Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion
This book distills decades of academic research on persuasion into practical, actionable techniques. Here’s what matters most:
The Core Insight
People dramatically underestimate how much others’ behavior influences their own decisions. When asked, they insist they’re not swayed by what others do—but the data consistently proves otherwise. This gap between self-perception and reality is why so many persuasion attempts fail: we design messages based on what we think would motivate us rather than what actually does.
Social Proof: The Power of “Others Like You”
The hotel towel reuse study is the book’s anchor example. Standard environmental appeals (“help save the planet”) were beaten by 26% when guests simply learned that most other guests reused their towels. But the real finding came next: telling guests that most people who stayed in their specific room reused towels boosted compliance by 33%.
The principle: the more similar the reference group, the more powerful the social proof. When selling to a salon owner, testimonials from other salon owners beat testimonials from British Airways executives. When persuading employees to adopt a new system, get testimonials from people in the same department first.
The Dangerous Flip Side
Messages highlighting how many people engage in bad behavior backfire spectacularly. A sign at the Petrified Forest saying “many past visitors have removed wood” nearly tripled theft compared to no sign at all. Health centers posting statistics about missed appointments saw no-show rates rise further.
The Magnetic Middle
Social norms pull in both directions. When researchers told high-energy-users how they compared to neighbors, consumption dropped. But low-energy-users increased consumption to match the norm.
The fix: add a simple smiley face emoticon to the feedback for people already doing well. This tiny signal of approval stopped the backslide entirely.
Choice Architecture: Less Is Often More
When a company offered 59 retirement funds instead of two, participation dropped from 75% to 60%. A jam display with 24 options generated purchases from only 3% of browsers; with 6 options, 30% bought. Procter & Gamble cut Head & Shoulders variants from 26 to 15 and saw a 10% sales increase.
But context matters. Extensive choice works when customers know exactly what they want and just need a supplier, or when the selection process itself is pleasurable.
The Compromise Effect
Adding a premium option changes which product people choose—even if nobody buys the premium. When Williams-Sonoma introduced a more expensive bread maker, sales of their existing bestseller nearly doubled. Consumers gravitate toward middle options, and adding a high-end anchor shifts what “middle” means.
Reciprocity: Give First, Receive Later
The fundamental reframe: instead of asking “who can help me here?” ask “whom can I help?” The norm of reciprocation creates social obligation that makes future requests more effective.
Key Nuances from the Research
Personalization multiplies impact. Restaurant servers who gave diners an extra mint while saying “for you nice people” saw a 23% tip increase versus just 3.3% for a standard single mint. The gift felt personal and unexpected.
Unconditional beats conditional. A hotel message saying “we’ve already made a donation to an environmental cause on your behalf” outperformed “we’ll donate if you reuse towels” by 45%. When favors have strings attached, they feel like transactions, not gifts.
Timing matters asymmetrically. Recipients value favors most immediately after receiving them, then discount them over time. Favor-doers show the opposite pattern—they value what they did more as time passes. This means you should call in reciprocity relatively quickly, and when doing a favor, explicitly note that you’d expect the same if situations were reversed.
Commitment and Consistency
The foot-in-the-door technique works because small initial commitments change self-perception. A person who agrees to a small request begins to see themselves as the type of person who does such things.
Active beats passive. Having customers fill out their own order forms rather than salespeople doing it reduces cancellations. Having patients write their own appointment reminder cards rather than receptionists doing it reduces no-shows.
Written beats spoken. There’s “something magical about writing things down.” Written commitments, especially ones shared publicly, have dramatically more staying power.
Fighting consistency with consistency. Older people show stronger preference for consistency and greater resistance to change. When asking them to switch, frame the change as consistent with their existing values—their previous choice was correct “at the time they made it,” and this new choice reflects the same good judgment applied to changed circumstances.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect
Asking someone to do you a small favor makes them like you more, not less. Franklin borrowed a rare book from a political rival and transformed the relationship.
The psychology: we’re motivated to align our attitudes with our behaviors. Having done someone a kindness, we conclude we must like them.
Authority and Expertise
Credentials matter enormously, but self-promotion backfires. The solution: have someone else establish your credentials. A real estate agency increased appointments by having receptionists say “Let me put you through to Peter, our head of sales. Peter has twenty years’ experience selling properties; he recently sold a property very similar to yours.”
The Brightest-Person-in-the-Room Danger
James Watson attributed cracking DNA to the fact that he and Crick weren’t the most intelligent scientists pursuing the answer. Rosalind Franklin, who was more intelligent, “rarely sought advice. And if you’re the brightest person in the room, then you’re in trouble.”
Leaders should seek input collectively; the final decision remains theirs, but the information-gathering process should be collaborative.
Captainitis
Crew members sometimes fail to challenge clearly incorrect decisions by authority figures—with deadly consequences in aviation and medicine. The research suggests creating environments where dissent is explicitly invited.
Weaknesses as Strengths
Volkswagen’s “Ugly is only skin deep” campaign worked because mentioning a drawback first created perception of honesty, making subsequent claims more believable. Avis’s “We’re #2, but we try harder” operated on the same principle.
The technique requires the weakness to be small and the strength that follows to neutralize it: “Our product has a 20% price premium, but it’s much faster and takes up less space.”
Similarly, companies that attribute failures to internal causes (rather than external factors) are perceived as having more control over their future—and show better stock performance.
Scarcity and Loss
We want things more when they’re rare, limited, or about to disappear. But loss framing is even more powerful than gain framing. “Don’t miss out on this opportunity” outperforms “Take this opportunity.”
Homeowners were up to 300% more likely to make energy efficiency improvements when told they would “continue to lose 50 cents a day” versus “save 50 cents a day.”
Fear Appeals
Fear-arousing messages work—but only when accompanied by clear, specific, actionable steps to reduce the threat. Without those steps, people block out the message or deny it applies to them.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear by itself”—fear without a clear escape route.
Similarity and Liking
We feel positively toward things associated with ourselves, including our own names. Dentists are 82% more likely to be named Dennis than chance would predict. People disproportionately move to states and streets whose names resemble their own.
Mimicry works. Food servers who repeated customers’ orders back verbatim saw tips increase nearly 70%. In negotiations, subtly mirroring the other party’s posture and speech patterns increases rapport.
Authentic smiles matter. Customers can distinguish genuine from performed positivity, and authenticity drives satisfaction—but only when service is good. Poor service with an authentic smile is worse than poor service with a fake one.
Cognitive Fluency
Easy-to-process information is perceived as more true, more valuable, and more persuasive:
- Stocks with pronounceable ticker symbols outperform those with unpronounceable ones in the short term
- Arguments in easy-to-read fonts are more convincing
- Rhyming phrases are judged more accurate than non-rhyming equivalents with identical meaning
- Simple product names are evaluated more favorably
When asking people to generate reasons to choose your product, ask for few reasons. Asking for many makes the task difficult, and that difficulty gets misattributed to the product itself.
Emotion and Decision-Making
Sadness creates a tendency to change circumstances—sad buyers pay more, sad sellers accept less. The effect persists even when the emotion is completely unrelated to the decision. If you’ve just experienced something emotional, delay important negotiations.
Fatigue increases gullibility. Tired people are more likely to believe what they read because they lack the cognitive resources to properly evaluate claims.
Caffeine, conversely, increases persuasion susceptibility to strong arguments by 35%—it enhances systematic processing.
Practical Applications
Reframe incomplete tasks. A loyalty card with 10 stamps needed but 2 already filled outperforms an 8-stamp card starting empty—even though both require 8 purchases. People are more motivated to complete something already started than to begin something new.
Use the word “because.” Even when the reason given is essentially meaningless (“because I need to make copies”), compliance increases substantially for low-stakes requests. For high-stakes situations, the actual quality of reasoning matters.
Name things evocatively. Unexpected descriptive names (Kermit green) and ambiguous names (millennium orange) both outperform generic names (green, orange) because they prompt consumers to think more about the product.
Connect advertising to point of purchase. Even people who loved the Energizer Bunny ads frequently misattributed them to Duracell. Memory aids at the actual purchase point correct this.
Make people self-aware. Showing someone their own image before a decision makes them act more consistently with their stated values. Even asking someone’s name has a similar effect.
The Meta-Lesson
Persuasion isn’t manipulation—it’s understanding the genuine psychological factors that shape decisions and aligning your communication with them. The same principles can be used ethically or unethically, but the research itself is simply descriptive of how humans actually work.
3 Big Takeaways
- Social proof from similar others is the most powerful persuasion tool—but highlighting negative behavior backfires.
- Give first, unconditionally and personally, to activate reciprocity.
- Make desired actions easy to process, easy to start, and consistent with existing identity.