Robert Cialdini is one of the world’s leading experts on influence and persuasion. He is an award-winning behavioral scientist and the president and CEO of Influence at Work. He is the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, and a New York Times bestselling author who has sold 7 million books in 44 languages in his career. He is frequently referred to as the “Godfather of Influence,” and coaches clients such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Coca Cola.
Robert joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about influence in leadership and much more.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Robert Cialdini On Persuasion, Influence And Leadership
Welcome to the Elevate Podcast. Our quote is from John Maxwell, “Leadership is influence, nothing more and nothing less.” My guest is Robert Cialdini, an expert on influence. He’s an award-winning behavioral scientist and the president and CEO of Influence at Work. He’s the Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and a New York Times bestselling author who has sold seven million books in 44 languages in his career. He’s frequently referred to as the godfather of influence and coaches clients such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Coca-Cola. Robert, welcome to the Elevate Podcast.
Thank you, Robert. I’m very glad to be with you.
As I was saying right before we started, it’s a full-circle moment for me. One of the best classes I took in college was with Professor Charles Dwyer. It was called A Course on Managing People, and two of the books we read and were tested on were Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion and Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. I keep my hall of fame of books right here. It sits on that short list.
That warms my heart.
So excited to dive into this. I was thinking about the business, or even the field, of influence, which has taken a very interesting turn in the last 5 or 10 years. We’ll dive into that as well.
Good, I recognize that change as well.
Robert’s Origin Story
I like to start at the beginning with your background, even childhood. What were you interested in when you were young? What piqued your curiosity? Were there any clues that you might have ended up in this line of work?
I was always interested in the fact that I grew up in an entirely Italian family in a predominantly Polish neighborhood in a historically German city.
Where was that exactly?
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I recognized that every time I would move from one of those cultures to the other, the influence process would change. Those things that were most likely to produce a good result in the way that you presented your case or your request changed because there were different norms and precedents associated with each of those cultures. I remember thinking to myself, “It isn’t just the merits of the case or the features of what you have to offer, it’s the way that those features are presented, the delivery system, that often made the difference.” I remember thinking, “That’s worth studying. That would be worth understanding to a greater extent.”
You were moving around, and this was a personal problem you had to figure out how to solve as a kid. How do you integrate into new groups?
My family was Italian, my neighbors were Polish, the people in charge at the city level had a German base, and so on. I was in an urban situation, not a rural one. If I ever went out driving and stopped, and there was a fresh fruit and vegetable stand along the side of the road in a rural county, you didn’t just approach them the way you would somebody in a supermarket. You made friends with them.
You had to build some rapport.
It was important to have those connections. All those things seemed to me important to build into the equation of how to be most effective as a communicator.
You moved on to college and grad school. You decided to get your PhD in psychology. What did you expect to do with that? I’m curious.
I expected to be a university researcher and teacher, which I did wind up being. What I didn’t expect was that I would be someone who was addressing much larger audiences of non-academics because the idea of influence turned out to be interesting to all kinds of people in all kinds of populations. “How do we best move people in our direction? Also, how do we best deflect and reject those influence attempts that we consider unwanted or unwarranted?” People would always be interested in that topic, and I thought, “I’m interested in it as well, all the way from childhood. This would be a worthy topic for me to make.”
You underestimated your own influence on influence.
Something like that.
What Is Influence
The foundation of your writing gear and your hallmark book is this concept of influence, especially in leadership and business. Let’s start at a high level. How do you define influence?
Influence is the ability to move people in your direction as a result of what you say or do. There are various ways to be influential. Some of them are not especially effective. You can order people to do it. That works in the short term if you’re in charge. You can deceive them into it.
Influence is the ability to move people in your direction as a result of what you say or do.
That works, again, for the short term, but when you’re revealed, they never want to come back to you. You can penalize them. They don’t like that. You can reward them. That’s costly. For me, the best route is persuasion, where we change the way we make our case by changing the words or the sequence of the words or the phrasing of how we present the case. That’s nearly costless, but it works as well, if not better, than those other options.
As I said, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion is probably one of the most influential books in the history of behavioral psychology. There are seven core principles of persuasion in that book. I think you started with six. We’ll talk about that, but reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. Let’s do a deep dive on a couple of these. I guess start at the top with reciprocation. I guess there’s two things. I think historically, you might’ve said a lot of people skip this in networking.
There’s an alternative view, I think, that Adam Grant has, and in some of his work, that too many people have actually become transactional with their reciprocity. He’s written a lot on that in his book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. How should people leverage the reciprocity principle to improve influence and do that in the right way?
Leveraging Reciprocity To Improve Influence
Two ways, I think. One, Adam’s right. You don’t want to be seen as someone who’s using the reciprocity rule, which says, “I owe you. If you give something to me, I owe you something in return.” That moment of obligation allows you to make a request inside that moment that I’m much more likely to say yes to. For example, there was a study done in a candy shop. If people came into a candy shop and the manager gave them a small piece of chocolate before they went to the counter, they were 40% more likely to buy candy. People would say, “That’s because they liked the chocolate.” Most people did not buy more chocolate. It wasn’t what they had received, it was that they had received.
If you start out by just trying to obligate people to you in the first place, they’re going to resent that. But if you start out by genuinely trying to improve their outcomes in any situation, give them more information, give them more effort, give them more focus of attention, listen more deeply to them, or give them various forms of rewards that would benefit them, but not you directly, they feel a sense of gratitude towards you and they want to repay it. For me, the key is you have to go first, but you have to go first. A study by McDonald’s, for example, found that, for a week, every family that came in got a balloon from McDonald’s.
Half of them got a balloon as they were leaving as a gracious thank you, the way we typically do after a business, thanking people by giving them a nice gift for working with us. The other half got the balloon as they came in, and the parents bought 25% more food because McDonald’s had just done something nice for the kid. We’re going to do nice things for the kids, but the key was when you do it first, and you have the rule for reciprocation working.
This is what I’m shocked to this day that people still don’t understand around networking, particularly when they’re dealing with people who get a lot of requests. In fact, I just walked upstairs from a discussion with my whole family and some visitors, explaining a request I got this morning to help someone with something they’re working on that has no connection to anything that I do. “Can we just have half an hour?” I’m working on this, and I have some good templates for this, but I’m trying to explain to my family, my kids make fun of me too, you’ve got to understand, in my position or your position or being public, I get a bunch of these in half an hour, twenty times a week, but just not connected to anything. It’s a list of stuff that they needed.
When you haven’t heard from that person before, it’s just a really tough way to network. You get the, “Want to catch up,” which, 90% of the time, means I’m on the job market, even though I haven’t talked to you in ten years, versus the people that I know who I would drop and do anything for, the people that were constantly creating opportunities and doing things for me and all that stuff for years. One time they needed something, and I was more than happy to help them out.
You’re standing on the balls of your feet. You can’t wait to help in return. That’s really the key. There’s one more side of it, which is if you have helped somebody for the first time, they really appreciate it, and they say thank you to you. Don’t do what I used to do and say, “No big deal. Don’t think anything of it. No big deal.”
You also probably don’t say, “I’ll be back to you one day.” There’s something in the middle, right?
No, but what you say is, “Of course, I know if the situation were ever reversed, you’d do the same for me.” You just put them on record. It’s on the map. When I need something, in the course of an honest exchange, you’re somebody who probably would want to help me.
The problem is, and I think people really don’t get this, a lot of people want to help, but they want to help around things that they care about, or they’re passionate about, or otherwise. When you bring them totally random requests, at some point, you just have to draw a circle around the things you’re going to focus on or not focus on. I always say, even with fundraising, people are like, “My family, we have a mantra, or here are the types of organizations.” There are a million worthy organizations. You would be overwhelmed by the amount of requests.
At some point, you have to say, “These are the things that we want to support.” I’m surprised, with a lot of people in their networking and their requests, they come to someone with something that’s a lot of work for them and doesn’t seem to be related to the things that they care about. They think there’s going to be a favorable response to that.
What we do is we get those requests, “Can you help with this or this?” Especially charity organizations. What we do, honestly, is we pick one worthy organization a year, and we are willing to help them, with donations, with time, with counsel, and so on. We say to all the others, “We do this one a year, and this is the one we’re doing this year. Sorry. We’re doing this for the Cancer Society.”
I know. I was going to say, I 100% agree. Furthermore, because I use templates to reply to a lot of things over time, I think it’s just easier to have a thoughtful thing. I would say, “We committed to this year, and I actually haven’t given them all the time that I want to give them yet. I’m not even going to make the good that I already committed to if I start committing to other things.”
That’s even better.
Social Proof
You fixed one of my answers, I fixed one of yours, so we’re good. One that’s super interesting is social proof. This may be one of the ones that’s gone through the most change since you had the book. It’s super easy for people to claim that they’re a top expert in a field, or you have things like Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, The World’s Best Burger. There’s also this thing where I wish the social media companies would apply some context to someone’s expertise or followership.
Robert is an expert on influence, but if you follow him for that, a million, he doesn’t know anything about crypto, so don’t listen to him, even though he has a million followers. What examples of social proof do you think stand out, and how do people use social proof when it has become very watered down in a lot of areas?
I think the best way is to include star ratings, rankings, popularity measures, and so on on your website to show people what your evaluations have been from other individuals that are genuine and not fake. There are some bandits out there that are buying evaluations, but we have algorithms to try to catch them. Those sorts of things where you can actually demonstrate to others, this is the biggest advantage of social proof in modern times.
People can get that information now. Before, they couldn’t get that information about us, but it’s right there. You can get information from people all over the world about how they’ve experienced an exchange with you or what their opinion is about you or your products and so on. You put those things on your site right away, and that goes as well for testimonials. Right away, they should have testimonials on your website. First thing, with ratings, evaluations.
There’s a great one you’ve probably seen where it actually shows people that are buying and rating in real-time, or it’ll say a hundred people bought this, or they bought this color. I always think that’s an incredible social proof widget because, as you’re about to buy, you feel like there are people around me all doing the same thing.
Combining Scarcity And Social Proof
You know who has refined this? A website called Booking.com. You go online, you try to reserve a hotel room, something like this. There are four other people looking at this room at this price, and there are only three left at this price. They’ve got research on this. It produced a skyrocketing effect when they first did that, that their marketing department thought, they called their tech people and said, there’s something wrong with the technology because we’re getting these crazy things, and the tech people said, that’s because of the thing you said for the first time this time. Look at the other people who are doing this.
That combines two things, it combines social proof and scarcity.
You’ve also got scarcity, exactly right. You’ve combined scarcity and social proof, and the numbers go into the strategy.
What would you say to someone who’s emerging and trying to develop their influence? Like, what’s the best way to show social proof when you don’t have a lot?
This is really a graduate-level question.
I’m glad I’ve passed out of undergraduate.
When people would ask me that, I would say, don’t use social proof then. If you don’t have it, you’re scared. If you’re a startup and you have something new that not a lot of people have, use scarcity, that not a lot of people have this and you can get in on the ground floor, or use authority, that you’ve got credible testifiers who say this is a good product. I don’t say that anymore because of new research, some of which we’ve done, my team. If you don’t have a lot of market share, if you don’t have a lot of buy-in, and this can apply to a new product that you have or a new model of a product, don’t say to them, so far, 30% of our established customers have chosen this new, better version of our product. Don’t say that, because that means 70% have not. We have research on it.
Your uptake goes down when you say that, but if you say, six months ago, it was 15%, last month, it was 20%, this month, it’s 30%, and you show a trend to that 30%, that 30%, which was a detriment, becomes a lever for change because it’s part of a trajectory. What our research shows is that people project a trend into the future, and they see it as it’s going to be the majority response. They want to get in early.
That’s super interesting. I also read in some book the power of 4 out of 5 would recommend, it sounds a lot better than 80%. Using those small numbers, when you see 4 out of 5 doctors who were asked, it sounds overwhelming.
Again, this is really a good question because there’s research to support what you just said. But if you say, and this was a study that said 4 out of 5.
It was a Clorox or famous toothpaste thing, right?
Right, but in this study that they did, 9 out of 10 doctors, if instead they said 89%, they got a better response. How could that be? It’s against social proof, right? No, it’s not only against, not only do you have 89%, which is not significantly different from 90%, you have evidence of your trustworthiness.
Interesting, because I think maybe the opposite was what I heard. That if you had lower numbers, obviously 60% wouldn’t sound like a great number, but 3 out of 5 dentists sounds like an overwhelming number. I think if you had lower numbers, you were supposed to use the out of, and if you had higher numbers, you were supposed to use the percentage.
I think we’re still on the same cake. What I’m saying is don’t use round numbers.
I see.
Round numbers sound like they can’t pull them out someplace lower.
I worked with an investment banker. When he was telling people the number of other interested parties, he would round down to an odd number because, again, you’re saying we have ten interested parties. It sounds like he made it up, seven sounds more credible.
This also applies to when you’re asking for a budget. Let’s say you’re asking for a budget for some project, or you’ve got another possibility, you’re giving people a price for a project that you’re doing, and let’s say it’s $24,518.
It sounds like you did precise calculations to determine that that’s the budget.
Remember in college and high school when your math teacher or your science teacher would say, on the test, don’t just give me the answer, show your work. I’m going to ask your listeners, show your work, how you got to $24,518. Show them your work.
You didn’t just pull it out of the air. I have the inverse of this. I have a distrust of contractors, and I got into a fight on a project we did with the GZ, who billed in all even numbers. There was an electrician, and he was there, and it was $5,000, and then he had random accessories, $500. I was like, this guy, his numbers are way too even. No one ever rounds, they don’t round in your favor, ever.
That’s one of the ways that I think things have changed within the influence process is that we’re getting more and more suspicious of the people who are presenting us the evidence, the number of stars, and the number of customers, and so on. By the way, here’s another way that’s changed, if you put on your website, we’ve got 1,014 reviews of our site. Don’t say reviews, say reviewers. Reviewers are people. You want people to be associating, somebody pressing that button, not the button. The button is the review.
Interesting.
The star rating. You want the person pressing that button in their minds.
That also makes it less of a bot or an automation with a lot of that stuff.
With a lot of that automation that we’re just getting sick of.
The Principle Of Scarcity
Let’s jump back to the scarcity part. This, I feel like, is a lesson no one ever learns. As a marketer, I’ve just seen it time and time again. The famous quote, “I don’t want the club that will have me,” I think is just apropos. There was a beer called Sip of Sunshine years ago. It was the first 8% IPA that was actually pretty drinkable. You just couldn’t get it around here. In fact, they would limit you to two, and you’d go, and it would only be on Thursdays.
One day they let me buy six, and I thought I was like stealing. The beer didn’t change, but as soon as it was available everywhere, it totally lost its thing. I always tell people if you’re doing an event, if you’re doing whatever, make sure the first one sells out or that people can’t get it. The best thing you could do is that people felt like they missed the first one. Is that right?
Right, because, by the way, you just described what happened to Coors. I’m old enough to remember when Coors could only be got in the West, and everybody wanted it. It became a national beer, and it didn’t sell. If you could get it, it wasn’t so valuable anymore. That’s the principle of scarcity. We want more of what we can have less of. This is the situation, and I’m not surprised.
We want more of what we can have less of—that’s the principle of scarcity.
I think, particularly early on, you are better off selling less than you could. Again, a conference, event, otherwise, and signaling that it is no longer available than having that extra capacity. We all see it, and you have to be very careful about how you use this as a marketer because you see that sometimes you get that “we’re almost sold out” thing for six weeks in a row, and then that ruins the whole spirit around it. You can’t really abuse the crowd’s trust with that. You have to just sell out and have some people disappointed.
In fact, there’s a study that shows how you describe that you no longer have an option available for people. One way is “it is out of stock” or “not currently available.” Those are the kinds of things. That’s wrong.
Sold out.
What you need to say is sold out.
It’s a demand problem, not a supply problem.
It’s not a supply problem. There was bad weather or a manufacturing thing or a supply line breakdown. Sold out works significantly better than those other things.
Let me ask you, so if you look at the last couple of years, and this is the problem. People can’t help themselves. What’s the quote about supply and demand? At the end of the day, you can’t beat supply and demand, but you have the pandemic, you have things like Zoom and Peloton or whatever that are sold out everywhere.
All of these brands just then tried to quadruple their capacity to take advantage of it. It pretty much destroyed their businesses because now you can get it. You’ve guessed the wrong way. It’s so hard to turn away business. There are two factors. As soon as everyone can have it, demand goes down, and then the second one is you are likely to overproduce supply even more. Peloton can’t sell bikes to save their life.
The way you can deal with it is to have something else new. There is the new and improved. You can say new and improved. It’s still the same thing. You haven’t lost the equity of that, but it’s something new. It’s a new version or a better model or enhanced experience. That’s the only way I know to deal.
Would you also encourage businesses not to stay with the scarcity and the pricing and not to ramp up supply just because there is demand? Again, it’s always very tempting to do that.
The problem is ramping it up too fast. You go with the supply. You go with the things that you are able to do without risking a lot of capital.
It seems like everyone who started this tends to assume that a momentary spike or whatever becomes the new normal, and then they build their business around that. They end up hurting for the next couple of years.
That’s right.
Evolution Of The Influence
You mentioned this a few times, influence. I think the first edition was in 1984, which is crazy at this point. You’ve updated numerous times over the 40 years. What are some of the more interesting updates you’ve made or changes, particularly based on what you’re seeing change in the marketplace? I know one of the big ones is you added a seventh principle and unity, but also how these principles evolved with technology and digital media or otherwise. That was a five-part question.
Fortunately, the new version of Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion that just came out is called Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion. We now have a seventh principle. That’s the principle of unity, which I think was crucial. This book is called the Bible of Online Marketing. It’s a book that was written when there was no online market. How can that be? People will ask me, how did you look ahead and foresee a platform that didn’t exist, that you could dominate? I always say I didn’t look ahead. I looked inside us. What were the principles of influence that have been the drivers of assent to requests of one sort or another that have always moved us as a species? You can change the platforms on which you make your case. You’re not going to change the things that are the most powerful motivators of human action. I haven’t had that problem.
Here’s an example. There was a study done of 6,700 online commercial websites. They looked at 29 different factors that influence conversions. Some were economic, like free shipping. Some were technological, like search functions within the site. You can go somewhere, actually psychological or sales-related. Is there a call-to-action line? Those kinds of things. The ones at the top of the brain were the principles of influence, scarcity, authority, social proof, these kinds of things. The one that surprised me was liking. How do you get liking online? You’ve never met that person. This person doesn’t know you. There’s no relationship that exists.
How could you use the principle that says people prefer to say yes to those they like and who like them? It turns out that they found that one set of sites that did this one thing significantly increased their conversions by virtue of the liking principle. On the landing page of the site, there was a welcoming statement, “Welcome. We’re so glad that you’ve decided to join us and to be part of our company.” The thing you would do to somebody who came to your door, that’s the thing. These principles are adaptable to a variety of different changes and technology inside the society because they don’t evolve as fast as technology does. Those principles are part of the human condition. We say yes to those we owe.
People say yes to those they like and who like them—even online, a welcoming tone makes a difference.
You can create inviting online, or you can create disinviting. In fact, I do some work with a company, and they do social monitoring of social media comments. They can help companies remove hate and vitriol and use A.I. on the comments, they found, particularly in their data, even more with women, that when you come into a company’s brand and you see all of this stuff, it’s unwelcoming.
Basically, you’re like, I don’t want to hear people saying all this nasty stuff. It’s not interesting in the world of social media for brands. It’s not just what they say. It’s the environment, particularly where you’re letting people comment and stuff around that, whether that is welcoming or feels friendly or not.
Here’s an extension of that. You know how on your site you will have, let’s say, ratings, evaluations, and sometimes you get a clunker.
They love to be heard.
That’s the one that draws attention. You have to respond to that person by saying, “We’re sorry that that happened, and if it’s something that was a mistake, we will fix it. We’ll be sure to fix it.” Or, if it’s not, if it’s just somebody who has a different opinion about your product than the majority of other people, you shift the eyes of the observer away from that person by saying, “We’re so glad, as you can see, that the vast majority of our customers have a different opinion of us.” You shift them away from this one outlier.
That’s super smart. Any leader listening to this and has the Glassdoor and has to respond, you can say, “This is right. I’m sorry to hear this. I’d like to resolve it, but this does not seem to represent what the majority of the people have experienced here.”
As you can see, it doesn’t point them to the proof, all the positive reviews.
These are great digital principles. As you said, these are timeless. I guess that’s why you’re in your 20th edition and 7 million copies.
We just had our 40th anniversary of the publication.
Unity And Belonging
In so many books today, there’s so much pump and dump, and they don’t sell five copies a year. Keeping it going as a franchise is pretty impressive. Talk to me about the unity one because why did you add it? I can’t think of anything we have less of these days. Are people missing opportunities for better influence?
Yes. The reason I added it was to look around me, first of all, at the polarization that was going on in our society.
When did you add it? Just out of curiosity.
In this last version, it was 2001.
Got it.
I could see it in the research, but also look at it around me. What the unity principle says is that we prefer to say yes to the people we see as one of us, not just similar to us, one of us. If I were to say to my team, “Robert is like us,” that’s one thing. If I were to say, “Robert is one of us, of us,” that means something other than similarity. It means commonality of belonging, that we belong together in a category. If I can identify categories in which we share a partnership with one another, then we will be much more willing to go along with what Robert proposes for us.
Unity means we’re more likely to say yes to people we see as ‘one of us,’ not just similar to us but truly belonging with us.
I’ll give you just a hundred questions based on this, particularly when you’re saying everyone is against you. Then what people actually need to do is influence the people outside of their sphere. How do they leverage that?
I’ll give you a couple of examples. One is anecdotal, but it’s called the Ben Franklin rule. He said, how do you turn a rival into a friend? Ask him to lend you a book. He did that with a guy who was his political rival, but this guy had a valuable book that Franklin wanted. He said, “I’m so interested in this book. Could you lend it?” The guy lent it.
Did he read it?
He read it and he came back with the book, and now they were partners in exchange with a topic that they both were interested in. He brought to the surface some commonality of category. They both loved whatever that book was about, science, maybe, or I don’t know, or this particular author. He said, “We’ve become friends.” That’s one thing you can do. The other is you can ask them for advice, because, let’s say you have a new initiative that you think will be very powerful inside your organization and you need this person, who you don’t like very well and who doesn’t like you, you want that person’s buy-in in order to advance this initiative. What we typically do is we give anybody that we’re looking for buy-in a summary, or an outline, or a blueprint of what our idea is.
We say, “Could you give me your feedback on this?” or “Can you give me your opinion on this?” That’s a mistake. When you ask for an opinion, you get a critic. You get somebody who steps away from you, who breaks the unity bond, who separates and goes inside themselves for the pros and cons. If you change one word, and there’s research on this, and you ask for their advice, you get a partner. You get somebody, a collaborator, who’s working with you on this.
The opinion is, “I hate it.” The advice is, “I might change this chapter because I think you’re overstating this principle.”
Another insightful point, because that’s what the research shows. Not only do they like your idea better, they give you better counsel on it. There are a couple of little things you can do to bring people in, besides identifying commonalities and bringing them to the surface. Here’s the study I was going to tell you about. All you have to do is bring it to the surface. A study done on a college campus had a student, somebody who was dressed like a student would be, student age, standing on the campus behind a table for United Way. As students passed by, she would ask for contributions. She got some because there was similarity there. Similarity works. She was dressed like them and was the same age.
If she said, “Excuse me, I’m a student here, too,” she increased contributions by 450% because you don’t say no to one of you. They probably guessed that she was a student, but it wasn’t brought to consciousness. It wasn’t made top of mind, that category, until you brought it there. That’s where I’m going in terms of my understanding of the influence process. It is not necessarily the feature of your case that is wisest, most economical, or most efficient. It’s the one that’s at top of consciousness that moves people. Your job is to take the best feature of your case, whatever it is, the one that would make it wisest for somebody to move in your direction, and bring that to top of mind, that concept to top of mind.
You’re saying it’s any of the 6 or 7?
Yeah.
Where are you on the concept? There’s a lot of data around argument dilution. Would you just bring the top 1 or 2 and not try to laundry list them all?
There’s, again, research on this. For example, take testimonials from authorities. What you get is a lot of people arguing, “Don’t dilute the best testimonials.” I’m of the vision, you put that first. You make the authority aura, the credibility, is infused to everything you say from the first word. We almost never see this on websites. The first thing you see is a testimonial. No, that’s buried somewhere. Authority, but the research shows if you put more than one authority testimonial, they do not dilute the best one. It’s still there, they reinforce the best one. The evidence is clear, multiple authorities outdistance a single authority, that’s the best one.
Is there no diminishing returns on that, even at some point?
I would say no more than 2 or 3, but you can’t let them think, “That’s something that this guy, Cherry Pit.”
Ethical Considerations In Influence And Marketing
Not right enough that it’s a trend and not enough that you get bored, basically. Interesting. I’m curious, how do you think about all the people? We live in a world where there’s marketing and advertising, but then there’s some pretty evil propaganda and things by social media. How do you think about the ethical considerations of using these powerful tools of influence and when they’re supportive and when they’re actually dangerous? Because I assume someone could use all of these things to manipulate someone into buying a scam product or a scam belief.
I think we need to penalize those people in the same way that we have in our country. We have offices, organizations, and government units that penalize false advertising. We have to develop, through technology, not just the ways to expand the information we have but to be able to identify and penalize people who employ these principles unethically. We’ve just started a new startup called the Childini Institute, where we do ethical influence for business. We train, and one of the things we’re in the process of doing is developing an AI function that identifies deceptive advertising or deceptive messages.
Is it the message that’s deceptive, or is it like I’m selling avocado seeds as the cure for everything because I deeply believe this? Maybe they’re dangerous, or maybe they do nothing or otherwise.
It would check the research on avocado seeds.
I understand the FTC and enforcing that, but there’s probably a lot of subjectivity. I know there’s a lot of people who were relitigating this around during COVID. The government tried to amplify certain things and censor certain things. Some of those weren’t the right things. There’s a lot of people who believe you should let the market sort that out.
Everyone who talks about this problem admits it’s immensely complicated, and they don’t know how to deal with it, but they also don’t think that we did a great job with it because, again, you’d say, it sounds so reasonable. Even social media, don’t let them amplify the bad stuff and let them amplify the good stuff, but it’s really hard sometimes in the moment to know which is which.
I think you can’t do a yes or no, you have to do a probability statement, which is what all science does. It says, “Here’s the probability that works. It’s significant by a certain degree of probability that that’s the truth.” Not that it is. You would have to have some kind of device, some kind of algorithm, that provided a probability statement.
You think the government is the only one who could really step in and arbitrate this?
Here’s how I think each of us could do it. If we have taken a step and we have been cheated or we have been deceived, we recognize that what we were told, we need to get on networks. We need to get online, and we need to tell everybody that we have contact with about the deceptiveness of this message or this organization.
We’re running a little short on time, but you also authored a fascinating book. I read it, called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, and it argues that changing a person’s mind is sometimes less about messaging, which might refute your earlier discussion, and more about priming and timing. What I think of right away is that movie Focus with Will Smith, where all day he needs the guy to bet on a certain number, and then you find out that all day this number was primed in the back of his head and at the restaurant and all this stuff. Can you talk a little bit about how people can incorporate the principle of priming?
What it suggests is that what I was describing earlier, the thing that’s most likely to drive our behavior in any situation, is the thing that is primary in consciousness at that point, is at top of mind at that point. Let me give you an example, a study done on an online furniture store. They focused on sofas, and half of the visitors, when they went to the website, saw fluffy clouds on the back of the landing page. The other half saw small coins, pennies. Those who saw fluffy clouds bought more comfortable furniture. Those who saw pennies bought less expensive furniture. It was about cost versus comfort.
That’s amazing, but what we can do is, again, as I would say, what’s the thing in your argument, in your case, that is the strongest? If it’s that you have great authority, testifiers, if you have scientific proof, or if you have scarcity, you put something there. First, there was a study of Norwegian cruise lines. They had an offer to make, but it was only good for a certain amount of time. In the subject line of the emails that they sent, there were two ticking down clocks, and they got 15% more.
Without even mentioning the concept of timing.
Below it was, but they primed them. They readied them for scarcity because that was at top of consciousness.
I’m surprised you’re not working for a marketing company and not another education system anymore. You haven’t been pulled over to the dark side.
What I say is, the book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion was about persuasion. What do you put into your message? The book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is what do you put in the moment before you send the message to make people more sympathetic.
It ties to Daniel Kahneman’s work, priming and anchoring, and super interesting. He was his example of the whales. If you make a donation to save the whales, the average donation is $10 to $50 versus the average person makes $100 to $200, or you see the button. You might have never thought about what’s enough to help the whale. That’s why you always see the $20s, the $5s, and the $10s in the tip jars, even when the thing just opened five minutes earlier.
Dan Ariely did a study where he asked people how much money they would pay for a box of Belgian chocolate. A large number, from your social security number, take the biggest digits versus the smallest digits. They paid more after they saw the biggest digits because the price of the chocolate seemed small.
Personal Mistakes And Missed Opportunities
Robert, we could go on forever, but I always like to ask this as a last question. It’s multivariate, can be personal, professional, single, repeated, and tied to influence would be interesting. What’s a personal or professional mistake you made that you learned the most from?
Here’s the one that I made that I most regret. I could have written my book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion three years earlier, and I was a coward because I didn’t have tenure yet.
Didn’t have social proof.
I didn’t, and there was no book like this. I waited until I had got tenure, and then I published it. If it flopped, they still couldn’t kick me out, but I think I missed a window there where I could have written the book and informed a lot of people about the influence process.
Love that answer. Robert, where can people learn more about you and your books and your work?
These days, they could go to Cialdini.com, and that’s where this new startup that we have called the Cialdini Institute is located, and that’s where we have access to all that we do.
Robert, thank you for joining us on this podcast. As I said, when we opened, this is a full-circle moment for me. I think I have pages of notes of things I need to go implement based on our discussion.
I enjoyed it.
To our listeners, thanks for tuning into the Elevate podcast. We’ll include links to Robert and his work on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave us a review or a rating. It only takes a minute, but it’s the number one way that new users discover the show. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion
- Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion
- Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
- Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
- Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
- Booking
- Cialdini Institute
- Robert Glazer
About Robert Cialdini
Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career conducting scientific research on what leads people to say “Yes” to requests. The results of his research, his ensuing articles, and New York Times bestselling books have earned him an acclaimed reputation as a respected scientist and engaging storyteller.
His books, including Influence and Pre-Suasion, have sold more than five-million copies in 41 different languages.
Dr. Cialdini is known globally as the foundational expert in the science of influence and how to apply it ethically in business. His Six Principles of Persuasion have become a cornerstone for any organization serious about effectively increasing their influence.
As a keynote speaker, Dr. Cialdini has earned a world-wide reputation for his ability to translate the science into valuable and practical actions. His on-stage stories are described as dramatic and indelible. Because of all of this, he is frequently regarded as “The Godfather of Influence”.
Dr Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Dr. Cialdini received his PhD from University of North Carolina and post-doctoral training from Columbia University. He holds honorary doctoral degrees (Doctor Honoris Causa) from Georgetown University, University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Wroclaw, Poland and University of Basil in Switzerland. He has held Visiting Scholar appointments at Ohio State University, the University of California, the Annenberg School of Communications, and the Graduate School of Business of Stanford University.
In acknowledgement of his outstanding research achievements and contributions in behavioral science, Dr. Cialdini was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
Dr. Cialdini is President and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK.
His clients include: Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Bayer, Coca Cola, KPMG, AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Merrill Lynch, Nationwide Insurance, Pfizer, Prudential, GlaxoSmithKline, Kimberly-Clark, Harvard University – Kennedy School, The Weather Channel, the United States Department of Justice, NATO, Novo Nordisk, RE/MAX, London Business Forum, Thomson Reuters, Ogilvy and London School of Economics
