This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
When psychologist Robert Cialdini was in college, a magazine salesman knocked on his dorm room door.
He was selling subscriptions to Sports Illustrated magazine.
Bob was going to say no, but then the salesman said, it's the most.
Popular subscription here in your dorm.
And the experts rated as the number one sports magazine in the United States.
And I found myself buying that subscription.
The exchange with the Sports Illustrated salesman got Bob thinking.
What exactly had the man said to overcome his resistance?
And could studying exchanges like this reveal why some people were more persuasive than others?
But I don't know.
I had the terms to explain it, but I knew that they had worked, and I knew that he had turned a no to a yes.
So there was something powerful there inside what he had said.
Over the course of several decades of observation and experimental research at Arizona State University, Bob eventually identified seven techniques of influence.
Last week on the show, we explored three of them.
We looked at the role of scarcity, the norm of reciprocity, and the effects of liking.
If you missed that episode, I would strongly recommend you go back and listen to it first.
Today we explore four more powerful ways.
To turn nos into yeses.