Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

To inaugurate my new desire to blog, I pulled a book of my shelf and decided to reread it and post summaries as I go.

The lucky book:

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. (amazon)

To start off, here's a summary of the introduction:

Cialdini is an experimental social psychologist, whose research interests lie in the psychology of compliance. In particular, he wants to know "which psychological principles influence the tendency to comply with a request". Shades of Dale Carnegie, certainly. Since every pop-psychology book needs some fanciful terminology, these principles will henceforth be known as weapons of influence.

The six primary weapons are: consitency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. The ability of each principle to produce " a willingness to say yes without thinking first" will be examined in future chapters.

Look for my next post on Chapter 1: Weapons of Influence soon!