PDF Summary:Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini

Have you ever wondered how persuasion works? How are salespeople, fundraisers, and politicians able to lure us into compliance — without even thinking that we’re being manipulated?

This is what Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion sets out to answer. The book shows how the persuaders of the world use our basic mental instincts against us, transforming them into tools of compliance. By exploring the origins and common uses of six principles of persuasion — reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity — you’ll learn to spot when you’re being hustled and discover how to beat the persuaders at their own game.

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You can feel it intuitively when you’re being asked to do something you don’t want to do. The key to fighting back is spotting these situations quickly. Otherwise the compliance professional will corner you with your own commitment. You should then turn the table on the compliance practitioner. Tell them that you’re onto them and you know exactly what they’re trying to do. Make decisions for a reason: don’t make reasons for a decision.

Social Proof

The Social Proof Principle posits that we decide what’s correct based on what other people think is correct. If lots of other people are doing something or thinking something, then it must be good and worthy of imitation. It’s why television producers add laugh tracks to unfunny sitcoms: they know that, through social proof, we’ll be more likely to laugh if we hear others laughing (even if we don’t find the content to be funny on its own).

Of course, social proof is often valuable: you’ll tend to make fewer mistakes if you follow social evidence than if you ignore it. When a lot of people are doing something, it usually is the right thing to do. We can look to others for how to model our behavior in everyday situations, rather than needing to meticulously analyze everything.

Social proof can also be faked or manufactured, however, or used for self-serving purposes by compliance practitioners. It’s why so many product advertisements talk about being the “fastest-growing” or “highest-selling”: the marketers want to convince you that there’s a groundswell of demand for the product from others. Or even worse, they’ll create fake “person-on-the-street” commercials where allegedly “real” people (who are actually paid actors) talk up the merits of the product.

To resist the manipulation, you need to look closer at group behavior. Is there a reason to do something, beyond just the fact that everyone else is doing it? Don’t be like a pilot who flies by relying solely on her instruments. You also need to actually see the sky in front of you. Sometimes you do need to look critically at the world around you, take the time to assess situations, think for yourself, and apply your own individual judgement.

Liking

The Liking Principle stipulates that we’re more likely to comply with requests from people that we know and like. Thus, we are more amenable to the compliance efforts of neighbors, friends, and family. It’s why salespeople will often mention the names of members of your family or friends that they’ve done business with. The salesperson wants you to translate some of your warm feelings about those individuals onto them.

We are also more willing to acquiesce to people who we see as being good-looking, affable, or who profess to like us. This creates a wide opening for compliance practitioners. If you like the seller, you’ll like what she’s selling. The efforts at manipulation can be almost comically transparent and still be effective: one car salesman claimed great success just by mailing generic postcards to his customers every month saying nothing more than “I like you.”

There’s nothing wrong with liking people, and usually someone’s charm or warmth indicates that they are trustworthy and reliable. But to avoid being manipulated, you need to evaluate each situation on the merits. If you feel that you are strongly liking someone after only being briefly acquainted with them, you need to pause and assess what is producing these feelings. Always separate your personal feelings for the person trying to sell you something from the thing you’re actually looking to buy. Judge your potential decision solely on the merits: don’t comply with a request just because you like the requester.

Authority

The Authority Principle states that people are hard-wired to comply with requests that come from an acknowledged and accepted source of authority. Thus, we are strongly inclined to be deferential to people whom we consider to be in a position of power or expertise, like teachers, members of the armed forces, police officers, doctors, and judges. In fact, we respond to even just the symbols of authority—like titles and uniforms.

Of course, there are good and legitimate reasons why we’re strongly conditioned to obey authority. Leadership, hierarchy, and authority are obviously necessary ingredients in any functioning society. Our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to organize complex societies if there hadn’t been some authority figure giving orders, assigning priorities, and allocating resources. Indeed, authority is the basis of government and law: without it, there’s only anarchy.

Unfortunately, authority can also be abused and exploited. In the famous Milgram experiment at Yale, ordinary people were shown to be highly vulnerable to pressure from an authority figure who instructed them to administer painful and dangerous electric shocks to fellow experiment participants. Clearly, the instinct to obey authority runs deep and can be easily exploited by compliance professionals who only need to adopt the most superficial patina of authority to trick people into acceding to their requests.

To avoid getting suckered, don’t blindly obey authority. Always assess an authority figure’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials. A cop telling you to pull over is a legitimate authority figure whose training and expertise clearly compel you to comply in this situation. An actor who plays a doctor on a TV show, on the other hand, is not a legitimate authority from which to take medical advice in a pharmaceutical commercial. Their training is as an actor, not as a physician.

Scarcity

The Scarcity Principle tells us that we find more appealing those things with limited availability. Thus, rare goods are expensive, abundant items are cheap. Scarcity is closely related to the idea of loss aversion. We’re inherently conservative and cautious: in fact, we’re more afraid of losing something than we are enticed by the hope of gaining something of equal value.

Like our other fixed-action mental shortcuts, scarcity usually is a good gauge of how valuable something is. It’s simple supply-and-demand: when there’s less of something and there’s a high demand for it, the price increases. It’s why gold is more valuable than iron and why high-skilled workers earn more than low-skilled workers.

But compliance practitioners know how to twist this instinct to their own advantage. It’s why we see so many “limited-time only” or “first-come, first-serve” sales pitches: the goal is to drive you into a scarcity frenzy that forces you to suspend your better judgement and rush headlong into an ill-considered decision.

Our scarcity instinct is accelerated when things become recently scarce (where they were previously abundant) and when they become scarce through social competition. For a salesperson, then, there’s no better scenario than when customers are bidding against one another for a product of limited availability: the sense of loss aversion will compel many people to grossly inflate the value and desirability of the item.

To avoid being manipulated this way, you need to ask yourself if you truly wish to use the item for its intended purpose, or if you merely wish to possess it because of the rarity itself. Do you really want that sports car because of its inherent features, or do you just want it because so few other people have it? If your answer is the latter, then you’ve probably fallen into a scarcity compliance trap. You should want things because of their intrinsic value, not because of their rarity or status.

All of these principles of persuasion turn our greatest strengths into some of our greatest vulnerabilities. Compliance practitioners are adept at fooling us by activating our fixed-action patterns to get us to agree to whatever it is they’re trying to push on us. Thus, they’ll give you “free” samples; manipulate you into making seemingly innocuous commitments; create phony social proof, butter you up with flattery; put on a fake uniform to lend themselves the air of authority; or give you a made-up deadline to make you think your time to act is limited. Knowledge is power: the more you know about the compliance tricks, the better prepared you’ll be to resist them.