Cialdini's Principles of Influence (Cialdini, 1984)

Six (later seven) heuristics that reliably trigger automatic compliance — the concrete inventory of the peripheral/heuristic cues ELM and HSM name abstractly:

• Reciprocity — we repay gifts, favors, concessions.
• Commitment & consistency — after a small public/active commitment, we act to stay consistent with it.
• Social proof — under uncertainty we copy similar others (stars, counts, "used by").
• Authority — we defer to credible expertise and its symbols.
• Liking — we say yes to those we like, resemble, and who like us.
• Scarcity — we value what is rare, ending, or exclusive.
• Unity (added later) — shared identity ("one of us") outweighs mere liking.

Transfer. For awareness content these are cheap to fake and therefore inflationary: fabricated social proof and manufactured scarcity are exactly the slop signals a savvy audience now discounts, so borrowed-authority tricks erode trust faster than they build it. The durable applications are the ones backed by something real — reciprocity by giving away genuinely useful work first (the free tool, the actual answer), authority by demonstrated competence not claimed credentials, unity by speaking a community's real idiom. Earn the cue; don't perform it.

Kin: elm · heuristic-systematic-model · compliance-tactics · models · slop-is-a-context-deficit