Why I’m reading a book about persuasion — starting Cialdini’s Influence
I’ve just started a new book: Influence by Robert Cialdini. It’s about persuasion — specifically, why human beings say yes to things, often against their own interest.
If you’ve been following the notes here, most of what I’ve written recently has been from a securities market workbook — ratios, valuation, regulations. So a book about persuasion might look like a detour. I don’t think it is, and explaining why is a good way to begin.
The one idea that made me pick it up
Cialdini is a social psychologist who spent years studying why people comply with requests. What’s disarming is how he opens the book: by admitting that he has been, in his own words, a patsy his whole life. An easy mark for salespeople, fundraisers, and operators of every kind. He kept ending up with magazine subscriptions he didn’t want and tickets to events he had no intention of attending.
That admission is the hook. He didn’t study persuasion because he was good at resisting it. He studied it because he was bad at it, and wanted to know why.
I find that a much better reason to trust a book than the opposite. A book on persuasion written by someone who claims to be immune would be a book written by someone who hasn’t noticed what’s happening to them.
What he actually did
The interesting part of his method is that he didn’t stay in the lab. He ran experiments with students, as academics do — and then decided that wasn’t enough, because it told him nothing about the world outside the psychology building.
So he went and joined the other side. He answered job advertisements and trained as a salesperson. He worked in fundraising, marketing, recruitment. He read the internal sales manuals that get passed from one generation of salesmen to the next. He interviewed the people who catch them — fraud squad officers, consumer protection agencies, investigative reporters.
His logic for this is worth repeating, because it’s the sharpest sentence in the opening pages: the compliance professionals know what works and what doesn’t, because the law of survival of the fittest assures it. Their livelihood depends on getting people to say yes. The ones who don’t know how to do it fall away. The ones who do, stay and flourish.
In other words, the techniques that survive in the wild have been tested far more brutally than anything in a laboratory. If a tactic is still being taught in a sales manual after fifty years, it’s because it works on people. On you and me.
The seven principles
The book is organised around seven levers of influence. In this edition Cialdini adds a seventh, Unity, to the six he’s been known for:
- Reciprocation — we feel obliged to give back to those who have given to us.
- Liking — we say yes to people we like, and there are reliable ways to make us like someone.
- Social Proof — we decide what’s correct by looking at what other people think is correct.
- Authority — we defer to experts, and to the symbols of expertise.
- Scarcity — things become more desirable to us as they become less available.
- Commitment and Consistency — once we take a stand, we feel pressure to behave consistently with it.
- Unity — we are far more open to persuasion by people we feel share an identity with us.
Read that list and you’ll probably do what I did: think of a specific time each one worked on you. That’s the uncomfortable part. None of these is a trick you need to be told about. They’re all things you already half-know. The value of the book is in making the half-knowledge explicit.
Why this book, on this blog
Two honest reasons.
The first is that I’ve just spent weeks studying how markets are supposed to work — how to value a business, read a balance sheet, discount a cash flow. All of that assumes a rational person making a decision on evidence. And then one chapter, near the end, quietly admits that people don’t do that. It listed the biases: loss aversion, herd mentality, anchoring, confirmation bias. It noted, almost in passing, that the pain of a loss is about twice as strong as the pleasure of an equivalent gain.
That was the most interesting chapter in the entire workbook, and it was five marks out of a hundred. The subject deserves more than five marks. Influence is the same territory approached properly — not “here are some biases to be aware of,” but “here is why they exist, here is how they’re exploited, and here is what to do about it.”
The second reason is simpler. Everything I’ve written here so far has been about money. This isn’t a money blog; it’s a reading journal. I said at the start that I’d write about whatever I read, and I meant it. Persuasion is a subject that touches everything — how you’re sold to, how you negotiate, how you’re recruited, how you’re argued with, how you make up your mind about anything. It’s more broadly useful than knowing what a P/E ratio is.
What I’m expecting to find
I have a suspicion I want to test as I read. It’s this: these principles aren’t flaws. They’re shortcuts, and they exist because they usually work.
We can’t deliberate carefully about every decision — there isn’t time. So we’ve developed rules of thumb: if an expert says it, it’s probably right; if everyone’s doing it, it’s probably sensible; if it’s rare, it’s probably valuable. Most of the time these rules serve us well. They only fail when someone deliberately engineers a situation to trigger them.
If that’s right, then the goal isn’t to stop being persuadable. That would be exhausting and probably impossible. The goal is to notice the moment when a shortcut is being used against you rather than by you — and to have a plan for what to do in that moment.
Whether the book delivers that, I’ll find out.
The plan
I’ll write one note per principle, seven in all, plus whatever I find worth saying at the end. Each one will be what the principle is, where I’ve seen it in ordinary life — Indian weddings, shop counters, WhatsApp forwards, job interviews — and what, if anything, can be done about it.
These will go under Life & Philosophy rather than The Shelf, because I suspect these notes will end up being more about life than about the book.
First up: Reciprocation, the rule that says if someone gives you something, you owe them. It’s the one I expect to recognise most uncomfortably.
These are my personal notes and reflections from reading. If a book gets mentioned here and it sounds useful, buy it — the author did the hard part.