Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Influence is often seen as a skill we have to cultivate, a charismatic quality leveraged by select leaders, business people, and successful social media accounts. But in her new book, “You Have More Influence Than You Think,” social psychologist Vanessa Bohns demonstrates that we all have influence through our words, choices, and even just our presence. Maya and Vanessa discuss how we can become more aware of our power to persuade, and learn to wield it wisely.
Vanessa Bohns
When I think of influence, I think of any time one person changes another person's attitude or behavior.
Maya Shankar
That's Vanessa Bohns, a professor of social psychology at Cornell, an author of the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think. When I hear a title with the word influence in it, I immediately think of Dale Carnegie. In 1936, he published the book How to Win Friends and Influence People and it's still a bestseller today. Dale makes the case that influence is a skill we need to actively cultivate, but Vanessa makes the opposite argument.
Vanessa Bohns
I am very purposefully not the modern day Dale Carnegie because I think there's so many resources out there that are trying to be that. Here's how to win friends and influence people just in these other thousand different ways. I think my take is really that we already are influencing people. We just don't see it.
Maya Shankar
On today's episode, what science teaches us about the influence we already have. I'm Maya Shankar and this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change.
I love when I come across research that shows we can improve our lives with just a small shift in perspective. Vanessa says we don't need to follow a rigid set of principles or completely overhaul our personalities to be influential. There's a much simpler approach and it starts with recognizing what even counts as influence.
Vanessa Bohns
I think a lot of people think of influence in a very formal sort of way. They think of those times when you're actively trying to persuade someone to completely change their minds or you're standing in front of a room with your presentation trying to win over a set of clients. My definition of influence captures those kinds of instances, but it's also broader than that. It's also the times we just make a throwaway comment and suddenly that changes the way someone feels about something. It's just your presence in a room that changes how people talk about a particular topic. So I think of influence as so much more broad than a lot of people tend to think of influence.
Maya Shankar
One reason your approach really resonates with me is how to win over people strategically, it's always felt so icky to me like a person needs to depart from who they are in order to have an impact on the world. I think as listeners, we'll hear over the course of our conversation, this is about just staying true to who you are and what you already are made up of. And that can be enough. You don't have to engage in these huge strategic changes in order to affect people.
Vanessa Bohns
Yeah, absolutely. We think we need to try so hard and get the wording exactly right to impact another person, but often just saying what we think, no matter how inarticulately, no matter how softly at times, people hear it and they think about it later. We don't always see that. We think that if we had influence, someone will turn to us and say right there, "Oh, you've totally changed my perspective on that." But think about all the times that you change your opinion. It often happens a week later when you're still thinking about something somebody said. It happens after somebody else said the same thing. It's got this cumulative sort of nature. So we have a lot more influence that we don't see through these more subtle sorts of things.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. As we're moving about in this world, we sometimes believe that we are wearing what you call an invisibility cloak. When we're sitting on the subway listening to a podcast or eating lunch at a cafe, it just feels like we're in our own little worlds and that no one's noticing us. I certainly feel this way, but research shows that isn't true. Right? Do you mind, Vanessa, sharing an example from the research?
Vanessa Bohns
Sure. So this is research by my colleague Erica Boothby and her collaborators, and they show that we tend to think that we are observing other people more than other people are observing us. So for example, in one study, researchers surveyed people who were eating lunch in a cafeteria and they asked them how much they thought other people were noticing them and curious about them. It turns out they underestimated how much people were noticing and curious about them by about 67%, which is a huge amount.
Maya Shankar
When I take a step back, it makes a lot of sense why we would reliably underestimate how much other people are observing us. We're rarely confronted with positive evidence that people are observing us, right? Because it's really uncomfortable to sustain eye contact with someone on the subway who's just looked at you and you're looking at them. And you talk about the fact that humans tend to engage in what's called gaze deflection. What this refers to is that when we look at someone, they have a tendency to deflect our gaze and to look away from us even if they were just looking at us moments before. We are absolutely left thinking that we are the only ones out there in the world who are observing others.
Vanessa Bohns
That's right. You could totally imagine the times that you know looked over at someone and caught eyes and you quickly looked away and your assumption was probably that they caught you looking at them when it's just as likely that you caught them looking at you.
Maya Shankar
Okay, so Vanessa, we've just established that generally speaking, we tend to underestimate how much people notice us. But you say that there's no need to get paranoid. Why should I not feel paranoid in this moment?
Vanessa Bohns
Usually the first thing people think when I say that other people are paying attention to you more than you realize is that everybody's paying attention to the exact things that we wish that they weren't paying attention to, our bad hair days or the times we misspoke or the times we tripped and fell, when in fact, that's also not true. So it's actually kind of happy news all around. This is based on a finding called the spotlight effect, this fear that we have a spotlight shining on our most self-conscious flaws or concerns and that everybody else is looking at them when in fact they aren't. They're seeing us as a whole person and whatever embarrassing thing we have going on, they really aren't even noticing.
Maya Shankar
So to summarize, we tend to underestimate how much other people notice us except when it has to do with something that we're very self-conscious about or we're really embarrassed by. One reason that this is so important is because of the connection between observation and influence. When others are observing us, we have the potential to influence them. When we're observing others, they have the potential to influence us. So it's really important to realize that there is a really strong connection between these two concepts.
Vanessa Bohns
That's right. Our mere presence with another person can impact so many things.
Maya Shankar
Let's talk about a few situations in which we might be influencing people without realizing it, what I might call passive influence. Research shows that just sharing in an experience with someone can influence how they experience that thing.
Vanessa Bohns
This is work on this idea that shared experiences tend to be amplified or intensified. Some of my favorite work on this was done using chocolate where they had a participant come in and eat a piece of chocolate and they either did it by themselves or they did it with another person in the room who ate the exact same kind of chocolate, and they weren't allowed to speak and they couldn't even look at each other and make eyes and decide that this is good or this is bad. All they could do was be present in the same room together. The fact that they were eating this chocolate in the same space as another person actually amplified the experience of eating that chocolate. When the chocolate was sweet and delicious, they said that it was even more sweet and delicious if they were eating it with another person than if they were eating it by themselves.
But the most interesting thing to me is that it's not just that the presence of another person made the experience better or more positive. It turns out that when they gave them bitter chocolate, which didn't taste great and they ate it with another person, they thought it tasted worse and more bitter. Even in the case where you were doing something negative, the experience was amplified. It wasn't made better by the presence of another person, it was actually just intensified.
Maya Shankar
Intensified. Yeah. What do you think the mechanism at play here is?
Vanessa Bohns
The researchers explain this finding by something that they call mentalization. So basically what this is that while you're having an experience and reflecting on how you feel about that experience, you're simultaneously wondering how that other person is experiencing that thing and what they think of this chocolate, for example. And because you're seeing it through two minds, your own and another person's, it amplifies that experience. It's that experience squared.
Maya Shankar
Deliciousness squared.
Vanessa Bohns
Deliciousness squared.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. And you also say in your book that when we read books that we know other people are reading, when we watch shows that other people are watching, we tend to pay more attention to those shows. We remember them better. So it just feels like we're having a more immersive experience.
Vanessa Bohns
That's right. When you have a book club and all your friends are reading the same book, you're reading the book with those other people in mind. I wonder how so-and-so is going to react to this plot turn. I wonder what this person's going to think of this particular character. My friends and I do this thing we call music taste test, where we all submit a set of songs and then it gets downloaded to a playlist that we all listen to and then we rank them all after a couple weeks of listening to this playlist. It just makes listening to a playlist so much more interesting because the whole time I'm thinking like, "Oh my God, I know that this person's going to hate this song, or this person's going to love this song." And it just amplifies the whole experience and makes it so much more pleasant.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. I love the research showing that even when we're just an audience member, we can have influence on the person or the people who are at the front of the room. The reason that this is so surprising is because it's definitely a context in which we think influence flows in just one direction from, say the speaker to the crowd, but it's actually flowing in two directions.
Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. This is one of my favorite findings. Just like we think of influence in this formal way, we think that it's that person in the front of the room on the podium with the microphone, that's the person doing all the influencing in the room. But in fact, for anybody who stood in front of a room of people, you are looking out at that crowd of people and wondering what they think of you, right? You're trying to get a response from them. You're trying to get them to like you, to agree with what you have to say. So you're looking out for any kind of cue that they may or may not be agreeing with what you have to say. So you're altering your behavior based on what you see. You also are altering the things you say based on what you presume that audience is going to respond to.
In a classic study on how much we tend to tune our messages to the audience that we're talking to, the experimenters brought participants into the lab and they had them listen to this speech. It was a neutral speech about legalizing marijuana. So there were pros, there were cons. It didn't make any particular conclusion. Then these participants were told, "We'd like you to summarize this speech to this other person." They were either told this other person is already pro legalization or this other person is against legalization. The participants gave the summary of this neutral speech, but when they gave it to the person who was pro legalization, it took on a little bit more of a pro legalization bent. When they gave it to the person who was against legalization, it came across as much more against legalization.
The most fascinating part about this is that the person who was receiving the summary knew that that person giving the summary didn't actually have this belief. They were just summarizing someone else's belief. For example, imagine I was summarizing this particular speech for you, Maya. I know that you know that it's not my opinion, I'm just doing this for the experimenter. I'm just summarizing this speech, and yet I'm somehow tailoring it to your viewpoint because that desire to tune to your audience is so strong.
Maya Shankar
I mean, that is so interesting. I don't know, it just feels like this very primitive desire to be liked, for people to like us. So even when we know that person's not going to ascribe what I'm saying to my own values or beliefs, you just know in that moment they're still, through some sort of association, going to like me a little more if I err on their side of the debate.
Vanessa Bohns
Absolutely. We just don't want to be associated with that position that we know this person isn't going to like, even if we kind of say, "No, no, no, it's not mine."
Maya Shankar
I'd love to also talk about situations where we make decisions that we think are just for us or just for ourselves, but they can have a really strong influence on those around us.
Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. So this is another aspect of how we can impact people simply by them seeing what we do, simply by them observing our behaviors and our decisions. So you can imagine we see somebody else litter. All of a sudden we think, okay, that's normative around here. Maybe it's not a big deal if I throw my banana peel on the ground. If we see somebody else put some trash in the correct receptacle, we're more likely to follow suit.
One of the things that comes out of this tendency for people to observe our behaviors more than we realize and then follow suit with our behaviors more than we realize is that every time we make a decision or engage in a behavior, that decision or behavior actually has two effects. We have a direct effect on our environment, that particular decision that we've taken, but there's also this secondary indirect effect that could be even bigger. That indirect effect is all the people who observed us do that thing who are now impacted by it. This is something called behavior contagion, where basically when we see somebody else do something, we're more likely to do it ourselves.
One example is say I schedule a destination wedding. I'm not just responsible for the carbon footprint of my own wedding, but also for the fact that everybody who comes to my wedding and has an amazing time wants to have their own destination wedding. Now there are all these other destination weddings who are producing their own carbon footprint, and then those weddings spawn more people having destination weddings. So there isn't just the one decision of my wedding, but in fact there is this effect where it continues on and on and on.
Maya Shankar
After the break, Vanessa teaches us how to navigate situations when we're intentionally trying to influence others. She also shares a cautionary note about how we can wield our influence more carefully. We'll be back in a moment with A Slight Change of Plans.
So far we've talked about ways in which we have, what I was calling before, more passive forms of influence, the way that we can influence people literally just by showing up. But of course there are times when we're more actively trying to influence people. For example, sometimes we need people to do things for us and it can be extremely uncomfortable and nerve-wracking to make these kinds of requests. What does the research say about how we should be navigating these kinds of situations?
Vanessa Bohns
This is such a fascinating topic because it seems like such a simple thing to ask someone for something. If I want something, be it a raise, or I just need a favor from a friend, I should be able to just go ask. And yet we all know that it's just not that simple, that asking can be so painful and awkward. But what we've found in our research is that in fact, people are much more likely to agree to do things for us when we ask for them than we expect. This idea that people are disagreeable and when we ask for something, what we're trying to do is to get to yes or even get past no is just not true. In fact, people tend to default to being agreeable, but we don't realize that until we start asking more and suddenly we realize that people are actually much more likely to agree than we expect.
Maya Shankar
And you found this during your early years as a researcher, right?
Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. When I was a graduate student at Columbia, Frank Flynn, a professor at Columbia and I, we were running a study where we wanted a diverse adult participant sample. So I left the Columbia campus and went down to Penn Station every day and asked people to fill up my survey for the study. And it was so painful going up to people.
Maya Shankar
Yes, I can understand.
Vanessa Bohns
It was just torturous going up to people over and over and being like, "Will you fill out my survey? Will you fill out my survey?" So when the study was completed and Frank Flynn and I started looking at the data, it didn't work out. And I was particularly devastated because it had been so painful to collect that data. So I was describing this to Frank and saying, "Oh my God, I can't believe it. After all that." And he kind of looked at the data and was like, "Can you say more about what all that is? Because I'm looking, and in fact, it looks like most people were saying yes to you. Were the no's particularly bad?" And I was like, "No, actually people were pretty polite when they said no. Most people were pretty happy to help." So we realized that maybe that was the big finding, that in fact, the way influence was in my head, the way it was to ask someone for something so painful, so awkward, actually wasn't as awful in reality.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. I'm just thinking back to when I was an undergrad doing research, and that was during the period of my life where I studied non-human primates. So we'd end up going to this island where the monkey to human ratio was 500 to one. And you can't ask a monkey, "Hey monkey, do you want to participate if I experiment?" So what we do is we walk around with little fruits like coconuts and apples and stuff to try to lure them into the experiment, which was a whole different kind of asking. I thought that was already a fairly painful experience, but it still fell short of how uncomfortable it was to ask adults a year later in my visual perception lab to fill out a survey for me in exchange for candy or whatever it was that I was asking of them. So yeah.
Vanessa Bohns
That's amazing.
Maya Shankar
It's hard. It's hard for us humans.
Vanessa Bohns
That needs to be my next study where I just have people either ask a person or some sort of non-human [inaudible 00:20:11].
Maya Shankar
A Reese's [inaudible 00:20:12]. Exactly. Yeah. Ooh, bring me back. Lots of screeching on that island.
Back talking a little bit when it comes to people's willingness to say yes to things more than we think, you said that can also change our approach to asking people for things.
Vanessa Bohns
I think the two main risks of underestimating our influence and others' willingness to do things for us is, one, that we might be overly assertive. If I think that you're not going to be open to my influence attempt, if you are going to say no, then I'm going to come in guns blazing trying to push for what I want. The other risk is that I assume that you're just going to say no. So I don't even bother asking or I ask for too little or I ask indirectly by sort of hinting, so I don't really run the risk that you're actually going to reject me. And of course, all those are also ineffective ways of influencing other people. So it really keeps you from hitting that perfect middle ground where you ask directly, you ask for what you think you deserve, but you don't do it in this overly assertive way that people don't respond well to.
Maya Shankar
There are studies showing that people are twice as likely to agree to things they're being asked than we think they are. So we just overestimate in a lot of cases, like the likelihood of rejection. And you and your research team just ran such a clever study where you got people quite outside their comfort zone, I would say.
Vanessa Bohns
Yeah. So one day we came up with the idea of sending our participants into libraries with a book that we made to look like a library book and asking people to vandalize the book. They would go up to people in libraries and say, "Hey, I'm playing a prank at my friend. Will you please just write the word pickle and pen in this library book?" Of course they thought most people would say no. But when they actually made the request, most people said yes. We didn't even think it was going to work. We were surprised as our research participants, we were like, "This is crazy. There's no way this study is going to work." And yet, the majority of people ended up saying yes.
Maya Shankar
Yeah, and there's an interesting mechanism at play that's leading people to say yes that we might not fully appreciate. Do you mind talking about what researchers call insinuation anxiety?
Vanessa Bohns
Sure. So insinuation anxiety is this fear we have of insinuating something negative about another person. For example, if someone were to ask me to borrow my cell phone and I said no, what does that say about what I think of them? That I don't trust them to give my phone back? That I think they might do something weird with it? That I don't think that they look like a nice person that I want to help out? There's so many worries there about what saying no might insinuate, and we're really averse to doing things that are socially risky, like potentially making someone feel bad or awkward or suggesting that we're not a helpful person.
Maya Shankar
And you can see how powerful this effect is because even in a case where people are being asked to do what most of society would agree is an immoral act, which is vandalizing a public library book, their fear of insinuating that they don't trust this person is so strong that a lot more people than we would think are actually willing to go ahead.
Vanessa Bohns
I think that this shows up in a lot of really consequential situations. If I'm not willing to insinuate that you're a bad untrustworthy person, if you're asking me to vandalize a library book, if there's any ambiguity about some comment that you make that's inappropriate, then what am I insinuating if I speak up in that situation? So that fear can cause us to hold back from saying all sorts of things that we maybe should say.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. I think this is such an important mechanism to talk about, insinuation anxiety, because we might have all this influence that we don't realize we have, but we never want to misuse that influence. So given that we know people are sometimes saying yes to us simply to allay their own anxieties, their own social anxieties, we should be quite careful of what we ask of people, right? Because they might be inclined to say yes, but not always for the right reasons.
Vanessa Bohns
That's right. I think a lot of people assume the takeaway from my research is that we should just ask all the time for anything we want because people are more likely to give it than we think. When in fact, if part of the mechanism there is that people are often saying yes because it's so hard to say no because they have anxiety about saying no to us, then really it's not about just asking for anything we want. It's about being more mindful about what we ask for.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. Being judicious. Yeah. All of this research is just about increasing our awareness of our influence. It's not saying use it more, use it less. It's saying be aware of all the spaces in which that influence exists, and then use your moral judgment to figure out what's appropriate in any given situation.
Vanessa Bohns
Exactly.
Maya Shankar
Another finding that I loved reading about in your book, this is such a hopeful message, Vanessa, that we regularly make better and less awkward impressions on people than we think. And on the whole, people feel more positively towards us, which is powerful because we know from research that when someone likes us more, we do have a greater ability to influence them. You call this the liking gap, the difference between our perception of how much people like us and how much they actually do like us.
Vanessa Bohns
That's right. This is more research by Erica Boothby on this finding called the liking gap. And what she does is she brings people together and has them just have a simple conversation. Then she lets them go their separate ways and gives them some questionnaires and asks them, "How much do you think that other person liked you and enjoyed that conversation? How much do you think that they'd want to hang out with you again in the future?" But she also asked them, "How much did you like that other person?" And what she finds is this gap in our perceptions and that gap between our perceptions of how much we think the other person liked us and how much they report having liked us is 12%. So people like us 12% more than we think that they did. This is consistent across the board, but it's especially true for introverts. So people who are particularly shy and worried about how they come across in a conversation are actually doing much better than they tend to think.
Maya Shankar
I'm sure your book has empowered so many people by helping them realize the influence they already have. As we've talked about, it's a double-edged sword. You want to moderate your behaviors in certain cases and you want to lean in to your behaviors in other cases. Any personal stories, Vanessa, of ways that it's changed your approach to trying to influence people or being aware that you might be influencing them in ways you didn't want to? I'm just curious how this has affected your personal life.
Vanessa Bohns
One of the things I talk about in the book is how much more expressing gratitude means to other people than we tend to think or realize. So I'd say if there's one thing that's really impacted my life, it's that I try to express gratitude more. This happened just last week. So I am writing a new syllabus for a new course I'm teaching, and I was thinking about how when I was a first year in college, so 25 years ago, I took this amazing course and I want this course to feel like that course. I was thinking about someone's class, another person's class from 25 years ago that was still impacting me today. Because I know that gratitude means so much, I sent him a thank you note. I tracked down his email, he had already moved to another school. I said, "Thank you so much. Your course meant so much. I'm thinking about it 25 years later and trying to incorporate it into my syllabus."
He wrote back this lovely email. We had a back and forth kind of just updating each other on our lives. He was like, "Let's stay in touch." And it was just such an amazing experience that went from, I learned something from someone, which is awesome, but not just that. I appreciated how longstanding that impact was and got to give something to him in the form of the gratitude and receive something back. And the fact that I felt so good about it. So it became such a more wonderful situation. We hold back so often because we worry about saying the right thing. We think that we're going to write this awkward email and the other person's going to feel weird, but in fact, the other person doesn't really care how you say it. It gets back to not worrying about being inarticulate, right? No one cares how you express gratitude. If you're expressing gratitude to them, it just feels good.
Maya Shankar
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when I talk with science writer Florence Williams. After her 25 year marriage came to a sudden end, Florence went on a quest to understand how heartbreak was affecting her mind and body.
Florence Williams
Heartbreak is one of the hidden landmines of human existence, and we don't really take it seriously enough. It's so disorienting in a way that's kind of like a deep freakout and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out our immune systems and our bodies are really paying very close attention to that sense of freak out. So I had this tremendous urgency to try to understand it.
Maya Shankar
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner, Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer, Sarah McCrae. Luis Gara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industry. So big thanks to everyone there. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram @DrMayaShankar.
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