collected
Nonfiction · Psychology · Social Science · Self-Help
About 12 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 25 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Social psychologist Robert B. Cialdini draws on experiments and time spent among salespeople and fundraisers to explain why people agree to requests without thinking them through. He organizes persuasion around six principles: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Gifts, public promises, and other people's choices become examples of useful mental shortcuts that can be exploited, with each chapter explaining how a tactic works and how to resist its misuse.
Conversational explanations, personal anecdotes, and accounts of experiments make this popular psychology book concrete and accessible. The chapters develop their ideas through numerous examples from sales pitches and everyday encounters, giving the book a practical, sometimes cautionary tone.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Not really. Conversational explanations, personal anecdotes, and accounts of experiments make the ideas accessible without prior knowledge of psychology. Chapters develop the six persuasion principles through numerous examples from sales pitches and everyday encounters.
Yes. Each chapter explains how a persuasion tactic works and how to resist its misuse. Gifts, public promises, and other people's choices illustrate mental shortcuts that can be exploited when people agree to requests without thinking them through.
It suits people interested in why they agree to requests, whether in sales encounters or everyday life. The emphasis on persuasion, useful mental shortcuts, and their misuse gives the psychology a practical, sometimes cautionary purpose.
Cialdini combines scientific studies and accounts of experiments with personal anecdotes and time spent among salespeople and fundraisers. Those sources support explanations of six persuasion principles, including reciprocation, social proof, authority, and scarcity.
608 pages in the Harper Business 2021 paperback edition.
Harper Business · 2021 · paperback. ISBN 9780063138803.
About 12 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 608-page Harper Business edition. Dense books can take longer.
Robert Cialdini is an American psychologist whose writing treats persuasion as a feature of ordinary judgment rather than forceful personality. He combines experimental research with case studies and observations of salespeople, fundraisers, and advertisers, using each to clarify how influence works in daily life. His characteristic method is to begin with useful habits of thought and show how they can become tools of manipulation. In Influence, cues such as reciprocity, social proof, authority, and scarcity illustrate both sides of that concern: why familiar shortcuts help people decide efficiently and how readers can recognize their exploitation. His later work broadens the same inquiry. Pre-Suasion examines how timing and context direct attention before an appeal, while Yes! considers how small changes in wording or circumstances affect cooperation. Throughout his books, explanation and self-defense remain closely linked.
