The PSYCHOLOGICAL TRICKS To Persuade & Influence ANYONE (video)
Long-form interview between Robert Cialdini and Lewis Howes (School of Greatness, episode 1164) following the release of the 2021 expanded edition of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini walks through all seven principles in order with concrete experiments, single-word tweaks, and ad-tested examples — making this the most structured single-source recital of his framework in this wiki. The conversation also previews the central thesis of his 2016 book Pre-Suasion.
Why this source matters
This is Cialdini’s framework in his own voice, in 2021, with the seventh principle (Unity) added since the 1984 original. Where prior wiki coverage had only Commitment and consistency and Scarcity principle as standalone pages — the rest were named on the Robert Cialdini entity but unfilled — this source justifies promoting all seven to first-class concept pages, plus a separate page for Pre-suasion.
The seven principles, condensed
Cialdini’s research method (already on his entity page): infiltrate the training programs of the major influence professions — car sales, insurance, portrait photography, fundraising, recruiting, even cults — and look for commonalities. He found six (now seven) universal principles.
1. Reciprocation
People feel a drive to give back to others who have first given to them.
- McDonald’s balloon study (Colombia/Brazil): kids handed a balloon as they entered drove +25% in family food sales — including +20% in coffee orders the kids weren’t getting. Order matters.
- Key-ring vs. yogurt at a fast-food shop: gift the customer a key-ring → +12% sales. Gift them a small yogurt (food, in a place they came in for food) → +24%. Personalization to the recipient’s actual need doubles the effect.
- The gift must feel genuine, not a device, and new/unexpected rather than the same opt-in PDF for ten years running.
- Don’t dismiss thanks. When someone thanks you for help, the wrong reply is “no big deal, anyone would have done it” — that pulls reciprocity off the table. The right reply: “Of course, it’s what partners do for one another” (or, with a stranger: “I know if the situation were reversed, you would do the same for me”) — putting the other person on record while keeping the obligation alive.
- Speaker’s-agent slow-pay anecdote: a chronically slow-paying art-loving client started paying invoices in half the time when she enclosed a single art-museum postcard with each one.
→ See Reciprocation.
2. Commitment and consistency
People want to act in line with their previous public commitments.
- Gordon’s restaurant: “Please call if you have to change or cancel” → “Will you please call if you have to change or cancel? (pause)”. The pause forced a “yes.” No-shows dropped 67%.
- Boy Scouts popcorn: “Would you like to buy some popcorn?” → 15%. “Do you support the Boy Scouts? Yes. Then would you like to buy some popcorn to support us?” → 55% — and many “no popcorn but here’s a donation.”
- Congratulate on commitment, not progress. “Congratulations on your progress” makes people look back and coast. “Congratulations on your commitment to this goal” makes them look forward and finish on time.
- For team meetings: don’t let anyone leave the room without saying “yes, I will” to their next-week task — a public commitment.
→ See Commitment and consistency.
3. Social proof
When uncertain, people use the responses of others (especially comparable others) to steer their own.
- UK pub put up a sign: “This week, our most popular beer is our porter.” Porter sales doubled.
- Beijing restaurant put a small asterisk beside the genuinely most-popular item in each menu category. Each starred item became 13–20% more ordered, in every category.
- Hotel-site segmentation (“best for business travelers / families / couples”) works because the relevant social proof is from people like the searcher, not generic averages.
- The 6,700-site online A/B-test meta-study Cialdini cites (see Scarcity below) put social proof at #2 of all conversion factors.
→ See Social proof.
4. Liking
People say yes to people they like — and the two cheapest engines of liking are similarities and praise.
- Email negotiation study: when negotiators traded info before bargaining, stymied (deadlocked) negotiations dropped from 30% to 6%. Looking closely, what mattered wasn’t how much info they exchanged — it was whether they discovered parallel similarities (both runners, both only children, etc.).
- Praise: Cialdini’s confession — he often thinks praise but doesn’t say it; the social value evaporates in the gap between mind and tongue. He now externalizes any internal compliment.
→ See Liking.
5. Authority
Cialdini distinguishes carefully between two senses:
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In authority = power, hierarchical position. Not what influence is about.
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An authority = knowledgeable, credentialed. This is what moves people.
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Hospital stroke-rehab study (Phoenix area): hanging the physical therapists’ diplomas, awards, and certifications on the wall of the room where they briefed patients raised home-exercise compliance by 31% — measured in flexibility, strength, and range of motion.
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You can’t claim authority face-to-face without sounding awful. Instead: send credentials ahead of the meeting (resume attached, “looking forward to Thursday on topic X — here’s my background”), put initials in your email signature, link your LinkedIn, put testimonials on book covers.
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New finding: testimonials at the top of a page, not the bottom. Bose Wave Music System ad — the same testimonials moved from bottom to top → +15% in sales. “The authority aura suffuses everything that comes after.”
→ See Authority.
6. Scarcity
People are more motivated to avoid a loss than to chase an equivalent gain — and scarcity is loss flagged in advance.
- Anchored to Loss aversion. The financial-advisor parable: don’t call a wealthy client at 5am to say “you can gain $25,000 if you act now” — they’ll hang up. Call to say “you can avoid losing $25,000 if you act now” — they’ll thank you.
- Bose Wave Music System ad: original headline listed “new features, new convenience, new simplicity, new elegance.” Replaced with “Hear what you’ve been missing” → +45% in sales. Loss-framed beat gain-framed.
- Limited quantity > limited time. With limited time you can wait until the last minute; with limited quantity, you must act or someone else gets it. Quantity converts more.
- The 6,700 e-commerce sites A/B meta-study Cialdini cites: the top six conversion factors were the six principles, with **scarcity 1**, social proof #2, authority #3, **liking via a welcome letter 4**, then limited time.
- iPhone 5 launch line story: TV reporter asks the woman who’s #23 in line — she traded her #25 spot to the woman who’d been #23, in exchange for that woman’s $2,800 Louis Vuitton bag, because “I heard this shop didn’t have a lot and I didn’t want to lose the chance.”
→ See Scarcity principle.
7. Unity (the new one, 2021)
Convince someone you share membership in a “we” group — and everything inside the boundary becomes easier.
Cialdini explicitly distinguishes Unity from Liking-via-similarity. Similarity is “we both run.” Unity is “we both belong to” — the shared identity, the “we” pronoun.
- Texas couples persuasion study: pairs were asked to argue over a long-standing disagreement.
- Coercive (“do this or you’ll be sorry”) → polarization (the partner moved further away).
- Rational (“examine it more closely, my position is more reasonable”) → laughter, no movement.
- Unity (“we’ve been together two and a half years, I’d really appreciate it if you’d do this for me”) → the only one that worked.
- A simpler implementation: using “we / our / us” in the request itself raises compliance.
- Co-creation is, per Cialdini, the most successful marketing-loyalty strategy of the past decade — asking customers to help design the next version of the product makes them a unit with you.
- Single word swap: ask for advice, not feedback or opinion. Feedback makes people step back into themselves; advice makes them stand next to you. The research shows people like the asker’s idea more when asked for advice than when asked for feedback or opinion.
- Cialdini’s own anecdote: an irritable colleague refused his ask for data needed by tomorrow (“I can’t be responsible for your poor time management”). Cialdini said, “Tim, we’ve been in the same psychology department now for 12 years — I’d really appreciate it if you’d do this for me.” He had the data that afternoon.
→ See Unity.
Pre-suasion (the cross-cutting layer)
Teased at the start and returned to as one of Cialdini’s three “truths”:
What you say or do before you ever send your message puts people in a mindset consistent with the message — and that message becomes more successful.
Concrete example: adding two ticking-clock emojis to the subject line of an email selling a scarce opportunity raised conversions by 15% — pre-loading the recipient with a scarcity mindset before they even saw the ask.
→ See Pre-suasion (Cialdini, 2016 book of the same name).
Notable quotes
- “We have to flip the script of the usual business arrangement: instead of asking the customer to commit first, we go first.”
- “It’s not about manipulation. It’s about pointing to something true. True social proof. True authority. True scarcity.”
- (On the Unity Texas study) “No new information. No greater logic. Just bringing to consciousness that we are a we group. Inside we groups, people support and compromise.”
- “Don’t have a favorite principle of influence — you choose the one that’s already there in the situation, the one whose engine is already running.”
Other things mentioned in passing
- Daniel Kahneman — cited for prospect theory and the 2× loss-aversion asymmetry (his “Nobel Prize a few years ago” — actually 2002).
- Adam Grant, Give and Take — recommended in the reciprocity section.
- John Ruhlin, Giftology — same.
- Frank Luntz, Words That Work — invoked as a parallel to Cialdini’s “single-word change” examples.
- Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference — invoked on the importance of small communication tweaks.
- Self-disclosure reciprocity as a truth-eliciting technique: lead with vulnerability and the other person matches.
- Adaptability in conversation — flagged as an extempore add at the very end.
Sources
raw/cialdini-school-of-greatness.txt(auto-captions via yt-dlp)