INFLUENCE
The Psychology of Persuasion
ROBERT B. CIALDINI PH.D.
This book is dedicated to Chris,
who glows in his father’s eye
Copyright © 1984, 1994, 2007 by Robert Cialdini.
Contents
Introduction v
Weapons of Influence
Reciprocation: The Old Give and Take…and Take
Commitment and Consistency: Hobgoblins of the Mind
Social Proof: Truths Are Us
Liking: The Friendly Thief
Authority: Directed Deference
Scarcity: The Rule of the Few
Notes 211
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INFLUENCE The Psychology of Persuasion INTRODUCTION
I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy. For as long as I
can recall, I’ve been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, fundraisers, and operators of one sort or another. True, only some of these
people have had dishonorable motives. The others—representatives of
certain charitable agencies, for instance—have had the best of intentions.
No matter. With personally disquieting frequency, I have always found
myself in possession of unwanted magazine subscriptions or tickets to
the sanitation workers’ ball. Probably this long-standing status as
sucker accounts for my interest in the study of compliance: Just what
are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And
which techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about such
compliance? I wondered why it is that a request stated in a certain way
will be rejected, while a request that asks for the same favor in a slightly
different fashion will be successful.
So in my role as an experimental social psychologist, I began to do
research into the psychology of compliance. At first the research took the form of experiments performed, for the most part, in my
laboratory and on college students. I wanted to find out which psychological principles influence the tendency to comply with a request. Right
now, psychologists know quite a bit about these principles—what they
are and how they work. I have characterized such principles as weapons
of influence and will report on some of the most important in the upcoming chapters.
After a time, though, I began to realize that the experimental work,
while necessary, wasn’t enough. It didn’t allow me to judge the importance of the principles in the world beyond the psychology building and
the campus where I was examining them. It became clear that if I was
to understand fully the psychològy of compliance, I would need to
broaden my scope of investigation. I would need to look to the compliance professionals—the people who had been using the principles on
me all my life.
They know what works and what doesn’t; the law of
survival of the fittest assures it. Their business is to make us comply,
and their livelihoods depend on it. Those who don’t know how to get
people to say yes soon fall away; those who do, stay and flourish.
Of course, the compliance professionals aren’t the only ones who
know about and use these principles to help them get their way. We
all employ them and fall victim to them, to some degree, in our daily
interactions with neighbors, friends, lovers, and offspring. But the
compliance practitioners have much more than the vague and amateurish understanding of what works than the rest of us have. As I thought
about it, I knew that they represented the richest vein of information
about compliance available to me. For nearly three years, then, I combined my experimental studies with a decidedly more entertaining
program of systematic immersion into the world of compliance professionals—sales operators, fund-raisers, recruiters, advertisers, and others.
The purpose was to observe, from the inside, the techniques and
strategies most commonly and effectively used by a broad range of
compliance practitioners. That program of observation sometimes took
the form of interviews with the practitioners themselves and sometimes
with the natural enemies (for example, police buncosquad officers,
consumer agencies) of certain of the practitioners. At other times it involved an intensive examination of the written materials by which
compliance techniques are passed down from one generation to another—sales manuals and the like.
Most frequently, though, it has taken the form of participant observation. Participant observation is a research approach in which the researcher becomes a spy of sorts. With disguised identity and intent, the
investigator infiltrates the setting of interest and becomes a full-fledged participant in the group to be studied. So when I wanted to learn about
the compliance tactics of encyclopedia (or vacuum-cleaner, or portraitphotography, or dance-lesson) sales organizations, I would answer a
newspaper ad for sales trainees and have them teach me their methods.
Using similar but not identical approaches, I was able to penetrate advertising, public-relations, and fund-raising agencies to examine their
techniques. Much of the evidence presented in this book, then, comes
from my experience posing as a compliance professional, or aspiring
professional, in a large variety of organizations dedicated to getting us
to say yes.
One aspect of what I learned in this three-year period of participant
observation was most instructive. 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. It is worthy of
note that I have not included among the six principles the simple rule
of material self-interest—that people want to get the most and pay the
least for their choices. This omission does not stem from any perception
on my part that the desire to maximize benefits and minimize costs is
unimportant in driving our decisions. Nor does it come from any
evidence I have that compliance professionals ignore the power of this
rule. Quite the opposite: In my investigations, I frequently saw practitioners use (sometimes honestly, sometimes not) the compelling “I can
give you a good deal” approach. I choose not to treat the material selfinterest rule separately in this book because I see it as a motivational
given, as a goes-without-saying factor that deserves acknowledgment
but not extensive description.
Finally, each principle is examined as to its ability to produce a distinct
kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingness to say yes without thinking first. The evidence suggests that the
ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make
this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent
in the future. It will be increasingly important for the society, therefore,
to understand the how and why of automatic influence.
It has been some time since the first edition of Influence was published.
In the interim, some things have happened that I feel deserve a place
in this new edition. First, we now know more about the influence
process than before. The study of persuasion, compliance, and change
has advanced, and the pages that follow have been adapted to reflect
that progress. In addition to an overall update of the material, I have
included a new feature that was stimulated by the responses of prior
readers.
That new feature highlights the experiences of individuals who have
read Influence, recognized how one of the principles worked on (or for)
them in a particular instance, and wrote to me describing the event.
Their descriptions, which appear in the Reader’s Reports at the end of
each chapter, illustrate how easily and frequently we can fall victim to
the pull of the influence process in our everyday lives.
I wish to thank the following individuals who—either directly or
through their course instructors—contributed the Reader’s Reports
used in this edition: Pat Bobbs, Mark Hastings, James Michaels, Paul
R. Nail, Alan J. Resnik, Daryl Retzlaff, Dan Swift, and Karla Vasks. In
addition, I would like to invite new readers to submit similar reports
for possible publication in a future edition. They may be sent to me at
the Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
85287-1104.
—ROBERT B. CIALDINI
Influence: Science and Practice, Reviews
Book by Robert Cialdini
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