Influence

Part 10 of 12  ·  Attack

The Offense Codex

Thirty techniques of applied influence stated as operating laws, each with its mechanism, its historical proof, and the point at which its use stops being persuasion.

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1 Law 1 — Control the Frame Before You Argue the FactsAmos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s ‘The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice’ (Science, vol. 211, 1981) and its…
2 Law 2 — Give First, and the Debt Will Ask For YouDennis Regan’s ‘Effects of a favor and liking on compliance’ (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971), and the Hare…
3 Law 3 — Ask For Almost Nothing FirstJonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser’s ‘Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique’ (Journal of Personality and…
4 Law 4 — Ask For Too Much So the Real Request Feels Like MercyRobert Cialdini, Joyce Vincent and colleagues‘ ’Reciprocal Concessions Procedure for Inducing Compliance: The Door-in-the-Face…
5 Law 5 — Anchor the Number Before They Can ThinkTversky and Kahneman’s rigged wheel-of-fortune anchoring demonstration in ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’…
6 Law 6 — Bind Them in Public, Then Collect in PrivateMorton Deutsch and Harold Gerard’s 1955 demonstration that public responses produce far higher conformity than private ones, and…
7 Law 7 — Manufacture Scarcity and Let Desire Do the WorkJack Brehm’s ‘A Theory of Psychological Reactance’ (1966) and Stephen Worchel, Jerry Lee and Akanbi Adewole’s 1975 cookie-jar…
8 Law 8 — Impose a Deadline and Deliberation DiesThe White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002, and its deliberate rollout timing — Andrew Card’s remark that 'you don’t…
9 Law 9 — Wear the Uniform and the Order Obeys ItselfStanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale (published 1963), in which 26 of 40 men in the baseline condition proceeded to…
10 Law 10 — Give Them a Common EnemyMuzafer Sherif’s 1954 Robbers Cave field experiment in Oklahoma, foundation of realistic conflict theory, and Radio Television…
11 Law 11 — Divide the Categories, Then Rule the FragmentsBelgian colonial administration’s 1933-34 census in Rwanda, which issued identity cards fixing every person as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa…
12 Law 12 — Isolate Them and You Become RealityJim Jones' 1977 relocation of the Peoples Temple to Jonestown, Guyana, where passports and communications were controlled and…
13 Law 13 — Flood Them With Love, Then Ration ItThe Unification Church’s 1970s recruitment practice that gave the term ‘love bombing’ its name, and Donald Dutton and Susan…
14 Law 14 — Reward Unpredictably to Create CompulsionB.F. Skinner’s variable-ratio reinforcement schedules and their commercial implementation in machine gambling, documented by…
15 Law 15 — Make Them Argue Your Case to ThemselvesLeon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance (1957) and its industrial application in Maoist ‘thought reform’, including the…
16 Law 16 — Escalate Their Investment Until Retreat Is UnthinkableBarry Staw’s ‘Knee-deep in the Big Muddy’ (Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1976), which demonstrated increased…
17 Law 17 — Repeat It Until It Feels TrueLynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino’s ‘Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity’ (Journal of Verbal…
18 Law 18 — Own the Vocabulary and You Own the VerdictThe US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memoranda of 1 August 2002 (the ‘Torture Memos’ by John Yoo and Jay Bybee)…
19 Law 19 — Let the Crowd Deliver Your MessageSolomon Asch’s line-judgment conformity experiments (1951), in which participants gave wrong answers on roughly a third of…
20 Law 20 — Make Them Compete For Your ApprovalLouis XIV’s court ritual at Versailles — the lever du roi, in which roughly a hundred nobles competed for privileges such as…
21 Law 21 — Choose the Stage, Not the ArgumentAlbert Speer’s ‘Cathedral of Light’ at the Nuremberg party rallies, 1934-1938, built from 152 anti-aircraft searchlights, and the…
22 Law 22 — Assign the Role and the Behavior FollowsPhilip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (August 1971), terminated after six days when assigned guards escalated to abuse,…
23 Law 23 — Engineer the Default and Skip the PersuasionEric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein’s ‘Do Defaults Save Lives?’ (Science, vol. 302, 2003), which showed presumed-consent organ…
24 Law 24 — Set the Agenda and Let Them Draw the ConclusionMaxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw’s Chapel Hill study, ‘The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media’ (Public Opinion Quarterly,…
25 Law 25 — Attack the Accuser and Claim the WoundJennifer Freyd’s DARVO construct (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), developed from 1997 and since measured empirically,…
26 Law 26 — Appear Not to Need ItElaine Walster, G. William Walster, Jane Piliavin and Lynn Schmidt’s ‘Playing hard to get: Understanding an elusive phenomenon’…
27 Law 27 — Confess the Small Sin to Bury the Large OneElliot Aronson, Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd’s 1966 pratfall experiment, the ‘stealing thunder’ trial studies of Williams,…
28 Law 28 — Never Let Them See Where It Came FromThe KGB’s AIDS disinformation campaign (Operation Denver, often called Operation INFEKTION), launched with an anonymous letter in…
29 Law 29 — Trade Secrets to Manufacture IntimacyMarkus Wolf’s Stasi ‘Romeo’ operations from the 1950s to the 1980s, in which male officers were trained to court West German…
30 Law 30 — Be Unpredictable Enough to Be FearedRichard Nixon’s ‘madman theory’, described to H.R. Haldeman during the 1968 campaign and reflected in the October 1969 global…