A couple of months ago, I read somewhere that when it comes to the psychology of persuasion and influence, Cialdini is the “daddy” of this subject. I chuckled and moved on. But then, a few days ago I found myself in a bookstore holding this book and heading to the counter. I came back home, and devoured it chapter by chapter, awestruck and flabbergasted by the sheer brilliance of the psychology of persuasion. Cialdini is no novice, apart from being an academic scholar and researcher who conducted innumerable experiments over the course of his career; He spent three years, in field, researching for this book. He entered into programs offered by different business enterprises and marketing agencies to train sales staff and dealers in ‘the art of persuasion’. Cialdini explains the science at work behind the curtains of this ‘art show’ in this book.

We live in a consumer society. Our markets survive and thrive on mass consumption of products that are neither necessities nor luxury, but still they find their way to our homes right through our pockets. Why and how it happens, how we are convinced and persuaded to do something we really don’t need or want to do? Why in certain situations we are unable to fight the temptation to buy something we have no use of? How exactly do we fall for these marketing gimmicks? This book has the answer.

For our convenience, our brain has evolved some fixed-action patterns, patterns that we follow almost blindly without any recourse to reason or logic. Why we do this? Because our brain has been programmed this way and because by doing this we don’t have to think too hard, it seems natural and effortless, almost as if it is the most obvious and right thing to do. This ‘shortcut’ of ours is exploited, almost everyday by people who are trying to sell us something.
Cialdini repeatedly uses the term ‘click, whirr’, which explains our behavior patterns when we encounter a situation for which we have a ‘programmed reaction’. What the situation does is that it appeals to our conscious mind with a red-flag-signal. A file is ‘clicked open’ as a result, and ‘whirr’… out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.
(view spoiler)[For instance, if a thing is expensive it is good. If a thing is rare, it is precious. Likewise, we are more likely to spend a higher amount on alloy rims if we have spent a fair deal on the car. The more we spend on our suit, the more we are likely to spend on shoes and tie. This is due to the contrast principle, which is that on spending a high amount of money on an expensive thing we are likely to spend money on something less expensive than the initial product but which is still expensive enough if compared to its alternatives in the market. Click, whirr. The more we spend on the first thing, the more we are likely to spend on the second and the third. (hide spoiler)]

The other important principles that marketing agents employ to get our assent are: Reciprocation, Commitment and Consistency, Friendliness, Authority and Scarcity.

These are the shortcuts our brain is evolved to rely upon for making quick smart decisions, and it is by manipulating these very ‘click, whirr’ responses that we are compelled to say yes, even when we don’t want or need to.

The synthesis of his entire research has been divided and assembled in 7 chapters. Each chapter explaining, through case studies, social experiments, research and psychological analysis of human behavior, different methods and tact with which we are convinced to do or not do a certain thing.


This book has a lot in common with Daniel Kahnemans’ “Thinking, fast and slow” which is one of my favorite books of all time. I highly recommend these two books to anyone who is interested in behavioral psychology.