Author: Jeremy Candelas

 

If you’ve taken a Psychology or Communication course at Cornell, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Robert Cialdini’s six principles of social influence. If not, long story short: Dr. Cialdini’s principles of influence are a great (and simple) way of getting what you want by messing with people’s heads. Knowing these six principles and how to use them can come in pretty handy here at Cornell (go figure).

 

1) Reciprocation

 

 

Ah, the old “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.” Take the time to do something nice for your TA – like being the one person to break the awkward silence, and actually speak up when they ask for questions/answers in section. They’ll keep that in mind the next time they’re grading your assignments, and be more likely to show you some mercy.

 

2) Social Proof

 

 

Herd behavior, social proof, bandwagoning, peer pressure… whatever you want to call it, it’s real. Use it to your advantage by convincing others that literally no one is studying for the next prelim, while you secretly study under the veil of night. Then watch as you manage to score well above the mean for once. Unethical? Definitely. But hey – it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

 

3) Commitment and Consistency

 

 

It turns out that once someone has actually committed to doing something, they have a really hard time backing out because they want to maintain consistency in their actions and words. You can use this to your advantage by getting your professor to enact small changes, like pushing the deadline for your weekly quizzes back an hour. The more of these changes that you can convince your professor to make, the more keen they’ll be to accept similar requests (and more likely to accept larger requests too).

 

4) Liking

 

 

Not surprisingly, we’re more likely to help out those individuals that we actually like. So if you’re trying to pass a class but you’re not quite getting the material, just suck up to the professor (or TA) big time. Go to their office hours and pretend that you really are just that interested in hearing about their dissertation on aquatic-mammalian migratory breeding patterns in Papua New Guinea, and they might just bump your grade up a few points.

 

5) Authority

 

 

As shown in the Milgram experiment, we’re basically hardwired to follow anyone we consider to be in a position of authority. So next time you need to to get a passing grade, just tell your professor that daddy is a U.S. Senator or the CEO of an undisclosed Fortune 500 company, and if you don’t get the grade you want then there will be consequences to pay. You should be good to go.

 

6) Scarcity

 

 

So you’re the one person in Intro to Wines who actually realized it’s a serious class and took notes? Great, that means you can take advantage of the scarcity principle. If you’ve taken any kind of Econ class you know that when there is less of something, it’s more desirable, and by extension worth more than if there is a large surplus. Putting this to your advantage, you’ll have some leverage over your friends. Use it wisely.