Influence

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert B. Cialdini (1984; expanded 2007; New and Expanded 2021)

A jewelry store, a misread note, and a price that doubled

A friend of Cialdini’s once opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She had a batch of turquoise pieces that simply refused to move. Peak tourist season, plenty of foot traffic, fair prices, decent quality. The jewelry sat there. She tried the standard tricks. Moved the case to a more visible spot. Told her staff to push harder. Nothing.

The night before a buying trip, she scrawled a note to her head saleswoman: "Everything in this display case, price × ½." She wanted the stuff gone, even at a loss. A few days later she returned, and every piece was sold. Not surprising. What was surprising: the saleswoman had misread the smudged scribble. Instead of halving the price, she had doubled it. The jewelry that had been impossible to move at the original price flew out of the case at twice that price.

This is the puzzle Robert Cialdini spent his career trying to crack. Why do humans, who like to think of themselves as deliberate, rational decision-makers, behave more like turkeys reacting to a cheep-cheep sound? Why does a higher price sometimes cause more demand, not less? Why do we say yes when every fiber of our self-image insists we are too smart to fall for the pitch?

Cialdini, an experimental social psychologist at Arizona State, was not content to study compliance from inside a laboratory. He suspected the real experts on saying yes were not academics. They were the people whose paychecks depended on it. So for almost three years he went undercover. He answered newspaper ads for sales trainees and let car salesmen, vacuum-cleaner reps, fund-raisers, and dance-lesson studios teach him their methods. He sat through training programs. He memorized scripts. He took notes at night in his car. And he watched the same handful of psychological levers being pulled in completely different industries by people who had never read a textbook in their lives, who had simply discovered, through trial and error, what worked.