Before Heath and Heath, there was Cialdini. Cialdini is probably the single most contemporary researcher of influence. You can read his work in any number of places, there was an HBR about 15 years ago, his original book called Influence has been in multiple editions. Many folks are exposed to his work in classes and undergrad, grad school, and his inital motivation came from trying to understand how things like door-to-door salesmen work. Those people, who were successful in that situation, what were they doing? He actually did first person research. He signed up and sold door to door, in order to be trained in those techniques and find out what it was that was going on. From his research and over the years, and now it's been decades, he's distilled it down to six principles. Cialdini considers this the six principles of persuasion. Like Heath and Heath, and really like much of the field, there's not much here that's surprising or that hard to understand. The challenge is, let's get exposed to it, and then keep it salient as we try to give our persuasive messages. So in just a nutshell, his principles are reciprocity, social proof, consistency, authority, scarcity and liking. So reciprocity is the notion that we're talking about elsewhere in this course. Long established in Sociology and Psychology that we're inclined to treat other people the way they treat us. So if you want others to cooperate with you, you cooperate with them. If you want others to be nice to you, you be nice to them. If you want others to give something to you, it helps to give something to them. So it turns out that this is a bit of a sales technique used in various places. Social proof is the demonstration that others are doing what you want people to do. To demonstrate to others that others have bought in, they've committed, they've engaged. Using others as an example of the behavior you're trying to elicit. Consistency is one of the more subtle ideas in Cialdini's principles. This is, he calls it commitment and consistency, and it draws on work in psychology on dissonance reduction. Once a person is stated a committment to a course of action, especially if that statement was given in a voluntary way, in a public way, they're going to be inclined to stay on that course. So if you can elicit from someone a commitment, especially a voluntary one and a public one, the more that they will stay in line with that commitment over time. A fourth principle from Cialdini is authority. This is calling on those who have credentials, credibility, history. Drawing on other people's credibility essentially to back the claims that you're making and the causes you're trying to elicit from others. Fifth is scarcity. This, of course, people find more valuable those resources that are more scarce. Cialdin's talking about something more subtle than that, which is that the perception of scarcity can drive people to increase their demand for it. So if people think an offer is only available for a limited time, if they credibly believe that, they're going to be driven to act on it with more urgency. And then finally, liking. This draws on a notion, again, long established in psychology, of similarity. That we're more persuaded by those we are more similar to. And this one is sufficiently common and sufficiently available that I want to give one quick example. And I'm going to give an example by contrast, essentially. And this is just a quote from a book, but it makes the point very nicely. The quote itself comes from a Barbara Kingsolver book called Prodigal Summer, and it was used by Amy Clark in a New York Times article a few years ago to point this out. She says, the quote, let's go with the quote first. The quote is, bite, he'd said, with a Northerner's clipped i. An outsider, intruding on this place like a kudzu vine. So, it is an observer noticing someone speak with a dialect that's a little different than the local dialect. And as a result, this person gets categorized as this foreign negative vine that they're familiar with. So Amy Clark says, one vowel instantly marks the speaker as the outsider, leading to assumptions about his politics, religion and trustworthiness. It's a brilliant comparison to the kudzu vine, a choking week imported from Japan in the late 19th century that swallows entire hills and trees. But you see what she's emphasizing there. Once a person's marked as an outsider, all the assumptions that come with that category, politics, religion, trustworthiness, all of which are negative here because you're an outsider, come along with it. All because they spoke differently. We can flip that all around. And one of the things Cialdini's saying, basically, that when you're trying to persuade others, you want to get onto similar ground in some way. You want to establish a commonality with the audience, because once you've done that, they're going to find you more persuasive, they're going to be more open to you. They're going to be coding you not as an outsider, but as an insider, with all the beneficial attributes that come with that.
