Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Cialdini

There is a study that shows that people who were asked their political opinions, when there was a picture of the American flag in the corner of the questionnaire, reported more favorable attitudes toward Republican Party positions, because the flag is typically associated in people's minds with a Republican belief set. If people vote at a polling place inside a church, they vote more Republican. If they vote at a polling place inside a school, they vote more Democrat.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.

At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.'

The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.

Presuasion is what you say immediately before you deliver your message that leverages your success tremendously.

There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.

The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.

The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.

The factor that frequently determines whether people are going to make a particular choice is not the factor that counsels wisely or the one that leads to the greatest economic benefit. It's the one that's top of the consciousness in the moment.

There's a difference between a mystery and a question. Questions demand answers, but a mystery demands something more valuable-explanation.

A few years ago, the Bose Acoustics Corporation had a new product, the Bose Wave Music System. And their ad campaign for it was not successful until they changed one thing. At the top of the ad they said, "Hear what you've been missing." And that caused the skyrocketing of the interest in purchasing of the product. Why? Because with something new, people are uncertain, and when they are uncertain, they want to avoid losses.

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it.

If we are paying attention to something, it's important. That's how we decide to pay attention. But a communicator can reroute our attention to something that isn't important, but make it seem important as a consequence.

By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it. It's the ability to cause people to have something at the top of their consciousness that makes them receptive to your message that's yet to come.

What I'm talking about is pre-suasion, directing their minds to the moment before they experience the content. There's this interesting study. A guy goes to a shopping mall in France. And he tries to get women's phone numbers as they pass various shops, so he could call for a date. But in neither of those cases was he very successful. He only got a number 13 percent of the time. But there was one kind of shop that doubled his success rate when women were passing it, a flower shop. Why? Because flowers put women in the mind-set of romance.

What new psychology suggests, it's the factor that is top of consciousness at the moment before you make that economic decision that will win the day.