ISBN0205493955

After reading Mr. Cialdini's comments about his book, I wondered: is he trying to employ his "scarcity principle" to influence book sales? ;)

The most valuable benefits of adopting this book for my class was the unbelievable support from the publisher. A&B provided a study guide, a test bank, a huge package of transparencies, a powerpoint presentation CD...--all of this for free. I have been astonished by the sevice and free benfits I have gotten as the result of choosing this otherwise excellent book.

Let's hope the competition emulates this author and publisher.

this book opens the doors of cognition ; in fact , when tiing a famous person ( ie : demora , luther king , kenwrinkel ) to notions of social psychology like ( social role , influence , aggression , etc ) , it allows our memory to widen , and teach a method to learn more and more easily !
that is , build couples : idea and picture !
this book uses cognition methods and invite us to study that field !
... opening the doors of cognition ...teaches too , that very simple tools may have terrific and positive effects !

Surprisingly, this book is enjoyable to read (this coming from a college student). It presents an engaging real-life story at the beginning of each chapter to cause the student to become interested in the content of the chapter that goes after the story. It weaves the stories into each chapter's content and wraps it all up at the end in thought-provoking conclusions. What drives me crazy is its index. This is a sore spot for me because many text books are lacking here. But this book is worse than some. It devotes dozens of pages (at least 35) to its crazily enormous list of references, and has 19 pages devoted to a names index. What student cares about any of this?! (Which makes one wonder who this book is really for..?) Its lonely index sulks in the corner all by itself - all 15 pages of it. I have yet to find a single word I've looked for (out of an attempt so far of perhaps 10).

The book is not searchable online so what is a student supposed to do? There is no glossary. Studying the text is therefore relegated to a linear progression from beginning of chapter to end and on to the next. Trying to correlate my class notes with the text has proven absolutely impossible. Where is any of the words in the phrase "comparison level for alternatives" found? God only knows (and the publishers, darn them.) So how then do I know what material my instructor has taken from the text and what he has given us that's NOT in the text? This is information I need to know!

After reading a few of the reviews I found it extremely interesting that every one of them gave their opinion about what the book should have been. I have a comment, "It has already been written and there's not much that can be done other than publishing a new edition. I feel that since the scope of social psychology is extremely broad, just pinning it down is a challenge. At this point, you might be woundering why I hold such perspective. As a future reasearcher, I feel that people don't realize how much work it takes to put reasearch toghter. If this people that wrote their reviews even got a little taste of what it takes to put toghter all this work, they would realize that their comments are quite insignificant.

Now, as for the content of the book, I feel that it was well written because one can easily read through it, understand it and at times identify with it. It also holds large amounts of reasearch that help build a strong fundation for and non psychology majors.

I can probably give many tips as how to study with this book but I think I would deviate from the purpose and scope of the book and this review.

SO, in conclution, I found the book extremly helpful and would recomment it to anyone that wants to learn about "the fundamentals" about social psychology.