ABSTRACT
Cialdini organizes his collection of influence techniques around seven principles: contrast, reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. Contrast has to do with the sequencing of message stimuli. In so many exploitations of the reciprocity principle, the persuader provides something that costs relatively nothing. Consistency, is the impulse to bring our beliefs, values, and attitudes into line with what we have already done or decided. Similarity and familiarity tend to increase liking, and liking is especially influential when it is perceived as mutual. Like coercion and material inducements, authority in and of itself is not persuasion. Cialdini defines the scarcity principle as follows: opportunities seem more valuable to US when they are less available. The alternative to mindful processing, according to Cialdini, involves reliance on a variety of external cues and automatic, information-processing mechanisms, including the none-too-reliable filter of evaluative consistency.
