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Writer's pictureJonno White

400 Best Robert Cialdini Quotes: Author of Influence (2023)

1. “As Samuel Butler wrote more than 300 years ago, “He who agrees against his will / Is of the same opinion still.”


2. “Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.” – Robert B. Cialdini


3. “What is social proof? A phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior.”


4. “To change minds a pre-suader must also change states of mind.”


5. “those who cheat for you will cheat against you.”


6. “When we like someone, we are more receptive to their ideas.”


7. “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay.”


8. “Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”


9. “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line.”


10. “The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.”


11. “Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent. It’s a poor trade-off, then, for social influence when we allow present-day forces of separation – distancing societal changes, insulating modern technologies – to take a shared sense of human connection out of our exchanges. The relation gets removed, leaving just the ships, passing at sea.87 UNITY.”


12. “To all appearances, Vincent was at once knowledgeable and honest, a combination that gave him great credibility. He was quick to exploit the advantage. When the party had finished giving their food orders, he would say, “Very well, and would you like me to suggest or select wines to go with your meals?” As I watched the scene repeated almost nightly, there was a notable consistency to the customer’s reaction—smiles, nods, and, for the most part, general assent. Even from my vantage point, I could read their thoughts from their faces. “Sure,” the customers seemed to say, “You know what’s good here, and you’re obviously on our side. Tell us what to get.” Looking pleased, Vincent, who did know his vintages, would respond with some excellent (and costly) choices. He was similarly persuasive when it came time for dessert decisions. Patrons who otherwise would have passed up the dessert course or shared with a friend were swayed to partake fully by Vincent’s rapturous descriptions of the baked Alaska and chocolate mousse. Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated expert of proven sincerity?”


13. “But the rule for reciprocation, which states that those who give first are entitled to receive in return,”


14. “Recent research indicates that my advice to steer clear of social-proof evidence if it is not fully present is mistaken. Rather than relying only on evidence of existing social proof, a communicator can do at least as well by relying on evidence of future social”


15. “On the one hand, she specified a set of manageable activities that reliably increase personal happiness. Several of them—including the top three on her list—require nothing more than a pre-suasive refocusing of attention: 1. Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. 2. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. 3. Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.”


16. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” – Robert B. Cialdini


17. “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” – Robert B. Cialdini


18. “It should come as no surprise, then, that there is a strong but sad parallel in the human jungle. We too have profiteers who mimic trigger features for our own brand of automatic responding. Unlike the mostly instinctive response sequences of nonhumans, however, our automatic tapes usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept.”


19. “Be as precise as possible about your need for aid.” – Robert B. Cialdini


20. “In meetings, sit across the person you want to influence. A speaker in full view usually determines the outcome of a discussion.”


21. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason.”


22. “Optimal persuasion is achieved thru optimal pre-suasion; positioning people to agree with a message before knowing what’s in it.”


23. “Attractiveness, similarity, compliments, contact and cooperation can make a person more influential.” – Robert B. Cialdini


24. “If what you do before your request is seen as a ploy to get a yes, your relationship could pay the price.”


25. “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” With”


26. “Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.”


27. “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?” – Robert B. Cialdini


28. “In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.”


29. “We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle.”


30. “Christ, I think I'd grow old if I lost you.”


31. “It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.”


32. “Embarrassment is a villain to be crushed.”


33. “No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”


34. “Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”


35. “The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” – Robert B. Cialdini


36. “tactic can be particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, when a communicator mentions it, little additional damage is done, as no new information is added—except, crucially, that the communicator is an honest individual. Another enhancement occurs when the speaker uses a transitional word—such as however, or but, or yet—that channels the listeners’ attention away from the weakness and onto a countervailing strength.”


37. “The behaviors you witness others getting away with will influence you to join.”


38. “Need to boost sales? Transform buyers’ attitudes to the item or idea by connecting it to a celebrity.”


39. “There’s an implication for influence: persuaders would be wise to match the System 1 versus 2 orientation of any appeal to the corresponding orientation of the recipient. Thus, if you are considering a car purchase primarily from the standpoint of its emotionally relevant features (attractive looks and exhilarating acceleration), a salesperson would be well advised to convince you by using feelings-related arguments.”


40. “frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.”


41. “Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others of attainment.”


42. “Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.”


43. “When the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person’s suicide, older drivers died in such crashes. l advised, then, to take special care in our travels at these times.” – Robert B. Cialdini


44. “All the weapons of influence discussed in this book work better under some conditions than under others. If we are to defend ourselves adequately against any such weapon, it is vital that we know its optimal operating conditions in order to recognize when we are most vulnerable to its influence.”


45. “If a gift, favor, or service incorporates all three features of meaningfulness, unexpectedness, and customization, it can become a formidable source of change.”


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


47. “The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.” – Robert B. Cialdini


48. “The researchers thought that recipients of precise offers are much more likely to believe that the person making that offer has invested time and effort preparing for the negotiation and therefore has very good reasons to support the precise offer they are making.”


49. “Algunas de estas técnicas son muy retorcidas y las investigaciones han demostrado que elevan las probabilidades de obtener confesiones falsas: mentir acerca de la existencia de huellas incriminatorias o de testigos oculares; presionar a los sospechosos para que se imaginen repetidas veces cometiendo el crimen; y colocar en un estado psicológico nebuloso a través de la privación de sueño y de los interrogatorios incesantes y exhaustivos. Los defensores de estas tácticas afirman que están diseñadas para extraer la verdad.”


50. “The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion – the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it.”


51. “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.79”


52. “The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that “civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” Take, for example, the “advance” offered to civilization by the discount coupon, which allows consumers to assume that they will receive a reduced purchase price by presenting the coupon.”


53. “The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.” – Robert B. Cialdini


54. “When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all.”


55. “Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.” – Robert B. Cialdini


56. “At the top, elected officials engage in “logrolling” and the exchange of favors that makes politics the place of strange bedfellows, indeed. The out-of-character vote of one of our elected representatives on a bill or measure can often be understood as a favor returned to the bill’s sponsor. Political analysts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson’s ability to get so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration. Even members of congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the proposals were voting for them. Close examination by political scientists has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the House and Senate. As President, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.”


57. “The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”


58. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason.”


59. “But it comes down to this: in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses;”


60. “Cuando la gente actúa al unísono, no solo se ven a sí mismos como más parecidos, sino que después se evalúan unos a otros más positivamente.”


61. “Hey, back to me, guys. I’m supposed to be traumatized, and you’re supposed to be making me feel better. So far, you suck at it.”


62. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”


63. “But it comes down to this: in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses;.”


64. “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. —WALTER LIPPMANN”


65. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.”


66. “good-looking people are aware that other people’s positive evaluations of them are not based on their actual traits and abilities but are often caused by an attractiveness “halo”


67. “Little wonder, then, that the influential French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in describing the social pressures surrounding the gift-giving process in human culture, can state, “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay.”12”


68. “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.” – Robert B. Cialdini


69. “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”


70. “the world abounds with cults populated by dependent people who are led by a charismatic figure.”


71. “The other servers were not even close to him in weekly earnings. I began to linger in my duties around Vincent’s tables to observe his technique. I quickly learned his style was to have no single style. He had a repertoire of approaches, each ready for the appropriate circumstances. With a family, he was effervescent, even slightly clownish, directing his remarks as often to the children as to the adults. With a young couple on a date, he became formal and a bit imperious in an attempt to intimidate the young man into ordering and tipping extravagantly. With an older married couple, he retained the formality but dropped the superior air in favor of a respectful orientation to both members of the couple. Should the patron be dining alone, he selected a friendly demeanor—cordial, conversational, and warm.”


72. “As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust—in.”


73. “In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.”


74. “He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. —”


75. “John Stuart Mill, the British economist, political thinker, and philosopher of science, died more than a hundred years ago. The year of his death (1873) is important because he is reputed to have been the last man to know everything there was to know in the world.


76. “this”


77. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Or, at least, so goes a frequently heard quotation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.”


78. “Para cambiar este resultado, empezó a emplear el principio de la coherencia por su cuenta. Tras asegurar a sus evaluadores que quería responder a todas las preguntas de la forma más detallada posible, añadía: «Pero antes de empezar, me gustaría saber si me podría responder usted a una pregunta. Siento curiosidad. ¿Qué parte de mi currículum le ha llamado la atención para convertirme en candidato?». A continuación, sus evaluadores terminaban hablando de cosas positivas que veían en él y en sus calificaciones, comprometiéndose así a las razones para contratarle antes de que él hablara. Me ha jurado que ha conseguido tres trabajos mejores seguidos empleando esta técnica.”


79. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.” – Robert B. Cialdini


80. “Mysteries can be a great pre-suasive tool. They prompt people to want to listen more deeply and retain information to solve that mystery.”


81. “Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action.”


82. “We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style.”


83. “Surveys can increase demand. Asking a question the right way can put your customers in the right frame of mind to buy what you’re selling.”


84. “the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners’ attention to a selected sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners’ existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reaction. For”


85. “Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.” – Robert B. Cialdini


86. “Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.”


87. “So by my lights,”


88. “One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim – and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.34.”


89. “The differential phrasing might seem minor, but it is critical to achieving the company’s unitization goal. Providing advice puts a person in a merging state of mind, which stimulates a linking of one’s own identity with another party’s.”


90. “Üstüne gelinmiş, stresli, kararsız, umursamaz, aklı başka yerde veya yorulmuş olduğumuz zaman eldeki bilgilerin en azına yoğunlaşırız. Bu şartlar altında karar verirken ilkel fakat gerekli tek kanıt yaklaşımına döneriz. Bütün bunlar ürkütücü bir anlayışa dayanır: Dünyanın doruğuna yerleşmek için sofistike akıl düzenimizle öylesine kompleks, ilerlemiş ve bilgiyle dolu bir çevre yarattık ki bununla başa çıkmak için soylarından geldiğimiz hayvanlar gibi davranmak durumunda kalıyoruz.”


91. “Abraham’s willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action was not judged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.”


92. “In general, here is how it works: The teacher stands in front of the class and asks a question. Six to ten children strain in their seats and wave their hands in the teacher’s face, eager to be called on and show how smart they are. Several others sit quietly with eyes averted, trying to become invisible, When the teacher calls on one child, you see looks of disappointment and dismay on the faces of the eager students, who missed a chance to get the teacher’s approval; and you will see relief on the faces of the others who didn’t know the answer…. This game is fiercely competitive and the stakes are high, because the kids are competing for the love and approval of one of the two or three most important people in their world. Further, this teaching process guarantees that the children will not learn to like and understand each other. Conjure up your own experience. If you knew the right answer and the teacher called on someone else, you probably hoped that he or she would make a mistake so that you would have a chance to display your knowledge. If you were called on and failed, or if you didn’t even raise your hand to compete, you probably envied and resented your classmates who knew the answer. Children who fail in this system become jealous and resentful of the successes, putting them down as teacher’s pets or even resorting to violence against them in the school yard. The successful students, for their part, often hold the unsuccessful children in contempt, calling them “dumb” or “stupid.” This competitive process does not encourage anyone to look benevolently and happily upon his fellow students.77”


93. “Social proof occurs when people want to follow the lead of multiple, similar others.”


94. “In meetings, sit across the person you want to influence. A speaker in full view usually determines the outcome of a discussion.”


95. “In one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian college students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, each class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half inches taller than as the “student.”


96. “Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.”


97. “That is, the car salespeople I observed threw the low-ball by proposing sweet deals, getting favorable decisions as a result, and then taking away the sweet part of the offers.”


98. “Fue interrogado durante dieciséis horas por un equipo de cuatro policías que se fueron rotando, y un técnico de polígrafo que informó a Peter de que, según el detector de mentiras, sí que había matado a su madre. La conversación, registrada en la transcripción del interrogatorio, deja poco margen para dudar de la confianza del técnico que manejaba el polígrafo sobre el asunto: PETER: ¿En serio eso lee mi cerebro? TÉCNICO: Totalmente. Totalmente. PETER: Entonces ¿he sido yo? ¿No puede haberse tratado de otra persona? TÉCNICO: Imposible. No a partir de estas reacciones.”


99. “Reciprocity is part of a healthy ongoing relationship. Nurture it by giving before asking for a request.”


100. “Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough. The.”


101. “As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust-in.” – Robert B. Cialdini


102. “Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.” – Robert B. Cialdini


103. “In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.”


104. “our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”


105. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. —G. K. CHESTERTON”


106. “It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.”


107. “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.”


108. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”


109. “Consider the results of a study conducted at Northwestern University. Researchers gave online participants information about a pair of sofas we’ll call the Dream and the Titan. The two, manufactured by different furniture companies, were comparable in all respects except for their cushions. The Dream’s cushions were softer and more comfortable than the Titan’s but less durable. In”


110. “quienes hacen trampas por ti también te las harán a ti.”


111. “Content also builds on the principle of authority. You’ve demonstrated your expertise in this field, and so customers will rely on you in the future.” – Robert B. Cialdini


112. “In Korea, the product was a brand of Chinese communism; in the United States, it might be a brand of cuticle remover. The”


113. “The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.”


114. “The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.”


115. “Those who don’t know how to get people to say yes soon fall away; those who do, stay and flourish.”


116. “Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought.49 In”


117. “All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in.”


118. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality. And what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”


119. “Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.” – Robert B. Cialdini


120. “The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.” – Robert B. Cialdini


121. “We want to do business with people or brands that we like and have forged a bond with over the years.” – Robert B. Cialdini


122. “Those scientists in France Worried about raising the chance A guitar would prompt “Oui” To a stranger’s startling plea Need not have been so troubled, Phone numbers more than doubled.”


123. “Without question, when people are uncertain, they are more likely to use others’ actions to decide how they themselves should act.”


124. “Before introducing their message, a masterful pre-suader arranges to make their audience sympathetic to it.”


125. “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Following brief reflection, nearly everyone answered yes. In that privileged moment—after subjects had confirmed privately and affirmed publicly their helpful natures—the researchers pounced, requesting help with their survey. Now 77.3 percent volunteered.”


126. “Un resultado interesante de este proceso es que los niños que ven que sus padres abren sus casas a diferentes personas, será muy probable que, cuando lleguen a adultos, ayuden a otros.”


127. “Las empresas mejoran la probabilidad de que una persona se presente a una reunión o a un acto si, al convocarlo por teléfono, en lugar de decirle al final de la llamada: «Le apuntamos en la lista de asistentes. ¡Gracias!», utilizan la siguiente frase: «Le apuntamos en la lista de asistentes, ¿de acuerdo?”


128. “Do not seek dishonest gains; dishonest”


129. “It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference.”


130. “People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.” – Robert B. Cialdini


131. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”18.”


132. “No matter what industry you’re in, the ability to influence others is crucial. Your professional success can rely on it.”


133. “There’s a difference between a mystery and a question. Questions demand answers, but a mystery demands something more valuable-explanation.” – Robert B. Cialdini


134. “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. –Alfred North Whitehead”


135. “Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.”


136. “Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it.”


137. “The more you identify yourself as being a member of a particular group, the more unified you will feel with others in the group.”


138. “At the beginning of each lecture I say, ‘Here’s a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you’ll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.’”


139. “A job candidate might say, “I am not experienced in this field, but I am a very fast learner.” An information systems salesperson might state, “Our set-up costs are not the lowest; however, you’ll recoup them quickly due to our superior efficiencies.”


140. “when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd.”


141. “The main work of a trial attorney is to make a jury like his client. —CLARENCE DARROW”


142. “With this single maneuver, Vincent engaged several important principles of influence. First, even those who did not take his suggestions felt Vincent had done them a favor by offering valuable information to help them order. Everyone felt grateful, and consequently, the rule of of reciprocation worked in his favor when it came time to decide on his gratuity. Besides hiking up the percentage of his tip, Vincent’s ploy also placed him in a position to increase the size of the party’s order. It established him as an authority on the current stores of the house: he clearly knew what was and wasn’t good that night. Moreover—and here is where seeming to argue against his own interests comes in—it proved him to be a trustworthy informant because he recommended dishes slightly less expensive than the one originally ordered. Rather than having appeared to try to line his own pockets, he seemed to have the customers’ best interests at heart.”


143. “The patrolman’s account provides certain insights into the way we respond to social proof. First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.”


144. “First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.”


145. “Weathermen pay price


146. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. —G. K. CHESTERTON T”


147. “The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.” – Robert B. Cialdini


148. “Every day in every way, I’m getting better. – EMILE COUE.”


149. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality… and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”


150. “Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.”


151. “Every day in every way, I’m getting busier. —ROBERT CIALDINI”


152. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”18”


153. “Because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.”


154. “we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided”


155. “We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.” – Robert B. Cialdini


156. “The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of reciprocal concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.”


157. “The second important thing to understand is that we, too, have our preprogrammed tapes; and, although they usually work to our advantage, the trigger features that activate them can be used to dupe us into playing them at the wrong times.”


158. “By no means is my friend original in this last use of the “expensive = good” rule to snare those seeking a bargain. Culturist and author Leo Rosten gives the example of the Drubeck brothers, Sid and Harry, who owned a men’s tailor shop in Rosten’s neighborhood while he was growing up in the 1930s. Whenever the salesman, Sid, had a new customer trying on suits in front of the shop’s three-sided mirror, he would admit to a hearing problem, and, as they talked, he would repeatedly request that the man speak more loudly to him. Once the customer had found a suit he liked and had asked for the price, Sid would call to his brother, the head tailor, at the back of the room, “Harry, how much for this suit?” Looking up from his work—and greatly exaggerating the suit’s true price—Harry would call back, “For that beautiful all-wool suit, forty-two dollars.” Pretending not to have heard and cupping his hand to his ear, Sid would ask again. Once more Harry would reply, “Forty-two dollars.” At this point, Sid would turn to the customer and report, “He says twenty-two dollars.” Many a man would hurry to buy the suit and scramble out of the shop with his “expensive = good” bargain before Poor Sid discovered the “mistake.”


159. “people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.”


160. “Vincent reserved the trick of seeming to argue against his own interests for large parties of eight to twelve people. His technique was veined with genius. When it was time for the first person, normally a woman, to order, he went into his act. No matter what she picked, Vincent reacted identically: his brow furrowed, his hand hovered above his order pad, and after looking quickly over his shoulder for the manager, he leaned conspiratorially toward the table to report in hushed tones for all to hear: “I’m afraid that is not as good tonight as it normally is. Might I recommend, instead, the . . . or the . . . ?” (At this point, Vincent suggested a pair of menu items that were slightly less expensive than the dish the patron had selected.) “They are both excellent tonight.”


161. “the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.”


162. “No matter what industry you’re in, the ability to influence others is crucial. Your professional success can rely on it.”


163. “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”


164. “Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.”


165. “Sabemos por numerosos estudios que jugar a videojuegos violentos incita de manera inmediata conductas antisociales.”


166. “This pattern offers a valuable lesson for would-be rulers: When it comes to freedoms, it is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. The problem for a government that seeks to improve the political and economic status of a traditionally oppressed group is that, in so doing, it establishes freedoms for the group where none existed before. Should these now established freedoms become less available, there will be an especially hot variety of hell to pay.”


167. “numerosas investigaciones demuestran que reducir la distancia ante un objeto hace que parezca que este merece más la pena.”


168. “The lesson applies as well to the politics of family as country. The parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically invites rebelliousness by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the child. The parent who only sometimes prohibits between-meal sweets may create for the child the freedom to have such snacks. At that point, enforcing the rule becomes a much more difficult and explosive matter because the child is no longer merely lacking a never-possessed right but is losing an established one.”


169. “This parallel form of human automatic action is aptly demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied.”


170. “You use your cuts to get people to swing attention to the parts of your message you really want them to focus on.”


171. “Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight. The”


172. “the one hand, she specified a set of manageable activities that reliably increase personal happiness. Several of them—including the top three on her list—require nothing more than a pre-suasive refocusing of attention: 1. Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. 2. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. 3. Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.”


173. “Bad social proof in this situation. Temporarily disconnect automatic pilot.”


174. “The greatest recall occurred for details of ads that the researchers stopped five to six seconds before their natural endings.”


175. “That’s why it is so important to be alert to a sense of undue liking for a compliance practitioner. The recognition of that feeling can serve as our reminder to separate the dealer from the merits of the deal and to make our decision based on considerations related only to the latter.”


176. “just envisioned themselves moving toward (rather than away from) a container of snack food came to like it better and were willing to pay over four times more to obtain it.16”


177. “Persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” – Robert B. Cialdini


178. “The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey ascribes the essence of what makes us human to the reciprocity system: “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation,”9”


179. “Audiences have been successfully manipulated by those who use social evidence, even when that evidence has been openly falsified.” – Robert B. Cialdini


180. “In the realm of self-correction mechanisms, then, we can find another source of validation for a core tenet of pre-suasion: immediate, large-scale adjustments begin frequently with practices that do little more than redirect attention.69”


181. “I needed to determine whether those reasons were genuine or mere justifications for my decision to stop there. So I asked myself the crucial question, “Knowing what I know about the real price of this gasoline, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice again?” Concentrating on the first burst of impression I sensed, I received a clear and unqualified answer. I would have driven right past.”


182. “Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.”


183. “Therefore, when children of different racial groups are thrown into the incessant, harsh competition of the standard American classroom, we ought to—and do—see hostilities worsen.”


184. “There’s a difference between a mystery and a question. Questions demand answers, but a mystery demands something more valuable-explanation.”


185. “stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We don’t have to think hard about the issues anymore.”


186. “Each prospect who was interested enough to want to see the car was given an appointment time—the same appointment time. So, if six people were scheduled, they were all scheduled for, say, 2:00 that afternoon. This little device of simultaneous scheduling paved the way for later compliance because it created an atmosphere of competition for a limited resource.”


187. “Exodus 23:8–“And thou shalt take no gift; for a gift blindeth them that have sight and perverteth the words of the righteous.”


188. “audiences have been successfully manipulated by those who use social evidence, even when that evidence has been openly falsified.”


189. “I can live for two months,” confessed Mark Twain, “on a good compliment.”


190. “Aunque para la mayoría de nosotros esta posibilidad parece remota, puede ser más real de lo que creemos. La idea de que no se puede persuadir a ninguna persona inocente a confesar un crimen, en especial uno de gravedad, es errónea. Y, de hecho, ocurre con una frecuencia perturbadora.”


191. “Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A”


192. “In addition, there’s a unique, secondary source of power within the scarcity principle: as opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms. And we hate to lose the freedoms we already have; what’s more this is principally true of important freedoms. This desire to preserve our established, important prerogatives is the centerpiece of psychological reactance theory, developed by psychologist Jack Brehm to explain the human response to the loss of personal control. According to the theory, when free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us want them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than before. Therefore, when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than we did before.”


193. “There are certain disturbing things we simply would rather not realize. Because it is a preprogrammed and mindless method of responding, automatic consistency can supply a safe hiding place from those troubling realizations. Sealed within the fortress walls of rigid consistency, we can be impervious to the sieges of reason.”


194. “Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action.” – Robert B. Cialdini


195. “The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.”


196. “un programa popular de televisión— hace algo más que exponer al público a los mensajes publicitarios que lo acompañan, sino que también predisponen a esa audiencia, pre-suasivamente, a determinados tipos de mensajes comerciales.”


197. “Así pues, solemos seguir la corriente de aquellas personas de nuestro entorno a las que nos parecemos.”


198. “The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.” – Robert B. Cialdini


199. “Our ability to create change in others is often and importantly grounded in shared personal relationships, which create a pre-suasive context for assent. It’s a poor trade-off, then, for social influence when we allow present-day forces of separation—distancing societal changes, insulating modern technologies—to take a shared sense of human connection out of our exchanges. The relation gets removed, leaving just the ships, passing at sea.87 UNITY”


200. “Parte de su fenomenal éxito se debía a su infatigable capacidad de trabajo y compromiso, pero no todo. Según los cronistas de aquel triunfo, Feldman nunca presionaba para lograr una venta a los potenciales clientes que se mostraban reticentes. En lugar de ello, introducía un toque sutil (y astuto) en su discurso que los guiaba con suavidad hacia esa decisión.”


201. “Jsou to lidé, kteří mají skrytou vadu osobnosti – nízké sebepojetí. Hluboko uvnitř je pocit, že jejich osoba má malou cenu, a to je nutí vyhledávat prestiž ne prostřednictvím vytváření nebo vylepšování vlastních výsledků, ale skrze vytváření či vylepšování asociací s výsledky druhých. V naší kultuře se daří několika variantám tohoto druhu. Klasickým příkladem jsou ti, kdo se vytrvale ohánějí slavnými jmény. Další představují fanynky rockových kapel, které nabízejí sexuální laskavosti za právo vykládat kamarádkám, že byly chvilku „s“ proslulým muzikantem. Bez ohledu na to, jakou formu na sebe chování těchto jedinců bere, má jedno společné téma – poměrně tragické vyhlídky na úspěch, jehož by mohli dosáhnout sami.”


202. “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. –Alfred North Whitehead.”


203. “The time to react protectively is when we feel ourselves liking the practitioner more than we should under the circumstances.”


204. “Arguing against your self-interest creates a perception of honesty and trustworthiness, putting you in a more persuasive position.”


205. “By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.” – Robert B. Cialdini


206. “And once you've got a man's self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.”


207. “we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.”


208. “PINE: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. ZAPPA: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”


209. “Responsibility. Those subjects facing the opponent who used the retreating strategy felt most responsible for the final deal.”


210. “you’re much more persistent when you’re confident in your abilities.”


211. “Hell: A sumptuously provisioned banquet hall full of hungry people with locked-strait elbow joints who can’t feed themselves because their unbendable arms won’t allow it. Heaven: Everything’s the same except people are feeding each other.”


212. “Àqueles a quem muito se dá, muito se exige.”


213. “When attention is directed toward something, everything else pales in comparison. This is your moment of power.”


214. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. —Leonardo da Vinci”


215. “In large measure, who we are with respect to any choice is where we are, attentionally, in the moment before the choice.”


216. “Take, for example, the strange case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.”


217. “extensive analysis requires more time, energy, and motivation. As a consequence, its impact on our decisions is limited by the rigor it requires. If we don’t have the wherewithal (time, capacity, will) to think hard about a choice, we’re unlikely to deliberate deeply.”


218. “READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.”


219. “For an unrelated reason, I was fortunate to be in London to witness a set of extraordinary festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne of England. Although the queen had been traveling the globe for months to Commonwealth nations hosting Golden Jubilee events in her name, the celebrations peaked on June 4, 2002, with a program on the Mall in London that drew over a million well-wishers from around Britain and the world. The marked adulation surprised many in the national press who’d predicted the Jubilee would be a fizzle, demonstrating the modern-day irrelevance of the British monarchy in general and of Her Royal Highness in particular.


220. “The key to the success of this method is that each new prospect is visited by a salesperson armed with the name of a friend “who suggested I call on you.” Turning the salesperson away under those circumstances is difficult; it’s almost like rejecting the friend.”


221. “the”


222. “Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures.”


223. “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”


224. “El riesgo por temor resulta ser de verdad peligroso y ciertamente temible.”


225. “automatic-pilot device, like social proof, should never be trusted fully;”


226. “I wanted to live among books.”


227. “But more telling for me as a persuasion scientist attuned to pre-suasive approaches was how Mr. Buffett began that all-important section.”


228. “Good-looking people are aware that other people’s positive evaluations of them are not based on their actual traits and abilities but are often caused by an attractiveness 'halo'.”


229. “As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust.”


230. “they described how they were able to draw website visitors’ attention to the goal of comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper of the site’s”


231. “More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment. Unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world. But the consequence of our new deficiency is the same as that of the animals’ long-standing one. When making a decision, we will less frequently enjoy the luxury of a fully considered analysis of the total situation but will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually reliable feature of it. When”


232. “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”


233. “Desde que publiquei a primeira edição de O poder da persuasão, aconteceram algumas coisas que merecem”


234. “The first, a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.” The second, an adage from the advertising profession, is tactical: “If you can’t make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.”


235. “Persuasion, unlike artistic inspiration, is learnable.”


236. “it will be when prestige (both public and private) is low that we will be intent upon using the successes of associated others to help restore image.”


237. “Embarrassment is a villain to be crushed.” – Robert B. Cialdini


238. “The principles—consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity”


239. “One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim—and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.34”


240. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”


241. “After being exposed to the price of the large item, the price of the less expensive one appears smaller by comparison. In the same way, the larger-then-smaller-request procedure makes use of the contrast principle by making the smaller request look even smaller by comparison with the larger one. If I want you to lend me five dollars, I can make it seem like a smaller request by first asking you to lend me ten dollars. One of the beauties of this tactic is that by first requesting ten dollars and then retreating to five dollars, I will have simultaneously engaged the force of the reciprocity rule and the contrast principle.”


242. “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead”


243. “What we present first changes the way people experience what we present next.”


244. “If we want them to buy a box of expensive chocolates, we can first arrange for them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price of the chocolates. If we want them to choose a bottle of French wine, we can expose them to French background music before they decide. If we want them to agree to try an untested product, we can first inquire whether they consider themselves adventurous. If we want to convince them to select a highly popular item, we can begin by showing them a scary movie. If we want them to feel warmly toward us, we can hand them a hot drink. If we want them to be more helpful to us, we can have them look at photos of individuals standing close together. If we want them to be more achievement oriented, we can provide them with an image of a runner winning a race. If we want them to make careful assessments, we can show them a picture of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.”


245. “such cases it is vital to remember that scarce things do not taste or feel or sound or ride or work any better because of their limited availability.”


246. “los investigadores que estudian esta tendencia general a valorar más aquellas entidades ligadas al propio yo (denominada «egoísmo implícito») han averiguado que los sujetos prefieren no solo a las personas, sino también los productos comerciales (galletas, chocolates, tés) cuyos nombres comparten letras con los suyos.”


247. “All the weapons of influence discussed in this book work better under some conditions than under others. If we are to defend ourselves adequately against any such weapon, it is vital that we know its optimal operating conditions in order to recognize when we are most vulnerable to its influence.” – Robert B. Cialdini


248. “we are trained from childhood to chafe, emotionally, under the saddle of obligation.”


249. “Therefore, it is possible to attach this pleasant feeling, this positive attitude, to anything (political statements being only an example) that is closely associated with good food.”


250. “In general, then, your best strategy when in need of emergency help is to reduce the uncertainties of those around you concerning your condition and their responsibilities. Be as precise as possible about your need for aid. Do not allow bystanders to come to their own conclusions because the principle of social proof and the consequent pluralistic-ignorance effect might well cause them to view your situation as a nonemergency. Of all the techniques in this book designed to produce compliance with a request, this one is the most important to remember. After all, the failure of your request for emergency aid could mean the loss of your life. Besides”


251. “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. – LEONARDO DA VINCI.”


252. “So by my lights, the number one rule for salespeople is to show customers that you genuinely like them. There’s a wise adage that fits this logic well: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”


253. “As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust—in”


254. “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay.” – Robert B. Cialdini


255. “the recipe for disharmony was quick and easy: Just separate the participants into groups and let sit for a while in their own juices.”


256. “The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.” – Robert B. Cialdini


257. “In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.” – Robert B. Cialdini


258. “there’s a telling answer to the question of what Albert Einstein claimed was so remarkable it could be labeled as both “the most beautiful thing we can experience” and “the source of all true science and art.” His contention: the mysterious.”


259. “The most successful persuaders spend more time crafting what to say or do just before making their request.”


260. “principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”


261. “People find objects and opportunities more attractive to the degree that they are scarce, rare, or dwindling in availability.” – Robert B. Cialdini


262. “a communicator who references a weakness early on is immediately seen as more honest”


263. “Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others of attainment.” – Robert B. Cialdini


264. “Such cases it is vital to remember that scarce things do not taste or feel or sound or ride or work any better because of their limited availability.” – Robert B. Cialdini


265. “There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.” – Robert B. Cialdini


266. “Bad social proof in this situation. Temporarily disconnect automatic pilot.” – Robert B. Cialdini


267. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”


268. “Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.”


269. “It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.” – Robert B. Cialdini


270. “People will do business with people they know, like and trust based on your knowledge, your creativity, and your credibility.” – Robert B. Cialdini


271. “our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think.”


272. “We like people who are similar to us. This fact seems to hold true whether the similarity is in the area of opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle.”


273. “The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: expensive = good.”


274. “Obviously, horse-race bettors are not alone in their willingness to believe in the correctness of a difficult choice, once made.”


275. “One study found that the reading scores of students in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classrooms were situated close to elevated subway tracks on which trains rattled past every four to five minutes. When the researchers, armed with their findings, pressed NYC transit system officials and Board of Education members to install noise-dampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, students’ scores jumped back up. Similar results have been found for children near airplane flight paths. When the city of Munich, Germany, moved its airport, the memory and reading scores of children near the new location plummeted, while those near the old location rose significantly.”


276. “Believe in yourself. That's real magic.”


277. “Every day in every way, I’m getting better. —EMILE COUE”


278. “Not all commitments affect self-image, however. There are certain conditions that should be present for a commitment to be effective in this way: they should be active, public, effortful, and freely chosen.”


279. “in deciding whether a possibility is correct, people typically look for hits rather than misses; for confirmations of the idea rather than for disconfirmations.”


280. “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.”


281. “This last phenomenon has been replicated in a pair of restaurant studies in which patrons received their bills on tip trays that either did or did not contain credit-card logos. The diners tipped significantly more in the presence of the logos, even when they paid with cash.”


282. “once a person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image.”


283. “By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.”


284. “Be as precise as possible about your need for aid.”


285. “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.” – Robert B. Cialdini


286. “A communicator who references a weakness early on is immediately seen as more honest.”


287. “As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to depend increasingly on our shortcuts to handle them all.”


288. “We seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.”


289. “The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.”


290. “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. —LEONARDO DA VINCI”


291. “The rule says that favors are to be met with favors; it does not require that tricks be met with favors. A”


292. “Our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think.” – Robert B. Cialdini


293. “Lastly, these findings tell me that the answer to the question of whether, as a group, MDs are primarily patient-serving or self-serving is . . . yes. They are each, depending on their attentional focus at the time.”


294. “When you don’t pay direct attention to something, your brain puts little importance on it.”


295. “The simple act of scheduling makes otherwise fun tasks feel like work and decreases overall enjoyment.”


296. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”


297. “The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle—a stereotype—to guide their buying: “expensive = good.”


298. “Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.”


299. “ethology—the study of animals in their natural settings.”


300. “According to the theory, whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously.”


301. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”


302. “Think of the law of Reciprocity, we all like to return favours. Most people got it all backwards thinking it means if you will do this for us, then we will do something for you…that’s wrong.“ – Robert B. Cialdini


303. “The messenger is the message.” Of”


304. “what is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action,”


305. “The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.”


306. “The more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater is its ability to influence the attitudes of the person who made it.”


307. “Price alone had become a trigger feature for quality; and a dramatic increase in price alone had led to a dramatic increase in sales among the quality-hungry buyers. Click, whirr!”


308. “civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”


309. “The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle – a stereotype – to guide their buying: expensive = good.” – Robert B. Cialdini


310. “When screening potential jurors before a trial, Jo-Ellen Demitrius, the woman currently reputed to be the best consultant in the business of jury selection asks an artful question: “If you were the only person who believed in my client’s innocence, could you withstand the pressure of the rest of the jury to change your mind?” How could any self-respecting prospective juror say no? And, having made the public promise, how could any self-respecting selected juror repudiate it later?”


311. “There's a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it's necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?


312. “WHO WE ARE IS WHERE WE ARE Whenever”


313. “They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison.”


314. “What is social proof? A phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior.”


315. “Anyone who knows how to time a request correctly, will become more successful.”


316. “in an early study nursery-school-age children chosen because they were terrified of dogs merely watched a little boy playing happily with a dog for twenty minutes a day. This exhibition produced such marked changes in the reactions of the fearful children that after only four days, 67 percent of them were willing to climb into a playpen with a dog and remain confined there, petting and scratching it while everyone else left the room. Moreover, when the researchers tested the children’s fear levels again one month later, they found that the improvement had not evaporated during that time; in fact, the children were more willing than ever to interact with dogs.”


317. “higher price typically reflects higher quality.”


318. “once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.”


319. “Observers have a greater liking for those whose facial features are easy to recognize and whose names are easy to pronounce.”


320. “Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to.”


321. “Now, during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially.”


322. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”2”


323. “The powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of children can be used as therapy for various problems. Some striking evidence is available in the research of psychologist Robert O’Connor on socially withdrawn preschool children. We have all seen children of this sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was impressive. The isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O’Connor found when he returned to observe six weeks later. While the withdrawn children who had not seen O’Connor’s film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior. Such is the potency of the principle of social proof.50 When”


324. “School desegregation is more likely to increase prejudice between blacks and whites than to decrease it.75”


325. “The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.”


326. “revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life.”


327. “subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating.”


328. “Classrooms with heavily decorated walls displaying lots of posters, maps, and artwork reduce the test scores of young children learning science material there. It is clear that background information can both guide and distract the focus of attention; anyone seeking to influence optimally must manage that information thoughtfully.”


329. “To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence: the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. The principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behavior. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it. Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer.”


330. “Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence (for a review of this evidence, see Langlois et al., 2000).”


331. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.”


332. “Actually he wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For some obscure reason, a central distinction had been lost as the years eroded the accurate version of his statement to mean something entirely different and, upon close inspection, entirely silly.44”


333. “the correctness of an action was not adjudged by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or usual moral standards, but by the mere command of a higher authority.”


334. “A person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing us an uninvited favor (Paese & Gilin, 2000). Recall that the rule states only that we should provide to others the kind of actions they have provided us; it does not require us to have asked for what we have received in order to feel obligated to repay.”


335. “Las acciones pueden abarcar desde tamborileo con los dedos en un laboratorio, sonreír en una conversación o cambiar de postura en una interacción entre profesor y alumno; todos ellos, si se realizan de forma sincronizada, hacen que las personas mejoren sus respectivas evaluaciones entre sí.”


336. “We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves” – Robert B. Cialdini


337. “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?”


338. “Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought.49 In.”


339. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.” – Robert B. Cialdini


340. “The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.”


341. “First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.” – Robert B. Cialdini


342. “un comunicador que alude pronto a alguna debilidad es visto enseguida como alguien sincero.”


343. “quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.”


344. “Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough. The”


345. “The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”


346. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.” – Robert B. Cialdini


347. “When the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person’s suicide, older drivers died in such crashes. l advised, then, to take special care in our travels at these times.”


348. “pluralistic ignorance “in which each person decides that since nobody is concerned, nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, the danger may be mounting to the point where a single individual, uninfluenced by the seeming calm of others, would react.”


349. “So many books, so little time.” ― Frank Zappa


350. “Surveys can increase demand. Asking a question the right way can put your customers in the right frame of mind to buy what you’re selling.”


351. “The tendency to want what has been banned and therefore to presume that it is more worthwhile is not limited to such commodities as laundry soap. In fact, the tendency is not limited to commodities at all but extends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information is becoming increasingly the determinant of wealth and power, it is important to understand how we typically react to attempts to censor or otherwise constrain our access to information. Although much data exist on our reactions to various kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography, radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence as to our reactions to the act of censoring them. Fortunately, the results of the few studies that have been done on the topic are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban.112 The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship. Perhaps the authors of this country’s Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.”


352. “Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.” – Robert B. Cialdini


353. “The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent… yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.”


354. “patsy. For as long as I can recall, I’ve been an easy mark”


355. “the guiding factor in a decision is often not the one that counsels most wisely; it’s one that has recently been brought to mind.”


356. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People”


357. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”


358. “During the Korean War, many captured American soldiers found themselves in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps run by the Chinese Communists. It became clear early in the conflict that the Chinese treated captives quite differently than did their allies, the North Koreans, who favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance. Specifically avoiding the appearance of brutality, the Red Chinese engaged in what they termed their “lenient policy,” which was in reality a concerted and sophisticated psychological assault on their captives. After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively to determine what had occurred. The intensive psychological investigation took place, in part, because of the unsettling success of some aspects of the Chinese program. For example, the Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in striking contrast to the behavior of American POWs in World War II.”


359. “La respuesta tiene que ver, en parte, con un principio de la comunicación que, aunque es esencial, generalmente no se tiene demasiado en cuenta: aquello que mostramos primero modifica la forma en la que la gente percibe lo que presentamos después.”


360. “Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.”


361. “La fiabilidad. Si solo pudiéramos elegir una cualidad de la que dotar a la gente con la que interactuamos, esa sería la de la fiabilidad.”


362. “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. —WALTER LIPPMANN I”


363. “Em condições normais, você torce por seu sexo, sua cultura, sua localidade [...] e o que você quer provar é que você é melhor do que a outra pessoa. Seja quem for a pessoa por quem você torce, ela representa você; e quando vence, você vence.”


364. “Since 95% of the people are imitators and only 5% initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”


365. “Once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.” – Robert B. Cialdini


366. “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response”


367. “Frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.” – Robert B. Cialdini


368. “One of the keys to happiness involves purposely focusing attention to the positive aspects in your life.”


369. “Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to”


370. “Even those children whose birthdays fall soon after the holidays receive fewer toys because of the recent Christmas spree.”


371. “Si no tenemos paz es porque hemos olvidado que nos pertenecemos unos a otros.”


372. “The world abounds with cults populated by dependent people who are led by a charismatic figure.” – Robert B. Cialdini


373. “Actually he wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For some obscure reason, a central distinction had been lost as the years eroded the accurate version of his statement to mean something entirely different and, upon close inspection, entirely silly.44.”


374. “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”—”


375. “In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.” – Robert B. Cialdini


376. “Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the ‘fastest-growing’ or ‘largest-selling’ because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good; they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough.”


377. “After all, the reciprocity rule asserts that if justice is to be done, exploitation attempts should be exploited. READER”


378. “It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.” – Robert B. Cialdini


379. “Be assured that any strategy able to triple the percentage of compliance with a substantial request (from 17 to 50 percent in our experiment) will be used often in a variety of natural settings. Labor negotiators, for instance, often use the tactic of making extreme demands that they do not expect to win but from which they can retreat and draw real concessions from the opposing side. It would appear, then, that the procedure would be more effective the larger the initial request because there would be more room available for illusory concessions. This is true only up to a point. Research conducted at Bar-Ilan University in Israel on the rejection-then-retreat technique shows that if the first set of demands is so extreme as to be seen as unreasonable, the tactic backfires. In such cases, the party who has made the extreme first request is not seen to be bargaining in good faith. Any subsequent retreat from that wholly unrealistic initial position is not viewed as a genuine concession and, thus, is not reciprocated. The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated just enough to allow for a series of small reciprocal concessions and counteroffers that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent.11”


380. “Every day in every way, I’m getting busier. —ROBERT CIALDINI B”


381. “The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.” – Robert B. Cialdini


382. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”


383. “We have all seen children of this sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was impressive. The isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O’Connor found when he returned to observe six weeks later. While the withdrawn children who had not seen O’Connor’s film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior.”


384. “There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.”


385. “When our freedom to have something is limited, the item becomes less available, and we experience an increased desire for it. However, we rarely recognize that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we want it. Still, we need to make sense of our desire for the item, so we begin to assign it positive qualities to justify the desire.”


386. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”88”


387. “If the answer is that we want it primarily for the purpose of owning it, then we should use its availability to help gauge how much we want to spend for it. However, if the answer is that we want it primarily for its function (that is, we want something good to drive, drink, eat, etc.), then we must remember that the item under consideration will function equally well whether scarce or plentiful. Quite simply, we need to recall that the scarce cookies didn’t taste any better.”


388. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news.”


389. “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.”


390. “Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to.” – Robert B. Cialdini


391. “Okay, we should go.' Kylie touched Della's arm. But then, being Kylie and unable to leave on a bad note, she looked back at the new vamp. 'Welcome to Shadow Falls. I'm Kylie'


392. “People rarely make decisions in a vacuum; in other words, our choices are almost always influenced by context,”


393. “Vincent reserved the trick of seeming to argue against his own interests for large parties of 8 to 12 people. His technique was veined with genius. When it was time for the first person, normally a woman, to order, he went into his act. No matter what she elected, Vincent reacted identically: His brow furrowed, his hand hovered above his order pad, and after looking quickly over his shoulder for the manager, he leaned conspiratorially toward the table to report for all to hear “I’m afraid that is not as good tonight as it normally is. Might I recommend instead the ___ or the ___?” (At this point, Vincent suggested a pair of menu items that were slightly less expensive than the dish the patron had selected initially.) “They are both excellent tonight.”


394. “People who learn they have something significant in common like each other more, leading to more cooperation and liking.”


395. “The house I got them spotted for looks really great after they’ve first looked at a couple of dumps.”


396. “through centuries of experience, the female hunters have located a weakness in their prey—a special blinking courtship code by which members of the victims’ species tell one another they are ready to mate. Somehow, the Photuris female has cracked the Photinus courtship code. By mimicking the flashing mating signals of her prey, the murderess is able to feast on the bodies of males whose triggered courtship tapes cause them to fly mechanically into death’s, not love’s, embrace.”


397. “We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.”


398. “The human mind can hold only one thing in conscious awareness at a time.”


399. “the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. For example, because only healthy, normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single “cheep-cheep” noise.”


400. “An essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.”


401. “Subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating.” – Robert B. Cialdini


402. “to make it climb, make it rhyme. Within”

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