INFLUENCE
The Psychology of Persuasion
ROBERT B. CIALDINI PH.D.
This book is dedicated to Chris, who glows in his father's eye
Contents
Introduction 1 Weapons of Influence 2 Reciprocation: The Old Give and Take...and Take 3 Commitment and Consistency: Hobgoblins of the Mind 4 Social Proof: Truths Are Us 5 Liking: The Friendly Thief 6 Authority: Directed Deference 7 Scarcity: The Rule of the Few Epilogue Instant Influence: Primitive Consent for an Automatic Age Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher v 1 13 43 87 126 157 178 205 211 225 241
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
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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
