The key ideas

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Robert Cialdini, 2016

At every meeting, the best alarm salesman “forgot” his papers in the car, and according to the author, this helped him sell. The author of “Influence” shows that a decision often starts taking shape before the request is even made. The book is about how attention, a question about yourself and a sense of “we” prepare the moment, and about why such effects deserve a careful reading.

Who it is for

For people who often ask for things, negotiate or sell, and for anyone who wants to notice when they themselves are being led toward a decision.

What we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.

What the book is about

The best fire alarm salesman in the company “forgot” something in his car during every meeting with clients. He would apologize and ask permission to step out and let himself back in. Why would such an experienced salesman be so absent-minded? The answer is on the next page.

Robert Cialdini is a psychologist and the author of “Influence”. For many years he studied not only lab experiments but also people who persuade others for a living: salespeople, advertisers, negotiators. He noticed that the most successful of them put a great deal of effort into what happens before the request. He gave this stage a name: pre-suasion.

An important frame. The book is the author’s model and a selection of studies. Some of them concern priming, and many experiments in this field were later repeated with mixed success. So what follows is about what can influence a decision, not about buttons that always work.

Idea 1. The salesman who forgot everything

In the book, the salesman is called Jim. He sold expensive fire alarm systems and, according to Cialdini, did it noticeably better than his colleagues. While the clients were filling out a fire safety test, Jim would remember that he had left important papers in his car and ask whether he could step out and then let himself back in. Sometimes they gave him a key to do it.

Cialdini’s explanation goes like this. Whom do we let into our home unsupervised? Usually someone we trust. By allowing it, the homeowners were in a way telling themselves: this person can be trusted. By the time the talk turned to buying, the trust was already in place.

A note of our own: the trick rests on a small lie, and the value of the story lies more in the mechanism than in a ready-made script to repeat.

A Livria example. Before prescribing something unpleasant, a doctor asks how the patient slept after the last procedure and listens to the answer. The next piece of advice may now sound like it comes from someone who cares about you.

A decision can start taking shape before the request is made. What a person felt on the way in can become the backdrop for the whole conversation.

Read in Livria

About the author

Robert Cialdini is an American social psychologist and Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He wrote “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” (1984), one of the best-known books on persuasion.

All books by this author: Robert Cialdini

Terms from the book

  • social proof
  • Priming
  • Unity
  • Pre-suasion: Cialdini’s term: preparing the moment before the request itself, so that a person is ready to hear it. It is the author’s concept, not a scientific category.
  • Privileged moment: An image from the book: a short window of time after a person’s attention has been pointed in a certain direction, when, in the author’s view, a request may be received more willingly.

All terms

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