A great animation describing the fundamental principles of persuasion based on the research of Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Dr. Cialdini, if you’re not familiar, is the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and the co-author of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business [...]
Tom Stafford discusses a lot of the psychological principles that make rational bidding hard. Auctions also hit on many psychological persuasion techniques: First, auctions use the principle of scarcity, whereby we overvalue things that we think might run out. Auction items are scarce in that they are unique (only one person can have it), and [...]
In response to But Wait … There’s More, a kind reader passed along a link to a wonderful interview between Andrew Warner and Tim Hawthorne (a producer of infomercials). On how to orchestrate an immediate response: ..In order to do that, I think there are definitely certain products that fall into a category of generating [...]
…marketers also understand that, by using the illusion of scarcity, they can accelerate demand. This false scarcity encourages us to buy sooner and perhaps to buy more than normal. We saw two excellent examples of this effect this summer with the launches of the iPhone and the seventh Harry Potter book. In both cases, the [...]
You’ll never look at infomercials the same after reading this post. Robert Cialdini calls But Wait…There’s More “A wholly fascinating account of a wholly fascinating industry.” If you’re interested in how late night TV infomercials use every psychology trick in the book, you need to read this. Infomercials are powerful. A thirty-second commercial for Tide [...]
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? In this video, Paul Bloom argues that our beliefs about the history of an object profoundly changes how we experience it. Bloom argues that we value an expensive bottle of wine from a friend of ours more than an identical one from our employer, [...]
From London to the Middle East riots have shaken political stability. Why? Is it human nature? “Imagine you’re on a bus,” explains Vaughan Bell, clinical research psychologist at King’s College London. “It’s full of people and you have to jam into an uncomfortable seat at the back.” Very little connects you with any of the [...]
James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, says: We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but not of a piece of information — not for long, anyway. Nor [...]
