Influence

"I gave a Berkshire share to Cialdini as a thank-you for writing it."

"The Cialdini book is very important because it covers a range of ways in which we end up doing things, and how we don’t understand why we’re doing them. It also shows you how much other people have control, at the end of the day, over our actions. Both of these elements are crucial. The book is becoming even more important these days. Firstly, because electronic communication now gives us the ability to tailor messages. We have more ways of reaching people. Secondly, because we need to persuade people to start behaving differently – for example by saving energy. There’s a very nice company called Opower, which prints out information about your energy bill. They are trying to use the Cialdini principles to get you to behave slightly better. This is very important. The New York intervention was based on the idea that all people need is more information. People don’t know how many calories this food has, we only need to tell them and everything will be fine. This was the theory. The Cialdini approach is not about information. It’s not saying that people don’t know that there are a lot of calories in this food, and if you only told them they wouldn’t eat it. We have learned that there are very few things where just by giving people more information, you can get them to behave better. What the Cialdini approach says is that people need to be pushed into behaving better. In particular they need to have social proof. They need to be told something like, “Smart, intelligent people choose this.” Yes. People are already getting their energy bill. They know what it is. What Opower does on top of that is give people a little note that says, “This is how much energy you are using compared with your neighbours.” They also give you a smiley face, or a sad face, to reflect your performance. It turns out that this makes a huge difference. These are old techniques, but they’re finding new ways to apply them. In the past, it was difficult to print an individually tailored energy bill for every person. Now we can do it. There was an experiment recently by one of Cialdini’s former students, Noah Goldstein. He went to look at hotels, which are always begging us to recycle our towels. He tried to figure out what message would be the most persuasive. “We have learned that there are very few things where just by giving people more information, you can get them to behave better” They decided that if you applied the Cialdini principles, you would need to have a message that appeals to people, and tells them that other people like them are behaving in this way. What they came up with was the message, “76% of the people who have stayed in your room have been recycling their towels.” And it turns out that that was the most successful intervention. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s much less successful. It’s not zero. But if you compare something that has an environmental appeal with something that has a social appeal, the social appeal wins hands down."

"It’s a book that really was the foundation for much of what we spearheaded in the FBI that moved professional negotiators towards becoming crisis interveners. What we realised when we examined cases was that we were responding to people manifesting their anger, rage, frustration and loss. Typically we found they really had no clear purpose or goal in their behaviour. So what we had to do was try to create an opportunity to influence them positively, to move them away from taking violent actions in situations when they neither wanted nor needed something tangible from us. When we were working out how to do this we copied very heavily from Cialdini’s book. We looked at ways people gain influence with another and it is all about relationship building, earning trust and demonstrating a genuine interest in their issues and concerns. We learned that negotiators needed to come across as being non-threatening and non-judgmental. The primary tool which is taught to negotiators around the world is something we call active listening skills. This is the idea that listening is not a passive endeavour but it requires an active engagement in which the negotiator paraphrases whatever issues are brought up by the person that we are dealing with. Further, the negotiator acknowledges the emotions being expressed by saying things like, ‘You sound angry or you seem frustrated,’ or, ‘You sound like you are confused and just don’t know what to do.’ Such statements are a powerful way that a negotiator can reflect back to the person to show that you understand how they feel about what is going on in their life and the impact it is having. And a lot of that came from Cialdini and the research that Cialdini reported in this book. Absolutely, and those adaptations that were made to law enforcement negotiators to be more successful in the most volatile situations obviously have a higher level of success when you are dealing with friends, children, colleagues and spouses. Listening is always the cheapest concession we can make to anyone. Taking the time to listen and understand is a powerful tool to create a trusting relationship that helps resolve conflict and gain cooperation. No, she tells me she’s heard it all before, and because she knows what I do for a living if I try that stuff she says, ‘Hey don’t try that here!’ But I think in most situations in life listening is the key ingredient that we can employ in avoiding or resolving conflict. If we come across as being sincere and genuine it speaks volumes about us as human beings and makes us worthy of the other individuals’ respect in kind. When I used to interview people when they had surrendered after an incident and ask them what one thing I said to make them change their mind, they would invariably reply, ‘I don’t know what you said but I liked the way you said it.’ Our genuine, sincere, and concerned tone and demeanour are the most powerful tools of influence that we know."

"It might seem a bit odd to put a book about psychology dating from the early eighties among my all time favourites: reading the media these days you’d think that all the quirks in people’s thinking (known formally as ‘ behavioral economics ‘) were only discovered yesterday. But this book tells you something absolutely fundamental about our interactions with other people, which is how we get other people to do what we want, and how other people get us to do what they want. And while academic research may have made some discoveries since then, at least some of the insights are simply a more formal description of human traits that successful second hand car salesmen (one of the groups Cialdini studied) have known about — and exploited — since time immemorial. When you start thinking about it, most of daily life — whether professional or personal — is about getting other people to cooperate with whatever we have in mind, or vice versa, and after reading the book I couldn’t have a telephone conversation or email exchange without reflecting on what was going on. The book is also very funny. Cialdini describes someone coming up with a really crap plan to break into the Watergate building in Washington DC in 1972. Though most of the people involved thought it was a bad idea and generally pointless, the persuasive techniques used by one of the conspirators led to the others just going along with it. The rest, as they say, is history."