The Science of Persuasion | Vanessa Bohns | Podcast Episode 550

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. Unfortunately for me, and, uh, you may have noticed this in your own life, people do not just automatically do whatever I want them to do. The world does not bend to my will, not for lack of trying. Or perhaps more accurately, not for lack of trying skillfully. Today we're going to hear from a researcher who has been studying the best ways to influence, to persuade. Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist and a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She's the author of a book called You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion and Why It Matters. In this conversation, we talked about how much we often underestimate our influence, why it's so hard for people to say no, why people are paying more attention to us than we might think, the impact of asking for things in person, the responsibility that comes with being in a position of power, why we should work on getting perspective rather than taking perspective, and what it means to experience your own influence and how we can be more aware of the influence we have. We'll get started with Vanessa Bohns after this. Before we get started with today's episode, a brief word about the very fun topic of anxiety. If you're dealing with anxiety, you're in good company. That is, if you consider me good company. The bad news is that anxiety is unlikely to disappear overnight, but the good news is that you can change your relationship to it. I've seen this play out in my own life over and over again. And this is why we over on the 10% Happier app are relaunching one of our most popular meditation challenges ever. It's called the Taming Anxiety Challenge. It starts on February 6th. In this challenge, you'll hear, uh, meditation teacher Leslie Booker and Harvard Medical School Associate Professor Dr. Luana Marquez provide many, many strategies for dealing with anxiety. You'll get videos and meditations specifically designed to help you tame your anxiety, as well as daily meditation reminders to help keep you on track. To join the challenge, just download the 10% Happier app today wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com, all one word spelled out. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join. Okay, now on with the show.

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Hey, thanks so much for having me.

It's a pleasure. I love to ask this question of people who've gone deep on a very specific issue In your case, why influence? What got you about this subject matter?

It all started when I was a graduate student at Columbia University in New York, and I was working with a professor there, Frank Flynn, at the business school. And we were collecting data for a study where we wanted a diverse set of participants. We wanted adults, not just college students. And so what I would do is I would have to go down to Penn Station every day, with my little surveys in tow, and go up to strangers and ask them to fill out a survey. And I did this day after day, and it was just absolutely horrible and really painful. And, you know, to this day, Penn Station brings back all sorts of traumatic feelings. And then, you know, the study ended, and I brought my data back to Frank, and we analyzed it. And when we looked at the data, it turned out that the study didn't work. And it was particularly devastating for me. You know, this happens all the time. Studies don't work in science, but it was just so devastating to me because it was such a traumatic experience because collecting that data was so awful. And so I expressed that to him and I said, oh my God, I can't believe after all I went through that the study didn't work. And then he was looking at the data. And one thing I had collected was how many people said yes to me, and also any sort of responses they made if they said no. And he was like, you are describing this horrible experience, but I'm looking at this data and actually most people seem to be saying yes to you. And even when they're not, they seem to be being really nice to you. So, you know, what's going on? What's this sort of disconnect between how you experienced those interactions with people and how they were actually going? And so that was sort of the start of it, this idea that I could have such a salient emotional experience that felt so sort of, you know, negative in many ways. But in fact, in reality, people were quite kind and people were quite helpful, and I actually did have quite a bit of influence and got a lot of people to do this thing I was asking them to do. And so that was sort of the beginning of this study, and then seeing it replicate again and again and again in the lab and seeing how surprised other people are by the influence they have and how much better things go in reality than they are in our head has sort of kept me at it.

I love that, and I have so many questions, but let me just start. Is it possible that you were getting better responses because you're a young white woman as opposed to somebody who didn't share those characteristics, who might have, you know, might be less socially— might be more marginal socially? subject to racism or sexism in ways that you aren't?

Absolutely. And so the first question we sort of asked was, is this something special about me, be it, you know, my age or my demographic profile in some other way, my race? You know, people have said all sorts of sort of possibilities— the way I was dressed, my attractiveness level, whatever it might be. And so the first sort of step before we concluded too much from my personal experience was to bring other people into the lab and have them do exactly what I did. And so we started bringing participants into our lab and sending them out and having them ask people for favors. And we started with the very favor I had asked people at Penn Station. So we said, welcome to the study. We're going to have you go out and ask people to fill out a questionnaire. And before you do that, we want you to guess how many people are gonna say yes to you. Then you're gonna go out and actually do this, and keep track of how many people say yes, and come back and report to us what happened. And so now, across my studies for 15 years now, you know, we've run over 15,000 people in these kinds of paradigms, and what we find is that, in fact, across all sorts of different demographics, people make this error. They think that people are gonna be more likely to reject them than they are, they think it's gonna be harder to get people to agree to things, or to do things for them than it actually is. actually winds up being. And it's funny because when we run these studies, you know, we look at the data, but we also interact with the participants. And often you don't get a big sense of what's going on before you actually look at the numbers. But we bring participants into the lab, and as soon as we tell them you're going to ask strangers for things, there's like this palpable anxiety, right? They're just annoyed that they have to do this. They ask us questions like— What if nobody says yes? What if I don't finish in the time that I have? And then they go out and they do this, and they practically bound back into the lab. They're just so amazed at how much easier it was than they expected and how much nicer people were than they had expected. And so you really kind of see what happens in front of your eyes and sort of this misperception that many of us have of all different demographic groups.

I'm just trying to think back to my own experiences. One of the worst parts of being a TV news journalist was, for me, something we call MOS— man on the street— a term invented in a less enlightened time. But MOS was you just stop people on the street and ask them for their opinion on whatever story you were covering. I guess another name for this is vox pop. And so I would sometimes have to go stand on the street corner with a camera and ask people if they'd be willing to talk to me, and I hated it. Hated it. Really, really hated it. So I totally— I, I completely relate to the anxiety, the palpable anxiety you're describing among your study subjects. Wondering then, if people estimated that they were going to get refused X percentage of the time, how much more likely were people to say yes to them? Because in my experience doing MOS and in my experience walking through the streets of New York City and having people stop me for any number of things, and generally speaking, I don't acquiesce. I'm just wondering what the actual success rate is.

Yeah. So what we find is that people underestimate by about twice as much the likelihood that people will agree to these requests. And that has happened across the board. So we've had people ask, as I said, for, you know, will you fill out this survey? We've had them ask to borrow people's cell phones and call us back at the lab. And so they have to get like 3 unique phone numbers to call back from. We've sent them out and had them ask someone to escort them to a location they couldn't find that's 3 city blocks away. We've also worked with Team in Training, which is part of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and they basically are a charitable organization where you raise money by getting sponsored for a race. And so we worked with people who were already committed to participating and raising money for this race. And they also underestimated by about twice as much how many people would agree to this request to sponsor them for this race. So they thought they would have to ask about 200 people to meet their fundraising goals, which were in the thousands of dollars, but they actually had to ask around 100 people. So once again, about, about the same amount. So that's what we find in our studies. But the interesting thing about your circumstance, right, is that you're standing there with a camera and a microphone and you're kind of advertising. that you're going to ask people for something potentially. And so that is one context where we don't get these effects. So if someone's standing there with a clipboard looking very obviously like a canvasser, or— there's one place in Toronto where there were a bunch of people asking for donations for Greenpeace and all sorts of other organizations, and that's the one place we had trouble finding our result because— Why? Suddenly, when people know they're about to be asked, they're sort of primed to come up with their script to say no. And so it winds up being a lot easier for them to say no because they see you coming, right? And they prepare.

Yes. So I guess that was part of my skepticism about this, because I say no to people, all politely, who are asking me to fill out a survey or to give money on the street. Let me just make one little Caveat here is that I, when I lived in the city, I did carry ones to hand out to homeless people. But that's a, I think, a slightly, maybe slightly different subject. But if somebody asked me on the street to give them directions or for my cell phone, I think I would be 100% likely to do both of those.

Yeah. And so when we talk about the mechanism for this, like the reason Is that if you imagine yourself from the perspective that you're suggesting, like the person who's being approached, right? And someone comes up to you and genuinely says, I need to use your cell phone. I need to make a call to my doctor or my friend who I'm meeting up with and my phone is dead. It's really hard to say no in that situation. It's really hard to sort of find the words, even if you don't feel comfortable with it. Even if you feel like, I don't really wanna give my phone to this person. I don't know if I trust this person. It's so awkward to actually say, no, I'm sorry. You feel like a bad person. You feel like you're insinuating something about the other person, like that they are untrustworthy in some way. And so the awkwardness of saying no actually drives a lot of our effects. But when we're asking someone for something, we really don't realize how much we're kind of putting them on the spot. And so we've kind of used that mechanism to have our participants ask for all sorts of other things. sometimes unethical things and find the same sorts of results.

Okay, so tell me more about that. You— we— you found that people can go out and ask for unethical things from strangers, or maybe not strangers, and the yes rates are higher than you might expect?

Yes. And so this is again because of this mechanism. So there's kind of 2 things going on, right? We are more helpful than people anticipate us being, and that's true both ways, right? Like, other people are more helpful than we anticipate. So there's actually a happy story here, but there's also sort of a darker story, which we find as well, which is that it's also just really hard to say no in the moment when someone's asking you for something. And so to test this, we've run studies where we've sent our participants out and had them, in one study, ask people to tell a simple lie. So we told our participants, okay, you're going to go out and say that you're doing this pitch that you really don't want to do, but you have to get signatures saying you did this pitch as part of your job. And so you're just going to ask people, will you just sign this? I'm not going to give the pitch, I just don't feel like it, but just sign your name here. And so people had to lie for them. And we once again had them guess how many people would agree, and then they kept track of how many people agreed. And we found the same sort of pattern where people are about twice as likely to agree as our participants expected. And You could kind of listen to that and say, yeah, but that doesn't seem like a really big unethical request. And the other person could kind of code it as being helpful, right, as a prosocial favor that you're doing for somebody. And so we followed it up by trying to come up with a request that was really clearly unethical that everyone would sort of code as being wrong. And what we did is we sent our participants into libraries with books that we made to look like library books, and we had them go up to strangers 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 then they saw what people did. And again, they guessed how many people would actually agree to vandalize these library books, and then they recorded how many people actually did. And once again, they guessed that most people would say no, but about— 10%. Twice as often as they expected, people wound up saying yes. And in these cases, it wasn't necessarily because they were being helpful. You know, they were saying things like, this doesn't seem right, we shouldn't be doing this. But it was so uncomfortable for them to say no that they wound up doing something that they also found very uncomfortable, which was vandalizing this library book.

Why is it so hard to say no?

Yeah, so we are a social species. We're evolutionarily wired to maintain ties with the group and maintain relationships. And saying no feels very socially risky. It feels like we're communicating so many things that might break this relationship, right? That we're communicating that we're not a helpful person, that we don't care about this other person, that potentially the other person is asking for something they shouldn't. And so the other person is doing something wrong, and that— can make the whole interaction awkward. And so when we're in the position of saying no, it feels very socially risky. And in fact, we tend to exaggerate those risks. So research shows that people don't judge us as harshly as we expect when we say no, but we expect this really harsh judgment just for saying no to somebody.

Either in your research or just in your applying your wisdom to your field of study, do you have any advice to those of us who have trouble saying no and need to say no more often? I'm asking this for a friend.

Yeah, so saying no is most difficult when it's face-to-face and you're put on the spot. You kind of have to do it right away, make your decision, say yes or no. And so the best advice that we have from our research is to buy yourself time to say no. So if someone asks you for something on the spot, you say, let me think about that. You don't have to say no right there because that's really hard for people. Let me think about that. Get back to me with an email, or I'll email you my response. Something that allows you to sort of make a decision mindfully about whether you wanna agree to something or not, and then allows you to write out in words that you feel good about why you're saying no, if that's what you choose to do. Because a lot of us just can't find the words in the moment to say no, and we wanna communicate like, it's not about you, it's not about us, I'm a good person. There's so much we wanna say. But we can't find the words. But if you actually take some time to think of a way to let the person down and do it over email, often that can be a much easier way for people to say no.

You know, I've heard it argued, and I, I think I agree with this argument, that it, it is a, a form of courageous boundary setting to learn how to say— I think people have argued this on this show, but former guests— that it's a courageous form of boundary setting to learn how to say no so that you can maintain your priorities, especially if you've thoughtfully set your priorities about your purpose on the planet.

Yeah, exactly. And I think in the moment, it— the sort of pressure of the situation and the awkwardness and the emotional context of having someone ask for something can lead you to forget your overall priorities and make you feel like you're making one decision, when in fact, every time we agree to one thing, we're basically saying no to something else that we won't have time to do. So we can't kind of consider all these things that we are considering doing, considering saying yes to, and which ones we really care the most about, right? Unless we actually are a little bit more mindful, we take a step back and think about the things that saying yes to this thing might take us away from.

My former ABC News colleague George Stephanopoulos once said to me, when he gets asked things, He tells himself, if this was tomorrow, would I say yes? Which I've, I've tried to apply to a lot of the asks that come over the transom for me. But let me get back to your research for a second. So it seems like you said there's a happy story and a less happy story. So it seems like the happy story is human beings, because we are social animals, are more helpful than we might imagine. And that tendency to be helpful is exploitable through abusers and con men.

That's exactly right. So if you need help, it's easier to get it than we tend to think, right? The things that we kind of want to influence people to do or want to convince people to do are actually more within reach than we tend to think. But as you said, that can be exploited. And so it's something, you know, it's a very Spider-Man-y sort of conclusion where it's like with great power comes this responsibility that actually you do wanna think twice before you ask someone for something because they may actually find it difficult to say no to you if they don't wanna do it.

I say that Spider-Man thing to my son all the time. So one of the things you argue in your book is that in the spirit of us having more influence than we might think, that we don't need to pay or be overly assertive, that sometimes in order to get our requests met, we offer to compensate or we make our case very, very strenuously. But apparently neither of those is necessary much of the time.

That's right. So we tend to have this default assumption that other people don't want to agree to the things that we're going to ask them or are really going to push back when we try to convince them of something. And That assumption tends to be wrong, but it leads us to either hold back and not ask, or just not push at all, or it leads us to go in sort of guns blazing, really overly aggressive. So we may think this person would never agree to do this unless I paid them, and so we offer money, or we think this person is just clearly not going to listen to what I have to say, so I'm going to go in and make this really assertive argument to convince them. When in fact, the research shows that people respond much more positively to less assertive arguments, persuasive arguments. And also, we found that when we get our participants to either offer people money in exchange for a small favor or just ask for a small favor, that the money doesn't impact actual compliance rates. People are just as likely to do things for free, but our participants think that money is going to make all the difference. And so when we sort of assume that people don't really want to help us out or do things, we try to get them to do things in all sorts of unnecessary ways.

I get you on the money, but I'm having some hesitance on the assertive front because I'm just interpolating back into my life, in particular in the rather tumultuous and sharp-elbowed world of television, where I've had the experience often with either junior colleagues or female colleagues where in particular a male boss just won't listen until you light your hair on fire. And so how does this anecdotal evidence that I'm presenting you jibe with the quantitative evidence that you've gathered in your studies?

Yeah, and I think you make an important distinction that I should make clear. You know, I'm using the word assertive, but aggressive is probably the better word to use because Being direct and assertive, right, is a good thing. And often we won't be clear about what we're asking for or clear about what we think and the reasons for it. And so all of that is actually very important for influence, but being overly aggressive where you're pushing really, really hard can sometimes just cause people to shut down and there, there's this backlash. So there's research where people have been asked, for example, in the case of trying to get a loved one to take better care of their health. Mm-hmm. These researchers asked people, you know, is it better to say, maybe you should try this, like a soft approach, or, you've got to do this? And people think that you've got to do this, this more like aggressive, assertive, it's unclear exactly where that falls, is gonna be the more effective message. But in fact, the more subtle, gentle message tends to work better. So part of it could be the context. I'm sure there's some contexts where you have to be more aggressive or more assertive, potentially because the culture is that way. certainly some contexts where we maybe overapply that when a softer approach would be more effective.

Coming up, Vanessa Bohns talks about how we often underestimate how much other people are paying attention to us, why we're often too hard on ourselves, and why it's better to ask for things in person or on the phone rather than digitally. That and more coming up.

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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We're in a new year. Many people are thinking about how they can be their best selves. I would strongly argue that one of the most powerful levers you can pull when it comes to self-improvement is therapy. I've been talking to my therapist for many years. He helps me with everything from interpersonal conflict to intrapersonal conflict, you know, me fighting with myself. To insomnia, to a recent resurgence of claustrophobia I had, which by the way is getting much better with his help. Working with a therapist can genuinely help you get to the best version of you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's completely online, convenient, flexible, and affordable. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/happier today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/happier. All right, so let's, let's reset for a second because the, the book, as I understand it, was really designed for individuals to be more effective in the world. And I think I'm quoting you back to you here. You say, when we think about how much influence we have, the first mistake we make is underestimating how much other people pay attention to us. And I believe you call this the invisibility cloak illusion. Can you talk about that?

Sure. So this is based on research by one of my colleagues, Erica Boothby, who has documented that basically we walk through the world doing our ordinary daily routine, kind of thinking that other people are not paying much attention to us and the things that we're doing. And so you can kind of picture this yourself. You know, maybe you put on your headphones and sit on the subway or flip through your phone or read a magazine, or maybe you have, you know, your sunglasses on and you're walking through the park and you kind of feel like you're invisible, like you're walking around in an invisibility cloak. But in fact, Erika's research shows that people are noticing us, more than we think. And so one of the reasons for this is something called gaze aversion. And so if we go back to the subway and you're sitting there and you kind of look up and you catch someone's eye, right? When she asks people, you know, if you catch someone's eye, did they catch you looking at them or did you just catch them looking at you? We tend to assume that they just caught us looking at them when it's just as likely that they were looking at us. And so these sort of polite norms of averting our gaze when we catch someone's eye and kind of looking away make us think that no one's really paying attention to us and we're observing other people. And so she's also done studies where she's asked people who are sitting in a cafeteria, as they exit the cafeteria, she asked them, how much were you sort of noticing the people around you and wondering what they were thinking and wondering what was going on in their minds? And then she also asked people, How much do you think those other people were noticing you? And she finds this bias where we think that we are paying more attention to other people and are more curious about other people than other people are actually paying attention to us and are curious about us.

It's interesting because I've always kind of found the opposite to be a form of wisdom. In other words, I've heard it argued, and maybe I've myself argued, that We can get really caught in our own heads and our own stories about what other people are thinking about us, but they're probably not thinking about us that much. We're all the stars of our own movie, which means that everybody else is just as narcissistic, if not more than we are. So don't worry so much about what other people think of you. I, I remember something a former boss of mine said to me once about humiliation he had endured, and he compared it to seasickness. He said, for you, it feels like the world is ending, but for everybody else, it's only mildly amusing. So what say you in response to that?

Yeah, so you're describing another finding called the spotlight effect, and this is our tendency when we're really self-conscious about something— when we're having a bad hair day or we feel like we've misspoken or did something stupid— we think everybody's looking at us. We think that we're in the spotlight, when in fact most people aren't noticing that thing that we're really, really focused on. And so Erica Boothby, the one who did the invisibility cloak illusion, kind of reconciled these 2 effects in a study where she either gave people something to be really self-conscious about— so she had people put on a t-shirt that was really embarrassing to wear, and she asked them how much other people noticed this embarrassing t-shirt— or she just had them show up to the lab and asked them how much people noticed the ordinary clothes that they had come to the lab wearing. And it turns out that when there's something you're acutely self-conscious about, like something embarrassing you're wearing or something embarrassing you've done, you think everyone's noticing that thing, but in fact they really aren't. But when you're just kind of going through your everyday life, doing ordinary things, wearing your ordinary clothes, people are noticing you more than you tend to think. And so it means when we're kind of off, when we're not really self-monitoring, that other people are paying attention to us. And it could be with very important things. You know, they could be noticing whether we're wearing a mask or whether we threw something in the recycling bin or whether we littered. These kind of behaviors we may do throughout the day thinking no one's really noticing, they actually are noticing some of those things.

So it's really about expectations that other people are paying attention to us all the time. But if we're acutely self-conscious, like I, for all of 7th grade, I had a pimple right here in the crevice of my nose, and I thought everybody was noticing that all the time. time, they probably weren't noticing it as much as I thought they were. By the same token, I might have felt like a complete loser in 7th grade. Nobody cares, nobody notices that I'm even walking through the hallways. This would be on other days, and on those days, actually, people were more aware of my presence than I would have given myself credit for. And it really comes back to, as I said before, expectation.

Yeah, and I think it comes down to— I'd say I would call it focus, kind of like what are you really And most of us, you know, we're looking out at the world, looking around us. We don't see ourselves when we're looking through our own two eyes, and so we're not really part of sort of the main features of what we're observing. And so for the most part, we're not super, super focused on what other people are looking at on us. But then as soon as we're self-conscious about something, we become really focused on that and assume that everybody is. And so I do think it's a very sort of heartening, reassuring story that We kind of mean more in the landscape of the world as we walk around than we think. You know, people are noticing us, we are having an impact, but not in these ways that we're really worried about.

So this is all very interesting, but where does the rubber hit the road as it applies to influence?

So there's several different ways that this can impact the influence that we have on other people. One way is through something called behavior contagion. And so this is basically the tendency of behaviors to spread to One person sees me do something and notices me doing that more than I realize that they do, and that impacts whether they go on to do that thing, right? It tells them sort of what the norms of the situation are, and that leads them to do that more and leads their friends to do that more, etc. So one example of this by one of my colleagues, Bob Frank, is the idea of solar panels And neighborhoods. And he talks about how if you look at neighborhoods from sort of an aerial view, you see these clusters of solar panels where people see their neighbor put up a solar panel. They notice them doing that. They kind of are curious about why they might be doing that, you know, what advantages might that have. And as you are curious about other people, you're basically playing the decision out in your own mind, right? Hmm, I wonder if we should do that. And then that leads you to be more likely to actually adopt that behavior. And so you sort of see behavior spreading almost like a disease, right, as these sort of solar panels pop out. So that's one way through this behavioral contagion. Another way is that one thing we do is that we know that other people like us more when we say things that we think they want to hear. Right. And so if I'm in a meeting, for example, and I notice that you're in this meeting, I'm going to sort of talk about things in a way that I think is going to be amendable to you. And this is called audience tuning. So you can imagine a situation where you have an audience full of men or an audience full of men and women, and maybe you're talking about like HR benefits or something. And it's more likely that I'm gonna think talking about maternity leave will appeal to the women in the room. And so I'm more likely to bring that up and talk about why that's important. And there's another phenomenon called the saying is believing effect. So now I'm talking about why maternity leave is important because I think that's gonna make you happy and I want you to like me. And that's now making me think, actually, that is really important cuz you're nodding and I'm saying it and it seems like maybe that's a really good idea. And what's so fascinating about that is that the people in the room are essentially influencing what the speaker believes without saying a thing themselves. Just because we guess what that person wants to hear, we say it, it's confirmed through this sort of affirmation of them nodding. And now I'm thinking, actually, that was a pretty good idea that I thought that they would like, and it turns out they like.

Again, all of this is just so interesting. The human animal is so interesting. And I'm trying to get a sense of, like, what you would advise us based on these findings. How do we conduct ourselves in the world and have the kind of influence we want based on what you have learned about— you and your colleagues have learned about how, how humans conduct ourselves?

I think in general we find that people notice us more than we think. They listen to the things we say and believe them more than we think. And they do things for us more than we expect. And so that means that we should show up, right? Even if we show up to the table and we don't know if we're really going to say anything, our representation there actually does matter because other people, even if we don't say anything, other people might talk about an issue more because we're there. And so we can impact the conversation in that way. But then also the things that we do say actually have more impact than we realize. And then if we actually ask for some change, We are more likely to get that change than we tend to assume.

So show up and speak up.

So show up, definitely. Even if you're not going to speak up, even better, speak up, right? And even better, actually ask for something specific.

You've also said that we tend to be too hard on ourselves in our postmortem analysis of our comments or requests. Why is that important in this context?

That's right. So you can imagine people who show up and can have this impact, but then really feel like they don't want to say anything because they don't want to seem stupid, or they're not sure they really have a firm grasp on the issues. And what's interesting is that we tend to think that if we phrase something awkwardly or we don't say it perfectly, that other people are really focused on that.

Hmm.

Right? Again, that thing that we're really self-conscious about, that I didn't phrase that quite right, did people really understand that, is not really what other people are focused on. And if you ask people sort of, what did people say in that meeting, they'll give you these broad stroke memories, right? That person was for this, this agenda point, that person was against it, they had some good points about it. You know, they're not gonna say, and they phrased it in this very specific way that was kind of awkward, right? No one's really thinking that. They're just kind of coding the room as, Okay, this person generally believes that, this person generally believes that. And so simply by saying what you believe, you can have a big impact by sort of shaping the understanding of the opinion of the room without saying it perfectly. I think we tend to hold back until we have the perfect argument and think that matters so much that we say things perfectly, when in fact simply getting it out there— this is my opinion, I don't have a fully formed way of saying it necessarily, but this is my general sort of stance at this point. That actually means a lot, especially when you're trying to sort of gauge the dynamics of a room and what people think.

That's very compelling. And I, I think, I mean, you certainly have me, and I imagine you have lots of people at this point. And yet when you say show up, and even better, speak up, fear is real and fear is hard to overcome. I say this as somebody who's got plenty of experience with anxiety and panic. And public speaking is one of, if not the greatest fears that humans harbor. So how do we get over our fears in order to operationalize your advice?

Yeah, and I, I also, I have always struggled with public speaking, which is ironic since I'm a professor now. And I am one of those people who will obsess about something I said in a meeting, worried that I didn't say it right or people thought it was just a stupid comment. And I mean, the first thing I really do to reassure myself is turn to these findings that actually people remember the gist of what we say. They don't remember the details. So there's a theory called fuzzy trace theory, and the idea is that when someone speaks, you know, we hear both things. We hear the gist of what they're saying, and we also hear the specifics, but very quickly we forget the specifics and we just remember the gist. And so I try to remind myself that. No matter how clunkily or inarticulately I make this point, that at the end of the day, it's more important to actually make it because that's what people are going to remember. Another way I think that leaders and everybody can sort of help is that it shouldn't always depend on having to speak up and make this compelling point, right? Sometimes just taking a sense of the room by anonymous ballots or even just Writing down thoughts that you have can be helpful. Another thing I often suggest to my students who have trouble speaking up is write down what you want to say and don't be afraid to read it.

Hmm.

Because a lot of us kind of have trouble coming up with the words in the moment. We start to panic and lose our train of thought, and that, that takes over. And I found that when I really struggled with that, if I wrote it down and I could read it and get over like whatever awkwardness might come from me reading off of something, that, that was really helpful. I could actually get my point out in a way that I felt good about.

It's good advice. You say in your book that if we want to have influence and get our needs met and have a request fulfilled, it's better to ask in person. You know, you've talked a little bit about the power of in person already, but Could you just say a little bit more about why in-person is so impactful? And I'll add on another question on top. How do we do that in a remote work environment?

Yeah, so it's interesting when we have run studies where we've had participants ask people for things either over email or in person. In one of our studies, we had 34 times more compliance when people asked in person. So these are just really, really big effects of asking in person as opposed to over email. Interestingly, when we asked our participants which they thought would be better, and we said, do you think this is going to be as effective as this? They don't really see a big difference because they think that when people decide to help or decide to agree to something, that they're kind of rationally thinking about the positives and negatives and deciding mindfully if they want to do something or not. And so it doesn't matter if it comes over email or it comes in person, when in fact so much of how we decide to say yes or no to something is emotional. It's in the moment and It goes back to what we talked about, about sometimes you're just put on the spot and you feel like you can't say no. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes, you know, you're asking someone for something that's good for everybody, and it's okay if you're the person in the room getting them to do that favor that's going to make them happy in the end and be helpful to you. And sometimes that really does put them on the spot in a way that later comes to bite everyone back. Regret that they committed to something or resent you or do something that they weren't comfortable with. And so I like to point out that in-person is much more effective, but that doesn't always mean that's the way we should go. And so there's lots of times, like, if I ask my graduate students to do something, I try to— even if I ask them in person, I say, answer me over email, take time to think about it, make sure that this request isn't overburdening you and that you really want to do this, if I really want them to sort of buy in. And so Your other question about how do you do this in a remote world, we've also looked at what happens when you ask over email versus phone versus video call versus in person. And what we find is that in person is better all around if what you're looking for is compliance. And so there is something fundamentally different about being in the room with someone, but if you can't be in the room with someone, It's still way better to pick up the phone or do a video call than it is to send them an email. And so even though many of us are Zoomed out at this point, I think even just picking up the phone, we didn't find a difference between video calls or phone calls, but picking up the phone still has that sort of urgency where you're talking in real time. There's this humanization where you're hearing another person's voice, so there's that emotional connection. And so I think that is the sort of next best thing that you can do if you're asking for something.

2 stories from my own life coming to mind in response to this whole conversation. One is I recently had this experience that I found pretty unpleasant. Well, part of it was pleasant. I gave a TED Talk. I'd never given a TED Talk before, and I gave a TED Talk. That was very pleasant. But then when it was set to be released, I was encouraged by the folks at TED and also my own team to basically ask everybody I know with a sizable Twitter following to tweet it out or put it on Instagram or Facebook. And I was really dreading doing this, really dreading. I hate doing things like this. And I was surprised— you will not be surprised given your research— how high the compliance rate was of just asking people to do this thing, which for me was a big deal, but for them was super easy. So that's one story. And then on a related note, I made all of those requests via text or email, and it got me thinking As did this conversation about the fact that I'm so uncomfortable with making requests that I often revert to text or email because I don't have to like see the look of pain or rejection on somebody else's face. And yet I had an experience yesterday where maybe it was in anticipation of this conversation with you. I realized I needed to ask somebody for something, and it was a bit of like an icky self-promotional favor, and I was Prepared to text him. And in fact, I just texted him and said, can I call you? And we talked about it and it went really well. I mean, it was totally no big deal to him at all, but a huge deal to me. Anyway, I'm flooding you with a bunch of information. I'm about to shut up and see what you make of all of the foregoing.

No, I love all of that and it, it's so consistent with things that we find. So one thing we find is that another sort of part of the anxiety of asking for things is that we exaggerate how big the thing is that we're asking for. So what someone else thinks is really, you know, no big deal. And it's even part of our politeness norms for asking for things. We're like, I have a huge favor to ask you, right? Like we say that even if it's not a huge favor, but we sort of exaggerate that. And the other person on the other side, the politeness norm is to be like, oh, that's no big deal. Don't worry about it. And so there's already built into our language structure and politeness norms, there's this, this sense that Asking is a really big thing, but the doing is like a no big deal kind of thing. But I think that that actually does affect us psychologically, where we think the things we're asking for are way bigger than they actually are, in the way that, you know, bigger than the other person sees them as being. And then the other point is that the people you were asking were mostly people who already knew you, and we do see a difference with emailing friends. So it's still better to get on the phone or talk in person, even for friends. But it doesn't make as much of a difference as it does for strangers or people who don't actually know you already. So it doesn't surprise me that the phone worked really well, but it also doesn't surprise me that actually email didn't work so poorly for your friends either.

Up next, Vanessa talks about the role of bullshit when it comes to influence, the importance of being responsible, especially if you have power, and what we can do to become more aware of our own influence.

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Okay, so just to recapitulate here, we've established that we should show up, speak up. We're likely to be more effective than we think, and we don't need to spend so much time second-guessing every little phrase we used while speaking up or making a request. And there seems to be quite robust evidence that when making requests, in person is best in many circumstances. However, and you made reference to this earlier, but I think now is the time to dive more deeply into this. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and we need to be careful as we go about this because we, as you say, underestimate how easy it is for other people to fall for our bullshit.

That's right. So we talked earlier about the invisibility cloak illusion. There's also something called the invisible audience on social media and on the internet. And so these are the people we don't realize are also noticing and sort of taking in our tweets and the information we put out there. So In one context, right, you know, you could think on social media, you know, I see an article or I just come up with a thought. I don't really know if it's true. So bullshit, as you mentioned, is— it's not lying, but it's just not caring whether something's true. I'll just say something to say it. I'm not really vetting myself. And so we do that a lot. We'll just say something or tweet something that we're not sure is true and assume that that's not really going to have that big of an impact, but in fact, our impact tends to be much bigger than we think because many more people are seeing that information we put out there. Same for sharing with other people. So there's something called the truth default, which is that when we say something, even if we don't know if it's true, the person we say it to tends to assume that we're telling the truth. So it's a basic norm of conversation that we assume that the 2 people having a conversation are telling one another the truth. And you can think there's certainly circumstances where you can imagine, like, someone's coming up with their own way of seeing things, or where you would immediately sort of doubt what someone's saying. A lot of those examples are political, or they might be very specific contexts. But in most conversations, we assume someone else is saying something true. So, for example, If I went out to dinner last night and I say, yeah, but you know, the steak was really overcooked, I wasn't that happy with it, I don't say like, I don't believe you, I bet the steak was cooked fine, right? And if we kind of countered people and assumed that people were lying on every little thing that they talked about, we would never get anywhere. We wouldn't be able to have normal conversation. And so in general, when I say something, you assume it's true. And you can imagine, you know, I could say, oh, this person got passed over for a promotion because of this, or I can't believe that person wore this thing that's so inappropriate. And now I'm conveying my own norms that may or may not be true, passing along gossip potentially. You're assuming what I say is true, you're passing it along to other people, and so there's this proliferation of bullshit potentially that goes even farther than, than we even imagine it going.

First of all, just to say I love that bullshit as a scientific term here, but it's worse than just bullshit because it's toxic bullshit at times. You know, if I underestimate my influence, especially— and we'll talk about the fact that I have positional and societal power— if I underestimate my influence and I'm just saying things casually that might be, you know, mildly derogatory about another person or about an organization, those ideas can metastasize in ways that are really pernicious.

Exactly. So you can imagine, you know, even these little comments about why someone gets promoted or not, right? All of a sudden that becomes the norm by which we judge people's performance, right? A comment about someone, you know, taking sick days suddenly tells other people like, oh wow, I guess we shouldn't take sick days and we should come in when we're sick. You know, it sets kind of norms that are broader and organizational and even bigger than that, sometimes without us in many cases without us really intending to set such a big sort of norm. And it also, as you said, can be toxic, right? It's— even if we don't intend, we might wind up spreading misinformation. And the research shows that things that are not true tend to be more sort of emotionally juicy, and they spread further. And so once we put that out there, it spreads even further than things that actually are true.

All of this is reminding me of a great expression When I first arrived at ABC News, my now former employer, what, it must have been 22 years ago, I had a next-door neighbor. There's sort of a catwalk of offices that overlooked the main set where Peter Jennings would deliver the evening news, and all the New York-based correspondents had offices on this catwalk. And I had this tiny little office because I was the plankton of the correspondent row, and my next-door neighbor was a sort of a senior statesman by the name of Mort Dean. And He kind of took me under his wing a little bit, and I remember him talking to me about the nature of office politics. And he said he had something called the asshole theory. And this theory held that someday, at a time that we will be completely unaware of as correspondents, our bosses will be holding a meeting, and somebody randomly in that meeting will say, you know, Mort Dean, he's an asshole. And then everybody else in the room will be like, yes, he is an asshole. And then your career is over. And that seems to be exactly Exactly, or in part, what you are describing here.

That's right. One person speaks up, everyone's like, all right, I guess if that's true, we all believe that's true. And then it just, yeah, snowballs.

So influence has a dark side, as you argue. But why? Let me ask this question with false skepticism, or I'm pretending here, but devil's advocate. You say that we shouldn't ask for things that are inappropriate, but if we're likely to get it, What's to stop us? Why, why not ask for things that are inappropriate?

Yeah, so this is why I really do sort of call on people, as a major takeaway from the book, to take responsibility and try not to do that. Because in the end, you know, if we get people to agree to things that are inappropriate, first of all, it can come back to hurt us, right? Once that comes out, or once that becomes potentially a pattern, most people don't ask people for one inappropriate thing. It usually is more of a pattern. And also, you kind of break the trust in that relationship. All of a sudden, that person feels like they can't trust you. They felt like they couldn't say no. They feel like this loss of autonomy. And so you could lose relationships. You could push people out of the workplace. One context I talk about in particular is the MeToo movement, and a lot of the same dynamics we talked about where someone will agree to vandalize a library book, Even though they find that really uncomfortable, because it's even more uncomfortable to say no. In the workplace, right, when these are colleagues, potentially bosses, people who, you know, you really don't want to upset and ruin relationships with, if someone asks you for something inappropriate or asks you out on a date and you want to say no, or asks you for something else that you want to say no to, it could be really, really hard to say no. And there's research showing that people will accept Romantic advances from people that they don't really want to go out with because of these dynamics. And it also shows that even saying no can have sort of long-term repercussions that the person who asked doesn't actually see. Like, that person wastes energy thinking about this, talks to other people about this, sometimes considers switching jobs and careers. And so there's a lot that feeling sort of put on the spot like you can't say no can lead to that we'd rather not.

What is the difference between power and influence?

So power is a form of influence. So power is when you actually have control over somebody else's outcomes and, and resources. So if I have power over you, I can take things away, I can fire you, I can give you raises, I can control the tasks that you're assigned to. You can have influence without having power. So influence is just changing the way someone thinks or feels or does something. And so you can do that because you have status, which is different from power. So status is having respect. So it's possible that I'm very influenced by someone who I respect, but they actually don't have any power over my outcomes. And you can also be influenced by people you like, people who actually you have power over. you could be influenced by because they have good ideas or they have informational influence, or again, you just like them. And so power is a very specific kind of influence that can come through this coercion and rewards and things like that.

And you write that power can lead us to underestimate our influence even more. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, one of the interesting things is that you think of power as this formal form of influence, and so you would think people in positions of power are super aware of the influence that they wield in their position. But in fact, the research suggests that people in positions of power may be even worse at seeing the influence they have. My colleague Adam Galinsky has used this phrase, when you're in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout.

Hmm.

And so there's this idea that you have that much more influence when you're in a position of power, right? But you may not realize that when you are whispering, it's interpreted by other people as a shout. So if I give a mild suggestion, Someone else might see that as a command. And so there's a few reasons for that. Research shows that when we're in positions of power, we're less likely to take the perspectives of other people, and we're worse at doing it. So if I'm trying to guess how you're feeling about something and I'm in a position of power, I'm more likely to be wrong. And, you know, that sounds really bad, but it's kind of just practical because if you're in a position of power, your outcomes aren't as dependent on other people as other people's are on you. And so you don't need to get in other people's heads and figure out what makes them happy and what makes them mad the way that people who aren't in power have to do for you. And so you just don't do it as often, and you lose practice, and you're, you're worse at it. Another thing that being in a position of power does is it, it takes away many of the situational constraints That we tend to feel. So we don't feel like we have to conform to the norms of the situation. We feel like if someone asks us for something, we feel like we can say no more easily. And the problem with that is that we forget that other people are operating under different constraints than we are. And so we assume that if we ask someone for something and they think it's inappropriate or can't do it, that they'll say no to us because that's what we would do in that situation. Mm-hmm. But we forget about the power dynamic and that other people feel more constrained and like they can't really say no to us.

And a million misunderstandings ensue. You've said that when people are reminded of the responsibility that comes with power, they want it less. What's that all about?

That's right. You know, there's really kind of 2 components of power. One is the opportunity that power gives you. So now, you know, you have a chance to set the agenda and push things in a direction that you're excited about. And there's opportunities for growth. But then, of course, with those opportunities comes this responsibility, because if your agenda doesn't work, it's not just you that is affected. It's also all the people under you, right? It's also the organization. And many of us immediately think of the opportunities that come with power and forget about the responsibilities that also come with it. And so in research, when people are reminded that actually you may make some money, but then you have to decide how much money everybody else in that group gets, and you're gonna be responsible for allocating that and dealing with any fallout of that, all of a sudden people are like, that doesn't sound so fun. I'd rather not have that position of power.

Kara Swisher, one of my favorite podcasters, she's a tech journalist. She's got several podcasts, but on the Pivot podcast that I particularly like, I heard her say that many people talk about inbox zero. zero, getting their inboxes to zero. She thinks a lot about employee zero, so she has nobody reporting to her. And I found myself feeling a ton of empathy for that position.

It's true, being responsible for subordinates is really— it's a lot of work, especially if you care. That's the thing, you really— if you really care about helping them to improve and being a good mentor, it, it takes a lot of work.

Okay, so In your book, you talk about some research-based strategies for helping people become more aware of their influence over others. I'll walk you through them so that you can walk us through them. The first is visualizing. How does that work?

That's right. So we talked a little bit earlier about how when we're sort of looking out at the world through our own two eyes, we can see what everybody else is doing, right? We could see the way that Those people are impacting one another. We could see the way that those people are impacting us. But what we don't see sort of naturally in that scene is ourselves and the ways in which we are potentially contributing to group or relationship dynamics. And so there's some research that suggests that if we can take a third-party perspective, kind of a fly-on-the-wall perspective, where we can actually see ourselves in this sort of visual representation of the scene, that we're much better at understanding the ways in which we are contributing to a particular dynamic. And so this comes from some work that my colleague Eli Finkel, who wrote a book, The All-or-Nothing Marriage, has done. So what he did is he assigned to newlywed couples— he either assigned them to a control condition or he assigned them to an intervention condition where he had them 3 times over the course of a year just write about an argument they had had from the perspective of a third-party observer. So just remember this argument you had with your spouse, but remember it from someone outside of the couple, right? And what he found was that people who did this just 3 times a year wound up not experiencing the typical drop— sorry to say it, but the typical drop that newlyweds experience in their relationship satisfaction over the next 2 years— because they were sort of able to see how they were contributing to these dynamics, and they were able to sort of cool down their intense feelings in those arguments and sort of take a more abstract third-party perspective. And so that's the suggestion I make more generally, right? Just try to get out of your own head and pay attention to the things you're doing that are contributing.

Your next suggestion is getting perspective rather than taking perspective. What's the difference?

Yeah, so many, many books and resources tell people that we should take perspectives more, that we should try to get into other people's heads more and understand what they're thinking and feeling. And that would be really good for understanding how we're impacting other people, of course. The problem with trying to take perspective is that we never get out of our own heads. So we try to guess what somebody else is thinking or feeling, but that guess is based on our own history. It's based on what we hope that they're thinking and feeling. It's based on stereotypes we might have of them or impressions of them as a person. And so it turns out that when you tell people, try really hard to take the perspective of this other person, we're really bad at it, but we don't realize it. We think we're good at it, but we're really, really bad at it. And so some researchers, Tal Ayal and Nick Epley, have looked at what happens when instead of trying to take perspective, you actually get perspective. And the way they define that is by actually getting information from outside your own head. So they have people actually ask somebody, what do you think about this thing? And then they make a judgment about what that person actually thinks about that thing. And of course, they're wildly more accurate, right? It's no surprise. The thing that's more surprising is that they don't realize they're so much more accurate when they actually ask questions than when they just try to guess. And so the big sort of takeaway from that is not to make assumptions and not to try to guess what's going on in someone else's head. Mm-hmm. But as much as you can actually collect outside information, ideally from asking them directly or asking people around them directly, or even reading information that might give you some outside insight, the more accurate you're gonna be about figuring out how the things you're doing might be affecting them.

Finally, you recommend experience our influence. What does that mean?

So that's really a recommendation to go ahead and test out your influence. And see for yourself that it winds up being bigger than you realize. And so this is constrained, of course, to the sort of positive domains that we've been talking about. So it's not like go out and, you know, sexually harass people and ask for inappropriate things. But there's so many ways in which we can test out our influence where you get this sort of immediate feedback that people are actually responding to you more positively than you think. They're doing things for you more frequently than you think. And so one way to do this is to basically do for yourself the kinds of experiments that I put my participants in. So go out and ask people for things and see if they agree. So this is based on kind of more of a game than a real therapy, but there's something called rejection therapy where people basically play this game where they, they get a card or they get something that tells them to ask for something kind of wacky. And they go out and make these requests and they try to get rejected every day. So it could be requests like, you know, can I speak on the intercom at Target? Or, you know, you're walking down the street, like ask a stranger to dance with you down to the end of the street, these kind of crazy things. And what people who do this find is that it's actually harder to get rejected than you think.

Hmm.

And that when people reject you, it's actually way less painful than you expect. People are actually quite Right. And kind about it. And so that's one way to sort of test out your influence. Another is through expressing compliments and gratitude. We also have research showing that we underestimate how good simple compliments make other people feel, even just really simple superficial compliments that convey some genuine respect and appreciation. And if you just sort of make the effort to go out and give a little compliment when you notice something you like about somebody else, you'll realize that that really makes their day and also actually makes you feel good as well.

We've covered a lot of ground very quickly here. Is there anything— this is an example of my getting perspective rather than taking perspective— is there something I should have asked but failed to ask?

I actually— I think we did cover pretty much everything. That was a lot.

Does all of the research go out the window when we start talking about children? Because getting my 7-year-old to do anything is very hard, and I'm not sure any of these techniques will help me.

I know. I actually find it very helpful with my kids in this way. So I have found that the sort of gut tendency is to keep saying something over and over to drill it into your kid's head, right? I'm just gonna keep telling you this thing that you keep not listening to me about. But I've been really surprised when I say something once And my kid comes back hours later or days later and is like, you know, when you said this, this is what I'm thinking about it. And so I still think a lot of these things do apply, that at some point people tune out when you are being like super assertive and repeating yourself over and over. And that actually they hear things that we say, they don't necessarily acknowledge it in the moment. And I think with kids, they especially don't like to acknowledge it in the moment that they've heard you and maybe are thinking about it. But I think it gets in there somewhere. We have to kind of trust that the things we say are actually percolating there, you know, and, and may, may find their way in days later.

This has been a fascinating interview. Thank you very much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Thanks again to Vanessa Bohns. Great to talk to her. Thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on the show. 10% Happier is produced by Justine Davey, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. See you next time for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, Prime members! You can listen to 10% Happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery+ in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com/survey. In business, competition is the key to success. Every product you own, from the shoes on your feet to the phone in your hands, got there because of cutthroat business decisions. And Wondery's podcast Business Wars brings you stories about the most well-known companies in the world and how the decisions they make shape what you buy and how you live. With over 50 seasons to choose from, you'll hear about the fight for your feet with Nike versus Adidas, the battle to control the smartphone market with iPhone versus BlackBerry, Or the game-changing company that is Tesla and Elon Musk's bid to take on the entire auto industry. Business Wars covers every sector from fashion to food, tech to travel, sports to pop culture, and more. These stories are entertaining, fun, eye-opening, and will help you understand a little bit more about the world around you. Follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.