Book Notes - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I finished Robert Cialdini's Influence a couple months ago.

The book is one of the most often cited when it comes to biases and our psychological tendencies that work against us. It's also heavily cited in Rationality: From AI to Zombie, another book I've read and have yet to write about.

(If you're interested in that general idea, be sure to check my post on Charlie Munger's list of psychological tendencies.)

More precisely, the book is about the big principles that "compliance professionals" (marketers, salesmen and negotiators of all ilks) exploit in order to influence us towards their preferred outcome.

Cialdini identifies six such principles, which he describes in turn:

  1. Reciprocation
  2. Consistency
  3. Social proof
  4. Liking
  5. Authority
  6. Scarcity

Cialdini asserts that we humans come with a large store of evolved automatic responses. A very simple example is that we are prone to grant favors, when such favors are requested with a reason, the quality of the reason notwithstanding! Just adding "because I really need it" or "because I'm in a hurry" after your requests apparently increases the chances they will be granted.

Another such automatic response is that we tend to treat cost as a heuristic for quality. Hence sometimes increasing the cost of a product makes it sell better.

There are good reasons for these heuristics to exist. They are often pretty useful, or at least were useful in the ancestral environment. Cialdini explains for each principle why it is/was advantageous, how it is now being used against us, and how to avoid falling for it.


I took a few note while reading, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them.

One reason I take notes is that I'm not usually too great at remembering things I have read. Making notes makes it easy to come back to a topic. But more than just offloading the info to my hard drive, I also want to remember. It happens too often that I've read a book, want to tell someone about it, and nothing but uninteresting platitudes about the book come to mind.

This book, in particular, seemed well suited for being remembered. After all, if you're getting the feeling that someone is trying to get advantage of you, you'd like to remembert the standard set of technique likely to be used against you, wouldn't you?

So what I did it was boil down the content of the book to a set of very short aphorism-like sentences. This probably won't make much sense to people who haven't read the book, and possibly to people other than myself.

The plan is to re-read this once in a while, so as to imprint some of the ideas. Anki could be a useful tool for this too.


1. Reciprocation

2. Consistency

3. Social Proof

4. Liking

5. Authority

6. Scarcity

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
— G. K. Chesterton

Bonus: Perceptual Contrast