Crenshaw's Books & Decks

I was finishing this book when one of my brothers played one of the tricks mentioned in the book without he knowing that it would not work on me. He had bought an antique book written by a distant relative of ours, and he thought it expensive, because it is expensive in the part of the world where he lives and because his partner wouldn't be happy about him expending so much money on this sort of thing. When I asked him about the price he told me something relatively high but after talking for another five minutes or so he told me that the price he had mentioned before wasn't real, it was quite cheaper. He added that he had done so the second figure would appear lower than it is in this way. The contrast principle. It made me giggle.

Cialdini's "Influence" is a classic of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Behavioural Economics, and of Marketing and Business. It is, above all, a serious book of Psychology by a reputed psychologist. Originally published in the 1980s, this review is about the revised edition.  

This is a book about compliance and manipulation  in general. The book offers detailed answers to two main questions 1/ what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And 2/ which techniques most effectively use these factors to generate compliance?  Besides, there are many interesting, every-day sort of questions, that are posed and answered in the book. Just to mention a few:

• Why should the voting of a Jury member be secret while the Jury is discussing a case?
• Why does a commitment made in public or by writing have such a powerful effect on the person who makes it?
• Why do we need to shout help and ask for specifics when we really need help? 
• Why people commit more suicides after listening about suicides or disasters in the media?
• Which factors cause a person to like another person? 
• Why do some people associate themselves so closely to their sport team that if their team is consistently losing they feel as losers as well?
• Which tricks do car sellers play to trick us to buy something right here right now? 
• Why a TV commercial with a renowned actor playing a doctor selling pills has the same power as if he was a real doctor?

After studying all the tactics used by sales people, and the myriad techniques they use to manipulate, Cialdini came with six basic weapons of influence, each one governed by a psychological anchor or shortcut in human behaviour: 1/Consistency, 2/ reciprocation, 3/ social proof, 4/ authority, 5/ liking, and 6/ scarcity. Each of them is analysed in an individual chapter, where we are shown the psychological shortcut that produces automatic auto-pilot reactions that are used by manipulators, why these anchors sit comfortably in the human psyche from an Evolutionary Psychology and Sociology point of view, and in which precise ways they work, work better and can be enhanced or downplayed.  Examples from many lab tests, natural psychology tests, scientific bibliography and Cialdini's own personal life are used to explain these mechanisms with simplicity.

Cialdini wants normal people, no matter we are a seller or not, to understand how our psyche works, because the trickster can be tricked and our psyche works using mechanisms that can be exploited and manipulated easily against us by anybody, for good and for evil. This is not a book on how to use or manipulate people and isn't directed to marketers or sellers specifically. A good part of Cialdini's work was done by infiltrating training programs from sales people and Cialdini mostly address the majority of people who don't use compliance techniques. However, he doesn't hold a grudge, nor want us to, against "compliance practioners" as he calls them (sales operators, fund-raisers, charities street workers, recruiters, advertisers, real-estate and travel agents, among others) are just people using the knowledge of our psyche without lying or masquerading anything. When they do, Cialdini advices war:

 "I would urge forceful counterassault. There is an important qualification, however. Compliance professionals who play fairly by the rules of shortcut response are not to be considered the enemy; on the contrary, they are our allies in an efficient and adaptive process of exchange. The proper targets for counteraggression are only those individuals who falsify, counterfeit, or misrepresent the evidence that naturally cues our shortcut responses (...) The real treachery, and the thing we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make their profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts."

Sadly enough, the same sort of people and behaviours that Cialdini wanted us to counterassault are using the book as a 'Bible', so much so that "Influence" is, to this day, the number one business and marketing book out there. 

"Influence" is an useful book,  not only to be learn and be aware of the tricks that compliance professionals play on us, but also of the ways people use them in our private lives to get something from us even if it is just approval, lack of a reprimand, or just sex. Most importantly the section "How to say no" in each chapter tell us, exactly, what to do or how to recognise the manipulators, the psychological anchors discussed in the chapter, and how to respond and react so our decision is o-u-r decision.

The book reads well, in simple English and is very entertaining and easy to understand.You will certainly get a few aha! moments as you can put into perspective what happened while booking a time with your hairdresser, your beauty salon, dealing with a charity worker that stops you in the street with a compliment, while a shop attendant shows you different stuff, dealing with a travel agent, dealing with your Real Estate agent, or while certain TV ads that do not make sense rationally but do make sense, totally, to your subconscious.

My favourite chapters in the books are those on Consistency and Direct Deference, purely because I was way more aware of reciprocation, liking, authority and scarcity; however, many of the specifics on how and why they work are still fascinating. I also love Cialdini's comparison between tribal practices and hell-week practices in University fraternities and the military, and the Readers's Report section at the end of each chapter, which includes letters from readers describing how some of the things mentioned in the book were applied to them.

There are too many people including quotes in their books, but the ones Cialdini uses at the beginning of each chapter are spot on, as they summarise each chapter to perfection.
  

SOME CRITIQUE
>>>  Cialdini is a bit reiterative at times, goes for pages unnecessarily, and although I loved most of the examples that Cialdini  mentions, there are too many and he could have cut a few without the book losing interest or quality.  
>>> Probably because the book was written in the 1980s, some stuff is really well-known nowadays and doesn't need of long explanations, or won't surprise anybody. I would say that people with a basic degree of education would not be saying what what what?! when reading about the bystander factor, the halo effect and the good cop-bad cop dynamics, or that our titles are something that can be used to trick people and that people who don't have them will attach to those to get a bit of the spark.  

>>> The book has not aged well with regards to a few points:
1/ Some contextual facts that were common in the 80s are are no longer in use, or even legal in some parts of the world, like door-to-door sales. We live in the world of the Internet, online stores, publicity everywhere we look at, constant spam and marketing on networking sites, and the use of our private meta-data by corporations to sell us things or know what we want to buy. I would have loved seeing an analysis on how the shortcuts presented in this book have morphed to adjust to the needs of the online world and market, if some of these shortcuts are now more prominent than others, and if new shortcuts have been added to the six mentioned here. 
2/ The bibliography used and referenced is still mostly from  the 70s and 80s, with a few additions from the 90s. It would have been great adding a modern bibliography in a "further reading" sort of chapter when the book was revised.  
3/ The use of some vocabulary is no longer OK. Referring to primitive cultures is no longer acceptable or accepted without discussion and calling animals infrahumans it is  an anthropocentric adjective that doesn't connect with the reality of the environment and the planet we live in. I would call a shark or alligator a suprahuman!
4/ Some social practices have changed dramatically in the last decades, even though Cialdini thought that they would not as they have a function in the human psyche. Well, it seems no longer. For example the hell-week practices in Universities, which were in decline in my University before I entered mine and banned when I was in. They might be alive in the American Fraternity Societies, but there is something called Open University that works quite well, is everywhere and expanding, and people don't need to be part of a group or enter any building that often. The world is quite different nowadays more than people in the 80s would have imagined.  

RENDERING FOR KINDLE
The book has a word index at the end, but it is not linked in the Kindle edition of the book. The author advises using the search tool to find them. Well, Kindle's search tool is not the most accurate sensitive sort of search tool. Kindle books should be sold cheaper if indexes or features that were in the hard-copies are not available in the electronic edition.

This is a great reading overall, informative, entertaining and useful for our daily life, to notice things to stop us from buying something we don't want to buy right now or  just not to act in a way that feels is not you but we are being pushed into and is not in our best interest. Entertaining and eye-opening this might be a bible for manipulators, but also a bible to counter-attack  those who want to bend our will for their own benefit. We should learn about how influence works because automated stereotyped behaviour works better now than in the 80s, as the pace of modern life is faster and more stressful, and we have less time and energy to pause and think for a second to ask ourselves what we really want. This being the case, we can be manipulated more easily today than 30 years ago.  

In Phising for Phools George A. Akerlof --co-Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics--, and Robert J. Shiller --co-Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics--, discuss the myriad ways in which Politics, the Economy (stock market, businesses, marketers, advertisers) actively use deception and manipulation with all of us, they phish for phools, us. The chilling part is that most of those people are not evil people, they are playing by the rules in an Free-Market Economy that  allows them to deceive and trick us for their benefit using the natural working of the economic system, first, and by exploiting humans' psychological cognitive biases and weaknesses, then. "The free-market system exploits our weaknesses automatically". They lead us to misinterpret reality and act on our misinterpretations, they exploit the conflict between what we need and what we crave, they exploit the volatility of our emotions, they present things in ways that are deceiving but trigger our automatic responses. Thus, we will buy things and services we don't need, at prices that are way over their real value, they will are sell products and services that aren't what they say they are.  Phishing is inevitable. We are all phools by nature. 

The book is structured in three parts. The first is a sort of framework on Behavioural Economics. The authors heavily and explicitly rely on Robert Cialdini's lists of basic biases and principles exploited by marketers and sellers, and everyone that want something from you:   

"we are phishable because we want to reciprocate gifts and favors; because we want to be nice to people we like; because we do not want to disobey authority; because we tend to follow others in deciding how to behave; because we want our decisions to be internally consistent; and because we are averse to taking losses. 23 Following Cialdini, each of these respective biases is paired with common salesman’s tricks." (p. 7). 

Here we also find defined Phishing Equilibrium (those economic forces that build manipulation and deception into the system unless we take courageous steps to fight it.), a concept that will be repeatedly mentioned throughout the book.

Part Two presents the microeconomics of phishing for phools in different contexts: advertising, marketing, politics, real estate, car sales, credit cards, the food and drug industries and the alcohol and tobacco industries. We are also presented with two specific examples from the financial markets, how bankruptcy is used for profit by some financial institutions or financial gurus (examining the case of Michael Milken and his junk bonds) and the crisis of the 1980s. This part ends with a brief exam of anti-phishing heroes, that is, people, private and public organisations and associations in the US that have fought for the right of consumers and for fairer and more ethical business practices. 

Part Three contains two chapters.The Conclusion, which focus on the Economical policies of the US Government and how the change on focus after Regan had dramatic repercussions in the Economy, favouring phishing-for-fools practices like  never before. In the Afterword we are presented with the authors' particular view on the nature of the Free Market, what is good and bad with iy; they explicitly state that this chapter is addressed to their critics, i.e. other economists who advocate the wonders of Free Market and ignore its dark side, or consider economic crisis (resulting from phishing for phool practices) as something exogenous and exceptional, when they are actually endogenous, at the very core of how the Marke works. In this chapter, Akerlof & Shiller also try to contribute to behavioural economics by adding another element to Cialdini's list. The core of their contribution is:

We are claiming that economists’ view of markets makes similar oversimplification. It may be standard economics to pretend that economic pathologies are only “externalities.” But the ability of free markets to engender phishing for phools of many different varieties is not an externality. Rather, it is inherent in the workings of competitive markets. And the same motives for profit that give us a healthy benign economy if everyone is fully rational are the same motives that give us the economic pathologies of phishing for phools. (p.166)

***

This an interesting book, that succeeds mainly at three levels. Firstly, the authors make a terrific job at letting us distinguish the forest from the trees and vice versa. The trees are the phishers (businesses, industries, financial groups, corporations, dealers and facilitators of services, networking sites that have Phishing at the core of their economical practices). Phishing is everywhere, and that is so because the trees are part of a forest, the Economy of Free Market, of how this  works, and of the Politics and economical practises associated with it, which make possible the growth of the forest. Secondly, they succeed at presenting the forest for what it is, a beautiful luscious green forest full of berries and edible wonders that is inhabited by wolves, witches and nasty beings, allow me the analogy. Thirdly, the authors succeed at having a social conscience and at seeing beyond their own noses, and analysing the Economy with a bit of objective distance and with a good deal of ethics, advocating economical practices that are more beneficial for both the Economy and Society in general, not just a parasitic symbiosis that benefits the Economy and its actors. Fourthly, they succeed at adding another layer of interpretation to the biases mentioned in Cialdini's list, that of the mental script or framework. People are phishable because of the stories they tell themselves, or place themselves in, are very important (subconsciously) in the decisions they make, something that leads phishers to create manipulative stories that resonate with the phools and are advantageous to the phishers.

On the other hand the authors also fail at several levels. They fail at times to go beyond what we already know in general. Let's be honest, haven't you found two grandpas in a park talking about how the Economy was different in the old days when there was more protection for workers, Medicare was better when, University free and there was some sort of better life balance Don't you know, upfront, that Politicians would lie and manipulate in pre-election campaigns to get your vote? that lobbies are happy lobbying everywhere and selling things that make you sick? that the commercial that says that  a moisturiser is going to get rid of your wrinkles or the lotion that will make your receding hairline come back are BS and  manicured lies? or that the free stuff given to you by some businesses is never ever free? Don't you tell yourself at times, damn it, this seller was so good that despite me knowing that he was selling half-truths I still fell for them? Secondly, the psychological part, the biases and heuristics, and all the psychology on which Behavioural Economics rely are barely sketched as the information used, although very well presented, is not theirs. They haven't done any psychological study on phishing for phools.
Overall the book is very well edited, with barely any typo, and a good rendering for Kindle. I just noticed a few thingies, resulting from the conversion, like words whose syllables have been automatically split.

The noting system, the bibliography and the index are properly done and a a pleasure to go through. I love and respect any author that bothers to provide these following academic criteria, and that provides notes that are rich in content. Indeed, some points are discussed at length in them. In these case, they are also a sort of  treasure chest for me and I got a good list of new readings to add to my reading list. The notes occupy  52 pages! The index is properly linked back in the Kindle edition, something that I expect from any Kindle edition but it is rarely there.

Akerlof & Shiller have produced a book that has an unified style, with occasional references to them as individuals. They use a very approachable language and the examples they present are really interesting, intriguing and to the point under discussion. and some of them very entertaining. I am not familiar or comfortable with the language of Economics and Finances, so I really enjoyed how the authors describe and analyse the World crisis in the1980s and the collapse of the markets in 2008, or on how crap-bonus work. Some of their explanatory analogies are great.

The book is well structured and organised, very didactic. "We are going to", appears frequently. At the beginning of the book they summarise the parts and chapters of the book and this repeated again at the beginning of Part 2, which is the bulkier one, and the conclusion also makes good points summarising the approach, findings and conclusion. Besides. each chapter ends with a very pertinent summary about the main points discussed in it. However, overall,  the style of the book is a bit conference-like, sophomores course like, and a bit simplistic at times, a bit complex at others.

I dislike it when authors use pretentious words that aren't relevant for what is being said. For example, in this book, I found six times "parenthetically" in expressions like "(We note, parenthetically, that perhaps....) Can you see the brackets, yes? So do I. Unless you are blind you don't need this sort of thing.  I also dislike when the contrary happens, when words that are not popular should be there and are replaced for something too simplistic, in this case "monkey-on-the-shoulder" instead of subconscious. To put it differently, if your are going to be snobbish, great, do that consistently all the way, and if you are going to be pro-general-reader do so consistently and all the way.

I have an problem with Academics using Wikipedia as a source of anything. We all love Wikipedia, don't we?, but we cannot ignore that, unless we are reading an entry about a celebrity (and even those) the Wikipedia can be misleading and heavily biased, and is not always properly curated. And hey, the Wiki is becoming the only source of knowledge, that is another way of phishing for phools... Wikipedia has the best phishers's crafted grabbing story ever. Besides, any professional editor will tell you that references to encyclopaedias and dictionaries are not recommended in an academic publication unless you are using very specialised terminology that is difficult to find in your usual Oxford dictionary or encyclopaedia or when the definition of word is vital a la Wittgenstein. Now, you can understand my surprise at finding 25+ references to the Wikipedia in the footnotes, when the information could have been obtained through other sources. If this wasn't enough, our Nobel couple use it to provide a contrast definition opposing theirs in the use of the expression... 'rip-off'. Yes, no joke. I'd rather go to the Urban Dictionary for definitions of modern terms, as they show that words aren't always used like a monolith or, I wanted to be  rigourous, I would go to any Oxford dictionary. Yet, do you need any dictionary or encyclopaedia to define 'rip-off'? And, if this wasn't enough, the definition the give of 'rip-off' is like buying "overpriced". Not only that, the same definition of what they mean by rip-off is repeated several times throughout the book as this was just a novelty.  I see in all this the hand of the undergraduates "assistants", not the work of two Nobel laureates.

Arkof & Shiller are gracious enough to enthusiastically acknowledge everybody, every single person!, who has contributed to the book. They are very honest about what they did personally and what their research assistants did. That is always to praise, especially with Academics, as too often this is not the case, sadly. They especially praise their three research assistants, three exceptional Yale undergraduates, who did the research for them, edited the book for them, and made suggestions: Victoria Buhler, Diana Li, and Jack Newsham. So, if they did the editing, why aren't they presented as editors of the book or co-authors? Undergraduates co-authors with Nobel prices, you must be joke, you might say. Yet, they are good enough to make some of the work for them. And the authors themselves say, :

 The ideas in this book are a collage of what we have learned, and what we have listened to, over the course of our lives as economists. (p. 77)

After seeing the bibliography, well, I understood why is so good and so large

 ***

Brilliant at times, mediocre at others, pretentious at others, thought-provoking overall, Phishing for Phools is a great reading that I don't think showcases properly the brilliant mind of the authors, but it is intriguing and entertaining enough.

Phishing for Phools reminds me of the brilliant animated clip below. I watched it about 3-4 years ago and is still one of my favourite animated shorts, i-Diots could be called i-phools as well.  

What a cool book

What is insight? How does it manifest? Which things favour insight? Which things prevent insight from happening? Which forms does insight takes? How can we increase insight in our private and work life? Klein does have the answers.

Klein departs from the analysis of the a classic work on insight, Graham Wallas's The Art of thought (1926), especially  the chapter "Stages of Control", which presents a four-stage model of insight: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. This model is still the most common explanation of how insight work. Klein acknowledges the good points that Wallas makes, but shows the deficiencies of this system  to provide an explanation to how many real cases of insight occur.

After doing his own research Klein proposes an alternative model, which allows researchers to explain all cases, major and minor, of insight. Klein calls it the Triple Path Model. In this model each pathway has its own means of altering the beliefs that anchor the way we understand things and restructure beliefs (that is, the story we use to understand events). Klein says that Wallas wasn’t wrong, he was addressing just one of the three paths.

Klein shows that there are five different strategies for gaining insights, although most insights are a combo of at least two: 1/connections, that is connecting the dots even when not all the dots are visible, which happens by being exposed to many different ideas. 2/ Coincidences, which are sparked by the question, what is going on here?. 3/ Curiosities, which comes for the realisation that there is something seriously wrong with the story we tell ourselves. That realisation can be achieved by having an open mind or just by having a critical sceptical mind to investigate paths that others have missed. 4/ Contradictions, which lead to paradigm shifts, and 5/ Creative desperation, which is the result of accidental unplanned events, of being in the right place at the right time. Point one four and five are the most common, while 56% of the cases were the 'aha!' type and 44% were gradual insights.

Klein digs in into his own research material and bibliography to try to understand the link among the five categories of connections. The second and third part of the book are devoted to an analysis of what interferes with insights and what promotes it. 

Among the elements that interfere with insight, beyond our daily moments of  stupidity fostered by  us being on autopilot, are 1/ flawed beliefs, 2/ lack of experience, 3/ a passive stance, and 4/ a concrete reasoning style, which is exacerbated by the constrictions that some software has in the work we do, the mere nature of the Internet, and organisational guidelines, procedures, filtering methods, and the zeal to reduce uncertainty and minimise errors with leads them to the  predictability trap and the perfection trap.
The ways unearthed by Klein to foster insights are 1/Critical thinking; 2/ opening up to contradictions and using other people's perspective and views; 3/ having encounters with different kinds of people, working in a variety of areas, peppering us with new ideas.; 4/ focusing on contradictions and 5/regarding organisations, it also involves not being so focused on the war on error, loosening the control filters, and increasing organisational willpower.

Klein makes a detailed and clear exposition of how he approached this research and is honest about the sources and method he uses. He uses a naturalist approach, that is, he uses examples from people acting in the real world under natural conditions, and not from people subject to artificial lab psychological tests. I am sure the Academia, the establishment, will hit back and question his approach, but I love when people who are part of the same Academia question it and come up with new approaches and theories. Klein is a Ph.D. scientist, a respected psychologist, who has been there, done what he is supposed to do and seen that it does not always work. When he criticises lab experiments in the field of Insight, he is not using generalisations or is not saying that lab research is not good, he is saying that lab research is leading nowhere in the field and that models developed in the early 20th century are not good enough to explain how insight occurs. His critique is elegant, tamed and conciliatory. I love that true researchers are always non dogmatic. They are the ones giving us breakthroughs in Science not the others.

The examples he uses for his study come from the real world: the military, astronomy, medicine, fire fighting, scientific discoveries, the stock market, corporate world, sports, and from Klein's own personal and family life, and they are truly illustrative, and very interesting for the lay reader.

Some brilliant quotes by Klein in this book
 >> "I don’t believe insights are the same as “aha,” any more than conception is the same as orgasm."

>> Systems such as Google determine what we don’t want to see and either filter it out completely or bury it so deep, perhaps on page 25 of the search results, that we probably won’t find it. The personalised searches we get from Google, Yahoo, and others gauge our preferences and then screen out the items we’re likely to find irrelevant. Pariser argues that searches also need to show us items that are challenging and even uncomfortable. They need to expose us to other points of view. (p. 147).
>> Our insights transform us in several ways. They change how we understand, act, see, feel, and desire.
>> Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns (p. 27).
>> I don’t believe the purpose of science is to do “good” science. The purpose of science is to learn more about the world, including the world of insights. We don’t want to be sloppy about it. We want to use methods that yield results worth taking seriously. We shouldn’t, however, become so fixated on the methods that we lose sight of the object of our inquiry. We shouldn’t evolve a set of methods that don’t fully capture the phenomenon we want to understand. (p. 178)

The book has two main downsides. The first, is that Klein's considerations about his naturalistic approach are repetitive and redundant at times, split in two different parts of the book. A chapter on methodology would have sufficed and, honestly, I would have expected the editor to regroup Klein's considerations in whichever part was most convenient. Regarding content, many of the considerations that Klein makes regarding how to foster insight in the corporate world and organisations are a bit 'wouldn't be nice?', because although he solutions he proposes are great, they go against how the corporate world and organisations are structured and function internally. 

This is a book really easy to read, well structured, entertaining, and with substance, and some aha moments that make any reading always special.