# Influence Psychology

> Persuasion science and ethical influence — an AI agent skill based on *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion* by Robert Cialdini.

Published 2026-02-19 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Sales & Persuasion · Free and MIT-licensed
Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/influence-psychology/
Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/influence-psychology

**Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/influence-psychology --global`

## What is the Influence Psychology skill?

Built on Robert Cialdini’s Influence, the Influence Psychology skill teaches your AI agent the levers behind why people say yes — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity and unity — then puts them to work auditing and rewriting real pages, emails and onboarding flows, flagging anything that crosses from persuasion into manipulation.

## Key concepts from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion your agent applies

- **Reciprocity** — Give value first — free tools, insights, or gifts — and people feel compelled to give back.
- **Social Proof** — Show that others are choosing your product — testimonials, case studies, user counts build trust.
- **Authority** — Demonstrate expertise through credentials, endorsements, and demonstrated knowledge.
- **Scarcity** — Highlight what people stand to lose, not just gain — limited availability drives action.
- **Commitment & Consistency** — Get small yeses first — people who take a small step are far more likely to take the next.

## When to use Influence Psychology — and when not to

Reach for it when:

- Your homepage shows testimonials and a logo bar but nothing that tells a stranger why credible people trust you.
- You want onboarding to ask for a small yes first instead of demanding the large one on screen two.
- Your urgency claims are the kind everyone has learned to ignore — a countdown that resets on page reload.
- A campaign is technically competent and lands flat, and you want a diagnosis rather than another rewrite.

Reach for something else when:

- You need the words themselves rather than the psychology beneath them — StoryBrand Messaging and Made to Stick write copy.
- You’re deciding what to test on a live page and in what order — CRO Methodology brings the process and the maths.
- The conversation is one-to-one and adversarial; Negotiation is built for the room, not the page.
- You want customers talking to each other about you — Contagious is about sharing, which is a different mechanism.

## About Robert Cialdini

Regents' Professor Emeritus at ASU, godfather of influence science. Robert Cialdini is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. His 35 years of research on the science of influence have made him the most-cited living social psychologist in the field of persuasion.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1198516
The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL18290713M/Influence · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practice · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6030214

## Example prompts

- Audit my landing page for persuasion principle usage using influence-psychology skill _(CRO)_
- Add social proof elements to my SaaS homepage using influence-psychology skill _(Website optimization)_
- Design an onboarding sequence that uses commitment escalation using influence-psychology skill _(User activation)_
- Create a pricing page that leverages scarcity and authority using influence-psychology skill _(Pricing)_

## Frequently asked questions

### How do I install the Influence Psychology skill?

Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/influence-psychology --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Influence Psychology skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.

### Which book is the Influence Psychology skill based on?

It packages *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion* by Robert Cialdini — regents' Professor Emeritus at ASU, godfather of influence science. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering reciprocity, social proof and authority. It sits in the Sales & Persuasion part of the library.

### Where’s the line between influence and manipulation?

Cialdini draws it at whether the principle is genuinely present. If two thousand people really do use your product, showing that is surfacing evidence a buyer would want anyway; inventing the number is fabricating it. Same with scarcity — a cohort that truly closes on Friday versus a timer that resets. The skill runs that check on every tactic it proposes, partly on principle and partly because manufactured proof, once spotted, costs more trust than the sale was worth.

### Is it six principles or seven?

Six in the original book — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity. The expanded edition adds Unity: the pull of shared identity, of being one of us rather than merely similar to us. It’s the one most sites under-use, and it isn’t a badge saying “community” — it comes from genuine shared category membership, co-created work, or language your customers already use about themselves.

### How does this compare with the CRO Methodology skill?

Influence Psychology tells you what to try and why it should work; CRO Methodology tells you whether it did. The principles are a strong prior — decades of experimental evidence — but priors lose to your own visitors regularly enough that shipping them unmeasured is a gamble. In practice you use this skill to generate the hypothesis and the rewrite, and the CRO skill to prioritise, run and read the test.

### Do these still work now that everyone knows the principles?

Mostly yes — knowing that social proof moves you doesn’t stop it moving you. What has changed is the cheap end. Fake countdowns, “only 2 left”, invented testimonials and hollow authority signals have trained buyers to discount the whole class of cue, so a genuine one now has to work harder to be believed. Detected manufacture doesn’t just fail; it reverses, and the skill treats specificity as the antidote.

## Related

- All Sales & Persuasion skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/sales/
- $100M Offers: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/hundred-million-offers/
- Negotiation: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/negotiation/
- Predictable Revenue: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/predictable-revenue/
- CRO Methodology: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/cro-methodology/
- Monetizing Innovation: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/monetizing-innovation/