It wasn't on my list of future book reviews, but I heard about Dr. Robert B. Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and really wanted to read it.Basically, the book is about all the dirty tricks that "Compliance Practitioners" (which include everything from car salesmen to prison interrogators to politicians) use to make you comply with things you otherwise wouldn't. The author asserts that in order to conserve intellectual effort we have evolved decision-making shortcuts that avoid the need for thinking. They work well most of the time, but the Compliance Practitioners are exploiting them to our disadvantage.The book is full of fascinating examples of how the different techniques work. Basically, there are six:

1. Reciprocity - when people give you something, even just a concession, you feel like you have to give them something back.
2. Consistency and Commitment - you tend to do things that are consistent with your immediately previous thoughts, statements, and actions; and once you have decided to do something, you justify that decision in ways that make it difficult to reverse course, even when the reasons you did it in the first place aren't there anymore.
3. Social Proof - you tend to accept as correct whatever you see people like you doing.
4. Liking - you are more likely to do things for people you like, who are similar to you, physically attractive, who have complimented you, with whom you have cooperated on something, and with whom you have positive psychological associations.
5. Authority - you tend not to question the instructions of an authority. Titles, dress, height, and status symbols all tend to create authority in the minds of people.
6. Scarcity - things seem more valuable if they are soon to be more difficult to get. This also works for ideas, like liberty.

The author describes himself as a life-long "patsy," and at the end of each chapter he proposes some method of avoiding having these techniques of compliance employed on you. I found the suggestions somewhat unrealistic. His solution for the "Liking" technique, for example, is to ask yourself before complying with someone's request whether or not you like them more than you would have expected to. Call me pessimistic, but I don't see that happening. His whole argument is that these decision-making processes are automatic. He doesn't explain how that is to be overcome except to insist that we have to stop and think.Then he suggests that we should rebel against compliance practitioners who debase the value of these useful decision-making shortcuts. Again, I can only see that working if we can take what has been automatic and make it a conscious process, in which case we have already lost the benefit of these shortcuts anyway.In addition to being unconvincing, these sections of the book felt separate - somehow tacked on to add pages, or something. By the 5th technique, I just stopped reading them. With the exception of those sections, the book was very good. It's full of interesting - and sometimes disturbing - stories of how easily human beings can be convinced to do things that would otherwise seem completely opposed to their own best interests. The ideas dovetail nicely with the ideas of automatic decision-making expressed in Blink! and with the physiological understanding of how ideas are formed and triggered in the mind expressed in The Political Mind particularly in the latter case in the chapter on consistency and commitment.Really, though, it's a more useful text for a person who wants to become a compliance practitioner than for the person who is trying to avoid complying with others.This has a similarity to Made to Stick in that it's a book that tells you how to get other people to do what you want them to do. Which makes it eminently political. Specifically, it seems to me that a careful consideration of these principles could make door-to-door canvassing and fund-raising efforts a heck of a lot more successful.