How to Influence Others | Robert Cialdini | Big Think

How to Influence Others

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The psychologist of persuasion Robert Cialini on winning friends and influencing people.

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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: We can begin by talking about the book Influence [the subtitle of the books is: The Psychology of Persuasion], which resulted from my two and a half year program of research into the training programs of all of the different influence professions to see what they do to get us to say yes. I was surprised by one thing that I encountered in all of these programs. There were only six universal principles. Now, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of individual tactics, but only six universal principles of influence that seem to capture the great majority of what all of these individuals were doing.

Reciprocity. The desire of all of us to give back to someone who has given to us. So if an individual gives us something, a free sample, for example, we feel obligated to at least listen to what they have to say. At the supermarket, for example, that little lady with the cubes of cheese and meat, after you’ve eaten one of those, it’s very hard to just give her back the toothpick. You feel like you’re obligated to buy. Reciprocity is one.

Another is scarcity. The desire to have those things you can have less of, so things that are scarce, rare, dwindling in availability. One of the things that many organizations will do is to inform us of how rare, how uncommon their features are.

Another principle is commitment and consistency. The desire to be consistent with what we’ve already said or done, to be congruent with our internal values and what we’ve said that we’re going to do. So, for example, one study showed that if you call people on the phone, registered voters, and asked them if they will vote in the upcoming election, they, of course say yes. And they now vote, significantly more often than if they didn’t receive that phone call getting them to commit to that sort of thing.

Another principle is consensus or what we call, social proof. The idea that people want to follow the lead of similar others, people just like them. We’ve done a study, for example, in hotels. I don’t know how much you travel but when I do, in 70% of the hotels where I stayed, there’s a little laminated card asking me to reuse my towels and linen, right? We put different kinds of cards in rooms to see what we could say on the card that would most increase the likelihood that people would say yes. What hotels typically say is, “Do this for the environment. Do this for future generations. Or cooperate with us toward this common cause...

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