Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2022-05-11

It’s defense against the dark arts, but for sales tactics instead of magic. Some people hijack our rules-of-thumb to make a sale.

The tactics:

Reciprocation. If they do us a favor, we want to do them a favor.
Commitment and Consistency. We don’t want to be seen changing our mind.
Social Proof. We want to do what other people are doing.
Liking. We trust people we like, even outside their area of expertise.
Authority. We trust people based on titles and appearances.
Scarcity. We want things that are scarce, especially if they are becoming scarcer, especially if it’s due to high demand.

Very wordy. Not information-dense. You should skim through most of it. Most of the advice boils down to “just be aware”, which is not super helpful.

Pet peeve: his references to “lower animals” and how utterly inferior other life if compared to humans.

Random thoughts and insights:

If you want to know what theories actually work in practice, observe people whose livelihood depends on it (e.g. understand psychology by observing salespeople)
Names for the same thing: Stereotype, rule of thumb, shortcut, cognitive bias, trigger feature, fixed action pattern
Many “cognitive biases” are good and useful most of the time
Shortcuts can be exploited. E.g. an insect appearing like another poisonous insect. Or a salesperson offering a “discount” on an inflated price. Or a pattern designed to fool image recognition software.
Shortcuts are “fast” thinking from “Thinking Fast and Slow”. We fall back to shortcuts if surprised or if making a quick decision.
Confirmation bias / commitment / consistency is a way to be happy with your decisions. We would probably have a lot of regret otherwise.
The slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy. It actually does make future decisions easier/harder.
The point of hazing is to make membership feel hard-won and valuable.