Robert Cialdini
Key intellectual source for Munger's psychology of misjudgment framework
Biography
Robert B. Cialdini is an American social psychologist who spent his career at Arizona State University, where he became one of the youngest professors ever named to the university's Regents' Professor rank. His 1984 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, written for a popular audience, distilled decades of experimental research into six principles — reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity — through which "compliance practitioners" trigger automatic, often irrational assent in their targets.
Cialdini's experimental method was field-based as much as laboratory-based. He infiltrated sales organizations, fundraising operations, and advertising agencies to observe how influence was actually practiced, then returned to the lab to isolate the mechanisms. The result was a catalog of persuasion techniques with an unusual property: they worked on everyone, including people who knew about them.
For Charlie Munger — who had spent decades observing human misjudgment in boardrooms and courtrooms without a systematic psychological vocabulary — Cialdini's book was a revelation. Munger read it in the course of his general reading, immediately recognized its operational importance, and did two characteristic things: he sent copies to all his children, and he mailed the author a share of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock as thanks. Few books ever produced that response from him.
Key Stories
The Berkshire stock thank-you. The most striking evidence of Cialdini's impact is what Munger did after reading Influence. "I immediately sent copies of Cialdini's book to all my children," he told the Harvard audience in 1995. "I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public." Munger, who measured praise in dollars the way other men measure it in adjectives, considered the gesture noteworthy enough to describe publicly — and he added that selling hundreds of thousands of copies of a social psychology book was "a huge feat, considering that Cialdini didn't claim that he was going to improve your sex life or make you any money."
The zoo experiment. In the 1995 speech Munger walked through Cialdini's most elegant experiment in detail. Compliance practitioners wandering a campus asked strangers to supervise juvenile delinquents on a zoo trip; one person in six agreed. When practitioners first asked for a huge commitment — two years of weekly supervision — and got a hundred percent rejection, the follow-up request for a single afternoon at the zoo tripled the acceptance rate from one-sixth to one-half. The small concession by the practitioner was reciprocated by a small concession from the subject. Munger's verdict: "Now, a professor who can invent an experiment like that, which so powerfully demonstrates something so important, deserves much recognition in the wider world."
The perverse readership. Munger also noted, with dry pleasure, the book's unintended audience. Part of Cialdini's readership wanted, like Munger, to become less often tricked. "However, as an outcome not sought by Cialdini, who is a profoundly ethical man, a huge number of his books were bought by salesmen who wanted to learn how to become more effective in misleading customers." A manual of defense, Munger observed, doubles as a manual of offense — which is precisely why everyone needs to read it.
Impact on Munger's Work
Cialdini's book arrived at the exact moment Munger was assembling his own system of psychology, and it supplied the empirical backbone. Munger had the observations; Cialdini had the controlled experiments. "With the push given by Cialdini's book," Munger said, "I soon skimmed through three much used textbooks covering introductory psychology. I also pondered considerably while craving synthesis" — and the result was the talk that became The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Munger's single most influential intellectual construction.
Several of Munger's twenty-five standard causes of misjudgment run directly through Cialdini's territory. The reciprocation tendency — including the Watergate analysis Munger borrowed from Cialdini, in which the attorney general's acceptance of a mere burglary followed the rejection of a grander scheme — is Cialdini's reciprocation principle applied to history. The social proof tendency, the authority-misinfluence tendency, and the liking/loving tendency all have Cialdini chapters behind them. Munger was explicit that academic psychology had merits alongside its defects, and his proof case was always the same man: "a distinguished psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, at Arizona State."
The impact persisted for decades. At the 2008 Berkshire meeting, recommending reading to shareholders, Munger said flatly: "you couldn't start with a better book than Cialdini's 'Influence.'" And at Stanford in 1996 he ranked him among the select: "There have been some fabulous psychology professors in the history of the world. Cialdini of Arizona State was very useful to me." Coming from a man whose standard for "useful" was set by Darwin and Franklin, that is the family price of admission to Munger's personal pantheon.
Key Passages From Munger's Speeches and Letters
"I immediately sent copies of Cialdini's book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public."
"I learned this eventually, in the course of general reading, from a book, Influence, aimed at a popular audience, by a distinguished psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, at Arizona State, a very big university."
"Now, a professor who can invent an experiment like that, which so powerfully demonstrates something so important, deserves much recognition in the wider world, which he indeed got to the credit of many universities that learned a great deal from Cialdini."
"There have been some fabulous psychology professors in the history of the world. Cialdini of Arizona State was very useful to me, as was B.F. Skinner—for his experimental results, if divorced from his monomania and utopianism."
Referenced In
Source: Charlie Munger Knowledge Base — Munger speeches, Wesco Financial annual letters, DJCO annual meeting transcripts