Concept
Unity
Unity is Cialdini's seventh principle: we say yes to people we count as part of our own identity — family, place, tribe — not because of an exchange but because their outcomes feel like ours. The honest use is to find the 'we' that is real; the dishonest use is the stranger who calls you brother.
Pre-Suasion added a principle that Influence had folded into liking, and separated it because it works differently. Liking is about a person we enjoy; unity is about a person who is, in some sense, us. Family is the deepest form, and Cialdini's data on requests framed by kinship are striking; shared place, shared struggle and shared creation build weaker versions of the same bond, which is why teams that have built something together, or suffered together, cooperate in ways that incentives cannot buy. Acting together — moving in step, singing, working side by side — produces unity quickly, which is what military drill and company rituals are for. The honest use is to locate the genuine we with the people you need to move: the same city, the same profession, the same problem solved side by side, and to build it slowly through shared work. The dishonest use is manufactured kinship, and it is the most corrosive of all the fakes when discovered, because it forged the bond that everything else relied on. The defence is to ask whether the we is real before you let it decide anything.
A real-life example
A cooperative of olive growers in Ayvalık finds that the pitch which finally moves a reluctant buyer is not price but the fact that the buyer's grandfather bought from two of the same families. Nothing was invented; a real we had been sitting under the table for forty years.
How to use it
- 1Find the real we with the people you need to move — place, profession, a problem solved together — and build it through shared work.
- 2Create it honestly through acting together: a joint task, a shared struggle, a thing made side by side.
- 3Never fake kinship; a discovered false we costs every bond that rested on it.