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Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) (Paperback)
by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.
| Category:
Influence, Persuasion, Selling skills, Sales mastery |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
MSL price:
¥ 168.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
One of the bestselling sales books and probably the best written book on the art of persuasion. |
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Author: Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.
Publisher: Collins
Pub. in: December, 2006
ISBN: 006124189X
Pages: 336
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00080
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0061241895
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller (in North America) ranking #277 in books on Amazon.com as of December 27, 2006. |
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- MSL Picks -
A National Bestseller in North America with more than a quarter million of copies sold worldwide, Influence has established itself as the most important book on persuasion ever published. In it distinguished psychologist Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., explains why some people are remarkably persuasive and how you can beat them at their own game. You’ll learn the six psychological secrets behind our powerful impulse to comply, how skilled persuaders use them without detection, how to defend yourself against them - and how to put those secrets to work in your own behalf.
This is an interesting book written by a Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. dealing with the psychology of request compliance (persuasion) The book is replete with real life anecdotes and psychological experiments without any psychobabble. The subject deals with basic human psychology, automatic response and human perception The level of analysis is quite detailed with pictures, graphs, cartoons and famous sayings. The author keeps the subject interesting by mixing conceptual presentation, story telling, historical issues and psychological research. It is a well studied subject reminiscent of Dale Carnegie’s classic book about How to Make Friends and Influence people. This book arms the job hunter and the workplace with effective techniques in persuasion. The book end abruptly without integrating the subject. The seven principles outlined in the book are: Weapons of Influence - studies the concept of perceptual contrast as an example an unhappy event in contrast with a more philosophical approach might reduce the severity of the event when contrasted. Reciprocation: Emphasizes human nature of feeling obligated when one is provided first with a small favor. Commitment & Consistency: being consistent (as opposed to being right) is a natural human response stemming from the need to appear logical, honest and personal and intellectual strength. This sometimes results in mechanical consistency. By encouraging someone to making a statement or taking action the individual creates commitment and hence will feel pressed to remain consistent with that commitment. Social Proof: At times of uncertainty or indecision people are influenced by those who can show clarity through suggesting acting or thinking like the rest of us. Liking: We tend to say yes to those who we know or like. The Tupperware party’s example demonstrates this principle. Authority: The author suggests that authority in context, title, attire has a significant influence. Scarcity: as opportunities become less available people realize that they hate losing freedom so they react to correct that. The book deals with the ethical issues as well as methods to counteract the unscrupulous practitioners of these principles
One of the most warmly received books by Amazon.com and barnsandnoble.com readers in the area of sales, marketing and communication, Influence: Psychology of Persuasion is a must read for people who in business and government, especially those in sales, marketing, and communications, where the in-depth understanding of human nature is key to persuasion success. Practically this book is for anyone and everyone as all of us have to deal with one challenge: how to communicate more effectively with others, and this book will help you to get to that effectiveness. MSL gives 5-star rating to this book and highly recommend it to everyone.
Target readers:
People in sales, marketing, corporate communications, advertising, leadership and government as well as people who want to exercise influence on others.
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Get Anyone to Do Anything: Never Feel Powerless Again - With Psychological Secrets to Control and Influence Every Situation
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Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. received graduate and postgraduate training in experimental social psychology at the University of North Carolina and at Columbia University. He is currently Regent' Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe.
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From Publisher
Some people just won't take no for an answer. In Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini explains the six psychological principles that drive our powerful impulse to comply to the pressures of others and shows how we can defend ourselves against manipulation (or put the principles to work in our own interest).
Influence guarantees two things: Readers will never say yes again when they really mean no, and they'll be more persuasive than ever before.
Whether you wish to understand what shapes you own personal decisions or need to persuade in a job or business, this astonishing took is indispensable.
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Chapter One
Weapons of Influence
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
I got a phone call one day from a friend who had recently opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved in a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving, She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even asked her sales staff to “push” the items hard, again without success.
Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled an exasperated note to her head saleswoman, “Everything in this display case, price x 1/2” hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was surprised to find that every article had been sold. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because her employee had read the “1/2” in her scrawled message as a “2” the entire allotment had been sold out at twice the original price!
That’s when she called me. I thought I knew what had happened but told her that, if I were to explain things properly, she would have to listen to a story of mine. Actually it isn’t my story; it’s about mother turkeys, and it belongs to the relatively new science of ethology - the study of animals in their natual settings. Turkey mothers are good months - loving, watchful and protective. They spend much of their time tending, warming, cleaning, and huddling the young beneath them. But there is something odd about their method. Virtually all of this mothering is triggered by one thing: the “cheep-cheep” sound of young turkey chicks. Other identifying features, such as their smell, touch, or appearance, seem to play minor roles in the mothering process. If a chick makes the “cheep-cheep” noise, its mother will care for it; if not, the mother will ignore or sometimes kill it.
The extreme reliance of maternal turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviorist M. W. Fox in his description of an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy whose approach is greeted with squawking, pecking, clawing rage. Indeed, the experimenters found that even a stuffed model of polecat, when drawn by a string toward a mother turkey, received an immediate and furious attack. When, however, the same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played “cheep-cheep” sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the recording was turned off, the polecat model again drew a vicious attack.
How ridiculous a female turkey seems under these circumstances: she will embrace a natural enemy just because it goes “cheep-cheep” and she will mistreat or murder one of her chicks just because it does not. She looks like an automaton whose maternal instincts are under the automatic control of that single sound. The ethologists tell us that this sort of thing is far from unique to the turkey. They have begun to identify regular, blindly mechanical patterns of action in a wide variety of species.
Called fixed-action patterns, they can involve intricate sequences of behavior, such as entire courtship or mating rituals. A fundamental characteristic of of these patterns is that the behaviors that come with them occurred in virtually the same fashion and in the same order every time. It is almost as if the patterns were recorded on tapes within the animals. When the situation calls for courtship, the courtship tape gets played; when the situation calls for mothering, the maternal-behavior tape gets played. Click and the appropriate tape is activated; whirr and out rolls the standard sequence of behavior.
The most interesting thing about all this is the ways the tapes are activated. When a male animal acts to defend his territory, for instance, it is the intrusion of another male of the same species that cues the territorial-defense tape of rigid vigilance, threat, and if need be, combat behaviors. But there is a quirk in the system. It is not the rival male as a whole that is the trigger; it is some specific feature of him, the trigger feature. Often the trigger feature will be just one tiny aspect of the totality that is the approaching intruder. Sometimes a shade of color is the trigger feature. The experiments of ethologists have shown, for instance, that a male robin, acting as if a rival robin had entered its territory, will vigorously attack nothing more than a clump of robin-redbreast feathers placed there. At the same time, it will virtually ignore a perfect stuffed replica of a male robin without red breast feathers; similar results have been found in another species of bird, the bluethroat, where it appears that the trigger for territorial defense is a specific shade of blue breast feathers.
Before we enjoy too smugly the ease with which the lower animals can be tricked by trigger features into reacting in ways wholly inappropriate to situation, we might realize two things. First, the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of time. For example, because only healthy normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single “cheep-cheep” noise. By reacting to just one stimulus, the average mother turkey will nearly always behave correctly. It takes a trickster like a scientist to make her tapelike response seem silly. The second important thing to understand is that, we, too, have our preprogrammed tapes; and, although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can be used to dupe us into playing them at the wrong times.
This parallel form of human automatic action is aptly demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94% of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60% of those asked complied. At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words “because I’m in a rush.” But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case. It seems that that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word “because” and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was again nearly all (93%) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggers an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys - even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat - so, too, did the word “because” triggered an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects, even when they were given no subsequent reason to comply. Click, Whirr!
Although some of Langer’s additional findings showed that there are many situations in which human behavior does not work in a mechanical, tape-activated way, what is astonishing is how often it does. For instance, consider the strange behavior of those jewelry store customers who swooped down on an allotment of turquoise pieces only after the items had been mistakenly offered at double their original price. I can make no sense of their behavior, unless it is viewed in click, whirr terms.
The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle - a stereotype - to guide their buying: “expensive = good.” Thus the vacationers, who wanted “good” jewelry, saw the turquoise pieces as decidedly more valuable and desirable when nothing about them was enhanced but the price. Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality; and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers. Click, whirr! …
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One of the reasons reciprocation can be used so effectively as a device for gaining another's compliance is its power. The rule possesses awesome strength, often producing a "yes" response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would have surely been refused. Some evidence of how the rule's force can overpower the influence of other factors that normally determine whether a request will be complied with can be seen in a second result of the Regan study, Besides his interest in the impact of the reciprocate rule on compliance Regan was also interested in how liking for person affects the tendency to comply with that person's request. To measure how liking toward how affected the subjects' decisions to buy his raffle tickets, Regan had them fill out several rating scales indicating how much they liked Joe. He then compared their liking responses with the number of tickets they had purchased from Joe. There was significant tendency for subjects to by more raffle tickets from Hoe the more they liked him. But this alone is hardly a startling finding. Most of us would have guessed that people are more willing to do a favor for someone they like.
The interesting thing about the Regan experiment, however, is that the relationship between liking and compliance was completely wiped out in the condition under which subjects had been given a Coke by Joe. For those who owed him a favor, it made no difference whether they liked him or not; they felt a sense of obligation to repay him, and they did. The subjects in that condition who indicated that they disliked Joe bought just as many of his tickets as did those who indicated that they liked him. The rule for reciprocity was so strong that it simply overwhelmed the influence of a factor - liking for the requester - that normally affects the decision to comply. (From Chapter Two: Reciprocation: The Old Give and Take… and Take)
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Patrick Goonan (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
This is a great book on the psychology of influence. The author writes in a style that is easy to read and relates persuasion back to our biology and psychology using many interesting studies or cases as powerful examples.
Specifically the book addresses the following areas: reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof and the relationship between commitment and acting consistently. This sounds simple on the surface, but the explanations will really increase your understanding of the old evolutionary forces at work.
This book is useful for sales professionals, business people and others would need to understand the art of persuasion. It is also useful for people who want to avoid being manipulated. Finding the balance between ethical sales/marketing behavior and manipulation is often a difficult. This book will deepen anyone's understanding of this important topic. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Dr. Cialdini has hit on something very powerful in this book. He explains the six major psychological traps which he found caused human beings to instinctively comply with requests. The scary thing is that once you awakened to what these techniques, philosophies, and skills are you will start to see them everywhere. I put the book down to drive to work after reading his section on association and sure enough the radio only advertises their station next to the "hit" songs. At that point I started laughing.
The brilliance of this book is that you can learn to defend yourself against these techniques, and use them to your advantage. They are powerful and can change the way people react to you. Even better, it doesn't take too long to learn them (although it takes years to master them). The book presents each technique in its own chapter with numerous examples, as well as a theoretical background that makes the rest of the chapter a very easy read. I'd recommend this to anyone. I even plan on using some of the techniques when I start work as a waiter tomorrow.
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Brenda (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
As a marketing person, how would you like to better understand human nature, our "hot buttons" that make responding in a given way almost irresistible?
As a consumer, how would you like to know how you are being manipulated based on human behavioral tendencies, and how to defend yourself from these techniques?
Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist, has documented these behavior-based techniques in Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion.
To get a better insight into your own behavior and the behavior of others, and to understand how to use behavioral tendencies to influence others, to be aware of when you are being influenced and resist these techniques, study Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. |
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