Robert B. Cialdini Quotes

audiences have been successfully manipulated by those who use social evidence, even when that evidence has been openly falsified.

When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all.

In large measure, who we are with respect to any choice is where we are, attentionally, in the moment before the choice.

Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?

The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.

The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

The automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. For example, because only healthy, normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single "cheep-cheep" noise.

There's a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it's necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. - WALTER LIPPMANN

Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence (for a review of this evidence, see Langlois et al., 2000).

The researchers thought that recipients of precise offers are much more likely to believe that the person making that offer has invested time and effort preparing for the negotiation and therefore has very good reasons to support the precise offer they are making.

Persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.

once a person's self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image.

Now, during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially.

Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.

We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style.

we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided

Often we don't realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle - a stereotype - to guide their buying: expensive = good.

WHO WE ARE IS WHERE WE ARE Whenever

When the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person's suicide, older drivers died in such crashes. l advised, then, to take special care in our travels at these times.

The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.

Embarrassment is a villain to be crushed.

Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.

once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.

In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item's availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A

Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.