Which are your favorite Robert B. Cialdini quotes?
Robert Cialdini is the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and was a visiting professor of marketing, business, and psychology at Stanford University.
Let’s be honest, we all know of Cialdini from reading the famous book, ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’. If you’d like to know more about some of the lessons Cialdini teaches, you can read this article.
Here’s a collection of a whopping 58 Robert B. Cialdini quotes:
58 Robert B. Cialdini Quotes
1. “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.” – Robert B. Cialdini
2. “Attractiveness, similarity, compliments, contact and cooperation can make a person more influential.” – Robert B. Cialdini
3. “Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.” – Robert B. Cialdini
4. “Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight.” – Robert B. Cialdini
5. “It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.” – Robert B. Cialdini
6. “Once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience.” – Robert B. Cialdini
7. “People will do business with people they know, like and trust based on your knowledge, your creativity, and your credibility.” – Robert B. Cialdini
8. “Subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating.” – Robert B. Cialdini
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9. “The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.” – Robert B. Cialdini
10. “The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start.” – Robert B. Cialdini
11. “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay.” – Robert B. Cialdini
12. “We want to do business with people or brands that we like and have forged a bond with over the years.” – Robert B. Cialdini
13. “All the weapons of influence discussed in this book work better under some conditions than under others. If we are to defend ourselves adequately against any such weapon, it is vital that we know its optimal operating conditions in order to recognize when we are most vulnerable to its influence.” – Robert B. Cialdini
14. “Audiences have been successfully manipulated by those who use social evidence, even when that evidence has been openly falsified.” – Robert B. Cialdini
15. “Content also builds on the principle of authority. You’ve demonstrated your expertise in this field, and so customers will rely on you in the future.” – Robert B. Cialdini
16. “Frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.” – Robert B. Cialdini
17. “Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?” – Robert B. Cialdini
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18. “Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds.” – Robert B. Cialdini
19. “Persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” – Robert B. Cialdini
20. “Such cases it is vital to remember that scarce things do not taste or feel or sound or ride or work any better because of their limited availability.” – Robert B. Cialdini
21. “The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.” – Robert B. Cialdini
22. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” – Robert B. Cialdini
23. “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” – Robert B. Cialdini
24. “We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves” – Robert B. Cialdini
25. “All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.” – Robert B. Cialdini
26. “Bad social proof in this situation. Temporarily disconnect automatic pilot.” – Robert B. Cialdini
27. “Deep inside is a sense of low personal worth that directs them to seek prestige not from the generation or promotion of their own attainments, but from the generation or promotion of their associations with others of attainment.” – Robert B. Cialdini
28. “In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.” – Robert B. Cialdini
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29. “Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions.” – Robert B. Cialdini
30. “Our typical reaction to scarcity hinders our ability to think.” – Robert B. Cialdini
31. “Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action.” – Robert B. Cialdini
32. “The aim is to get someone to want to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.” – Robert B. Cialdini
33. “The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.” – Robert B. Cialdini
34. “The world abounds with cults populated by dependent people who are led by a charismatic figure.” – Robert B. Cialdini
35. “There’s a difference between a mystery and a question. Questions demand answers, but a mystery demands something more valuable-explanation.” – Robert B. Cialdini
36. “When the newspaper detailed the suicide of a young person, it was young drivers who then piled their cars into trees, poles, and embankments with fatal results; but when the news story concerned an older person’s suicide, older drivers died in such crashes. l advised, then, to take special care in our travels at these times.” – Robert B. Cialdini
37. “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor.” – Robert B. Cialdini
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38. “Be as precise as possible about your need for aid.” – Robert B. Cialdini
39. “Embarrassment is a villain to be crushed.” – Robert B. Cialdini
40. “In this case, because we know that the things that are difficult to possess are typically better than those that are easy to possess, we can often use an item’s availability to help us quickly and correctly decide on its quality.” – Robert B. Cialdini
41. “Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.” – Robert B. Cialdini
42. “People find objects and opportunities more attractive to the degree that they are scarce, rare, or dwindling in availability.” – Robert B. Cialdini
43. “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.” – Robert B. Cialdini
44. “The customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise, were using a standard principle – a stereotype – to guide their buying: expensive = good.” – Robert B. Cialdini
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45. “The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.” – Robert B. Cialdini
46. “There is a group of people who know very well where the weapons of automatic influence lie and employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. They go from social encounter to social encounter requesting others to comply with their wishes; their frequency of success is dazzling.” – Robert B. Cialdini
47. “Think of the law of Reciprocity, we all like to return favours. Most people got it all backwards thinking it means if you will do this for us, then we will do something for you…that’s wrong.“ – Robert B. Cialdini
48. “As a general rule, whenever the dust settles and we find losers looking and speaking like winners (and vice versa), we should be especially wary of the conditions that kicked up the dust-in.” – Robert B. Cialdini
49. “By concentrating our attention on the effect rather than the causes, we can avoid the laborious, nearly impossible task of trying to detect and deflect the many psychological influences on liking.” – Robert B. Cialdini
50. “First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t.” – Robert B. Cialdini
51. “It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.” – Robert B. Cialdini
52. “Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there.” – Robert B. Cialdini
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53. “People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.” – Robert B. Cialdini
54. “Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to.” – Robert B. Cialdini
55. “The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.” – Robert B. Cialdini
56. “The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” – Robert B. Cialdini
57. “There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.” – Robert B. Cialdini
58. “We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.” – Robert B. Cialdini
Summary
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