Robert Cialdini reflects on his academic career, from the unexpected success of his book Influence to founding Influence at Work to teach ethical applications. He describes the daily rewards of research, teaching, and mentoring, and why publishing remains essential to his identity as an academic.
What I think I love about this whole process is something I've loved about the academic life from my start. Always learning something new every day. There's an opportunity to enrich myself not just monetarily, but intellectually every day. And this combination of roles and responsibilities gives me that opportunity. There is a book that I am known for. It's called Influence, and it has been more successful than I could have sensibly imagined back when I wrote it. So I'm very gratified about that. So what's happened after that book was published is even though it was written for the consumer, how to recognize and resist influence tactics when they're used on you and someone welcome way the people who called me were business people who wanted to know how to employ the psychology of influence. And so what developed was a set of talks that I do, workshops that we do. My company called Influence at Work, is responsible for on the ethical use of influence, how business people can be more successful moving people in their direction while being entirely moral and ethically responsible about it. You know, I would call myself an academic, and that includes being a researcher, being a teacher, being a mentor to students, and also a writer. To stay in the role, it's necessary to publish, and to publish, you have to write. So all of those things combined it Sam Sa.
