Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
This book has been a real joy to read. Inside you won’t find any ground-breaking revealed truth, but the author (Robert B.Cialdini Ph.D.) will bring you into a journey around the human brain, and the brain paths that lead us to decisions. Let’s face it: our reality is terribly complex, and each second our brain is bombarded by an incredible quantity of information. How could we still make good choices? Easy: through shortcuts. Our experience and culture helps us to choose the right direction through clues that most of the times lead us to the best choice. Sometimes some people more skilled than us in the influence tactics (usually people trying to sell us something!), use those clues trying to bring us to the choice the want us to choose, typically “Yes, I buy it”. Sometimes those sellers can tell us that some offer is “for a limited time only!”, triggering our urge for a quick decision through the principle of scarcity, and trying to convince us that if we do not make a positive decision now, we won’t be able to profit of some special offer in the future; this clue will guide us to desire something that normally wouldn’t attract us.
From the epilogue at the end of the book:
<<Where we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted or fatigued, we tend to focus on less of the information available to us. [...] for the sake of efficiency we must sometimes retreat from the time-consuming, sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more automatic, primitive, single-feature type of responding. For instance, in deciding whether to say yes or no to a requester, it is clear that we frequently pay attention to but one piece of information that we use to prompt our compliance decisions. [...] That’s why we employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so often and automatically in making our compliance decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly reliable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes than no.>>
Our instinct can also help us: sometimes we have to listen to our stomach! The stomach is one of our organs which is more strictly connected to ancestral areas of the brain which we cannot easily control and understand; most of the times the answer of some our questions are there, in the most ancient and uncontrolled part of our brain. Just giving an example, if we are conducting an interview, and we feel something like “an uncertainty feeling” in our stomach (no joke!), most probably our amygdala is aware of some negative signal of which we are not conscious. Learning to listen to our such clues can help us to use this kind of intelligence that is many times underused and underestimated. This kind of approach can save us sometimes to accept something we don’t really want.
The book explores systematically, one by one, the different principles that we usually tend to apply to shorten our decisions, and proposes also some mean to counter-attack to such principles once artificially triggered by people trying to make their own profit.
I recommend this book as a relaxing lecture; with lots and lots of real-life examples, the author will give the reader some consciousness of how people make decisions, which techniques usually people adopt to to convince us, and which weapons we can employ to contrast them.
You can google for some more information, finding out more about the “influence principles” by the author here.
