Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)
EUR 8,63
Many boring stories on the same principle - I totally agree with the person that gave just one star - except I give one more star because the content is worth reading - but not the book itself. Its stories are boring and the principles could have been explained on only 10 pages. Just read the table of contents and one example of each chapter, then you ve understood what the book is about. You don t miss anything by not reading the rest of the book. Just repeating it over and over again when the examples get more and more boring.I read You can negotiate anything by Herb Cohen before and the book is much better. More stories from real life, more interesting and more content.
Required Reading for the Intelligent Consumer - The human mind is a wonderful thing, capable of the most amazing thought processes and ideas. Yet the brain is on automatic pilot for most situations. That allows the conscious mind to really focus. The drawback is that some people will use our conscious inattention to sneak one by us, like a fastball pitch to a hitter looking for a change-up.Influence, the book, is very useful in this regard, because it uses interesting examples to help us be aware of our own tendency to let automatic pilot thinking take over.Since I first read this book many years ago, I have been watching to see if the circumstances I see support or invalidate Professor Cialdini s points. By a margin of about 9 to 1, Cialdini wins.Given that we are easily manipulated by our desire to be and to appear to be consistent with our past actions and statements, swayed by what the crowd is doing, and various other mechanisms, the only way we can be armed against unscrupulous marketing is to be as aware of these factors are the marketers are.At the same time, I appreciated how the book explores the ethics of when and how much to apply these principles. Without this discussion, the book would come off like Machiavelli s, The Prince, for marketing organizations. That would have been a shame. By dealing with the ethics, Professor Cialdini creates the opportunity to educate us intellectually and morally. Well done!I have read literally dozens of books about marketing and selling, and I find this one to be the most helpful in thinking about how influence actually works. Even if you will never work in marketing, you will benefit from reading this book in order to better focus your purchases and actions where they fit your needs rather than someone else s.
The brain shotcuts - This book has been a real joy to read. Inside you won t find any ground-breaking revelated truth, but the autor (Robert B.Cialdini Ph.D.) will bring you into a journey around the human brain, and the brain paths that lead us to decisons. Let s face it: out reality is terribly complex, and each second out brain is bombarded by an incredible quantity of information. How could we still make good choices? Easy: through shortcuts. Our experience and culture helps us to choose the right direction through clues that most of the times lead us to the best choice. Sometimes some people more skilled than us in the influence tactics (usually people trying to sell us something!), use those clues trying to bring us to the choice the want us to choose, tipically Yes, I buy it. Sometimes those sellers can tell us that some offer is for a limited time only!, triggering our urge for a quick decision through the principle of scarcity, and trying to convice us that if we do not make a positive decision now, we won t be able to profit of some special offer in the future, this clue will guide us to desire something that normally wouldn t attract us.From the epilogue at the end of the book:Our instinct can also help us: sometimes we have to listen to our stomach! The stomach is one of our organs which is more strictly connected to ancestral areas of the brain which we cannot easily control and understand, most of the times the answer of some our questions are there, in the most ancient and uncontrolled part of our brain. Just giving an example, if we are conducting an interview, and we feel something like an uncertanty feeling in our stomach (no joke!), most probably our amigdala is aware of some negative signal of which we are not consciuous. Learning to listen to our such clues can help us to use this kind of intelligence that is many times underused and underextimated. This kind of approach can save us sometimes to accept something we don t really want.The book explores sistematically, one by one, the different principles that we usually tend to apply to shorten our decisions, and proposes also some mean to counter-attack to such principles once artificially triggered by people trying to make their own profit.I recommend this book as a relaxing lecture, with lots and lots of real-life examples, the author will give the reader some consciusness of how people make decisions, which techniques usually people adopt to to convince us, and which weapons we can employ to contrast them.
A very good book - This is an eye opening book.My only beef with it is that in some examples it gives it reduces the cause of the human behaviour in question to a single mechanism, while there are several at play(which are not mentioned in the book, at least not in technical way).Nevertheless, a very good book, a must for people who manipulate or don t want to be manipulated.
Absolutely Convincing - Robert Cialdini, presents very basic mechanisms that we use to make our lives simpler. Those same mechanisms can be used by compliance professionals in a way that seems very natural to us.The Book Dissects 6 weapons of influence, namely, Reciprocation, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity.The book will protect you from being ripped off and will make you wiser and more aware of the psychological mechanisms taking place around you.
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