3 Takeaways - How to Get People to Say Yes: The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini (#42)

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Warren Buffett recommends Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, which has sold over 5 million copies, as one of the best business books of all time. Dr. Cialdini shares his latest findings on how we can all use the tactics of influence and persuasion to get people to say “yes” to us. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be here with Dr. Robert Cialdini. He is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of Influence, which has sold over 5 million copies. Warren Buffett and his partner, Charlie Mungunger call Dr. Cialdini's book Influence one of the most important books they've ever read. Dr. Cialdini has

spent his entire career conducting scientific research on what leads people to say yes. He will share today how we can all use the tactics of influence and persuasion to get people to say yes to us. And he's also going to share how we can avoid being manipulated by others. Welcome, Bob, and thanks so much for being here today. Well, thank you. I'm pleased to be with you, Lynn. It is my pleasure. I really enjoyed your book. I was also horrified at how well the tactics work.

How did you first become interested in influence? All my life, I'd been a sucker. I've always been a pushover for the appeals of various kinds of salespeople or fundraisers who've come to my door, and I would find myself in unwanted possession of these things that I didn't really want, contributing to causes I had hardly heard about. And it occurred to me, there must be something other than the merits of the offer that got me to say yes. It must have been the way the offer and its merits were presented to me, the psychological delivery system that made the difference. And I thought that's worth

understanding and investigating for more than just reasons of self-defense, because I thought people in general would be interested in knowing about that aspect of human behavior. And it turns out I was right to think that because people stop me all the time and say, can you help me be more influential? Or could you help me defend myself against people who are trying to influence me in some form of unwelcome or undue fashion? Your principles of influence and persuasion and the simple tactics really demolish the belief that we are making decisions rationally and of our own free will. These tools are so powerful that I'm shocked that even you as a scholar of influence have

been manipulated by them. It's extraordinary. It is. And I think part of the reason that it seems unusual that even I, who studies the influence process, would be swept by them from time to time, I still am, is how primitive they are. By that, I don't mean primitive in the derogatory sense of crude or brutish. I mean fundamental. I mean elemental to the way we function. They are the things that have evolved over eons and that we are socialized into that lend themselves to assent. the things that lead us to choose to say yes to requests or proposals or recommendations. Can you tell us about reciprocity and give us some examples? I was really amused and shocked at your example of the waiter, Vincent. Yes. One of the things that we've learned about human behavior that exists in all human cultures,

there's not a single society that fails to train its members from childhood in this rule. And that is that we are obligated to give back to others who have first given to us. One study that was done in restaurants showed that if a server puts on the tray with the bill at the end of the meal, again, all the merits of the case have already been decided. The food has been ordered. It's been prepared. It's been served. It's been consumed. It's been cleared. All of that is done. If the waiter puts a mint on the tray for each diner, the server's tip goes up 3.3% because people give back to those who have given to them, even something as small as a mint. Now, to instantiate this even further, the researchers showed that if the server put two mints on the tray for each diner, tips went up 14%. What this tells me is something I advise people who say they go into a new situation, maybe a new employment situation, they

want to be more influential within this group, and they go into a room, they should not say to themselves of the people in that room, hmm, who can most help me here? The question they should ask first is, whom can I most help here? Whose circumstances can I elevate? Whose outcomes can I enhance? Because by this rule that's been installed in every one of those people in that room, they will stand ready to help in return in ways that you see especially valuable for what you need. Can you talk about the waiter, Vincent? I thought that was a really amusing example.

Yeah, what Vincent did in the situations that I observed, what I did before I wrote the book was to try to get into as many influence professions as I could possibly get access to. And I would observe what they did and take their training. Well, in the restaurant industry, people, they live on tips. There was a guy named Vincent in one of the restaurants that I observed, who was always the one who got the greatest tips. And he combined two principles, one of which is reciprocity, in how he arranged for people to give him the largest tip and buy the most food so that the tip would be figured on a larger base.

So let's say it was a large group, 8 to 10. He would reserve this particular strategy for that one. He would begin by taking orders of the first person, and whatever that person ordered, he would pause. His pen would pause over his pad. He would lean down so everyone at the table could hear, and he'd give the whole table a gift. he would say, you know what, that's not as good tonight as it usually is. And then he would recommend something slightly less expensive from the menu. What that did first of all was to say, oh, we've just received from this man, he's given

us valuable information. And besides that, he's a credible source of information because he wasn't recommending the top of the line. Instead, he was recommending something less expensive, which certified him as interested in our interests, in our outcomes, in our satisfaction here. Then, when he would volunteer, would you like me to suggest a wine for the table, or vintages with your food? Or when he would come back and recommend the desserts, people would say, of course, Vincent. You've done this for us already. You know what's good here. And Vincent would pile on additional charges to the bill. And he had already established that the percentage of the bill he would receive as a gratuity was high because of the rule for reciprocity. He would every month outstrip everyone else on the wait staff by what he did. Can you talk a bit more about how personalization can magnify

the power of reciprocation? If we want an accelerant to the principle of reciprocation, something that really increases its impact. It should be that what we give first should be something that's personalized to the preferences, the challenges, or the needs of the people who we are giving to. I have a colleague in Europe who is a speakers agent, and she represents me in Central Europe. And she has one particular client who is notoriously a late payer. He takes six months to pay his bills, the invoices. This is very difficult for her business. And she began doing something based on the rule for reciprocity that significantly reduced the amount of time that it took him to pay the invoice. She would include with the invoice

a little gift. Sometimes it was a little box of chocolates It might be a Starbucks gift card or something like this. And the time to pay went from six months to three months. Now she's using personalization. She learned that he was a modern art aficionado. He loved modern art. He was located in a different city than she was. So she went to her local modern art museum and galleries and would get these little postcards of exhibits that were shown only there.

And then she would include one of those postcards, modern art, for someone who loves modern art. She says she now gets paid immediately. And her colleagues are all asking her, how did you do this? And she said, I'm not telling them. And you found that sometimes where people or organizations create problems that somebody can solve makes people even more appreciative than flawless service. This is a bullseye's observation because there's something about solving a problem that people have with you,

your products, your service, your idea. In this case, it was a hotel. Research shows that those people who are most likely to refer your hotel or remain loyal to it, come back and be guests again, are not those who experienced a seamless time there. It was those who experienced a problem that was rapidly and personally resolved for them by the staff. And I think I know why. When there's a problem and somebody fixes the particular problem you have, it's a personalized gift to you. And let me give you an example. There was a case in a hotel that had a tennis court associated with a couple of tennis courts.

And there was a guest who went to play tennis with her two young children. And it turns out that the hotel's two children-sized tennis rackets were in use. What manager did was to send one of his assistants to a local sporting goods store just down the street, buy two more child-sized rackets, and have them for the family to play within 15 minutes. Later that day, the woman, the mother, came back and said, I just booked my entire extended family into your hotel for the 4th of July weekend because of what you did for me this morning. Now, here's the point that I think reflects your point. If there hadn't been that mistake, if, let's say, the hotel stocked four children's rackets and were just given to the family, okay, here's the two rackets, right? even have been a blip of gratitude on the mother's radar. But because there was a problem that was resolved in a personalized way, in a special way, something special was due in return. And that's indeed what the outcome was. These strategies to me are so fascinating and the practices are just simple. Can you talk about commitment and consistency? One of the tendencies we have, something that's been

socialized into us from childhood as well as the desire to or the need to reciprocate, is the need to be consistent with what we have already committed ourselves to, especially in public, what we have previously said or done. Getting people to make a small commitment, and then people want to be congruent with what they have already said or done in a consistent way. Social proof is another one of your very powerful strategies. Can you tell us about that? Very frequently in modern life, we're uncertain about the right step to take forward because there are so many choices. There's so much information that we have to deal with. And one way that we can reduce that uncertainty is to look around us at what others like us have done or are doing, something like star ratings online and so on.

In Beijing, there was a string of restaurants that put a little asterisk next to certain items on their menu. What did the asterisk stand for? It stood for, this is one of our most popular items. And each one became 13 to 20% more popular for its popularity. So, a simple thing like that can greatly increase the likelihood that people will move in a direction because it reduces their uncertainty. Now, here's the best evidence. Researchers looked at the demographic characteristics of the various kinds of people in those restaurants. There was one group that outdistanced all the others. First-time guests, people who were uncertain about what were the most recommended or most delicious items on the menu.

They were taking their cue from social proof. It wasn't empirical proof. It wasn't logical proof. The proof was that other people had done it, and that was enough. How do we get hooked by scarcity? How does that work? The scarcity principle says that people want more of those things they can have less of. If an individual can honestly inform us that something is rare or scarce or dwindling in availability, we're much more likely to move in its direction as a result. I find it just amazing that if somebody sees something as simple as two cookies in a jar and is given one of those cookies, they think that that cookie actually tastes better than if there was a jar and is given one of those cookies, they think that that cookie actually tastes better than if there was a jar with 10 cookies and they are given one of 10 cookies.

That's right. If we start out by giving people a jar of 10 cookies, have them taste and rate one of them versus a jar with just two cookies and they get to taste it. They rate the cookie that came from the jar with just two as better. They all came out of the same Nabisco box in the back room. They rate that cookie better because it was scarcer. Again, one of these things that just drives our behavior without rationale behind it, it's really all about what has always been the case and a tendency that's been socialized or evolved into us to make good decisions usually about what to choose. Liking is another one of the strategies of influence and persuasion. You call it the friendly thief. Can you tell us about it and give an example,

or some examples of how one can get people to like you? No one would be surprised to know that we prefer to say yes to those people we like. But there are two very simple strategies we can use to enhance that sense of rapport people feel with us. One is to identify genuine similarities that exist, and the other is to give genuine compliments where they are warranted. I'll give you an example where it's worked terrifically for me. I have a newspaper deliverer. His name is Carl. And every morning for years, he's rolled by my house,

and he throws my morning newspaper from the window of his car onto my driveway. And most of the time, about 75% of the time, he gets it in the middle of the driveway so it doesn't get wet from the wet watering systems on either side. And also every year he includes around the holidays a little envelope, self-addressed envelope, which I know means that it's an envelope where I can put a tip for him, a check for his service during the year. And I always do. But this past year, I included a note. I said, Carl, I want to thank you for your conscientiousness in getting my newspaper in the

middle of the driveway most of the time so it doesn't get wet. Lynn, in the past, he would get it in the middle about 75% of the time. So far this year, 100%. That is phenomenal. So compliment a lot and compliment a behavior that you want more of. Precisely right. With that compliment, give people a reputation to live up to. So trustworthiness is another one of your principles. What are the strategies to get someone to trust us? There's one particular form of communicator that is the most effective we have ever uncovered in behavioral science. It's the credible communicator, the person who has two elements. One is knowledge, authority, background, experience, credentials, these kinds of things. The other is trustworthiness, the

idea that this expert information that this person is providing is being offered in an honest, unbiased way. Not designed to line their own pockets, but to accurately depict reality for us. And it turns out that it's possible to get instant trustworthiness by using a small device that most of us don't recognize, and that is the use of weaknesses in our case, of drawbacks in our case, that we mention immediately before we deliver our strongest argument. So, if I am trying to convince you to a particular point of view, and I'm giving you all the strongest arguments, the most compelling features of it, the most attractive aspects of it, if you don't see me as a trustworthy person yet,

those things aren't getting through. You're still not certain that I'm worthy of processing that information and believing it fully. But if before I mention all of my strongest arguments, I mention a weakness, I mention a drawback in my case. Now, you see me as trustworthy because I'm first of all knowledgeable about the pros and the cons, but secondly, I'm honest enough to talk about the weaknesses as well as the strengths. And now when you present your strongest arguments, I will be readied to believe you fully because you've shown me that you are a credible source of information. That strategy produces instant trustworthiness. And I'm going to have a suggestion here. There's a place for your strongest argument inside the case that you make for it. It's fully the next thing you say. That should be the place for your strongest point. I was fascinated that Warren Buffett does that.

Warren Buffett does it on the first or second page of text of every one of his letters to shareholders that he writes every year by describing something that didn't go well that year, a mistake they made. And he says, we know better now. We know not to do that ever again. Then he describes all the strengths. He establishes his credibility, his honesty, and then I believe the next thing he says every time because he's just shown me his honesty. And that's where the strengths go. And then he says, well, let's talk about all the things we've done right. Can you tell us about the contrast principle, which is another one of the strategies that you talk about that can be undetectable to most people. Yes. For example, it's a perceptual feature of us that

when we are presented with two items consecutively, and they are relatively different from one another. Let's say I ask you to lift a heavy object first, a bowling ball, and then I ask you to lift a much lighter object, a baseball. You will experience the baseball as lighter than you would if I hadn't asked you to pick up the bowling ball first. In contrast to the heavier object, the lighter one seems lighter than it actually is. This is something that is employed, for example, by car salesmen, who first get you to decide on the overall price, the base price for a new car, many thousands of dollars. And then they will suggest upgrades of one sort, better wheel covers or a better sound system. So compared to the many thousand dollar price that you've already been made to think about as the price, this new one seems trivial in comparison. And people stand in amazement at the end of the deal with all of these

upgrades, how the base price has ballooned out of proportion because they bought all these things that were presented one at a time after the larger price was established, the base price. And they blame themselves for this. The customer blames themselves and they don't realize that the contrast principle has been used on them. Precisely right. The rejection and retreat strategy is very similar to me, again, because the person on the receiving end doesn't realize what's happened. Can you tell us about that? It's the tendency to, because of the rule for reciprocation and the rule for contrast working together, here's a technique that works very well. In fact, my research team did it. We walked up to people on campus at

the university, students, and said, we're here from the Arizona Blood Services Organization, and we're asking for people who'd be willing to serve as a long-term blood donor to come in every six weeks for two years and donate blood. Would you be willing to do that? That was a very large request. Everybody said no. Two years? I don't even know where I'll be. I can't commit to that. And then we said, oh, if you can't do that, would you be willing to give a single unit of blood tomorrow at the campus blood drive? We had asked people as well, just for that small request, would you be willing to just walk up without the larger one? If we we did that we got 33 percent of

the people said yes i will do it but if we started with the large request and then retreated to the small request smaller request it wasn't a small request but it was smaller 55 percent 55% show up at the blood center. They drain their pain. So amazing. Loss aversion is another one of your principles and strategies. And it was so interesting to me that using loss aversion and framing something as, quote, we have a deal, all you have to do is agree to this proposal, unquote, is so much more effective than saying, quote, all you have to do is agree to this proposal, and then we'll have a deal. Can you explain that? It has to do with something that I know one of your previous guests, Daniel Kahneman, has found to be the case, and it is that inside our tendencies,

we are more motivated to avoid losses than to obtain gains of the very same thing. This fits under the idea of scarcity, because loss is the ultimate form of scarcity. It means you can't have it anymore. But I have a friend who's a divorce attorney, who also does mediation. And she will get couples into her offices, one per room. They can't be in the same room very often because the interactions break down. And they are trusting her to mediate a deal between them. And very frequently, there's a last issue that they can't get beyond. And it torpedoes the whole process and they wind up in divorce court where they didn't want to be in the first place. And she asked me, Bob, what could I do to get these people to agree on that last issue that they're just stuck on. And I said, well, what do you say to

people when you bring from one room to the other that last offer? And she says, I say to them, if you will agree to this last proposal, we will have a deal. I said, try this, Sandy. Go into the room and say, we have a deal. All you have to do is agree to this proposal. I saw her at a party a few months later. She came up to me. She said, Bob, this is amazing. This change works every time. And I said, Sandy, come on.

Nothing works every time. She put her hand on my arm, Bob, every time. Why? Because if you say, all you have to do is agree to this proposal and we will have a deal, it means you are obtaining that deal. If you say to them, we have a deal, all you have to do is say yes to this proposal. If you say no, you're losing that deal. And Daniel Kahneman's research suggests you'll be two and a half times as motivated to say yes to avoid a loss than to obtain the gain of the very same thing. Bob, so far we've been talking about individual strategies and tactics. Can we shift slightly, and can you tell us the strategies and tactics that could be used if, let's say, we're the

seller of a house? How do we get buyers to raise their prices? And the flip side of that, let's assume that we're the buyer of a house. How do we get the seller to reduce their price? In both instances, I would use competition. That is to say, if you're the seller, you can honestly tell people how many others have been looking at the house and how many real estate agents have called you about it and so on. Give them honest information that there are others who are interested in this. So you have two things working for you there. One is social proof. A lot of other people are interested in the house.

And you have scarcity. You might lose it. All right? You have loss aversion. In the case of the buyer, you honestly say, we're looking at several places and we want to choose the one that would give us the best overall deal. So now the seller is in competition against other sellers and has to recognize that they have to sharpen their pencil and provide a better offer than these others might. In both cases, if you do that honestly, you've invoked the rule of scarcity and competition for scarce resources. Interesting. What are the biggest mistakes

that you see people making and how do we protect ourselves from all of these remarkably effective strategies being used on us? That I'm going to answer as two separate questions. Here's the biggest mistake I see people making when they try to be influential, when they try to be more persuasive. They try to identify a favorite strategy, a favorite approach that they can take. They ask me, so what's the strongest, what's the most powerful, what's the best procedure I should use to get people to move in my direction? Well, I answer that by describing a research program that a colleague of mine initiated. He's a marketing professor, to find the single most effective influence approach, the one that works across the widest range of situations and so on,

that will be most effective because it's the most powerful. I saw him at a conference and he said, how's it going with that? He said, well, I found it. I found the single most effective influence approach. It is not to have a single influence approach. That's a fool's game. To think that the same strategy is going to work in all situations, on all audiences, with all manner of previous histories with you and so on. No, that's naive. What you do is you look for what's already there in the situation. Is there real authority there that you can point to? Is there real social proof? Is there real scarcity? Is there a real commitment that people have already made to a feature that's part of what

you have to offer? You bring that to the surface. You look for something that's there and you raise it to consciousness. That way, you're using something whose engine is already running. It just requires that you connect it to an individual's consciousness. And it strikes me that that allows us to be ethical in all of this. We're not fabricating or creating or counterfeiting one or another of these principles dishonestly. We're simply pointing to something and allowing the power of that rule that normally steers people correctly to infuse our request. If you're trying to be influential, that would be.

Now, what's my advice to people who want to recognize and resist and be aware of these principles? First of all, you have to know what those principles are. But it turns out just knowing those principles doesn't cover all the bases. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Presuasion that has to do with the moment before a communicator sends his or her message. What can they do in the moment before that causes people to be sympathetic with the message before they've encountered it? What I'd say is to be sure that you're properly defended against these things.

Don't just look at what this person is saying inside the message. Look at what they've arranged for you before they've sent that message. Look at what's happened before the message is sent. Before I ask for your three takeaways, is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you haven't already discussed? A lot of people have asked me how they can get access to this information. We now have a training program at my website, influenceatwork.com, that provides a workshop on how people can learn to be ethical and effective at the same time. It's an online, on-demand workshop, so people might be interested in that. And last, what are the three key takeaways or insights you'd like to leave

the audience with today, Bob? I'm going to suggest one takeaway that has three dimensions to it. I have a colleague, when his son turned 13, he wanted to gather advice, my colleague wanted to gather, from his friends who thought might have good things to suggest that he could tell his son to do to equip him to be a young adult. And here was mine. go into a new situation where you don't know the people there, expect the best of them and from them because that allows you to be generous with them. And that generosity has three important downstream consequences. First of all, the liking rule. They like you more for being generous with them. Second, the rule for reciprocation. They will give generosity back to you. And finally, commitment and consistency. In the process of seeing themselves committing themselves to you with this generous set

of outcomes that they provide you. They will want to be consistent with that into the future. And now you have two people interacting with one another who like each other and are committed to generosity toward one another. I think that's a good place for that young man to start off as a platform for his social interactions. Bob, this has been wonderful. I loved your book. There's so much more in it that I would love to discuss with you, but we are out of time. I highly recommend your book and just want to say thank you. This has been terrific. Well, I have to say I enjoyed our interaction.

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