200. The Golden Age of Persuasion feat. Robert Cialdini

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Unsilenced is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. So wherever you are today, enjoy today's episode, and here's your host, Greg LeBlanc. Welcome to Unsiloed. This is Greg LeBlanc, and I'm here with Robert Cialdini, who is a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University. Also the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, probably one of the most influential, if I can say that, and best-selling books in the field of, well, interpersonal communications, marketing, persuasion, social psychology, behavioral economics, whatever you want to call it, a really important book. And then also more recently, a book called Pre-Suasion. A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Welcome, Bob.

Thank you, Greg. Glad to be with you.

Now, if I think of this book Influence, I think of influence as primarily being about motivation, and I think of persuasion primarily being about attention. And I think of these two as probably the areas that most social psychologists are— this is where we spend a lot of our time. And certainly in business, we spend a lot of time thinking about these issues. But if we go back in time, I think social psychology was a little bit less mainstream. Social psychology was off there. You had these folks doing experiments. I mean, I remember when I was in undergrad, I took classes in social psychology with Robert Cialdini and other folks over there. We read Goffman and Aronson and all those folks. And then when I went over to the business school and I took class on management, it was all very anecdotal and it was kind of like, Bob's a manager and Bob's got to motivate his people. And then something happened and it was sort of, I think, kicked off by the publication of your book back in the 1984. It's hard to believe that this was so, so long ago, but it really kicked off this whole movement where social psychology became super important to people who are out there in, in the field doing stuff. I mean, my grandfather was a head of sales for Hoover in the '30s, and then he started a, a firm kind of like the one that you have, which was training salespeople, right, on how to do sales. But there wasn't any social science. It was all, ah, you know, this worked and that worked, and And I was wondering, since the publication of that book, in the 30 years between that book and the publication of Pre-Suasion, I mean, you've seen a lot that's changed in the world of social psychology and you've seen a lot that's changed in the world of marketing. Maybe you can talk a bit about that change. We can start off with that and then we can start digging into the books.

I think if there's one variable, one factor that lent itself to the kind of change you've been talking about, the sort of widespread adoption of the social psychological approach with data and controlled research as the basis for decision-making. It's a shift toward evidence-based decision-making in all of the major institutions of the society, which happened around the time that Influence came out. And there's a particular kind of evidence, research-based, science-based evidence about the influence process that happened to be all together in one little handy book. And as a result, the sales took off. It, not at first, it was 2 or 3 years before we got any kind of movement, but along came this idea of evidence-based decision-making. Here was this book. That offered various kinds of insights into the way to move people, to influence people, and people were very receptive to it. So the book suddenly became a New York Times bestseller and it stayed that way for 30 years. Yeah.

But the book was not originally intended to be a manual of persuasion. It was really meant to be a self-defense book. Right. And so. In business school, we spend a lot of time teaching people how to persuade, right? Because we think, oh, hey, you got to get stuff done. You got to get people motivated. You've got to push your ideas. You've got to push your product and so forth. I teach a course on data and decisions, which I spend most of the time trying to teach people how not to be persuaded. Do you think that the demand for your time and the demand for your brain is probably more on the influence side and less on the influence deflection side. Did that surprise you?

Right. It did. You know, I wrote the book for consumers, how to recognize and resist unwanted or undue influence attempts using fundamental principles of psychology to leverage those attempts. And not a single consumer group ever called, but my phone didn't stop ringing from requests from marketers and merchandisers and advertisers and so on. How do we harness these levers of influence in ways that will increase our persuasive success? When that was the case, then I had to address another set of issues associated with the ethics of that process. How do we do this in professionally responsible ways so that the influence increases the outcomes of the recipients? Who are moved in directions that lend themselves to the recipient's wellbeing. And so all subsequent editions have had that ethical component embedded in them.

Right. So, I mean, you, you could probably have two different versions of the book, right? Where one is like how to persuade and the other is, you know, how to be resistant to, I think there are some other authors who I'll leave unmentioned who have actually managed to spin two completely separate books out of the concept. But I also found your methods interesting, right? Because while most social psychologists were either doing lab experiments, you were sort of out in the field. You were spending a lot of time in the field. You describe yourself almost as a human ethnologist. The examples that you pull into that book and in subsequent editions of the book are from experiences that you've had, from stories that you've heard. And then you flip back and forth between the kind of anecdotal evidence and the scientific evidence, how important is it that social scientists kind of get out into the field and observe phenomenon in the wild?

That's my soapbox these days. I think it's crucially important for a couple of reasons. One is in the laboratory, we control or eliminate all sources that may affect our data except the ones that we are studying. That's what we try to do. Those may be the things that exist in the natural environment that could influence the effects, but we don't register their influence because we've eliminated them in the hothouse of the experimental lab. So that's one thing. The other is we can really see the power of the effects that we find in the field, because if they are successful, They have overcome all of the myriad of other influences that are working on people making decisions, making choices in everyday situations to transcend all that ground noise that's going on that could otherwise eliminate the effect if the effect wasn't strong enough to overpower those influences.

Well, like pathologists in general, I think that you try to contextualize a lot of this. So you mentioned that these responses that we have, these natural responses, these automatic responses, they exist for a good reason. And then really what you're warning against is how they can be hijacked by strategic actors. But fundamentally being influenced by social proof, I mean, there's a logic to it or reciprocation. I mean, there's a logic to it. These things, exist for a reason. And I love how you started off the book. And I was, you know, I went back and reread the book this week because I haven't, hadn't read it in, um, I think last time I read it was when I was preparing for a, a lecture to utility executives on how to reduce energy consumption. And there's, you know, there's so much in the book, I just kind of ripped a bunch of different pieces of the book to talk about that topic. And I think you've talked to executives about that, but I'd forgotten that you started the book out with these animal examples, right? And you talk about the kind of click-whirr, right, where something happens and then there's this automatic response. And so, you know, the new book, it seems like if you're using— I don't even know whether anybody even would recognize the click-whirr example. I think it's from old, like, photocopiers or printers. If the click-whirr response is what you talk about in Influence, it seems like persuasion is really all about, okay, you know, you got to turn the machine on and prepare it for that kind of click were response.

I use the term, I speak of gardeners and cultivating the earth before you plant your influence seed. If the earth isn't cultivated, you're not going to get full growth. You're not going to get full fruit from that, that seed. So you have to be like a gardener who understands how to nurture the environment to produce the best possible outcome.

A lot of what you discuss in Pre-Suasion is sort of behavioral economists would refer to it as framing and social psychologists refer to it as priming. And a lot of it really is about timing. Can you dig deeper into how you think about the relationship between kind of motivation and attention? Why is it you think that you underestimated the importance of attention maybe in earlier book? What drew you to start spending more and more time thinking about attention?

Yeah, I think that's a good insight. And it had to do with the fact that my charge to myself in the first book is to answer the question, what do you put into a message that significantly adjusts upward the recipient's receptivity to that message, right? What's, what do you put into a message? The book Pre-Suasion says, what do you do before you present that message? That essentially increases the likelihood that people will attend to the feature of your message that you think is going to be most functional, is going to be the lever that produces the change. I mean, a great example is this study that was done on an online sofa sales company. They were interested in getting people to buy more expensive furniture than, than the less expensive furniture. The margins were bigger there. And they did an experiment in which they sent half of the people one week who came to the landing page of the site. They put fluffy, soft clouds in the background. That significantly increased the likelihood that people would buy more comfortable furniture, right? Just because before they ever encountered the options, they were put in mind, their attention was drawn to the idea of comfort, and that's the one that guided their behavior. It's interesting that as good researchers, they had a Another condition in which the landing page had as its background small coins, pennies, had focused people on money. Those people bought less expensive furniture after landing on that page because they were directed to the concept of expense and cost and money. And so. That's what drove their behavior. So that's the idea pretty much of what do you do before you even present a set of options to people and try to direct them inside your message to, let's say your strength is price. You've got the best price on the market. What you do is on the landing page of, you know, you have images of coins and money and so on. That's what pre-suasion is all about.

Well, it's kind of like alley-oop, right? You know, you got the alley, you set up the customer for the persuasive information. And I mean, this is really kind of about the economy of attention, right? And how people have a finite capacity to process information. It really kind of made me think about Herb Simon. When I was reading this, I kept thinking that Herb Simon is lurking in the background kind of cheering you on.

Actually, there's another Nobel laureate, Danny Kahneman, who I think has crystallized the point of, and that is that it's not just that you only have a limited amount of attention. And so the one that you've been channeled to is the one that's going to most likely drive your behavior, that particular topic. He said, there's nothing as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. In other words, focusing, giving something attention elevates its perceived import in your eyes, because typically we pay attention to the most important things in our environment. That's how we make good determinations, right? So what he's saying is focusing people on a particular feature of your product or service, let's say. Could be price, not only channels people there and makes them most likely to respond on the basis of that, it also elevates price as in terms of its importance in decision-making. It's a one-two punch that's very powerful.

Well, another example you talk about is how getting people to think of themselves differently, right? Will influence them. And I found parallels there between your discussion of commitment in the previous book. So if you get someone to think of themselves as a generous person, and you could do this either in the moment where you provoke them with a question or you plant the seeds of this kind of earlier on as with the famous examples. So this idea of managing people's attention, I think in the book you emphasize the immediate right before you have the encounter or the engagement, you can kind of tee this up. But it seems also that you can kind of start working on shifting their attention somewhat earlier. When you start working earlier, are you working on the, on tweaking their attention or are you tweaking their motivation?

Yeah, I think it's attention in that case. So for example, that book that you showed, Influence, there's a subsequent edition to it, and at the top of the COVID is the statement, 5 million copies sold.

Right?

Yeah. That gives people evidence before they even begin.

Why isn't it on this one? This one, you probably had sold 3 million by the time this one was revised.

Yep. So right now it's 5. And it's interesting that I had to fight the marketing department of my publisher to include that first.

Had they read the book?

And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. And you know what they were saying? Well, you know, We need more white space on the COVID So people are invited in a white space, white space compared to this fundamental principle of influence that steers people in a particular direction and that we talk about inside the book. So yeah, I did spend some time thinking, well, what's true? What's true that I have? That I can cultivate the earth with before anybody encounters my garden of claims and insights. Yeah.

You talk in the book, I mean, you're very humble. You talk about how you are susceptible and you fall prey to a lot of these things yourself. I mean, you're intimately familiar. You describe when the dean of business school kind of duped you into teaching a class, which is why the book was delayed. When I was trying to figure out, okay, I gotta get Bob Cialdini on the show. I figured, all right, I'm gonna send an email I'm going to mention all the other people that were on the show and see if that makes a difference.

I went to your website and I checked, and yes, it made a difference.

Yeah. So I think now that I have you on the show, I'm going to start saying, hey, I got Bob Cialdini on the show. You got to get on the show. But if people are interested to get back to this idea of immunizing yourself, are there tools that people can work on to make sure that they're persuaded and influenced by the things that they want to be persuaded and influenced on? I mean, I know there's a lot of books out there on attention that are trying to advise people.

Let's take each motivating and providing a context for it, but start out with the context. Here's what I advise people to do in order to take into account the power of pre-suasion. You know, those people who visited the sofa landing page, here's what they should be saying to themselves. What are those clouds doing there?

Well, first they have to notice them, right?

What's that all about? Right. There's, there's a reason, right? That those clouds are there. They had all kinds of choices and clouds aren't inherently related to furniture, but they're there. Okay. So what's that? So they can step back and say, okay, I think I get it. I think I see that there's an association. That they want to establish at the top of my consciousness that's likely to guide my future behavior. On the persuasion part, motivating people, again, I think what you have to do is step back from the situation that you're in and ask yourself a relevant question. So for example, one of the principles of influence is authority. What are the experts saying in this particular domain? And there's a testimonial that you'll see on websites and so on. What I say at the end of every chapter in Influence, there's a section called How to Say No. And what I say about influence by authority is you have to ask yourself two questions and they're simple questions.

Okay.

You see this testimonial. And you have to ask yourself, is this expert truly an authority on the topic at hand? What does Tiger Woods really know about Buicks? You know, what, what does Matthew McConaughey really know about Lincolns? What is that? What is that? That's not an authority influence that I ought to be susceptible to. I ought to allow myself to be susceptible. So that's one question. You focus yourself away from external features and onto legitimate credibility of the expertise of the authority. It, does it apply here? Then there's the question, well, what if there is a genuine authority? Uh, somebody who has the, the credentials of a physician, let's say Dr. Oz. Right. And he's promoting nutritional supplements that he gets a cut of every time you buy a bottle. Well, then he may be an authority, but I can't assign him credibility because I know he may not be speaking faithfully about the, um, about the benefits of that particular supplement because he's influenced by self-interest. So those are the two questions you ask yourself. And if the testimonial or the authority passes both of those, it's pretty good. It's a pretty good cue that this is probably something I should pay attention to. Here's a knowledgeable, honest person giving me evidence that will allow me to reduce my uncertainty. As to what's a good choice here.

Right. So I think that to use the language of data science, right, there's the sensitivity dial and then there's the more developing a better classifier. If your classifier is not very good, then the only thing that you can do is you can either become more or less gullible. And you describe in the book, in the first book, this story, it's kind of a sad story about some young child that was trying to like give away flowers. And this guy's like, I know your game, like get away from me. And this is kind of like a person that has been embittered by all of the manipulations that they've been exposed to. And so in order to eliminate all potential manipulations, they basically eliminated all possibility of persuasion even by kind of well-motivated people. And they're no longer accepting gifts even from kind of generous people. And it seems like with respect to authority, there are people that they're suspicious of all authority, but then that kind of makes them just as bad as people who are gullible with respect to all authorities. It's easy to be on one end or the other. What's hard is to actually do the dirty work of kind of filtering the good from the bad authorities, right?

Knee-jerk no is as bad as knee-jerk yes, because you miss the opportunities for genuine influence that are afforded by true authorities, people who are knowledgeable, competent and experienced in a particular domain, offering counsel as to how you should comport yourself there. You miss that if it's just knee-jerk, no. But you have to, as you say, ask yourself a couple of questions or step back from the situation and assess what might be really going on here. What are, what are those clouds doing in those kinds of self-inquiries that allow you to move forward with more confidence.

But as a persuader though, I mean, you kind of have to utilize all the kind of tricks in the book because it's kind of an arms race. If someone uses all these persuasive tools to make a bad argument and then you don't use any of these tools, but you've got a good product and a good argument, you're still going to fail to sell. Don't you have to, if you got plaintiff's attorney and you've got a defense attorney and the plaintiff's attorney whips out the logos, the pathos, the ethos, and then you show up on the other side with just the logos, I mean, even if your argument is better, you're still gonna probably lose. I mean, do you have to kind of make sure that you don't leave any persuasive tools on the table when you're in a competitive environment and when all of your other folks who are vying for attention in the minds of the consumer?

Yeah, if you have a good product or service, you will have one or another, and usually multiple of these principles to apply. And the key is to point to them rather than fabricating or manufacturing, uh, counterfeiting their presence in the situation. And the outcome is usually a good one for the recipient who sees that, oh yeah, there is this principle here. The authorities truly are saying that this is a good thing, or this truly is a unique opportunity in the market. And here's the thing that I think that equips you with that your less honest, less scrupulous competitors can't have if they pursue their approach. Oh yeah, he's the honest one. She's the one with integrity. You get that label. And now in all future interactions, people are going to be processing your arguments more deeply and believing them more fully because you've earned the label of the credible source.

You've also highlighted how people can feign this kind of honesty and humility by starting off with, you know, here are all the things that are why you shouldn't, but then, oh, by the way, but here's what you should. There are ways to kind of, once you recognize the markers of honesty, then a lot of these in biology, we have those mimics. So you notice that the successful ones are doing this. And so, you know, there's a frequency-dependent strategy, which is to kind of copy them. And then really it's about the customer who has to do the dirty work of pecking the fake bird to find out if they're a real bird. You talk about salience quite a bit. There's a whole section on salience. And I think this is something which is almost unavoidable now in the kind of news cycle where the news industry has the propensity to take certain events and bring them to the fore and then bring another event and bring it to the fore. And so it's kind of like the consumer of media now is just constantly engaged in a ping pong match where their attention is being buffeted around. Is there a way that people can not just manage their attention for specific appeals to their attention, but just in general divert themselves from these attempts to produce salience? Because you mentioned in the book that we are exposed to more information than we ever have been in human history, that there's just this constant barrage of appeals for our attention. How can we manage that? How do you manage that personally?

I'm going to take a leaf from your playbook, which is decision-making, and say that there's one strategy that I think is the most powerful in terms of rebalancing the scales for, against the over the larger impact that a salient argument has. And that is to consider the opposite. There's the research shows if you step back and think about what if The opposite occurred. How could the opposite take place than what this argument is saying? Then you rebalance the salience. You do it yourself. You think about the negative consequences, not just the positive ones that have been foisted on you by the communicator. That's the one that I use. If I'm gonna make a major choice, now you can't do it with every decision in your life, but any major choice. If I'm going to decide for this model automobile or this new appliance, I'm going to say after I've decided, now consider the opposite, that this is the right choice. What factors can be honestly marshaled to say that that might not be a good choice? And in the end of that, you've balanced out salience and it's down to the merits.

So this is about cultivating counterarguments, right? And one way would be to dig deep within one's own self and try to manufacture those counterarguments. Another would be to kind of seek out those counterarguments and see if you could locate folks that might—

that's right, find voices who are making the counterargument.

And I guess in organizational context, it's a bit easier, right? Because you can design an organization maybe where you might even be able to hire and recruit people that have sort of differential interests or dispositions or different perspectives, maybe even appoint people in that role to some degree.

You're the devil's advocate. Come to that meeting equipped with reasons against the one that we've chosen. And so it sobers us and maybe even persuades us to take a step back and reconsider.

One of the examples you used, which I found fascinating, was this idea. You talk about this advertising campaign for an art museum, and you talked about how social proof is wonderful when you're dealing with a certain type of audience with a certain type of motivation, right? Where they want to be part of the crowd. But then there's other folks that want to be distinctive and different, and you have to use a very different kind of campaign with them. And then you said this might even have some implications for your dating life. I found that interesting. You could potentially— marketers know that they need to segment their markets, but the idea that there's different motivational tools that work with different people. Right.

The difficult part for marketers is to identify a personality in their set of recipients. They don't know. They haven't been able to do a personality inventory on their audience, so they don't know whether this sort of person is the one I should be dealing with, or this. But the research I was relating in the book showed that you can do that with salience again. So what do you make top of consciousness for people? And what they showed is that in an ad for Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, if you show them a movie clip before that ad that makes them afraid. It's one of, you know, it's a thriller or there's a horror movie. They're a little unsettled by that. Then the ad for the museum works best if you tell them the crowd goes there because there's safety in numbers. People want to be around others when they're slightly frightened. There's safety in numbers. If instead the movie you show them is a romantic comedy and what you've brought to consciousness is the motive to have a romantic relationship, then you don't want a lot of people around you. You wanna be the only one. In the eye of your prospective romantic partner. So under those circumstances, if the ad says, be one of the few who are able to recognize the benefits of this museum, that's the one that best performs there. So the idea is you can put your ad in television programming that you know produces one or another kind of motivation in people. And then there are, there's a particular principle of influence, either social proof or scarcity that works better depending on the motivation that you've instigated.

Well, we've just gone through a couple years where I think fear, I think it's safe to say that there's been quite a bit of fear. Maybe prior to the pandemic there, there was fear as well. I mean, fear seems to be something that that sells to some degree. Do you think that the predominance of fear in our culture has exacerbated this susceptibility that people might have to social proof? I was wondering if this section on the new book on identity and so forth, was that inspired by kind of recent developments? Could you talk a bit about how we seem to have descended into some kind of tribalism to some degree more so than in the past? How does that work? Why did you feel the need add a 7th principle of persuasion for this latest edition?

Well, your perception is accurate. I began to recognize how the categorization process, how people categorize themselves in terms of identity-relevant groups, political parties, religious denominations, nationalities, localities in which they resided, and so on. Influenced the influence process. For those other members inside that identity-relevant category, all influence barriers went down. Those other people were now able to influence us significantly more because they were of us, not just like us. They were one of us. And the best little study I know that shows this is Uh, it was done on a college campus. Researchers had a young woman who was about college age, dressed the way a college student was, would take a spot on a heavily trafficked part of campus and ask for donations to the United Way. And she was getting some kind of response. But if they asked her to add one sentence before she made her request, Donations increased by 450%. So what was the sentence? I'm a student here too. I'm of you. I'm one of you. And we have a tendency to feel, to want to follow the lead of and to increase the outcomes of the people who are of us. And I see that all around these days in political polarization. It's regrettable.

Well, now this is independent of authority, right? It's almost like, all right, if you are part of my team, then your request will be more likely to be honored, your claim is more likely to be believed. Magicians would refer to this as kind of the ad hominem fallacy if we're talking about belief formation, but here it's about doing something that is pro-in-group, right? So it's, it's pro-in-group. Yeah.

So it's, it's, I'm calling these we groups, those, those groups in which we call the people around us, we use the term we to categorize them, define them. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you, you'd already written quite a bit about similarity and how you can evoke liking through emphasizing similarity, right? Through mirroring behavior and other sorts of things. How does this relate to that? I mean, it seems like there's similar things at work here.

There are some similar things, but the difference is similarity versus belonging. I'm similar to that person. Oh, we have the same taste in ethnic food or cinema or humor or, but that's different from I belong to this person's political party. Here's the example I always use. And so suppose I ha— have a friend at the office who is just like me in so many ways. We like the same kind of movies and we go to the same, uh, restaurants. We like the same kind of dress, fashion, all kinds of things that are similar or similar, but on the peripheries. And then my brother, I am more dissimilar to him by far, right? Than my colleague. He and I don't have the same ideas and choices and preferences and so on. And I'm out on a boat. With the two of them and they fall in and there's only one life preserver. There's no question who gets it. It's not the similar guy. It's the guy who's of me. And what I use as a kind of a, a label for this is that the we is the many mes. We see ourselves in those people that we share an identity with. And so there's a very positive reaction toward those individuals as a concept.

Now, that's always been true, but the salience of these different identity markers seems to change over time, whether it is, you know, one point I think religious grouping was probably more important than it is today. And now it seems like party affiliation seems to be an important marker of group identity and, you know, but there are some smaller ones too that apply sports fans, fans of the same team.

So I grew up in Wisconsin and the NFL team associated with Wisconsin is the Green Bay Packers. So I'm a fan. And I saw an article that showed that Justin Timberlake and Lil Wayne are both avid Green Bay Packer fans. Greg, I immediately thought better of their music. Right.

Of course you did.

And I wanted them to succeed more. Mm-hmm. All right. So they don't have to be big demographic categories. They can be just things that we see ourselves as sharing an identity with somebody, something, a way that we identify ourselves.

Yeah, I remember when I was in college, I was traveling in Spain and I met this guy on the train. He was an American guy and he was a total jackass. And I thought, "Oh, this guy is some guy I'd never want to hang out with at all." And then, we were wandering through the streets of Pamplona, I think it was, and some drunken Spanish guy came up and asked for cigarette from this guy. And the guy was just a total jackass to him. And then, the Spanish guy's friends started showing up and it looked like there was about to be some kind of brawl. And I immediately rushed to the defense of this American jackass because the minute there was a possibility of a conflict, I realized that even if I either got to pick a side or they're going to pick a side for me anyway, so I need to immediately huddle up with somebody that I have some kind of shared identity with. Even if in the abstract, I would've much rather, I probably would've identified with the Spanish people who seem to be significantly nicer than this American jackass.

And there's some really regrettable aspects of that. Uh, there is a study that showed that if you perceive a legislator of your political party who has committed a violation of finance law, right? So he's done something like insider trading or something like that, you're significantly less likely to turn him in than someone of the other party. You're even willing to allow somebody of you to break the law without consequence, right?

I think Trump bragged about— he said if he could, he could kill someone in open daylight on the streets of New York and he wouldn't lose any, any votes, right? And he's probably— he was probably right. I mean, it's probably true.

I think that's right.

And so I think you dig a lot into associations in the book, and we've been talking about some of them, but I think it was Hebbing's Law, right? Whatever fires together wires together, right? You talk about how important language is. And right now there's a lot of people in universities and other organizations that are engaged in what we might think of as language engineering, right? To try and make us think about things differently. You seem to have a lot of optimism that this can be done and it works. Is there like a half-life to this, right? How far can we go with respect to using subtle language cues to kind of alter how we think about the world?

Well, let's stay within this concept of unity, the 7th principle, and how changing one word has been shown to be remarkably successful in getting people to move with you in the direction you're hoping. So let's say you've got a new idea. You're in your, uh, you're in an organization, maybe you're new to it and you've got an idea for an initiative or a new product or service that you think if successful would burnish your reputation and allow you to move up in the company, but you need the support of your colleagues to be able to take this up the ladder. And so, uh, you show your blueprint or your outline to one of your colleagues and ask for input on it, hoping to get positive testimony that you can say, well, you know, Joe likes it and Jane likes it. And right before you take it to your boss. And what we do typically is say, so Joe, could you give me your opinion on this idea that I have? That's a mistake. Not a mistake to try to get the support of a colleague. It's a mistake to use the word opinion. When you ask for opinion, you get a critic. You get somebody who steps back from you. And goes inside themselves to analyze the merits of your offer. If instead you change the word opinion to advice, Joe, can I get your advice on this? You get a partner. The associations to advice are of partnership, people working together on a project. You've made the, the colleague one of You, you're, you're working together in this way. And research shows if you use the word, if you use the word advice rather than opinion, you get significantly better input and significantly more favorability to your idea. And the newest research that I saw. Says they did the same thing this time, changing the word opinion to feedback, and they got the same result. Partnership beats opinion and it beats asking for feedback because those two things are asking the person to go into themselves and separate from you. The word advice asks that person to be a collaborator with you. That's the kind of impact that a single word can have because of the associations that are freighted with that word.

I've been part of an organization where they never ask for input because they don't really want input. So they're afraid that if they ask for input, they might get it and then they might have some expectations around it. And I remember asking an administrator like, why do you never ask for input? And she said, well, if we ask everybody for input, then we might actually have to respond to it. So, so, you know, that's precisely why we don't use the word.

But you do want that, that information.

Well, you do and I do, but maybe not every decision maker does.

Well, if you, if you ask for it as, as in terms of advice, yeah, people want to see you succeed with it, will help you with it.

Yeah. And so I think in, in that sense, people are, you know, it's, it's not just that they're trying to influence other people, but they're, they're actually influencing themselves by changing the way they look at the world. A lot of what you're describing in terms of persuasion, in terms of motivation and attention, I read this and I think not only how can I impact the world, but how can I impact myself? So if you're trying to persuade yourself of something, when I read that whole chapter back years ago on commitment and you talked about how you can get others to commit to certain course of action, I realized, well, I do that myself all the time. If I want to make myself follow through on something, I will take actions that will alter my conception of myself. And that'll change my sort of preferences going forward. So these tools of persuasion, I think the ethics is a little bit different here, but when you're persuading yourself, the same tools kind of work. You have kind of two people. You have the persuader self and the persuaded self.

I don't sign petitions anymore. Yeah. Unless it's for a cause I want to persuade myself to take the next step toward. That commitment, that active public voluntary commitment to that cause changes me in terms of the willingness to take a more active step. In their direction.

Now, you're teaching marketing, but I think a lot of the things that you're talking about apply equally well in the world of, of leadership, right? So when you're leading a team, you're leading a company, you have to persuade all the people within your company to get things done and to adopt your vision to some degree. Do you think that the disciplines of, of leadership and marketing, that there's something of a false dichotomy between these disciplines? I mean, that there's so these fundamental unities that transcend those different disciplines. Why do we think of them as so distinct? Is that just purely for organizational convenience?

I think so, because the goal, the broader goal, which is to influence people in our direction, is in common. The specific instances in which we try to get that influence, to buy our product, to sign a contract for our services, Those are discrete entities. For leadership, you want influence in the long term. You want to, to create an aura that allows people to feel comfortable moving in your direction, even though they don't have to make a purchase or anything, but they're willing to go along with your preferences because you've established yourself as a credible source of of authority for them.

Now, I think at the beginning of the book, you know, Persuasion, you use another metaphor. You got a lot of great metaphors and analogies, and one of them was that, you know, you're gonna work on hunger but with dietary restrictions. And one of the dietary restrictions was indeed ethics. You know, when we're teaching ethics, we have two approaches. One is where we kind of tack on the ethics at the end, right? So I remember taking an ethics class in business school, and it was like, all right, now that you've learned how to do all this stuff Let's think about, you know, when you don't want to do it. It seems like ethics needs to be integrated throughout every time you're learning how to do something. The question should be like, you know, when and why and under what circumstances does it make sense for you to do this? When you're teaching, how do you bring ethics into your content?

The larger topic of ethics, I don't try to resolve for people. I mean, philosophers have been banging their head against that particular wall unsuccessfully for years, but within the domain of influence, I think I have a strategy that works for me anyway. And that is, so here are these, these 7 universal principles, reciprocation and authority and social proof and commitment and consistency and scarcity. You know, the things that we've been talking about, the thing that defines an ethical versus a manipulative or ethically objectional approach is whether I use one or another of those levers of influence by re— by pointing to it versus manufacturing it, counterfeiting it, fabricating it in some way. If there really is scarcity, I'd be a fool. And not to mention the unique quality of this or the limited availability of this. If there really is authority, there are authority voices that I can point to that say these experts are praising this product. I'd be a fool not to point to them. That's all. The problem comes when people lie with statistics or make up testimonials or pay people for using or testifying in a— that's corruption. Of the principle that normally works well to steer the recipient in the correct direction for their own outcomes. That's the key. It's, can I inform people into assent versus can I trick or deceive or coerce them into assent?

So I think, I mean, we're certainly in a golden age of persuasion, but I think we also are in a golden age of awareness. Of persuasive techniques and tools. And I think kind of both of these books, even though your original intent was to provide some kind of guide to resisting, right, unwanted influence, and you've basically made a living teaching people how to do influence, I think that the resistance tools are just as important, and I've certainly found them to be incredibly useful. And I think that your original intent is certainly being fulfilled for a lot of the readers who have looked into these books and enjoyed your work.

Greg, I think that's such an important process to think through from the outset, not as you say, tag it on at the end, but think through from the outset what constitutes an ethically commendable, not just acceptable, commendable use of these principles by honestly informing people of their presence without exaggerating in any way, that this is, this exists and it exists there at a representative level. There is true social proof here. And you show them that, uh, by the way, the name, the latest research indicates that if you show them a trend in social proof, that's even more effective than just showing them the last entry in that social proof trend. So if you can honestly inform people of that, everybody wins.

Well, if the people with good products and good ideas aren't using these tools, then they're basically leaving the field open to the folks who have the bad ideas and bad products. I've certainly found a lot of utility in all of your books and your work. So Bob, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

I have to say I enjoyed our time together.

So check out this book Influence and be sure to get the latest edition, which has the extra 120 pages and also Pre-Suasion. And then you've got this other book. I think this is— we didn't even talk about this— is kind of like a— for people with less attention span, you know, yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Appreciate your time, Bob. Talk again soon.

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