1: Weapons of Influence
The chapter opens with an anecdote about a friend of the author's who owned a jewelry store, and had an allotment of pieces she had difficulty selling. She instructed an assistant to reduce them to half price, but her assistant misread the message and doubled the price instead, and the pieces sold out.
Fixed-Action Patterns
He then mentions experiments with turkeys, which found that hens respond almost exclusively to the chirping of chicks: they will care for chicks who chirp, ignore or even attack those that don't. They will even care for stuffed models of things that do not resemble chicks (even those that resemble natural predators) if they chirp. This is not unique to turkeys, but these sorts of "fixed-action patterns" can be found in a number of species.
These patterns can be exploited to trigger reactions, or to avoid triggering reactions. Sometimes, it is a single characteristic that triggers the behavior. For example, the territorial behavior of the male robin is triggered by the red breast-feathers of other male robins - if a model with red feathers is placed in proximity, the male will attack it, but if the model lacks red feathers, he will not attack it.
But before we become smug about the foolishness of lower animals, we should consider that human beings have fixed-action patterns of behavior that usually work to our advantage, but can be used to dupe us.
For example, one experiment (Langer) demonstrated that a person who would ask to cut in front of someone in line to use a photocopier would get permission 60% of the time if they informed others that they only needed to copy five pages - but their cusses was nearly total (94%) if they added "Because I'm in a rush." This shows the effectiveness of a "request plus reason" pattern. But it was also observed that the simple word "because" was highly effective: even when the person added "because I need to make some copies" resulted in a 93% success rate. As such, it was concluded that merely stating a reason, even if the reason is meaningless or nonsensical, would increase compliance significantly.
Human behavior does not work in this automatic way in every situation - but it I astonishing how often it does. Here, he returns to the original story about the jewelry store, speculating that it was the price that created a perception of value, hence the desire for the items, that made the pieces more appealing when the price was increased. That is, customers likely regarded the jewelry as being cheap, hence undesirable, at its original price - but when the price was doubled, it created the automatic impression of quality. Which is to say, there is a fixed-action pattern that makes us think something is valuable simply because it is expensive.
Mental Shortcuts
He speculates that relying on the price as an indication of quality is a mental shortcut upon which most people rely. A person with domain knowledge of something can make an independent assessment - if they know jewelry, they would recognize the true value of something - but if we do not have knowledge, we go by the automatic assumption that high price means high quality. This assumption saves us a great deal of time in gaining the expertise necessary to make assessments of everything we purchase.
He quotes Alfred North Whitehead: "civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking." Particularly in the modern world, where we have a plethora of options, we cannot invest time in assessing everything but must rely on signals to avoid the task of evaluation.
He then speaks about promotional strategies that present the appearance of a discount. When people have the sense that the price of something is less than its value, they are more eager to purchase it. This works on impression alone, as demonstrated by a printing error that caused a tire store's coupons to offer no value: the price stated on the coupon as a "savings" was actually the regular price, not the discounted price - and the redemption was just as good as that of campaigns that actually offered a substantial discount.
It's clear that the function of sales offers are merely to create the impression of value - but Cialdini asserts that it is because they save people the time and energy of having to monitor prices and know when a promotional price is a good offer. They simply assume that because they have a coupon, they are getting a good deal.
Decoys and Lures
Most people simply do not recognize their automatic behavior patterns: they do what comes naturally without thinking about it - and this makes us highly vulnerable to anyone who employs them. Moreover, to employ triggers, a person need not understand the precise mechanisms of how they work, but merely discover what does work.
Returning to the world of nature, he considers species that use mimicry to their advantage. Consider the behavior of non-venomous snakes that imitate venomous species - successfully deterring predators by imitating certain behaviors. Or consider the species of firefly that imitate the mating behaviors of their prey to lure them. He spends a bit of time talking about the "blenny," which is a small fish that imitates "cleaner" fish that larger species allow to pick parasites from their gills - except that the blenny merely moves like a cleaner fish to trick the larger fish into allowing them to get close ... and then they take a bite out of them and dart away.
Sadly, this has a strong parallel in the human species: many people who seek to exploit others approach them under the guise of someone who is there to help them, or at least means them no harm, in order to get past their defenses and take advantage.
He returns to the jewelry store owner again, indicating that once she discovered that people would buy on price, she began exploiting that programming: to speed the sale of items, she increases the price. It's particularly effective during tourist season, because unsuspecting vacationers looking to purchase a souvenir are generally back home before they recognize that they overpaid, and cannot return to the shop with a grievance or dissuade other customers.
He also mentions an observation of a scam in a tailor's shop, in which the clerk who fitted the customer in a suit would pretend to be hard of hearing, asking the customer to speak more loudly to him. When the customer asked the price of the item, the clerk would call back to the manager to ask the price. The manager would shout the price, "forty-two dollars" and the clerk would tell the customer a lower price "thirty-two dollars," pretending to have misheard the shop owner. He mentions that "many" customers would purchase the suit immediately and scurry from the shop, thinking they had just gotten away with something.
The Contrast Principle
Another weapon of persuasion exploits the principle of contrast in human perception: we tend to consider things comparatively. If we lift a light object before a heavier one, we will assess the second object as being heavier than it is. Or in mating, we may find a woman at a cocktail party to be more beautiful than she really is if she is standing with a very ugly friend.
In terms of attraction, he mentions studies at Arizona State and Montana state that asked people to assess the attractiveness of pictures of those of the opposite sex, and routinely found that both men and women rate average-looking people as being less attractive if the first images in the sequence were of highly attractive people. This is cited as the problem of media bias - how seeing very attractive people in advertising and entertainment cause us to feel ourselves and others to be less attractive.
Similar studies looked into touch sensation: a person asked to move their hand from a pail of cold water to a pail of room-temperature water estimated it as being hotter than it was, and those who began with a pail of hot water estimated room-temperature water as being cooler.
This "nice little weapon of influence" is often used in retail stores, which offer an array of merchandise and will show a customer something that is unappealing in order to make a piece of average quality seem better to them. Alternately, they will show the person the average item first and, when the customer seems reluctant, they will show them a very poorly made one for a slightly lower price - and the mark will then develop the impression that the first item is much better than it is and well worth the small difference in price.
He mentions witnessing the very same tactic used in real estate and automobile sales: whether the salesman shows the customer an inferior item first and then delights them with a slightly better one, or shows them the better item first and makes it more appealing by showing a worse one afterward, the contrast trick remains a reliable method of upselling.
He also mentions a related practice of selling minor upgrades after getting consent on a more expensive item. Tailors can sell accessories (belts, ties, cufflinks, etc.) at higher prices once the customer has consented to purchase an expensive suit; automobile dealers can sell upgrades (whitewall tires, window tinting, etc.) after selling the car. Cialdini reckons that this is because there is contrast between the price of the main item and the price of the upgrade or accessory: having agree to pay two hundred dollars for a suit, the customer will be less likely to haggle over a twenty-dollar necktie.
Persuasive Judo
An interesting feature of the weapons of persuasion is that they require very little effort to use. The typical approach to persuading someone is to apply a great deal of effort to "selling" the other person on an idea - to give them more reasons or more details that they ought to do ask you ask of them. But this is not as effective and requires a great deal more effort than exploiting psychological weaknesses.
He draws an analogy to the Eastern styles of martial arts, such as judo or jujitsu, which enable even a small and weak person to topple a much larger and stronger opponent by their understanding of momentum, balance, and the structure of the human body. It is not the amount of strength that a practitioner applies to the task, but the technique they use to identify and exploit weaknesses in the motion and posture of an opponent's body.
And in the world of persuasion, we find that those who use the weapons of influence exert little force: a grasp and a gentle tug is all it takes to overcome resistance and bend others to their will. It's done so subtly that even the victims tend to see their compliance as the result of their own character weakness, rather than the manipulative behavior of their exploiter.