Robert Cialdini

Robert Cialdini is a social psychologist and Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, born April 27, 1945. He built his reputation on field-based research into persuasion rather than laboratory studies alone — most famously going undercover for nearly three years in sales training programs, fundraising organizations, and other "compliance professions" to observe real-world influence tactics as they were actually taught and practiced.

That research became Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984), which identified a small set of recurring principles — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity — that reliably move people toward agreement. The book became a foundational text in behavioral psychology and marketing, widely taught in business schools and cited across both academic and popular writing on decision-making ever since. Pre-Suasion, published in 2016, extended that work by focusing on the moments and attentional cues immediately preceding a persuasive appeal, rather than the appeal's content itself — arguing that what a communicator does right before asking often matters more than the ask.

Cialdini has consulted for corporations, government agencies, and non-profits on ethical influence practices, and has repeatedly emphasized in interviews that his interest lies as much in helping people recognize and resist manipulation as in helping communicators persuade effectively.