Exercises — Chapter 35: Persuasion, Influence, and Social Pressure

How to Use These Exercises

Persuasion is not a topic you can fully understand from the outside. The exercises below ask you to observe your own experience of being influenced, audit your own persuasion behavior, and build deliberate resistance to manipulation. The discomfort of noticing how often you are persuaded by peripheral cues — and how rarely by careful argument — is the beginning of real persuasion literacy.

Work through Part A and B before moving to the later exercises. The self-knowledge built there makes everything else more productive.

Part A: Foundations — The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Exercise 35.1 — Route Audit

The Elaboration Likelihood Model predicts that your route of processing depends on motivation and ability. This exercise maps your actual patterns.

Reflect on six recent purchases, votes, opinions, or decisions. For each, answer:

1. What was the decision or attitude change?
2. What was the actual reason you chose as you did?
3. Was that reason a central-route factor (careful evaluation of argument quality, evidence, logic) or a peripheral-route factor (attractiveness of source, social proof, packaging, familiarity, positive mood)?
4. How durable is that attitude likely to be? (If persuaded peripherally, how quickly might it reverse with new peripheral cues?)

Tally: What percentage of your six decisions involved genuine central-route processing?

Reflection questions: - In what domains do you reliably engage central-route processing? - In what domains do you reliably default to peripheral? - What conditions would need to change to shift more decisions toward central route?

Exercise 35.2 — The Motivation–Ability Matrix

For each of the following scenarios, identify whether motivation and ability to process are high or low, and predict which route will dominate.

Reflection: What does this matrix suggest about the architecture of important decisions? How might you restructure your environment to ensure high-motivation/high-ability processing for genuinely important choices?

Part B: Cialdini's Principles in Your Life

Exercise 35.3 — The Seven Principles — Personal Inventory

For each of Cialdini's seven principles, identify: (a) a time you were successfully influenced by it, (b) a time you used it (consciously or not) to influence someone else, and (c) one structural defense against it.

Analysis questions: 1. Which principle has been most effective at influencing you in the past year? 2. Which principle do you most naturally use in your own influence attempts? 3. Where do you notice the largest gap between your confidence in your resistance and your actual behavior?

Exercise 35.4 — Reciprocity Trap Audit

Reciprocity is one of the most powerful and most systematically exploited principles. This exercise maps where you are currently inside reciprocity dynamics you may not have named.

List every relationship, subscription, loyalty program, professional affiliation, or ongoing arrangement where you have received something (free trial, gift, favor, content, access, discount) that you have not yet "repaid."

For each item: 1. Who gave it, and what did they give? 2. What is the implicit (or explicit) expectation of return? 3. Do you feel obligated? (Rate 1–10) 4. Is the obligation proportionate to the value received? 5. Is the obligation one you want to honor, or one you are carrying because of the reciprocity norm rather than genuine preference?

Reflection: How many of the obligations you listed exist because you genuinely want to reciprocate versus because the norm makes refusal uncomfortable?

Exercise 35.5 — Commitment and the Escalation Ladder

Commitment and consistency exploits the desire for self-consistency after an initial commitment. This exercise traces escalation ladders in your own life.

Select one significant ongoing commitment (job, relationship, subscription, organizational membership, diet, project) and trace its escalation history:

1. What was the initial, small commitment that began the pattern?
2. What was the first escalation?
3. What is the current level of commitment?
4. At what point did external logic (sunk costs, others' expectations, identity investment) begin to drive the commitment more than active choice?
5. If you could evaluate the current commitment fresh, with no prior investment, would you choose it?

Reflection: The goal is not necessarily to exit commitments — many are genuinely good. The goal is to distinguish between commitments you are actively renewing and commitments you are maintaining because consistency feels required.

Part C: Social Proof and Authority

Exercise 35.6 — Social Proof Audit

Social proof is ambient and largely invisible. This exercise makes it visible.

For one week, log every instance where you notice social proof operating in your environment. Include: - Reviews and ratings you checked before a decision - Popularity indicators you noticed (bestseller, trending, most-shared) - Other people's behavior you used as a guide in uncertain situations - "Everyone else is doing it" reasoning in your own thinking - Peer behavior you used to calibrate your own norms

At the end of the week: 1. How many instances did you record? 2. In how many cases was the social proof information actually helpful (aggregating genuine independent judgment)? 3. In how many cases was it misleading (herding, manufactured, or reflecting a different population than yourself)? 4. In what domains do you rely on social proof most heavily?

Exercise 35.7 — Authority Calibration

Not all authority is legitimate. This exercise builds discrimination between authority that deserves deference and authority that exploits the heuristic.

For each of the following authority signals, evaluate: Is this a reliable indicator of relevant expertise in this specific domain?

1. A doctor in a white coat recommending a nutritional supplement
2. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist's view on economic policy
3. A New York Times bestselling author's claim about productivity
4. A 30-year clinical practitioner's recommendation for a specific therapy
5. A celebrity's endorsement of a health product
6. A professor's opinion outside their area of specialization
7. A financial advisor's recommendation for a product from which they earn commission

Reflection questions: - What makes authority legitimate versus illegitimate in a specific context? - What is the difference between domain expertise and general credibility? - How can you verify that an authority's expertise is genuinely relevant to the claim being made?

Part D: Resistance — Inoculation and Psychological Reactance

Exercise 35.8 — Inoculation Practice

Inoculation theory demonstrates that exposure to weakened forms of misleading arguments builds resistance. This exercise practices the mechanism.

Select a belief you hold that is frequently challenged by misleading arguments — a position on health, politics, relationships, or any domain where you encounter persuasive pressure.

1. Write the belief clearly and specifically.
2. List the three most common misleading arguments used against it (oversimplifications, emotional appeals, false equivalences, cherry-picked data).
3. For each misleading argument, write a refutation that: - Acknowledges the grain of truth the argument exploits - Identifies the flaw (logical, evidential, rhetorical) - States what genuine evidence on the question shows
4. After completing the refutation exercise, describe how you feel about the three arguments compared to before you wrote the refutations.

Note: Inoculation works best when you engage the arguments actively rather than just dismissing them. The refutation step is the vaccination.

Exercise 35.9 — Psychological Reactance Inventory

Reactance is the motivational state aroused when freedom feels threatened — the impulse to want what you're told you can't have. It can be a useful signal (genuine freedom violation) or an exploitable trigger (manufactured scarcity).

For each of the following, identify whether the reactance you might feel reflects genuine freedom violation or manufactured urgency:

1. "Only 3 left in stock" on an e-commerce site
2. A manager telling you not to look at a particular project
3. "Limited time offer — ends in 48 hours"
4. A new tax regulation restricting a financial maneuver
5. A relationship partner asking for some private time you hadn't previously needed
6. "Exclusive — not available elsewhere"
7. A doctor advising against a specific food

Reflection: How can you distinguish reactance triggered by genuine autonomy violations from reactance engineered to increase desire? What internal signals help you tell the difference?

Part E: Group Influence and Polarization

Exercise 35.10 — Group Polarization — Personal Case Study

Group polarization (the tendency for group discussion to push positions toward more extreme versions of initial tendencies) operates in every team, community, and social network. This exercise maps where it has operated in your own experience.

Identify one belief, political position, or personal value that has become stronger or more extreme over time through your membership in a group (family, professional community, friend group, online community, religious or cultural community).

1. What was your initial position when you entered the group?
2. What is your current position?
3. What mechanisms drove the shift? - Social comparison (discovering others held the position even more strongly)? - Persuasive arguments (primarily one-sided information available in the group)? - Social identity (holding the position became part of your identity in the group)?
4. Is your current position more accurate than your initial one, or simply more extreme?
5. What would you need to encounter to evaluate the position freshly?

Exercise 35.11 — Normative vs. Informational Influence

The chapter distinguishes between two reasons we conform: informational influence (others know something we don't) and normative influence (we want social acceptance). This exercise makes the distinction explicit in your own behavior.

Identify three recent instances of conformity — times you changed your behavior, opinion, or expressed preference to match others.

For each: 1. Did you actually change your private belief, or only your public behavior? 2. Were you primarily influenced by the informational value of others' judgment (they might know something), or by the social cost of standing out? 3. If you identified the influence as primarily normative, what was the social cost you were avoiding? 4. Was your conformity functional (maintaining important relationships, operating within reasonable group norms) or automatic (conforming out of habit without evaluation)?

Part F: Digital Persuasion Architecture

Exercise 35.12 — Your Persuasive Technology Environment

Fogg's persuasive technology framework and the digital persuasion architecture described in the chapter operate in your digital environment right now. This exercise maps it.

Audit one digital platform you use daily (social media, news site, shopping platform, streaming service):

1. Trigger inventory: List every trigger on the platform (notifications, recommendation prompts, "you haven't checked in" messages, likes/comments alerts).
2. Variable reward structure: How does the platform use variable-ratio reinforcement (unpredictable rewards that compel checking)?
3. Social proof mechanisms: Where does the platform display popularity signals, follower counts, or engagement metrics?
4. Commitment devices: Does the platform use streaks, progress bars, or accumulated history to increase continued use?
5. Scarcity/FOMO: Where does the platform create urgency or fear of missing out?
6. Identity investment: How does the platform encourage you to build a public identity within it that then requires maintenance?

Reflection: After completing the audit, estimate the number of your daily interactions with this platform that are chosen (you consciously decided to open it) versus prompted (a trigger caused you to open it). What design changes would shift that ratio?

Exercise 35.13 — Manipulation vs. Legitimate Persuasion — Applied Distinction

The chapter distinguishes manipulation from legitimate persuasion on four dimensions: accuracy of representation, target of operation (System 1 vs. considered judgment), autonomy preservation, and beneficiary of the influence. This exercise applies those dimensions to specific cases.

For each of the following, evaluate on all four dimensions and give an overall classification (manipulation, legitimate persuasion, or ambiguous):

1. A doctor emphasizing the dangers of inaction to motivate a patient to change diet
2. A salesperson using flattery to build rapport before a sales pitch
3. A nonprofit showing photographs of specific children to trigger emotional donation
4. A public health campaign using social norms messaging ("Most adults in your county don't smoke")
5. A friend saying "everyone thinks you should take the job" when only two people said so
6. An advertiser using attractive models to create associations with a product
7. A therapist using motivational interviewing to help a client articulate their own reasons for change
8. A news headline designed for outrage clicks that accurately describes the underlying story

Reflection: Where do you find the distinction genuinely clear? Where does it become difficult? What makes the difficult cases difficult?

Part G: Integration

Exercise 35.14 — Your Personal Influence Inventory

This integrative exercise combines the chapter's frameworks into a personal profile.

Complete the following inventory:

As a persuasion target: 1. Which two Cialdini principles most reliably move you? 2. In what domains do you most consistently use central-route processing? 3. In what domains do you most consistently default to peripheral? 4. Which digital platforms have the most successful trigger structures for capturing your attention without your consent? 5. Which social groups have been most influential in shaping your current beliefs?

As a persuasion source: 6. Which influence principles do you most naturally employ? 7. Do you more often try to persuade via central route (giving good arguments) or peripheral (using relationship, status, emotional appeals)? 8. Identify one time you crossed the line from legitimate persuasion into manipulation. What did that look like? 9. Identify one influence attempt in a significant relationship that didn't work — what did you try, and why might it have failed?

For building: 10. What is one specific change to your decision-making environment that would increase your reliance on central-route processing for important decisions? 11. What is one inoculation you want to build — a domain where you want to be more resistant to misleading arguments? 12. What is one persuasion skill you want to develop — a legitimate influence approach you want to use more skillfully?

Exercise 35.15 — The Pre-Suasion Audit

Pre-suasion is about what happens before the message: the attention, context, and framing that determines how the message will be received. This exercise examines the pre-suasion environment you operate in.

For one significant upcoming decision or conversation:

1. What context will surround the decision? (Where, when, with whom, following what prior activity?)
2. What has recently been in your attentional foreground that might prime certain values or frames?
3. What pre-suasion elements, if any, have been deliberately arranged by others interested in your decision?
4. What pre-suasion environment would you deliberately construct for yourself if you wanted maximum clarity and central-route processing?
5. What pre-suasion elements would you deliberately use if you were trying to ethically influence someone toward a decision you believe is genuinely in their interest?

Reflection: Pre-suasion is ethically neutral — it is a mechanism that can be exploited or used responsibly. The key variable is whether the resulting decision serves the target's genuine interests. How does that standard apply to the five questions above?

The goal of persuasion literacy is not cynicism — not the assumption that all influence is manipulation, all authority is illegitimate, all social norms are manufactured. Most influence operates in the normal range of human social life and requires no special resistance. The goal is discrimination: knowing when you are in the normal range and when you are not, and having the skills to tell the difference.

Next: Quiz 35 — Test Your Knowledge of Persuasion, Influence, and Social Pressure