity
• scarcity
• authority
• commitment/consistency
• liking
• social proof

Cialdini shows how the use of these principles looks like in real life and how people he calls compliance artists, use those tricks to manipulate and ultimately sell you things that you didn't really want or need.

The principles explain many things we encounter in our day to day life: free taste "gifts" at super market stalls, why TV shopping programs always have limited editions, why you see user testimonals clobbered all over the internet, why toothpaste brands use doctors in their commercials or why all the models in commercials are usually beautiful but also relatable.

The work of Cialdini hints at a bigger picture of how humans have flawed decision making machinery that can be easily influenced and biased. Other books such as Daniel Kahnemans Thinking Fast and Slow, Malcolm Gladwells Blink or Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely explore the same picture in more detail and especially Kahnemanns work is brilliant because he is one of the leading researchers who figured out a lot of this stuff.

One of my favorite graphs on Wikipedia is the list of Human Cognitive Biases.

There are two more tactics that Cialdini mentions in his book:

• anchoring
• contrast/anchoring

Examples of this include first asking for something big (often irrationally big) that people respond "no" too and then using the fact that people tend to feel bad about having declined someone to ask them for the real thing, what one actually wanted them to do. Or showing a more expensive product first, so that the second one seems more reasonably priced (the same idea applies to subscription model prices on the internet), where the highest tier is usually priced way too high because it's not intended to be bought, it's intended to anchor the expectation and make the other price seem reasonable.

Cialdini refers to all these tactics of persuasion as weapons, highlighting how powerful they truly are in re-shaping human reality and behavior. To me it is incredible how much marketing has perfected the use of all of them into an abstruse form of art. I personally, dislike that they are used at all, to me they feel Machiavellian and evil. Manipulating people against their own interests is a dark pattern, but we still need to learn about and be aware of it, simply because it is so commonly used.