This is a book review for Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini.

This is one of the best books that I have read in a long time. The author is a well known expert in the field of Behavioural Science and has written a classical book on it called Influence.

This book stresses on the way that in order to influence a situation/person, you have to set up a context just prior to the message being delivered in order to have a maximum chance of influence. It’s subtle but the author does a great job of giving us tons of examples to help drive home the point.

I found the text difficult to read at times and had to go through the passages several times to help understand the depth of what the author is saying at times. The references section in the book runs well over a 100+ pages, which by far is the largest referene that I have ever seen in a book.

This book is definitely useful to anyone in any field, especially in today’s world where we are so constantly fed with continuous data that to get our message across and make the opposite side sit up / notice / follow is a challenge in itself. This book gives you a context to help build up before the actual message is delivered. It’s useful to leaders, to project managers and to all of us because some of the examples given by the author are everyday instances.

The author also goes back to his earlier work of reference, Influence and discusses pre-suasion vis-a-vis the pillars of Influence that he covered in that book like Scarcity, Social Proof, Authenticity, Liking, etc. There are techniques in this book that could be misused too and if you are clever student of what is going on around you, it will hard not to notice how they are being subtly employed everywhere. In my opinion, some of the best exponents of this has been the politicians and the way they are delivering some of the speeches.

All in all, this is a book that I am sure I will keep coming back too. A tough read for me but I am glad that I persisted. I give it 5/5 stars.