The Science of Persuasion

Per­sua­sion is not an art; it’s a science.

That’s accord­ing to Yes!—the book by social psy­chol­o­gists Robert Cialdini, Noah Gold­stein and Steve Mar­tin that pro­poses to offer 50 ‘sci­en­tif­i­cally proven ways to be persuasive’. 

For his review of the book, Alex Moska­lyuk lists these 50 ways to be per­sua­sive, as gleamed from dozens of psy­chol­ogy stud­ies.

2. Intro­duce herd effect in highly per­son­al­ized form. The hotel sign in the bath­room informed the guests that many prior guests chose to be envi­ron­men­tally friendly by recy­cling their tow­els. How­ever, when the mes­sage men­tioned that major­ity of the guests who stayed in this spe­cific room chose to be more envi­ron­men­tally con­scious and reused their tow­els, towel recy­cling jumped 33%, even though the mes­sage was largely the same.