Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

by Robert B. Cialdini

I helped conduct to investigate the effects of managers’ degree of personal involvement in the creation of a work product. I’d expected that the more involvement managers felt they’d had in generating the final product in concert with an employee, the higher they would rate its quality, which is what we found: managers led to believe that they’d had a large role in developing the end product (an ad for a new wristwatch) rated the ad 50 percent more favorably than did managers led to believe they’d had little developmental involvement—even though the final ad they saw was identical in all cases. In addition, we found that the managers with the greatest perceived involvement rated themselves more responsible for the ad’s quality in terms of their much greater perceived managerial control over their employee, which I’d also expected.