The Power of Persuasion: Better Security Through Manipulation?
Nate Lee
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 2 · Main
Security professionals spend most of their careers trying to influence people — engineers, executives, end users — who don't report to them and don't have to care. Nate Lee surveys the psychological and behavioral science literature on persuasion heuristics and maps six principles directly to the security context, arguing that understanding how human brains actually make decisions is as important as any technical skill a security leader can develop. ---
AI review
Cialdini's six principles of influence with security examples stapled on. The applications are competent and some of the framing is sharp — the copier experiment opener works, the two-sided AI debate concept is stolen from BS25-004 which had it first — but this is a psychology literature review, not security research. Worth reading the book instead.