Author
Robert Cialdini
The social psychologist who catalogued the six levers of persuasion, and taught the world to notice them.
2 books on BookYol
The story and the impact
Robert Cialdini is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Before writing Influence, first published in 1984, he spent years inside the world of compliance professionals, training as a salesperson, fundraiser and advertiser, to see the techniques from the practitioner's side.
Influence organized what he found into a small number of principles, reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity, and became the standard reference on persuasion for marketers and for the people trying to resist them. Pre-Suasion, in 2016, added the moment before the message; later editions of Influence added a seventh principle, unity.
The signature
Cialdini thinks like a field naturalist of human behavior. His principles are not tricks he invented but regularities he observed and then tested, each presented with the automatic 'click, whirr' response it triggers and the defense a reader can mount against it. The stance is even-handed: the same book that teaches persuasion teaches how to recognize it.