Influence

Click, Whirr

A friend of Robert Cialdini owned an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. One summer a batch of turquoise pieces refused to sell. She tried everything. She moved the display to the center of the store. She told her staff to push them harder. Nothing worked. Before leaving on a buying trip, frustrated, she scribbled a note to her head saleswoman: "Everything in this display case, price times one-half." She came back to find the jewelry gone. Sold out. But not at half price. The saleswoman had misread the scrawl and doubled the price instead. The turquoise sold out at twice what it had failed to sell for the week before.

That story sits at the front of *Influence* for a reason. Most of us, encountering the punchline cold, would invent an explanation about a sudden surge in demand or a tourist with deep pockets. Cialdini's whole book is an answer to that explanation. There was no surge. There was no rich tourist. There was a price tag, and the price tag triggered something in everyone who walked past — a shortcut so old and so reliable that it overrode the actual quality of the stones. Expensive equals good. Click, whirr.

Cialdini spent about three years undercover to write this book. He enrolled in sales training at encyclopedia companies, vacuum-cleaner companies, portrait studios, dance studios. He infiltrated public relations firms and fundraising operations. He interviewed bunco squad officers and consumer protection people. He read the sales manuals that practitioners pass to each other like samizdat. What he found, across thousands of specific tactics, was a small set of psychological levers that kept appearing in different costumes: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Six principles. The same six, again and again, in jewelry stores and recruitment drives, in car dealerships and political campaigns, in cults and in fundraising mailers.