Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I learned about this book in Stanford’s Psych 1, and it has become one of my favorite nonfiction books. The book goes through what Cialdini describes as six ideas that contribute to compliance, which is agreeing to something without being forced to. The book is a treasure trove of specific research and applications, and outlines situations and setups that make us more likely to comply. Some of these mechanisms are simple, like how receiving something makes you more likely to give something in return, but they can compound with each other, like reciprocal concessions to score beneficial deals in negotiations. I would recommend this book to everyone remotely interested in people (you!), as chances are, you’ll be in a situation where you want to persuade someone else or you want to defend yourself against these same tactics.

The most important takeaway for me was how simple and irrational our decision making is when exposed to certain cues. One simple example is that we associate halo effects with positive traits, like how we are automatically biased toward thinking well-dressed or good-looking people as more intelligent or more reasonable, even though we have no rational proof to justify that biased prior belief. All the above happens on the first moment we meet others, and the simplicity and irrationality in this case occurs on the scale of seconds. This is but one case out of many, and they fascinate me to no end. Just like how Descartes theorized on animals’ physical reflexes by observing hydraulic automata at the water gardens, this book will make you observe our psychological reflexes in witnessing cases where rationality spectacularly fails.