The best books on persuasion

If you read one book on persuasion, read this one. Cialdini spent three years inside sales floors, fundraising drives and recruitment offices to find out what makes people say yes, and came back with six patterns rather than a hundred techniques: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority and scarcity. Each is a shortcut that usually serves us and can be arranged to fire against us, and each chapter ends with how to defend yourself.

Its examples have aged in places, and the expanded edition adds a seventh principle, unity, and newer studies. But no other book gives the levers so cleanly, and everything else on this list either explains one of them or shows how to use it honestly.

Thirty years later Cialdini wrote about the step before the six levers: what the audience is attending to when the message arrives. His claim is that focus confers importance, so a communicator who moves attention first — with an opening question, a setting, an image — has done half the work before the case is made. The book also gives unity its own chapter.

It is more academic than Influence and repeats some of it. Read it for the privileged moment and the first question, which are the two most portable tools on this list for anyone who prepares what to say and never prepares what the listener is thinking beforehand.

The oldest book here and still the plainest. Carnegie's 1936 principles — be genuinely interested, remember names, let the other person talk, never argue, admit your own errors first, let people save face — are the honest version of what later research explained. The word that carries the book is sincerely; flattery, he says, is detected and despised.

It is anecdotal rather than researched, and some of its stories feel their age. But it is the book to read if your problem is the conversation rather than the idea: if you freeze, over-explain or argue, this is where the cure is written.

The Heaths asked why some ideas survive and most proposals evaporate by lunch, and answered with a checklist: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story. Underneath sits the curse of knowledge, the reason experts speak in shorthand that sounds like noise. Their tapping game — the tapper hears the melody, the listener hears knocking — is the single most useful image on this list.

It is about the form of the message rather than the levers around it, which is why it belongs beside Influence rather than instead of it. If your good idea keeps losing to a worse one that was better said, start here.

Kahneman's account of the two systems that produce our judgements is the widest and hardest book here, and only a few chapters are about persuasion. Two matter more than anything else: anchoring, the first number pulling every later one toward it, and loss aversion, a loss weighing about twice a gain. Every lever in the other books works because of something Kahneman documents.

A reader in a hurry can go straight to those chapters. Read it when you want to know why any of the rest works, and to notice when it is being worked on you.

Voss negotiated with kidnappers for the FBI, and his tools for a conversation that has gone cold — the label that voices the other side's feeling, the accusation audit that names the worst thing they might think of you, the calibrated question that hands them the problem — turn out to be Carnegie's principles for a harder room. People say yes when they feel understood.

The book is about negotiation, so it is last here, but for anyone whose persuasion fails at the moment of pushback it may be the most useful of the six.