My Impressions: Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion

Nearing the end of November.  I have started 39 books in 2016 and just finished book 29.  Likely I won’t hit the 50 book mark…  Maybe next year.  In my defense a lot of the books I started are “textbook style” such as Excel 2013 Power Programming with VBA…

Anyway, so how I stumbled upon this book was because Tai Lopez’s youtube advertisement kept on hitting me.  I was just trying to stream my favorite Miley from The Voice and Tai kept on showing up between videos showing off his huge mansion and fancy cars trying to persuade me to buy his course and become a wealthy man like him.  I researched his course, I read about reviews, I tried really hard to evaluate how dope his method is.

Look at how lovely Miley is!

The truth is, I found his video quite captivating.  I was curious to keep on watching it…  It was long, I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t really stop. 

I came across one reddit post basically saying his ad has more learning value for sales and marketing than his whole course he is trying to pitch (inclined to agree).  Tai’s ad packs all the psychology of persuasion in his video ads (though clumsy), and that in itself is kind of an art piece.  The original poster then mentioned this book for reference…  So I thought, read the source!  And here we are.  

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition

Now the content is pretty tight.  Every time I read a new example, I think to myself, “Damn, the real estate agent used that on me,” or “Oh that’s what happened at the car dealer.”  Chapter two talks about the rule for reciprocation: Krishnas giving people a ‘gift’ – a book, and then asks for a donation.  This exact thing happened to me at the O’Hare just a few weeks ago.  Apparently this rule is so powerful that people feel obligated to give even if they don’t like the requester.  I didn’t.  I hate it when people ask me for money and make it feel like they are doing me a favor. 

The main idea is, over the centuries, humans have evolved in such a way that like Pavlov’s dogs, we are conditioned to behave certain ways without thinking about it.  Press the button, something happens.  Many of the examples from the book still hold true.  But the same time, some of these techniques have been over-exploited so much that people now have an auto-hate response towards them.  The really scary ones are the revolutionized methods based on these principles that haven’t been publicly recognized.  This is war.   

I recommend people to read it and safeguard yourself...