Six main roads to change: broad boulevards as smart shortcuts

The ethical question is whether you align them with value or exploit them against someone’s interest.

Pre-suasion doesn’t replace these roads. It improves entry onto them. If the moment before your request activates the right principle, the ‘yes’ that follows feels less like persuasion and more like common sense.

Once attention has been prepared, the message still needs a route into action, and Cialdini returns to the six principles that were the heart of Influence — now reframed as 'broad boulevards,' the wide, reliable roads the mind travels when deciding under time pressure. They are reciprocity (return favors), liking (say yes to those we like), social proof (follow the crowd), authority (defer to expertise), scarcity (value what's rare), and commitment/consistency (stay true to what we've said).

He is careful to call these shortcuts rather than errors. In a complex world no one can deliberate every decision from scratch, so the mind offloads onto trustworthy rules of thumb — usually the crowd is a good guide, usually the expert does know more. The principles are efficient heuristics that serve people well most of the time, which is exactly why they are so influential: they are trusted defaults, not lapses in judgment.

Pre-suasion's contribution is to show that these boulevards can be primed before they're driven. Getting a person to focus on connection makes the liking road more available; foregrounding what others are doing pre-activates social proof; evoking a small prior commitment readies the consistency route. Cialdini's synthesis is that the classic principles decide the direction of the yes, while pre-suasive attention decides which principle is uppermost when the moment to say yes arrives.

The chapter also foreshadows the book's own addition to the map. Alongside the six boulevards Cialdini signals a seventh road he considers uniquely powerful — unity, the felt sense of shared identity — which the following chapters develop in full. His claim is that unity is not a variant of liking but a deeper route, because it does not ask us to favor another person so much as to treat them as part of the self.