Influence Psychology
Persuasion science and ethical influence
Apply the science of ethical persuasion using Robert Cialdini's six principles of influence. This skill helps your AI agent incorporate reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and commitment into marketing, sales, and product design.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/influence-psychology --global 
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert Cialdini View on Amazon
02 What it is
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.
03 Key concepts
Five principles your agent applies.
Drawn from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — not advice it repeats back to you, but decisions it makes while it works.
04 Fit
When to use it, and
when not to.
four symptoms it fixes, and four it doesn't.
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.
05 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the skill at the end of a prompt and the agent applies the framework rather than a vibe. Or say nothing — it loads on its own when a task matches.
Audit my landing page for persuasion principle usage using influence-psychology skill
Add social proof elements to my SaaS homepage using influence-psychology skill
Design an onboarding sequence that uses commitment escalation using influence-psychology skill
Create a pricing page that leverages scarcity and authority using influence-psychology skill
06 About the author
07 Same stack
The stack it sits in.
Six Sales & Persuasion skills. Most people run two: this one, and whichever fits the next problem.
All Sales & Persuasion skills08 Questions
Before you install.
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.
09 Guides that use it
Put it to work.
Long-form playbooks where this skill does part of the job.
One skill, one command.
Install Influence Psychology, or the whole stack.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/influence-psychology --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account