When we experience feelings of ineffectiveness or invisibility, there’s evidence to suggest that we may be overlooking our own power of influence. Cornell ILR School professor Vanessa Bohns explains how we can better observe our influence, reconsider our fear of rejection and sometimes even use our influence more sparingly.
Our words, actions and even our presence can profoundly affect other people, but we often misread the situation or underestimate ourselves. Emotions and cognitive biases often get in the way.
Through extensive behavioral research and workplace study, Vanessa Bohns — the Cornell ILR School’s Braunstein Family Professor and chair of the organizational behavior department — has developed strategies for us to better observe our influence, reconsider our fear of rejection and sometimes even use our influence more sparingly. Bohns, the author of “You Have More Influence Than You Think,” encourages us to recognize the influence we already possess rather than seeking new ways to gain it.
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Chris Wofford: On today's episode of Cornell Keynotes, I talk with Professor Vanessa Bohns, from the Cornell ILR School, about her extensive behavioral research on influence and persuasion. In her book, You Have More Influence Than You Think, Vanessa offers strategies for us to better observe our influence, to reconsider our fear of rejection, and sometimes even to use our influence more sparingly.
Somewhat of a counterintuitive impulse, but she encourages us to recognize the influence we already possess rather than seeking new ways to gain it. I think this is fascinating stuff and there's some great advice in today's episode. And now here's my conversation with Professor Vanessa Bohns, author of You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters.
How would you distinguish your approach to influence and persuasion, as it relates to any works that have come before, or how we conventionally think about it?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, so it's very, sort of, typical to find books and seminars and, you know, workshops on gaining influence.
This is the classic Dale Carnegie on how to win friends and influence people kind of approach and that approach is fine and people find it very helpful but it really is about getting more influence, right? And my approach is kind of the opposite. It's like, you don't actually need tips and tricks to get influence.
This is really about recognizing the influence that you already have all the time that you just don't see. And so, as a social psychologist, you know, we're constantly seeing these studies where someone walks into a room and the whole vibe changes. Or, you know, someone expresses their opinion and it changes someone's mind across the table.
And those are the kinds of things that, you know, are happening all the time that we're not aware of when we're the ones doing it. And so we feel like, oh, I don't know how to influence someone, so I need to figure out, like, how to express this when you just did, you just said your opinion, and that influenced someone else's approach.
So, it's really more about recognizing your influence that you already have, and less about trying to get this influence that you don't have.
Chris Wofford: You know what, I think it's going to be a little interesting detour that's going to happen later in our conversation, but you talk about actually attenuating your influence. Dialing it back in certain situations, which I think is fascinating. So let's go back to Carnegie for instance, right? How do you distinguish between influence and power? This is critical.
Vanessa Bohns: Understanding sort of what we're talking about when we talk about influence is sort of the first step.
And so, we have to kind of think about these different ways we think about influence, and a lot of people conflate power and influence. Power is one way to have influence. It's kind of one subset of influence. So power is the kind of influence we have over someone where we can control their outcomes, or we have some sort of positional authority over them.
I use this example in my class, you know, you can imagine that this weekend, you're going to go to a movie. And if I'm your professor, and I say, actually we're going to incorporate the new Bob Dylan documentary into class next week and I want everybody to watch it this weekend and write about it and I'm going to grade a paper on it, right? I've just convinced you, I've made it more likely that you're going to go see that movie this weekend because I control your outcomes.
Because otherwise I can affect your grade, right? But, you could also imagine a situation where you read this great review in the New Yorker and you're like, oh, wow, you know, they made that movie sound great so I'm gonna go see the new Bob Dylan documentary because that review sounded great. Now, that New Yorker reviewer doesn't have any power of you.
They can't, they don't control your outcomes, they don't have any authority over you. And yet, because you respect them and they have this status, they also, just like I did as the Professor, right? They've also influenced you to go see that movie. And so there's these different routes to influence and power is just one.
And when you think about it that way, you can kind of see that, when you take routes, such as, like, listening to someone you like, listening to someone you respect, you can go into that experience like I actually am excited to see this movie, as opposed to, I'm compelled to see this movie, right? So it can be even more effective to influence someone through these other routes other than just when you have power.
Chris Wofford: Okay. So let's follow up on that. So when we talk about a situation like, how might you, I don't want to use exert influence, but practice influence? When you're talking about trying to influence somebody, who's in a more of a powerful position than you? How do you think about that? How do you frame that? What do you do practically?
Vanessa Bohns: So as we talked about, there's different ways to influence people. And so one way is I actually can control your outcomes. We're assuming that is kind of off the table if you're trying to influence someone who has more power than you. So then there are these other ways.
So there is something called informational influence. So that's essentially like, I know this information that you don't know, right? So maybe I don't control your outcomes, but I am like on the ground seeing all these things day to day. I have this information that will make your life better or will make your life easier, and kind of, being that go to person who has the information can make you very Influential. It's a more status driven kind of influence, right?
They respect you, you have something that they need that is helpful. So you can kind of point out your expertise in a certain thing and have influence that way. Another way is just influence through liking. So we are influenced by people we like. And so this is where things like social networking come, right? So you imagine you're in a meeting, and if there's someone you've been spending time with, and you like, and they're a friend, and they speak up, you're more likely to actually listen to what they said and kind of take that whatever they said into advisement and kind of consider it than if it's someone that you don't know at all, right?
So all those other things are ways to kind of gain influence without necessarily having power.
Chris Wofford: You had mentioned, in our pregame huddle, a little bit about the influence as like an active endeavor or an inactive endeavor to some degree. And I want to ask you, like, what does that mean? Is that really, is it vibes? What are we talking about here?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, so I think we tend to think of influence as this very formal thing. So I want you to do something, I'm going to actively try to get you to do that thing, and then your action is going to tell me whether I influenced you, right? But influence actually happens all the time without this kind of active, formal, way of trying to get someone to do something.
So, simply by, you know, engaging in a behavior that other people see, we impact that person. They start to recognize that, oh, wait, maybe that's a norm, and people follow norms. We look, when we go into a situation and we don't know what's expected, we look to other people to figure out what the norms are.
And that means that when we're behaving in a situation, other people are looking to us to understand what the norms are. So we're not actually trying to influence anybody, you know, we're just kind of influencing them by being ourselves. You can also think of like a throwaway remark. Who doesn't have someone's throwaway remark kind of just burned in their brain, reverberating, you know, you always think about this thing someone said and you ask them and you say like, I remember when you said this thing, and they're like, I don't remember ever saying that, right? So these throwaway remarks that we make can also sometimes impact other people in ways that we just completely don't anticipate.
And so, all the, that whole sort of range of things, also in my definition, counts as influence.
Chris Wofford: I want to talk about the tagline for your book, which is, How We Underestimate Our Powers of Persuasion, and Why It Matters. So let me ask you. How do we do it and why does it matter?
Vanessa Bohns: We do it in all of these ways that I've been talking about.
So, those moments, where we behave in a certain way and someone else mimics that behavior because they're using our behavior to sort of understand the norm of a situation, we tend to underestimate how much other people are actually paying attention to our behavior. So we underestimate how much people see us, copy us.
Chris Wofford: And your research supports this.
Vanessa Bohns: There is research to support that, that's right.
Chris Wofford: Tell me about it.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, so there's research on something called the invisibility cloak illusion. This is by Erica Boothby and she basically shows that when we're sort of going about our daily life and just, you know, sitting on the subway or, you know, walking across campus or whatever we might be doing, that more people notice us than we assume. And so she's done these studies where she has people just sit in a room with another person and ask them, how much do you think other people notice like what you were wearing? And afterwards, she looks and sees how much other people did notice what you were wearing, and you tend to underestimate how much the other person was paying attention to you.
Interestingly, this is not true if you're wearing something you're really embarrassed about. So this is just like, I'm wearing my ordinary clothes, I'm not thinking much about it, but people are kind of looking at me and I'm not noticing. And this happens because we all kind of look away when we catch someone's eye. We're like, we don't want them to know we're staring at them, right?
So, but if we are acutely embarrassed, so she has other studies where she gives someone a t-shirt and it's an embarrassing t-shirt, and then she asks them how many people were paying attention to what you were wearing, and then looks at how many people were actually paying attention. And there you get this acute, sort of, spotlight effect, right? So you get this invisibility cloak illusion, where I'm just going about my ordinary day and assuming no one's noticing me, but lots of people actually are. Or, you're like, I'm having a really bad hair day or I'm just like feeling really self conscious about what I'm wearing today, and then you're like, everyone's noticing that.
But in fact, most people are not. So it's a happy story, kind of, both ways. But it does, the sort of influence element, is that, because of that, we might be wearing something, to give sort of a superficial example, right? We could be wearing something from five years ago. We didn't pay any attention, we threw it on, and other people noticed it and they're like, oh, that was really cute. And now they go and, sort of, buy that thing. And we don't realize we actually impacted their behavior down the line.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. It's funny how a lot of this, and maybe I'll ask you about your early training, but a lot of this is social regulation, kind of, behavioral stuff, right? This is, this is just kind of how we behave. And I think I might've cut you off when you were just getting lift off on why it actually matters. But why is, why is being persuasive important?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: I think I understand, but.
Vanessa Bohns: So it, what it really means is that if people are paying more attention to us than we realize, it means that our behaviors really are impacting those social norms in ways we don't realize.
You know, the things we say do matter to people and affect them in ways that we might not realize. And so, we kind of, you know, I like to avoid as much as possible the Spiderman quote of, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, but a major, sort of, ramification of this idea that we underestimate our influence is that, you know, if we have more influence than we think, we also have more responsibility to kind of pay attention to the things that we say and pay attention to how they might impact other people as well.
Chris Wofford: And I think that's a really interesting takeaway from the book, right? Which is, just the fact that we do, and your research supports it, underestimate our own power of influence. That's got to be a surprise, I think, for a number of people in our audience. Speaking of which, so if you have questions, drop them in the chat.
I'll be taking those on the iPad here. You also have research on underappreciated importance of expressing appreciation and gratitude. Whether it's personally in the workplace, whatever, what were your findings there? I was surprised.
Vanessa Bohns: So this is an example of the way in which things that we say to other people can impact them more than we realize.
And in this case, it was looking at how expressing gratitude for other people or just expressing a simple compliment can make people feel better than we expect it to.
Chris Wofford: You'd think so.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, so we ran some studies, some were strangers and then some other researchers ran studies with people, friends, and people you know.
And in our studies, we basically brought people into the lab and instructed them to give random people compliments. So we said, okay, you're going to go and find, you know, the fifth person you run into, because we didn't want them targeting a certain person, just random people, right? You're going to say, hey, I like your shirt.
That's all you're going to say. And we asked people before they went and did this, how good do you think that's going to make the other person feel? And we asked them how awkward is that interaction going to be? And so then they went out, they did this, and then we gave a survey to the person who was complimented.
And we asked them, how good do you feel? Like how flattered do you feel? And how awkward was that whole thing? And what we found is that our participants didn't realize they underestimated how good that compliment would make the person feel. And they overestimated how awkward the exchange would be.
And this has been replicated using, you know, friends using gratitude letters, like writing a letter that really expresses gratitude to like a mentor in your past. And the big, sort of, unifying explanation is that we get so focused on how to express it just right, like how to say what we really mean to say, and how we might stumble over our words or be awkward, and this kind of competence piece that like, I'm not going to be able to express myself accurately and they're going to judge me for that.
And we forget that when someone says something nice about you, it just feels good. Like, we don't really, we forget that it's just really about the emotion and the warmth and no one cares if you stumbled or said it awkwardly, it's just like, oh, that felt really good.
Chris Wofford:It can really make your day.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Right? Just a simple compliment. I think a lot of people probably also have fears of misfiring on that compliment.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Wofford: Take it the wrong way, etc. I have a really good question from Andrea here, who asks, or opens up with the bridging influencing style. Bridging influencing style. You familiar with this?
Vanessa Bohns: No.
Chris Wofford: Anyway, she explains, involves a degree of vulnerability, which can sometimes be perceived as a weakness or make others uncomfortable in a professional setting. How can I effectively use the bridging style without appearing weak or burdening others? So any vulnerability component within some of your studies where maybe a leadership style is perceived as maybe a little bit more weaker or stronger than others? I don't know.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah. So I think, I'm not sure exactly what the breeding, bridging influence style is, but I can say thinking about sort of leadership that this, it relates also to the discussion about power, right? We tend to kind of assume that to be a good leader that you really want to, sort of, impose and manage and kind of be much more active than you really need to be.
Where so much of leadership that we're not taught is kind of taking a step back and making room for other people, we tend to feel this need to like, prove ourselves. And so one example I give in the book is when I worked at the Sleep Lab as an undergraduate, and this was a crazy sleep lab, where these kids would come for an entire week and be like in a dark basement with electrodes in their heads and doing very uncomfortable things.
And I, in the book, I talk about how we found really important results. It wasn't actually that terrible for the kids, but, going into it, you're kind of like, oh my god, how am I going to maintain control of these? They were like, kids, like around pubescent years, you imagine them just kind of rebelling against the situation.
And the very first day of our training, we had this clinical psychologist, who was in charge of the well being of the kids, and they said these kids are gonna do anything you ask. They are going to be nervous. You are in a power position. They're not going to want to tell you if something's uncomfortable if they don't like what you're doing.
So you have this responsibility to pay attention, right? And not overreach in terms of your power and influence, right? To actually listen more. And I, I never forgot that, this idea of like, the way we go into as leaders, we're like, okay, how am I going to make people listen to me? How am I going to control?
It's just our natural, sort of instinct, right? And especially if we're, we've risen from the ranks and we like want to prove ourselves, when in fact so much of it is like now you're in a power position and you have to like kind of take a step back and realize what that means and how that's changed the dynamics and kind of, what responsibility you have now to that group.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, I think so. Great question, Andrea. And, thanks for taking us where you took us on that one. I think it was really useful. Audience, now's the time we do need your input, so get your phones ready. We're going to be displaying a QR code here. We're going to keep this up for a minute, because it's going to take a second to populate, but real simply, question number one.
What is your comfort level when making requests? We all have to do it. Here are the three choices. I limited it to this. I'm usually uncomfortable because I fear I may come across as unreasonable or imposing. I don't want to put this person out. Response number two, I'm somewhat comfortable making requests, but I do so sparingly.
Response number three, I'm a request pro, no issues whatsoever. I will ask for anything. So let's let that go for a minute. In the meantime, Vanessa, some of your research findings around making requests? What have you observed?
Vanessa Bohns: Really, you know, from that experience that I had in Penn Station, which is where I was, I learned kind of how making requests was in my head compared to the reality.
Frank Flynn, the person I was working with at the time, and I decided to see if we could actually use that as an experimental paradigm and see how other people would respond and behave in a very similar situation. And so, at this point, we've run, more than about 12,000 people in our study, so we've been doing this for like 15 years now.
And we have brought people into the lab and basically made them do what I had to do in Penn Station. So we've said, you know, we're going to send you out into the world and we're going to have you ask for things. And so we've had them go up to strangers and ask, you know, to complete surveys, just like I did in Penn Station, to loan their cell phones to our participants, even to do, kind of crazy things, which we can get to, like vandalize a library book, and also people who have, who are already in a position of needing to ask for things.
So we've teamed up with Team in Training, this charitable organization where people actually had to ask for sponsors, and we had people go ahead and make those asks. Now in all these cases, we said to people before they made these requests, how likely do you think it is that people are going to agree?
So we said, basically, how many people are you going to have to ask before you reach your goal or get five people to agree or whatever it might be. And so, we would ask them, have them go out and actually make these requests and then compare what people predicted to what actually happened. And we found again with almost 12,000 people that people underestimated how likely people were to agree to their request.
Chris Wofford: Maybe that sort of fits in with what we have found here. So most of our audience, 63 percent, said kind of comfortable making requests, but I do so sparingly, and maybe that speaks to the, to the idea of the unlikelihood thinking that the likelihood of someone saying yes is probably not very good.
Vanessa Bohns: It's partly, right, this idea of, you know, people don't ask for things for lots of reasons, right? They don't ask because they're worried about a no, but it could also be that, you know, we're worried that we, we don't impose on somebody, we worry that people don't actually want to do the thing that we're asking. And so, this is a very fine line that I tread in my research, because there's research showing that we actually enjoy helping other people. It makes us happy. We appreciate being asked if, in the end, that can actually make us feel like a good, helpful person, right? On the other hand, we find it very hard to say no, and so, when you're on this kind of receiving end of a request, you do worry, you know, about, it is a legitimate worry to, kind of, worry about coercing people into doing something.
Chris Wofford: You know, I should note that 19 percent of our audience are request pros.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, I think that that's.
Chris Wofford: No issues whatsoever, so maybe they understand the likelihood to say yes.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's pretty typical, too. I always get a couple people, when I give talks, for example, who are like, I have no problem with this, I ask. And so there's definitely this individual variability, for sure.
Chris Wofford: Oh, that's so funny to see. Okay, we're going to go question number two here. Let's roll right into the second one. How well do you respond to requests, listeners? Option number one, they're a constant irritation. I think people should handle their own business.
Number two, I'm careful about which requests I fulfill. It depends on the ask and the person doing the asking. Number three, or the third, I'm always happy to oblige when others make requests of me, makes me feel essential. Bring them on. So let's let that populate for a minute. Thanks for your participation, by the way, audience.
So Vanessa, why is it hard to say no? What have you found?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, so it's really interesting. So, we are often acutely, sort of, aware of how hard it is to be rejected, right? We all know it, like, it hurts to be rejected. But we forget sometimes, especially when we're the ones asking for something, that it also hurts to be the one who has to do the rejecting, right?
We are evolutionarily wired to maintain social ties, to smooth things over with the group, and there's no kind of, there's no kind of worse way to disrupt these social ties than to reject someone.
And so we worry about this. When we're gonna say no, it's not that we're saying no and you know, there's this expression no is a complete sentence, which just drives me crazy because I think it's very rare for people to actually feel like they can use no as a complete sentence, right? Instead, we're worried, you know, if I say no this is going to mean something about me, like I'm not a helpful person.
Or if I say no, it's going to mean something about our relationship, like, oh, you know, we don't have the kind of relationship where I would do that for you. Or it might mean something about that person, like, they don't deserve this, or they shouldn't be asking for this. And so, all these things are going through our heads, and when we say no, we kind of want to address all those things, which makes it really hard to find the words to say no.
Chris Wofford: Right.
Vanessa Bohns: Right. And so you're kind of in this loop of like, you know, trying to find the words to say no. And so it really, it does come from this very positive place where we want to be helpful people, we want to be close to people, but it can make it very hard to say no.
Chris Wofford: Exactly, or to come off like we're trying to come up with some viable excuse that may not actually be the reality. Let's look at our results here. Kind of what I predicted, right? Careful about which requests I fulfill. It depends on the ask and the person doing the asking. 35 percent of us said always happy to oblige.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Maybe no surprises there, but it speaks to some of the dynamics that you had just kind of reviewed there a moment ago. Very cool. Thanks audience for your participation. Thanks for these questions that are coming in, by the way. We'll hit these in a couple minutes. So, if it's harder than we realize for people to say no to us, how do we create as the request tours, a place where people do actually indeed feel safe to say no.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, I think this is really important and something we don't talk about enough. So, there tend to be a lot of resources to help people get better at saying no. And we really sort of put the onus on the person who's on the receiving end of the request, right? And so, you know, we'll tell people to have a script and we'll tell people, you know, to plan ahead and do all these things.
But I also think that, again, coming from this context of this idea that we have more influence than we think when we ask someone for something that impacts them more than we realize. We should also find ways to ask for things where we kind of give people the space to say no. And so, some of the things we've looked at are, you know, giving, actually, we talked about how hard it is to find the words and we've done studies where we actually give people the words to say no when you make a request.
So, we've all done the thing where it's like, will you do this? You can totally say no. So we're telling people they can say no.
Chris Wofford: And here's how or why?
Vanessa Bohns: Right. So the thing about telling people they can say no, right? Is that they already know that like, I could, yeah, I could say no. I'm just having trouble finding the words.
So we have, sort of, a condition where we tell them they can say no. And then another condition where we say, if you'd like to say no, just say the words, you know, and it changes depending on the study, you know, I'd rather not, or give me this excuse, like, just so you don't have time. And it's basically saying, like, I will accept that excuse.
That will alleviate all those concerns you had about what this no might mean. I'm giving you a safe word, essentially, to say no to me. And we find that people feel more comfortable and freer to say no if you give them the words. Other things that I do in particular a lot are, ask for them to respond through email or text, which is often much easier than saying no to someone's face, and giving people time to process.
So, I have graduate students, I often want to ask them to do something, but I really, really only want them to say yes if they have the time and really want to do that thing. And so what I'll do is I'll, I'll make my pitch in person, and I'll say, here's this, I think this is a really good idea, it would be really helpful, but don't tell me right now, I want you to think about it.
And then just email me in a couple days. So I'm giving them time, they can come up with the words to say no. And I even sometimes tell them, you know, like, just tell me you don't have time. And then I've also given them the words to say no. So it's this way of like, you make your best pitch, but then you put it in their court and you don't pressure them.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, I have to do a lot of pitching, and qualifying the ask is something they always can never really
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Kind of forget. Any, any thoughts on that? Like how to, how to better position the request itself?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's so much.
Chris Wofford: You already did, but yeah.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so much in like, sort of, how to ask to get a yes.
And so all those kinds of things are like, you know, ask in person, get that answer right there, be direct. I'll say, the, one of the things that people often forget that makes a huge difference is to be direct. I can't tell you how often people say, It would be great if you would do this. And they didn't actually ask me.
I mean, everyone knows that's the ask, but it's a lot easier to say, well yeah, than if they say, will you do this, right? Just simply turning it into an actual request, now is something that they actually would have to say no to to say no, right? They can't just kind of dodge it and so actually asking is actually a huge mistake people make when they ask.
Chris Wofford: Negotiation among genders, very dynamic. Interesting place, and I'm going there because Kathleen chimes in and asks, you had mentioned likability as a factor in influencing others.
How do we increase our own likability? Big question. I also worry that this advice seems much like advice given to women for ages, or women who are, moving on in age, whereas men don't need to be as likable to have influence. There's that. Then Randy checks in. My experience is that this is very different for men than women, and possibly can also change with age.
Any thoughts on these? What are your findings?
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, I mean, this is a huge question, of course. I will say, for this idea about, the idea of how gender and likeability kind of clash, there's a great book called Likeable Badass by Alison Fragale, and she addresses this exact thing, kind of, the ways in which the actual realistic, like, kinds of issues that women face about needing to be likeable to be able, you know, if you're going to exert your power, you also have to be likable in ways that men can just exert their power, right?
And she kind of talks about how you can balance all those things. But I'll say, in terms of like gender and other demographics, you know, age, race, all these things, I like to think of it in terms of three buckets when it relates to influence. So the first bucket is like the actual influence you have.
And we know from, you know, just decades of research that there are actual differences in the influence you have based on your demographic. So, there's actual research that show, you know, it used to be women don't ask. That's not true anymore. New research shows that women actually do ask, but they don't get what they ask for as much.
So there's like an actual real difference in, you know, gender, same thing for race, right? Then if we move over to this second bucket, which is what I study, which is, you know, what are your intuitions about? What would happen if you did ask? Do you underestimate how likely it would be that you would get a yes?
Do you overestimate, etc? And what we find in a lot of different contexts is that there aren't these demographic differences. So while there are real differences, we're all, sort of, underestimating where we are in the spectrum. We're all kind of underestimating the influence that we have. And then there's this third bucket.
So what does that mean for you, depending on these demographic factors? And to take gender as one example, right, so if women and men both underestimate their influence, right? Women, right, might take that information and say, well, if I'm not likely to get a yes then I'm not even going to bother asking.
Whereas men may say, you know, I don't think I'm going to get a yes, but I'm just going to go for it because of the different ways we've been socialized, kind of take risks versus to, you know, maintain these social connections and smooth things over. So iIt really is complicated, right? There are actual differences in influence.
We all seem to underestimate, and at the same time, the fact that we all underestimate can still mean different things, which lead to different behaviors down the road. So yeah, demographic, kind of, the way we're socialized depending on our demographics can make a huge difference.
Chris Wofford: But that's the critical message, right?
We're all underestimating our potential for influence, which is where the power really is. And that's, I think, where I hope that our audience goes after this, right? Thinking about it. So in your book, You Have More Influence Than You Think. You offer some tips and exercises for getting more in touch with, recognizing the influence that we have.
So, tools. What do we do?
Vanessa Bohns: There's a bunch of different exercises. Some get you better at seeing the influence you have. So we'll start just with that. So, this is the idea that when we're in a situation, you know, just by virtue of, you know, our biology, we are seeing outward. We're seeing everybody else and how they're impacting us.
And we're just not seeing what we're doing that might be impacting the situation. And so one thing that research has found to be really effective is doing this little exercise, where you essentially reflect on maybe a difficult conversation that you had with somebody and you reflect on it from a third party perspective.
So you imagine you're a fly on the wall. Another way that's been used is you imagine that, you know, you're a, either neutral observer or just a colleague or a friend who really likes both people involved. And you write about it from that perspective. And this now puts you in the frame, right? Now you're seeing yourself and the other person, not just all those things that were coming at you from the other person, but also all the things you were doing that that person was responding to.
And so that can give us some more insight in sort of the way that we contribute to a situation. And there's some really fascinating research by Eli Finkel, who's done this in the context of newlyweds. And for the first year of people's marriages, he assigned one group of participants to essentially do this.
And they and their spouse were both going to do this. They recalled a fight that they had with their spouse from this third party perspective, just three times over the course of the year for like this 20 minute exercise. And when they looked at marital satisfaction, they found that it actually remains stable, whereas, sorry to say, like people who didn't do it, it just went down that first year of marriage. And so it does seem to kind of give us a little sense of maybe the dynamics that we are also contributing to. So that's one way,
Chris Wofford: Being reflective is a great attribute, but how to do it? Maybe not so much for a lot of us, right?
This is kind of a high level emotional intelligence that you must cover in the book to some degree. I have a couple more questions here, from our audience who, I got to ask it because this is coming up. People are thinking about the job title of influencer versus exerting influence. How do you talk about this when you're making the rounds on this?
People must ask you for influencer advice, but this seems outside of your purview.
Vanessa Bohns: Yeah, you know what's interesting is, so, one thing I talk about is, usually when people are thinking of influencers at this point, it's almost always social media influencers. And so it is really interesting because these social media influencers have totally skewed our idea of the influence we have on social media.
So, if you ask people, sort of, these questions that get at how much influence they have when they post something on social media, they also underestimate it there. So we talked about the invisibility cloak illusion, and this is kind of underestimating how much people are noticing what we do and where in our daily life.
But we also do some, there's also something called the invisible audience. So we post something and we assume that, based on likes or actual engagement, like comments, we can kind of figure out how many people saw that thing. In fact, a huge number of people see those posts that don't comment on it and then maybe mention it to someone down the line or it affects something that they post down the line.
And so in fact, the things that we post on social media have much more effect than we assume. So we underestimate our influence there as well. And part of the reason we do that is that we are so focused on influencers, as these people who have just this insane number of followers, and you look at their engagement and it's just so high that we don't realize that actually in many cases, you know, we may be very well and above average influencer on social media, but our comparison group is just so, you know, off the charts essentially.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. Thank you for making that distinction. So I have a question here. I'm going to give them some terminology that you cover in your book about getting better at feeling or sensing our influence over the others.
Again, getting back to our, our central theme here. What's the difference between taking perspective and getting perspective? What do you mean by that?
Vanessa Bohns: This, you know, again, we can kind of like, start to acknowledge, like, oh, I did these things, and that person might have responded to them, but it's still really hard to get in someone's head and really know how things that we said or did made that person actually feel.
And so, one thing that people will often instruct people to do, and Dale Carnegie even does that in How To Win Friends and Influence People again, great book, not trying to, like, throw him under the bus or anything. But, you know, he instructs people to try to take the other person's perspective. But social psychologists know that we are notoriously terrible perspective takers.
So when we try to take someone else's perspective, we inherently anchor on our own perspective and how we would behave. And not just how we would behave or feel, but how we think we would behave or feel, which often is not even true to how we would behave or feel.
Chris Wofford: Correct.
Vanessa Bohns: Not to mention, you know, how we hope the other person is taking something we said.
So you know, if I'm trying to figure out like how you felt about some comments I made, I'm like, you know, well I wouldn't have been hurt by that. And I kind of, all these kind of, self serving biases kick in to make me think like you can't really be that upset by that, for example. So when we try to take perspective, we make a lot of mistakes and we don't learn much about our actual impact.
Some researchers recently came up with the simplest possible way to actually understand how someone else is feeling or impacted by things that we say, and it's, they call it getting perspective. And it's literally just asking people. So ask them, you know, how did that make you feel? And listening. So, we so often are trying to guess and we don't just go ahead and ask.
And the interesting thing they found is that when they ask people, you know, is it going to be, you know, if you just try to guess or you ask them, is it going to make a big difference in basically your interpretation? And people are like, no, I could guess just as well as, you know, if they actually told me.
But in fact, it was a huge difference, right? When they actually asked people how they felt about something or what they knew about something, they were, not surprisingly, so much more accurate about how they actually felt.
Chris Wofford: There you go. Another path to influence. What are just the one or two things that you want our audience to take with them as they leave our Keynote here today?
Vanessa Bohns: There's a few things that I like to suggest that kind of wraps it all up. So, when we ask for things, we want to give ourselves the best chance, right? And so, I like to tell people to actually ask, make a direct request, right? Ask in person. And when you do ask, assume that you're going to get a yes.
And if you assume that, you know, when I ask, this person is going to say yes, which is more likely than we tend to think, that sets the right tone. So you're not, you know, negotiating with yourself before you negotiate with the other person. You're not kind of going in guns blazing and like way too aggressive trying to get past that no that you're anticipating.
And at the same time, you're not, you know, avoiding asking or holding back. So ask in person, ask directly. Assume a yes, it will set the tone, but also, by assuming a yes, that also makes you kind of aware of the ways in which that you could ask for something that maybe would put someone on the spot or pressure somebody, right? So it's not just about getting to that yes, but I always like to point out it's also about trying not to pressure people because it is actually hard for people to say no.
Chris Wofford: Author of You Have More Influence Than You Think, Vanessa Bonds, it's been lovely to have you in the studio today.
Vanessa Bohns: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
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