Robert Cialdini || The New Psychology of Persuasion

to scientific research into valuable and practical actions. He's a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today best selling author with over seven million copies sold in forty four different languages. He's the President and CEO of Influence at work as a popwor keynote speaker, he also helps organizations in the US and abroad. Robert, what an honor it is to chat with you today. Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to our interactions. Scott. Well, you're a

as you know, you're a legend in this field. And this book is such a seminal book. I remember reading it in grad school and savoring every single word of it. Why do you decide to update it? Well, you know that there was a push and a pull there. To be honest, the previous version was still selling very well, and there's that if it ain't fixed, don't break it,

an idiom that I had to confront. But it's also the case that there was a quote that my grandfather used to favor when I was a kid, and it just seemed to me that it had a lot of relevance for my situation. And he used to say, if you want things to stay the same, things are going

to have to change around here. And it just struck me that that's exactly the situation I was, and things were going well, but if I wanted them to remain going well, I needed to align myself with the newest research in persuasion science that I hadn't addressed in previous editions. And I even had a new universal principle of influence I thought that had occurred to me in the interim

that I needed to talk about. And besides that, there were a lot of readers who had written back to me about the content of the book Influence, which has universal principles of influence that define each of the chapters, and they said, you know your descriptions of those concepts, of those principles, we get it, and we see where they come from, and how they work, and why they

work the way they do. But could you give us specific wordings that we could use to harness those principles, harness the power of them, unleash those principles in the situations that we're dealing with. So this new edition has a lot more of the specifics of how we trigger the power of those influences by what we say or do in a particular situation. Oh great, that's great, So we'll get to that. But first I wanted to just

go over the original, the original sex. Do you mind telling me what the principles of the sixth Universal Principles are of influence? And then we'll talk about the seventh one you added not at all, I think that's all together appropriate. The first one is the principle of reciprocation that says that by the way in every human society we are obligated to give back to others who have

first given to us. We just we just are obligated to do so by the socialization we have all undergone, so that we are taught from childhood you must not take without giving in return. You must not take without giving in return. For those people who break that rule, we have very nasty names. We call them moochers or ingrades or takers, and nobody wants to be labeled like that. So people will go to great lengths to give back to those who have given to them. There was a

study done in McDonald's restaurants in Colombia and Brazil. In South America. The researchers arranged for every family to come into the location and for the children to receive a balloon. Half of the families got the children got that balloon as the kids were leaving as a thank you to the family. The other half got the balloon as they came in, and those families bought twenty percent more food. Not only that, within that twenty percent more food, coffee

orders went up by twenty five percent. So it wasn't just the gift to the children. The parents felt that anything you give to my child, you give to me. We'll get to that in that section called unity, where we feel that about that those people inside our groups are essentially share our identity. You give to them and you've given to us. But I think it's instructive that

the key was who went first. The rule for reciprocity doesn't say you use the typical economic exchange model where you say to people, look, if you'll buy my product, you'll use my service. I promise you will get the best possible outcome of your experience. That means the other person has to go first. But reciprocity says you go first, you give first, and then people want to give back

to you. Second principle, changing the script. There a bob yes, and it's it's not just that McDonald's fails to do it properly. In this particular study, how many times have you been in a restaurant where as you leave, on the desk, the registration desk, there's a bowl of mints for you to take as you leave. There's a study of this shows that if the way instead of doing it that way, if the waiter puts a mint on the tray for each of the diners, his tip goes

up three point three percent. If he puts two mints on the tray for each of the diners, his or her tip goes up for we're teen percent. So all in keeping with the rule for reciprocity, you just have to do it right, you know, I say to people, when you go into a room and you want to be influential. The first question you should ask yourself is not who can help me here? It is whom can I help here? That arranges for those people to want

to help you when you need it. It's just a good system that in fact, most societies are based on. So that's reciprocation. Okay, that's number one. Yeah, that number two is liking. Nobody in your audience would be surprised to know that we prefer to say yes to those we like. What's interesting, though, is that there are two small things that are available for us to do to greatly enhance the rapport that people feel with us. One is to point to genuine similarities that exist between us,

because people like those who are like them. The other is to point to genuine commendable aspects. In other words, to compliment people in some sort of warranted way for what they've done or who they are. And that I have to admit to something my greatest weakness, greatest weakness. I can't tell you how many times, you know, maybe you've had this experience. I've been in a research meeting with my graduate students and I hear myself say, gee,

what Scott just said? There was brilliant, and I say it to myself, and I miss all of the goodwill that would come from moving it from my mind to my tongue. So I scrupulously avoid that mistake now, and the results have been really outstanding. I mean, just the goodwill and the exchange. The welcomingness of having people give those kinds of comments is established, and we all like each other better. Great point, Bob, got it out of my tongue, supposedly keeping it in my head. No, great,

great point, excellent. I love what you're saying. Yeah. The next principle is what we call social proof, the idea that one way we decide what we should do in this situation is not proof that comes from some empirical or logical information that we've received. It comes from social information. What are the people around us like us doing in this situation that allows me to reduce my uncertainty about

what I should do in this situation. So, for example, a study done in Beijing shows you the cross cultural reach of the restaurant managers at one string of restaurants in China put a little asterisk next to certain items on their menu, and each one immediately became thirteen to twenty percent, depending on the item more likely to be purchased.

So what did the asterisk stand for. It wasn't what we normally see, which is this is a specialty of the house, or this is the chef's selection for this evening. It was this is one of our most popular items, and each became thirteen to twenty percent more popular. It's popularity. So one way, as a communicator of genuine information that we can give to other people is to say we have a lot of popularity for what we are doing and give them examples of that, or percentages or market share,

this sort of thing. And that always is an easy way for people to take the shortcut to yes, Oh okay, then I don't have to continue to calibrate and think about the pros and cons of this. The majority of people like me like it, so that's a shortcut t yes.

But there's some new research now my team is responsible for some of it that takes the principle of social proof to another level, and it is that suppose you have a startup, or you have a new product or service or an idea, a new initiative you would like people to join you in, but because it's new, you don't have, you can't point to social proof. The social proof is minimal. I mean it's actually negative. Not a

lot of people are doing it. Is there anything you can do under those circumstances, It turns out it is. There is even if you don't have even if you only have a minority or a small minority of people who have adopted it, because it's a good idea. You have to have a good idea. But if it's a good idea, you get to show a trend to that minority position. If it's only twenty percent of the market that's interested in. If you just say twenty percent, that's

a statistic. If you said six months ago it was ten percent, that's a difference, and that's much better. But if you say six months ago it was ten percent, three months ago it was fifteen percent. This month it's twenty percent, the same. Twenty percent is the endpoint of a trend, and people project the function of a trend into the future, so that for the first time you have the leverage of something we didn't know the label

of before. Future social proof. In the research that we did, showed that if you give people a trend to twenty percent, they are more likely to say yes to it right, because they expect in the future it will be more than twenty percent. If you've got a good idea with that kind of ability to move people upward in a trend, you'd be a fool of the influence process not to honestly give them three data points. One data point is a statistic, two data points a difference, three data points

a trend. Next principle also helps you. You're on a roll, you're on fire. Ah, you know it's got a love this stuff. I can tell you all my life, I've been curious about human behavior, and I have a job. We have a job where the job is to find out what we're curious about, find out to solve the things were interested in and curious about. What a job? How did you get what a job is? Right? But how did you get how did you get interested in

this topic to begin with? Like? Were you even fascinated with the idea of influence when you were like a little kid? Yes, well, partially when I was a little kid, but also a little bit older when I recognized that I was a patsy. I was a pushover for the appeals of various salespeople or fundraisers, and I would find myself in unwanted possession of these things or giving the

causes I hardly heard of. And it occurred to me that there must be something other than the merits of the case that got me to say yes, because I didn't really want these things inherently. I didn't really want to give my money to this cause I didn't know anything about because of the features of it that had been that it seemed to have. It was because of the way the merits and the features were presented to me that made the difference. There was a psychological dimension.

It had to do with the delivery system that was employed to give me the merits or the features, and I was swept by those. Those things enthralled me, and I remember thinking to myself, now, that's that's interesting. That's worth studying, and not just out of self defense, right, but because I thought, well, a lot of people would be interested in that. So that was the beginnings. Your intuition was right, Okay, so where are we now? Are we're up to the fifth principle? Well, we were up to.

The fourth principle was authority. That says, another way people reduce their uncertain and p is to is to make themselves available to information from authorities, and if a communicator provides that information, they significantly increase the likelihood that people will say yes to them. Some people ask me, well, how do I how do I amplify the principle of authority if I've got if I've got an authority voice who is aligned with what I am suggesting, is there

a way to Well, there are two things. First, you make that authority testimonial. First, make it first so that that aura of expertise and authority applies to everything you say after that, don't put it, don't bury it in the body of your materials. The second thing is you

enhance authority by multiplying it clear research. If you have multiple experts taking a position, it's significantly more persuasive than a single expert to So your job is to is to marshal that information so that where it exists honestly, if it truly exists, you get to use that multiplier. Next principle is commitment and consistency. People want to say yes to those things that are consistent with commitments they've already made, and commitments in the form of what I've

already said or done on a topic. And so there's a lot of research on this. But let me give you an example that has worked very well for an acquaintance of mine who says that he was having trouble getting jobs. He would get into these job interviews and they wouldn't go especially well, but then he hit upon something that has gotten him three better jobs in a row.

That he says at the start of an interview where he's in a room with an evaluator, sometimes a team of evaluators, and he always would say, what we're trained to say, thank you for inviting me here. I very much want to answer all of your questions. And then he says, but before we begin, I wonder if you could answer a question for me. Why did you invite me here today? What was it about my resume, about my background and experience that made you think I was

a good candidate for the job. And he said, you will hear these people committing themselves to your strengths and your candidacy out loud, actively, voluntarily, And he said, you now experience that not only have you heard the things that they consider the strongest elements that of your case, then you can embellish on those and zero in on those. But they've made a commitment to you, and he says three better jobs in a row. Okay, so that comment inconsistency.

It's amazing, like how small things can have such big effects, you know, just I'm amazed all these things you're saying. They're just like you know, like social psychology, minor tweaks can cause huge changes. It's amazing, Scott. That is a bullseye observation. How would this be you because we had Yes, I mean I heard it in my head and you

got it out. Yeah. We have this idea that this law of proportionality where we think that in order to get big changes, we need to have big inputs we need to make, you know, to have big outcomes, we need to have big changes, big steps that we take to produce those, not if there are big motivational systems that we can simply trigger with a small word or

deed of some sort. Imagine you're in a stadium and it's for a night event, a game or a concert or something like this, and you're in charge of lighting this stadium before the event. You don't go around to each one of these You flick one switch and that minor amount of effort engages of powerful system that's already

installed there in the in the stadium. That's how it is with these principles, things like authority or social proof for you know, liking those are big, big power sources inside of people, and all we have to do is activate them. We flip the switch that harnesses the power that they that's already been installed there. So I think that's why it works. It's not that these strategies require

a lot of muscle. They just require the knowledge of what what already exists muscularly inside people's motive motive systems. Here have any of these findings not replicated over the years, because I know there was this big social psychology replication crisis, and I was wondering how your the Influence research has kind of stood with that. Yeah, so this is really a timely issue for us. Fortunately, in the book Influence, I don't talk about any single study that may or

may not replicate because of some issues. You know, we don't even have to go with statistical power and all the kinds of things that may lead observers astray. I talk about concepts where in each concept of commitment and consistency or liking or authority. There are multiple studies that

you couldn't claim were errors in some way. They're just too many of them, and they all cohere in some sort of way that makes it more convincing, more compelling that, yeah, this is something that works, and here's the other side of it that I think gives me some confidence that

these principles are major drivers of change. In order to uncover these principles, I got outside of my laboratory at the very beginning of my investigation and engaged in something called participant observation research, where I became something of a spy of sorts and infiltrated the training programs of various professions dedicated to getting others to say yes to them, sales, marketing, advertising, recruiting,

these kinds of things. Fundraising It was easy. They were just they would put ads asking for recruits to be in there, and I would and I would enter undercover, disguised in identity. And what I looked for was the commonalities, which were the things that they said worked for them across all of those different settings, those different arenas where people were getting others to say yes to them and

whose livelihoods depend on it. Depended on it, so they had to have beta tested these things over trial and error. And there were just six of them. There were hundreds of individual tactics practices, but I thought I could characterize, categorize the great majority of them in terms of these

just the six categories, these six principles. So that helps me feel that the studies were talking about they reflect something, uh of the results of a much larger experiment than we could ever conduct, sure in the laboratory, or that it's it's what has proven to be successful for people who's whose livelihoods depend on the success of the strategies, right, it would be I'd be shocked to find out that that someday it turns out that that if if you

don't like the person, that's better than if you like the person, like like you know, like that'll overturn that one, you know, or you know, some of these seem like, yeah, well there's a universal principle there, yeah, of human nature. Okay, So what's what's the are we on number six? Well, Well, we've got one last one and another one. You people,

all your your your followers will agree scarcity. People want more of those things they can have less of and one reason that is the case I think applies to what Daniel Konnoman has won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating, and that is the power of loss aversion as opposed to so that we are more in his prospect theory says, the prospects of losing something are more motivating to us than the prospects of gaining that same thing under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Not all. Yes, he was just

on the podcast. Oh he was. That was a good get. I know, I got him in you I can retire now. Yeah, you know, I was on at a conference where I was in the program to be interviewed with Richard Thaylor and Daniel Konnoman. Me right, And I said to the interviewer, you know, I feel like I'm in a Nobel laureate sandwich. I'm lettuce. That's hilarious. I mean those are big hitters. Those are those are big hitters. Anyway, Yeah, it's yeah, so thank you. But what Knoman says is there's lost

a version. Well, that's what's scarcity. The basis of scarcity is you're if something is scarce or rare or dwindling an availability availability, you're afraid that it will be lost to you, And so that's the reason people want those

things that have those characteristics. And there was a study done of six thousand, seven hundred e commerce websites and they looked at ab tests within them to see which were the factors that if they included it or withdrew it had made the biggest difference in a conversion from prospect to customer. It was scarcity. It was scarcity if you could honestly say that we have a limited number of these at this price, or with these features, or with this payment plan or whatever it was, you got

significantly more conversions than any other feature. They looked at at twenty nine of them. By the way, the next five were the other principles of influence nice, but scarcity was at the top of those principles, provided that it was scarcity of number, not scarcity of not limited time. So it was a limited number of items rather than oh you can only get this for one week. If you can get it for one week, that means you

can decide to get at anytime in that week. If it's a limited number and there's competition for it, therefore you better move now. And that's the reason limited number is more successful than limited time offers makes sense. So those are the original sixth principles. Now you added one that is very very relevant to the world today. It's the principle Yeah, preez, I'm doing a drum roll. I'm doing a drum And the seventh one is unity, And essentially it's membership in a group that you use to

define your identity in some important, meaningful way. And if a communicator can arrange for me to believe that this individual is one of us inside that group, inside that category that I use to define myself, then I'm significantly more likely to say yes to that person. Because the research shows you trust those people inside your wei groups more, you believe them more, you're more persuaded by them, you're more willing to cooperate with them, and you're more willing

to comply with their requests. So there is a lovely study done on a college campus where researchers took a young woman who college aged, had to stand in a heavily trafficked area on campus and with a canister asking for donations through are legitimate charity. She was getting some contributions, but if she added one more sentence she more than doubled contributions, and the sentence was I'm a student here too.

In other words, I'm one of you. And all the barriers to change came down, and she didn't say I'm a student like you. We're not talking about similarity in a broad kind of sense. There's certainly not similarity of pastes or style preferences or you know, these kinds of inclinations. We're talking about commonality of membership in an existing meaningful group what commentators are calling our tribes these days, and tribalism, you know, yeah, I mean it's so obviously tied to tribalism.

And you know, there's a certain mentality going around of like, well, you can't understand, possible understand what I've been through because my own personal experience, that's right, So how can we You're not like me, you're not up yeah. Yeah, And you know people have asked me, well, how do we get to those people, let's say, who are resisting getting a vaccine for COVID and uh, And it turns out there's a technique within persuasion science that allows us to

get into their we group. And it's not just to have somebody who is similar to them in background or region, but who can honestly say I used to believe that too, right, and then I saw something happen, or something happened to me. There was a new piece of information that entered the system, and I changed right. And the title of this is called the convert communicator. The person who has been converted from who you were in this very relevant way is

something else based on a new piece of information. It makes it very difficult to dismiss that person. Oh that's not me, that's not us. No, it was you. But there's something new that maybe you want to hear about, and you're more open to hearing about it under those circumstances. Oh, let's just double click on this topic because it's just

going to be it's so important. So which types of recognized commonalities between different ethnic or racial groups lead to lasting reductions of prejudice and which only lead to very temporary reductions. Yeah, the temporary ones are the ones that get swept away easily by the passage of time or new situations that evolve where but those that are the are the more durable are those that are aligned with evolutionary forces. And there are two of them that are powerful.

One is commonality of family and research indicating that we treat as family those individuals that we invite into the home and don't treat as guests, even those from out groups, because there's good evidence that children who view their parents treating outgroup members in the home as if they are family then feel a family like bond to those individuals.

So one thing we can do as parents. Now this is a longer stage approach, but if we want our children to view the species as the group, the meaningful social identity, if we want them to see humanity as the group, should systematically invite into the home people from a variety of groups that are not our own. Right, And and and here's the key that my mother would criticize me for. If I can guess, I guess, don't

treat them as though they're guests. That's exactly right. Yeah, ask them to help set the table, ask them to help clean up, just like you would a family member. And now your kids are seeing you treat them just like family, not like somebody separate from us, not from somebody that we do something different for. Right, So that's one of them. The other is something that is much more easily done, but it's not it's not easy to

undertake in the moment. But there's research to show that we feel more bonded to the people that we share a region or community or neighborhood with, because again, evolutionarily, we began as a species in E. Voultlets, that we evolved in small groups tribes and clans of one sort or another that were barely more than twenty five to fifty individuals at a time, and those individuals typically shared

our identity, they shared our genetic identity. And so what we find now is evidence that people give favor to those inside their region. There's even a term for it called localism, where you find, for example, that if you receive a request to participate in a survey from a university, you're significantly more likely to comply with that request if it's a university in your state. There was a study done of people who reacted to a military death in Afghanistan.

Let's say Afghanistan. So a soldier, a US military personnel was killed, they became significantly more against the war in Afghanistan if that soldier was from their state. So there's this regionalism there, and I'm going to tell a story I haven't told in any of the interviews that I've done on this book because it is it's appropriate, but

it's it's a downer. Okay, let's hear it. During this during the Second World War, we know what happened when Nazi forces would command a region, country and so on, they would take the Jewish residence and put them in concentration camps, work camps, off in death camps and eliminate. Well,

there was a there was a practice. It really makes my skin crawl when I hear that if any in a work camp, if any one individual right violated a rule, everyone was lined up, and there was a guard who would go down the line, counting to ten and executing every tenth person. And the story was told to an anthropologist named Richard Ronald Cohen by a former Nazi guard who said he saw this happening again as it often had, but the same guard who was the bloodless killer in

the past, and he came. He went went through the ten bang one through three, four, five, six, ten, and he stopped, raised his eyes brows, made a half turn, and executed the eleventh. And afterwards the second guard asked the killer, why did you not why did you kill the eleventh and said, was somebody you had noticed was especially a good worker, especially able to do the things that you wanted him to do. This guy laughed, He said, no, no,

I recognized him. He was from my hometown. Wow. Okay, So the thing is inside our neighborhoods, inside our communities. So what we should be willing to do is to relocate, not get out of your house and go. But when you are deciding on a neighborhood to move to for your next relocation, one of the factors should be how many how many outgroup members live there? That should be

a plus for you. That's going to reduce our sense of unity as this small nuclear group to something much larger than that that includes people from outside of our in groups. Yeah, that was a really powerful story, by the way, And you know, overgeneralize, generalizing from those principles, I mean, has a lot of deep implications for the way we treat each other these days, people that we think are in our out group. You talk in your book about the role of threat in undermining favorability and

inciting hostility towards those outside of ones in group. What role does threat play there? Threat causes us to pull in the boundaries of we. We become protective, self protective, right, and so it turns out that the boundaries of our WE groups are relatively elastic. We can extend those to

include other people under certain sets of conditions. When, for example, we when there is no threat, when we've been successful, when the environment seems to be welcoming and reinforcing, we are emboldened to allow a much larger tent to exist. But when things are threatening, then we become much more protective and and constrict those boundaries a way, and especially away from those individuals who are are not of us. We we start finding differentiations and reasons to put them

outside of the tent. Threat is probably the biggest single uh motive for constricting art WE groups. This is so valuable. Well, you know your original book was incredibly timely, and this one is even more timely. I just want to say congratulations on this updated version, but just a huge thanks for for what you've contributed to the field of psychology throughout your whole your whole along and UH and UH and impactful and influential career natural career. I should say you.

I appreciate hearing those kind words. Thanks for being on the podcast today. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can join us at Patreon

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