Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini present fifty short chapters, each describing a specific experimental finding about influence and its practical application. The structure follows Cialdini's six principles: reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking and social proof.

The applied findings include that hotel towel reuse messages work better when they cite what other guests in the same room did than when they appeal to environmental values; that describing what most people do is persuasive while describing widespread undesirable behaviour normalises it and backfires; that a small gift given before a request produces compliance because of reciprocity; that making a commitment active, public and written increases follow-through; that adding a small cost or a minor drawback to a description increases credibility; that too many options reduce purchase rather than increase it; and that naming the specific person responsible increases compliance where a general appeal does not.

The book is practical, each chapter is two or three pages, and it is directly usable in marketing, fundraising, negotiation and management. The problems are significant. Many of the studies cited are small single experiments from the pre-replication-crisis social psychology literature, and several specific findings in this area, including some priming and social proof effects, have failed to replicate or shrunk substantially under better methods. Cialdini's core principles have held up better than the individual studies illustrating them. Read the principles as durable patterns and the fifty specific tactics as hypotheses to test in your own context rather than as established effects.

Regents' professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University who studies compliance and influence.

Influence organises the persuasion research into six principles - reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity - each tested experimentally and observed in the field among salespeople, fundraisers and negotiators. Pre-Suasion adds the timing question: what an audience attends to immediately before a request changes how they answer it.

Arizona State University