Robert B. Cialdini Quotes

those who cheat for you will cheat against you.

The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle — a stereotype — to guide their buying: “expensive = good.

you’re much more persistent when you’re confident in your abilities.

The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of reciprocal concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.

civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

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 the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result — hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.

Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others’ actions to decide how they themselves should act.

The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.

audiences have been successfully manipulated by those who use social evidence, even when that evidence has been openly falsified.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. —

we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.

Abraham’s willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action was not judged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.

a communicator who references a weakness early on is immediately seen as more honest

once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.

As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust — in