Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion

Finished reading the Book- INFLUENCE- The psychology of Persuasion. The fundamental theme of the book is that often when we decide about someone, or something, we don’t really use all of the relevant available information. We use only a single, highly representative piece of information. Even though it normally counsels correctly, can lead to clearly stupid mistakes- mistakes that, when exploited by clever others, leave us looking silly or worse.

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Another complicating companion theme of the book is that: despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that accompanies reliance on single feature of the available data, the pace of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut.

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?Lower animals rely on solitary stimulus features because of their restricted mental capacity. Their small brains cannot begin to register and process all the relevant information in their environment. So these species have evolved special sensitivities to certain aspects of the information. Because those selected aspects of information are normally enough to cue a ?correct response, the system is usually efficient. We, ?of course, have vastly more effective brain mechanisms than do the lower animals. We are unchallenged in our ability to take into account a multitude of relevant facts and consequently make good decisions. Indeed it is this information processing advantage over other species that has helped us help make the dominant form of life on the planet.

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Still, we have our capacity limitations; and for the sake of efficiency, we must sometimes retreat from the time consuming, sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision-making to a more automatic, primitive, single-feature type of responding. In this book the author have explored these single unit of information that are used to prompt compliance decisions. They are the most popular prompts precisely because they are the most reliable ones- those that normally point us towards the correct choice. That is why we employ the factors of reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and unity so often and so automatically in making our compliance decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly reliable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes instead of no.

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When rushed, stressed, uncertain ,indifferent, distracted, or fatigued, we focus on less of the available information. Under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary “single piece of good evidence” approach to decision making.

All this leads to an unnerving insight: with the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as species, we have created an environment so complex, fast paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.

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We now live in the world where most of the information is less than 15 years old in certain fields of science alone ( physics for example), knowledge is set to double every 8 years. This even extends to everyday areas of knowledge, where we strive to keep ourselves current- health, education, nutrition. Novelty ,transience, diversity and acceleration are prime descriptors of civilised existence. Our modern era, often termed the information age has never been called the knowledge age. Information does not translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed- accessed, absorbed, comprehended, integrated, and retained.

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The blitz of modern daily life demands that we have faithful shortcuts ,sound rules of thumb in order to handle it all . These are no longer luxuries; They are out-and-out necessities that figure to become increasingly vital. That is why we should want to retaliate whenever we see someone betraying one of our rule of thumbs for profit. We want that rule to be as effective as possible .To the degree its fitness for duty is regularly undercut by the tricks of profiteer, we naturally will use it less and less and will be less able to cope efficiently with the decisional burdens of our day. That we cannot allow….the stakes are far too high……