Instant Genius - The science of persuasion, with Prof Vanessa Bohns

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

How strong are your powers of persuasion? Probably a lot greater than you realise. That’s according to social psychologist Vanessa Bohns, professor of organizational behaviour at Cornell University and author of book You Have More Influence Than You Think. In this episode, she explains the power of compliments, a concept called behavioural contagion, and how to convince somebody to do you a favour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How strong are your powers of persuasion? Probably a lot greater than you realize. That's according to social psychologist Vanessa Bond, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and author of the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think, how we underestimate our power of persuasion and why it matters. In this episode, she joins us to talk through the science of persuasion, the power of

compliments, and some top strategies for when you're looking to convince somebody else to do you a favor. So, how did you first get interested in the science of influence? Well, it all started when I was a graduate student working in my PhD at Columbia University in New York City. And I was working with a professor there, Frank Flynn, and we wanted to collect data from sort of a diverse group of participants. So I had to leave the university where we would normally collect data and go down to Penn Station, a very busy train station in the middle of New York City, and go up to strangers with my little packet of surveys and say, hi, will you fill out this questionnaire? And I had to do this.

over and over, and it was this horribly painful thing to do to go up to strangers and make this request. And after, you know, the number of days that I had to do this, I brought all the data I had collected in the form of these surveys back up to Frank, and we were taking a look at it. And it turns out the study that I had done, you know, all this work to collect data for didn't work. And that's not such a surprise because studies don't work all the time in science. and you kind of, you know, pivot and try to figure out why. But this one was particularly devastating to me because I was describing to Frank that, oh, my God, this was such a painful exercise going down there. You know, it was so traumatic. I can never go back to Penn Station. And Frank kind of looked at me funny

because he had the data in front of him. And I was describing this horrible experience. But one of the things he could see in the data was that, in fact, most of the people I was asking to fill out this survey were saying, yes. And I was also recording what they said if they said no. And even if they said no, they were actually quite polite and kind and nice to me. And so he kind of noticed that I was describing this awful, terrible experience when in fact, in reality, it didn't look so terrible. So in the end, what was in my head about this attempt to influence people, essentially, to get them to do this thing for me, felt the survey, just didn't match the reality, and it was much more negative in my head. And so that's what started my interest and influence and the ways in which it can sort of

differ from the way that we think it's going in our heads. So what are some of the biggest ways that we can influence somebody else without us knowing? So this is interesting. After my experience in Penn Station, we, Frank and I set on a course of an experimental program of study where we wanted to see if other people also had the same experience as me. And so we ran a bunch of studies where we had people go out into the world and make requests like I had done and guess how hard it would be to get people to agree to these requests and then keep track of how easy it was in the end to get people to agree to these requests. And we found that again and again, in all these studies now we've run studies for 15,

years, we've had our participants ask over 15,000 people for requests. We found that on average, people tend to overestimate the likelihood of being rejected when they ask for something by about 50%. And so we found this sort of underestimation of influence. We don't realize the power of a simple request. And I thought that this was a super interesting finding and it's informed a lot of my thinking. But it wasn't until more recently when I came across some other more recent work by my colleague Erica Boothby and some of her collaborators that I realized that there was even more to this idea that we underestimate our influence than I originally thought. So in my studies, we're kind of intentionally trying to get someone to do something.

In Erica's studies, as you said, you could influence someone without even realizing that you're doing it. And that's because she shows that we actually believe that people are paying less attention to us than they in fact are. So as we go about our daily lives and make decisions and engage in behaviors, if I were to ask you, you know, how many people are noticing the things that you're doing? You know, how curious are the people around you about the things that are going on in your head and why you're doing the things you're doing? You would underestimate, according to Erica's studies, where she's asked people this question. You would underestimate the extent to which other people

are watching you, thinking about what you're doing. And interestingly, this has downstream consequences, which means that you would underestimate how much those behaviors that you're doing, that you don't realize other people are noticing, are affecting their behaviors later on. And so we kind of find a similar pattern with this idea of unintentional influence that we found in my earlier studies where you're kind of intentionally trying to influence someone. That in both cases, you have this influence. and you don't necessarily recognize it. That's quite interesting. So at first it sounds quite contrary to sort of common advice

that other people are just thinking about themselves all the time. You know, if you go out with a bad hair day, anyone will be so wrapped up in their own thoughts that they won't even notice. Absolutely. And that's a really good point. There are times when I tell people about this finding that people are, oh, they're paying more attention to you than you realize,

and it makes them really paranoid. Like, I knew it. I knew everyone was noticing my bad hair days or the times I stumbled. And in fact, that's not the case. That's not what this finding means. So there's another phenomenon called the spotlight effects. And that phenomenon says that when you are acutely self-conscious about something, when there's something you're really embarrassed about and are worried about people noticing, you overestimate the extent to which people are paying attention to that particular thing. So we tend to feel like we're in the spotlight when in fact we're not. Most people are not noticing the things that we are really embarrassed about, that we hope that they're not noticing.

And we kind of have to reconcile these two effects, right? Because you're like, you just told me that there are studies showing that people pay more attention to you than you think. And now you're telling me that people pay less attention to you than you think. And in fact, Erica Boothby, the person who did the work showing that people pay more attention to you than you think, something she calls the invisibility cloak illusion, has tried to reconcile these two findings. And so she did it in this way. She brought people into the lab and she had them either just come in wearing their ordinary clothes that they would just be walking around in during the day, or she had them come in and change into an embarrassing t-shirt. And so this is a t-shirt they would be self-conscious

about other people seeing them wearing. And she had them interact with another person while they either wore their ordinary clothes or this embarrassing t-shirt. And she asked them how much she thought the other person was paying attention to what they were wearing and how much they noticed what was on their shirt. And so it turns out that when you're wearing your ordinary clothes, you have no reason to be self-conscious. You're just kind of going about your day. We tend to underestimate the extent to which other people are noticing things about us. But as soon as we get really acutely self-conscious about something, like, oh my God, everyone's noticing this really embarrassing flaw. Then we tend to overestimate how much others are paying attention to us. And what it means is really that we have this

influence as we just make our daily decisions, right? And people are noticing us, but not in this way that should make us super embarrassed or worried about the things that people are noticing. So it's kind of a happy story all around. What's been the biggest takeaway of your research so far? I'd say that people are truly compliant, shockingly compliant, that people have a really hard time saying no to things and will agree to all sorts of things. So I mentioned that, you know, we've run these studies where we've had our participants ask over 15,000 people requests, but I didn't get into too many specifics about what those requests have been. So they've been things, you know, like favors. For example, will you fill out a survey? Will you

loan me your phone? Will you donate to this charity? But we've been very curious about how far we can push this effect. And so we've also had people ask unethical requests. So we've had them go into libraries and ask people to vandalize what they presume to be are library books. And so we bring our participants into the lab. We give them these books that are not library books. They're just books off my shelf, but they're made to look like library books. And we tell them to go up to strangers in libraries and say, I'm playing a prank of my friend, but they know my handwriting. Will you just write the word pickle and pen in this library book? And they hand the library book and the pen to people and they guess how many people will say yes and then keep track of how many people do.

And just like when asking for favors, people tend to underestimate how many people will go along with this request. They think most people will say no. Amazingly, over 50 percent. So the majority of people they ask actually say yes. And it's not because they necessarily want to. They don't think it's like a fun thing to do. They actually say, this is vandalism.

I'm not sure we should be doing this. But it's so much more uncomfortable for them to say no to this person who's asking for this thing, than it is to just simply do this thing that they are clearly uncomfortable with as well. And so the big takeaway I've taken from just all the different requests we've gotten people to agree to is that people are just surprisingly, surprisingly compliant. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity,

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experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So can you give me some examples about some of the most powerful ways that we might influence people and not know? So to sort of follow through in this idea that people pay more attention to us and are curious about the things that we do and why we do them more than we tend to realize, this can have real-world implications for influence. So one way in which this is the case is through something called behavioral contagion. This is the idea that once we see what other people are doing, we kind of take that as a norm that, oh, I guess this is what people do, maybe this is what I should do, and it influences our behavior.

And so this can be in sort of small ways. We can see this influencing fashion choices, for example, but it can also be in bigger, more consequential ways. So my colleague here at Cornell, where I'm currently a professor, his name is Bob Frank, and he's talked about this idea that our decisions about whether or not to use solar energy to, for example, put up a solar panel on our homes can impact our neighbor's decisions without us even realizing it. So when we make a decision, like to put a solar panel on our roof, for example, we kind of go about making this decision as if it's just our decision, our own individual choice. You know, we weigh the positives and the negatives. And we're not usually thinking about whether it would impact other people. But as our neighbors walk by our home and see us putting up that solar panel, they start to wonder what we're doing. They notice what we're doing.

They start to be curious more than we realize about why we made that choice. And as they try to figure out why we decided to do that, they kind of start to simulate that choice for themselves, right? Maybe they did it because it was going to be, you know, good for cost. Maybe they're doing it because they want to, you know, reduce their carbon footprint. And they start thinking about all these reasons maybe they should do it. And it turns out that Bob Frank has talked about this sort of aerial imagery of neighborhoods where you can see these clusters of solar panels where you can see that one person's behavior sort of spread through the neighborhood, almost like a disease it looks like. So that's one way. Another way is that we can make these sort of offhand comments where we don't feel like we're

necessarily trying to influence someone, but they can in fact stick in someone's head much longer than we tend to assume. So in other work, Erica Boothby and some of her other colleagues have shown that we assume that people sort of stop thinking about the things that we have said to them more than they actually do, that they actually keep thinking about a conversation they had with us and that they're not really picking apart the things that we said. They're actually just kind of reflecting on them. They're kind of remembering the gist. Oh, that's interesting. You know, I remember the other day, so-and-so said that they supported this or they made this decision, right? And that has a sort of long-term effect that we don't really see and we don't realize.

that can in turn influence that other person. And to sort of give you an example of that, I'm sure many of us can look back in our own lives and think there's this comment someone made the other day or even months or years ago that I still think about today. And most likely that person has no idea that that has kind of stuck in your head. And that's true for the things we say as well in other people's heads.

Is there a certain type of offhand comment which is more likely to stick in someone's head? I think in general things that are more personally relevant. So a lot of the persuasion literature, for example, shows that if you are personally invested in something and someone talks about that or tries to persuade you about that, that's the time when you're really paying attention. And so, you know, if someone makes a comment about something that you are considering right now, like a decision you're trying to make, if they make a comment about an insecurity you have, those are the things where your ears really prick up. and you're going to remember those sort of down the line for sure. Are there some easy ways that you can make someone's day much better off then? Yeah, so interestingly, just like people are more likely to remember the things we say after we interact with them, those things actually mean more to the people we say them to. And one domain that we've looked at this experimentally in is the domain of compliments.

So we've run studies where I mentioned in the past we've had people go out and ask people for things. But we've also run studies where we've sent people out and had them give people things. And specifically the things we have them give are compliments. So we bring participants into the lab. We send them out into the world and we have them go up to random strangers and find something they like about that person and just compliment them on it. And after they do this, we have them give that person a survey that, that asks, you know, how good the compliment felt, how flattered they are, and, you know, how good they feel in general as a result of this interaction. And before they go out and do this, we have our participants guess how this compliment will make somebody feel.

And so what we found is that before we give a compliment, we think it's not going to actually mean that much to the other person. You know, we think they're going to see it as just us trying to like ingratiate ourselves in some way. In fact, we even think that we might annoy the person by approaching them and potentially interrupting them. So we really have a lot of doubts about giving people compliments. But in fact, that other person feels really good, much better than we expect after they get this compliment. So it really makes them feel better. It makes them feel more flattered. They're not at all annoyed that you stop them to tell them something nice about themselves.

And so it's a really easy way to have a big impact on another person's day that doesn't cost that much. So you sort of got into it a bit there, but why is it really important that people realize their own powers of persuasion? Yeah. So I think when we fail to recognize the things that we can do that impact other people, the things we can ask that can, you know, get us what we need or want, we miss out on opportunities to use our persuasive powers. So a lot of us can probably recall times that, you know, we could have easily just asked someone for a favor and gotten something done, you know, really quickly. But instead of asking, we bent over backwards to avoid asking for this favor. Or I'm sure we can recall times when we thought something really nice about another person and thought, you know, I'm sure they've heard it before. I'm sure they don't care what I think. And we kind of held back and didn't actually tell them. And so

there are lots of opportunities to use our influence like that and many others. that if we sort of underestimate, you know, our likelihood of getting help or how much our words mean to someone else, we may miss out on. Then there's also a flip side to this, right, which is that if we don't realize the extent to which the things we say really impact other people, we may also kind of unintentionally harm people or, you know, say things that in the end reverberate in their heads, but not in the way that we hope, right, in ways to actually make them feel self-conscious or worried or insecure. And so recognizing that this power has sort of two components.

It can do a lot of good, but there's also this responsibility that comes with it, that actually the things you say do impact people. They do mean things to people. You know, when you ask people for things, they can find it hard to say no. Recognizing that is also an important component of sort of recognizing the influence that we have. And why is it so hard to say no? Yeah, so this goes back to these studies that I talked about a little earlier where we had our participants ask for things. And, you know, I sort of gave the highlights, which is that people were twice as likely to say yes than our participants thought. And that's great. And, you know, our participants were so happy by that. And they really felt like people were so nice. And to some extent, that's true. People are nicer than we expect. They are more helpful than we expect. And so there's a really happy story there. But in our study, we also have identified something else that's going on. And that's that it's really hard for people

to say no when we ask them for things. And when we're the ones doing the asking, we fail to realize that. So if you put yourself in the perspective instead of the person asking, right, the person being asked, so you imagine someone coming up to you on the street and asking you, for example, to borrow your cell phone because they're in a bind and they need to call a friend and they're supposed to be meeting, in that moment, you know, it's really hard to come up with the words to say no. We feel really awkward. We feel like we're kind of a jerk if we say no. And all of that kind of highlights how socially risky saying no feels in the moment. And in the abstract, you can think like, what's the big deal? You know, just say no. But anyone who's been in that position knows that in the moment, it's not that simple. It's actually a really emotionally fraught experience. because it's a rejection of another person, and we're evolutionarily wired not to reject other people, not to break social bonds, you know, to maintain ties with the group. And so we want to sort of avoid rejecting people and giving them any reason to think that we aren't good people who should

be part of the group. And so all that manifests in this really awkward moment when we're being asked for something where it just becomes incredibly hard to say no. And we want to sort of avoid any negative attribution. So we want to come up with the perfect excuse, but it's hard to do that in the moment. So if you ask somebody to do your favor and if they say yes, how can you tell if your unseen powers of persuasion has steamrolled them? How can you tell, is there any way of checking that somebody knows that they can push back against suggestion? So I think it's hard because I do think that there are certain politeness norms and relational norms where people don't want to admit that they felt steamrolled by you, right? They don't want to say, like, you really pressured me into that.

That's a pretty awkward conversation to have. And so I think the onus is really on the asker, if you want to be sure that that person is, you know, really comfortable with agreeing to this request. And so some ways of ensuring that that person is really agreeing sort of fully and completely and doesn't feel pressured are giving them time and space to come up with their answer. So when we ask for things, you know, and we put someone on the spot and we ask them face to face in the moment and we expect them to respond right there in front of us, that's a really tricky place to put the other person in, right? It's an awkward sort of interaction to face to face in the moment, come up with the words and decide whether or not you want to say yes or no. So if we really care about sort of getting buy-in from other people, I always suggest you could ask in person.

There's nothing wrong with that. But let the other person respond at another time. Give them time to process, to think about whether they really want to do something, to be mindful of whether they're saying yes or no. And give them the chance to sort of come up. up with the perfect phrasing that's going to make them feel okay if they do want to say no. So another way to do that is to say, you can email me your response. So think about it, get back to me tomorrow, email me your response. And that gives them time, space to come up with

their response. And if they want to say no, it gives them a chance to. So I'm going to take on the flip side of this. And here's something I think a lot of people will want to know. If you wanted to convince somebody else to do you a favor, what are some good techniques to use. Yeah, absolutely. And so again, it takes a lot of sort of awareness on the part of the asker. Like, is this something that is a totally reasonable thing to ask? And in the end, you know, we'll all be happy for having done it. And so I really just want to get that yes. That's fine too. And the way to do that is kind of the reverse of what I just said, right? So if we really want someone to have the space to say no, you want to let them respond.

at their own time, you want to allow them to respond over things like email. If you really want that yes, you do the opposite, right? You put someone on the spot face to face. We find that when you ask for things face to face, and one of our studies, when we compared asking face-to-face to asking over email, we found that face-to-face was 34 times more effective at getting a yes. So that was a huge effect. And interestingly, when we asked participants, which they thought would be most effective, right? If you ask face-to-face, what will the compliance rate be versus if you ask over email what the compliance rate would be? They actually didn't see a big difference. So their sort of mental model of why people agree to things was that, okay,

people weigh the pros and cons and they decide whether they want to do something. When, in fact, we often agree to things just out of an emotional sort of mindless impulse in the moment, right? And so we get that when you ask for something face-to-face. But if you ask over email, you don't have that same sort of emotional context. You don't have that same urgency. And so, number one, ask face-to-face. Now, I know these days that's not always possible. And so we also have studies showing that if you can't ask for something face-to-face,

the next best thing is asking over video call or phone call. And interestingly, we don't see a big difference between the two. So if you have Zoom fatigue, it's okay to avoid the video call and just pick up the phone. That has the same advantages of sort of humanizing the request because you have that human voice through the phone call and making the request more urgent. So a phone call is still in real time. There isn't that email delay. So that's one. Another suggestion I make is to ask directly.

And this is another mistake we often make is that we think. is that we think that the polite thing to do is to sort of hint at what we want. So, you know, if I need to borrow your phone to use that example again, I might say, I'm really in a bind. I need to call my friend, but my phone died, you know, and just wait for the other person to offer to help. And we think that we've done enough to convey what we're asking for. But people often don't get the hint. And so you really need to ask directly. So if you need a favor and of saying, like, I could use some help, you have to actually directly come out and say, will you help me do X? And that gives the person. It sort of puts the person in a position where

they have to say yes or no. And as we talked about, it's hard to say no. And in fact, people want to be helpful. And so when you ask directly and actually come out and make that direct request, you're much more effective. Do you have any more tips about how to be more persuasive? I would say the biggest tips I have for how to be more persuasive. And I would say, the biggest tips I have, is first of all, not to hold back. So so often we underestimate the likelihood that we're going to get an affirmative to a request. And so we don't even bother asking for something. And so the number one piece of advice I always give people is to go ahead and ask. As long, again, as it's a reasonable request, you know, it's not something inappropriate or something the other person is really

clearly not going to want to do, right? When it's something that you really feel strongly that you want to ask for, just do it. So many of us hold back. Another thing that I think is really helpful is that we tend to assume that other people's default is to reject us, to argue against us, right? That people really are sort of wired to not want to help us out and not want to agree to the things that we are suggesting or asking of them when in fact people's default tends to be to be cooperative. They want to agree with us because that leads to good relationships. They want to help us because generally they want to feel like good people and they want to be good people.

And so reminding yourself that in fact, most people would be receptive to the things that you're going to ask them or ask of them or try to convince them of, that can help you sort of strike the right tone when you are trying to ask for something or persuade someone of something. So you go into that interaction thinking, okay, this person's going to be receptive to me. And because of that, I'm going to ask for the thing I really want instead of sort of negotiating myself down before I even ask. I'm going to ask in a tone that's not overly assertive, but isn't overly timid as well. It's just kind of right in the middle, which is where you want to be. and you're going to go in there with a certain confidence that is going to allow you to ultimately be more persuasive.

So I think that sort of mindset shift from how am I going to get this person past no, which many of us go into interactions thinking, to actually this person is very likely to say yes. So how am I going to sell this to them to get that yes that they actually want to give me? Is that the biggest surprise that your research has uncovered so far, do you think? I do think so. And I think sort of on top of that is that not only are we surprised by how compliant other people are, we're even surprised by how compliant we are in certain situations. So in my most recent studies, we've been having people come into the lab and we've been asking them, you know, if we ran a study where we asked you to unlock your phone and hand it over to the experimenter so We could search through your phone.

And in some cases, we even say your web search history, which is something people really don't want you looking through. Most people say, of course, I would not let you do that. But then when we actually make this request of people, so we, instead of saying, you know, we're thinking about this, we just go in and do it. We just say, okay, as part of this experiment, we just want you to unlock your phone so that we could take it out of the room and look through your web search history. We get over 90% compliance in that case. So this is people basically saying, I would not do this, but when they're actually put in a position of being asked, they just agree mindlessly because it's awkward to say no. And so I think, you know, it's surprising that other people are compliant, but it's also surprising that we are more compliant in these situations than we would expect to be as well. That was Vanessa Bonds, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and author of the book, You Have More Eighty.

influence than you think, how we underestimate our power of persuasion and why it matters. Thank you for listening to this episode of Interested Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as your preferred app store. You can, of course, also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

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