Influence by Robert Cialdini is an excellent, excellent, book. Not only does it present voluminous evidence on the social psychology of persuasion and compliance, but it does succinctly and engagingly, mixing academic references with historical vignettes and personal anecdotes. The book discuss how techniques of persuasion work, grouping them under six major headings, and for each heading the book provides a ‘defence against’ section detailing how to stop yourself being unduly influenced. The final, glorious, touch is that in order to write the book Cialdini – who is a professor of social psychology – engaged in a three-year project of going undercover to explore first-hand how techniques of persuasion are used in the real world: applying for a waiter’s job to study how to increase customers’ tipping, attending tupperware parties, going on training programmes with door-to-door salesmen…it makes the book a wonderful blend of thorough research and astutely observed practice.
The book has been extensively and excellently summarised here, at happening-here.blogspot.com, so I’m just going to pull out some particularly fun examples of persuasion techniques, particularly as the relate to advertising and marketing.
Notes on Cialdini, R.B. (2001). Influence: Science and Practice. Forth Edition. Allyn & Bacon
A key idea is that we all use various cognitive ‘shortcuts’ (heuristics) we use to decide on what to buy. Advertisers can take advantage of these short-cuts to skew our behaviour. For example, there is a price-as-an-indicator-of-quality heurstic which means, if we’re not thinking carefully about a purchase decision, we might just use the assumption that