Influence, New and Expanded

The principles—reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and unity—are discussed both in terms of their function in society and in terms of how their enormous force can be commissioned by a compliance professional who deftly incorporates them into requests for purchases, donations, concessions, votes, or assent.1 Each principle is examined as to its ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people: a willingness to say yes without thinking first. (Location 114)
Research shows that messages are more likely to be successful if recipients can first be made to feel positively toward the messenger. Three of the seven principles of influence—reciprocation, liking, and unity—seem particularly appropriate to the task. (Location 126)
reciprocation, liking, and unity for when relationship cultivation is primary; followed by social proof and authority for when reducing uncertainty is foremost; followed in turn by consistency and scarcity for when motivating action is the principle objective. (Location 140)
The second important thing to understand is that we, too, have our preset programs, and although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can dupe us into running the right programs at the wrong times. (Location 201)
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. (Location 203)
The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a simplifying principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: expensive = good. Research shows that people who are unsure of an item’s quality often use this stereotype. Thus the vacationers, who wanted “good” jewelry, saw the turquoise pieces as decidedly more valuable and desirable when nothing about them was enhanced but the price. Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality, and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to a dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers. (Location 220)
We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of the trigger features is present. (Location 259)
Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes. (Location 269)
rather than thinking about an expert’s arguments and being convinced (or not), we frequently ignore the arguments and allow ourselves to be convinced just by the expert’s status as “expert.” (Location 274)
Quite a lot of laboratory research has shown that people are more likely to deal with information in a controlled fashion when they have both the desire and the ability to analyze it carefully; otherwise, they are likely to use the easier click, run approach. (Location 278)
We resist the seductive luxury of registering and reacting to just a single (trigger) feature of the available information when an issue is important to us. (Location 289)
It is odd that, despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns. Perhaps that is so precisely because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur. Whatever the reason, it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work. (Location 311)
According to the Cornell research, you should beware if a review: lacks detail. It’s hard to describe what you haven’t actually experienced, which is why fake reviews often offer general praise rather than digging into specifics. “Truthful hotel reviews, for example, are more likely to use concrete words relating to the hotel, like ‘bathroom,’ ‘check-in’ or ‘price.’ Deceivers write more about things that set the scene, like ‘vacation,’ ‘business trip’ or ‘my husband.’” includes more first-person pronouns. If you’re anxious about coming across as sincere, apparently you talk about yourself more. That’s probably why words such as I and me appear more often in fake reviews. has more verbs than nouns. Language analysis shows that the fakes tend to include more verbs because their writers often substitute pleasant (or alarming) sounding stories for actual insight. Genuine reviews are heavier on nouns. (Location 346)
Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse. If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend much more on the purchase of a sweater, but the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle advises: sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. The same principle applies to a man who wishes to buy the accessories (shirt, shoes, belt) to go along with his new suit. Contrary to the commonsense view, the evidence supports the contrast-principle prediction. (Location 420)