Dorie Clark and Vanessa Bohns: The power of persuasion

Hello everyone, this is Dory Clark and we're here with our weekly edition of the Newsweek livestream interview show Better. And our guest this week is Professor Vanessa Bohns. She teaches at Cornell and she has a new book. It's called— or new-ish, right? It's called You Have More Influence Than You Think. So we're going to be talking today about the power of persuasion and how we can leverage this in positive ways in our own lives. Vanessa, so great to have you here.

So great to be here. Hi, everybody.

Wonderful. And if you are tuning in and joining us, please feel free to type into the chat box and let us know who you are and where you are watching from. And of course, we will be taking your questions for Vanessa. So please feel free to type those in and we'd love to hear what is on your mind. So, Vanessa, my first question, the starting point, You know, inevitably it has to be. You have more influence than you think. This is the title of your book. This is the central premise here. What's the problem? Why don't people understand that they have influence? What's going on?

Yeah. You know, and one of the inspirations for writing this was the fact that there are so many books out there where people just want to find out how to gain influence. Right. We all know all those major influence books that are so popular. So it's like, People really feel like they need these sort of resources to get this influence that they feel like they don't have. And the funny thing about that is, as a social psychologist who has studied social influence for 15 years, I have seen in my research for years that we have a ton of influence over other people. So I always thought this sort of disconnect between the influence we really have and what we think we have was really interesting. And so this book is really about those biases that prevent us from seeing the influence that we have. And some of those are kind of just the way we think of what influence is. So when we think about influence, we tend to picture these sort of formal moments when we're standing in front of a group, really trying to persuade everybody, and we're doing our PowerPoint, and everybody says yes at the end, right? We think it's gonna be really formal. We're gonna know it when we've done it. We might, you know, think of times we would argue with our relative who has a totally different political position from us. And sort of how good it would feel to have them say, you're right, and I totally changed my opinion. And so we have this idea of influence in these formal moments. And of course, those moments don't happen that frequently. But actually, influence tends to happen in a very different way. So it tends to happen in a more delayed, cumulative way. People don't just change their minds in front of us and sort of blurt it out. Sometimes we change someone's minds by actually strengthening an opinion they already had or getting them to continue doing a behavior they were already doing. And so because of that, so much influence happens where we can't see it, right? In someone's head, sometimes where they don't even want us to see it. And so we miss it. And so we base our sort of guess on how much influence we had on someone on these times where we really tried and it's clear we failed. And we don't know all those times that we just made a little comment and someone kept thinking about it after the fact, maybe for weeks.

Really interesting. Thank you so much. I'm Dori Clark. We're here with Professor Vanessa Bohns. Her book is You Have More Influence Than You Think. If you want to learn more about Vanessa, just go to her website. It's vanessabohns.com. And we're talking about influence, power, persuasion, all the good stuff here today. We want to say hi to some of our great friends tuning in from around the world. Thank you for being here. Vidya is here from the Netherlands. Jyoti is joining us from, from the US. We have, uh, Chie from Colombia. We have Michael in New Jersey. Aneta is in Galveston. Nancy's in Boston. Zulima is back again from Mexico. Angelo's in Italy. Cindy's in Savannah. We've got Maureen joining here. Zeeshan from London. Ravi from Mumbai. Diana from South Carolina. And many more. We're so glad you're all here. Type your questions for Vanessa Bohns into the chat box. We want to hear what's on your mind. And Vanessa, a question that I'm curious about. One of the things that you talk about in your book is about how people sometimes accidentally or inadvertently misuse their influence. Can you talk about that? The sort of negative side. I mean, of course, we know there's all the, like, the Jim Jones types that are very deliberately trying to get you to drink the Kool-Aid. But what about people who just have no clue and they're somehow accidentally misusing influence? What does this mean? What does this look like?

That's right. So if, you know, we think of influence in this very formal way where it's like, I'm actually trying to get you to change your behavior or change your attitude, then we don't realize all the times where we weren't actually trying to get you to think that at all. Or, you know, I sort of made a remark and it was kind of a throwaway remark and I didn't expect you to remember it, or, you know, I didn't expect it to impact you. And so because we often don't see the impact that those kinds of comments can make, we can sort of accidentally, you know, say things we might not intend. And we all, you know, if you reflect on our own, on your own life, we all have sorts of things people said to us that just reverberate in our heads for months or years, right? Some little comment someone made that made you question a decision or, you know, Some sort of suggestion someone made that you just ran with because you thought it was more of an order or the person was more serious about it than they really were. But we tend not to realize when we're the ones who are doing those things, and especially when we're in positions of power. So there's a great quote that when you're in a position of power, your whisper sounds more like a shout to people who don't have power. But the funny thing is we tend not to realize that. And so we think we can just sort of make comments like we would ordinarily. And that people can brush them off. But in fact, when a powerful person makes a comment, we tend to take that pretty seriously and see it more as an order.

I think that's a great point. I certainly know in my work coaching a lot of leaders, they really have to adjust their, their style because they're still thinking of themselves as a normal person. And of course, if you're a leader, you know, for better and for worse, your people don't think you're normal anymore. And so we need to turn the dial down a little bit. So I think that's a That's a really great point. Now, I'm curious, and we're here with Vanessa Bohns. We're talking about her book, which is You Have More Influence Than You Think. I'm Dori Clark here for Newsweek. And so, Vanessa, a question that occurs to me is how this factors in with demographic considerations and diversity considerations. I mean, we know, of course, that leaders perhaps don't quite understand the influence that they wield But how does this play out if you are in a minority group of some kind and, you know, you might, you might be coming from just a different position? Does that factor into questions of influence and how you might deploy it?

Yeah, absolutely. So I find that it's helpful to think about this question in terms of 3 buckets. So it's the actual influence you have based on your sort of demographics. The way in which you experience that influence, do you underestimate it? Do you overestimate it? And then what does that mean to you? And so we know from longstanding research across many different fields, economics, psychology, sociology, that there are actual demographic differences in influence that depending on your race or your gender, if you ask for something, you could be more or less likely to get it. So there are real differences. Interestingly, we find in our studies when people sort of estimate how much influence they actually have or whether someone would be likely to do something for them if they asked, that across the board, we seem to find pretty consistent results that most people do underestimate. So despite these sort of actual differences, most of us are overly pessimistic about our influence. But then there's this third piece. What does that mean, right? And so if I underestimate my influence, if I think that someone's less likely to say yes to a request than they actually are, maybe if I'm a white male, I'm like, I'll just take the risk, you know, it doesn't matter, I'll go for it. I, you know, it's not gonna be that socially risky to me to be rejected. But maybe if I'm a woman, or if I'm a Black woman, I may kind of question whether I really want to ask If I really am perceiving this likelihood of rejection, it feels more socially risky to me, right? Especially when there's pressure to be likable and fit into this community and not sort of rock the boat. And so there's real differences. There's differences in what it means to underestimate our influence. But it does seem like most people underestimate their influence, at least to some degree.

Really interesting. Thank you. Professor Vanessa Bohns. Her book is You Have More Influence Than You Think. If you're enjoying this conversation, hit the like button and hit the share button so that your friends and colleagues can benefit from it as well. And we want to say hi to some of the great friends who are tuning in from around the world to be here. Thank you for joining us. Rebecca in Chicagoland. Ana Maria is here from North Carolina. Hi there. Patricia's in Stockton. Cheryl is back from Minneapolis-St. Paul. We have Nisha from Hopkinton, Mass. Very nice. Sohail is here. We have Destiny from Washington. Laura is in Arizona. Patrick's in Mississippi. Annette's joining us from SoCal. Solhail is from Pakistan. Zeke is from deep South Texas. I love it. You're so poetic, Zeke. That's great. And Don is joining from Colorado. We love having all of you. And type your questions for Vanessa Bohns into the chat box. So, a question, Vanessa, that I'm curious about. I read an interview with you where you're talking about your book, and you put forward the concept that you should always be thinking of ways to make it easier for people to say no to you. Why would you want to do such a thing? Please enlighten us.

That's right. So we tend to have this sort of misconception that people are sort of inclined to say no to us. And you see this all the time, right? Like how to get past no and how to get to yes, as if everyone's just ready to reject us all the time. But in fact, in my research and others' research, we find that it's really hard to say no. And so even if we reflect on our own experiences of people asking us to do something, you know, a boss asking us to stay late or someone stopping us on the street and asking us for a favor, in those moments, it's really hard to say no. It's especially hard to say no if it's someone in a position of power over us. And so actually, this is a misperception that it's easy for other people to say no to us, right? And we can sort of see that in our own lives. And so one of the suggestions I often make is, If you're not sure about something that you're asking someone for, right? If you're not sure they really wanna do it and you really truly want them to sort of buy into what you're asking, you wanna actually make it easier for them to say no. You wanna ask in ways that don't put them on the spot where they don't feel pressured and then go on to sort of reject, regret saying yes, right? That you want them to actually have time to process. And so some ways of doing that, that I try to do are not to ask for things In person on the spot. If I really want a yes, that is my go-to move, right? Ask on the spot in person because it does put people in a situation where they feel like they really have to say yes and it's hard to say no. But if I really want this person to buy in, if I really want their consent, if I want to make sure that they feel free to say no, then I might ask them in person and say, email me your answer, right? I don't want to know right now. Take time, think about it. And then email me the answer so you don't have to tell me to my face. And that makes— that gives people a space to say no if they want to say no.

I love it. That's my go-to strategy for second dates. So well, well done, Vanessa. That sounds great. And a question came in. Oh, and by the way, if you're enjoying this conversation, go to vanessabohns.com. That's who we're interviewing, and you can learn more about her and her work, including her book, You Have More Influence Than You Think, at vanessabohns.com. And if you are enjoying this conversation in general, guess what? We do it every Thursday at noon Eastern, 9 Pacific, 5 o'clock in London. All you need to do is go to dorieclarke.com. That's me. You can download a self-assessment and join the email list, and you will get reminders for great conversations like this where we're talking about the power of persuasion. But a great question came in Vanessa, from Siraj, and he wants to know, is there any way to gauge or measure the influence you have on others? I mean, we can assume, you know, if you're the CEO of a company, you probably have a lot of influence. But in other cases, it may be a little bit more subtle. How do we actually know? How can we tell this?

Yeah, and this is a great question because one of the main reasons we tend to underestimate our influence is that we guess what our influence is. We guess what people thought of the thing that we said. We guess how someone's feeling about something that we ask them, right? And we are often incorrect when we try to guess what's going on in someone else's minds. We use all the information we have access to, what we want them to be thinking, stereotypes we might have of them, ideas about who they are as a person, and we don't actually know what they're actually thinking. And interestingly, it turns out that the best way to figure out what someone else is thinking or how we've impacted them is to ask, right? It seems so simple. But psychologists call this getting perspective instead of just trying to take perspective, where you're just trying to figure out what's going on in someone's head. You actually have to ask in some way. And so you can do this in lots of different ways. You know, if you're talking about sort of general influence, of course, we all know about 360-degree feedback and things like that, where we can get some insight into how other people are experiencing the things that we're putting out into the world or the workplace. But it could also just be through having conversations with the person we're interested in or with people who might know what's going on in their heads. But at the end of the day, no one can tell you more than that person the influence that you've had on them.

Really great. Thank you. I'm Dori Clark. We're here with Vanessa Bohns. She's a professor at Cornell and she is the author of the book You Have More Influence Than You Think. We want to say hi to our amazing friends tuning in from across the globe. Jamie is in California. We have a LinkedIn friend from Houston. Suraj, who just asked the great question, is from New Delhi. Monica's from Lisbon. Christine's in Rochester. We have a LinkedIn friend from California. Alicia is in Oakland. Lupe is from Arizona. We have a LinkedIn friend from Las Vegas. Danielle is in Brazil, and Alcibiades is from Denmark. Wow, I love that. You don't hear too many Alcibiades, but I am a fan of Plato's Symposium, so props to you. All right, amazing. Vanessa, we have a great question. Alicia wants to know Can you recommend ways to increase our rejection tolerance? And is it the same as resilience? If people are going to be saying no to us, how can we cope with this and not get demoralized? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I love this question so much. And so one thing I talk about in my book is something called rejection therapy, which is not a real therapy. So it's kind of— it's more of a fun game. But it's actually based in some pretty realistic therapeutic techniques such as exposure therapy. And this game that has been created and is out there if you want to Google it basically asks you to find a way to be rejected every day. So you ask people for these crazy things. It could be like, you know, you're walking down the street and you're like, okay, will you dance with me down the street to a random stranger? Or, you know, in one of them You have to ask someone if you can make an announcement, right, at like Target over the announcement speaker. And so there are these kind of wacky things that you can do to get a feel for rejection and realize it's not so bad. And often what people report after going through this rejection therapy is that they realize that rejection isn't so terrible. And that actually when people reject you, they're a lot nicer than you expect. And actually people are way less likely to reject you than you think. And so I actually have 15 years of research on this question where we send people out into the world, have them ask for things, and people are less likely to reject them than they expect. I'll add one more point to that, which is that what we find is that when people reject you, it's more often than not because of circumstances and not because of you or what you're asking or them or the relationship, all the things we worry about. So the person who's rejected kind of attributes it to all that stuff. But the person doing the rejecting is like, I just don't have time or the experience or whatever it might be. And so it often isn't as meaningful as we tend to make it out to be. So hopefully that makes you feel better as well.

I think that is very comforting. Thank you. We're here with Vanessa Bohns. She's the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think. If you're liking this conversation, hit like, hit share so that your friends on social media can see it and benefit from it as well. And we have great friends who are joining us. Jonathan is in Costa Rica. Peter is tuning in from Edinburgh. Govind is here. Diane is from Oxford. Dee is from San Diego. Jason's in New Jersey. Anis is in Qatar. We have Steven Durga from Durham. We've got another Steven from San Jose. We have Dia from Algiers and Honida from the United Arab Emirates. And Sushma is in India. We love having all of you. Thanks for being here. And thanks for your great questions. Including one from Lupe. Now, this is a broad question, but an important one, Vanessa. Lupe in Arizona wants to know, how do you use persuasion to lift people up and do good? If we just want to, you know, put something, put good vibes into the universe, maybe we want to help our coworkers, maybe we want to be a better friend or a better neighbor or a better person. How can we go about and use persuasion in order to do it? What are your tips?

Yeah, I love this question as well. You guys all have such good questions. And I think this also goes back to the sort of formal definition of influence that many of us think of, and then sort of how, what influence actually is. And when we define influence, it really is just changing someone's attitude or behavior or how they feel. And so when I talk about influence, that includes things like just giving compliments to people. Expressing gratitude to people. And it turns out we have studies where we have people make a guess about how good expressing a compliment will make someone feel. We actually have them go out and give compliments to people and then measure how good it makes them feel. And we all seem to underestimate how good a kind word can make somebody else feel and sort of how it can actually change the culture in an organization. How it can make someone feel like they want to continue doing whatever it is they're being complimented on or, you know, have read a gratitude letter or an expression of gratitude about. And so even these simple little things that we think aren't, you know, a big deal, that we think, you know, aren't going to be that meaningful to people actually mean a lot. And so even just putting out there those positive vibes actually makes a big difference.

Great point. We're here with the Newsweek weekly interview show Better. I'm Dory Clark. We're interviewing Vanessa Bonds, author of You Have More Influence Than You Think. We want to say hi to our amazing friends from around the world. Rogerio is here from Brazil. We have Godwin from Nigeria. Adnan's in Turkey. Vijay's in India. We have Fatia from Egypt and many more. Thank you for being here, including Rita Marie from Ireland. And a question came in for you, Vanessa, from Belfast. And Claire in Belfast wants to know, What do you feel about the interplay between influence and power in real terms? For instance, access to resources or work schedules. And when the rubber meets the road, we've, you know, we've got, we've got, you know, sort of soft influence, but there's, there's real resources at stake. And so how do we think about these factors playing together? What are your thoughts?

Yeah. So there's a lot of different places I could go with this question about power and influence. I'll, I'll make a couple of points. So one is that we tend to think if we don't have power, this kind of hierarchical power, that we don't have influence. And we know that that actually isn't true, that there's a lot of ways to have influence without power. And 2 of the big ones are through our sort of social standing or social status in the group. So networking with people, developing nice relationships with people, which also in my book I talk about, is easier than you think to do, right? Having, just having people sort of like you and respect you actually gives you a lot of influence, even if you don't have this sort of authority or this hierarchical kind of power. Another thing is informational power. So if you really know your stuff and you know what is going on, people are going to turn to you and you're going to have a lot of influence, even again, if you don't have this sort of positional power. And so you can have influence without power. Another sort of interesting aspect, though, of this interaction between power and influence is that people with that hierarchical power— and Dori sort of alluded to this before— often forget how much influence comes with that power. So they actually tend to underestimate their power in some situations, or influence in some situations, even more than people with less power. Because we spend so long getting up to that power position, we forget that we're not those people anymore, right? That now we have this new role. We are less likely when we're in a position of power to take other people's perspectives and kind of figure out how they're really reacting to the things we say. And we're in a position where we can kind of say no if we want. So we assume everybody else can do that as well. So there's a lot of things that go on when we have power that make us underestimate the influence that comes with that power. And there's a lot of ways to have influence without power.

That's great. Thank you, Vanessa Bohns. If you're interested in learning more about Vanessa and her book, Just go to vanessabohns.com. You can check it out there. We have amazing friends tuning in. Heather's in Connecticut, Marie's in Atlanta, Herman is in Indonesia, and Amjad is in Kuwait. We're so glad all of you are joining this conversation for Newsweek. And I am curious, Vanessa, one of the things that, that, you know, we've been talking about persuasion in an interpersonal context, but there's also broader societal persuasion. And I know you have talked a bit about some, some of the ways that this plays in with some of the recent cultural phenomena around viral misinformation or around the MeToo movement. Can you talk about persuasion in a kind of broader, more global context?

Yeah. So one of the things I talk about in terms of social media in particular is something called the invisible audience. And so this is something that researchers at MIT have identified where When we post something online, we guess sort of how many people see it based on how many engagements we get, how many people like it, how many people comment on it. And that's not often a very high percentage of the people who actually see it. So we tend to think that the things we sort of put into the, you know, internet ether aren't seen by that many people, when in fact the actual numbers of people who see it are much, much higher than we expect. And there's this invisible audience of people. who actually see the things we put out there. The problem with that is that when we put something out there that's actually misinformation, right, it often tends to be spread faster than true information. And so if we don't slow down and sort of check the things that we're saying, the articles that we're retweeting and sharing, we could be putting things out into the world, and that could be having a bigger impact than we tend to think. So this kind of plays out both on this interpersonal level, as you said, but also in this sort of broader societal level as well.

Great point. Thank you. We're here with Vanessa Bohns and we're talking about persuasion and influence. And a great question came in, Vanessa, from Nisha. And she wants to know, as a leader, what are the key traits that one needs to cultivate for influence? If we're, if we're thinking about, you know, how we can actually burnish this as a skill, what should we be working on?

Yeah. And so, I think that one of the interesting things when you become a leader, when you're in that position, we think so hard about how we're going to influence people, how we're going to get them to listen to us, right? When in fact, simply being in that position, the default is that people are primed to listen to you. They're primed to hear the things that you say. And so, we often approach it from this perspective of, okay, I have a problem. I'm going to present it to the team. And I'm quickly going to present my answer to it and then see what the team thinks of it, right? Because I'm going to influence them. And I need to prove why I'm here so that they'll follow me and know that I'm smart and know what I'm doing. And we have all those insecurities that make us talk and give our opinions. In fact, the best thing to do often as a leader is to step back and listen. And that brings more influence, ironically. So if you just blurt out what you think, right, all of a sudden, the room kind of assumes that's what you want to hear. And you're not going to get alternate perspectives. And you're not going to have a lot of debate. But if you step back and you ask good questions, and you listen, and you do it in a way where people, you know, feel free, there's psychological safety where people really feel free to voice their ideas, that can give you more influence. And it also can just make you a better leader because you're getting different perspectives. You're not just relying on yourself.

Excellent point. Thank you very much. We're here with Vanessa Bohns. She's the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think. And we're talking about persuasion, the positives and the negatives. And Sushma wants to go there to— she wants to know about the dark side here, Vanessa. She says, how and where do you draw the line between persuasion and coercion when the positive force becomes too much and it becomes negative? How can we tell the difference and be mindful of that?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. So I have many studies, as I said, for the past 15 years, I've been exploring this question of whether people will do things for us when we ask for them. And so I spent the first, you know, maybe 5 years looking at asking for help and things that, you know, feel very innocuous and benign and just all around positive, right? And people are more likely to agree to help us with things than we think. But I also had this question, right? If people are more likely to help us with things than, than we think, and part of the reason for that is that it's actually really hard to say no, what other things might people do too? And so we extended that research to get people to— our participants in our studies— to ask people for things that were unethical. And so one of my favorite studies, we actually gave our participants fake library books Sent them into libraries and had them ask people to vandalize these library books. They said, hey, I'm playing a prank on my friend. Will you just write the word pickle in pen in this library book? And guess how many people would say yes to that? And it turns out we got the same findings we had gotten for our help requests. So people were more likely to agree to that than our participants expected because it was so hard to say no.

Wait, how many people did it?

More than half of people said yes. And our participants thought that most people would say no.

So civilization is going down. Geez,

it is a shocking, uh, finding even for us. And so I think it's, it's such an important part to, uh, point to make is that if people listen to us more than we think, if it's hard for them to say no more than we realize, then we really have this responsibility to make sure that we aren't using our persuasion for, you know, bad and that we're not being coercive.

Excellent. We're Getting into the denouement of our conversation here with Vanessa Bonds. If you want to learn more about her and her work and check out her book, go to her website. It's vanessabonds.com. The book is You Have More Influence Than You Think. And if you want to tune in every Thursday, we're here at noon Eastern, 9 Pacific, 6 o'clock in continental Europe. It is our weekly Newsweek interview show, Better. And you can sign up and download our self-assessment. You'll get reminders at dori-clark.com. But one last question, which I think is a great one, and it's on many people's minds, Vanessa. Our friend Adnan in Turkey wants to know, what are the biggest mistakes to reduce our influence? If you're a leader, if you're an aspiring leader, you just want to be a more influential person. What are the things we should avoid that would be blowing our chance to influence other people?

OK, I've got 3 points to answer that. So one is the, is the fact that we just assume that people are primed to say no. So we go into a situation assuming that we have to push extra hard to get someone to listen to us, or we kind of negotiate ourselves down before we ask for something because we go in with this assumption that we are sort of fighting against someone who is going to say no. So going into something assuming that actually someone is quite likely to say yes can help you set the tone. And then there's 2 sort of more practical suggestions. One is that asking for things in person, you know, we talked about how when you want to give people space, you don't want to ask and make them say yes in person. If you really want a yes, in person is the best way to ask for something. And then being direct instead of indirect. So when we ask participants, you know, do you think it's better to sort of just ask for something directly or to sort of hint at what you might need, right? They don't really see a big difference. They're like, well, it's kind of polite to hint and people will get it and they'll say yes if they get what I'm saying. But no, you have to actually directly ask for what you need and be clear about it. And part of that is realizing that people are receptive, more receptive than we think to those kinds of requests.

Fantastic. Bringing it in on time. It is exactly 12:30. So thank you so much. This is Dori Clark, repeat, here for Newsweek with Vanessa Bohns. She is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think. Thank you all for tuning in. And Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me, and thank you all for your wonderful questions.

Thanks, and see you all next week.