Influence by Robert B. Cialdini

“We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided”

In his bestselling book Influence, Cialdini helps us better understand what are the factors that determine our decision-making. He explains the psychology of persuasion and teaches us how to use it to our advantage.

Cialdini’s principles of persuasion are reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity, and unity. Influence is a comprehensive guide to using these principles to move others in your direction.

You should by all means read this book for yourself. Below, I have written out my book notes, but I couldn’t cover hundreds of pages in just a couple of bullet points. That is why I highly encourage you to create your notes whilst going through the book, and for the time being use mine as a guide on what this book is about.

For more books check out Best Self-Improvement Books or Best Classic Books, and for a full self-improvement guide, you can also take a look at my Roadmap to Overman.

Book Notes

Levers of Influence

In order to best understand how you could influence other people, we should first highlight three basic biological and psychological systems that control our decision-making. These levers of influence are:

• • Trigger features—This concept could be understood as signals that cause us to automatically respond. For example, some birds automatically react to mating calls by flying to their partner. The sound that these birds hear is the trigger feature that causes them to fly towards their partner.
  • Perceptual contrast—the tendency to see two things that are different from one another as being more different than they actually are.
  • loss aversion—people are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

Now we will start explaining each of the principles of influence.

Principle 1 Reciprocation

• • One favorite and profitable tactic of certain compliance professionals is to give something before asking for a return favor. The principle states that one person will try to repay, in form, what another person has provided.
  • Another way the rule of reciprocation can increase compliance involves a simple variation on the basic theme: instead of providing a first favor that stimulates a return favor, an individual can make an initial concession that stimulates a return concession. By starting with an extreme request sure to be rejected, a requester can then profitably retreat to a smaller request (the one desired all along), which is likely to be accepted because it appears to be a concession.

Principle 2 Liking

• • People prefer to say yes to individuals they like. There are a couple of ways to increase other people’s liking of you. These are:
    1. Physical attractiveness— it creates a halo effect that leads to the assignment of other traits such as talent, kindness, and intelligence.
    2. Increased familiarity through repeated contact with a person or thing is yet another factor that normally facilitates liking. This relationship holds true principally when the contact takes place under positive rather than negative circumstances. One positive circumstance that works especially well is mutual and successful cooperation.
    3. Association—by connecting themselves or their products with positive things, advertisers, politicians, and merchandisers frequently seek to share in the positivity through the process of association.

Principle 3 Social Proof

• • The principle of social proof states that one important means people use to decide what to believe or how to act in a situation is to examine what others are believing or doing there. The principle of social proof can be used to stimulate a person’s compliance with a request by communicating that many other individuals (the more, the better) are or have been complying with it. Therefore, simply pointing to the popularity of an item elevates its popularity.

Principle 4 Authority Directed Deference

• • People are more likely to feel strong pressure for compliance with the requests of an authority figure than someone who has no authority.

Principle 5 Scarcity

• • According to the scarcity principle, people assign more value to opportunities that are less available. This engages the human tendency for loss aversion. In addition to its effect on the valuation of commodities, the scarcity principle also applies to the way information is evaluated. The act of limiting access to a message causes individuals to want to receive it and to become more favorable to it. In the case of censorship, the effect of greater favorability toward a restricted message occurs even before the message has been received.

Principle 6 Commitment and Consistency

• • Psychologists have long recognized a desire in most people to be and look consistent within their words, beliefs, attitudes, and deeds. Within the realm of compliance, securing an initial commitment is the key. After making a commitment (that is, taking an action, stand, or position), people are more willing to agree to requests in keeping with the prior commitment.

Principle 7 Unity

• • People say yes to someone they consider one of them. The experience of “we”-ness (unity) with others is about shared identities—tribe-like categories that individuals use to define themselves and their groups, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and family, as well as political and religious affiliations.