7 Ways to Influence People with Robert Cialdini, Ph.D

bulletproof radio a state of high performance you're listening to bulletproof radio with dave asprey today it is a great honor to bring a guest back on the show who was on about 450 episodes ago guy who pioneered the science and psychology of influence in fact he's known as the godfather of influence his name is robert cialdini he's the guy who studied influence and how to use it ethically in business over 40 years of using evidence-based peer-reviewed scientific studies he's written an epic epic book called can you believe it influence and just re-released it with a bunch of new information in it robert it is a great honor to have you back on the show today well i am looking forward to it i have to say we had a good experience last time i'm looking to replicate it this time we also this time have the upgrade collective members in our live studio audience if you're just tuning into the podcast the upgrade collective is my private mentorship and membership group and part of the benefits there are many that come from members is that you get to tune in while the podcasts are being recorded i'm actually looking at the members they're looking at me right now and they'll be asking some questions at the end of the show so this is a new a new format that's been really popular uh so know you have not just me but lots of people there great you've been relatively recently elected to the american academy of arts and sciences and the national academy of sciences did you think when you started on this path of studying influence decades ago that it would get to this point never first of all the national academy of sciences for example only has 12 social psychologists in it and back when i started there were none as far as i could tell so it just didn't seem that influent science persuasion science was something that would have a category that would allow me into that body of people you know they told me oh during the meeting where you're inducted be sure to come to that meeting you get to walk across the stage that albert einstein walked across well there's no comp no no no similarities we're not comparable in any way but that kind of thing just never occurred to me as in my future well it's a it's a huge honor and i think you've earned it with your work which is which is really cool because everyone says they want to be influential but do they even know what they're asking for if you're talking to a 20 year old i want to be influential why do they want that why do they want that it seems to me that there are a lot of ways you can be influential you can influence a person's attitudes you can influence their beliefs you can influence their perceptions of you you can influence their definition of the situation in which they're but it seems all of those occur in the service of influencing their behavior so that's what i mean by the influence process i mean being able to move people to say yes to us more frequently to comply with our requests recommendations proposals and so on and here's the secret it seems to me without changing the features of what we are offering them but only changing the way we present those features to them the psychology of that very frequently we don't get to change the features of some offer that we have we got to change the way we deliver that message about the merits of this case and that just always struck me as worthy of study because truth be told all my life i've been a sucker i've always been kind of a pushover for the appeals of various uh fundraisers or sales people who would approach me and a lot of times i would find myself in unwanted possession of things and i would say wait a minute it couldn't be the merits of the thing it had to be the psychology of the way those merits were offered to me that swept me that's worth studying one of the reasons that i appreciate your work so much is that when you understand how influence is applied you can see when it's used against you consciously or unconsciously and it sort of opens your eyes up right so i look at some of the media campaigns running today this isn't even elegant influence the way they're doing like come on guys at least do a better job of trying to trick me okay come on you can do better do you find that you get uh tired or frustrated or maybe a little bit bitter when you see people misusing influence you know frustrated is closer to it because it seems to me the opportunities for genuinely influencing people to their betterment so they get a chance to seize an opportunity that really would enhance their outcomes if we fumble that away we do both of us a disservice so that is really something i i i i always shiver uh when i see somebody dropping the ball that way i i don't pick up any bitterness in you you're actually a really vibrant happy guy you can tell you you know if you you like what you do uh so i would been surprised if it brought you there but yeah frustration when you see someone you know don't use that technique to get people to you know drink sugar water or something it's not nice you know i do try to nudge people in the right direction there is an example uh that i i talk about it being in a uh an airport and hearing the guy behind the counter uh say that the the plane was full and he was offering uh a bonus to those people who would give up their seat for you know and he said and if you will do that we will give you a two dollar credit and and everybody left and then he said no no really uh it's 200 that was exactly what he should do because he put into action the contrast principle compared to two dollars now 200 dollars seems more than if he had just said two hundred dollars by itself that was so i went up and i congratulated him on that now do you think he was trained to do that or was he just naturally good yeah he was just naturally good i asked him about that is that in your trade no no he said no i think it was trial and error on his part how do we get people and he said you know uh first of all you got to get them to pay attention to you so if you say two dollars they look up and say what and then they're they're ready to hear the next thing you say so it was really brilliant those are the kind of people when i see them in the wild i'll sometimes hire them because they're true geniuses just you know not necessarily knowing what they're doing you you came up with uh in your original book which just sold like five million copies or something a lot um you came up with six principles of influence but in your new version that's very heavily updated you added a seventh can you walk me through the six and walk our listeners through uh so when someone you're listening they're saying all right what would i have to do to be influential or to know if influence is being used against me right what are they so the first one is what is called reciprocity reciprocation the rule that exists in all human cultures by the way that we are obligated to give back to others what they first give to us so there's a very simple implication of that if you want others to give you attention if you want them to pay uh to benefit you benefit them first pay attention to them first i always advise if you go into a room where you want to be more influential your first question should not be who can help me here your first question should be whom can i help here whose circumstances can i enhance they will then be standing on the balls of their feet ready to give to you what you need when you need it that's the way to operate uh with that so that uh you're always arranging for relationships where people want to say yes to you uh and it's very important not to s to slap that influence opportunity away how many times is this used to happen to me all the time i would do somebody a favor go beyond the call and they would thank me profusely for it and i would say i don't think anything of it no big deal just part of the job just i would have done it for anybody i mean literally slapping that earned influence out of the window and and so now what i advise is if that ever is the case if somebody says thank you in a genuine way to you for what you've gone out of your way to accomplish for them if if you're part of an organization or a you have a history with them or a friendship with them here's what you should say of course it's what long-term friends or long-term partners do for one another you put it on the map you don't diminish it you don't minimize it now if you don't have a history with them it's the first time you've interacted with them you say something a little differently i think you say of course i was glad to do it i know if the situation were ever reversed you'd do the same for me right and it's very important not to say if the situation had been reversed you would have done the same for me that's locating it in the past with some exchange that will never exist no if the situation were to be reversed i know you'd do the same for me once again you've put it on the map and people are ready yes you know this is a thing that i've done with the new edition of the book there were these six principles and people would say to me you know we get a lot from those principles but can you tell us exactly the best way to trigger them what's the best wording or the best action i can take to harness the power of that principle and so a lot more of that is in the new book where i talk about exactly what words to use to send the power of that influence into the situation for you did you study neuro-linguistic programming or nlps like tony robbins talks about it and all that is that a part of your your sources for this i did and i always felt that there was so much good information there so the logic that they employed fit with existing psychological theory i haven't been a practitioner of it because i'm a researcher and the nlp people they count on the logic rather than the empirical evidence for what they're recommending and i'm just i prefer to be over there on the uh on the research-based evidence-based side you can find evidence that if you use the right language that may come from the world of nlp it works better and yes there you go okay that's right i i've got it yeah i i've studied i've read the original bandler books and all that stuff but i don't think it's necessary to practice nlp to get people to do things as long as what you're asking them to do is the right thing and you you couch it properly you shouldn't have to manipulate them right you can influence them without manipulating them oh that's such a that's such a crucial distinction i hope we get to it later yeah yeah i want to ask you about that right now so the difference between manipulating someone and influencing them how do you know when you're doing one versus the other because you can tell is this is the principle of influence that we're going to talk about you know like reciprocity liking authority social proof scarcity are they really there in the situation waiting for you to point to them point them out to the person who you're trying to convince if so you have influenced in an entirely ethical and i'm going to claim commendable way you've educated them into ascent if that principle is fabricated there if it's counterfeited if people are lying with statistics to tell you about the the growth of their product or the popularity or they're they're not giving you a an accurate picture of what the authorities are really the experts are really saying about their idea or product that's the manipulation that's the exploitation of these principles and of the audience to them and as a consequence you lose long-term advocates who are cheated they ghost you at that point so for all you internet marketers listening to this right now rewind and hear that part again it's it's not okay to lie to people to get him to do what you want to do what about politicians what about politicians uh what's different for those guys because it seems like they aren't very reciprocal uh at least i haven't seen much of that in my short life actually they are if these days though they're they see themselves as adversaries rather than cooperators working for the best interests of their constituency or of the country at large it seems to me that they're um they're sharpshooters they're they're picking each other off um rather than finding a way to uh to interact in ways that are um that are mutually beneficial but there's this the great story of lyndon johnson who for years he was the speaker of the house and then the the head of the uh democratic party in this in the senate and uh and a majority leader and in those positions he was able to give all kinds of favors to politicians on both sides of the aisle and when he came into power he was able to produce a set of legislation that was unheard of by getting people from both parties to sign on to it right and if you look at uh the biography of him it turns out the way he did it was calling in his favors getting the reciprocation process to work and that's how we got these uh the great society programs uh uh uh enacted these days you've got people like uh like clinton like obama like trump who say i come to washington from outside the washington establishment nobody i am not obligated to anybody there and it accounts for why they were having so much trouble getting their program because nobody there was obligated to them it makes sense it's why you might want to elect a career politician because at least they know how to play the game and they have some some chits to cash in right versus a disrupter uh i i see your point there because it's it seems like not a lot's been getting done lately but hey what what do i know i live in canada now not that politics are any different so that definitely covered reciprocity which is only one of the big six and i really want to get to the seventh new addition to your work but so you have commitment and consistency that's doing it regularly right yes so but what you want to count on is that the people that you want to move in your direction feel and need to be consistent with what they've already said or done in your presence so if you can get them to take a small step in your direction they'll be significantly more likely to want to take another step in that direction i have an acquaintance who says he uses this in job interviews he said he was having a hard time getting hired and then he did one small thing differently in job interviews where he would go in there would be an evaluator or maybe a team of evaluators and he would always say the same thing to them so i'm very glad to be with you and i want to answer all your questions right and it wasn't getting him too far but then he added one thing he said but i'm curious i have a question for you why did you invite me here today what was it about my resume or my wow background and he would hear them make commitments to his strengths they would say well it was because of your credentials or because of your experience because you give evidence of being a fast learner whatever it was and then he knew what they they were looking for and he would hear them because they had made active commitments to those things continue to be consistent with those commitments he said this is an acquaintance of mine it's not a he said he's gotten three better jobs in a row using that strategy wow this whole episode of bulletproof radio if you're looking for work that one little hack is gold no one's asked me that during an interview but i can see how it would work because then you've already said they're good and then you have to go back to your team later so actually i told them they were good but and now i'm going to tell you they're not and it creates a logical fallacy in your brain wow that's some serious serious power thank you robert what about social proof i mean we all have likes on our instagram pages and whatnot but how does social proof work in the world of influence the way you see it social proof works by reducing uncertainty we live in what is the most information overloaded stimulus saturated environment that's ever existed on our planet we have all these choices all these these opportunities to move in one direction or another all this information and it leads us to be uncertain about the best choice to make one way we can reduce that uncertainty is to ask ourselves what are the people around me like me doing in this situation right it's something that we call pierce wage instead of persuasion persuasion which turns out to be more effective than per simple persuasion if you can get people to see that a lot of others are are experiencing your product or service or idea in a positive way well you've reduced their uncertainty about the likelihood it's going to be positive for them too so for example uh there was a study i loved from beijing china shows you the cross-cultural reach of social proof some restaurant managers put little asterisks next to certain items on the menu and um they didn't the asterisks didn't stand for or refer to the specialties of the house or uh the chef's special for that evening no they just signified this is one of our most popular items and each one immediately became 13 to 20 percent more popular for its wow well we all have most popular models we all have most popular features we have all have most popular upgrades we even have most popular payment plans we're fools of the influence process if we don't just point to that it reduces people's uncertainty they get off the fence now and get into the game of choosing as a result that is so fascinating and i imagine that that restaurant put the asterisk next to the highest margin items on the menu it didn't matter where they put them exactly here's another little interesting feature of it um although every demographic then became more likely to purchase the items they had the asterisk most popular asterisk there was one group that far outstripped everybody else first-time visitors who were uncertain and they used the evidence from peer suasion to decide so if you've got an if if you've got a startup or you you you have somebody who's come to you who hasn't been a long-term customer social proof is gold got it so i i can say uh the upgrade collective is is new people's favorite way to learn more about all of the content that i've created and just by saying that thousands of people listening are signing up for the program right now i wouldn't be surprised it's a good program it it definitely is uh people's favorite way but that's a truthful statement not a manipulative one now so we've covered uh reciprocity hard word to say and the commitment and consistency is social proof and what's different between social proof and liking which is the fourth of your your major principles so liking is the principle that says nobody would be surprised anybody who's a listener would not be surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like right uh the the surprise is how simple two small things could be to produce that rapport that we're looking for that serves as the basis for everything else we do once people like us they want to do business with us and and one is to point to genuine similarities that exist um between us the other is to point it is to give genuine praise to give true compliments that this was my greatest weakness all through my life failing to give people warranted compliments i can't tell you the number of times in research meetings with my graduate students i would hear myself say that was really smart what brad just said or you know how rosanna just how she just characterized that is a great insight for how we go next the next step we take and i would say it to myself and lose all of the all of the good will that would come from that exchange that that and i i don't do i've trained myself now whenever i hear myself complimenting someone in my mind i move that compliment from my mind to my tongue and dave it has been remarkable the consequences of that for the relationship building features of that next step so we've got to combine that with bj fogg's work on habit formation so you can form a habit of taking the good things you think about others out of your mind and putting them into your mouth that's also profoundly good advice robert thank you i'm going to work on that one myself because yeah there's all kinds of good stuff that happens but if you don't say anything did it really happen that's a bullseye that's absolutely a bullseye in the same way that you may have the most popular uh feature that you think really gives the most benefit to people if they upgrade to it if you don't say so if you just don't say so it's as if it isn't the most popular i really like the idea of saying this is the most popular because there's a thing that happens where you don't always want to be a shill for your own stuff you know i talk about bulletproof coffee sometimes but i didn't bring it to death on on the show and things like that just because i'd rather shine praise on all the great work in the world that isn't mine because i figure if you're if you're listening to the show you already know it how do you cross that line between hey everybody look at this really worthy stuff that i did versus thank you for all of your work robert right how do you suggest people navigate the not over self-promoting yet being being useful to others you're you've hit on the next principle of influence besides the one we've just talked about and it is testimonials so you're not the one waxing rhapsodic about yourself there are other people so one kind of person that is peers who can speak to their experience with the whatever it is bulletproof coffee what and experts who can talk about the health benefits and the flavor uh features that are built into it right and you don't have to be the rooster crowing about yourself right so you so for me testimonials not only should be used well and often they should be used first they on your website they go before you even begin to make your case so all of the aura that comes from that testament especially if it's an uh an expert an authority or someone that they feel is a credible source of information that flows to the very first word you write or utter well i'm taking notes because i could definitely do a better job on that i have tens of thousands of testimonials for bulletproof diet and all that and i always felt a bit like a douche bag like i'll put those up front and center on the website and all we're like i don't i don't know but they're all authentic and they're all real but i guess maybe i have an internal thing i don't want to over self-promote right but also i feel like it's worth it for people so where's that coming from yeah so i i because you we you don't want to be seen as a braggart you don't want to be seen as a self-promoter it reduces your liking right you know what i used to do and then finally it hit me on my website we have a category for testimonials our visitors had to go there what a mistake no no take a few of those and then rotate them around by the way to show right okay that these are testimonials right at the outset the first thing people get when they come upon our our website is a testimonial from somebody who they're likely to know and believe because this person has a a a good reputation so those those kinds of mistakes are things that i've i'm glad to um to dispense uh because i i i learned my lesson and but i had a tuition charge i had to pay that i hope your listeners won't have to pay uh as a result you understand why the show exists it is i want to learn from you and also i want everyone listening to not pay the tuition as you so elegantly put it for all this stuff because god we've both made enough mistakes on our lives right which does make us authorities which is one of the other um the other principles in your book uh influence or say your new book on influence so talk to me about authorities that only come from others or does it come from being an authority yourself yes it's and you said it the right word way it's being an authority not being in authority and you said it the right word way it's being an authority not being in authority in authority is a boss in authority is somebody who commands or can control my behavior because they can apply rewards or punishments and control me that way that's power it's not influence in the way that i'm using it no influence and by the way people don't like being pushed around they don't like being commanded and so they when you're not there they sneak around the corners right and and don't comply but if you're an authority and have convinced them that this is the right step to take now they carry that around them with them wherever they go that belief that you've instilled as to this is the right way to proceed so you will do well is there with them and they can uh they can abide by the the the the recommendations from that uh idea or or fact i i like that difference between being in authority versus an authority it's such a big deal um it makes me have to ask though uh 48 laws of power robert greene are you a fan yes i mean there's a lot in there but you know what no i just i'm not dissing this at all you can't remember 48. you could remember that is true you can remember seven we've got seven principles that's manageable 48 i can't yep yeah you have to pick the right one um you're right 48 is a lot and robert's been on the show a couple times but it's funny because you're talking about influence versus power yeah right and they are different they're fundamentally different and influence is a softer form of power but it's one that's way more palatable right right and in my world i want to know when people are using influence against me in a negative way and i want to know when they're applying the tools of power against me in the right way so that you can respond appropriately in either one but influence is sneakier than power but i think it's more powerful at the end of the day yeah often it happens it flies below the surface you don't even recognize that you've been moved by a word or two that's been um applied productively what about scarcity that's your sixth principle from your your original book right um how does scarcity come into play when you're influencing people people want more of those things they can have less of so it means that um if you can first of all the thing that you we all learned in um in our training make your differentiator prominent in consciousness the thing that's unique to you and what you offer often it's not one thing but it's a suite of things a combination of things none of your rivals can provide that set up that set of of differentiating elements and make that central or very prominent in your appeal because people see if they can't get it anywhere else they get a little crazy to want it more there was a and and this really works online where um there was a study done 6 700 commercial online sites were tech were tested by these researchers in terms of what they had used in their a b test to see which features of the site made the most difference in moving people into um from into conversion from prospect to to customer and they they located 29 different features some of them were just technological like is there a search function within the thing some of them were financial is there uh is there um free shipping some of them were uh designed to be persuasive uh uh is there a call to action right none of those made any difference the top six were the six principles of influence wow and the top of those a particular type of scarcity limited number scarcity if there is a limited number of options at this price or a limited time when you could get this at this price and there are competitors for those things that out distance all 29. the next was social proof but the top if you're in competition for something that has limited number it means you better get it otherwise those rivals could make you lose it and we hate to lose daniel kahneman's prospect theory won him the nobel prize in economics showed that that people are more motivated to get something right if they are considering how it might be lost to them then how it might be obtained by them we're more psychologically mobilized into action by the thought of losing something then gaining that same thing right so yeah okay that seemed to work well for the vaccine marketing campaign where there's a limited number of doses get yours while you can and it created a big surge of demand that then petered out when people realized it wasn't actually that limited exactly right exactly right that's what we're facing exactly okay then what about the new principle and so it's a big thing where you have a book with five million uh copies or so that are out there that's been very well received won all the awards and you're saying all right i'm gonna go through and based on a lot of new learning i'm going to add things but i'm going to add a new principle that's kind of the highest level what is the new principle that's in uh influence the the new version of influence yeah what is it and why did you decide to add that one okay so that this is a great question as to why i decided to write this book you know uh as you say it it's been very successful and there's this saying don't fix what's not broken right but i remember as a quote that my grandfather used to always use like when things were going well he would say if you want things to stay the same things are going to have to change around here right i mean there's so much wisdom there you can't sit on your lawyer laurels right and so i knew i had to update and the there was this evidence that was all around us right now tribalism right the extent to which we are driven by the groups our membership and loyalty to the groups that we are in right and and if a communicator can arrange for me to see him or her as a member of a group that i identify myself with right i i define myself in that group right all my barriers to influence by that communicator drop i just say yes to the people who are not just like me in in kind of like liking principle or similarity oh we share the same preference in ethnic food or music or comedies or movies or no no we share a membership in the same important i social identity based group here's an here's an example of what i mean a study was done on a college campus a young woman was asked to stand a college age young woman uh researchers had her stand on a busy spot on campus and ask passersby other students for donations to a good cause and she was getting some contributions but if she was asked to add one sentence to her request contributions more than doubled and the sentence was i'm a student here too i'm one of you and now 250 more compliance right wow it it's interesting the reason i didn't trademark the term biohacking back when i i was creating this movement is i wanted there to be a group of people who were working on upgrading ourselves and i didn't want to have that authority power that we talked about before where like i own this but it it's its own group but people who are biohackers like oh yeah i'll do this to help other biohackers yeah i'll do this because our knowledge is expanding and and i don't know how conscious i was of the principle you're talking about here but it so applies to why biohacking is a global phenomenon with millions of people who are doing it now we're so generous we favor the people inside our groups and we follow their lead too i mean something happened to me a while ago i saw this newspaper article that raided celebrities and their allegiance to various nfl football teams right well i grew up in wisconsin and so the green bay packers were always my home team and i saw that in this article justin timberlake and little wayne are both avid packers fans the way i am i immediately came to think more of their music better of their music and i wish them greater success they were of me and i wanted them to succeed that's the i mean that's the lever for change and uh people who understand how to use it to create this sense of weakness or partnership with another are greatly advantaged i really i really like that and it it's changed a little bit in the era of um the era of kovid where people are way more remote than they were before right but it seems like it's working that the biohacking conference that i've put on for almost 10 years now obviously has gone virtual for a little while and we're going to have a physical one later this year but now we've got more than 10 000 people who will be at the conference much bigger than it was before yeah but the the tools and technologies to be able to create the sense of unity even though we're remote it's face-to-face video and all that do you have any recommendations for people who are working on creating unity even if we're not going out to dinner together right now yep and i'm going to give an example that involves changing one word in what you say when you appeal to uh another individual to come on board with you to be uh a supporter of what it is that you are offering let's say let's let's take co-creation as an example i'm a big fan of asking our customers our prospects to our clients to co-create the next version of our product line or a particular direction for us to take and so on so they they give us feedback on what they think is most valuable uh what also what we can prune away because they don't find a lot of that and if we take that into account they really do become uh of of us they really feel partnered with us under that circumstance all right now what we typically do is for to ask for their feedback but here's the mistake i see almost everybody making in make in asking for that uh co-create creative uh uh uh introduction to our ideas it is we say could you could you give me here's here's our idea here's our product or maybe here's a new initiative that we're thinking about can you give us your opinion on that the word opinion is a mistake it's right to ask for their feedback but to ask for it through an opinion is in error here's why when you ask for someone's opinion you get a critic you're asking for that person literally to step away from you in psychologically to take a half step back from you and align themselves with everybody else against you and your idea and give give you their opinion about it if instead you ask for their advice they take a half step towards you you're asking for their partnership in this process right and they align themselves with you against everybody else they're giving you information is for your idea as to how it will be received by everybody else and there's research to show if you ask for assistance uh let's say buy-in on a new idea and you use the word advice can i ask for your advice on it you get significantly more favorable reactions to it in responses than if you ask for your for that person's opinion even worse is to ask for their expectation by the way but we typically ask for their opinion it is out distanced in terms of favorability by asking for uh advice because there's an old saying when you ask for advice you're usually looking for an accomplice [Laughter] and here's what the science says if you get the advice you get the accomplice wow i one of the reasons that i do the show is to get to learn new stuff all the time and get to talk with you and talk with other masters of their area of study and i think about what my life would have been like if i'd have had a copy of influence when i was a senior in high school if they would have taught this in a class just what you said right there you know all the mistakes that i've made over time where where you and many others know not to do that do you ever see influence being taught in high schools it is taught in high schools it's usually in uh a class in psychology okay so there's never a class just on influence but it will be uh assigned or let's say chapters from it will be assigned in high schools and that just warms my heart you're right to say i would love to and again it's not about i i've sold enough copies i would love to be able to have given those kids a step up to make them more influential in their lives well uh if if you're a high school teacher listening to this uh you're welcome to use this episode in your class if you're not assigning the book and you should probably assign the book as well um even if it's not a psychology class this is one of those fundamental things uh like how to win friends and influence people or you know think and grow rich or something where if people just have that level of understanding of these things everything you do is easier because you learned how to ask the right way you learned how to position it and it's it's just frustrating how many times eventually you'll stumble into this stuff unconsciously but it might take 10 years of struggling for for someone who just didn't know which book which expert to consult so i think your book can actually save or your work can actually save people a lot of struggle whenever which is why i was super happy to have you on the show again there's one area i haven't very gratified to hear that come from you know someone of a considerable attainment in this field so that really makes my heart warm oh you've you've earned it robert really uh the amount of thinking and the pictures in your head that have to happen and for you to be able to boil it down and explain it the way i have it's it's an elegant and elegant achievement uh and one that didn't come lightly i recognize that one error i haven't got to pick your brain on though okay influence of large numbers of people influence or someone hiring you influence in personal relationships so how do these principles of influence apply to your significant other so there's a study it may be my favorite study of all in the in the realm of interpersonal relationships was done in texas researchers had couples come into a laboratory where they uh were asked to think of a problem that had been besetting the couple uh for that they couldn't really resolve it you know they were just at loggerheads with one another and they said well one of you we they would flip a coin one of you will be the persuader and your job is to persuade your partner to come into line with your position on this issue right and we'll leave the room well they left the room but they had tape recorders and and they were filming uh through a a one-way mirror and so on so they knew what was going on and they they were able to identify three kinds of approaches that people who were in the persuader role used to convince their partner to come into line the first was disastrous it was um the one that said look if you don't do this you'll be sorry because i'm gonna have to do something that you don't like right not only did that fail to move the partner it produced a boomerang effect and you got these people polarizing further away from the their partner it was a gigantic error there was a second group not as wrong but still wrong they they were called instead of the coercive group they were called the uh rational um logical group they said look if you just examine the situation closely you'll see that my position is the more reasonable one it's the more and they didn't get uh uh polarization they got laughter yeah sure yeah you wish that were yeah yeah so they they got no change at all and then there was a small percentage that did the one thing that moved their partner in their direction right it was a unity a maneuver they said you know we've been together now for whatever number of months i really wish you'd do this for me right or they use the words our we or us in the way they described it and what they did was to bring to consciousness to top of mind the unit the unit character of the relationship it was a couple they weren't going to stand still for the researcher telling them to focus on a difference to focus them on something that was wrong inside the relationship where they didn't agree they raised the level of the the concept of couple back to the top of mind and people responded to one another as members of a partnership of who we are this is who we are and inside partnerships you give grace right that is my favorite example of how you maneuver those situations differently now i have to say there's another factor that applied in here not only did the partner move closer to the persuader in response the persuader then moved closer to the partner's position it was a reciprocal exchange they met in the middle and both sides were happy now with that so by going to unity you got reciprocity which was the first principle anyway right well that's worth adding uh to the book and what a powerful piece of advice for people in relationships uh to understand even if you're right you can just say let's do it together yeah and then you'll still get what you want maybe and you know um it also works inside business relationships where you've had long relationships with people why not say if there's some you know there's an issue of pricing or some kind of new thing that's happening and you want this person to move begin by saying you know jim you know sharon we've been working together for a long time on as business partners use that as the platform that's what those people in this study did they didn't add any new reason for moving in their direction any logical reason any factual they just raised to consciousness the fact that there was a long-term connection a bonding a relationship there and then the features of a long-term relationship took over to allow people to give one another to compromise and give one another grace wow it's interesting that you brought up the word grace how does that play into persuasion yeah it's a version of saying to people look i think well of you i am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt i don't mistrust i don't have skepticism about what you're going to do with this with this movement in your favor right i have a colleague who once asked me he said i have a son he's 12 years old and i want to give him a piece of advice to lead him into his adulthood and i'm asking all of my friends and fellow colleagues who i respect what piece of advice would you give and here's what i said tell him to go into every situation where he doesn't know the people there and think the best of them wow what that's going to do is going to it's going to allow you to give them grace it's going to allow you to be generous with them and by the rule of respect not only will they like you more for being genuine by the rule of reciprocation they're going to give you grace they're going to be generous with you and now you've got two people who like one another being willing to give and take that's the basis of the best form of business i know it also goes right back into game theory you know where if you if you play the i think the best of you you take the high road first the other person is more likely to do it and if they don't reciprocate then you know all right i'm not going to play with you anymore or you change the path so it seems like it wins by all the frameworks that i know for that kind of a thing well i i really appreciate you coming on on bulletproof radio and i'd love to get some questions from the upgrade collective you ready for some audience participation yes it's always fun all right susan you had a question yes hello um thank you so much for coming on today your book uh remains one of my top books that i think about and use so this is um just an opportunity great opportunity so i had two questions for you one is when you revisited your work and wrote your updated book that came out today what most surprised you and then the second question is what do you consider to be the top most applicable new ideas yes so um the the the first question really is what surprised me in all this work and i have to say it's the very how small the footprint is of universal principles of influence right i only counted seven as we were saying a little earlier that's manageable it's not like i know that there are hundreds maybe thousands of tactics and techniques and practices that you can use but it seems to me you can categorize the great majority of them into just these seven universal principles and that really surprised me when i i expected there to be many more that would work across the board and all the various situations that's just not what i found at all so the newest ideas are those inside the principle of unity i really hadn't treated them before i mean i i was aware of unity around me uh you know this side of this sense of uh affiliation being something but i always thought that it was just an accelerator it made the others work better the new insight was this is a standalone principle of influence this if we can as as um communicators simply arrange our language arrange how we comport ourselves so that people see us as partners with them before we begin the the process of of uh trying to to move them in our direction their their barriers to influence drop dramatically thanks for your question susan i think we're coming up on the end of the the time that we've got to spend together robert and thank you for taking audience questions from the upgrade collective just thanks for for putting decades of thinking into a relatively short readable book it's not that short but to condense that much i know how much work it is i know many late nights i've stayed up writing and thinking and trying to condense the work that i do and when i read your book it's really clear that you've got a huge amount of things that you tossed out in order to to have things that made the bar and destruction well so as a fellow author well done well thank you but i know what you mean about being concise there's a there's a great story of winston churchill after he was uh no longer uh in power in england he was a a speaker on the speaker's circuit and there was a guy who wanted to hire him and uh for an hour talk and he said well what's your fee and he said uh five thousand dollars well back then that was a lot of money and the guys oh gee i i don't know if we have five thousand dollars how about uh how much would it be for a half an hour speech and he said that would be ten thousand dollars i love that that's like the mark twain quote but much better that if i'd have had more time i'd have written less but winston brings it to dollars that's fantastic yeah well uh i in fact uh susan is commenting in the chat thread from the upgrade collective she says that your audio books are great too uh which is the case so guys you're listening to the show and you're saying what should i do you actually really want to read dr book on influence because it'll change all sorts of things where you don't realize you're applying influence whether you're you know buying a car discussing with your spouse something that's irritating to you or much bigger work in the world all of these so this is a core human skill that we usually aren't good at and and what we learn without structure usually comes from being yelled at in seventh grade so we don't really have great great uh coaching and teaching on this and so we emerge with ineffective influencing strategies and this is a chance to say all right what would happen if i spent the next 20 years of my life studying how to do this or you could find someone who spent 40 years studying how to do this and just learn from him which is why this episode is an important one in the library and robert your website is influence work dot com anywhere else people should go to find you or your brand new book well that's the best place uh but we also have a brand new um on-demand uh online uh training program that they can include in that uh in that influence that works website so you'll teach people how to be more influential all right that is worth doing i haven't signed up for that but i'm going to check it out as well thanks again keep doing your awesome work in the world and i want to see what you write in another 40 years so do i so long for now if you liked today's episode consider what it would have been like if you were with us in the upgrade collective and you actually got to ask questions of robert well you can do that so go to ourupgradecollective.com and sign up and join thousands of people together working on upgrading ourselves via everything that i know and everything that we know together because well it's worth it all right rob would you see how i uh how i included some of your teachings i was impressed

Channel: Dave Asprey

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Id: luCmWfX72GI

Length: 63min 30sec (3810 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021