Robert Cialdini Explains Social Psychology

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The Ancient Greeks were the first to set forth the original rules of persuasion, called rhetoric. Today, anyone seeking to convince someone of something would do well to follow their example. There is, however, another set of rules that Greek methods did not address. These are the rules of subconscious persuasion, or what social scientist Robert Cialdini calls "pre-suasion," on account of their ability to prime an audience for your message before you undertake to explain it.

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ROBERT CIALDINI

Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of influence earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation. His books including, Influence: Science & Practice, are the result of decades of peer-reviewed research on why people comply with requests.Influence has sold over 3 million copies, is a New York Times Bestseller and has been published in over 30 languages.

Because of the world-wide recognition of Dr. Cialdini’s cutting edge scientific research and his ethical business and policy applications, he is frequently regarded as the “Godfather of influence.” Dr. Cialdini received his Ph.D from the University of North Carolina and postdoctoral training from Columbia University. He has held Visiting Scholar Appointments at Ohio State University, the University of California, the Annenberg School of Communications, and the Graduate School of Business of Stanford University.  Currently, Dr Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Dr. Cialdini is CEO and President of INFLUENCE AT WORK; focusing on ethical influence training, corporate keynote programs, and the CMCT (Cialdini Method Certified Trainer) program. Dr. Cialdini’s clients include such organizations as Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Bayer, Coca Cola, KPMG, AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Kodak, Merrill Lynch, Nationwide Insurance, Pfizer, AAA, Northern Trust, IBM, Prudential, The Mayo Clinic, GlaxoSmithKline, Harvard University – Kennedy School, The Weather Channel, the United States Department of Justice, and NATO.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Robert Cialdini:  Pre-suasion is the process of arranging for an audience to agree with your message before they encounter it. Now that might sound like some form of magic but it's not, it's established science. Very often we can use pre-suasive tactics, even other kinds of influence tactics on ourselves to increase the likelihood that we will reach our goals, that we will obtain the outcomes that we hope for in a particular situation. There's research, for example, to show that if you depict for people an image of a runner winning a race they become more achievement oriented and actually achieve their goal to a greater extent while that runner is in the background. There's another piece of research, a follow-up research that shows that if you depict for people an image of Rodin's The Thinker, the statue, they become more analytic and deliberative and they're more likely to solve problems, difficult complex problems that they're faced with. So this is something we can do to ourselves.

If we have a task that requires a lot of energy and motivation, put a picture of a runner winning a race in the corner of your computer screen where you'll see that cue there while you're preforming the task. If you're analyzing a budget perhaps or developing some plan that requires a lot of strategic thinking, put a picture of The Thinker there and you're more likely to achieve that particular goal. The thing is we get to control the cues in our environment that send us in directions that are likely to be successful for the particular task we have at hand.

When writing my book Pre-Suasion I dedicated it to my grandchildren. And it was something I did for myself to pre-suade me to make that the best possible book I could develop and produce. It was to put the following image in my mind of each of my grandchildren, who are young right now. Here's the image: when they're old enough to read it I've left a copy with their parents for each of them and I want their parents to give them the book and say, "You see this? This book was dedicated to you." Well, it better be a good book. It better be the highest quality book I can arrange. And so while I was writing that book there was a corner photograph of my grandkids on the screen...

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