Cialdini is right in what he says and his examples do work in the real world. However, you have to read it and understand it through the lens of americanised techniques and customer base - for the people who are buying products that Cialdini uses as examples.
Maybe I wasn't being clear. The broad strokes conclusions that Cialdini was trying to communicate are what I was talking about, not nit-picks in the scenarios themselves. What Cialdini was trying to communicate was that there exists certain instinctual phenomena in the human mind that kind be taken advantage of very easily. Like a simple button that, when pressed, consistently results in specific and predictable behavior in all subjects, like the mind control method you proposed.
While the phenomena he writes about are generally accepted as being real, their effects have been severely and intentionally overstated. It's like a drunk driver saying there was a breeze that blew against his car, implying that the breeze caused his car to crash. There was a breeze. The breeze did effect his car. You might say the driver made a factual statement, except of course that he's lying.
Cialdini falls into a school of thought I call Environmental Determinism. The father of this school of thought was a researcher named Foucault. He believed that the human mind is extremely malleable and is a simple reflection of it's environment. He envisioned humanity like a raging river, a slave to physics and circumstance. That river might still be tamed through infrastructure, the same way humanity could be improved through wise and judicious political reform. These reforms were his second great passion in life. His first great passion was taking children into graveyards at night, raping them, and infecting them with AIDS.
If you haven't already guessed, some of the worst men who ever lived were a part of this school of thought. Before you take this stuff too seriously, consider what sort of man would prefer that you believed that humans are not responsible for their actions, and that the concept of right and wrong is immature.
Maybe it would help to go through a few examples:
- Cialdini cites an experiment where Doctors order subjects to shock a man who pleads for mercy. He claims this is an example of authority bias.
- What he didn't explain is that subjects rejected the Doctors' authority outright. And of course they did, nobody even listens to their doctors normally. The Doctors then presented a logical argument to subjects, explaining that the man's suffering was temporary, but would advance science and ultimately result in incalculable benefit for humanity. Subjects responded 60-40, with 40% of people refusing to continue the experiment. Honestly, I'm surprised it's that high. Personally, I definitely would've pressed the button. Either way, people were pretty evenly split on how to deal with the situation.
- Cialdini cites an instance where a girl was raped and 20, 30, 40, or 50 people stood in a circle and watched it happen. The story changes depending on who tells it. He claims this is an example of the Bystander effect.
- The rape was real and caused a lot of anger in New York, where it happened. In order to distract from the crime itself, the press came out with the above story, which shifted blame from the rapist to the people who supposedly watched it happen. The story came from an anonymous investigator who spoke off the record. There has never been any evidence that the bystanders existed at all except from this anonymous informant, including the original police report.
- Finally, let's talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment
- The PI (Zimbardo) took a bunch of preppy Ivy League kids and dressed them up as cops and robbers, in order to show that the "prisoner" characters would immediately turn capricious and evil, and that the "guard" characters would become domineering and cruel. When this (obviously) didn't happen, the PI inserted himself into the experiment as the Warden and began punishing the prisoners intensely for no reason, in order to build resentment between the different roleplayers and hopefully kickstart the self sustaining dystopia he was trying to create. This also failed, of course. He canceled the experiment, after one of the prisoners allegedly cried, and declared it to be a success. There's a lot wrong with the Stanford prison experiment, but I'll keep things brief since people who are way smarter than me have already dissected it to death. Just know that it's so bad that even a lot of contemporary psychologists have been trying to distance themselves from this specific experiment.
