Robert B. Cialdini Quotes

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.

Actually he wrote, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. For some obscure reason, a central distinction had been lost as the years eroded the accurate version of his statement to mea...

Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the fastest-growing or largest-selling because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others thi...

After all, the reciprocity rule asserts that if justice is to be done, exploitation attempts should be exploited. READER

All the weapons of influence discussed in this book work better under some conditions than under others. If we are to defend ourselves adequately against any such weapon, it is vital that we know its...

All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; an...

Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.

Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.

Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their association...

I can live for two months, confessed Mark Twain, on a good compliment.

If we want them to buy a box of expensive chocolates, we can first arrange for them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price of the chocolates. If we want them to choose a bottle of Fr...

In Korea, the product was a brand of Chinese communism; in the United States, it might be a brand of cuticle remover. The

In general, here is how it works: The teacher stands in front of the class and asks a question. Six to ten children strain in their seats and wave their hands in the teacher’s face, eager to be called...

It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause th...

Jsou to lidé, kteří mají skrytou vadu osobnosti – nízké sebepojetí. Hluboko uvnitř je pocit, že jejich osoba má malou cenu, a to je nutí vyhledávat prestiž ne prostřednictvím vytváření nebo vylepšován...

Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best...

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that j...

One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim—and that you write it down. Ther...

The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal. Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one...