robert cialdini influence new and expanded the psychology of persuasion

I expected that this was going to send me back to the laboratory to understand why those particular practices worked as effectively as they did.īut something else arose. All I had to do was to enter their training programs to see what they said worked best and to look for the commonalities among the various professions. Merchandisers were looking for salespeople, marketers, advertisers, recruiters, and so on. How did you choose the different programs, and were there commonalities across them?ĬIALDINI: I just answered ads for trainees. That way, I could use the evidence of the streets to decide which influence practices were reliable and robust enough to warrant studying them, and to understand why they worked so well.ĮBERHARDT: Yes, I know you immersed yourself in these training programs for 3 years. The plan was to take this information from the streets back to the traditional research avenues where I could unpack it in an ordered and logical way. I did the same within training programs for marketers, fundraisers, and recruiters. I joined these training programs to learn what worked well in each of these jobs to get people to comply with requests. I learned how to sell insurance, portrait photography, automobiles, and nutritional supplements. Because I study social influence, I began to enroll, incognito, in the training programs of as many influence professions as I could get access to. One was to engage in a participant-observation project where I became integrated into a setting where the behavior of interest was unrolling naturally. We work in a very ordered and structured environment that doesn’t always keep us in touch with the raw goods of human behavior. To maintain the metaphor, I felt that I needed to step away from the “avenues” where I was working and get into the streets more often. I thought it was important to get back to what I call the “streets,” where the behavior occurs. We were passing information back and forth about how we had studied the behavior and increasingly moving away from the source of the behavior itself. Talk about the importance of adding participant observation and field research to the suite of methodological approaches we use in the discipline.ĬIALDINI: When I was a relatively young researcher, I thought I saw myself moving away from examining the true sources of human behavior and relying instead on studies that my colleagues and I had done to refine the understandings of that behavior. EBERHARDT: So many of us conduct research in the laboratory or, more recently, online.

Robert cialdini influence new and expanded the psychology of persuasion