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Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Author: Robert Cialdini
Publisher: HarperBusiness,U.S.
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

9 reviews
Sales Rank: 274

Media: Paperback
Edition: Rev. Ed., 1st Collins Business Essentials Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 1

ISBN: 006124189X
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.852
EAN: 9780061241895
ASIN: 006124189X

Publication Date: February 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New Book direct from the publisher. Takes 5 business days to ship. Usually delivered in 2 weeks.

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Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

It is a great book but not 100% what im after, reccomend it though.. August 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This book is definetly worth gettin because it is an interesting read and the author clearly knows what he is talking about. What i like about the book is it is based on research and science, not half guesses and assumptions.

It does make you more aware of sales techniques and how to not fall victim to their techniques. I do think some chapters he tends to go on abit too much for the sake of making the chapter and book longer ( feels that way when you read it) because when you read the book you will find a summary at the end of each chapter which explains 40 pages worth on 1 page.

Though he does go deep into the principles and logic of the science of persuasion if you think that you will become a master persuader after reading this then you will be dissapointed. I have seen Derren Brown and other masters of NLP influence people ( with extraordinary skill ) into making decisions with indirect suggestions, clever word play and body lanuguage without them even realising and this is the type of persuasion that interests me and this book does not go into any of this really.

As i said some interesting facts and research and a good read but for the reason above is why i rated it 3 stars

5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful book August 18, 2008
I read this book in less than 4 days.
I reckon this is a must read not just for Marketers but everyone involved in business.

I found the informal style really engaging but yet rigorous and supported by plenty of facts and research.
I have already started to spot at work some of the topics discussed and I am starting to use some of the tecniques.

I can only highly reccomend this enjoyable and interesting reading, especially if you liase with people in your daily job.

3 out of 5 stars

Not bad, but... January 19, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

This is not a bad book. Actually, I'm ok with having bought it here at Amazon. However, that was not my impression when I started in the first chapter; I thought "oh no, not again, another book of a wannabe self-proclaimed "guru"". From chapter 3 onwards it became better, but I have one serious problem with this book: I do understand Cialdini is an academic, but I really wish he would stop cluttering up the text with all these side steps to academic research; it's annoying. Just pose your statements, explain them short and clear, and put all your detailed explanations of academic research that supports your statements in the footnotes. This is your typical book where you have to turn back two pages constantly to see "what was his main argument?". This book could be considerably shorter, *still preservering the same value when it comes to insight", and would make for much more pleasant reading (Mind you, I hold a PhD myself, I know this is academic writing. That's fine when your audience is the academical world, but that is clearly not what the intended audience of this book is). To conclude: there are some valuable lessons contained in this book, it is worth the money, but it needs to be less on the academical details, because that distracts.

5 out of 5 stars

Priceless October 28, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

I have been entertaining my friends at dinner parties with this book. Cialdini, who admits to being a bit of a sucker himself, shows all the ways we've been manipulated over the years by small gestures and situations contrived by salesmen.

There are so many good stories. The one about Joe Girard, a car salesman who sends out each month 13,000 cards every month to former customers with a card saying, "I like you". Surely people wouldn't fall for that? Yes they do, he made more than $200,000 a year selling cars. He's in the Guinness Book of Records.

There's the story of how the Chinese got the American prisoners in the Korean War to betray their country by setting them essay questions. There's accounts of the trouble we can get into when we insist on being consistent or make a vague commitment to supporting a cause.

Cialdini exposes loads of sales techniques and has some fascinating insights into what motivates us.

As a self-employed person I'm really grateful for this knowledge. This is a book that everyone should read.

3 out of 5 stars

Good, but not totally convincing or that useful September 10, 2007
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

I bought this book for two reasons - one to make myself more alert to sales techniques, and two to see if there are any useful insights to glean that could be applied to other areas of life.

On both counts the book delivers. Having recently been pitched to at work by a media tracking agency and nearly taken the bait (didn't in the end) I immediately recognised the use of reciprocity and scarcity to try and harry me into signing up. That alone was worth buying the book for, and I will definitely use that insight in future.

In addition, the chapter on consistency is also very useful. I've been involved in trying (and failing) to get people behind certain campaigns in the past. As such the discussion about getting people to make small commitments to establish a self image which they then feel the need to act consistently with both rang true on a personal level, and seems like something worth trying out in future.

So why only three stars? For one I did not find elements of the book convincing. The section dealing with newspaper coverage of suicides is the bit that really troubles me. Some of the data seems both to be limited and have been interpreted quite loosely. I would need a lot more convincing that the stats are being interpreted reasonably, it looks far too rough and ready. Given that this book is really about behavioural biases surely it should be extra careful about interpretaion of data as this is something we humans tend to be very bad at, always looking for patterns that aren't there and so on. That then leads me to query the hypothesis built on top of the data and to be honest I find myself not buying it. That also makes me query whether other chapters suffer from similar flaws.

Secondly, the book isn't actually that useful once you get your head around the key techniques because, as a previous reviewer says, simply having the knowledge that you have biases doesn't make them go away. To be really useful the book should have spent as much time reinforcing ways to resist the influence of biases as it does explaining what they are.

That said it is very readable, and I got what I wanted from it, but it could have been better.