By admin | No Comments
Last updated: Sunday, September 16, 2007

A book I have threatened to read for ages. and it is Fascinating!

Influence

 And a must read for anyone in sales and marketing

The underlylying  social psychology of persuasion, and how standard psychological automatic responses:

 (click -whirr responses  is how cialdini describes them)

Can be manipulated not just by salesmen and conmen but are so powerful they can provide an explanation of how ordinary people could have done what the nazis did.

See the experiments on memory in the chapter on “authority” and be horrified….. how the persuasion of an authority figure allowed people taken from the street to be persuaded into giving electric shocks to volunteers, whose voltage was gradually wound up towards lethal. In screams of pain the volunteers pleaded to be released, but still the ordinary people were persuaded into hurting them more and more.

Cialdini identifies the following forces:

Reciprocation

Consistency

Social confirmation

Friend

Authority

And how they can be manipulated by the unscrupulous, or salesmen!
Wish I had read it years ago!

Bookmark to:

CommentSubscribe