Finished Reading: Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

“Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade ”, Robert Cialdini, (english language, EUR 12.99)

Robert Cialdini is a professor emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University, a visiting professor of marketing, business and psychology at Stanford University, and is the author of several books on the psychology of Influencing and Persuasion. This book is about getting someones attention, and using it.

Cialdini speaks about privileged moments, points in time where we have someones attention, and that person is also primed to actually follow our reasoning along with our message. It goes on to analyse what makes these moments privileged, and how we can help manufacturing them.

Being a funny and refreshing writer, Cialdini fills his stories with jokes and anecdotes illustrating the point he’s about to make. He’s also liberally using whatever he’s explaining right now in convincing us that this particular thing actually works, which is kind of a meta-demonstration of the point he’s making.

This book can help you trying to sell a thing or an idea better, to customers, colleagues or other people that you need to get to listen. It’s also helping you to understand what’s influencing you, and how, and giving you tools to notice (and allow or deny) this. Going full meta, Cialdini explains how that changes the process of persuasion, and gives studies and examples to back even this up.

The book itself is not only full of stories and games playing with the methods and the language of persuasion, it also contains a lot of footnotes and pointers to followup reading, in case you want to go deeper. Time and money well spent.