Cialdini? I’m finishing “Influence” right now. I was extra skeptical during reading it since I’m freshly acquainted with the replication crisis, but googling each citation and reading through the paper is way too much work. He supports many of his claims with multiple studies and real-life anecdotes (for all that’s worth). Could you point me to the criticism of Cialdini you have read?
Cialdini is based off a comment I think I saw by Scott Alexander along the lines of “everything in Cialdini now seems to be bunk”. This is low confidence and I’m happy to revise in light of new info.
My priors on Cialdini are mainly based on how priming, which seems similar to many of his claims, doesn’t replicate well.
That is indeed very low weight. My prior is pretty shaky as-is, but that evidence shouldn’t move it much.
I thought about priming a lot while reading. Many of the results he lists are similar to priming, but priming being false doesn’t mean all results similar to it are false. One could consider a broader hypothesis encompassing all that, namely “humans can be influenced by subtle clues to their subconsciousness to a significant degree”. That’s the similarity I see with priming, both it and many of Caldini’s hypothesis follow from this premise. The priming failure would suggest it’s false, but those experiments used extremely subtle subliminal clues, as if they were designed not to work. Much of Caldini’s work affirms this broader thesis. It’s no metastudy, but the guy lists a lot of studies, all affirming it. A lot of Kahneman’s work does, too. Surely it is acceptable that humans often act on instinct (unconsciously) and that they are subconsciously influenced by their surroundings. This follows from System 1 being so prevalent in our thought.
SSC has a new open thread right now, I should ask there. Maybe Scott can clear it up.
Cialdini? I’m finishing “Influence” right now. I was extra skeptical during reading it since I’m freshly acquainted with the replication crisis, but googling each citation and reading through the paper is way too much work. He supports many of his claims with multiple studies and real-life anecdotes (for all that’s worth). Could you point me to the criticism of Cialdini you have read?
Cialdini is based off a comment I think I saw by Scott Alexander along the lines of “everything in Cialdini now seems to be bunk”. This is low confidence and I’m happy to revise in light of new info.
My priors on Cialdini are mainly based on how priming, which seems similar to many of his claims, doesn’t replicate well.
That is indeed very low weight. My prior is pretty shaky as-is, but that evidence shouldn’t move it much.
I thought about priming a lot while reading. Many of the results he lists are similar to priming, but priming being false doesn’t mean all results similar to it are false. One could consider a broader hypothesis encompassing all that, namely “humans can be influenced by subtle clues to their subconsciousness to a significant degree”. That’s the similarity I see with priming, both it and many of Caldini’s hypothesis follow from this premise. The priming failure would suggest it’s false, but those experiments used extremely subtle subliminal clues, as if they were designed not to work. Much of Caldini’s work affirms this broader thesis. It’s no metastudy, but the guy lists a lot of studies, all affirming it. A lot of Kahneman’s work does, too. Surely it is acceptable that humans often act on instinct (unconsciously) and that they are subconsciously influenced by their surroundings. This follows from System 1 being so prevalent in our thought.
SSC has a new open thread right now, I should ask there. Maybe Scott can clear it up.