Similarity—the genuine, not the manufactured, variety—is a key form of human connection.

Robert Cialdini, the Arizona State University scholar and one of the most important social scientists of the last generation, calls this “the contrast principle.

The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and curiosity.

Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that it’s concrete and personal—and not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.

… Pantalon writes in his book Instant Influence.