Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things. New York: Morrow, 1984. Print.
How do you choose what books you read? Read the options below. How you respond might say something about the weapon of influence for which you are the easiest target.
- You were given the book as a gift.
- You are part of a book club and have committed to reading what the group selects.
- The book is a #1 New York Times bestseller.
- You like the author’s other books.
- Someone you respect—the NYT book critic or your pastor—suggested the book.
- The book is being banned in your child’s high school, and you want to know what the fuss is about.
Each of the above scenarios matches the six domains of influence, as taxonomically spelled out in Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Since its publication in 1984, the book has sold two million copies. Why did I choose to read it? A variant of #5. Someone I respect called Cialdini’s follow-up Pre-suasion (2018) the best advertising book he’d ever read. I wanted to check out the prequel before reading it. This is even though I’ve heard about the book from multiple venues over the past five years and have even started the introduction before putting it aside. It took that person of authority (along with the time and an easily accessible audiobook) to do it.
Having finished it in three days, I can attest that the book is even better than its stellar reputation. It’s a work of popular social science and psychology, and it does its job well. What struck me most about the book is that its chief aim is not to give us ways to influence others (though it gives implicit help) but to give us ways of disarming the effect the merchants of influence have on us. Cialdini’s first sentence-“I’ve always been a patsy”—provides a fascinating question that animates each chapter. Why do we say yes or no when a compliance expert goes to work on us?
The question has six basic answers: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, likability, authority, and scarcity. I can sum each approach up succinctly. Reciprocity appeals to our desire to give in return. Commitment calls on our desire to be personally consistent. Social proof exposes our desire to behave in socially acceptable ways. Likability draws on our desire to do business with people with who we feel a connection. Authority appeals to our need for an expert. Scarcity calls on our fear of missing out.
But while those summaries are easy enough, knowing how to use them or avoid those who want to use them on me is quite difficult. These “weapons of influence” can be wielded by good or bad people. Underlying each of them is our penchant for using cognitive rules of thumb, which run like a machine in the background of our thought processes so that we need not data-crunch everything from the breakfast we eat to where we park at work. The “click – whirr” of our decision machine, however, can also be triggered by those who intend us ill. Cialdini expertly fills each chapter with pertinent research-tested insights as well examples from popular culture and personal examples to demonstrate not only the scientific veracity of the influence category but also how to explain certain befuddling decisions. It’s the anecdotes you’ll remember most.
1. For Reciprocity: how G. Gordon Liddy got C.R.E.E.P. officials to agree to the $250k Watergate break-in because he had first suggested a far more outlandish $1 million plan and even a $500k plot which had been rejected. The officials who were most susceptible to Liddy’s offer were the ones who had said no and who felt they “owed something” to Liddy because he had conceded his earlier demands and thus asked for reciprocal concessions (i.e. an a-okay) from his bosses.
2. For Commitment: how Chinese prison camps extracted treasonous essays from prisoners without force by first asking them to admit that the United States wasn’t perfect and then asking them to continue fleshing out those shortcomings until they had penned anti-patriotic words which poisoned other prisoners against the essay writers, only further entrenching them in their position.
3. For Social Proof: how Jim Jones’s real coup was moving his cult to the jungles of Guyana, where cult members had no way to gauge his demands’ social acceptability or scandal.
4. For Likability: how US school integration largely failed to lessen racial tension because the scholastic environment fomented competition among students, further deepening existing divides. More was necessary than social exposure. Collaborative multi-ethnic group work was necessary to begin to overcome the problem integration was supposed to fix. Students could only start to like each other in situations where they worked together.
5. For Authority: how a white coat-wearing Robert Young sold untold amounts of Sanka Coffee for six years by associating his authority as Marcus Welby, M.D. to his coffee recommendation.
6. For Scarcity: how Kennesaw, Georgia instituted a mandatory gun ownership law and saw gun sales skyrocket…but only to those who lived outside the town. Those who were not forced to live by the restriction chose to live by it. (This chapter also has a fascinating explanation for the 1968 Watts, Newark, and Detroit riots.)
Cialdini uses many of these weapons himself. He makes himself likable by admitting he is subject to these weapons too. For example, boy scouts got him to buy chocolate bars he didn’t want through retreat and concede techniques, and the local toy store ensured he always purchased twice as many toys as he intended through his own commitment to his child. Moreover, he is an academic, and the book’s insights are punctuated by enough anecdotes drawn from his university life as well as peer-reviewed research that he earns the title of expert. As for social proof, well, it’s plastered on every edition’s cover: 2 million copies sold!
What’s missing? The insights of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are absent, the men whose research laid the groundwork for behavioral economics and whose work on heuristics is often cited in academic journals (Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in 2003). We see elements of religion brought up in a negative light (particularly cults) without equal recognition of how religion influences society for the good. The book is by no means anti-religion, but someone could implicitly draw from its conclusions that our chief job is to wage war against the weapons of influence while denying the spiritual foundation—let’s call it the ultimate concerns—on which influence is built. The fall is the ultimate case of influence gone wrong. Want an example of how to resist? Check out how Christ rewrites the Genesis story during his 40 days in the desert. Satan’s appeals of scarcity, authority, and reciprocity fall to Christ’s internal commitment and reliance on the Word of God’s authority.
Christ certainly knew what book to read.