Influence Science: The Research-Backed Playbook
Signature Course No. 176 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Influence Science: The Research-Backed Playbook course, in the Communication & Influence category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for managers and team leads who must win genuine adoption for changes, programs, and standards — for communicators and program owners who write the notices, briefings, and campaigns that ask a workforce or a public to act — for sales and service professionals who want the research underneath honest persuasion at the principle level — and for anyone who is a target of influence, which is everyone.
It works in the order the research builds: first, Module 1 — The Principles, Graded by Evidence — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Evidence-Graded Audit; then, Module 2 — Techniques, Limits, and the Line — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Defended Plan.
Every claim carries its grade. Sturdy, narrow, contested, or failed — each principle is taught with the strength of its evidence, the conditions the effect depends on, and the way the effect is most commonly oversold. The grade is part of the teaching, not a footnote to it.
Influence, as taught here, means helping a person decide with better information, clearer stakes, and honest social evidence — while their freedom to say no stays fully intact. Every move in the course is checked against that line.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Evidence-Graded Audit and in The Defended Plan. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — an evidence-graded audit of a real internal campaign, with its keep, cut, and repair verdict, and a complete influence plan for a contested change, defended in writing and signed — written to be used on the real job, not just filed in the course.
This is the one hundred and seventy-sixth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with grading a claim by its evidence. Influence is not a bag of tricks. It is a body of findings — some sturdy, some narrow, some oversold — and the practitioner's first skill is telling them apart. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Evidence-Graded Audit for Module 1 and The Defended Plan for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Every day at work, people decide under uncertainty: whether to adopt a new process, approve a budget, join a program, trust a recommendation, or change a habit.
Decades of published research have studied how those decisions are actually made — which features of a message, a messenger, and a moment move people, which ones merely feel as if they should, and which ones backfire.
This course teaches that research as a working playbook. You will learn the canonical principles as research findings — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity — and the model that organizes them, the elaboration likelihood model's two routes to persuasion.
You will learn framing, the sequenced-request techniques (foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face) with their evidence status stated plainly, and source credibility as a research subject in its own right.
Then you will learn the limits: reactance, the pushback that pressure creates; inoculation, the science of building resistance to counter-messages; the replication lesson, taught honestly as its own concept; and finally the ethics line and the assembled, evidence-graded playbook you will build, defend, and sign.
What you will learn
- Grade an influence claim by its evidence — sturdy, narrow, contested, or failed — and state what each grade permits you to do
- Explain the elaboration likelihood model's two routes and design for the route your audience will actually take
- Apply reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity as research findings, each with its conditions and limits
- Frame the same true facts honestly in more than one way, and choose the frame deliberately
- Use — and recognize — the sequenced-request techniques, and judge source credibility on competence, trustworthiness, and goodwill
- Predict and prevent reactance, and build inoculation against counter-messages you know are coming
- Assemble an evidence-graded influence plan for a real decision, inside an explicit ethics line, and defend every move in it
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Influence Science: The Research-Backed Playbook, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Evidence-Graded Audit and The Defended Plan
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person who must move a real decision
Influence Science: The Research-Backed Playbook is for managers and team leads — who must win genuine adoption for changes, programs, and standards, not mere surface compliance that evaporates when they leave the room, communicators and program owners — who write the notices, briefings, and campaigns that ask a workforce or a public to act, and who need to know which levers the evidence actually supports,
sales and service professionals at the principle level — who want the research underneath honest persuasion — and anyone who is a target — which is everyone: half the value of knowing how influence works is recognizing it, accurately and without paranoia, when it is aimed at you.
Every claim in the course carries its evidence grade, and every technique is taught with its conditions and its limits. A finding that is real but smaller, narrower, or more fragile than its reputation is taught at its earned size — and a finding that has not survived re-testing is taught as a failure, never as a tool.
This is a Communication & Influence course. It assumes no background in psychology. It assumes a willingness to have favorite beliefs graded by evidence — including beliefs about influence itself.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Evidence-Graded Audit
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Influence Science: The Research-Backed Playbook is Signature Course No. 176. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.