50 Years of Basking in Robert Cialdini’s Reflected Glory

Robert Cialdini published a paper called “Basking in reflected glory” early in his career (Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman, and Sloan, 1976). The findings showed that students at universities with prominent football teams were more likely to wear university apparel on the days after their school’s team won a game. The students were not likely to wear such apparel when their team lost a game. When asked about the outcome of a football game, students were also more likely to say “we” when the team was victorious, we won! When the team lost, students tended to say they lost.

When that paper was published, I was a student of Cialdini's (though not an author on that paper). At that time, he was still in his 20s and did not look like someone who would someday be referred to as the “guru of social influence” by The New York Times and by Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler in his best-selling books on behavioral economics. But Cialdini went on to have a tremendous impact on the field of social psychology and in several other disciplines as well. His own book, Influence, for example, has sold over 7 million copies, and his recent follow-up, Pre-suasion, was an instant bestseller.

Perhaps illustrating my own inclination to bask in reflected glory, i have discussed the work of Cialdini and his impressive students in several earlier posts.

• The six principles of persuasion: Tips from the leading expert on social influence.
• Six degrees of social influence: What’s so influential about Bob Cialdini?
• And the year’s best paper on consumer psychology is…: Encouraging conservation, one towel at a time.
• The influence smugglers
• Pre-suasion: Before you try to persuade someone... Why controlling the moment before your message is critical.

Recently, the social psychology area at Arizona State University dedicated our labs to Cialdini, and there was a very touching ceremony. It includes a five-minute video prepared by Dave Lundberg-Kenrick (my coauthor and Bob’s) and Rob Ewing. In the video, two Nobel Prize winners (Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler), Charlie Munger, Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant, Noah Goldstein, Nancy Eisenberg, and several of my personal heroes (Peter Killeen, Jay Braun, John Reich, and Sandy Braver) describe the influence Cialdini has had on them and on the field. The video also includes a talk by Cialdini himself, still a great orator after all these years.

More basking in reflected glory

A few years after publishing the paper on basking in reflected glory, Cialdini won an advisor’s award from the graduate students, who all showed up for the ceremony wearing T-shirts saying, “I know Bob Cialdini.” Because Cialdini has had such a victorious career, it’s easy to find occasions to bask in his reflected glory. Now, where did I put that T-shirt?