Influence - The Psychology Of Persuasion

SUMMARY

Dr Robert Cialdini has examined the science behind making people comply with your requests. These requests may be made as part of your job as a salesperson, fund-raiser, recruiter, politician or even as an average individual trying to derive the best outcome for oneself by influencing others to comply with your ‘requests’. What makes this book different and authoritative is that Cialdini is a distinguished researcher in this field and has interacted with practitioners intensively in order to produce this work.

Key Insights:

The weapons of Influence:

Owing to the process of evolution and psychological development, we have a few fixed patterns in our behaviour. These patterns get triggered with certain fixed inputs and the author calls them ‘click and whirr’. It is like pressing a certain button a gadget of the human mind, clicking, producing the desired outcome, whirr. This is also a result of the need for shortcuts for humans to make sense of the complex world and automate the decisions at the mental level. For example, when you ask for a favour, the chances of the other person agreeing to your request increase manifold if you provide a reason. Similarly, people equate expensive to good and happily buy things priced at much higher prices than their genuine price. Salespersons sell many lower-value items with ease after affecting a high-value sale due to the principle of contrast. The book teaches six principles of influence and calls them the ‘Weapons of Influence’.

1.    Principle of Reciprocation:

The obligation to reciprocate is an old and socially developed trait of humans. A small uninvited favour can get you a bigger favour in return. Used by salespersons and donation seekers, the exchange thus affected can be pretty unfair. The principle works due to the ‘obligation to receive’ in the first place, fear of being disliked by society if one did not reciprocate. If we do not return the favours, we tend to suffer from internal discomfort and/or external shame. This weapon of influence can also be employed by offering a small concession at first and demanding a bigger concession in return, i.e., reciprocal concessions. Hiding your actual request behind an extremely demanding request is another variation that works very well. So, place a request for five times the funds you actually need and after refusal, replace the request with the actual amount. The percentage of obedience increases manifold with this simple modification.

2.    Principle of Commitment and Consistency:

Humans have an innate desire to appear consistent. And once we commit to something, we go to great lengths to prove that our commitment is to the right cause. And getting people to make a small commitment is a great way to extract much larger and more costly commitments from them subsequently. The reason people commit to increased levels of demands is to appear consistent. From the recruiter’s or influencer’s perspective, it is always better to extract a written and public commitment to assure future obedience When using this understanding as a defence, we must refuse to commit to even a trivial request from a suspected salesperson. The author’s final advice to the reader is not to fall for ‘foolish consistency’ and save one’s own self-interest whenever someone tries this tactic on you.

3.    Rule of Social Proof:

Social proof works in weird ways. Pre-recorded laughter added to TV programs makes people believe that the content is actually funny in spite of knowing that it is an artificial add-on. Before responding to any situation, people look at others in the situation and subconsciously decide to act like others. Most people look the other way if no one is helping a crime or accident victim. If many people are rushing to donate money to a religious leader, others also join them even if they didn’t want to originally. Valuable insights given by the author are to ask for specific help from a particular person if you need it for a personal emergency. Also, be careful not to fall for sales tricks designed to pull you in by planting actors beforehand.

The author goes on to describe three more principles, namely the principle of Liking, Authority and Scarcity in subsequent chapters. You can apply these principles as well to get people to agree to your requests or even demands.

Conclusion:

It makes sense to invest time and effort in reading this book to fully understand the dynamics of these rules, the situations in which they work best and how to defend oneself if someone else tries to use these on us. As the author is an experienced practitioner, he provides a plethora of examples of real-world situations as well as psychological experiments to bolster our understanding.