Influence

The promise

Here's a question almost nobody asks out loud, because it sounds like an insult: how does a person with two degrees, who checks the unit price on a can of beans, end up putting an entire severance check into a franchise resale pitched over a two-hour lunch? The comfortable answer — they were naive — is useless: nobody becomes less exploitable by feeling stupid.

Robert B. Cialdini proposes something else, and that's where the value of this body of ideas sits: agreeing to something against your interest is almost never an intelligence failure. It's the normal operation of a shortcut system that is right most of the time. The shortcuts aren't the problem — the signal switching them on can be counterfeited, and entire professions make a living doing exactly that. What follows isn't his full catalogue, and it isn't in his order: we leave two mechanisms out entirely, and the ones that stay don't arrive whole. Five ideas, arranged by a logic of our own — the question you stopped asking.

The idea in one image

The sliding doors at a grocery store do not recognize customers. They recognize a mass crossing a beam at a certain height, and that is the entire verification. Any six-year-old works this out in an afternoon — wave a hand, toss a cap, push an empty cart — and the door opens with the same courtesy it extends to a shopper with a full load. It opens for a dog. It opens for a plastic bag riding the wind.