As a rule, the introduction is where the author explains to the reader what the book is about. Before I do that, however, I will take the liberty of a brief digression of a personal nature. Whenever I’m at some sort of gathering and find I am acquainted only with the host, my interactions with other guests go off “without a hitch”. I’m not a particularly shy person, so it’s rather easy for me to get to know
others and to talk to them about more or less serious subjects. Problems begin when they ask me what I do for a living. My answer – that I am a psychologist – provokes a feeling of unease in my interlocutors. “So you must be observing us and analyzing,” I hear. “What do you think about us?” My answer, that I’m not observing or analyzing anybody but, just like everybody else, having a beer, chatting about Almodóvar’s latest film, Kundera’s books, recent sports events or political happenings isn’t taken at face value by others. It gets worse when the conversation turns to questions like “So what is it you do exactly? Do you put people through psychotherapy, or devise intelligence tests?” I respond that I’m not a therapist and that I’venever created any intelligence test, and nothing would indicate that I ever will. I explain that for many years I have been engaged in the study of social influence techniques. When I give a few examples by way of explanation, opinions about me are uniformly devastating: I am a guy who sits in a lab and dreams up schemes for effectively manipulating people.