To start with, I would recommend (in the following order)
Thinking Fast and Slow- Kahneman and Tversky Influence: Science and Practice - Cialdini How We Decide- Lehrer How to Win Friends and Influence People - Carnegie Nudge: Thaler and Sunstein
Cialdini and Carnegie have a bad habit of not citing sources, so you may want to take any unsubstantiated claims with a grain of salt.
This list is not comprehensive. If anyone else would like to add some recommendations for books or particularly informative studies, I would definitely appreciate it.
In addition to reading, experience in dealing with people is very important for things like this. If you are not currently employed, I would recommend getting a job in sales. This will give you a chance to practice and experiment in a relatively safe environment. Additionally, I have heard that unusual behavior is more accepted in bars, so that might be worth looking into (I'm under 21 and live in America, so that is not really an option for me. As such, bear in mind that this is secondhand advice). Finally, if you are particularly skilled in some subject area, you may want to consider tutoring. In addition to bringing in money and helping someone else, this will allow you to experience being in a high-status situation.
Once again, the list of recommended experiences is not comprehensive. I would welcome any additional suggestions.
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I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...
I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.
So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.
And yet it is the truth.
I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?