Guest User

June 23, 2022

Episode 206: Prof. Vanessa Bohns: You Have More Influence Than You Think

Guest User

June 23, 2022

Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist and associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell. She holds a PhD in Psychology from Columbia and an AB from Brown. Her research has been published in top academic journals in psychology, management, and law, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, and on NPR's Hidden Brain, among other media outlets.

Her popular and business writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, and her first book You Have More Influence Than You Think (2021, Norton) was published last September.

Welcome back to another exciting and informative episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast, a show all about finances and how to get the most of your money responsibly. To make the right decisions regarding your investments, besides the knowledge and understanding of financial systems, you also need to understand the psychology behind your decisions. To help us unpack this complicated and interesting subject is Professor Vanessa Bohns, a Social Psychologist and Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Cornell University. Professor Bohns has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia and is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters. The topic of the book is exactly what today’s show is about, as we delve into the intricacies of human behaviour and decision-making. In today’s episode, we learn about the influence that people have on one another, how people perceive one another, the human behaviours that scammers take advantage of, why people worry about saying the wrong thing, what the default behaviour of people is, why people struggle to say no to a request, and so much more! Don’t miss out on this fascinating episode with special guest and expert, Professor Vanessa Bohns!

Key Points From This Episode:

How much impact and influence people have on one another. [0:03:09]
What people tend to notice about other people. [0:04:50]
Why people don’t realize what other people are paying attention to. [0:08:58]
How being in the presence of other people affects experiences. [0:10:31]
Whether communicating with someone about a shared experience amplifies it. [0:12:41]
Reasons why some people are underconfident in their social lives. [0:13:20]
Problems that stem from underconfidence. [0:15:52]
The consequences of underestimating how much people like us. [0:18:02]
Why people worry about saying the wrong thing. [0:20:53]
Whether it is default to believe or disbelieve when assessing information. [0:22:55]
The impact of people interacting with people anonymously. [0:26:01]
How the default to believe people impacts receiving advice from experts. [0:27:22]
The authority on a subject can switch between domains of expertise. [0:31:19]
Ways in which scammers take advantage of behavioural biases. [0:32:22]
Problems caused by people being dishonest or spreading false information. [0:34:47]
Approaches to ensure that you are not spreading misinformation unintentionally. [0:36:04]
Why asking for what you want is so effective. [0:38:21]
Whether asking for what you want becomes easier over time. [0:40:33]
The effect that money has when asking for something. [0:42:24]
Differences in response to small or large requests. [0:43:48]
How responses differ between direct and indirect requests. [0:45:23]
What effect asking in person as opposed to over email or text have on responses. [0:47:20]
Reasons behind the hesitancy for people to ask for what they want. [0:49:04]
Why people find it difficult to reject a request from someone. [0:50:36]
Whether saying no in person is the same as saying no over email. [0:52:12]
Feeling guilty and whether you should feel bad asking for things. [0:53:52]
How people generally respond to unethical requests. [0:56:21]
Find out if people with authority realize how much influence they have. [0:59:01]
Approaches to help people be more aware of their influence. [1:00:58]
A rundown of the impacts of not being aware of other people has. [1:05:12]
We end the show with Professor Bohns sharing her definition of success. [1:07:41]

Read the Transcript:

So let's jump right into it. So how much impact do people generally have on other people?

Yeah. One of my reasons for writing the book is that it turns out we have a ton of impact on other people, but we tend to miss it. I think if you kind of look at what people gravitate towards in the influence landscape, right? There's so many books on how to have influence, how to be more influential and tricks and tips for doing that. So it really gives you the impression that people feel hopelessly influential. They need so much help to have impact.

It's funny because as a social psychologist, I've been studying social influence for over 15 years now and the whole field that I study is predicated on this idea that we have a huge impact on other people. We are social creatures and we look to other people to decide what to do. We listen to what they have to say. We take their advice seriously. We mimic their behaviors.

We are acutely attentive to the people in our world. And if that's true, that means everyone else is sort of looking at us and attending to us and listening to what we have to say. So a lot of what I talk about in the book is, "Why don't we realize that? Why don't we see that just as much as we're impacted by other people? Other people are similarly impacted by us." So I uncover a number of psychological biases that cause us to miss the times that we are having this incredible impact on others.

Now, for someone who's pretty introverted, that sounds terrifying. What do people tend to notice about other people?

Yeah, it's funny. I think in some ways I want this to be a positive message for introverts. I am an introvert for sure. And a lot of these biases that I talk about in the book are actually exacerbated for introverts. We think when you say people are paying attention to us, it's like, "Oh my God, I don't want to be the center of attention." But actually what it means is that we don't have to be this extroverted typical influencer to have an impact, right? So we tend to think of influence as the person who's standing in front of the room who's trying to convince people who has all this charisma when in fact so much of influence is just you being there and going about your daily life and just stating your opinion even quietly and people hear it and they listen to it.

One of the things they do is just pay attention to what you're doing in a situation, right? And not the things that we're insecure about, not the things that we're worried they're paying attention to us, like how awkward we are or whatever insecurity we have on a given day about how we look or what we said. It turns out that people dismiss those things pretty quickly and don't even notice them for the most part.

People are pretty generous in their assessments. So they notice us more than we realize as people, as these general blurry people who are doing these things, but they aren't noticing us in this way where they're judging us incredibly harshly. So to give a specific example because it sounds kind of vague, there's a classic study that Tom Gilovich and his colleagues, Tom Gilovich is a professor here at Cornell did, where they gave people these Barry Manilow t-shirts, which at the time they pretested and people were embarrassed to be seen wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt although I would totally wear one of those now. And they had them go into a crowd of people, a group of people in a room and then leave the room under this whole sort of storyline about why they had to go in and leave.

And they said, "How many people do you think noticed that embarrassing t-shirt that you're wearing?" And they thought most of the people in that room would've noticed and been paying attention to this thing, they were really self-conscious about, when in fact most of the people in the room did not notice. So at the end of the day when we're embarrassed about something, other people really just aren't paying attention to it as much as we think that they are.

On the flip side, there's work showing that when we're sort of just going about our ordinary day, doing things we're not acutely self-conscious about and to take sort of another comparable example like wearing our everyday clothing, people are noticing us more than we think. So my colleague, Erica Boothby did another set of studies where she did a similar thing to Tom Gilovich. She had people come in to the lab wearing their ordinary clothes. And she had them interact with another person and said, "How much do you think that person noticed what you were wearing, just your ordinary clothes?" And she found that in that case, people underestimated how much the other person noticed what they were wearing.

The other person was actually paying attention to just nice normal things about them. So you see these two effects that when I say people are paying attention to, you're like, "Oh my God, I'm so nervous about that. That makes me really self conscious because it's all the things I wish they weren't paying attention to." When in fact it's the things that are just you and the things you say and the things you may not realize they're seeing and noticing and potentially taking to heart.

Wow. That is so interesting because they don't notice what you think they notice, but they do notice what you kind of take for granted. Is that an accurate assessment?

Exactly. That's right.

And why do people not realize this? This is kind of blowing my mind here, but why do people not realize how much other people are paying attention to, and I guess dot, dot, dot, things that may not seem to be that outstanding?

We are pretty bad at getting in other people's heads and realizing what they're thinking and seeing. And especially how they're seeing us and what they're thinking about us. So we walk through the world feeling kind of invisible. So actually, the phenomenon that Erica Boothby, the colleague I mentioned, she calls it the invisibility cloak effect. So you feel like you're walking through the world and an invisibility cloak essentially like you can imagine yourself sort of walking through the park with headphones or sunglasses and just kind of going about your business.

We're so sort of acutely focused on ourselves and sort of nervous about being judged that we don't realize in those moments where we're not being self-conscious, we're just kind of walking around that, "Oh, people are noticing us. They're paying attention to us." If you think about the things they might pay attention to, for example, if we litter, right, people notice that. And that suggests a certain social norm. If we throw something in the recycling and someone was about to throw something out, they may realize, "Oh, that's where I should put this." Right?

So that's a simple example of ways in which people might notice these just everyday behaviors. You're not thinking about like, "Oh, other people are watching me throw this out." But they are noticing that. And then they may be copying that behavior in turn.

How does being in the presence of other people affect experiences?

Yeah. So this is really interesting. So on the one hand having people notice us more than we realize means that they may mimic the things that we do more than we realize, and we can sort of set social norms. Another thing that means is that we can also impact the way people feel about certain experiences. So there are these fascinating studies where researchers either have people enjoy something like chocolate by themselves or they enjoy it with another person in the room who they don't speak to, and they don't look at, but they know is eating the same chocolate as them.

So what they find is that when they ask people how sweet and tasty was that chocolate when they're by themselves, they rate it as less sweet and tasty as when they are in the same room with somebody else who's enjoying that same thing.

And this is with no communication, no eye contact, no agreement that, "Oh, this was a great piece of chocolate." What they say is that what's happening is that when you are experiencing something and you know that somebody else is experiencing that same thing, that experience becomes amplified. You engage in something they call mentalizing. You imagine not only what you're feeling, but also what that other person is thinking of that thing.

So it just amplifies the whole experience. And there's studies that have done this with sweet chocolate. There's also studies that have done this with really bitter chocolate that taste bad and they find that's also amplified. So it doesn't just make things better. It also makes things just more intense, even if it's a bad thing.

They've done this with art. So just looking at artwork you can imagine standing at a museum next to somebody. Someone you don't know. Someone you're not even engaging with, but you're thinking about what this means, but you're also wondering what the person next to is thinking, and that changes your experience in these just incredibly subtle, but powerful ways.

So you're saying you can amplify by doing nothing. Does that mean you can further amplify by doing something? And if so, what is that something?

Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating that by doing literally nothing but being present that you can amplify an experience, but then of course, if you take it to the next level and then you start having a conversation about it, that just adds to the effect. Right? So if suddenly, now I say, I think this about this, and I've put that in your head, now you're like, "Ooh yeah, I can see that." And then we just get an even more intense impact of those two people.

Wow. So we know people are over confident in many domains. Why are people under confident in their social lives?

Yeah, this is really interesting and I think a big part of it... So as you said, people tend to be overconfident in things like their driving and their morality and their intelligence and things like that. What they show is basically when you are thinking about how smart am I compared to other people? Or how moral am I or how good of a driver am I compared to other people? What we tend to do is we reflect inward.

We think to ourselves about how moral we are, the last decision we made, or the last time we drove, if we're thinking about the driving question. We just reflect inward. We remember experiences we had. We tend to do this selective search of those experiences. We come across those experiences that paint us in the most positive light, not surprisingly because that's what people do.

So we feel pretty good about ourselves in the end. And we say, actually I'm a really good driver because I remember all these great times that I navigated these really difficult situations. When we try to think about ourselves socially and look at, "Well, how social and influential and likable am I?" What we tend to do is instead of reflecting inward. For social categories, we tend to reflect outward and we compare ourselves to what we see other people doing. And the things that come most easily to mind when we think about other people are the influencers, are the people posting on Instagram about all their fancy dinners and their exciting social parties and whatever it might be.

So we think of these exemplars of being influential and popular and social and clearly most of us pale in comparison to those exemplars. So we think, "Oh, well, I'm definitely like that." So I'm clearly lower than average on my social ability. Right? But in fact, both of those are errors, right? They often say like the average person thinks they're smarter than the average person. And in this case, the average person thinks they're less social than the average person. And they're both errors because that's impossible.

But we tend to make this assessment by turning inward when we're thinking about something about ourselves, but outward when we're thinking about, "Well, how social am I?" This kind of social category.

That seems like a pretty big deal. What are the problems that stem from that under confidence?

Yeah. This kind of general under confidence in our ability to influence other people and how much other people are going to like us, if we interact with them in how central we are to our networks, it could do a couple things. So one of them is that it can make us hold back and miss out on opportunities. So if I think that, basically, no one is going to listen to me if I say something or it's not really worth me stating my opinion, of course, I'm just going to hold back and not even bother in a lot of cases.

So I may either not ask for something or not state something. I may negotiate myself down before I actually do ask for something. So one thing people do is they think, "I could never sell that. I could never get that. And so I'll ask for less." So we basically ask for less missed opportunities and don't take advantage of the influence that we actually do have because we underestimate it. On the other hand, some people go in the other direction and if we feel under confident about our ability to influence people, get them to do the things we want.

Again, convince them of things and our persuasive abilities, we may think that to do that, we have to come in like guns blazing, right? We have to be super aggressive and overly assertive to get people to listen to us, to get people to pay attention to us and do things for us. And in fact, that's also an error, right? So one of the things I often tell people is if you start from this sort of assumption, the starting point that people are going to listen to you, they very likely are going to agree to what you ask.

They very likely are going to be convinced by the things you say. That kind of allows you to go in with the level of confidence where you ask for what you really want. You say what you really mean, but not in an overly assertive way. You get that tone, that balance between those two sorts of mistakes that people make.

I have a similar question to Ben's. What are the consequences of underestimating how much people like us?

Yeah. So with this one, and this refers to something called the liking gap, which is basically the tendency for us after we interact with someone to assume that they liked us less than they actually liked us. And I love these studies. They basically get people to come together and have a conversation. They separate them and then they ask them like, "How much did you like that other person? How much did you enjoy the conversation? How much would you want to hang out with that person again?"

And what happens is that both people say that they liked the other person more than they think the other person liked them. So this is a bias where we really enjoyed that conversation. We walk away. We feel like, "Okay, that was just a pleasant conversation." But we think, "But here's all these things I did wrong. I talked too much or I didn't ask enough questions. I was so boring. I'm sure they didn't like me as much as I liked them."

So of course one clear consequence is that we all want to be liked. That's a huge part of being human. We want to feel like we're part of the group. And as many times as people say, "Not everybody needs to like you." We try to convince ourselves that it's okay. I mean, it's still hurts. So this idea that we walk through life with a biased assessment of how likable we are is important just to our basic self-esteem, right."

But then there's also on top of that my domain of social influence. A lot of social influence occurs through liking. And if you think about it if a friend you really like tells, "You should check out this podcast, Rational Reminder. It's amazing," you're so much more likely to take that recommendation than if somebody you don't like that much makes that same recommendation.

So what it means is that if actually people like you and you have this conversation, you're actually pretty charming, but you don't realize it. And you're talking about some podcast you like, or some movie you liked, people are going to take that recommendation more seriously than you think, because they like you more than you realize. So not only is it just on a basic level kind of reassuring to know that we are just more likable in general than we give ourselves credit for.

Again, I think this effect is one of the ones that's exacerbated for introverts. So I think that's especially reassuring for introverts, but at the same time, it means that also when we say things, people are taking them seriously because they think we have interesting things to say.

So given that, and by the way, this is all so relatable as an introvert. I can feel everything that you're talking about. It's a little bit stressful. I'm just kidding. Why are people so worried about saying the wrong thing?

Yeah. There's this idea that if we say the wrong thing, people are going to jump down our throat. I think it's a very common fear that many of us have these days. And to some extent, we've seen that to be true on social media and on certain platforms, but we think that's true in everyday life that if we're in a conversation with friends or at a party that we have to be so careful and watch our words and not say something that could potentially offend someone.

And in fact, those fears are really overblown. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, people's assessments of other people are actually much more generous than we give them credit for. We will work hard to understand what someone's trying to say, if they are being inarticulate. So a lot of us worry that I'm just being so inarticulate. We really work to make sense of things that people say. If you listen to conversations, like there's so much jumbled language. But somehow people are... They are working at figuring out what the other person really means.

Also, when someone says something that we find kind of or like, did they mean that? Could they have possibly meant that slightly offensive thing? We tend to give them the benefit of the doubt so much more than we think, right? We hate making a scene. We hate making things weird and awkward. We're very unlikely to actually call someone out in person face to face for something that they've said.

We're much more likely to gently question or try to understand or just let it go. All of that comes into play and yet we think we still have this impression that if I say the wrong thing, they're going to be super judgemental of me.

So even though we tend to let it go, are people by default, do they believe or disbelief by default when they assess information from other people?

Yeah. This is another place where the common intuition is that people are just... They're just there watching carefully for you to say something wrong to say like, "Oh, that was inaccurate." I know that wasn't true. And again, I think a lot of that does come from some of the norms that we see on social media these days or some of the norms we see on the news and the 24 hour news cycle. That makes us think that's how people communicate these days that in the end we're all just waiting to shout, "Gotcha," at every moment.

But actually the research shows that in fact, people are inclined to believe the things you say when you say things. Not necessarily if we're talking about politics and you're on the O other side of the spectrum. I already have a predetermined idea about what I think about something and you say the opposite, right? It's not those situations. But we think that's influence, right? We think those debates about politics are like, "That's what influences." But really there are so many more things.

There's just explaining some vacation I went on or a restaurant I went to, or why someone got fired or promoted at my job. So many of the conversations we have with people are more about those kinds of everyday things. And those everyday things still shape bigger picture, important things. Right? If I'm talking about like, "Oh my colleague got promoted and she didn't deserve it because of X, or she didn't get promoted and it was the right call because of X," I'm basically communicating social norms about who's deserving of promotions and why I am communicating these actually underlying important sort of themes and norms and ideas. And people are believing what I say, right?

If I say like, "She didn't deserve it for X," there's no reason for them to doubt me. And in fact, there's a famous language theorist named Paul Grace who has these maxims of human communication. One of the fundamental maxims is that for human communication to work, we have to default to believing what the other person is saying, to believing that the other person is not just saying a million lies to us. Right? Because how would we even communicate then? If every time you said, "Oh, I read this book," and I was like, "I don't believe you read that book." And you're like, "And then I went and checked out this new restaurant." I'm like, "I don't think you really did that."

There has to be sort of just a basic level of belief for us to be able to communicate. But again, we assume the fundamental way of interacting is this underlying disbelief, but that just couldn't be true logically.

That's really interesting. So, so much of communication is based on believing, but that's when you know the other person. You mentioned social media. What's the impact of being anonymous either you or the person posting as anonymous? Has that changed that dynamic?

Yeah. There's so many things about social media that change a lot of these dynamics. So certainly the anonymity, the fact that you can say things and the other person doesn't know who you are and you know that the other person doesn't know who you are changes things. At the same time, there's definitely elements on social media where things get out of hand and people say things that they wouldn't say face to face. I mean, that's undoubtedly been documented.

But I also think that, that happens less than we think as well. We often post things and people try to engage with us in good faith in many cases, or people do change their opinion and announce it on social media. So the impression that we have often of what's happening tends to be more pessimistic and more negative than what's actually happening if you analyze the full spectrum of what's going on social media, not just the individual instances that are kind of atrocious.

Hmm. So to take it back to more personal relationships or interactions, what are the implications of that default to believe for professional services like financial advice, what we do, where people, the clients are relying heavily on advice for important decisions?

Yeah. I think this is such an important question because as I said, these are the kinds of conversations that many of us have with people, right? So we talk about financial decisions, what we decided to do for our retirement, why we invested in one thing versus another. I think we forget when we're the ones offering advice or even just sort of stating what we did, how much that can stick in someone else's head and affect their later decision-making. And they could even pass it on.

I can't tell you how many times I've had a conversation with a friend or just someone who knows more about finances than me. And they've said, "Well, here's what you want to do. You want to do X, Y, Z." Right? For them, it's probably just like an off the cuff like I'm just talking about stuff. I'm not analyzing your personal situation. I'm just throwing some things out there.

I'm still thinking about it a week later. Then I tell my husband, "Oh, I heard that we should do X, Y, Z." We may pass it along. We're talking to friends and saying, "Oh yeah, we heard that you should do X, Y, Z." And it kind of gets spread. Right? It might not necessarily be the best advice for that person's particular situation, but it's worth keeping in mind that people really do take these things seriously.

We're more likely to remember that stuff, this off the cuff stuff that we in person get from another person or from a one-on-one conversation. Then all this research we do online where we have a million different kind of perspectives, right? That in-person touch means so much and just sticks in our brains.

It's a different context. But I remember I was talking with a friend maybe a year ago at a party and I had read this article about vaccines for kids because a lot in my group have small kids and we were dying for the vaccine to come out for little kids. I was like, "Okay, I read this article that it's going to be out in September or something." And I said this to my friend. It started getting passed around.

It turned out like whatever article I read was wrong and I had unintentionally spread this misinformation and felt terrible about it. And there was no good point at which I could correct it and say, "Actually, no, I read another article that said that was an optimistic assessment and that was unlikely." But it's a similar kind of thing. Right. You throw something out there and it spreads and people remember it and they take it seriously.

That is fascinating. So I was thinking about professional interactions, but you're saying people in general should be careful about what type of financial information or whatever they provide, because that can be a bit of a... It can be amplified throughout a social circle.

Yeah, I think so. And I mean, on a professional level, when you add the authority piece that like, "Oh, this person has authority," I'm really going to take what they say seriously. It's I think even more exacerbated. I mean, that person probably has more expertise. And so maybe you should be taking their opinion more seriously. But at the same time, and this is just speculation, I don't have research on this, but it's possible that you'd be less likely kind of research alternatives in that case and just kind of take that person's word at face value and think, "Okay, I'm just going to go with that."

In the introduction of the episode. I'll say what the study is, but there is a study on that specifically where when people are getting information from a trusted authority, they turn off their critical thinking stuff. Now, on your comment about the qualifications and stuff like that. That's a big problem in financial services, which is kind of why I was curious about the question. Like the bar to give financial advice as a professional is actually pretty low, which is kind of scary given what we're talking about.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

But does that authority transfer from one realm to another? If you're not an expert in finance, you're an expert in some other domain, does that authority go between domains?

Yeah. So there's research that shows it does. That's why at makeup counters, they have the people wearing doctor's lab coats and looking like doctors because anything that conveys a sense of authority just makes us think that person knows better than me. Right? That person looks like they know. There's another great study I love where they had two people jaywalk across the street. One of them was just wearing ordinary street clothes. The other person, they looked exactly the same. It may have been even been the same person just dressed in two different sets of clothes. The other person was wearing a suit, like a business suit. And so many more people followed the businessmen across the street.

When you think about it, that person does not know more about whether it's safe to cross the street. Right? But there's something about that aura of authority that makes you think, "I should follow that person."

I wonder how much authority you have by wearing that Rational Reminder hoodie right now. So back to the question about believing, is this tendency for us to believe others? Is this how scammers work?

Yeah. It is. This tendency to believe what other people say is on the whole a good thing, right? It allows us to communicate. It allows us to cooperate if we trust other people by default. We can cooperate. It basically is a very human sort of aspect for a social animal. Right? But there are these outliers who know this and wind up exploiting it. They know how hard it is for people to disbelieve someone. And then even more than that, call them out on it.

So even if we have our doubts in many cases, even if we're like, "Something seems fishy about this, or I'm not really sure." There's so many examples where people just don't say anything because it would be so awkward and uncomfortable for everybody involved if you actually were to call them out on these doubts that you have.

So I talk in the book about Kevin Mitnick, who is a social, or was a social engineer, which is essentially a hacker who doesn't use computer code to hack into other people's computers and passwords. Instead, he uses social engineering. So he actually asks people and talks them and has conversations and uses cover stories and persuades them to give him their sensitive information or their passwords and things like that.

Now, he's on the good guy's side and he helps companies prevent this kind of attack. But he wrote a book Ghost in the Wires where he talks about how he hacked into Motorola years ago. And this is before he went to jail for doing this. He would call up people who worked at Motorola and come up with this cover story. And there would be moments where they were like, "Wait a minute. I'm not really sure if I should be giving you my password."

He would just give some reason why it was okay. And they'd just be like, "Well, okay." And at the end because to really push and say like, "No, I don't want to do this. I don't feel comfortable. I don't trust you," is just not part of human nature really. It really goes against our nature. It's hard and so people have to be trained to do that.

Yeah, that's unreal. I kind of related to that, given the propensity that we have to believe other people, how much of a problem is... From your book, you reference a Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, how much of a problem is (censored)?

Yeah. It's funny. So these scammers, they lie. So they outright just lie. (censored) is not lying. The difference between (censored) and lying is that at the end of the day someone who's (censored) just doesn't care whether they're telling the truth or not. They're just saying words and they don't have any sort of inclination to make sure that what they're saying is true.

So what that can do in the end is it's similar to sort of spreading lies or intentionally spreading misinformation. You can wind up unintentionally spreading misinformation or putting things in people's heads that make them kind of doubt whether a vaccine is safe or whether they should wear a mask or whatever it might be. I mean, those are the things that are probably most top of mind for people in terms of misinformation right now.

But they can throw things into the ether without really caring, without really having this sort of concern about accuracy that can then let allow ideas to spread because people run with it and they think, "Well, that sounds maybe plausible." And someone said it. So if somebody else said it..." Again, where social creatures, we look at, what other people think, we think, "Okay, if someone else said it, maybe I don't have to vet it as much." Right?

So what can people do to minimize their BS'ing?

Yeah. There's actually research on ways in which you could sort of reframe that moment when you're about to spread misinformation or spread (censored) or just put something out there without any concern for the truth where you suddenly become concerned for the truth. Right? It's really about... Most of us say in general like, "I wouldn't want to spread misinformation. I wouldn't want to be part of the problem." Right? In theory, we feel that way.

But in the moment we just talk, right? People feel like they need to fill a space. Sometimes it's just fun to spitball ideas. Sometimes if we're on social media and something grabs our attention and we're like, "Oh, other people might want to see this. Click retweet." So some researchers actually at the University of Regina, Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues have shown that if in the moment you can reorient people towards caring about accuracy, reminding them that actually they don't want to be part of the problem, right?

You actually should care about whether the things you say are true. You actually should care about whether the information you're spreading on social media is accurate. And if you could just remind them of that and say, "Actually, is this accurate do you think?" People take a beat and then they reflect, and they're less likely to, for example, share misinformation or share things that they're not sure are exactly accurate articles.

So it's really more about keeping it top of mind because often we (censored) when we're just not thinking. And so being more mindful is one way to sort of slow down the churn of just BS that gets circulated out there.

Is that as simple as just inserting that expectation of accuracy?

So in these studies, that's what they do. They highlight that expectation of accuracy. So they just say like, "Is this accurate?" And the assumption there is that people actually do want to be accurate. They don't want to be part of the problem, but they're not thinking. So they need to slow down and reorient to that underlying goal that they do have somewhere there that they lost in the moment.

So you're triggering some sort of natural social norm of integrity, I guess?

Yeah.

So interesting. How powerful a tool is asking for what you want?

Yeah. So this is actually what most of my research has been on for 15 years now. I can say that first of all, just asking for what you want is the simplest, most powerful way of getting things that you want. But it is also one of the most fraught things for so many people, right? So we worry so much about asking.

I mean the amount of distress. So in my studies, I bring people into the lab and I have them ask people for things. That's my main paradigm I've been doing for many years. At this point, I've had participants in my studies ask over 15,000 people for things and I bring them into the lab. I tell them everything up front, this is what the study consists of. You're going to go out and ask people for whatever it is we're having them ask them for.

And the tension and the distress is palpable. People hate asking other people for things. You We feel bad. We feel awkward. We don't want to go up to people. We worry they're going to reject us and we have them then go out and actually make these requests. What we found again and again, it's a really strong effect is that people are about twice as likely to agree to do these things for our participants as our participants think that they will.

So they make a prediction of how many people will agree. They go out and they ask and people are so much more willing to agree so much more helpful than they expect. And then they come back and they kind of had that aha moment where they're like, "Oh wow, that is really powerful." Just asking was so powerful. People just said, "Yes, it was so much easier than I expected." All that anxiety is released and they wind up being really happy at the end of our studies.

Is this one worse for introverts too?

We haven't looked at that specifically, but I would not be surprised. Especially in our studies because a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them, we have them go up to strangers and ask. And so I'm pretty sure that would be true. Although I can't say for sure.

And then after that realization that they can ask, is it easier for them to ask after?

That's such a good question and I don't know the answer. I have not looked at this empirically in my studies, but there is this person who has this game called rejection therapy, which is actually a very fun, silly game that a lot of people swear by. And basically, what you do is every day you draw from this card, I think it's online now and you get just a randomly assigned thing and you try to get rejected by asking someone for something.

So you're supposed to ask people for things that are crazy to get over this fear of rejection and to realize that it's not so terrible to ask people for things. Actually, what they find is half the time, it's hard to get rejected. It's harder to get rejected than you think. So some of the things are like ask someone to give you a compliment. And people just do or there's some other funny ones where it's like ask the police officer, if you could sit in the front of his cop car, ask someone to make Olympic rings out of donuts at Tim Hortons or something.

People actually agree to do these things. And through this process that people who have talked about trying this therapy out, which is supposed to resemble like an exposure therapy kind of thing, they do claim that it gets way easier to ask. Right? They start to realize, actually, it's not so bad to ask. So again, that's not an empirical study, but I've been pretty convinced watching that if you do it in this concentrated way, not just like one of my studies which may be the next day, they'd feel better, but they'd probably forget about it a month later. But this concentrated for a month you're doing this every day, I think it would probably make it easier.

And what if you throw money into the mix and offer money in addition to asking, how does that affect the response?

Yeah. This was a study we did where we actually had people go out and ask people for things, once again, but half of our participants, we randomly assigned them to get a dollar essentially to go up to people and just hand them the dollar and say, "If I give you this dollar, will you fill out a survey?" I think in one of the cases. And our participants just felt so much better when they could offer a dollar. So asking felt so fraught. It felt so anxiety provoking and they just really worried about being rejected. They didn't think people would help them.

Suddenly giving a dollar just changed all of that. And they were like, "Oh yeah, people will do it for a dollar." It's like they reassessed kind of what they were asking for that it wasn't such a big deal actually. And so I'm sure people would do it. Then they went out and actually asked people either for free or for a dollar. And the thing that is most interesting about that study is that there was no actual difference in compliance rates.

So giving people a dollar didn't make them any more likely to say yes, they were just as likely to say yes for free, but our participants thought it would make a huge deal. And part of that was that it just made them feel so much better about asking.

Now, are people as responsive to large requests as they are to small ones?

So we have played around with changing at the size of the request. And what we found is similar to the dollar thing where the people asking think that the size of the request makes a huge difference. In some ways, when we ask someone for something, we almost imagine that they're doing like a cost benefit calculation. How big is the favor that you're asking? How much time is it going to take? How much am I going to get back for it?

So when we ask our participants how many people do you think will agree to do this one page survey? So a lot of times we just use simple surveys so we can manipulate it pretty easily versus this giant packet of a really thick survey, that's this many pages. Our participants think that many more people will say no to this giant packet of surveys. Not surprisingly.

Again, though, when they go out and ask, we actually found no difference. So I don't think that means size doesn't matter. Clearly if they went out and asked people for $200 or something, they're going to get a lot more nos. So it's not that size doesn't matter. But I think what I take from a lot of the studies we've done is that the size of the request matters less than we think that often we can ask for more than we think that we can. And we undersell ourselves. I think we'd be surprised by how much people are willing to do for us if we just asked for what we really needed or wanted or thought we deserved.

And our indirect request as influential as direct ones?

Yeah. This is another really interesting one. So in these studies, I'm explaining, we gave people a script. We said, "Go up to people and say, 'Will you fill a questionnaire?'" Some of them were, "Can I borrow your cell phone to make a call?" And they would call us back at the labs that we made sure that they had someone's cell phone. Some were like just, "Will you sponsor me for charitable race?" Things like that. So in all those cases, they were asking directly, right? They were saying, "Will you do this thing?"

When we ask participants in another study, "Do you think it would be more effective essentially to ask directly like that, 'can I use your phone to make a call?' Or to kind of hint indirectly and beat around the Bush and say like, 'I really could use a phone to make a call.' I'm trying to get that person to offer that phone." They think that it's actually going to be a little more effective to ask indirectly. And I think part of it is we think that's polite. We think it's allowing the person to decide whether they want to help.

But when we ask people on the other side of the equation, which one are you more likely to agree to, they said the direct request, because at the end of the day if someone's hinting, you're not really sure if they're asking you. It also is pretty easy to pretend that you didn't hear them or interpret it differently, or you don't actually even have to say no. A big part of it is that if I ask directly, you have to say no, if you want to get out of it. Right? And that's really uncomfortable for people.

But if you ask indirectly, they can, again, pretend not to hear you, pretend you didn't really ask them. So asking directly makes a big difference, but we don't realize how important it is to just come out and actually ask directly. You could do it warmly. You could still be polite, but you still have to ask directly.

Asking in person, does that have the same effect as asking over email or text?

Yeah. So of all the variations that we've been talking about so far, this is the one that we found the absolute biggest effects on. So we had participants ask for, again, just a simple thing. "Will you complete this survey for me, do me a favor?" We had them either ask over email or face to face in person. Both cases in one of our studies, we had them ask strangers. We've done other studies where we've had them ask over Zoom, over the phone, over email, and they've asked friends.

So we've done it in all sorts of different iterations. What we found is that when we ask participants, "How many people do you think will agree to this request over email and in person?", they thought it would be about the same. And again, if you think it's this cost benefit calculation, if you think this person is going to decide whether they have time for this and whether it's worth it, and then they'll make a decision, you would think like, "It doesn't really matter how I ask. They're going to make that decision regardless with this cost benefit calculation."

But when we actually had them ask in person was 34 times more effective than email. Biggest effect I've ever found in my life, it was just huge. And in person, again, people really underestimated how many people would say yes. Right? They thought that they'd be rejected much more. Over email, they were rejected so much more than they expected. So they really overestimated how many people would say yes. So it was a complete flip of the effect. And it definitely showed us that so much of this is a sort of face to face phenomenon, for sure.

So why is it that people are so hesitant to ask for what they want?

As I said, when people come into the lab and we tell them, they have to ask people for things, it's so anxiety provoking. And I think there's so many things going on. Asking really opens us up for rejection, which is one of the worst things, because, again, we're social creatures. Being rejected is really painful and suggests that maybe our relationship isn't what we thought it might be with this other person. Maybe I'm not deserving of that person's help. Maybe they don't really like me. There's so many things you can read into rejection.

But even if you're not rejected, there's a sense of vulnerability. If I'm asking you for something, it means I can't do it myself. Maybe you're going to think less of me because I asked for this. There's also a sense of burdening the other person and we don't like to feel burdens.

But actually there's also research showing that we think asking someone for advice is going to make them think less of us. But actually when we ask someone for advice, they think that they think we're smart. We think that person must think I'm really smart if they're asking for my advice. And I feel pretty good about it. So there's this misperception about how we're going to be judged when we ask for something that turns out not to be the case.

So it's hard to say no. If we change the perspective from the askers, or you can get what you want because it's hard to say no to the askee. In the position of the person being asked, why is it so hard to say no?

Yeah. It actually goes back to what we were just talking about, about this idea that we're social creatures and rejection is a painful thing that suggests we don't have the relationship we thought. We're not part of the group the way that we thought. And when we talk about being rejected, that seems really obvious. It's like, "Okay, if the group is rejecting you, it's painful. If the group is rejecting you, you feel like you're not part of it." Of course, that would be really difficult. Right?

But if you think about the flip side, when you reject someone, all the same concerns are there, right? If I say no to you, maybe you'll think our relationship isn't what it was. Maybe you'll think I'm not a helpful, nice person. Maybe you won't want to be friends with me anymore, or want to help me out in the future. So as much as it feels socially painful to be rejected, saying no is also socially painful. And it's socially risky because you don't know how that person is going to react to that no.

So there's lots of cases where we actually will agree to things that we don't want to do because it's easier to do that thing we feel really uncomfortable doing or really don't want to do than to say no and risk damaging that relationship in some way.

Unreal. So it sounds like there's lessons in there both for asking, because people tend to say yes, but also for being asked where you know, you might feel compelled to say no even though that may not be the best thing to do.

Exactly, yeah.

And is saying no in person the same as saying no over email?

So this is another place where it really is so much a face to face phenomenon. Think about getting an email and you want to say no, you can, first of all, just ignore that email. Right? You could just pretend you never saw it. You could take all the time in the world to respond to that email and come up with the perfect words to say. So a lot of times, it's hard to say no, because we can't come up with the words in the moment to mitigate all those social risk concerns that we have.

We want to say, "It's not about you. It's not about me. I'm still really nice. It's not about us. We still have a good relationship." You want to say all that stuff, but you don't know how in the moment. Over email, you can take 48 hours and think of the exact excuse or the exact way you want to phrase it where you maintain that relationship.

So it is just a lot easier to say no and mitigate all those concerns. When you're put on the spot, face to face, first of all, there's this immediacy to the interaction. You don't have time to think of the right words. So we're often like struggling. And then there's also the element of just saying no to someone's face. They're standing there looking at you. There's research showing that there's a lot more empathy and trust built into these face to face interactions.

The more human the interaction whether you can hear the person's voice or see their face or they're in person. So all that stuff also makes it hard, and it makes you less inclined to say no to that person.

So given the difficulties that people have in saying no and how powerful of an effect it is, do you think people should feel guilty about asking for stuff?

Yeah. You know what, this is, I think, one of the hardest questions because I think a lot of it comes down to individual differences. There are plenty of people who feel way too guilty asking for things. So there's a variable called guilt proneness. It's like, "How likely you are to feel guilty for various things?" And you can give someone this kind of funny personality test that's like, "You ran over someone's cat with your car. How guilty do you feel?" It's a really funny personality test if anyone wants to take, the guilt proneness scale.

But basically that people vary. There's variance in how guilty people feel. And some people will hold back from asking for things that people would be happy to do for them, that everyone would walk away happy from that exchange of help. And they really shouldn't feel guilty. They really need to err on the side of feeling less guilty asking for things, because people are actually happier to help us than we tend to give them credit for.

It's hard to say no. That's definitely a thing. At the same time, people also enjoy helping more than we think. So they also feel good about themselves when they could be helpful. So those things both are true. On the other hand, there's some people who don't recognize the burden that they could potentially be placing on people when they ask for things too often, or ask for things that are too big or ask for inappropriate things in some cases.

So those people could potentially err on the other side. So I'd say less than the feeling of guilt. I'd say being more mindful I think of our own tendencies sort of self-reflecting on our own tendencies. Being more mindful of some of these dynamics can maybe help us recalibrate and figure out where we are on that spectrum.

That's a big takeaway though that people not only is it difficult to say no, but people actually like helping.

Yeah. So there's some recent research showing that is also a major driver of some of my findings where people say yes more than we think. So I was actually thrilled to see that because I felt like that also had to be true. People do find it hard to say no for sure. But they also like helping. So both things are definitely true.

How do people respond to requests to act unethically?

Yeah. So this is where I sort of alluded to this a little bit about there are cases where we need to be more mindful if we ask for potentially inappropriate things about the fact that it's hard for people to say no. So we've done some studies which are probably my favorite studies that I've ever done where we've had our participants... Up to now, we've been talking about bringing people into the lab and having them ask for favors and innocuous things.

But we wanted them to ask for unethical things to see if they would make the same mistake. Is this just about people are more helpful like we're talking about than we think, or is it something bigger? Is it really about this inability to say no?

So we came up with this very fun paradigm, I think where we told participants to go into libraries, on campus and ask people to vandalize library books. So we took a bunch of books off my shelf and we put the codes on the spine of the book to make them look like library books. So we didn't actually hurt any library books. Sometimes I get hate mail about that.

I love libraries. So we had these books that look like libraries and we had our library books and we had our participants take these books into the libraries and say, "Hey, I'm playing a prank on my friend, but they know my handwriting. Will you just write the word pickle and pen in this library book?" And they would hand over the library book, hand over a pen and see what people did. And just like in our other studies, they guessed how many people would agree. And then they actually went and asked and kept track of how many people would agree. And just like in our other studies, they thought most people would say no.

They really thought like, "Of course people are not going to agree to this." And I'll be honest, we didn't think it would work. As the researchers we were like, "This is crazy. There's no way people are going to do this." But when they actually went into the libraries and asked people to do this, 64%, so more than half of the people they asked agreed to vandalize these library books. It was crazy.

Again, it's not that they didn't care. So some people are like, "Oh, well, people just didn't care. They didn't think it was such a bad thing." They would say things like, "This is wrong. I don't think we should do this. I think that we're going to get into trouble for this." So they clearly were coding this as like, "This is a wrong thing to do."

But even though they were uncomfortable doing this thing, they were more uncomfortable saying no to this person standing in front of them asking them for something. So they just went along with it.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Yeah.

We touched earlier on positions of authority when we were talking about professional financial advice and the person in the business suit. Do people in positions of power or authority realize how much influence they have?

Yeah. This is also a sort of fascinating counterintuitive aspect of this is, is that you would think that someone in power is super aware of the influence that they wield. Right? So one of my colleagues, Adam Golinski has this quote he likes to use that, "When you're in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout to people who don't have power."

So you say something small and it just really lands on other people. They feel like, "Oh, that was a command, not a suggestion." So you would think if you wield that kind of power that you would be sort of hyper aware of it. You have this position, but in fact there are all sorts of psychological effects of having power that exacerbate a lot of the things we've been talking about. So people in positions of power are less likely to take the perspectives of people who are in lower positions of power.

A lot of that is purely practical. It's like they just don't need the people in lower positions of power as much as the people in lower positions of power need that high power person. Right? So if you're in a low power position, you're like, "What makes this person tick? What motivates this person?" Are they going to be offended by something I say? What will they like that I say?"

When you're that high power person, you say things and you don't worry about how everybody's taking it so much. So you tend not to realize that actually that person felt like they couldn't say no to that request that you made or you told them that this was just a suggestion, but they took that as like, "That was actually a command." So we tend to kind of miss the ways in which we put pressure on people when we're in power positions and that they can't always speak up and feel comfortable saying no to us.

So what can people do to become more aware of their influence over others?

Yeah. So there are a few things I talk about in the book. One of them is that part of the problem with being able to see our own influence is purely physiological, right? We look out from our own two eyes in our heads and we see everything else that's happening around us. We see all the things other people are doing that are impacting us. We see all the things other people are doing that are impacting each other in the situation. And the thing missing from that scene is us, right?

We don't see the ways we're contributing. We're not usually part of that situational display that we're sort of imagining. So one thing to do is to do little exercises where you get out of your own head and you start to visualize situations from a third-party perspective. My colleague, Eli Finkel has done this with married couples and it has these really incredible effects.

So what he does is he calls it like a 21-minute intervention. Very quick and easy intervention where three times a year for seven minutes, you sit down and you write about the last argument you had with your spouse from a third-party perspective. You just imagined watching this argument take place, right? So you're not in your position. You're not trying to get in the other person's position either, because we're not actually very good at that. Just a third-party, totally neutral watching this happen.

And what he's shown is just doing that three times a year for seven minutes is this little writing exercise actually reduces the decline that many newlyweds feel our experience over the first two years of marriage. So sorry, newlyweds but usually marital satisfaction goes down in the first two years of marriage. But he actually shows that doing this little intervention keeps it steady.

Part of that is that you start to realize the ways you contribute to certain dynamics that are happening, right? What are you doing that people might be reacting to in this situation? And that's something a lot of leaders can do as well. You're looking out seeing like, "Why are you all acting like this? Get out of your own head. What are the things you're saying that they're responding to?" Right? Because especially when you're in a power position, people are very much responding to what you're saying and doing.

So that's one thing. Another one is something called instead of taking perspective, which is a common sort of recommendation, something called getting perspective. So when we try to take perspective and see how other people are experiencing the things we say, or ask, or do, we're actually pretty bad at it because we're trying to figure out what they think about something while searching our own heads for an understanding of why they do that thing. Right?

So we never actually get out of our own heads and we make a lot of mistakes trying to jump into someone else's head. So what research has shown is if you actually get perspective, which is super simple, it really just means asking people more questions. What did you think about this? How did you take this comment that I made? Are you thinking of other options rather than this suggestion I made?

Just kind of actually asking the questions and not making assumptions makes people not surprisingly way more accurate at figuring out how people are taking the things we say. And yet when you ask people, do you think that's going to make a huge difference? They think I could guess just as well as asking, right? We don't realize what a big difference that tends to make.

Vanessa, you told us earlier that you feel Canadian even though you're not because you spend time in Canada and your husband is Canadian. I went to get poutine the other day and they ran out of gravy. The guy came out and said... He helped gave me cash and said, "Sorry, we're out of gravy." And I wanted to ask, "Can you just give me more cheese curds and I'll take the fries?" But I didn't because I felt nervous. That was coming up for me the whole time we were talking about this very Canadian story.

I bet you anything they would've said yes too.

I know. That's what I was thinking the whole time, but I'm just... Anyway, replaying that in my head like, why didn't I ask for more cheese curds?

And they probably would've felt better because they probably felt bad about not having a gravy.

Yes, 100%. Oh, I know. Okay. So to generalize on that little anecdote, what are the costs of not being aware of the influence that we have over other people?

Yeah. I mean, in the end you lose out on a lot of cheese curds. That's a major cost. I mean, that's such a good example of all these little missed opportunities where it's like... Just first of all, the small day to day things that we could ask for that people would be happy to provide and that would've ended with both parties feeling good, right? That we don't ask for. We imagine it so much more negatively than it would go in our minds. Right?

We would actually feel better after. We focus on that immediate fear of asking but after it would feel so much better, right? We'd feel like that was the right thing to do. And also in bigger things like asking for raises and things like that. I mean, there's some work suggesting that some of the issues like gender pay gaps and educational gaps and things like that come from certain groups of people not asking for help when they need it or not asking for raises when they really should be, or not asking for as high raises.

And that's not to say that's all on those people. I think that part of it is us recognizing that it is hard to ask and not making lots of resources contingent on asking and making sure that they're distributed more equally. But in terms of the fact that a lot of that is based on misperceptions that people are willing to help, actually you could get more if you asked for it. I think there are actually, in addition to cheese curds, all sorts of bigger, more important things, opportunities that we might miss.

The sort of flip side too is that if we are more mindful of the influence we have, we also will not put people in situations we'd rather not. Right? So we talked about the unethical request study. I've applied that to other situations like me too examples where people have asked people, coworkers, for example, or subordinates out on dates or for other things. And not always realized that in that moment, that person really didn't feel comfortable saying no.

So things can go on much longer than they need to if we're not sort of aware of the power we wield and the awkward positions we sometimes put people in. So it really has both sides that we should ask more in some cases, ask less than others and just be more mindful I think in general of the things we ask for and how we ask.

That's a great answer. Our final question, Vanessa, how do you define success in your life?

I was thinking about this is such a good question. I used to define success in a typical way. What is the next high prestige publication I can get? What job promotion can I get? What school can I get into? All those kinds of things where you're racking up things that make you feel like you're successful. And over the years, I haven't gotten all those things, but I've gotten some of them. Even when I get these things that I think are like, "That's going to make me feel successful." You've reached a certain point and you look back and you're like, "But I still don't feel successful enough.

Other people have more stuff. There's always more stuff you could go for. And at some point I realized that really is not the thing that makes me feel successful. I was reflecting on this and what are the moments when I really do feel successful? And the moments where I feel secure enough, and I think the point at which I felt secure enough in my position, in my field and my job to start pulling people up with me, to start getting other people those accolades.

When I learned that I'm in a position now, I can nominate people for awards, for young scholar awards. I can help my graduate students get those prestigious publications. Nothing makes me feel more successful than feeling like I have the knowledge to get other people that stuff. So I think that's really been... For me, that is how I define success, and I hope moving forward how I continue to define success.

Wow. I love that answer. This has been incredible conversation, Vanessa. And just thinking about your... Talking about rejection, we opened up to you with a chance of being rejected. So I'm so happy you said yes. This has been an incredible conversation. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much. It's been just a total pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks, Vanessa. That was awesome.

Really such a pleasure.

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The study was Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically Offloads Financial Decision-Making Under Risk by Engelmann.

Wow. I'm so glad that was a real thing.

Yeah.

It's not just (censored), right?

Yeah.