Josiah's Reviews > Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

If I had read this book a few years ago I probably would have thought it was fantastic. Now I rate it as largely worthless.

Why the change? The book largely relies on so-called "priming" research, which is the idea that our decisions are substantially influenced by seemingly trivial elements of one's background environment. For example, in Pre-Suasion we are told that customers are more likely to buy French wine if there is French music playing in the background. Similarly, worker productivity shoots up if they are shown a photo of a runner winning a race, people express more conservative political opinions on questionnaires that include a miniature American flag in the corner, and Parisian men are more likely to help a woman retrieve a stolen phone if they had previously been asked how to get to Valentine Street (because the word Valentine primed them with associations of romance and chivalry).

If these findings seem hard to believe, you may be onto something. Priming has been a hot topic in pop psychology in recent years, but attempts to replicate the findings of many priming studies have failed. As far back as 2012 Daniel Kahneman (who won a Nobel prize for his work in psychology) said that priming research had become the "poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research."

Yet while the problems with priming research have been known for years, there is zero hint in Pre-Suasion that the findings being presented are questionable. This means that either Cialdini is unaware of these criticisms (which would be bad), or that he is aware but he decided not to mention it because it would undercut the thrust of his argument (which would be worse). Either way, you should not let a book based on such questionable research influence you.