Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1390: The Psychology of Persuasion with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue The Psychology of Persuasion with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
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Transcript 14,159 words · 2 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 I want to reach back into my archive today. I want to talk about the psychology of persuasion. I'm going to do that with two back-to-back episodes. The same guest. The guest that you can have when it comes to the psychology of persuasion. For me personally, I think this is appropriate because everyone is always going through a reset, so to speak. High on Monday, coming down by the end of the week. Good month, good year, bad year, whatever. But the psychology of being a human being is always coming down on us.
0:38 Speaker 00 And there are ways that we can communicate to help ourselves and to help other people. I want you to, at least for today, at least for a little bit of your time, to feel a different perspective. Something more real, something more tangible. Without any further delay, let's jump right in. Back-to-back with Robert Cialdini.
1:15 Speaker 00 My guest today is Robert Cialdini. He is best known for his 1984 book on persuasion and marketing, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Selling over 3 million copies, translated into 30 languages, Robert is the go-to man for understanding effective persuasion. Robert has outlined six key principles of influence. Reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. His 1984 book that I cite goes into each of those in-depth.
1:58 Speaker 00 Our conversation today, though, is something different. His newest book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Pre-suasion comes before the persuasion. This is priming the table, getting people ready to accept the messaging. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Robert Cialdini about pre-suasion.
2:34 Speaker 00 The last couple of years, my guests, and I'm sure many of these people are peers, friends, associates, my guests have included Daniel Kahneman, Vernon Smith, Gerd Gigan-Rinzer, Steven Pinker, Laurie Santos, Collard Cameron, Anders Ericsson, Dan Arelle, Phil Tetlock, Barry Schwartz, the list goes on. I would have had you on much earlier, but you have been, you have been cloistered, you have been immersed in a project now coming up for air, yes?
3:01 Speaker 01 You're right. It was the book that has just been released last week.
3:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, one of the things I would love to jump in at the very beginning here, so we've had this rise of behavioral economics, and then we look at your world from a psychology perspective. Can you talk a little bit about, and I think you know Daniel Kahneman helped to break this wall a little bit, and this could be a very long discussion, much more than a half hour, but can you talk a little bit about behavioral economics and the social psychology, your realm, and perhaps the overlap, and is there, is there a confusion, is there a competitiveness? How do you see that today?
3:36 Speaker 01 Well, I think that there's a deep connection between social psychological approaches and behavioral economic approaches, both of which suggest that human behavior is best predicted and described in terms of a set of factors that don't require that we think about economic self-interest as the major determinant of choices. There are all kinds of other factors, values, emotions, attitudes, and so on, that carry the day as well. And
4:18 Speaker 01 it's important to say as well, because we're certainly not suggesting that economic and fiscal factors are unimportant. It's just that they're not the sole, or even in many instances, the most determining factor in the situation.
4:38 Speaker 00 You're very well-known for your book Influence. It's become this more than a cult classic. It used to be a cult classic. Now it's just a standard. And so you mentioned, and I mentioned, your newest work, Pre-Suasion. It helps, I think, for sure, for people to see influence ahead of time. And there's a great video on YouTube that goes through a very brief overview. You have your six classic principles of influence: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity. But in your newest work, you see something coming before that. And I mentioned that word, "priming." And I think anytime any of us want to have an audience or an individual be receptive
5:22 Speaker 00 to a particular piece of persuasion that we might have, there's an earlier step, isn't there?
5:29 Speaker 01 You're exactly right. One of the things I learned when I was researching this book is that very often, the majority of communicators think that the way to optimize the success of a message that they deliver is to spend time getting the message content right. The structure of it, the clarity of it, the attractive features of it. All of that is true, but that's not how we optimize influence. We optimize that process in the moment before we deliver that message by putting recipients
6:14 Speaker 01 in a state of mind that makes them open and receptive to the message we are about to send.
6:22 Speaker 00 It seems so simple. It seems like common sense. I can tell the audience out there, while that might seem like common sense, the research, the findings behind this, the depth of pre-suasion, it takes a little bit of time to get through. I will say this, though, also, I can see that you have a lot of fun with this.
6:41 Speaker 01 Oh, I did, because it was an adventure. It broke the set I had, growing up with a model of persuasion that suggested that if I wanted to move people in my direction, I had to do something with my message to change their attitudes, their beliefs, their experiences with what I had to offer. This new research changed everything by suggesting I didn't need to alter anything inside my recipient, except what they were paying attention to in the moment before I
7:26 Speaker 01 delivered my message.
7:27 Speaker 00 Before we get into some examples, in our limited time today, we're just going to go through some examples, and I implore people, they're going to have to go do some reading to really get the full thrust and depth. But how did you start down this path? Was there an aha moment? I mean, here, you're very well-known for this classic book, Influence. What was the moment that triggered, or was it a series of events that got you going down this path?
7:51 Speaker 01 It was the latter, Michael. It was a series of recognitions, as I read the newest research in behavioral science and persuasion science, that a lot of the work on priming, or anchoring, or framing, or creating mindsets, didn't involve the Six Principles of Influence. These things set up the Six Principles of Influence. They teed them up in a way that gave them greater leverage. It forced me to go back to the research I had done in writing Influence, which was
8:30 Speaker 01 to infiltrate as many influence professions as I could get access to by taking their training. I posed as a trainee, somebody who was interested in a job, and I learned from the inside what they were doing to move people successfully in the directions they hoped for. And I went back to my notes, and I looked at what the top scorers in each of these professions were doing, right? The aces of the professions, what were they doing? And they were acting like gardeners.
9:14 Speaker 01 That is, they recognized that it didn't matter how good the seed was that you wanted to plant. If you didn't prepare the earth first, if you didn't cultivate the ground, that seed wasn't going to take root and flourish. So they spent more of their time than their average contemporaries did, creating a state of mind before they delivered their request that was consistent with the strength of their request.
9:48 Speaker 00 We're talking about trust in many ways, building trust ahead of time. Why don't we give a little color? And I love, there's many examples in the book, but there's an example of a gentleman selling home alarm systems. A simple story, but the data and the results behind it, quite amazing. I think you recall this one where he leaves the house, then comes back in. Could you tell that story?
10:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. So when I was infiltrating these training programs, I did get some training from a company that sold very expensive heat-activated fire alarm systems in the home. And they would send their salespeople into the home to convince people, usually a couple, that the expense was worth the safety involved in this, in this heat-activated system. I would follow along with some of them during my training to see what they did. Well, there was one salesperson, his name was Jim, who was always the top salesperson. So I was especially concerned to see what he did.
10:53 Speaker 01 He did something remarkable to create trust in his customers, his prospects, before he ever presented the system. He would first get people engaged in taking a 10-minute questionnaire, a little test on their knowledge of fire, fire safety in the home. Then while they were in the middle of the test, he would slap his forehead. He would say, "Oh, I forgot something out in the car. I need to go get it. It's some important information. Do you mind if I let myself out and back into your home?" And the answer was always sure. Sometimes it involves giving him a key to the front door.
11:39 Speaker 01 I saw him do this three straight times and I asked him about it and he said, "Look, Bob, who do you allow in and out of your house freely? Who would you give a key to your front door to? Only somebody you trust, right?" I wanted to be associated with trust in the minds of that couple before I began showing them the information because if they trusted me, now they believed what I had to say. It was brilliant and it was presuasive.
12:20 Speaker 01 He established a mindset of trust before he asked people to consider the pros and cons of his offer.
12:30 Speaker 00 Did he talk about how he figured that out? Was it just years of experience? Did he stumble into it? Did you get that data from him?
12:38 Speaker 01 Yes, he said one time by accident, he actually did forget this material out in the car. And when he came back, a skeptical couple then dropped all the skepticism and became very open and yielding to what he was saying next.
13:01 Speaker 00 I can imagine though, throughout your career, you've had those moments where you did not expect something and then boom, you turn around and it's right there. And you could do all the research in advance, but it's that that split second, that happen chance, that serendipity and boom, something, a light bulb goes off.
13:18 Speaker 01 You know, something just happened to me like that where I was the victim and I saw the light bulb of pre-suasion go on in my head. I just had a guy who I do business with commit a major flaw. He screwed up in a way that cost us, my business, a considerable amount of money. And he called to tell me about it. And before he told me about it, he said, now Bob, I hate what I'm going to tell you. And I especially hate it when it happens to good guys like you, to nice guys like you. And then he told me about how he messed up.
14:03 Speaker 01 And Michael, he gave me the role of a nice guy. And I responded to him like a nice guy. I didn't scold him. I didn't demand that he, that he make it right. I waved my hand and said, you know, it happens, happens to all of us.
14:25 Speaker 00 And that makes your point that you were saying in the very beginning that it's, that thinking only in terms of rational self-interest, there's a, there's a wider connection amongst people that's happening.
14:35 Speaker 01 Exactly right. He gave me a reputation to live up to. And I did.
14:42 Speaker 00 It, it is one of these things. It's, it's when you get into the subject and again, that's why I say you must have so much fun with it because as one reading the work, and I'm going to have to go back and read again, because it is one of these things. And I know you know this by design, literally you've tried to put, you've tried to let the audience see that every sentence has meaning. That's a challenge because I've written four books. So that's a very, that's a challenge to do.
15:06 Speaker 01 Exactly right.
15:07 Speaker 00 Uh, that's not easy. Let me bring people in as you, as you talk about that example with the client. I thought another fascinating example too, was I think there was, it was a part of a, an example in the book. And it was somebody that was selling something, I believe. And they, they said something to the effect of, you know, I'm not going to be able to charge you, and I'm making up the number here. I'm not going to be able to charge you a million dollars, but, and then you drop it down. But that, that point of raising it up high, putting that in the mind and then bringing it down. The research backs the idea that if you, if you put that high number up, then bring it down. It's completely different than not having the high number, isn't it?
15:46 Speaker 01 That's the phenomenon of anchoring. We can anchor a person's, uh, Perception of what is a legitimate number by what we say first. Let's say I want to sell you a bottle of mineral water, right? I can get you to pay substantially more for it if I first ask you the distance to the sun. Because compared to the distance to the sun, that bottle of mineral water's price seems trivial. Now, that's what this friend of mine did. He's a consultant in Toronto.
16:26 Speaker 01 He was always getting pushback on the price he would, he would state for a contract. Let's say a $75,000 contract. He was always getting people saying, can you give us a break? Can you cut it by 10%, 15%? And he said, one day by accident, he said something that eliminated that pushback. And that's been the case ever since. He shows people this contract with the, with the charge of $75,000. But before they see it, he says, as you'll be able to see, I'm not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this. Now, it never, he says, that's not enough to win the business every time.
17:10 Speaker 01 Too many factors associated with that. But he says, it always eliminates pushback on price. Because compared to a million dollars, $75,000 seems reasonable.
17:24 Speaker 00 You've got a great line that you quote from Sun Tzu. And people have heard this before, but every battle is won before it's fought. Let me ask, in terms of the type of individual, what does the research show? So I've just kind of drew, drew myself a little sketch of a bell curve here. And I'm imagining to myself, okay, Robert has put all these, these, this great research, the technique behind pre-suasion. Is there, is pre-suasion, obviously I'm thinking in bell curve terms, it's going to, it's going to hit the masses for sure. I know that. Are there types of people, are there types of thinkers where pre-suasion is not as, as effective? Or have you found universally that across the populations, pre-suasion is just very effective?
18:04 Speaker 01 It seems to be a universal human operating technique, operating procedure. And let me give you the best evidence I know for this, that it's built into us from birth. Right. There was a study done in Belgium. Researchers brought subjects into an experimental situation and they showed them photographs with figures standing in the background. One-third of the subjects saw figures standing alone, by themselves. Others saw pictures of two figures standing apart, separate from one another.
18:46 Speaker 01 A third sample of subjects saw photographs of figures standing together, shoulder to shoulder, unified. Now, the researcher in all of the cases then got up from the table and accidentally, I'm putting that in air quotes, dropped a series of items onto the floor, a bunch of items onto the floor. And the question is, who gets down on their knees spontaneously, without being asked, and helps the researcher pick up these items? It was by far three times as likely to be one of the people who saw photographs of
19:30 Speaker 01 figures standing together. Unity, togetherness, is associated with cooperativeness and helpfulness, right? Now, that's the classic persuasive idea. What you do first, right, puts people in a state of mind that inclines them in a particular direction. And if that direction is what your goal is, you will get large-scale increases in the behavior you're looking for.
20:09 Speaker 01 Now, here's the thing that made me rock back in my chair when I read it about that study. The subjects were 18 months old.
20:25 Speaker 01 They were babies, Michael.
20:29 Speaker 01 They could hardly talk. They couldn't plan, or reflect, or reason.
20:37 Speaker 01 But this procedure is so primitive, so fundamental in us, that it got 18-month-old babies to be three times as likely to be helpful because they saw a picture of people standing together in a cooperative, unity-based pose.
21:05 Speaker 00 You know, what's going to be really amazing, and I mentioned some names at the beginning, is the research that will get down to the cellular level to find out in the years to come, you know, how that unfolds, how the 18-month-old babies can be in that place of mind with no experience, no insights yet. But they're walking into the world with some genetic material that says, "I'm predisposed to think like this."
21:30 Speaker 01 You know, you mentioned Daniel Kahneman a little earlier as one of your previous guests, and somebody I respect very much. He was recently asked if there's one thing that people could understand that would make them recognize how behavior unfolds in themselves and around them, what would it be? And what he said was, "There's nothing that's as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. Everything seems more important than you think it is
22:14 Speaker 01 while you are thinking about it." So, the idea is that if we are thinking about a particular concept, or an idea, or even an image, it becomes more important in our eyes in the moment that follows. That's what happened to those... Children, those 18 months old, simply seeing the idea of togetherness and unity became more important for them in terms of their actions than before.
22:54 Speaker 00 Your world, your world is one nonstop.
22:57 Speaker 01 Well, I have to say, these things threw me back in my chair sometimes when I was reading about them. Here's another one that I just love. Suppose you're looking for support on a project, maybe with your boss. You've got a great idea, a plan. What we typically do is to ask for our boss's opinion about it in order to get some buy-in from the boss. That's a mistake. We should change one word presuasively. Instead of asking for your boss's opinion about your plan before you show it, ask for
23:38 Speaker 01 your boss's advice on your plan before you show it. Because when we ask for someone's opinion, what they do is take a half step back from us. It's a separating step. And they go inside themselves for the answer of what their opinion is. If we ask for their advice, they take a half step toward us psychologically. We get a mindset of partnership. And the research shows they're now going to be more supportive of our plan even before
24:20 Speaker 01 they see it, because they feel more a part of it.
24:25 Speaker 00 You know, you mentioned...
24:28 Speaker 00 One word, I've got a note here, it's actually the next thing I was gonna ask you about, is the right word, and the choice of a word, and I, maybe, maybe you're a great example right now with a new title out, "Persuasion." I'm imagining that there was a certain amount of, behind the scenes, there was a certain amount of sausage making that took place, that allowed you to get to the point where you knew that "presuasion" was gonna be the best word for the next many decades of your life, frankly, because you're gonna, you're gonna own this word now, and, and I'm sure a lot went behind it.
25:02 Speaker 01 You know, Michael, that's very insightful, what you just said, because the, for the first period of time when I was writing this book, the title, the working title, was "Moments of Power," and the idea was to find those moments in the, in the course of human exchange with one, with, with one another, where a, a request, or a recommendation, or a proposal will be most powerful. And the more I read, the more I researched, it became clear, it was the moment just before the persuasive appeal.
25:44 Speaker 01 So that's where this idea of "presuasion" came from, and you're exactly right, that the hope is to coin a term, so people will be saying to one another, "Well, what's our persuasive moment here? What do we put persuasively in the instant before we make our request, to give it special traction, to give it special leverage?"
26:11 Speaker 00 In our few minutes we have left, Bob, I have one last question, thought, let you elaborate some, but in your newest work, "Persuasion," you talk about a new principle of influence, unity, you call it, and I think a great example for my audience especially, could be Warren Buffett, you have a great story about Warren Buffett, and how he talks about his next, what will happen after him, who will take over, and how that will take place, and he really does a nice job of that, doesn't he?
26:40 Speaker 01 He does a beautiful job in a way that I'd never seen him do before. I'm a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder and for the last 15 years I've been getting his shareholder reports, the annual letters that he writes to stockholders. Last year, he had a special challenge because it was the 50th year of Berkshire Hathaway since he and Charlie Munger took over and brought it to amazing levels of profit. The challenge was, how does he keep people investing at these enormously expensive levels?
27:23 Speaker 01 A single share of Berkshire Hathaway's stock this morning on the New York Stock Exchange was going for $221,000 a share. We've never seen anything like it in our markets. Now, his challenge is, how do you get people to keep investing in this when he and Charlie are getting up in age and might not be there next year? So he laid out a very reasoned statement of why we should continue to invest in Berkshire Hathaway because of the various basket of strengths that they have going for them.
28:06 Speaker 01 But before he did that, he said something persuasively that caused me to wipe away any idea of selling Berkshire Hathaway stock. He said, "I'm going to tell you about the strengths of Berkshire for the next 50 years. And I am going to tell you this in a way that I would tell a family member if they asked me."
28:41 Speaker 01 Michael, I've never thought of selling Berkshire Hathaway again. He, not only did he make that point compelling, the argument compellingly, I was ready to believe it more deeply than before because he was talking to me like a family member, someone who's inside the boundaries of his sense of "we," of unity. Wow, I was just compelled.
29:15 Speaker 00 It's not just they are like me, but they are of me.
29:19 Speaker 01 That's the key literary difference, the key linguistic difference. It's not that we like Michael because he is similar to us. It's that we like Michael because he is of us. He's of us. And inside the boundaries of "we," everything is easier inside for the influence process. People cooperate more, they believe you more, they trust you more, they change more in your direction.
30:03 Speaker 00 Robert, I don't think I have to do much selling here. I think your enthusiasm and passion for the subject will win people over. I'm sure my audience will want to check out more. The book is available now, "Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade." Thank you for taking some time today. Is there a best website?
30:19 Speaker 01 Yes, there is. It's called influenceatwork.com. Influence at Work is all one word, .com.
30:26 Speaker 00 Again, the new book is "Pre-Suasion." Robert, I thank you for taking some time today. Great stuff.
30:31 Speaker 01 Well, thank you for such a perceptive set of questions, Michael.
30:35 Speaker 00 I appreciate it. Thank you. Unfortunately, today, I only had Robert for a short period of time, but due to the magic of the Internet, I will now provide a speech of his that I thought was just really insightful. I hope you enjoy this presentation from Robert Cialdini.
30:54 Speaker 01 I want to talk about behavior change, and I want to talk about the role of social norms in creating that change, but I'm going to talk about a particular kind of behavior, environmental behavior. How do we persuade people? How do we motivate people to move in our direction? That's been my research area for decades, but that applies to all kinds of behavior. I want to focus today on how we might persuade people to take environmentally friendly, sustainable action by changing the way we send the message to them, just changing the
31:37 Speaker 01 words that we use to engage them in that behavior change. So I'll begin with a pair of contentions. The first is that program designers or decision-makers can rely too much on economic factors, such as financial benefits, or on legal factors, such as regulations or laws, when seeking to motivate their citizens toward environmental goals. Now, those are effective strategies, there's no question about that, but they incur costs.
32:20 Speaker 01 The financial factors, bonuses, rebates, discounts, incentives of one sort or another, require economic resources that have to be applied to producing the change. And in our world, economic resources are not unlimited, so very often, they do not get applied to that particular crucial issue. I believe the issue of sustainability is as important as there is right now on this planet. But other goals can drive those resources away. So what happens if we don't have those economic resources to provide?
33:04 Speaker 01 Then we often rely on legal factors, regulations, rules, constraints. That provides another kind of cost to the decision-maker. Or the program designer. It's a social cost. It's not an economic capital that we are expending. We're expending social capital because people don't like being constrained. They don't like being regulated. And they resist and they resent those individuals who try to do it. So is there a third way that we could think of?
33:49 Speaker 01 That would also be effective, but would not incur these costs? I'm going to suggest that indeed, yes, there is. It is the social norms of the situation. Making people aware of, making them conscious of what is the norm in that situation to do. Now, there's the fundamental kind of norm, which is information about what is normal there. What are the people around us, like us, doing there? What have they been doing there?
34:34 Speaker 01 That has an automatic tendency to drive people in that direction. Now, there are some amplifiers of that effect. We are most likely to move in the direction of multiple others and comparable others. Let me give you another way of saying that. And that is, it's what many others do and what similar others do that spurs us to move in that direction. Let me give you an example of how this works in a situation that doesn't involve environmental behavior.
35:17 Speaker 01 But I want to show the reach of this principle of social norms. And indeed, even the cross-cultural reach, because it's a study that comes from restaurants in Beijing. Do you know that if the manager of a restaurant, in this case, it was a series of restaurants in Beijing.
35:43 Speaker 01 Marks the menu
35:49 Speaker 01 with notifications of which are the most popular items on that menu. A number of fascinating things happen. First of all, it produces an increase of thirteen to twenty percent in the sales of those items immediately, without a single cost.
36:14 Speaker 01 The manager doesn't have to put more high-quality ingredients into those. They have to hire a new chef, doesn't have to increase the pleasantness of the decor. No, just point to something that's true. These are the most popular items on this menu. And this applies, by the way, even to those items that people might not always order, starters, for example, or desserts. Suddenly, I know that when I go into a restaurant, I'm thinking, should I have dessert? Maybe I shouldn't. I had a big breakfast. I expect to have a large dinner. If I see on the menu,
36:56 Speaker 01 "The, this is our most popular dessert," suddenly, I have a reason to eat dessert that I didn't have before, suddenly. And it's a real reason. It's a reason that benefits all of us. I get a great dessert because it's the most popular one, and the owner, the restaurateur, gets
37:20 Speaker 01 an order for everyone benefits, except perhaps my waistline, which suffers. Secondly, notice that that strategy is not only effective, it is completely inexpensive, completely unpressured, completely honest, and here's the interesting thing,
37:45 Speaker 01 almost never employed. I've been counting. Fewer than ninety percent of the restaurateurs. Of ten percent of the restaurants where I patronize. Say that on the menu. Now, I want to make a comment at this point. People might ask you about, "Didn't you say there were interesting speakers? There was one guy talked about persuasion and influence." Oh, what did he say? Well, he told us that people want to do what they see others doing. You know what your colleague will say to you? "With this, he makes a living." Really? I knew that. Everybody knows that. You wasted your time.
38:29 Speaker 01 Tell them about the Beijing restaurant study and say, "If everyone knows that, why is it that in ninety percent of the restaurants that we frequent, there is no such message on the menu if everyone knows this?" See, we know these principles, and there are other universal principles of human behavior at a superficial level, but we don't know how to activate them optimally. We don't know how to amplify them optimally. Let me give you an example from environmental setting. It's the hotel towel research study that I and my team members did. If you travel at all, you know that in seventy percent of the restaurants that you frequent,
39:13 Speaker 01 somewhere in the room, there is a sign that the manager has put there, asking you to reuse your towels and linen. Here's an example of one. Very often, there is some nearly extinct woodland creature on the sign, and they ask us to save the environment by reusing their towels. We decided to see if there was a special kind of message we could put on that sign that would be more successful than the typical message.
39:51 Speaker 01 Here's an example of our sign that we put in hotel rooms, three separate hotel rooms in the Phoenix, Arizona area in the United States where I live. It said, "Help save the environment." That's the standard one. All those hotel managers want us to save the environment. They want us to save resources. They want us to save the earth. But we know they want to save something else, too. They want to save costs. So what can they do? Well, they can say, "Save the environment," and hope that will spur us. But there are some especially clever ones now who have decided to use a principle of social behavior
40:35 Speaker 01 that says, "People prefer to do things in partnership with others, in collaboration, in cooperation with others." So some hotel chains are now saying on the sign, "Partner with us toward this common cause," and hang up your towels. So we put different signs like that randomly in these hotel rooms, and then we check to see how many people actually hung up their towels. We were in league with the maids who made a check mark. And let me show you what happened. On any one night, if the message said,
41:19 Speaker 01 "Do this for the environment," an average of about 38% of the people helped on that one night. Usually, more than 50% helped at some time during their stay, but on one night, about 38%. If it said, "Partner with us," any ideas about what the percentage would be under those circumstances? Any ideas? 50%? Nothing. Why? Because you don't get to just claim a partnership. You have to earn a partnership in order to get people to play with that system. This was what the hotel managers were saying to us.
42:01 Speaker 01 "You pay us 295 euros tonight, and tomorrow, you don't get to use it." Use a fluffy towel. That was their, that was their deal? It was no deal. But we had a third message. An honest message. It was one that employed the social norms. It said, "The majority of guests at our hotel do reuse their towels at least once at some time during their stay."
42:30 Speaker 01 And under those circumstances, we get the most we have ever gotten. Now, here's an interesting question.
42:37 Speaker 01 Is there an even more impactful message that we can send, knowing what we know about the theory of social norms? There is. Remember what we said. Is that we don't follow the lead of many others, only. We particularly follow the lead of similar others. So we had a fourth sign. This one didn't say, "The majority of guests who've stayed in our hotel in the past have reused their towels at least once." It said, "The majority of guests who've stayed in this room
43:10 Speaker 01 have reused..." Room 215. Just like you.
43:19 Speaker 01 And under those circumstances, we get the most we have ever gotten.
43:25 Speaker 01 Let me say, there are two notable things about this set of results. The first is, those most successful strategies were both honest and inexpensive to employ.
43:40 Speaker 01 Secondly, we've never seen either of them in any city, in any hotel, in any guest room in the world. These aren't things that emerge as best practices within the organization. You have to know the behavioral science to hone your message properly. Why don't they know the behavioral science? Because on their board of directors, on their board of advisors, there will be someone from finance, there will be someone from logistics, there will be someone from transportation, there will be a legal person, and there will never be a behavioral scientist. There will never be a PhD-level decision scientist on their board. And it's a mistake.
44:25 Speaker 01 It's a costly mistake. Okay, let's ask another question. Right? Well... Is there any evidence that this normative information about similar others can influence what people do in their homes with energy conservation? Yes, there is. Yes, there is. Let me tell you about a study that I did with my colleagues, especially Dr. Wesley Schultz. We went to San Diego, California, and in random homes in particular neighborhoods, once a week for a month, we put a door hanger on the doors of homes in this neighborhood that had different messages.
45:06 Speaker 01 And we wanted to see what messages would be most effective in getting them to reduce their energy consumption that month. We also had a control group. One control group was some houses didn't get any message. We wanted to see what... So we wanted to compare the messages to that. We had a second control group where we had a sign that simply urged people to conserve energy. Here's the first finding. At the end of the month, when we looked at their energy usage, those two groups were identical.
45:47 Speaker 01 So simply urging people, simply exhorting people to save energy was the same as nothing. It was the same as nothing. They needed a reason. Well, let's talk about some reasons that we put on that sign. One reason is one you've heard, "Do this to save the environment." Another was, "Do this to be a responsible, a socially responsible citizen, to benefit the society." A third was, "Do this for your own economic self-interest, so that you will save money at the end of the month on your utility bill."
46:29 Speaker 01 And the fourth was, "The majority of your neighbors are undertaking energy conserving actions on a daily basis," something we had found in a survey. Let me show you the daily kilowatt hour usage of those signs plus the control group. So here is the sign, right?
46:53 Speaker 01 This is the combined control group. Environmental protection, benefit to society, saving money, produce small deflections. The only one that made a significant difference is what your neighbors are doing. And it was true. We just had to point to it. Okay, let's finish up here by asking this question. How can we use this set of insights to advance national energy goals? One possibility is to involve the private sector in the process. There is a company in the United States, I happen to be the scientific advisor for this company called Opower.
47:33 Speaker 01 They've taken our results and now they send consumers of utilities, energy companies, a message every month, not telling them how much energy they used last month, which you probably get in your message. They tell them how much energy you use compared to your neighbor. That's all, just compared to your neighbor. It looks like this. And let me show you the results in terms of energy savings. The longer these numbers are of the different utilities, the longer this is in place, the more energy is saved. It's now three years into the full commercial rollout of this company
48:16 Speaker 01 and it has saved 1.7 billion kilowatt-hours. For telling people something honest, alright? Let's finish. The way I started with my contentions. Decision-makers can focus too much on economic and legal reasons to motivate people. There are other reasons that don't just apply to energy, apply to general behavior. Besides this one, there are others, but social norms is one we should not forget.
48:53 Speaker 00 If you want a good book to read for the holidays, if you want to keep everybody on your wish list up to date, I highly recommend Pre-Suasion. Check it out. Again, Pre-Suasion, a revolutionary way to influence and persuade. It's everywhere. Grab a copy.
49:25 Speaker 00 My guest today is a repeat guest, but a very special repeat guest. One of the most important authors alive today. Because of one great book, he's got a couple of books, but his first great book, Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, which is what we talk today. That author, that man is Robert Cialdini. Unless you have been kind of lost at sea for many years, then you might not know about Robert. But for those that have something to do with business, entrepreneurship, psychology, almost
50:08 Speaker 00 any aspect of the human condition, this book, Influence by Robert Cialdini, is a must-have. This is the guidebook, the understanding of getting people to yes, understanding why they say no, the whole process. It is human interaction, successful human interaction. I mean, some of the main topics that we talk about, the main topics of his book, reciprocity, commitment, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity. Yeah, these might sound like buzzwords, but they're not. This is how you get things done with other human beings.
50:52 Speaker 00 This is how you communicate. This is how you interact. I am so fortunate to have the brilliant minds on this podcast. Without any further delay, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Robert Cialdini.
51:17 Speaker 00 It's really interesting to look at your career and I want to start at some early stuff, but just out of the gate, a big picture question. You've written a book, several now. The one we're going to talk about today, Influence, the new edition. This is a book that has caught fire for a long time, a long time. How has this changed your life?
51:42 Speaker 01 Here's the most notable change, Michael. People can pronounce my name now.
51:49 Speaker 00 There you go, right?
51:52 Speaker 01 It used to be all forms of what it is. It's Cialdini now and most people seem to be able to articulate it right off the bat. That tells me there's some reach for the book.
52:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's quite amazing and it's interesting too that I feel like when I first saw it, I don't know how many years ago, I grasped some of it, but as I get older, it gets deeper and deeper in your pores. There's a depth issue going on that I think some people, even though you've written it in a non-academic way, there's still kind of an issue of getting over the humps, so to speak, but then when you get it and the light bulb goes off, it's like you can't help but look at the world the way that you do.
52:35 Speaker 01 Well, that's very gratifying to hear. I think part of it may have to do with the fact that as we move ahead in time, new experiences, new examples, even new phenomena emerge that didn't exist before, but that these universal principles of influence still describe and help us understand. What we may be recognizing is that, oh yeah, this works here in this other thing that I've now encountered that I hadn't encountered before. A classic example is the internet. When I first wrote Influence, there was no internet, but it's now called
53:19 Speaker 01 the bible of internet commerce. It didn't exist before, but if we really have principles that are of universal impact, that are part of the human condition, then when new...
53:36 Speaker 01 Experiences, new phenomena come along, we can see a resonance to them.
53:43 Speaker 00 Let me take you back in time. You affectionately call yourself, I've seen you use the term, a patsy, that at various points in your career, early on in life, whatnot, that you would, I don't want to say fall for, but you were open to suggestion, a sales pitch or whatnot, or you appreciated these sales pitches. I would have to say, maybe one of the reasons it was hard for me to originally grasp your work, is I'm the opposite. So I was too skeptical, so I would just turn everything off. But take me back into maybe some early moments, where you started to kind of have the aha moment, before you even got into the research, where you started to feel like, what is this? What's going on? Was there an early, original moment? Was there one thing that kicked off your research?
54:28 Speaker 01 There was one class of things, and it does have to do with this self-description as a pushover or a sucker. I would often find myself in unwanted possession of things that I had bought from somebody who came to my door, some sales operator, or somebody who came and wanted me to donate to a cause I hadn't even heard of, and so on. And I would do these things, where I would buy subscriptions to magazines I wasn't really interested in. And I remember thinking to myself, wait a minute, there's something here, other than the merits of the offer, that got me to say yes to these requests.
55:12 Speaker 01 It must be the way that the requests were presented to me. It must be something about the psychology of delivering this offer and its merits, that hooked me.
55:28 Speaker 01 Isn't that interesting? This would be worthy of study.
55:32 Speaker 00 How old were you at that moment in time, Bob, roughly?
55:35 Speaker 01 I was in college.
55:37 Speaker 00 Okay, so like 21, 22?
55:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, a sophomore, junior in college. And I had just had enough of these experiences that it did occur to me that in the context of the psychology classes I was taking, there may be explanations for me owning a two-year subscription to Beekeepers Digest, you know? And I don't keep bees. There must be something that this salesperson did that engaged a feature of me that is so primitive, so fundamental, that I was inclined to say yes because of the way he presented it to me. His likability, or his credibility, or something like that must have done it.
56:24 Speaker 00 What was your research process at that moment? I mean, did you have one in the sense that, okay, you're having this aha moment, this lightbulb moment, something's going on? Did you talk to other people? How did you try to approach finding out more information?
56:37 Speaker 01 It turns out there was a fortunate confluence of events. At the time, I was scheduled to go on to graduate school in animal behavior. I was a research assistant for a faculty member who studied animal interactions. In fact, my first publication was about animal behavior. I was going to go to graduate school to study something called ethology, the study of animals and their natural environments. But I had a mad crush on Marilyn Rapinski at the time, who was taking a social psychology course. There was an empty desk next to her. We were at a point in our relationship where we wanted to be together at all times.
57:20 Speaker 01 So I would follow along after her, and I sat in this psychology, this social psychology class, the study of everyday human behavior. And I started to see where these dynamics and these tendencies might play in to the decision to say yes to somebody who is offering you something you don't really want, but has crafted the offering and the description of it and the proposal in such a way that they've engaged something very fundamental. So, for example, if somebody gives us something
58:00 Speaker 01 first, but does us a nice favor, and then asks us for something in return, we might say yes to whatever that is, even though we don't want it, but because we owe that person something, or because we like that person a lot, or because he's told us that a lot of other people just like us have made this choice and found it to be very successful for us. So there are all these other reasons besides the merit of the thing that could hook us and get us to move in that direction.
58:34 Speaker 00 If I keep you at that early stage again, though, you realized, once you got into this fully, no one else had yet done the work, so to speak.
58:43 Speaker 01 Not in a systematic way, no.
58:45 Speaker 00 That must have been a fun feeling.
58:47 Speaker 01 There was enthusiasm, there was elation, and there was trepidation. Because if you're going into something new, there's a lot of opportunity for falling on your face because nobody's been there. There are no guidelines, there are no guardrails. You can make a choice that turns out not to be a good one. At the same time, if nobody has really done this in a systematic way, and I'm thinking that I could do that, if it turns out, that really is, as you say, a groundbreaking opportunity then. It was something that had me definitely enthusiastic.
59:25 Speaker 00 In my world of investments and whatnot, I've had a chance to fall into some areas, blue ocean areas where people have not touched, and it's such a nice feeling. Changes your life in the sense that you're like, wow, I am so energized, I am going to go this path. And you chose one where, I mean, it just doesn't ever get dull. The examples never stop. It's just so intertwined in our life. It's your life now, too. It's just an amazing feeling.
59:49 Speaker 01 I count myself a fortunate man to have decided to study the persuasion and social influence process because who isn't interested in that? Everybody wants to become more persuasive or at least to know enough to guard themselves against people who try to persuade them in an unwelcome or undue ways. It seems to me I had both sides of the aisle there when it comes to persuasion and it turned out that yeah, a lot of people are interested in knowing in some sort of a compendium, which I tried to make influence, the book Influence, compendium of what we know scientifically about how and why people say yes.
1:00:34 Speaker 00 Let me keep you back in time a little bit. I found the process and perhaps there's some interesting nugget you might want to share, but the process, you start down this journey and how, where you started to search for how salespeople, so to speak, do this. You kind of went behind the scenes. Could I call you at one point in time, an investigative reporter almost?
1:00:58 Speaker 01 You could even call me a spy.
1:01:00 Speaker 00 Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Give me some early examples. Explain to the audience what I'm talking about and how you approach this because here you are, you're like, okay, I see something, but how do I investigate this? Where do I start? And you laid out a plan.
1:01:15 Speaker 01 It seemed to me that the people who really knew what worked in naturally occurring sales situations or management situations or fundraising situations, lobbying and whatever the influence domain might be, were those people themselves. They kept that information proprietary very often because they didn't want their competitors to know the strategies that they had figured out that worked. They weren't going to be likely to just tell me about it if I called them on the phone and say, let me understand what you do that works so well so I can put it in a book where all your customers and competitors will know what you're doing.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 I didn't think they'd be very receptive to that. But what I knew was that there was one place where they were very Very generous in describing what worked for their organization over a variety of situations and even over a variety of eras. And that is in their training programs. If your job as a trainer is to infuse new professionals, aspiring practitioners in your organization with the wherewithal to do a good job and be successful, then you had to give them that information that you had acquired over a long period of trial and error, essentially.
1:02:44 Speaker 01 I began enrolling in those training programs incognito, with disguised identity, disguised intent. I took my seat in their training programs and listened to what they were saying about what worked best and how they managed to make those particular tactics or techniques especially successful. And of course, this was all, as I say, undercover. Then, because I had to do this to be ethical, at the end of these training experiences, when I had gleaned the information I thought was most valuable, I would reveal my identity and say,
1:03:30 Speaker 01 "Actually, my name isn't Robert Calden. I'm writing a book about the influence process, and I wanted to learn from you. And I want to be able to get your written permission to use what I've learned in this book." Well, I figured that was going to be a long shot. All the gain would be mine, all the potential risk would be theirs in that particular exchange. I thought I would do something that I had learned from them would be very likely to increase the chance of yes. And that is, I gave them something.
1:04:13 Speaker 01 Before I asked for something in return, I said, "Look, no matter what your answer is to this request I'm about to make to you, here's what I'm going to tell you. I'm writing a book on this, on the influence process, and I learned some things from you. If you will allow me to use this information, I will send you an early copy of the book, before any of your competitors get a chance to read it. And you will get the information about what principles of influence work across the whole range of various organizations and industries and practitioners
1:04:58 Speaker 01 that I found out. So I will give you something. And I was hoping that they would then say, "Okay, then we'll give you this in return, our approval." But I could see in a lot of faces, I was getting frowns and grimaces. They didn't think that this was a fair trade. Then I said something I didn't even recognize was going to be effective in doing this. I said, in describing this, and this book I'm writing, it will be from my perspective as a university professor who studies the influence process. This is my research area.
1:05:40 Speaker 01 And I wanted to come to you to learn your strategies. And they looked at me and said, "Wait a minute. You mean you're a university professor whose area of expertise is persuasion? And we're teaching you? You're our student?" And I said, "Yes." And they would puff up their chests, Michael, wave their hand and say, "Of course you can use our wisdom."
1:06:15 Speaker 00 People are absolutely fascinating. And when you find out the process of how people work, boom, there you go.
1:06:20 Speaker 01 They were so flattered. I had given them a reputation of teacher to live up to. Well, what do teachers do? They don't hoard information. They disseminate information. One of the principles of influence is commitment and consistency. If they see themselves as a teacher, that that's who they are, that's this, this reputation I gave them, then to be consistent, they had to say yes to me. I got 100% of the people to give me permission.
1:06:55 Speaker 00 When you started that process, Bob, and you're going undercover, so to speak, in the very early stages, was there an initial aha moment? Was there some early experience in this undercover process where you literally were just sitting in your seat, just kind of like bouncing inside going, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm learning this right now?
1:07:17 Speaker 01 Yes, but it wasn't right away. It was after some time and some sampling of these training programs where the insight was, wait a minute, they're all saying the same things work for them. No matter what profession they're in, no matter what they're offering, what they're selling, what they're urging on their clients or customers, they're all using just six universal principles. There's hundreds of different tactics, but you can
1:07:55 Speaker 01 categorize them in terms of just six fundamental tendencies, human tendencies that they were hooking into to get people to say yes to them. And I thought, each one of these will be a chapter in my book. There are only six. I was shocked and excited by the fact of how small a footprint there was across all. All these various successful organizations. They were all using one or another of these six principles. And that outlined the book for me.
1:08:35 Speaker 00 At that point in time, you decide, you, I mean, here you are, you're kind of setting the stage and making a big decision. You did not know at that point in time, it would have a big decision or big outcome on society, a big influence on society, so to speak. But you pick six, you decide this is it. I mean, okay, there could have been seven or eight. Couldn't there have been? Or was there a debate in you? Or how did you narrow things to six? Or was it just painfully obvious there were six?
1:09:06 Speaker 01 There were more than six, but not everybody used them. These were the six that everybody used, whose economic livelihood depended on getting others to say yes to them. These were the six they all used. So that was the key.
1:09:25 Speaker 00 A lot of people have some familiarity with your quite famous book, but let's talk about some of the basics. This word reciprocity, I mean, of course, I don't think there's anybody on the planet that gets more credit for this word being understood than you. Reciprocity is so nice, and I think I was lucky enough to kind of learn something about reciprocity before I saw your work. And I just always felt like, well, if I just help that person out, and I don't really ask for anything, and I'm genuine. I'm genuinely curious about what they're doing, or I think I could help them. And let me just do that. I didn't have a term to apply that. I didn't have a term to associate with that, like reciprocity at the time. But then it's so nice years later to kind of fill in the blanks and backfill with your work.
1:10:10 Speaker 00 But a lot of people still don't get why it's so important to genuinely want to be able to help another person. Maybe you've got something deep in the dark of your mind where you hope that what you do for that person might get you an advantage, but it might not. But there's a real genuine aspect to reciprocity, because if you're not genuine, that's not really reciprocity.
1:10:30 Speaker 01 I really like what you just said. We do some training on the principles of influence, and we always say that there's an ethical approach to this. And the idea about reciprocity is that people give back to you what you first give to them. What we should do when we go into a room is not look around and say, hmm. Who can help me here? We should look around and say, whom can I help here? Who's available for me to benefit, to really advantage with what I know or what I can do? You just give that as a side effect. What comes back to you is benefit and advantage that that person wants to give. It feels obligated to give back to you, or feels grateful to you.
1:11:14 Speaker 01 And it just flows back automatically. There's no twisting of arms at that point. They just do this. There's this great little study that I saw about the owner of a candy shop in Southern California, who did a little experiment. One day, when people came in, half of them would be met warmly by the manager and then escorted over to the candy counter where they could make a choice. The other half were greeted warmly and given a small piece of chocolate and then escorted. Those people were 42% more likely to buy candy.
1:11:56 Speaker 01 Now you say, well, maybe they just liked the chocolate. Well, if you look closely at the data, the majority of them didn't buy chocolate. They bought something else. Even though they didn't like the chocolate enough to buy it, they felt obligated to do something in return. So it wasn't what they had been given, it was that they had been given something. What I always say is, just what you were saying. You start out by being gracious to people. You start out by doing what you can for them. And there are notions of karma and so on. We don't have to get into that, but it just has to do with the way we work as human beings,
1:12:41 Speaker 01 what we've evolved as a tendency to be sure that we stay in good relationship with the people around us by being sure that we give back if they've given. To us.
1:12:54 Speaker 00 You're right. I don't want to go off on a tangent with karma. I'm in Southeast Asia and I have to say after being in Southeast Asia for seven or eight years and learning a little bit about karma. Like I said, it's a whole different conversation, but maybe those folks a couple thousand years ago were actually laying the groundwork for your work, Bob.
1:13:14 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, I'm certainly going to feel aligned with the basic dynamic that they talk about.
1:13:22 Speaker 00 Yeah. It's funny too on reciprocity. So many people, unfortunately, in this world, in this day and age, everyone's always talking about getting paid. Let me get paid. Let me make my money. Okay, yes, everyone has to pay the bills. Everyone wants to have a career. But the basic idea of reciprocity is a very human connection. It's kind of like being friends on the playground, so to speak. So if you can be friends with people, it's amazing what can happen.
1:13:49 Speaker 01 I know you talk a lot about investing and so on, but Charlie Munger is a big supporter of the book. He told me that it was that principle of reciprocity that got him hooked enough to read on and read all the other chapters. Because he saw in it how it had worked for him and on him in business deals. That maybe wouldn't have occurred without a sense of reciprocity or for advantages that flowed to him. That wouldn't have flowed without the sense that the partnership was there and people were giving back to those who gave to them.
1:14:31 Speaker 00 You bring up Munger, obviously for the second principle, the idea of liking and commonality. I mean, that's a partnership where there was a whole bunch of liking and a whole bunch of commonality that's lasted for how long is the Buffett Munger partnership lasted, right? 50 plus years, I think?
1:14:46 Speaker 01 I think we're into 53 now.
1:14:48 Speaker 00 There you go. You sound like somebody that's maybe been to the shareholders conference at 53. You knew that right off the top of the tip of your tongue.
1:14:55 Speaker 01 Well, here's What happened? I didn't know about Berkshire Hathaway after I had written the book. But a few years later, I went to my mailbox and there's a envelope there from Berkshire Hathaway. And I opened it to find a share of Berkshire Hathaway A. stock and a note from Charlie, who said, "By the principle of reciprocity, you should get something for what you've given to us. We've made so much money implementing the lessons in your book." Now, at this time, that share was worth about $75,000. Now it's close to $400,000.
1:15:38 Speaker 00 Right, right there. Amazing reciprocity.
1:15:41 Speaker 01 Amazing, amazing. The other benefit I've got from it is as I go to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings, I'm a shareholder now. I'm a shareholder. And I get the Berkshire Hathaway letter, Warren's letter at the end of every year where he talks to us. And I can see what he does as a communicator. Not only is he a brilliant investor, he's a brilliant communicator about how to be a brilliant investor.
1:16:12 Speaker 00 Maybe I saw a speech somewhere with Charlie Munger talking about your book. I think I did, but I don't recall. But when you said 53, in my mind, I was like, okay, I need to pull on that string because no one says 53 without there being a story behind 53. He didn't say 50 or 51, 53. I was like, okay, there must be more going on here.
1:16:38 Speaker 01 I have to admit, it's at least 53. It may not be, but it's at least 53. Yeah.
1:16:46 Speaker 00 Let's talk about the third idea, authority. This is such an interesting one where I think you see it across the internet. For example, when people are trying to sell, you see it on Amazon. I mean, Amazon reviews and stuff and endorsements. People know enough about your book. It doesn't make a difference so much if some of the big names are saying. Something but authority and getting other people to say something, other people of note. It's really how we work in the modern world, isn't it?
1:17:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, because it's a shortcut, isn't it? Through the information overload of modern life. One, one way we can usually make a good choice is to see what those who are experts, those who are authorities, those who have the credentials and background and experience are saying about this. If we can communicate our message along with a testimonial from somebody who is a legitimate acknowledged expert in the field. Our compliance goes up dramatically, dramatically.
1:17:50 Speaker 00 I find in this day and age also that there's so many people that understand this idea. That, okay, we have information overload to begin with, then we have this shortcut of looking towards authority figures. But my gosh, there are so many authority figures on so many issues today. That also starts to become information overload. So you have to become an expert at discerning. What authority figures am I looking at?
1:18:12 Speaker 01 That's right. You have to be an expert on experts.
1:18:16 Speaker 00 It's true.
1:18:18 Speaker 01 But here's the mistake most of us make when we present an idea, let's say on an email or a proposal or something like this. We will wait to present the testimonial later into the body of our message. What I always recommend is to put it at the top. So that aura of authority is there for everything we have to say. Right from the beginning, we're getting the grace that comes with a testimonial from a acknowledged authority. Why would we wait to put it at the end or in the middle someplace? I always recommend putting it right up front.
1:19:03 Speaker 01 If you deserve it, if you've got it, if it's genuine, if it's honest.
1:19:09 Speaker 01 Don't pull your punch.
1:19:10 Speaker 00 When I listen to you, and I've listened to you in other places too, and you've been on my show once before. When I listen to you, it's like, okay, if I implement what this man is telling me, I'm making money. I'm making money. I'm increasing my ability to do better with my business. I can only imagine, because you seem very grounded and very calm, and I can only imagine that since these books of yours have come out, and when people hear you, I can only imagine the numbers of corporations and whatnot that would like to have you come participate. Has there been stretches of your life where you have just been on the road so much? Or have you kept yourself away from everybody and just done your thing? How have you managed this? Because I would just think so many people, you mentioned the one with Charlie Munger.
1:19:55 Speaker 00 I would think so many people around the world. Because when you start talking, it's different than reading only. Because there's a really interesting thing about you. How's that been over the decades, the people wanting you, so to speak?
1:20:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, very gratifying that I've had a chance to speak to communities and groups of people, and even individuals who invite me to come and make a presentation or to do some sort of a consult with them. What's great about it, they're learning experiences for me.
1:20:28 Speaker 01 The learning doesn't just go one way. I get to hear what works for those individuals and their take on what I'm suggesting and their nuanced examples that may reflect on what I'm saying. It has been something I've had to manage. Because I'm also an academic, and these days, I'm a writer exclusively. I retired from my university position. But I was traveling so much, and I needed to write this new version of Influence. Because, first of all, there's a seventh principle that's in there. But also, there was all kinds of updates and new phenomena to talk about
1:21:11 Speaker 01 that I didn't put in the first editions of it. And I couldn't get the time to do it, and then you know what came along? Covid-19.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 And just set me in front of my computer and I got it done. There were no airports, there were no hotels, there were no ballrooms that would constantly pull me away from a focus on that new book.
1:21:40 Speaker 00 I think somebody's going to be able to write a book in the future and as a fellow writer, I can attest to this, but COVID-19, the year of 2020, for writers that took advantage of it, was a once in a lifetime opportunity to focus.
1:21:52 Speaker 01 You know what? It was. It was. And there was a little trick I used to make me focus laser-like on this because after all, if that's all you're doing, pretty soon it gets burdensome. You start burning out on what you're doing and you need some pull to bring you back into the work if you've burned out on it after a while. So here's what I did to make sure I was in my seat, in my chair, working every available minute at the highest possible levels.
1:22:31 Speaker 01 I wrote the dedication for the book to my grandchildren and then I put a photograph of my grandchildren next to my computer screen because here was my image. I'm gone. My grandchildren have children and they go to a library and they find a copy of my book and they take it off the shelf and they show it to their child. And they say, you see this book? My grandfather wrote it for me. Well, Michael, it had better be a good book.
1:23:10 Speaker 00 That is a great piece of wisdom. I can't say I've used the exact same technique, versions of it, not as good as that one. That's a fantastic one. But it really gets to the idea that if you're going to do something in life, if you're going to create something, if you're going to write something, if you're going to make something, then, I don't want to use bad language, but don't make it half-assed. Go all the way. Make it great.
1:23:34 Speaker 01 Right. And every trick in the book that you can use, you're entitled to because you're not tricking anybody else. You're doing this, you're arranging the circumstances for yourself to take you out of the inconvenience of that moment and into The long term future where you want to be with that offering.
1:23:56 Speaker 00 Before I jump through the rest of the main principles and perhaps touch on the newest one that you write about, you just kind of open up a direction where I could say, okay, what do critics have to say? And if we look at America, so to speak, at the modern age, a lot of people might say, well, gosh, you know, Bob does really cool work and whatnot. But once American politicians on the left and the right get a hold of his work, oh, my gosh, that's the wrong way to look at it because people can go the wrong way on all kinds of things. But I think a genuine, honest person that looks at the principles that you've put together in influence, this is for good. I mean, look at Charlie Munger example. How do you address this day and age when the politicians, so to speak,
1:24:37 Speaker 00 get a hold of influence and perhaps they try to use some of these principles in an untoward way, a bad way?
1:24:43 Speaker 01 I liked what you were pointing to here, that there is nothing that can't be used for good or ill. If we were to censor ourselves and not produce anything that might lend itself to misuse, we would be frozen. We wouldn't contribute anything. Now, with that said, we still need to, and what we do, one of the things that we do in the speaking and training that we do, we talk about the ethical influence process, how you use these principles in ethically acceptable, in fact, commendable ways.
1:25:21 Speaker 01 So you can just give those examples and steer away from those examples where people have corrupted the process of exchange and partnership with others and moved into something unethical. Given what you said, anything can be used for good or ill, but we're going to go ahead and we're just going to restrict ourselves to examples of how to do this ethically, how to do it in a morally appropriate way.
1:25:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, I concur completely. There's all kinds of bad apples and the planet, and if they want to be a bad apple, that's their choice. The good apple direction is more fulfilling. Social proof is another one of the issues and the notion of how important it is for peers to feel comfortable, whatnot. But where I really want to go is number five, six and seven. Scarcity. This one is so great. I can think of an example, another investor, a guy named Seth Klarmann, kind of a peer of Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger, and he wrote a book years ago called Margin of Safety. And he did a 5,000 copied print run, and that was it. Now he's gone on to become this super, super successful investor out of Boston, but he only did 5,000 copies. And that has become the most collectible book in the world. I mean, most collectible investment book. You go on Amazon,
1:26:37 Speaker 00 I don't know what the price is today, but it's like, there's only 5,000 copies, and he never did another print run. It's not what he does. Speak to this notion of scarcity. It is something where we, especially Americans, we really, and I'm just using the idea of collectible. It's a lot deeper than that.
1:26:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. Scarcity, very powerful. Other animals on the chain, evolutionary chain, react to scarcity in the same way that we do. So it's a very powerful principle. We didn't have to learn it. It's essentially in bred there that we want those things more that are scarce, rare, dwindling in availability. In fact, I saw a couple of studies that showed that, for example, in a supermarket, they did in a supermarket chain, did an analysis of all the in-store promotions they ever ran to get people to buy particular items off the shelves. Sinage and that sort of thing surrounding or in front of the shelf or on the shelf that described the
1:27:35 Speaker 01 product that they wanted. The thing that outdistanced all the others was scarcity. Saying, limited time only sale, or only three items per customer doubled the effect of any other promotion that they had. And I recently saw something, if you want to Update this to the internet. There was a study by some researchers who looked at over 6,000 different internet sites, e-commerce sites that had done A B tests of various kinds of features within the site that they were studying.
1:28:15 Speaker 01 The one that had the most effect was limited number of options. And then there was social proof, which was a lot of other people are doing this, are buying this, look at all the positive reviews and so on. But the third was limited time. You're still getting two of the top three online, just the way you are in the grocery store.
1:28:46 Speaker 00 A follow up on this scarcity notion. Black Friday is now something across the world. Across the world, people don't even have Thanksgiving, but they still have Black Friday, which is really fascinating. I am somebody who has never bought anything on Black Friday. There's going to be some issues in my life where scarcity motivates me. But when it comes to the shopping experience, what do you call these people that that can't be influenced by scarcity? None of it moves me, but I know as a business owner, it surely moves clients. I know that you're 100% correct, obviously, and the proof is there. But what are the people that just have no, that can't be influenced by scarcity?
1:29:20 Speaker 01 I think we all have one or another of those dead spots where there are people who they're not going to be influenced by authorities. They're going to say, nah, I know better than they do. They're not going to be influenced by liking. They're going to say, no, I'll keep emotions out of my decisions. We all have some of that. But that's just a matter of how you were raised or how you were educated or some things, some lessons that you learned early on where things that seemed to be scarce didn't turn out to be that hot. What I would say is you might still be interested in another form of scarcity that is often misunderstood.
1:30:01 Speaker 01 When I do talk to organizations and talk about the scarcity principle, a lot of times they'll say, but we're not in that position. We have as many opportunities as people want from us. It's not like there's anything limited. What I will say is Here's what you probably do have, otherwise you wouldn't be successful. What is it about your product or service that's unique? That nobody else can get unless they come to you. That's what you need to bring to consciousness in your marketing. When you want to engage the scarcity principle. It means you have something people can't have unless they come to you.
1:30:45 Speaker 01 It's a scarce resource.
1:30:49 Speaker 00 That's got to be an interesting feeling also in the sense that as you have written about this subject. I mean, who is the other Bob out there? You are the scarce resource when it comes to influence. And that brings me to number six, which is also applies to you if I look at your career. Is you've not tried to be everything to everybody. You have stuck to your knitting, consistency in public, commitment. I mean, everyone knows you are, you're very consistent, very consistent.
1:31:21 Speaker 01 I mean, it's about what I guess is the term that people use now is authenticity. Where you look inside yourself and say, what works? What fits with what I prefer to do, what I want to be known for doing? Then staying congruent with that. So that people recognize that's the case. They know what they're going to get. But also it's the case that people will want to be consistent. With what they have said or done. So that people can come to me and say, well, you've said this in the past. So tell me, would you be interested in?
1:32:03 Speaker 01 What I have to offer that's entirely aligned with what you've already told me is important for you. That'll hook me. That'll get me to move in that direction. When people recognize. The power of consistency and how it works on me.
1:32:19 Speaker 00 Because you did not become a researcher who hit the ball out of the park, so to speak, who then flipped subjects, went to a different path. Because you do see this with some researchers, some authors, they'll tackle so many different topics over the course of a career. You seemed very comfortable and very knowledgeable that what you had come into, and you gave this great example for your grandkids in writing, is that this is your baby and that you're very comfortable with it. And you don't have to be all things to all people, but this one you love.
1:32:55 Speaker 01 Well, I think it's because I think I know this domain very well. I really know it inside and out. And it's forever interesting. And there are facets of it that I keep discovering. It's not like I'm trapped in the same quicksand or something like that where I'm always in there and slowly sinking. There's new things. There are always new examples, but even new dimensions within the principles I'm talking about that's worth revealing and allowing people to benefit from.
1:33:34 Speaker 00 100% because in the sense that I know, okay, I'm going to get Bob for 60 minutes here on this conversation, but if I knew I had no time limit, do you realize how many questions I could ask you?
1:33:46 Speaker 00 I would not stop. This would go on for a very, very long time because the depth of what you do, and I'm not trying to be fanish or anything, but it's very true. This subject has infinite depth.
1:33:58 Speaker 01 Again, I'm a fortunate man, having chosen this particular subject for that reason.
1:34:04 Speaker 00 Let's go into the last one before I have to lose you. A new principle that you put under influence, the notion of unity. Let me let you explain.
1:34:13 Speaker 01 Unity is the perception.
1:34:16 Speaker 01 That we share an identity. It's not the same as similarity. For example, sharing tastes or preferences or favorite movie stars or something like that. No, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about somebody who shares an identity with me. So if I were to say, oh, Michael is like us. That wouldn't be it. But if I said, Michael is one of us. All the barriers come down. Or Michael influencing us now. We're much more receptive because you are of us. There was a little study that was done on a college campus. Researchers had a young woman, a college age woman,
1:35:01 Speaker 01 stop people as they were walking down pathways and ask them to contribute to the United Way. And she got a certain number of contributions. If she said one phrase first, contributions more than doubled. And the phrase was, I'm a student here too. Being of them made them more receptive and more favorable. There are various kinds of unities that we can forge between ourselves and other people that create that sense of, oh, we're in the same boat. We share an identity, whatever that might be.
1:35:46 Speaker 01 If we learn how to do that, we're more successful. Warren Buffett did it in his 50th anniversary letter. He was describing to shareholders why they should continue to hold Berkshire stock and why prospective shareholders should want to buy Berkshire stock. And it was a number of items that were very strong because Berkshire has this very strong case to make. But he said, you know, if you were to ask me whether I felt it was wise to buy Berkshire stock into the future, I'd tell you what I tell my family, my family.
1:36:29 Speaker 01 In other words, he said, "I'm going to bring you into the boundaries of an identity that I share. I'm going to give you information that I would give to people in my family." I read that and I rocked back in my chair. Wow. This guy knows how to use an existing unity, apply it to people who are outside of that unity, and get them to move in his direction.
1:37:04 Speaker 00 What's amazing about that, too, is it's so brief. Sometimes people think they need to be so long-winded about whatever, but here you have an example with Buffett. It's so brief, it's one word, and it says so much.
1:37:15 Speaker 01 It strums a string that resonates inside all of us.
1:37:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's powerful. Again, I could sit here and pull your mind strings for hours and hours and hours, days and days and days. Honestly, it's just such a cool topic. The New and Expanded: Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. Bob, where would you like to send everybody? If they can't find this book, I think that's a good filter. If they can't find you or the book online somewhere, that's a good filter that maybe this is not for them. All joking. Where would you like to send people to?
1:37:45 Speaker 01 Amazon and all the booksellers, but our website, where you can get that and a lot more information, is influenceatwork.com. Influence at Work, all one word, no spaces, dot com.
1:38:01 Speaker 00 Bob, thank you for coming on again. And if there's any other versions in the future, any other embellishments or whatnot, I'm always welcome to have you on anytime. I know you've only got so much time and everybody wants you, but I will always take you. I appreciate it as always.
1:38:15 Speaker 01 I will be enthusiastic about it because you ask questions that let me get to the heart of my material.
1:38:21 Speaker 00 Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
1:38:23 Speaker 01 So long for now.
1:38:30 Speaker 00 I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected] . I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
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