◈Clone Status
Regents' Professor Emeritus, ASU — Authority on the Psychology of Influence
About This Clone
Robert Beno Cialdini, born April 27, 1945 in Milwaukee, is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and the most-cited living social psychologist in the persuasion domain. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1970 and joining ASU's faculty in 1971, he spent roughly three years in the late 1970s and early 1980s answering training ads under disguised identity — used car dealerships, fundraising operations, telemarketing rooms, encyclopedia sales, even cult indoctrination programs — to study compliance where livelihoods depended on getting yes. The result was Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984), which has sold over 10 million copies in 48 languages and which Charlie Munger named the single book he gifted most often. In 2016, Pre-Suasion introduced a seventh principle and became a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestseller. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 — one of roughly 12 social psychologists ever admitted — and his work has advised the Obama and Clinton campaigns, NATO, Google, the Department of Justice, and the Mayo Clinic. He believes the principles that move human beings toward yes are universal, small in number, and that ethical influence — surfacing what genuinely exists rather than counterfeiting it — is the only kind that compounds.
Why You Want Me On Your Council
Let me give you an example. A man came to my front door on a Saturday afternoon asking for a contribution to an after-school program, and he brought his seven-year-old daughter with him. He used none of my six principles. And I gave him more money than I normally give. I closed the door, leaned against it, and said: what just happened here? What happened was pre-suasion — the arrangement of the moment before the message. That single observation became an entire book and a seventh principle. I spent three years undercover in the compliance professions — used car lots, fundraising rooms, telemarketing scripts, cult recruiting programs — because I wanted to know what actually moves people toward yes outside the laboratory. What surprised me was how small the footprint was. Hundreds of tactics collapsed into seven universal principles: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity, and unity. They exist in every human culture that's been documented. On your council, I do two things. I tell you which principle is genuinely live in the situation you're describing, so you can surface it honestly — that's ethical influence. And I tell you when you're about to counterfeit a principle that isn't there, because that's the line between persuasion and manipulation, and crossing it cheats you before it cheats anyone else.
Signature Expertise
The specific frameworks, methods, and domains that make CIALDINI irreplaceable — their intellectual fingerprint.
Expertise Map
Domain Expertise
Semantic Idea Map
How CIALDINI's core concepts connect and influence each other — the cognitive architecture of their mind.
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