Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion | 
| Author: Robert Cialdini
Publisher: HarperBusiness
Category: Book
List Price: £10.99
Buy New: £5.99
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New (35) Used (11) from £4.87
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 1068
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 006124189X
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.852
EAN: 9780061241895
ASIN: 006124189X
Publication Date: February 1, 2007
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Buy It Because You Should Own It November 15, 2008
This book is one of those rare occurences when an academic manages to beautifully strike a popular chord in presenting his/her field of expertise. However, beyond that, this book will transform the transactional aspects of your life.
 Disappointing - over promises and under delivers October 4, 2008
Well, let's start by an admission, I'm only 1/2 way through so far. I'm writing because I feel the book is underdelivering on its core promise - that of being a way to improve ones own ability to persuade.
I work in marketing and am always interested in new ways to increase the persuasiveness of what I do - both to persuade customers to buy more, but more importantly to be more persuasive with the internal stakeholders I need on my side in order to be able to do anything at all.
And this is where it falls flat. Yes, the book is well researched. And yes, it's useful to help yourself stop being a 'patsy' (Caldini describes himself as the ultimate mug who learned to recognise how he was being played by persuasive salesmen). However, the book has two main failings.
1) it's old, old, old. The examples used are from 30+ years ago. Read through examples of Encylcopedia salesmen going door to door and you'll think... "hmmm, how is this relevant in helping me sell in the C21st?"
2) it's highly general, and not applied. Caldini (so far) has set up 6 attributes of persuasiveness, which he's researched and can support with lots of interesting personal anecdotes. But the attributes are so general (likeability), and the anecdotes either so lab-based ("we put a likeable student in a room with other students...") or so shallow ("when a salesman smiles at you...") that you again can't take anything specific and useful away.
A pity. But I'd strongly suggest that this one is worth a visit to the library to read, but not the 5-10 that it'll cost to buy.
 It is a great book but not 100% what im after, reccomend it though.. August 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is definetly worth gettin because it is an interesting read and the author clearly knows what he is talking about. What i like about the book is it is based on research and science, not half guesses and assumptions.
It does make you more aware of sales techniques and how to not fall victim to their techniques. I do think some chapters he tends to go on abit too much for the sake of making the chapter and book longer ( feels that way when you read it) because when you read the book you will find a summary at the end of each chapter which explains 40 pages worth on 1 page.
Though he does go deep into the principles and logic of the science of persuasion if you think that you will become a master persuader after reading this then you will be dissapointed. I have seen Derren Brown and other masters of NLP influence people ( with extraordinary skill ) into making decisions with indirect suggestions, clever word play and body lanuguage without them even realising and this is the type of persuasion that interests me and this book does not go into any of this really.
As i said some interesting facts and research and a good read but for the reason above is why i rated it 3 stars
Wonderful book August 18, 2008
I read this book in less than 4 days.
I reckon this is a must read not just for Marketers but everyone involved in business.
I found the informal style really engaging but yet rigorous and supported by plenty of facts and research.
I have already started to spot at work some of the topics discussed and I am starting to use some of the tecniques.
I can only highly reccomend this enjoyable and interesting reading, especially if you liase with people in your daily job.
Not bad, but... January 19, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is not a bad book. Actually, I'm ok with having bought it here at Amazon. However, that was not my impression when I started in the first chapter; I thought "oh no, not again, another book of a wannabe self-proclaimed "guru"". From chapter 3 onwards it became better, but I have one serious problem with this book: I do understand Cialdini is an academic, but I really wish he would stop cluttering up the text with all these side steps to academic research; it's annoying. Just pose your statements, explain them short and clear, and put all your detailed explanations of academic research that supports your statements in the footnotes. This is your typical book where you have to turn back two pages constantly to see "what was his main argument?". This book could be considerably shorter, *still preservering the same value when it comes to insight", and would make for much more pleasant reading (Mind you, I hold a PhD myself, I know this is academic writing. That's fine when your audience is the academical world, but that is clearly not what the intended audience of this book is). To conclude: there are some valuable lessons contained in this book, it is worth the money, but it needs to be less on the academical details, because that distracts.
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