Further Reading — Chapter 35: Persuasion, Influence, and Social Pressure

Foundational Academic Sources

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. Springer-Verlag. The foundational text establishing the Elaboration Likelihood Model — the theoretical framework, the experimental evidence, and the implications for understanding attitude change across contexts. More technical than Petty and Cacioppo's later review articles but essential for anyone who wants to understand ELM at depth. Accessible to motivated general readers willing to engage with experimental psychology.

Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (revised ed.). HarperCollins. [Updated as Influence: The New and Expanded Version, 2021] The foundational popular account of Cialdini's six (now seven) principles — written by the researcher who spent years embedding himself in compliance-gaining professions (sales, advertising, fundraising) to document how influence actually works. The most widely read book in applied social psychology. Essential reading; the 2021 revision adds the unity principle and updates the digital applications. Accessible to all readers.

Cialdini, R. B. (2016). Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Simon & Schuster. Cialdini's follow-up to Influence, focused on what happens before the message: how attention management, context, and priming determine how persuasive messages are received. More recent and in some ways more sophisticated than Influence; the American flag study and the discussion of channeled attention are particularly valuable. Accessible to general readers.

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men (pp. 177–190). Carnegie Press. The original Asch conformity experiments — the visual judgment paradigm that demonstrated conformity even on objectively clear perceptual tasks. Read as a primary source document: Asch's own framing of what the results mean and don't mean is more nuanced than its popular summary. Accessible as a historical document.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row. Milgram's own account of his obedience research — the experimental design, the findings, and his interpretation. More humanizing and more disturbing than secondary accounts because Milgram gives participants their full psychological complexity. His later Situationist interpretation is worth engaging critically. Widely available and accessible.

Moscovici, S., Lage, E., & Naffrechoux, M. (1969). Influence of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a color perception task. Sociometry, 32(4), 365–380. The foundational minority influence paper — the blue/green color judgment paradigm that established consistency as the key variable in minority influence. Available in institutional libraries. More technically accessible than most experimental papers.

McGuire, W. J. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 191–229). Academic Press. The original inoculation theory paper — the biological metaphor, the experimental evidence, and the implications for resistance to persuasion. The foundation of a now-substantial literature on psychological inoculation that has found important applications in public health communication.

Books for General Readers

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kahneman's synthesis of decades of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology research — the full System 1/System 2 framework, the heuristics and biases literature, and the conditions under which fast thinking fails. The most important popular science book about how minds actually work. Not specifically about persuasion but essential for understanding why persuasion works as it does. Required reading.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press. The foundational text on choice architecture — the environment in which decisions are made shapes which options are chosen, often more than deliberate reasoning does. Nudge theory is the benevolent application of ELM peripheral-route insights to public policy: make the default option the better option. An important complement to Cialdini — where Cialdini documents compliance gaining, Thaler and Sunstein propose using choice architecture ethically. Accessible and important.

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (K. Kellen & J. Lerner, Trans.). Knopf. The most rigorous social-scientific analysis of propaganda available — not as a form of government messaging but as a structural feature of modern technological society. Ellul's argument that propaganda is not primarily rhetorical but sociological — operating through participation, integration, and the satisfaction of belonging — is both disturbing and illuminating. More difficult than the other books in this list; essential for anyone who wants to understand the deepest forms of social influence.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. The foundational text on cognitive dissonance — the discomfort that arises when beliefs and actions are inconsistent, and the motivated reasoning it produces. Directly relevant to the commitment and consistency principle: understanding why people maintain prior commitments even against their interests. More technical than Cialdini but accessible and historically important.

Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Harcourt. A remarkably accessible account of cognitive dissonance, self-justification, and the ways people maintain commitments and beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. Directly relevant to the commitment/consistency principle and to the broader question of how influence operates through identity. Entertaining and alarming. Strongly recommended.

Sherif, M. (1936). The Psychology of Social Norms. Harper. The foundational study of informational social influence — the autokinetic effect experiments that showed how social norms emerge from shared uncertainty and persist in individuals even after the group context is gone. More historical than directly practical but foundational to understanding how social norms become internalized as individual perceptions.

On Digital Persuasion and Technology

Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. The book that established persuasive technology as a field — Fogg's framework for how computers, software, and interactive systems can be designed to change behavior. Written before smartphones and social media dominated the landscape but foundational to understanding what came after. More technical and optimistic than subsequent critical literature; best read alongside more skeptical accounts.

Harris, T. (2017, March). How technology hijacks people's minds — from a magician and Google's design ethicist. Retrieved from tristanharris.com. Tristan Harris's widely circulated analysis of how technology platforms use behavioral design to capture and monetize attention — written from the inside by a former Google product manager. Not a formal academic source but an important practitioner's account. Freely available online and directly accessible.

Lanier, J. (2018). Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Henry Holt. Computer scientist and digital humanist Jaron Lanier's case against the attention economy business model — arguing that social media platforms are "behavior modification empires" whose incentive structures produce degraded social cognition and political polarization regardless of platform intentions. More polemical than Harris but covers complementary ground. Accessible and provocative.

On Inoculation in Contemporary Application

Compton, J., van der Linden, S., Cook, J., & Basol, M. (2021). Inoculation theory in the post-truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 15(6), e12602. A comprehensive review of inoculation theory research updated for contemporary applications in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and contested science communication. The bridge between McGuire's original theory and current applied work. Accessible to motivated general readers.

The Character Reading Lists

Jordan is working through: - Pre-Suasion (Cialdini) — the American flag / attention management chapter heavily annotated; Jordan wrote in the margin: "The frame around the ask is as important as the ask itself. I've been doing this without naming it — now I can do it deliberately and examine it ethically." - Mistakes Were Made (Tavris & Aronson) — the commitment/consistency chapters directly relevant to the Customer Journey Council retrospective; Jordan's note: "The escalation of commitment analysis is uncomfortable. Worth it."

Amara is working through: - Influence (Cialdini) — reading the commitment/consistency and reciprocity chapters with Grace's family system in mind; clinical notes in the margins connecting each principle to specific client presentations - Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) — working through it alongside Chapter 35 material; writing a supervision note: "System 1 is the site of clinical vulnerability and also of clinical connection. The skill is knowing which function it's serving."