[S5E7] Influence by Robert Cialdini

Influence by Robert Cialdini identifies the major elements of persuasion. Its ideas can help you be more influential at work and more scrupulous in your financial dealings. Join us as we discuss this blockbuster work on social psychology. Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. But before we get to the book, let's introduce ourselves.

I'm David Short, I'm a product manager.

I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief research officer at a Washington D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.

And I'm David Kopec. I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. This month we read the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, one of the best selling books on social psychology of all time. Influence explains the essential ingredients that make what it calls compliance professionals successful, namely seven levers of reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, commitment and unity. In this episode, we'll explain all seven levers, share some of Cialdini's numerous examples of each and some areas where they have applied in our own careers. We'll also discuss the merits of the book as a whole and what we most got out of reading Influence. Let's start by talking about the author and giving a general overview of the book. David, can you tell us a little bit about who Robert Cialdini is and what the book Influence is about?

Yeah. So Dr. Cialdini is a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State. He's also had all kinds of roles at various universities, Stanford, et cetera, across the country. He received his BS from UW Milwaukee and a PhD in Social Psychology from UNC and also did some postgraduate work at Columbia and other universities. So he is a widely cited expert in marketing and influence. And this book, Influence, Influence, really has been a bestseller in the field for decades since it came out originally in 1984. In order to write the book, Cialdini actually spent years applying for jobs in these fields that he considered to be experts on influence, like used car salesmen, telemarketing firms, fundraising organizations. And so he really went through their recruiting and training process to learn how people in these specialized sales positions, you know, use techniques in order to influence people. And he then translates that into the, the levers that you covered earlier. And it's really a, a very deep dive into the world of marketing and influence and how, how we can convince others of things.

And I personally Love how he went undercover with some of these different calling firms and used car dealerships. It seemed like he was really getting some good insights from the field. And at one point he shares an anecdote where he was getting some of the insights from a training. And afterwards he went to them, and he didn't expect that they would let him use the anecdotes that he learned and the training modules that he learned in the book. But going to one of the levers of influence, authority, when he mentioned that he's a professor, the trainers actually became flattered and said, wow, a professor coming down from the ivory tower would actually want to use some of our training anecdotes and training vignettes in his own book. This is fantastic. Go ahead with it. And I just think as a social science researcher, it was just excellent of him to go in the field and actually hear from professionals, compliance professionals, who are doing this all the time.

Well, speaking of compliance professionals, Kevin, tell us what those actually are. What is cialdini mean by compliance professional?

Yeah, I'm not sure if he coined that term. It was something that I hadn't really heard before. I've said persuasion professionals in the past. Compliance professionals in his scope, really anyone whose job it is to get people to say yes, whether to contracts and deals, products, services, offers, any actions, Right. These job roles include salespeople, marketers, fundraisers, recruiters, political campaign operatives, nonprofit executives, and basically anyone who draws on the power of shortcut triggering cues and automatic cues. This almost goes back to Kahneman with the system one thinking, right? If you're using shortcut triggering automatic cues to achieve an objective, then you might be a compliance professional. Or if you're even using those levers of influence to help someone achieve one of their own objectives. Right? Even in that case, like therapists, psychologists could be seen as life coaches and counselors. Right. What's good about the book is that anyone is really a specialist in compliance in different situations. If you are in a personal relationship, if you're in a job situation where, you know, even if you're not a compliance professional, you're still using one or more of those principles of influence, you too are a specialist in compliance or persuasion, right?

There are very few jobs where being more influential would not be helpful. Okay, now we're going to go through all seven of the levers of influence one at a time. And for each of them, we're going to discuss what the lever is about, talk about some of the examples from the book, and we'll also talk about Some examples from our own careers where that lever has been important. Let's start with the first lever, which is reciprocation. David, tell us a little bit about what reciprocation is in the context of the book.

So reciprocation is what it sounds like, and I'm sure we all, we all know the word, but the idea that once someone has given something to you, you feel obligated to give something in return. And so the book really discusses this as a social rule, that we have this obligation to return favors. The thought is that this is ultimately deeply embedded in human society, that there were evolutionary reasons why you'd want to work together and return favors. People hunted at various different times and one person gives you food and then you give it back down the line. It's actually evolutionarily advantageous to be a sharing culture. And that has ultimately led to, you know, cultural indoctrination of this. We teach our children that, you know, sharing is important, that we want to return favors, that if this kid invited you, then you need to invite them back. And the interesting thing is that the gifts really don't have to be valuable or even requested to have this influence on people. And I guess what Cialdini sort of warns you about is you need to recognize when this is being used as a sales tactic and not necessarily feel compelled to return something that was being used to try and trick you into something where maybe they were going to make quite a lot of money on you and they were giving you very little upfront. So I think it was a really eye opening first chapter and really brought me into the book, made me feel like I was really going to learn a lot from Cialdini's experiences. Some of the examples he gives in the book are around free samples. You know, you receive something, you know it has little value, but ultimately you feel more obligation to end up buying that product the next time you see it on the shelf, even if it might be quite a bit more expensive than the one that you never received the free option from, that it might be, you know, of equal quality concessions during negotiations is a big one that I found interesting. And Cialdini highlights the Watergate example, actually, which is that at the time of the Watergate crisis in the Nixon administration, there had been a series of negotiations. And so the original proposal for Watergate had been like dramatically larger. I think there were going to be like hundreds of people involved. It was going to cost tens of millions of dollars. There were going to be vehicles, you know, flying over certain areas in order to collect information, et cetera. And so by the time they'd gotten down to the actual final proposal for Watergate, it was only a million dollars.

But.

And while it seems kind of crazy to us that there was this back office White House deal for a million dollars for everyone in the room, it really was a much more reasonable proposal than what had been there originally. Interestingly, in the anecdote that they share in the book, there was one guy in the room who hadn't been involved in the earlier two negotiations, and he was the one person who was like, this seems crazy, I don't think we should do this. But the other more influential people had been there for all the earlier negotiations and were ultimately willing to, to go forward with Watergate as a result of, you know, Cialdini thinks this, this concession standard.

Thanks for that, David. And you know, I had an example of free samples today. I was going around Costco on a busy Saturday and I have my kids with me and you know, you get them to try a little free bit of some food and they want more of that food if they like it even a little bit. It's obviously, it's very effective at Costco because when you go to Costco on a busy day, there's like 50 of these stations giving out these free samples. I will say, of course, we're all aware of that, right? And a lot of these examples in the book, and a lot of these seven levers of influence are obvious. So when we go through them, maybe it's reminding you and when you read the book about how effective they are, and Cialdini backs it up with research, he provides studies and real world statistics that prove that a lot of these levers of influence work. So when we go through some of these and you say to yourself, oh, that's pretty obvious. Yes, I knew about that. Well, that's actually a lot of the book. Let's talk about examples of reciprocation from our own careers. So, David, Kevin, in your working life, what's been a time where somebody has given you something and you've given them something back as a result, or the other way around?

The clearest example that really resonated or jumped out for me when I was reading this was around concessions and negotiations. So I was involved with a nonprofit called America Needs you where we would mentor first generation college students in professional development. And the big program was centered around a two year commitment that you would come, you know, every Saturday for nine, I think it was nine months a year. You'd come Every Saturday, twice a month the first year and then once a month the second year. So it's like, you know, I don't know, 35 plus like events you're committing to that are basically full day. But we also had a program for mentors, just called a career coach, where you just needed to show up for one day. And it was just an incredibly effective way to close people on like a one, one day volunteering to like first ask them if they would do two years of commitment and then be like, oh, but you know, do you want to just show up one time? Like almost everyone does say yes to doing the one time and it does actually get them exposure to it. And then maybe the next year they do decide, you know, I really did, you know, enjoy coming. I came a couple other times and I am willing to make that commitment. But having that negotiation tactic was, was super helpful.

Yeah, I'd say on my end, you know, this is not necessarily from professional career, but back in college when I was president of our independent newspaper, we used to actually send out fundraising solicitations with a kind of return addressed stamped envelope. And we would make a big deal of the fact that we've paid for postage for the return envelope for folks to donate. And one, you know, the benefit to the recipient was that it made life easier for them, they didn't have to put a stamp on it. But two, in doing so, we recognized that we were perhaps creating a feeling of indebtedness that oh, if these college kids took the time to put a stamped envelope on, I should at least send them back 5, 10, $20. And at one point we would also even send issues of our paper in first class mail. So imagine we'd put it in a nice manila envelope with a stamp on it because we wanted that issue to arrive to you, you know, in two to three days as opposed to second or third class mail, which may take two to three weeks. And by then the news wouldn't be news anymore. Right. So there were ways that we made little reciprocal benefits to our readership and to our subscribers. But we also knew that they might feel a bit indebted to us and be more likely to support us in our mission.

And that mirrors an example that Cialdini gives in the Book of Charity. Sending people address labels or even sometimes this is bizarre, but some kind of monetary value in the mail because they expect that that's going to feel, make people feel indebted just as those self addressed stamped envelopes did for your newspaper and get people to be More likely to open their wallets because you open their wallets for them. It's amazing how something like that can work. Okay, that was our first lever of influence, reciprocity. Let's go to the second. Liking. What is liking? I think we all know what liking is, but what's it in the context of influence?

Yeah. And one of the things I like about this book is that everyone will have experienced one of these different levers of influence or has used them in the past, both for positives and perhaps negatives. But they're so simple. And liking, Right. It sounds simple, but the way that he articulates it is it stands on the fact that people like to say yes to individuals they like. He mentions that liking can come from physical attractiveness, similarity of life experience, similarity of looks and intangibles. It can come from compliments, prolonged contact and cooperation, and even some conditioning and association. Right. So when he is giving us some examples of what liking means as a lever of influence, there's some subtle ones and there's some more in your face ones. Right? So he mentions this used car dealer, Joe Gerard, who was one of the top used car dealers in the nation at one point, and he would literally send holiday cards and quarterly kind of random I like you cards to his customers to cement the fact that he likes them and remind them of the fact that they probably like him, too. And if you like your used car dealer, if you like your professional services consultant, if you like your cable company, which many of us don't, you're going to be more likely to say yes to them, more likely to do business with them. Another fun one that I thought was interesting was Tupperware parties. So within Tupperware parties, Chaldani notes that a Tupperware party, remember when you would go to one of your neighbor's homes, there would be a Tupperware representative there with a big treasure box of different, you know, Tupperware products. And this applies to makeup parties and spa parties and all that as well. But they would be there. But the main draw was the likability of the host. Right. The person whose house you've been invited to, your neighbor. And Tupperware parties actually contain all of the seven levers of influence in different ways. And Chaldani notes that. But the most important one is liking that the guests like their host. They want to represent them well, right? Their friend hosting the party. And if they like him or her, they know that they make a profit from the sales. And that was the key to Tupperware. Absolutely. Blowing up that sales channel, that marketing channel, to the point where Tupperware wanted to limit their distribution through Target because they recognized that people might go into Target and only pick up one piece of Tupperware. But when they go to Tupperware parties, we have this unique opportunity that draws on all seven levers of influence to raise our revenue there. So it was really cool hearing about some of the specific ways that liking factors the influence model.

And one simple one that he backs up with research that you mentioned earlier is physical attractiveness. And I found this kind of interesting that if you just have a more physically attractive spokesperson for a product or salesperson, more people will buy the product. Now this is obvious, of course, if you've ever watched TV commercials, because we don't put like your average salesperson from the company on the TV commercial. You hire an actor not because the actor is a brilliant actor, but because they're good looking compared to the average salesperson on the floor. So physical attractiveness, unfortunately, you know, they say, people sometimes say, oh, you know, well, that person was born lucky because they look so beautiful. Right. Apparently the research backs that up to some extent. I'm sure there's a lot of negative things that come with being physically attractive too. But in terms of your influence, according to Cialdini's research, it actually goes a long way. Let's talk about some examples of liking in our own careers. I'll start this time. Something that's always gone well for me is interviews. When I job interviews, if I make it to the round where it's in person, I usually do pretty well. And I'm not always the best candidate in terms of my experience or in terms of my intelligence. But I'm often the most pleasant candidate. When I go for a job interview, I pull out all the stops to be as pleasant as possible. I remember when I was graduating from college, it was a tough time in the economy. It was 2008 was the fall of my senior year and there was of course the big financial crisis that just happened. And at our college everyone went through what was called corporate recruiting, where kind of big corporations would come up to the college to try to get seniors to join them. And usually most people got jobs through corporate recruiting. But that year, because Lehman Brothers had just fallen and Bear Stearns and everything that was going on, people were doing terribly in corporate recruiting and I did not have the highest GPA and I was not the most talented person amongst my friends or amongst my fraternity. We're going to talk about fraternities a Little later. But I was the first person to get a job. Nobody else was getting jobs, and I got a job. Why? I was very pleasant in the interview for the job I ultimately got. But I made them laugh at the end of it. I made myself likable. I might not have been the most articulate. I might not have even been the most talented. I certainly wasn't. But I was the most likable, probably of the people who were interviewing that day. And that's gone a long way for me. Just trying to be a pleasant person, being nice, being considerate.

Well, Kopeck, I would have hired you right away. And I will say that that makes a lot of sense to me, because you can train competence, but you can't train likability and pleasantness. Right. And to be able to find a coworker or subordinate who is both competent and that you like is a special thing.

Well, you can to some extent. We read a previous book, prior episode, how to Win Friends and Influence People, and there are some simple techniques that I always employ in interviews that are very effective, and they're really simple. Like, smile, like, honestly listen to the other person and ask them questions and be actually interested in what their responses are. So just making myself as likable as possible in interviews has gone a long way for me. What about for the two of you? What have been some examples of liking in your own careers?

So I would say it's. It's not so much an example of liking, but one of the anecdotes that he mentioned, Cialdini, that I liked was quote, subjects become fonder of the people and things they experience while they were eating. Right. And I feel that oftentimes in presentations that I'm giving, I am always the last speaker to go before lunch starts. I've never had the opportunity to actually speak or present data during lunch, but it feels like I'm often the person that goes to that hungriest moment before lunch. And so I will often stand up, and as an icebreaker, I will make sure to mention that I am aware that I'm the one thing standing between you and that delicious buffet lunch outside. And as a result, I will be even more efficient and even more respectful of your time. Right. So I'm acknowledging that I recognize this, and I'm working hard to make that time as short and relevant as possible. And I feel like that always kind of gets a chuckle, a laugh, and helps break the ice. And, you know, the fact that I'm bringing up food probably makes them a bit happier. As well to a more professional sort of story or strategy that I have. You know, as a focus group moderator. I've done hundreds of focus groups, and I go to great lengths in every group, regardless of how niche and audience we may have, to make sure to demonstrate similarity with my subjects, like what Cialdini talks about. So, for example, for apartment renter focus groups, I'm making sure that they know that I was a renter for 10 years, that I'm considering renting again soon. And I try to draw those similarities with them. Right. And once they understand that, they tend to open up more. Right. It helps us establish a rapport. And I think that goes a long way towards, you know, towards building that trust where they can respond openly and candidly and really give those rich results that myself and the clients are looking for.

Thanks for that, Kevin. Okay, we're up to our third lever of influence, social proof. David, what's social proof?

So social proof really is just looking to the behavior of others in order to decide what is right. So really trusting the crowd. People are most influenced by social proof from people they view as similar to themselves. And we'll kind of get into this a little bit more in a later lever as well, but it can definitely be a good heuristic, but it can also be definitely manipulated. And TLDD warns us about a lot of the ways in which we might be misled by this. So fake reviews on Amazon or other web pages, or like a classic one, that if you see a bunch of five star reviews and a whole lot, it may give you a lot of sense of social proof. A lot of people really like this product, but if a bot actually created it, then you're taking the wrong message from that information. It can also lead to inaction and emergencies. So it's another sort of negative to social proof. The crowd will not necessarily respond to the person who yells out. If no one seems to be reacting, it really does take that one person that starts reacting to then get the crowd to start to react. And then. And then it'll cause more and more. But if there's no one reacting to something, it'll give people a sense that, oh, it must not be a problem.

He called that pluralistic indifference or something like that. Right?

Short.

I thought that was a really great term that I'd never heard before.

I don't remember, but I trust you.

But I thought, like, putting a name to that, Putting a name to different things that, you know, exist and you've experienced was one of the benefits of this book. I thought, and it would help me to articulate in the future what. What's going on.

Absolutely. And he does give a whole lot of examples of ways in which social proof are used to influence us in a lot of positive ways, in some ways. So there's classic things like a laugh track that many of us may say that we don't like it, but it does give you confidence to know, oh, that's where the joke was, and to laugh along with the show. And shows with laugh tracks are more popular than the ones that don't have them. While we have kind of, like changed away from that to some degree now, I do wonder whether that data, like, is still accurate. It certainly was true for a long time, and it does certainly still exist. So there's definitely an audience for that, even if the social mores may have changed a little bit. Other examples of, you know, sort of ways people might trick you with social proof. And in some ways, it's positive. They're tip jars, the seating of the tip jar, so, you know, the waiter really does just put, you know, a five and some ones in so that people do start to add more money to that. If it's a completely empty thing or there's only a couple pennies, then the chances of them getting tipped are a lot lower than when they feel like, oh, there's been tipping that's already taking place.

One of the examples he gives that I really liked and that we all probably see is about Netflix and how Netflix for years was so private and, you know, held their viewership stats close to the chest. But at one point, they finally tested and they released some of the viewership stats online. And then now they've actually integrated into their user interface, right, where they show the top 10 shows and the top 10 movies being watched by your peers. And I've oftentimes found myself falling not into that trap, but just using that top 10 as where I go to first to figure out what I would watch for a mindless, you know, nighttime Netflix session. And, you know, I'd say some of these examples and some of these social proof examples he's giving are not necessarily nefarious. And one of the things he mentions is that it's ethical. It's still positive in some cases to appeal to this convenience shortcut system, one like Kahneman would describe it, thinking for something like mindless Netflix watching. The difference is when you're getting scammed by someone appearing to be an expert, and that's where things get a little nefarious.

He gives a Lot of negative examples in the book, too. You know, I think it makes the book very memorable, but it is also kind of jarring when you're reading this book and suddenly you see an example about Jonestown. Jonestown was this crazy cult where everyone drank a bunch of Kool Aid to basically commit suicide. And he goes into the idea that, well, why were people willing to drink Kool Aid to commit suicide? Just because some leader said drink the Kool Aid to commit suicide, he says, is because people became more comfortable because they already saw other people doing it. So it was a kind of social proof. Well, if other people who are just like me and are in this cult and believe the same things I do are willing to do it, then I'm going to be willing to do it too.

And remember, the big thing there, too was some of the cult members had accepted gifts or generosities from the leader, and that was the lever of reciprocity. And that there were some of the folks who got away were the ones who had always kind of shrugged off some of those offers and gifts, and so they didn't feel that reciprocity. And then when it came time to drink the Kool Aid, the social proof was everyone who was stepping up was looking to their peers to see if there would be a reaction of, no, don't do that, or folks reacting when they saw someone drinking the Kool Aid and then seizing off in the field. And because that didn't exist, everyone just drank the Kool Aid.

I'll say that it definitely made the chapter memorable, but it also was kind of jarring. And he doesn't just go into Jonestown, but he goes into the concept that suicides to some extent are contagious. And he cites the research of another psychologist who studied evidence that when a suicide is promoted in the media. So there's a front page newspaper article about it, or there's a TV show segment about it on the news that other people in that area who are of similar age are more likely to also commit suicide. So he then goes into the ethics of whether or not there actually should be stories about suicides, because they might actually lead to certain people who are on the edge and not actually necessarily going to do it. But once they got the social proof that, oh, other people like me are doing it, I'm more likely to do it too. And they, according to Cialdini, these studies are well grounded, they're statistically sound, they're statistically significant. There really is this effect. I know that there was a lot in the Media about a Netflix show a couple of years ago which featured some teenagers committing suicide. And then that there was a rise after that show came out in suicides amongst Teenagers. So I found these, these very powerful examples made the chapter very memorable. But I just want to warn readers of the book that, you know, they also can be very jarring. You're reading this book and it all seems like, oh, we're talking about sales, we're talking about finance professionals, use car salesmen. And then suddenly there's these examples about this very serious topic. And if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, you might want to skip over the social proof.

And he sort of gets fixated on it for many more pages than most of the examples.

Yeah, yeah, it really went for a while. Okay, let's go to some more positive examples of social proof from our own careers. So one that I've really seen in my career is how different companies have a different dress code culture. And I don't just mean the formal dress code. Like for example, where I work right now, it actually says in the employee handbook, we're not allowed to wear shorts. Okay. I don't just mean that. I mean that people tend to dress alike who work in the same place. And I've noticed that you actually get more respect when you kind of match the dress code, match the milieu of what you're expected to wear. So I've had jobs where everybody wears a collared shirt every day and most people wear ties. And I found it was beneficial to me to follow that. Especially when you're kind of a low level employee and you're kind of working your way up or you're new somewhere. You don't necessarily want to be the person who sticks out unless you have a lot of confidence and you have a lot of enthusiasm that makes that kind of fit with you and your personality style. I found it's much easier to actually go with the flow and by matching other people's dress. Actually, people I've noticed actually respect you more when you say something. This is my experience. I'll give you a very specific example. I worked at a college in Vermont. Vermont is a very laid back place and everyone there wears casual clothes kind of all the time. Even at work, you'll have a few people who will wear dress clothes, but most people are actually wearing T shirts, maybe polos on a day to day basis, even the professors. And now I've moved down to Pennsylvania to a college where the dress is significantly more conservative. And I don't know if I'm just imagining it or not, but days where I dress more conservatively, I feel like my colleagues respect me a little bit more than days where I dress more like I would have dressed in Vermont. I think that's a real thing. And I think workplace dress culture is an example of social influence. What do you think?

Well, remember, Cialdini even said himself that in that one experiment, pedestrians were more likely to follow a suited business dressed person into traffic than they were a person dressed like one of your fellow Vermonters, Kopeck. So I think you're onto something.

Yeah. And what are some examples of this from your own careers of social proof?

So I would say, you know, as folks know, I'm, I work in commercial real estate research and advisory services. I also have a lot of experience in just typical B2B and B2C, you know, management consulting and research. And so I put out my team and I put out thousands of survey invitations and focus group invitations. And I would say starting with something very simple. When we're sending out these invitations to participate in a survey, we're really selling participation in that survey. Right. We are marketing participation in that survey to benefit our client, ourselves, our insights, our ideas, and get feedback. So when we're sending out those surveys, I typically will make sure to include a mention that, you know, hundreds of your colleagues, hundreds of your peers are taking the same survey, which is truthful. And to back that point up, I will include anonymized feedback and bullet points that we're getting from folks who have taken the survey so far. Right. At the end of each of my surveys, I typically have a comment box and I will harvest from that comment box positives that people are saying, oh, this is a very important survey. It was great to provide feedback. And I'll actually put that in the reminder emails encouraging our respondents to actually click in and take the survey. Right. And so that's them receiving some social proof and some validation from others who have taken the survey. The second example I'll give is from the book with Cialdini. And, you know, we'll mention this later, but one of the good things, you know, this, this book has gone through a few different, you know, published versions and in the most recent version, there's sort of reader notes and reader letters that he received of readers who have been detecting or employing the different levers of influence in their professional and personal lives. And one of them was a reader from a Toyota dealership. They mentioned how they put an ad in, you know, online or in the local paper essentially trying to recruit top talent for their Toyota dealership. But they also noticed a spike in sales as they were fielding that ad. Right. And the reasoning being that some of these potential car buyers saw that the Toyota dealership was hiring the best caliber sales folks, the best caliber mechanics, the best caliber, you know, business folks and operations folks, and they wanted to buy a car from the company, from the dealership that hires the best. It's interesting. So I've actually advised clients in the past to make the Careers tab on their website as prominent as possible and make sure that that content is immaculate, compelling and that it's customer facing, not just talent facing. You know, particularly in the B2B world, I would see that clients will be more willing to work with a company they sense is soliciting and finding and hiring the best. Right. Because ultimately if they are searching out the best talent, incentivizing them, well, they have that robust Careers page. That client will think that those same people will service them and give them a better experience and give them better value. Right. And you know, this also kind of goes in with what Cialdini was saying, is that people respond more to information or messaging when they don't think that they're the intended audience. So if you're an everyday prospect or a client of a professional services firm, let's say, and you click on their talent page, you don't think that you're the intended audience. The intended audience is meant to be the people they're going to try to hire. Right. But if you're seeing messaging on that page that speaks to you, that's going to be even more impactful because you didn't think you were the intended audience and yet you're being persuaded and touched by that material.

Thanks for that, Kevin. Okay, we have three more levers of influence to get to, but before we get to them, just a quick ad break. Thanks to our friends at Audible for sponsoring today's episode. You know, Audible, it's a great place to listen to audiobooks like the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, which you can check out right now on Audible. In fact, you can get a free trial of Audible as well as some credits towards your first purchase by going to audibletrial.com biz. That's audibletrial.com biz. If you go there using our special link, you'll get those great benefits and you'll be able to check out Influence right away on audible.com for free. So check out the link. It's also in the show notes audibletrial.com biz and start your free trial of Audible today. All right, let's get back to the levers of influence. We're up to the next one, which is authority. Kevin, another one that had some kind of negative examples in the book, which we'll get into. What's authority?

Indeed? There are some tough examples that Cialdini seems to fixate on, but before that, to get into authority. So, you know, in Cialdani, Cialdini's, you know, scope of the book, it manifests in two ways, right? Whether it's one, being the authority with the power to change someone's job, role, position, standing right, being the authority, being the boss. The second example is being an authority, right? Having expertise, knowledge, or firsthand experience in a given subject, right. The general principle is that people will be more likely to say yes because experts recommend it, or they'll be more likely to say yes because their boss or someone in a position of power recommends it. So when we look at some examples from the book, this is where I mentioned that he kind of fixates on some depressing or dark examples. He dedicates a lot of page space to this as well. But Cialdini goes into this teacher learner authority voltage experiment by social scientists Abraham and Milgram, where the teacher who's a research subject has to quiz the learner, who is also presumably a research subject, and they also have a authority researcher in a white lab coat who is one of the social science researchers. As far as that, that teacher subject knows. The teacher subject quizzes the learner on impossible questions, a series of impossible to answer questions. And whenever they get it wrong, the teacher has to trigger a shock for the learner. And, you know, even as this progresses and the voltage levels go up, the authority researcher keeps telling them to shock. And what they found is that the teacher often does. Almost 100% of the time, the teacher research subject will keep hitting the shock, even going so far as 400 or more volts. Right. Luckily for that learner, the experiment's really a setup, right? The learner who's in the box getting shocked for getting questions wrong in most of the iterations is a plant from the research team, right? And it's not getting shocked, but Cialdini describes the screams and the tremors and everything that this poor teacher subject is seeing as they're shocking this person, right? And they're, they're, they're deploying all this pain, but yet still doing it because the authority in the lab coat is telling them to. It's that unfortunate Kind of I was just following orders excuse. And somehow all of the respondents, all the subjects in this experiment keep doing it. And Cialdini uses this to, to show the power of authority, but it gets pretty drawn out. And I think he describes how the teacher subjects, the ones who were administering the voltage, ended up having tremors and classic PTSD symptoms like during and after the experiment. But again, it's kind of a dark, depressing way that Cialdini shows, you know, the, the effect of authority as a lever of influence. And then, you know, he goes into some lighter hearted ones, like folks dressed as bank examiners who ultimately end up scamming senior citizens. You know, one of the lighter hearted ones is security guards who are ordering citizens to give their peers dimes to pay the parking meter. Right. This authority chapter is a little dark and depressing, but it does go to show, and some of this is respect the authority of, you know, of scientists as well. He gets into some of those examples, but the ones that stood out to me mostly involved scams and very harsh electric trials.

And he gives a warning in the chapter that we should think about this in the context of government, that people are very likely to answer to what authority figures tell them to do. And so we should always be cognizant. And I think the founders of the United States were cognizant of this, that we need to have some kind of mechanisms to check and balance the authority of the government. Not to get too political, but of course, this is a lot of the debate over the COVID 19 pandemic. And Cialdini talks about it briefly in the book with one of the examples from a nurse who was working as obviously on the front line and went to a supermarket and wasn't happy that some of the other people in the supermarket weren't using the hand sanitizer as they were going through the supermarket. So she called up the manager of the supermarket and was like, hey, this is going on. And then they put a rule in place that people need to use the hand sanitizer. And then suddenly everyone started using the hand sanitizer. I think we saw during the COVID 19 pandemic that people will generally follow the rules if an authority figure is telling them you need to follow the rules. There was a lot of controversy, of course, over many of the policies that were put in place during the pandemic, but the 50% of the country or so that disagreed with the policies still tended to follow them. The compliance rates were extremely high. So even if people disagree with authority, they will generally go with what's expected of them by that authority. And I think this is a really interesting warning that we have from the psychology studies that show just how compliant people are. In those troubling studies that you cited, the compliance rate was more than two thirds. More than 2/3 of folks will keep shocking somebody just because the researcher says it's okay to keep shocking them. So that, that, that really like that shocked me reading that. And so I went and I did some reading on my own outside of the book to see is that really true. And from what I found, those studies were legitimate, and they were also reproduced all over the world. So they really show that people are willing to do what is expected of them if they believe that the person who is expecting the thing of them has some power, has some knowledge, is a credible source of authority.

A couple things I want to tag on to what you were just talking about. One, those Milgram experiments are actually a big reason why there are institutional review boards now that review psychology research before it's conducted. And so, you know that. And the Stanford prison experiment kind of like inspired a whole new layer of review. And you would not be able to do those experiments anymore. And they are like, literally the specific examples that tend to get used for why they have those review boards.

On Covid.

I actually kind of think I had a completely different experience copec and I wonder if it's just where you happen to travel at the time in the Northeast. I certainly feel like you're right that I saw a lot of compliance. But if you went down to Texas or Florida in those same timeframes, there was very limited compliance with masking especially. And I think it really shows more of, like, a social proof type dynamic that at least for a little bit, people listen to authorities. But once the authorities kept saying ridiculous things in certain areas, people realized like, oh, this doesn't make sense when they say you got to go to a restaurant and you have to wear a mask, and then once you sit down, then you can take the mask off and you know, or you're on an airplane and you need to wear a mask and you need to put it back on in between bites of food or whatever. These just like, obviously completely ridiculous things. Some people continue to follow blindly, and some people didn't. And I think it really did, like, vary a lot regionally.

I think you're right. And I was in Vermont during the whole pandemic. And compliance with the rules was near 100%, including some of the rules that we all know when we look back on it. Even the folks who are promoting the rules say, you know, we're, we're kind of ridiculous, like the eating one, right. So in Vermont, if you went to a restaurant, people would put their mask on, then they would eat some food, take the mask off, and then put the mask back on between, like bites of food. It was, it was kind of that level of compliance. And I don't want to get into like the politics of it, and you know, I'm not a health professional, but the compliance level was extreme. So it's very interesting what you're saying, that in Texas that, that it was really on the opposite end. I, I think I've heard anecdotes about that, but. But you lived through it, and I guess you really saw that. Okay, any examples outside of the pandemic that we want to talk about?

I was about to say, I'm gonna call Anthony Fauci over here to join our podcast next month. You guys really went into that Covid hole a little bit. But I would just say, you know, coming from, I apologize for keep going back to Survey World, but I feel like the way that I try to run research studies and surveys, like I said, I'm trying to market and sell participation in my surveys. I'm trying to use surveys as educational and interactive and engaging. Right. And you'll hear an anecdote for me later on on that, you know, but one thing I always do when I am distributing surveys or working with clients on an email campaign, I'm always leading off those large research initiatives, whether it's for customers and clients, or it's even internal employees, with a note from the CEO or a note from the Chief Product Officer. Right. It gives customers and clients the impression that their feedback will go to the top. And it often does. And you know, that ask coming from a high level authority figure at their own company or at their vendor partner company definitely makes an impact in credentialing participation in my survey. So I use that as a lever of influence quite a bit. Then one other thing that I thought was great, you know, he does bring up a lot of depressing, dark examples like the Milgram experiment, like Jonestown suicides, et cetera. But he often revisits the Warren Buffett example. Right. And he also often talks about how at the start of all of Warren Buffett's annual reports for Berkshire Hathaway, he would build trustworthiness by beginning each of those investor letters, those reports with a mistake that he made. And then he will detail for that year and Then he'll detail how he was rectifying that mistake. Right. And, you know, in the past, you know, I try not to make mistakes when I'm doing work on behalf of my clients, but when I do, I don't see it as something to be covered up and something to be ashamed of. I aim to quickly rectify it and then kind of fess up to it. Right. And mention all of the things that I've done to both rectify that mistake and also make sure it never happens again. And, you know, it reminds me of I just participated in a panel at a multifamily real estate technology conference, and we talked about this idea of the silent renter, which is a renter who never has service requests and never engages with their apartment property manager. And for years, there's been sort of this myth that if someone is silent, that means it's fine, leave them alone. Right. But in reality, after doing renter focus groups and other, you know, research studies, what we found is that the silent renter is just kind of waiting to be engaged. And actually, when you look at recommendation scores, and Cialdini mentions this in an earlier chapter, but when you look at their recommendation and their satisfaction scores, folks who have had service requests. So there have been mistakes made, right. There's been an infrastructure problem. Folks who have made service requests and had them rectified quickly and had that issue resolved were a lot more satisfied on the whole and a lot more likely to recommend that provider. And than those who have never had a problem. It comes down to relationships, too, Right. Like a lot of relationship counselors, couples counselors will tell you that if a couple is never fighting, then that's almost as big a problem as having fights that are too big and too encompassing and too toxic. Right. It takes having some of those stumbles and making some of those mistakes in your career, in your relationships, to then get the muscle memory for how to correct them, fix them, and make sure they don't happen again. So I kind of embrace that philosophy when I'm looking at my own career as well.

Thanks for that, Kevin. Let's go to the next lever of influence, Scarcity. David, tell us about scarcity.

So scarcity is really the higher value that people place on goods that are rare or limited. Cialdini attributes this largely to sort of a version of loss aversion that they ultimately. Loss aversion is that you dislike the losses more than you appreciate the gains. Once people think that, like, oh, I'm. I don't have a chance to get this in the future, they're worried about that future loss aversion and they're much more compelled to take action now and go ahead and purchase that good that they think they, they won't be able to get again. It also serves as like some level of, you know, social proof as well. The fact that, you know, there are fewer and fewer of them are indicating that other people are acquiring them, that there are, there is demand for this good. He does also point out that a lot of this can be used to, to manipulate buyers and, and frankly this one in a little bit less of a negative way than some of the other stuff. Like it's effective at compelling people to buy things. But he doesn't seem to come as harsh against it as some of the other negative examples is given in some of the more recent chapters. So examples that come out from the book are limited time windows for sales. Black Friday is kind of like the classic example, although interestingly, as we've seen that that window keeps encroaching earlier and earlier as digital sales have really changed the dynamic of how all that, that only a few items are left in stock. We see this especially on websites, right? Oh, only, only two left in stock. I've got to, I've got to buy it now before I can't in the future. There are also just goods that are naturally created with the intention of having scarcity. So, you know, it's various collectible items, discontinued products. Legos are an example where, you know, once a LEGO set has been discontinued, the pricing will go up on that because people know they're not able to get it into the future anymore. And so the, the remaining ones on the shelves will go rapidly and in the secondary market people are now willing to pay more.

And he claims also that Apple and Nintendo employ this when they come out with new products that they will purposely not put enough in their stores so that it'll build up this idea that there's scarcity and a huge kind of rush of consumers to, you know, want the product because they can't have it.

And don't forget Cabbage Patch Kids from back in my day, you two are. Even though we're only separated by two years, I feel like that was a seminal two years where Cabbage Patch Kids, which never be in stores when you went to get them before Christmas, but then, you know, folks would always come back afterwards because they made a promise to their kids. And Cialdini actually mentions that's why you see sort of a doubling up of revenue in some of these stores because they will purposefully not have it in stock pre Christmas, but kids will have made their parents promise to buy them something, and then the parents will always return right after Christmas, and you'll see that bump. Christmas or Hanukkah.

You know, it's difficult to think about how these levers of influence are used on our kids all the time. I mean, that it makes us feel kind of bad. For example, Pokemon, which I don't know very much about, but I know that some of the cards are rarer than others. So kids will keep buying more and more Pokemon just because the cards they want are scarce. And I think Beanie Babies did a similar kind of trick on kids in the 90s, where some of the Beanie Babies would not be widely available. So people would keep going, buying Beanie Babies, hoping they would buy them. And it created this whole secondary market of Beanie Babies on ebay, which was actually one of the reasons that ebay first took off in the late 90s was the beanie Baby craze of trying to get these scarce Beanie Babies. Anyway, I think it's terrible how companies manipulate our kids in those ways by. By using the rule of scarcity. Let's talk about some examples of scarcity from our own careers.

Actually, just to quickly touch on the example you just gave Kopak. It's interesting. Beanie Babies were actually transparent, right? Like, you knew what you were buying and the value of that. There were websites that were tracking it, you know, whether or not it was accurate, who knows? But people were obsessed with them, and they thought, oh, this is going to be valuable in the future. But there are actually tons of them available. And if there was actually data available on it to some degree. What's happening right now is this Labu thing where you actually buy the item in a bag. So, like, you don't know whether you're getting the scarce one or the not scarce one. And it encourages people to, you know, trade in these things, basically.

I don't know what that is. What's Le Boo Boo?

It's the new Beanie Baby, I guess. Kopeck. It's.

And so the bag is not transparent.

It's exactly. You don't know what's inside. You don't know which one you're going to get. And some of them are very valuable because they're very rare, but most of them are not.

Well, to my understanding, that's just like Pokemon cards. And I mean, to a lesser extent, that's what baseball cards are, too, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Cards have always come in the not transparent decks and you didn't know what you were getting. But Beanie Babies just specifically that was what I was calling out about. It is like you knew exactly what you were getting when you bought a Beanie Baby. It wasn't like hidden from you whether or not you're going to get the rare one or not. It was just that people kind of thought that they were going to end up being valuable for, you know, who knows, you know, whatever.

Okay, that's a little bit different, of course, but it also is that the company just didn't make a lot of some of the Beanie Babies. Right. So there might be a. They could have made more of the ones that people really wanted, but they chose to purposely not make enough of some of them to make some of them more valuable than others.

Right?

Yeah.

And that creates the collectible market. Yep.

And this is also with NFTs and also some of the cryptocurrencies today. I'm sure that there's some scarcity that's driving, you know, investor decisions. I also think that I don't want to be sounding like a revolutionary or anything, but when you talk about the two party system, I think informational scarcity is something that kind of drives political parties and, and some of the big vendors and consultants in the political arena is that only they, the party structure can provide you with the voter file, the voting history, precinct level targeting, the inside information that, that can help you win campaigns. And so in some ways informational scarcity and positional scarcity there is, you know, actually changing the world.

Kevin, did you see, you used to be in the political consulting world, did you kind of see that firsthand? Is there like a major example from your career that, that, that played into.

Yeah, not, not so much in terms of my firm, but I know that for example, you know, when it comes to it, everyone used to always. I worked for a Republican polling firm and everyone would be surprised that there are Republican polling firms and Democrat polling firms. When it came down to it, the idea was each partisan firm sort of has inside information about the, you know, larger party agenda, the messaging, the campaign data, the voter data. And so you're sort of siloing that. So as a candidate, you really have to declare yourself one way or the other and work with that party's different data providers, polling providers, messaging and marketing folks, and ultimately get out the vote folks too. So it kind of pressures you into one, one system or the other in order to succeed. Right. And so there's going to be some of Those purple strategies out there and purple companies that try to bridge that divide. But ultimately, and it'd be fascinating to do a political industry book at one point for business books and company, but ultimately it's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. It's a bit of a virtuous and vicious cycle at times. If you ever think about having a third party, we would have to start with the infrastructure, the private companies and the quasi public institutions that support candidates.

David, tell us about Mac Heist.

Yeah, so one of the first jobs I ever had, sort of in between an internship and a job, because one of my close friends from college was a founder, was working at Mac Heist. And they had a program where essentially they would set up an alternate reality role playing game where various Mac websites would kind of shut down and have these games that you needed to solve in order to get some free software. And so that would get them a big list of users. And then ultimately at the end of each round of Mac Heist, or season I think they called it, there would be a big software sale. And so for, you know, maybe two weeks after the end, you would be able to get $500 worth of software for $50. And so this was in the time of shareware for Mac. So there were a lot of these indie developers that had software that they would basically give away and it would stop working after a week or a month. But they would charge, you know, pretty, pretty hefty fees if you did want to actually pay to, to use it long term. Mac Heist, they would get a lot less money. Right. They were only getting $50. It was spread across all these different teams. But there would be so many sales in that two week period that it would really drive the whole year for any of the software developers that really got into those bundles. So it was this interesting win win where the people got more software, the developers got dramatically more sales. Mac Heist got their cut of it as well, and everyone ended up with a much better deal but with that very short term scarcity thing really driving it because then the developers could still charge their normal prices for the rest of the year.

Yeah, I used to participate in Mac Heist. So thank you for creating it, David. It was a lot of fun as a consumer. Okay, let's go to another lever. Commitment and consistency.

So I commit to taking this one. So on the commitment side, the lever, the lever of influence is recognizing that something, someone or an idea that you have made a commitment to will hold more influence or persuasiveness over Time for you. Right. That's the commitment on the consistency side. It's also recognizing that once you've made that decision or one decision, you'll want to be or appear to be consistent with that decision going forward. Right. And this can have a snowball effect where one early, seemingly inconsequential decision, yes, I'll put the small yard sign in my front yard supporting pedestrian safety can lead to many more asks. Right. And more significant decisions and actions later on. Like, yes, because I put the small yard sign about pedestrian safety in my front yard. If that same volunteer comes back and asks me to put a big banner in my front yard, then Cialdini says, I'm a lot more likely to say yes to that. You know, he gives that example in the book. Another one I thought was really interesting was on courtroom trial selection for all the lawyers who are listening to us, where an attorney wrote into Cialdini and said that when they're selecting jurors, the attorney asks, quote, if you were the only person who believed in my client's innocence, could you withstand the pressure of the rest of the jury to change your mind? Right. And that attorney reported that someone who responds, yes, will have committed to that idea of independence and will want to remain consistent. And in some ways that will either force a good resolution for the client or force a hung jury even. Right. And that factors into their, their jury selection. Then I also think that one of the examples from the book is, is where consistency can help drive some good positive outcomes, too. There was a great example that Cialdini gives from a job interview, right. Where the interviewee, you know, right at the beginning of the job interview with the potential hirer, the interviewee asks, what was it about my background that attracted you to my candidacy? Right. And the whole point is getting that interviewer, you know, the prospective employer to articulate why they thought the background of that candidate was a good fit to bring them in for the in person interview. Right. Where Kopeck shines, we heard from his personality. Once you get that interviewer to say some positive things about you, to articulate that, that kind of, they've made a decision to do that and their behavior throughout that interview and the questions you ask and how they report back to their superiors and will kind of subconsciously be designed to back that earlier assertion to make that small decision, they made the right one. Right. And maybe they'll be slightly less likely to pay attention to any defects that you bring up. And so I thought that was a very, I'd never heard it put that way about asking an interviewer to articulate why they selected you to be in for that in person interview. To have them articulate, to make that small decision and to really stick to their decision. I thought that was really cool.

I'll just say it's not about having a great personality. Being pleasant doesn't require you to have a great personality. It requires you to be socially aware. It requires you to just be nice. Being nice doesn't mean that you're wonderful. It doesn't mean that you're the most charming person in the world. It means that you're kind, it means that you use pleasantries. It means that you engage with people in a respectful way. And so you don't need to have a great personality I think to be pleasant in an interview.

I love how my small shout out just struck a nerve there where you defended yourself. Again, talk about influence.

Because I didn't want to self call myself as oh, I have this wonderful personality. And that's why I do well in in person interviews. I think I do well in in person interviews because I'm nice. Which doesn't require you to be to have a wonderful personality. Anyway, there was another example that's relevant to all three of us that Cialdini gives in this chapter about fraternities and their initia rituals. The idea being why is somebody feel so committed to their fraternity? One part of it is that they have a shared experience of a bunch of, let's say some small and some actually a little bit difficult commitments that they made as they went through the initiation process. Famously a lot of fraternities have some kind of hazing and that might involve doing something that really is kind of unpleasant. It might be that it's embarrassing, it might be that it's physically strenuous. And sometimes these fraternities go way too far. And of course some people get hurt. But as a whole they actually create a bonding experience for the people who go through it because they have that shared commitment that they all made, that shared difficulty that they all went through. They feel like the fraternity is then worth something to them because they, they went through that commitment to, to have it. And he cites some research studies that show when people go through some kind of work to get something, they appreciate it a lot more. And he shows multiple studies where that's true. And that's in my experience. I don't know about the two of you, but I think that was part of my fraternity experience is going through the commitment process made me appreciate it more. And there's also a level of scarcity. The other influence part here too, in that not everybody's part of it. Right. If you're in a fraternity, obviously the people who are not in the fraternity don't get the same benefits. And so there is a scarcity element too. But did you feel like the initiation process of your fraternal career made it more substantial and worthwhile to you?

I think that going through a pledging process and being actively engaged, I guess, I guess what I would say is the people who are actively engaged in the process ended up being the brothers who were more engaged in the fraternity for the most part. And so there were people that would go through pledging and they would kind of go through the motions, and then there were people that would actually like, show up as expected. And now none of that exists anymore. So, you know, I do worry to some degree about what, what that does mean for how like, you know, fraternities without a pledging process, what the likelihood is of, like, the true commitment to the organization that'll come from, from people who are able to join without having to go through all those processes.

And for me, it was interesting at Dartmouth to be going through. I was taking a religion and cross listed philosophy class on liminal experiences and Ritz de Passage, or rites of passage. I don't think I pronounced that correctly, but I was taking that class while going through fraternity pledging. And so that made for an interesting pledge term. But I would say that, you know, in, in Cialdini's mind, you know, you're fighting, you know, as the, the pledging process. Any hazing that's going on is all about group survival in his world. And he mentions that, you know, it wouldn't befit this process if, you know, hazing included acts of volunteering for nonprofits and doing charitable works. Right. I'd like to think that the fraternity that we were in on campus also did a lot of those sort of beneficial community works as well. But when it came down to it, I mean, I was always a challenging pledge. I actually won the award for the most challenging pledge. And a lot of times the most challenging pledges were also the ones that were most involved, the most engaging with the brotherhood during that period. And so to that end, I definitely felt ownership over my fraternity experience and the fraternity itself, and hope that I was seen as a leader amongst my fellow brothers, but also to push the fraternity and the organization in the right direction. I also think, just societally and culturally, you know, particularly at Dartmouth, there were co ed fraternities and sororities and other organizations that did not have pledged terms, did not have rites of passage. And that should have been something that is applauded instead. If you look at kind of reviews of those organizations, you know, at the time, if you remember some of the anonymous, you know, web forms that were around, folks said that they had the least brotherhood, the least sisterhood. In one case, Dartmouth actually de recognized one of the chapters that had a no hazing, you know, a no hazing pledge as part of their organizational credo. Right. And so those, you know, unfortunately, those houses and organizations that did not have pledge terms, whether they hazed or not, who knows, were often seen as the ones that had the softest and less survivable membership. And so there's just a lot of dynamics here that we could cover an entirely separate podcast episode. But it is challenging and, you know, it was interesting to see Cialdini sort of take this on.

I was just going to throw out there that I went through Chinese during pledge term and so that was at 9:00am Every day. And. And I actually had drill at 7:45am Originally, like four days a week. And I would not recommend that for your pledge.

That that was the real hazing that they did. They ordered you to take Chinese with. With tutorials.

At 7am I moved to the 5pm drill section. So that that was at least.

Yeah. And I think at Dartmouth, where listeners, where we all three went, I think there was definitely a big initiative to make fraternity sororities and co ed organizations not just drinking clubs with a little bit of charitable service attached to them. And so I think it's a very different environment than some of the examples that Cialdini was giving throughout the book.

So when we think about commitment and all of the levers in this book, we're often thinking about how we can be more influential on other people. But I think commitment is also a lever where we can be influential on ourselves. We read a prior book on this show, Atomic Habits, which is all about how you kind of get yourself into a mind space of commitment. And I was thinking about with my career as an author. So he says Cialdini in the book, how when you write something down, you're much more likely to do it. And he again cites several research studies that prove that as an author, people sometimes say to me, like, how did you write that book? How did you. I've written five books. How did you write five books? Like that sounds like so impossible to me. I could never write 300 pages. Like, well, once you Start writing. You've made a commitment to yourself that you're doing this, that you're doing this project, you're writing a book. And every time you write, you've committed yourself even more in a small way to the project. So, you know, there's also this whole idea of sunk cost fallacy, which is, you know, even if you've only written 20 pages and you're writing a 300 page book, actually giving up that work you've done isn't such a big deal. But psychologically, when you've already written 20 pages, you feel like, oh man, I've already done all this work towards this book, I'm going to keep doing it. And the small commitments you make, and Cialdini talks about this in the book, how small commitments can actually be very influential, have an outsized effect on the long term commitment that we make. So if you get somebody to do something small, they're more likely to do something big. Well, the same is true when you're writing a book. Each of the individual pages is not hard to write. I mean, I'm sure everyone listening thinks to themselves, I could write a page, right? If you can write a page, you can write 300 pages. Because 300 pages is just 300 one page commitments. If you go and you write one page a day in a year you've written a book. And writing one page a day is a very small commitment, but it keeps you motivated and committed to the bigger goal. So I think authors are very good at psychologically tricking themselves into continuing with a book project by continually making small commitments. So I think we can also think about how these levers of influence aren't just things that can be influential on others, but also influential on ourselves.

Yeah, and I like that you brought up the idea of writing and communications. You're bringing up more as sort of a personal goal, personal influence. What I thought of when I was reading Commitments in Cialdini is he mentioned the wording of your commitment. The wording of the ask of someone is important. And as marketers, electioneers, educators, it's certainly important that the wording is right. And one example from my personal life or career was when my mom. So Liz Hudak shout out to my mom who listens to the podcast. So she ran for our town's town board back in the day and I did hundreds of get out the vote calls and voter ID calls for her, and her volunteers did as well. And the key question that we asked on these voter ID calls was not, are you going to vote For Liz Hudak, for Southeast Town Board, it was can Liz Hudak count on your support on election day? Right. And it's a subtle difference there, but somebody who said yes to that was making a lot more of a commitment than someone who just said, yes, I'd vote for her. Right. And like I said, it's subtle, but it's that small decision leading to big decisions. Someone who said yes to the can she count on your support? Can she count on your support on election day? Someone who said yes. We actually removed them from our repeated calls list from some of our messaging and marketing, you know, and that was someone who immobilized on election day, you know, as a result. One other example too, I always ask open ended questions in my surveys. It gives qualitative flavor to the, you know, respondents and to their responses and insights. But more importantly, it's part of that articulation thing, right? If they are typing out in my survey a response to why would you recommend this company? Or why would you recommend that one person that you worked with? It's really getting them to commit to that viewpoint and take it with them going forward. And so I think that's super important too. When you're, when you're fielding surveys, when you're communicating with folks as part of your career, aim towards those commitment questions. Not so much a looser open end.

All right, we've made it to the last lever of Influence. Unity. Take us away on Unity. David.

Unity is actually a newer principle that Cialdini added in the new and expanded edition of Influence that we read for this podcast. I guess that's something we didn't really specify earlier, but that was the edition that we read. And I guess something I'll talk about a little bit later is there are different versions of this going back to 1984. It's the principle in Unity that we are more readily persuaded by people that we think of as we, that we think of as one of us, that we feel like we're part of a tribe with. And so it differs from liking in that rather than just enjoying a person or finding them personable, you actually feel fundamentally part of the same group with them. And so I think it shares a lot with some of the earlier principles. I think that's probably why this ended up being something that got added later. But I do think it was an interesting perspective and I do think it's certainly reflective of something that I think a lot of us feel that there are different kinds of groups that we feel a part of and we're willing to do a lot for some of those groups. And so at the most fundamental level, there's obviously your family and even within family, right? There's your immediate family versus maybe more distant cousins. And to what degree you have a sense of we and willingness to do things for them are going to be impacted by the level to which you spend time with those people and have built relationships through a lot of the other examples that we've given other kinds of shared group identities that they call out and we've even kind of brought up already or alumni at a college, members of the same fraternity, I think, is one that would definitely call out for me specifically soldiers in a unit and even fans of a sports team. There are all kinds of ways that we become affiliated with groups and we start to think of ourselves as a we.

You know, I actually think that this is one of the biggest ones. So I'm just in my own personal experience. So I'm glad Cialdini added it to this latest edition. I've heard evolutionary biologists talk about how we all are kind of tribal, that because of how humans evolved in the difficult circumstances of the wilderness, we stuck together in our tribes. And you see this everywhere. I mean, Cialdini talks about you. And you mentioned also David, sports teams, right? Kevin and I are both fans of the New York Yankees, right? You meet somebody else and this has happened to me, like in a parking lot, or you meet somebody else just randomly on the subway and they're also a fan of the Yankees, and instantly you feel this kind of affinity for them. It's kind of dumb, right? Because, like, we don't have any influence on how the Yankees really do. We don't work for the Yankees. It's not like we actually have anything to do with the reality of how well the Yankees do or don't do. We have no control of the Yankees. But just because we both like the Yankees, we like each other a little bit more when we meet each other. Isn't that dumb? But that means the psychology trick is really real because you see it every day. And we know, of course, about this from history, right? We know about the rise of nationalism. And we know, like, just because we live in the same country, we support each other. So it's so real and it's so all around us all the time. And I think one area that Sheldean doesn't mention, that I've seen it a lot in my life, is professions. People who work in the same profession feel like they have an affinity with one another, even if they disagree on everything else. I'll give you an example from my life. When I'm in a conversation with other people who work as instructors, work as teachers, whatever, sometimes they'll want to be making some grand points, and they'll say, as an educator. And then they go into whatever their grand point is. And you know what? When I'm in an audience, I see people around me kind of nodding their heads almost immediately with whatever they're saying after they said as an educator, like, as if they're acknowledging that their point of view is more valid because they're in the same profession as us. So I think that we see tribalism in just, like, every aspect of our lives, every aspect of our careers, and we should be aware of it. You know, a lot of what the book Influence is about at the end of every chapter is kind of a defense. And Cialdini talks about, well, how can you actually avoid a compliance professional being able to manipulate you based on this lever of influence? I think this one, unity, is one of the hardest to actually defend yourself against because people have this built in evolutionary psychology where they always think about their own group first. And so I'm really glad he added it to the book.

Well, and what happens, Kopeck, too, if a compliance professional is getting in touch with you, is a member of the WE group, as Cialdini says, you're a member of that same group. Speaking of loss aversion, if you don't agree with what that compliance professional saying or buy their goods, do they have the power to kind of kick you out of that WE group?

Almost.

Can they shame you for not going the way of your we group? I think you're completely right, Kopeck. This is like the most harmful or the most challenging one. Right. And that defense commentary at the end is especially important for this. And he doesn't necessarily answer that question because it is one of the most challenging questions in the book.

What are some other examples where unity has been influential as a lever in your career or in your personal lives?

Yeah, I spoke recently in the podcast about our kind of shared Dartmouth connection, and I do a lot of fundraising for the Dartmouth College Fund, which exclusively raises current use funds to support undergraduates on financial aid. Now, for any folks out there who do fundraising of any sort of alumni, fundraising is very special in that the folks that you're calling are sort of all part of that, that tribe, that Dartmouth family. That appeal instantly resonates with folks. And then you have another layer that when I'm calling on behalf of my class, the great class of 2007. Right. And then on top of that, you layer into that ask the idea that all of these funds are supporting current undergraduates. And that makes a really, really powerful offer. Right. That idea of school unity, class unity, and that we are all directed towards serving the current undergraduates on campus. And so I found in terms of compliance, persuasion, my volunteerism with Dartmouth College fund has been some of the most rewarding, but also some of the easiest. Just because there is such affinity between folks of this family.

I really think there is something maybe not completely unique, but pretty rare about Dartmouth, which is the small size of Hanover and the remote location really does give sort of that, like, shared place in a way that, you know, other schools obviously exist in a specific place that people were at. But when, like, almost, you know, half of the town is the other college students, it really is just kind of a special experience that people feel. And then, frankly, some of the, like, shared suffering also of just going through New Hampshire winners, I think also makes, like, that Dartmouth alumni network, like, even stronger than I think, I think, you know, obviously college alumni networks are strong generally, but I think there's some special things about Dartmouth that do make it even stronger.

Well, the early decision deadline for Dartmouth passed November 1st. But as a shout out, there are regular decision. No, I'm kidding. I'm glad to talk about our shared alumni group.

Okay, so we've covered all of the levers of influence in the book. Influence. Now it's time for us to talk about the book as a whole. Is there anything about the book in general that we didn't mention as we went through the various levers that you would like our listeners to know?

One thing I would just say, and this doesn't necessarily impact my recommendation, it is a longer book. Right. Cialdini set out and says it in the prologue that he wanted to be a bit more conversational. Right. And it is a long conversation. The addition that we were looking at, you know, gets to about 500 plus pages, and it's heavily sourced. There's a long bibliography at the end, so don't let that page count intimidate you. But one thing that's interesting, that there's basically just the first chapters, prologue, there's this, there's the levers of influence, and there's a final chapter. I almost wish that some of the chapters were divided up into sections, that there were more chapters divided up into sections, but the book structure itself was interesting, and we haven't necessarily talked about that. He doesn't want to be like a kind of a pop culture social scientist, like a Malcolm Gladwell. He also wants to be more conversational and not so much like a conman with thinking fast and slow sort of falling in between that, though kind of gets a little lost. And there's. He goes very quickly from like personal anecdotes and vignettes to reader anecdotes and vignettes to some social science and then back to more conversation, which I found fascinating, but I'm not sure who that would appeal to.

Clearly appealing to a lot of people with more than 5 million copies sold, but that doesn't mean that every person that buys it is actually reading the whole book.

One other thing I would call out that we just didn't touch on at all and I just thought was. Was interesting was around within the Unity piece. And I think it was maybe in some other places. The idea of musical experience is actually driving some of that. And so it's just something I hadn't really liked thought about until recently. But musical things that are associated with some of these organizations can really drive that sense of we and bonding in a way that's really powerful. And obviously fraternities have chants and songs and things like that that I imagine you may have felt in colleges have alma mater. And those songs that everyone sings together can give you that sense of bonding. But I was actually at the who concert with my parents at the end of August, and literally I don't know any of the people at this concert. But just when everyone is singing together and knows the lyrics to a song and you're just in that rhythmic thing of music with people singing over, you really do feel a part of something in a way that makes sense that religions and all kinds of other things tend to have those shared musical things as well to drive that bonding.

And I'll just add something that I mentioned earlier before we get into our recommendations. There is a lot of disturbing imagery in this book, surprisingly, including we talked about all the anecdotes about suicide. There's also a lot of anecdotes about Nazism and about the Holocaust and World War II. So just, you know, this book is not necessarily like a light reading. It's a serious book. It has. And like Kevin said, it's kind of trying to balance be in the middle of being like a serious academic book and a pop psychology book. It's definitely more on the side of the pop psychology book, but it's very well cited. It has though cartoons sometimes, and then you're sometimes you're talking about a used car salesman and then you're talking about a Nazi prison guard. So it's kind of all over the place in terms of the imagery.

And he talks about his neighbors, too. Remember that Kopeck, when he's talking about weird Tim and Sarah next door? And, like, apparently he thinks they're not going to read the book, but then he. He talks about the stunning young woman who comes up to him to do a survey as well. There was all these, like, weird, you know, personal things that it reminded me of. What was his name? The 60 Minutes correspondent who would go around, just complain about things?

John Stossel.

Oh, no, not. Not John Stossel. Andy. What's his name? Yeah, it was like.

It was.

You know, reading this book was almost like he walking around like Andy Rooney sitting in on used car dealership training sessions.

I see that. I totally see that. So, anyway, people should just be aware that it's kind of uneven and some of the parts can be a little. A little heavy. Okay. Thinking about the book as a whole, do you recommend this book? And if so, who should read it?

So I'm happy to kick that off. I would recommend this for certain folks. I think that at our age, we're roughly about the same ages, we are aware of these things. We grew up in a tech forward, you know, kind of as. As millennials with technology and without technology, different points in our lives. We're doing a lot of these things without realizing it or having names for it sometimes. So that's helpful. I would really recommend this to folks who are getting out of college or graduate school and sort of entering the quote, unquote, real world for the first time, so that they get an understanding of how compliance professionals and persuasion professionals might be trying to take advantage of them, how social media might be trying to take advantage of them. I'd even recommend it to some older readers. You know, in the book, you have Cialdini saying that it's a lot of senior citizens who fall into these authority scams, and I think it would be beneficial to them then. One criticism of the book that I've seen online is that it really focuses on a Western orientation, Western culture, demographics, career types, etc. And even though it's been translated in X many languages, it doesn't necessarily factor in some of the cultural, you know, flavor peculiarities and highlights and lowlights. Right. You know, from international cultures. And I think that somebody who is looking to work for a Western company or work, you know, in North America or, you know, Western countries could really benefit from this. So somebody coming from a very different culture, you know, that has their own levers of influence to learn what is more sort of a Western bias. Levers of influence, I think would be really helpful for them. And so if you're coming from another country and trying to, you know, get a job in, you know, a US organization or Western organization, this might help you understand the levers of influence and how compliance professionals will work with you and try to get things from you and try to sell things to you.

So I will say that I recommend.

It, but with a lot of caveats.

Which is that I think I did learn some really interesting things in it. But it is very long and frankly, it has been so influential that I think I did know a lot of this stuff from other books that we've read, other just life experiences that I've had. Maybe I did, to Kevin's point, get some nomenclature for certain things that I didn't have before. But for the most part, many of these things are a little bit self evident. And he just, he really hits you over the head with the examples. And honestly, I think to some degree this may be just a fact. And this is me like guessing. I have not read the other editions, but just being a factor of having re released this repeatedly, they feel compelled to add additional content each time. And obviously there are lots and lots of examples of every one of these levers. So you can keep hitting us over the head with it over and over again.

But to me it did feel a.

Little bit that way, that like, it was like, okay, do I really need 70 pages for each one of these examples? I think you should feel free to skim it a little bit. You should feel free to go deeper in the chapters that you think are most unique or things that you don't know the most about. But I really did learn a lot in it, so I think it's valuable. It just felt a little bit like I probably got the most value out of maybe like 115 pages of the much longer book.

As I said earlier, you know, for a book about influence, its structure and length were not very influential.

Yeah, I agree with both of you. I agree with you, David, that the book is just too long. I mean, the actual text of what you're reading is about 450 pages. He could have said the same thing in 200. There's really just an excess of anecdotes, an excess of kind of reader submitted reports, and just. It's not that he's a bad writer. He's a good writer, but it's just unnecessarily long. And I agree with Kevin also that, you know, those. The three of us reading it in our late 30s, early 40s, like, we are already enmeshed enough in the culture that all of these were obvious to us. That's why we have so many anecdotes about everyone, right? That's why in this episode we were able to talk about it so much. Because in your career, you're going to see all of these levers of influence on a regular basis, and you're completely aware of them. So a lot of the book is pretty obvious. You know, that people who are from the same place are more likely to have an affinity for one another and be more influential on one another. We all know that. We all know that people who, who we like, we're more likely to listen to. Right? These, these, all of the seven levers of influence are obvious, but by making them at the forefront of your mind, you're more likely to pick up on when they're being used against you. Which is why I think it's great that he added those defense parts of every chapter. How do you protect yourself from these levers of influence being used against you for your career? I agree with you, Kevin, that if you're young, like, you're in your 20s, and you're just coming out of college and starting your career, this might be a great book to read because you don't have all that life experience where you've seen all of these levers be used, and so it might make you more aware of them earlier on. But I will say, I think the more useful book is a previous book we read on the podcast, how to Win Friends and Influence People, which is kind of the less academic version of this book, which has more practical tips for folks who are starting their careers. So if I was just going to read one book on influence for somebody who is trying to improve their career, I'd probably read how to Win Friends and Influence People just because it's more practical. This book is better support, supported by all of the studies that Cialdini cites. But that book is actually the one that's gonna say, okay, this is what you should do tomorrow at work that's gonna help you get to the next level.

Well, how to Win Friends and Atomic Habits combined would give you a pretty good personal and external agenda for life. I almost feel.

Absolutely. And I'm glad we read this book because I think it, again, it grounds it more in the academic studies it gives some really solid basis to believe in everything that it's saying, which Atomic Habits does to some extent. But it's been criticized. Some of the research that it's based on and how to win friends and influence people doesn't really at all. It's just like some guy giving you a bunch of anecdotes happens to be a bestseller of all time because he's right about most of them. But he doesn't like prove to you that he's right. All right, well, thanks for joining us. To learn about influence, I hope some of you check out the book. Don't forget the link in the show notes to check it out on Audio Audible and get a free trial and actually get right into the audio version of the book. The next book we're going to be checking out next month is going to be about artificial intelligence. We all know we're going through a big hype cycle right now and it's changing our jobs. So we're going to read a book that is about how artificial intelligence affects the way that we work and how specifically large language models, which have been the big artificial intelligence technology of the last few years, can be leveraged in a way that makes us more productive. We're still evaluating a couple books, but join us next month to find out which one we picked and learn some more about that field. David Kevin, is there anything you want to plug and how can our listeners get in touch with you?

You can follow me on xavidgshort.

You can follow me on x @hudak's basement. That's h u d A K S Basement and you can follow me on.

X. I'm Ave Kopek D A V E K O P E C I will plug. My new book just came out, Computer Science from Scratch. If you're a Python programmer and you want to understand more about computer science, you should check it out. All right, don't forget to subscribe to us on your podcast player of choice. Leave us a review. Whether that's on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, it really helps other people find out about the show and we look forward to talking to you next month.

Sa.