Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Vanessa Bohns on the Psychology Behind Our Daily Choices EP 366

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

In this eye-opening episode of the Passion Struck podcast, host John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Vanessa Bohns, a renowned social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University's ILR School. Together, they delve into the often-overlooked psychological aspects of choices and the consent behind them, examining how our words, actions, and presence impact others in ways we may not even realize. Vanessa is the author of "You Have More Influence Than You Think." Want to learn the 12 philosophies that the most successful people use to create a limitless life? Pre-order John R. Miles’s new book, Passion Struck, which will be released on February 6, 2024. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/vanessa-bohns-the-psychology-behind-our-choices/  Dr. Vanessa Bohns Breaks Down the Psychological Facets of Consent Consent plays a crucial role in our lives, affecting areas such as sexual assault, personal privacy, medical procedures, and data usage. However, the psychological dimensions of consent are often overlooked. Host John R. Miles welcomes Dr. Vanessa Bohns, an expert in the field, to shed light on the power dynamics of consent and influence. Drawing from her book, "You Have More Influence Than You Think," and her original research, Dr. Bohns explains why we often underestimate our impact on others. Sponsors Brought to you by OneSkin. Get 15% your order using code Passionstruck at https://www.oneskin.co/#oneskinpod. Brought to you by Indeed: Claim your SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR CREDIT now at Indeed dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK. Brought to you by Lifeforce: Join me and thousands of others who have transformed their lives through Lifeforce's proactive and personalized approach to healthcare. Visit MyLifeforce.com today to start your membership and receive an exclusive $200 off. Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion 50 to get 50% off plus free shipping!  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! How  Connect with John on Twitter at @John_RMiles and on Instagram at @john_R_Miles. Prefer to watch this episode: Subscribe to our main YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Subscribe to our YouTube Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@passionstruckclips Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my master class on six simple steps to achieving it. Want to hear my best interviews? Check out my starter packs on intentional behavior change, women at the top of their game, longevity, and well-being, and overcoming adversity. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on Passion Struct. A lot of the studies I talk about in the book are about these social comparisons we do where we fall short. A lot of psychology is about overconfidence and how we take risks. We shouldn't because we think that we'll surely be able to beat the lottery and make these things happen and that we're better at doing these calculations and other people. But when it comes to these sort of social contexts, it turns out that we wind up comparing ourselves to these people who are the absolute most social people you could imagine. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show,

we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 366 of PassionStruck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast. Thank you to all of you who come back to the show weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for joining us, or if you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member which we love when you do. We have episodes starter packs which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize in the convenience topic to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated. Everything we do here on the show.

Either their despotifier passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it last week I had three great interviews. First was with Kara Collier, a powerhouse in the world of health and nutrition. As a registered dietitian nutritionist and the co-founder, as well as VP of health at NutriSense, Harris' expertise is reshaping the landscape of personalized health. The second was with Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and the author of the Perfection Trap. With a TED Talk that has garnered over 3 million views Curran has become a leading voice in understanding, combating the rising tide of perfectionism.

Lastly, I interview Jeremy Fall, author of the book Falling Upwards, living the dream one panic attack at a time. This interview is a guide toing Upwards, Living the Dream, One Panic Attack at a Time. This interview is a guide to embracing mental health, challenging societal norms, and triumfing over adversity. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. If you love today's episode or any of the others that I mentioned, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see comments more listeners and these reviews go such a long way in helping us build out the passion-struck community. Today's episode promises to challenge the way you think about a concept that sets the

heart countless social issues. That concept consent. Consent, as we all know, plays a pivotal role in our lives, shaping our understanding of sexual assault, personal privacy, medical procedures, data usage, and more. But have you ever considered the psychological dimensions of consent? How do our words, actions, and presence influence others without us even realizing it? Joining us today is an extraordinary guest, Dr. Vanessa Bonds, a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University's ILRR School.

Dr. Bonds is the author of the eye-opening book You Have More Influence Than You Think, where she draws from her original research to shed light on the power-fod dynamics of consent and influence. As we navigate the complexities of consent, Vanessa won't unravel why we often underestimate the impact we have on others and how this lack of awareness can lead us to misopportunities or misusing our power inadvertently. With compelling stories and cutting-edge science, she answers the questions we all ponder, but might be too afraid to ask.

How much do others take heart, what we say? And they push back on our suggestions. Do they even notice our presence? Will they agree to help us when we ask? We'll explore the nuances of consent, recognizing that it's not merely a legal concept, but a moral and a psychological one, capable of transforming experiences and relationships. Together, we'll learn science-based strategies for becoming more aware of our influence, conquering the fear of rejection, and sometimes even using our power more consciously.

So, if you've ever felt invisible, ineffective, or inarticulate, prepare to be enlightened, go in us on the spot for boaking journey into the deaths of consent and influence with the brilliant Dr. Vanessa Barnes. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin. I am so excited to welcome today Vanessa Barnes. Abans on the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome, Vanessa. Hi, it's so nice to be here and nice to meet you. Well, I originally discovered you as I was doing an episode that I was researching on the power of asking and we're going to get a lot more into that

in a little bit, but I thought I would start out by asking you, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what led you to become a social psychologist? So, my background, I guess, I was interested in marketing and advertising for a really long time. I actually interned in a local ad agency. I grew up in a small town in New Jersey and it was this tiny little boutique advertising agency that worked with local companies. And I interned there and I had my little ad in the local paper. And I had this idea the whole time that I was going to go into advertising. And I went to a college, I went to Brown. And it was a big deal for me and my family that I wound up going to this Ivy League school because my dad was a mechanic and a

farmer and really for him education was like the end all be all because he had never even completed his high school degree and he really wanted us to go to college and I just felt like I really wanted to go to the best college. And I fell in love with Brown. I got in there somehow, and I wound up going there and experiencing a lot of imposter syndrome as so many people do. And as I now know, looking back and talking to my own students,

it doesn't even matter where you're from, we all experience it. But coming from this kind of blue collar background and being at this Ivy League school, I just always felt like I didn't fit in. I felt essentially just really underconfident, I'd say. Even though I was doing fine, my grades were great and I had friends, but I always just had this feeling

that I didn't belong. In fact, I studied abroad at Ireland in my sophomore year and I went to the registrar to transfer my grades. And for a second, they couldn't find me in the system. And I was like, I knew it. I never got in. I never belonged here. And then, of course, they quickly ended up finding my name.

But I'd say I had this idea of advertising. Then I had this experience of having a poster syndrome, but getting through college and having a good experience for the most part. And then I went and worked in a big ad agency in New York City. I worked for Ogleby and May there. And there as well, I had this sense of imposter syndrome. And I was working on sort of basic persuasion, but always with feelings under confident. Eventually, I left because it just wasn't fulfilling to me and I went back to graduate school after kind of a windy path. And when I got to graduate school, I went for psychology because I had been a psychology major again with this idea of going into marketing.

I continued to study persuasion, but I suddenly had this sort of shift where I was running a study with a professor and I had to collect data by going down to Penn Station and getting Strangers to fill out surveys. And it was such a horrible experience. I always thought everyone was gonna say no to me. And so I collect all this data, I go back to Columbia, where I was a graduate student, my professor and I are looking at this data.

And we find out that the study we were conducting on just ordinary persuasive techniques didn't work. And it was so devastating to me and I started complaining about it and saying how awful this experience had been. And then he was looking at the data and he was like, you're describing this horrible experience, but I'm looking at the data.

It looks like most people were saying yes to you. It actually looks like you had a lot of influence. It just wasn't the prediction that we had didn't pan out. And so that sort of realization was a big aha moment where I realized what I wanted to study, which is that the way I was experiencing influence in my head, this idea of no one is listening to me. People are going to say no to me if I ask,

was so different from the reality, the objective reality, if you looked at the data. And so that kind of changed my perspective on influence. So I went from this kind of lifelong way of thinking about marketing and advertising and influence in this traditional way, to becoming a psychologist and having this realization and realizing that actually we have a lot more influence than we think we don't need all these first ways of techniques we don't need to. We're not advertisers, we're not marketers, we have influence just by asking for things just by interacting with people. And so that's what I wound up studying ever since and that's what I continue to study today. Well, thank you for sharing that. And as I was going through the research that

you sent, you write that consent has not been a core topic of study and psychology. And I wanted to ask, why do you think it is that psychology has overlooked this crucial aspect of human interaction, especially given its legal moral and ethical implications. It's fascinating because, as I said, I studied ever since sort of that moment in Penn Station, basically asking people for things and our assumptions about whether they would agree to us or not and how those turn out to be, we tend to be underconfident. People agree to do things for us more than we expect. And the major reason for that is that people find it so hard to say no. And so for maybe now it's been 15, almost 20 years that I've been studying this, but maybe for

the first 12 years I was studying this, I was talking about compliance and persuasion and never once even thought about the topic of consent because it just wasn't something that the core sort of area of psychology really studied. And it took a legal scholar getting in touch with me and saying, I think your research on compliance and how hard it is for people to say no to you is actually really relevant to the topic of consent. And my mind was alone, and I was like, of course it is. Like, why, how could it possibly be not that makes so much sense?

And she had been studying consent through legal lens and pointed to me this to this long history in legal scholarship studying this concept of consent. And I was like, okay, I'll go back and look at what psychology has to say about consent because I never really considered it. And when I did that, I just found like crickets. There was a couple things about experimental consent because that's what we do

We run experiments and we have participant sign consent form So there was a little bit on that but even given the fact that every experiment we run has a consent form Way less than you would expect There's a little bit in very specific domains like the sexual domain Which is how most people think about consent? But consent especially Law has recognized this for a long time, but consent is such a broad concept. Every time you click agree on the terms of conditions of your phone or download a new app, every time you get a

medical procedure, you're consenting every time. You agree to do something willingly, you're consenting. And so it was fascinating to me that I hadn't been given as a central role in in psychology. And it's unclear why that's the case if it's just that people have always thought of consent in sort of one way as more of a sexual concept and haven't really thought about these broad or sort of legal implications that are covered in legal scholarship. But for some reason it was a giant overlooked area. And so I started to bridge this area between compliance and persuasion and consent, like not just getting someone to say yes, but actually getting them to consent voluntarily.

Well, let's unpack that legal definition a little bit more because the legal definition of consent primarily focuses on external obligations, observations, and judgments. However, a psychological understanding of consent, as I understand it, is centered on the actor's perspective, their unique insights into the subjective experience of consenting. How do those two intertwine? And I think this is really the prox of the issue and another reason psychologist may be overlooked this concept Actually, I printed out this quote that I love by Peter Weston who's a legal scholar at University of Michigan just highlighting how critical consent is To transforming our interpretation of a situation. So this is again a lawyer's perspective on this, right? So he says consent can transform the most horrific crimes into non-crimes, turning rape into

sexual intercourse, maming into therapeutic surgery, kidnapping, and invocation, trespass into hospitality and theft into gift giving. So when you think about what that really means, simply consenting to someone coming into your house is the difference between them trespassing and you're just inviting them over for a coffee or signing that consent form when you have a procedure or a surgery is the difference between someone at harming you right and actually just having this therapeutic surgery. So it's legally it is such a critical sort of assessment. Did this person consent because this situation is a completely different situation if they did not. And so legally, what you want to establish is that someone did it voluntarily so they didn't feel coarse or forced.

Someone knew what they were consenting to, so they were fully informed. And they were competent. So they were able cognitively capable. So they weren't drunk. So they were able, cognitively capable. So they weren't drunk, they weren't cognitively declining in some way that they couldn't make a decision. And so all that is super important to determine. And as you said, an outside objective, like a judge or a jury would decide that, right? This person was competent, informed, and voluntarily consented.

And so this is hospitality, not trespassing. But psychologically, as we all know, we can agree to something and still feel like, I didn't really have a choice. I signed that form, but what was I gonna do, not take that job? I signed this form and agreed to all these terms and conditions that I wasn't happy with, but I didn't really have a choice.

So yeah, I clicked agree on the terms and conditions when I downloaded that app. I know I maybe legally consented, but I don't feel like I was informed and I really knew what I was agreeing to. And so there's this difference between, okay, legally someone would say, you can send it. You're contractually obligated to do whatever you can send it to. But psychologically, it can feel different. It can feel like I felt forced. And now I don't trust whoever made me consent or I feel like if someone used my data in a certain way, that wasn't okay, because I didn't fully understand. And so there is this difference

between legal consent and the experience, the subjective feeling of, yeah, and you what I was getting into, I did it voluntarily and so I totally consented to that. So I was reading through the research that you did in hopefully I pronounced her name correctly, but your peer Rachel slunded. Yeah. So it was on what you were just describing. Basically, our perception versus the experience of informed consent. is the experience of informed consent. And how does our perception influence our informed consent? We've been looking at this idea that if I'm the person asking you to sign something, so I, for example, am a hiring manager and I'm onboarding a new employee and I give you a contract that I know in and out, and I've given to a million other employees, I feel what you're getting into, right? You're signing on

the dotted line. I've told you everything you need to know about this job, for example. And so if you come back in a few months and say, I didn't consent to work these hours or to do these kinds of tasks, I feel you know what you are getting into when you signed that contract. But as a person who is actually reading and then signing the contract, we often are much less clear on what things mean. We might not read it as carefully, we might not have as much time to process it, we might not understand some of the terms, even if they're explained to us until we experience them. And for us, that perception might feel very different than what the other person thinks, right? They're saying, you knew what you were getting into

and we're like, I didn't really know. I didn't, I don't feel like I was truly informed. And so that can make me feel like this isn't fair that I'm being asked to do this thing. Even if I signed a contract saying I would do it. One of the examples we use in the paper on informed consent is the example of Taylor Swift. So she is famously re-recording a bunch of her albums because she had signed a contract with this recording company that allowed them to sell her work and they ended up doing that. And she was really unhappy with that.

And she didn't like who now owned her masters. And even though she signed a contract, maybe she wasn't fully informed of what could happen or fully understand it, maybe she's changed over time and realized that actually I was naive back then or I didn't realize what I would become back then. And now I feel like I know a lot more about what this means and now I'm going to I changed my mind. But whatever it is, the signing of that legal contract did not make her feel like she consented

to what they then legally were allowed to do. She felt like this isn't right, this isn't fair. And I think at some point she even said that it felt like a non-consensual sale when they sold her masters, regardless of the legality of it. And so that experience can lead you to feel betrayed and not trust someone in her case. Wind up taking profits from that company because she's frustrated with the outcome. Yeah.

And what role do cultural norms and societal attitudes play in shaping our subjective experience when it comes to consent? That's a really good question. And one, we're so at the beginning of unpacking this that we don't have good answers to it yet. But I do think that, for example, one thing that's used to determine competence to consent is age. Like at what point are you developmentally capable of being able to

consent to something? And I think that's something that is constantly evolving about giving autonomy to kids versus protecting them from consenting to the things that they really are not capable of doing yet. So one thing we saw that I found really fascinating was during the sort of major intensive point of COVID where vaccines were coming out. And there were kids who wanted the vaccine, who wanted to consent to it, but who were not legally able, they weren't legally of age to be able to consent. And so there's this idea. So some people would argue, well, they should be able to, they understand they're cognitively capable. Other people would argue like that still their parents they should be able to, they understand they're cognitively capable.

Other people would argue like that's still their parents' role to be able to protect them and to make these medical decisions. And so that's something that's just an ongoing conversation that can shape our perceptions of whether someone should be allowed to consent, but also your own subjective experience. So if I feel like actually, I do know more than my parents and over the years, like kids have started to feel like, Oh, I have access to this information that maybe they don't have because I read certain things or I've access to certain news

or apps or whatever it might be, they may feel subjectively competent and be seen as not being competent. So I think that's one way in which we've seen conversations around shifting cultural ideas around consent. And in your research, you discuss the importance of consent in various contexts, and you've given a bunch of these today from sexual consent to medical procedures, data usage by corporations. And I wanted to tackle some of these to go a little bit deeper. And I thought

maybe we could start about this data usage because previously in my career, I was the head of data at two Fortune 50 companies. And we would collect data from our consumers, but we would also collect data on employees to understand in many ways how to make the work environment better. But let's focus on this data usage that many companies are doing on consumers. Facebook is a great one, Amazon is a great one because they're collecting all this data and then they're using it to drive what they consider is more personalized selling to you as the individual using the surface, but they're also selling your data to many other sources that you don't even realize when you've consented to this. Can you discuss that and perhaps some of the implications that we don't think about?

I think in terms of the question of consent, what's interesting about that is that as we all know, Facebook and all these social media sites and apps are always revising their terms and conditions, sending us a new one to scroll through quickly and accept. And in there, they may say, here's how we're going to use your data. But how many of us can actually say that, first of all, we read that so that we could even regurgitate the line about how they're going to use our data. But also the implications of that, the downstream implications. So what if they sell my data here? What does that really mean? How does that impact me behaviorally? Does it actually

change my behaviors or the world around me? And I think so one of my colleagues, Leslie John, has written about how essentially the idea of consent in those context has just become a charade. It's just we don't want to not use the site. So it doesn't really feel voluntary. If it's social media, for example, what are we going to do, just stop using Facebook, which a number of people do, but a lot of people decide it's connects them to people and they don't want to lose that sort of resource. And we don't really understand exactly what the risks are. We're really bad at predicting those risks. Another context of data usage is surveillance in companies. So not just consumer's data, but also like employees' data. And so another colleague of mine, Karen Levy, has studied truck drivers, like long distance truck drivers

and how a lot of long distance truck drivers got into the job because they didn't want to constantly be reporting to a boss. They just want to do their own thing and they talk about that being an appeal of the job. But in the years since, there's been this intense surveillance of their job to the point where they're always being tracked by GPS and their speed and things like that. And they've gotten so frustrated that they've started to dismantle these tracking devices and try to protest in that way. And so you wind up

in these situations where data is being collected and used in ways that we don't understand. The risks are unclear. It feels like a privacy violation. But it's hard to imagine saying, no, I won't use the site. No, I won't take that job. And so people wind up rebelling in these other sorts of ways. Yeah, it's interesting because right now, I'm at that time of year where I'm shopping for car insurance. And it's interesting how they're trying to incentivize you to have a lower rate by putting a tracker in your car Which is something I don't want and I would figure most people don't want everything that you do Tracked it's so interesting how we allow ourselves to then

Because we want that discount plug that thing in and then you almost forget about it and what that insurance company is collecting on you. Yeah, exactly. And it's so abstract to think about, well, what can they do with it? And the reality is more concrete, but we can't really make that sort of connection. Another example, I took my kids to Universal Studios last year and it's an expensive ticket. We fly down there, You wait in a really long line. The kids are like, raring to go into the park and we're waiting the line finally starts to go. And at the front, before we go through, we give our fingerprints, which I totally did not expect. They said on the ticket, like you may be asked to show ID, but we're actually giving our fingerprints to this theme park

and people are just filing in, not asking any questions. And I quickly, because I study this, I was like, how long do you keep this? What do you do with this? They tried to reassure me, but I still had no real idea of what they were doing with my fingerprints besides,

obviously they're trying to avoid me passing my ticket to someone else, but I didn't feel like I consented to that because we've been waiting in that line. We bought those tickets. My kids were like, what was I going to do? So I know I'm going to leave the park now. Still, I wasn't fully informed of what they were going to do with this data. But I still provided this private information and just went through. Yeah, I think that's a great example.

I'm wondering as I'm listening to you say that, what could they possibly need your fingerprints for? Yeah, they say it's each time you go in, you put your fingerprints on with your ticket so you're not passing it to someone else who gets a free passing, it's to say they're you, but it seems extreme to prevent that kind of fraud. It reminds me, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Yuri Ganesi.

We were talking about his book that came out last year and he gave the example of he went to a theme park and I think his child at the time was at this right around the cutoff age for when you get the discount ticket. And so he admits that let's say it was six years old and they had just turned seven, he told the person that they were six and then the child overhears it and says,

why did you tell them I'm six when I'm seven? But he was saying that they need a better way to overall police this. So I'm just thinking maybe the fingerprints is a way for them to somehow do that, although I don't know how you would tie the fingerprints to the kids age, unless you had some other form of way of identifying them. And I would also they didn't ask for the kids because then I think I would have said no because that just seems who knows by the time there are adults what could possibly

happen by giving your fingerprints out. And I'm not usually paranoid about these things, I will say, but I'm just much more aware of moments where I'm being asked to give what feels like very personal information to a company and it feels non-consensual. And yet, I'm consenting legally, I'm doing it, I'm going through, but it feels non-consensual and it makes me really frustrated. Well, another important area that I wanted to touch on before we explore your book is you and Lauren Devinson conducted research on unwanted romantic advances. What were some of your most important findings as they relate to consent?

Yes, so this kind of followed a long line of studies where I mentioned we were looking at how people feel like they can't say no when they're asked for something. And for many years, we'd explored that basic finding in asking for help, like a favor. So people will agree to do you a favor because it's so awkward to say no. We looked at it in an ethical context like people will agree to lie on your behalf because they find it hard to say no. We looked at it in an ethical context like people will agree to lie on your behalf because they find it hard to say no. And we thought this would also apply to other contexts. We started this actually right before me to hit. So it wasn't even inspired by me to, but eventually it became a really nice way of explaining some of the dynamics

that were coming out in the me to movement, but what we found is that similar dynamics occur in unwanted, romantic advances. Essentially, if someone isn't interested, they find it harder to say no than the person who's asking realizes. So we surveyed a number of people who worked in the STEM field, so science, technology, engineering, math. And we asked them if they had ever been approached by someone in their field with a romantic advance, and it was someone they weren't interested in, so they wanted to say no. Or we asked them if they were ever interested in someone in their field who turned out not to be interested in them. And we asked them how hard it was for that person to say no to them,

how uncomfortable it was for that person, and then to them, how uncomfortable it was for that person. And then how much it affected that person in terms of downstream consequences. Did they avoid you? Did they work on a different area? Did they even maybe switch labs or something like that? And what we found was that the people who were making these advances underestimated the uncomfortable position they were putting these other people in as they made these advances. So there's this sort of idea that it's easy for people to say no to you. If they don't, you just shoot your shot, you go for it, you ask someone out and if they don't want to, you're the one who gets hurt, right?

You're sad, you gave it a go, and so you're the one who's in this uncomfortable position of asking. But what we found is actually the other person is in a super uncomfortable position as well, because just like it's hard to hear now, it's hard to be rejected. It's also really hard to tell someone now. It's really hard to be the rejecter.

And that wound up affecting people's downstream consequences. So they did have to avoid that person they felt like they did spend time thinking about that instead of doing other things at work. They did consider switching labs, consider switching projects and things like that. And so simply by asking someone out, they put them in an awkward position that had these downstream consequences. And so we want to taking from that in terms of practical suggestions is we're all going to be interested in people, even people in our workplace who maybe aren't interested in us. But taking a moment, not just going for it when you are interested in someone, but actually trying to take time to make sure that person is open that they're available that they're maybe open to your advances before putting them in that awkward position. And also doing things like only asking once. Don't make someone say no twice

because even just saying no once tends to be quite hard. And maybe just to follow on to that, another thing that was interesting to me was how you wrote that what motivates suitors to misinterpret target friendliness or eye contact is indicators of sexual interest. I just found that whole thing that someone who wants to ask someone out, and you see this play out all the time, this other person might be friendly, where they might give you eye contact, or they might lean into you, which you as the suitor think are indicators of an interest. How do we misinterpret that so often? Yes, it's motivated cognition,

which I'm sure other people have talked about from time to time on the show, which just we do see and interpret the world the way we want. It's a really powerful force. We want to see ourselves as good and attractive in all these things. So we do tend to interpret things to make us feel that way. And so if we really like someone and we're motivated that we want them to like us back,

we read into every little thing and think, oh, I think they did give me that look or they held my eye contact for an extra moment. They smiled at me. So that must mean that they're actually interested when they're maybe just being friendly. And researchers found that this is even more the case when you're in a position of power. And this is because people in lower positions of power

tend to show deference to people who have power over them or who have power. So they smile and they're extra friendly and they do these things. They pay more attention to people in power because it's important to pay attention to people and positions of power. Like you learn something from them and they control these resources that you might need access to. And so you do all these things that this person in power then thinks means that, oh, maybe this person is actually romantically interested in me.

And so you get even more of these misperceptions when there's that this power imbalance. Well, thank you for that. And Vanessa, I'm now going to switch to your book, which came out, if I have a correct in 2021, titled, You Have More Influence Than You Think. And I first encountered this book recently, as I mentioned at the top of the episode,

when I was conducting research on a solo episode, I did on the power of asking. And the research was really important to that article because what you show throughout this book is that people chronically underestimate their influence over others. Why from a psychological standpoint does this this under estimation occur? There are a couple of reasons. One is something called negativity bias, which is essentially this bias that the negative events that happen to us loom a lot larger than the positive ones. So if someone's rejected us in the past, that sticks with us more intensely and longer than the times that someone just agreed to do something for us. And so we remember these instances where you really tried to persuade someone of something

and they just kept disagreeing with you or you asked someone to do something and they refused. So those incidents loom large in our minds and so when we think about do I have influence, those are the things that first come to mind and not all the times that someone just listened to us and that wasn't as painful and wasn't as intense and long-lasting in our psychology. So that's one and the other thing that plays a really big role in a lot of the findings I talk about in the book is that in the book is that influence doesn't always work the way we think it does. So we have this idea that if I influence someone, I will see it. It will be immediate. It will be a time I'm trying to influence them. I'm like actively trying to change someone's mind and I will see it. They will say, they'll concede the argument. They'll say, you really changed my mind or they'll say, okay, I'm going to do that. I promise. And the truth is that influence doesn't work like that. Influence often happens,

it's often delayed, it often happens in someone's head where we don't have access and we never actually see it. It's often cumulative. So we might say something and get no response, but they hear it again a week later and they hear it from someone else and it adds up and then they actually do come around to our position or maybe they think about it a week later a little bit more. But we're really bad at getting in other people's heads. We're bad at perspective taking. And so if a lot of the influence we have is happening when we're not trying to sometimes we just make an offhand comment or in cases where we're not immediately there and they're not telling us that we impacted them in some way. If we're going to guess, we're going to guess I didn't have an influence. I didn't get any clear signals from that person that I changed their mind, for example.

And so that also can lead us to underestimate our influence. And so that also can lead us to underestimate our influence. Why is it that we often refrain from complementing strangers or expressing gratitude to the most important people in our lives, because we underestimate the impact of our words on others. This is another example of being really focused on the negative experiences that we have had our expect to have. So we actually, when we run studies, we've done several studies where we've brought people into our lab and had them go out and just give random people compliments.

And we ask them what they think is going to happen if they go and compliment people. They actually think that people will be annoyed that they've interrupted them and stopped them and are bothering them. And they think that people will be annoyed, that they've interrupted them and stopped them and are bothering them. And I think that the people are not going to be as appreciative of the compliment. They think that they're not going to like it as much. It's not going to make them feel as good as it actually makes that person feel when we then go and ask that person, like, how did that make you feel? Did you appreciate that compliment?

How annoyed were you? Right? They're actually not annoyed. People love to get compliments. They're not bothered by it. And we, once again, are really bad at perspective taking, at putting ourselves in the position of that person being complimented, and remembering how good it feels

when we get compliments. Instead, we focus on the awkwardness we think will deliver the compliment with. We think that we'll be really, we won't be able to phrase it perfectly. It'll be an incompetent delivery as the way we often talk about it, like competence versus warmth.

And we often don't care, like a compliment is a compliment. It's okay if it's not done articulately. It's okay if you stutter when you deliver it, it still feels really good. That warmth is still there, that good feeling is still there. But when you're the compliment deliverer, you are just so focused on the ways you messed it up. Oh, I didn't say that.

Or with gratitude in the case of gratitude or like writing a gratitude letter to somebody, how could I really express it in a way that made sense? It's just gonna make them feel awkward. It's gonna make them feel silly. When in fact, they just feel the warmth of the gratitude. They don't pick apart the words you use to express it. I think it was in chapter one,

you discussed something called the reverse spotlight effect. Can you discuss what that is and how it shows that we tend to overestimate the extent to which people's attention is on us when we are self-conscious about something? Yeah. So there's the spotlight effect, which is when people, we think that work in a spotlight, when we're self-conscious about something, and that everyone is looking at that thing

that we're super self-conscious about. And so if I am wearing something new and I'm not sure if I'm pulling it off or I'm having a bad hair day or I stumbled or I misspoke, whatever it might be, we think everyone saw that and everyone was paying attention to that thing. In fact, when researchers have studied this by doing things like having someone wear something that they are embarrassed to be wearing like a silly t-shirt and then asking them like how many people do you think noticed your t-shirt, and then asking them like, how many people do you think noticed your t-shirt, and then actually asking the room,

how many of you actually notice that person's t-shirt, they find that this is not true, that you are not in a spotlight, everyone is not looking at those embarrassing awkward things that you think that they're looking at. And then the reverse spotlight is this idea that when we're not acutely self-conscious or focused on something that we're embarrassed of, that we think no one's noticing us. We think the only time

people pay attention to us are the times where we like really don't want them to be noticing us. We want to blend into the background and just hide away in a shadow. But it's the times where we are just doing our own thing that people do notice us more than we realize. And we actually can have a lot of impact on people just by modeling certain behaviors that people notice more than we think. And then go on to mimic, even just like throwing my trash out in the right receptacle, right? The person behind me who's not sure where to throw their trash out sees what I do, and they copy it. But we do not, we may not be aware of such a sort of mundane moment where we're actually

impacting someone else's behavior. Well, thank you for sharing that. And as I was reading the book, I could tell that almost all the information that you were arriving at as you were writing this was based on different experiments that you've done throughout the years. And I wanted to ask, what were some of the experiments or a particular one that you have done that turned out completely different than you expected it to going in? There are a couple experiments that I was just sure wouldn't work.

I actually thought that they were so audacious that there was no way this was going to work. So one of my absolute favorite experiments and we've replicated it many times, but we wanted to show, as I mentioned, we have all these studies where we have our participants come in, leave the lab, and then go ask people for things. And we started off for many years having them ask people for favors to show that like people are willing to help you more than you expect. And that's in part because they find it hard to say no to someone who's asking for help. But we wanted to show that this also extended to an ethical context. And we tried some small little things that were unethical, but we're like,

they're really not that bad. So we're not really making the point we want to make. And so we were like, let's just come up with something crazy that there's no way someone would do and just see what happens. And so we came up with this idea of having our participants go into libraries with books that we had made to look like library books and ask strangers to vandalize these books. And we gave them a script, we said,

you're gonna go into libraries and say, hey, I'm playing a prank on my friend, but they know my handwriting. We just write the word pickle and pen in this library book. And we came up with this and we said, there is no way this is going to work. And then when we actually trained our participants to do this and we asked them, they obviously thought, people are not going to agree to do this. This is crazy. And then they went out to these libraries, went up to people, and more than half of the people, they asked, want to be agreeing, and vandalizing these library books exactly as they were asked.

And they didn't do it because they didn't think it was a big deal or they didn't think it was bad. They would tell our participants would come back and say, they really seemed conflicted. They told us that we shouldn't be doing this. They were worried about getting into trouble, but they would still do it. And I would even get emails after the fact from people who signed it, even though we debriefed them, we like gave them all the input.

It was just a study. It wasn't a real library book, all of this, but I would get these emails being like, I can't believe you made me bundle as this library book. This is a terrible study. And it was first of all, you did it. You could have said no, by the whole point of our studies, that's a lot harder than people realized, but also no actual library books were harmed. But I couldn't believe that study worked. I definitely, it was a Hail Mary and we were really surprised when it worked out.

In the book, you talk a lot about the importance of getting perspective. And along those lines, you write that we think we are less sociable than the average person because we don't actually compare ourselves to the average person. We compare ourselves to the prototypical social butterfly. Can you explain why we do that?

So this is interesting. So a lot of the studies I talk about in the book are about these social comparisons we do where we fall short. And a lot of psychology is about overconfidence and how we take risks. We shouldn't because we think that we'll surely be able to like beat the lottery and make these things happen and that we're better at doing these calculations and other people, but when it comes to these sort of social contexts, it turns out that we wind up comparing ourselves to these people who are the absolute most social people you could imagine.

A classic example is flipping around like Instagram or whatever social media site you might think of. And you might be home on the couch just having an evening in for whatever reason. And if you're going to flip around on Instagram, what do people post right there, posting all these parties and dinners and people that they're out socializing with. And so it can make us feel really less than when it comes to how social we are because all those other people who are down the hall who are also on their couch flipping through Instagram or again, whatever social media site you've used, they're not posting that. They're not posting about how they're just at home on their phone. And so because that's the more visible,

salient, available sort of comparison, we wind up underestimating our own social ability and feeling like we fall short in comparison. Well, another interesting area that I thought was how individuals, even in positions of power, can underestimate their influence. And it's interesting because I had Marshall Goldsmith on the podcast and we were talking about some of the different leaders he had trained. And for about a 10 year period, the US Army hired him to retrain all general officers when they put on their first star.

And I asked him, what were some of the things that you saw that just stood out to why you needed to retrain them? And he said, it's interesting. Once they went from being a colonel to being a burglarer general, it's like they lost their minds and they lost the situational awareness of how everything they do from their actions to their words carries influence that they failed to realize.

And I know that this happens not only with generals, it happens in everyday life. How might this phenomenon impact decision-making in interactions within organizations when people on power like these general have underestimate their influence? This tendency to underestimate your influence, even when you're in a position of power, it's really fascinating because you would think being a power you're really aware of the power you hold.

But for one, so many of us take your time kind of making our way up the packing order to the point where we're so used to being in this position of someone being above us that we, it's hard for us to adjust and realize, actually, no, I'm, now I'm the boss and people are looking at me differently. My words carry a different kind of weight. There's also research showing that people in positions of power are less likely to perspective take and less likely to empathize with other people. And so just, they don't need to as much as you do when you're trying to understand what's going on in the boss's head. The boss doesn't need to understand what's going on in everyone else's head to the same degree. And so you just get this decrease in perspective taking. And with power comes

like less constraint. So you don't always have to second guess what you're doing. And so you expect that other people have no constraints either. And so you forget all this when you're in a position of power. And it can affect things from the most mundane things, for example. So I recently became department chair here in my department at Cornell. And we have these department meetings. And first of all, I'm a new department chair. So there's part of me that's thinking, how do I show that I deserve this position? Now I'm here, like I wanna prove

that I have good ideas and that I understand what's going on. And so one of the ways of doing that is to come up with a solution, come up with an idea. And so I'll raise a question for the group, a whole bunch of people who are much junior to me. And I'll quickly have this urge to answer my own question. Right? To prove that, oh, I'm here for a reason, I know it, I know the good answer. And also,

I forget, right, that if I say that, it's totally going to change the conversation. Because now the person with the most power in the room has just come up with a potential solution. And no one else is going to really question that. And it's definitely those words are going to hold more weight than someone else's solution. And so now everyone's circling around this idea that I threw out there. And if I'm having this meeting, I don't want to be the one coming up with the idea. I don't want it to be all about my ideas because the whole point of a meeting is to get a variety of ideas.

And so it can affect the most mundane things like you speak in meetings more than you should. So like a major sort of suggestion that a lot of people you hear make is to hold back if you're in a position of power, speak last, speak less, listen more, all that, but it is hard to hold back. But then of course, it can also affect much more serious things. For example, people in positions of power who abuse their power without realizing it. So there's this great quote by one of my colleagues that when you're in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout. And so even suggesting that someone may be trying to do something like a little unethical or asking someone who reports to you out on a date,

even if you feel like, oh, well, if they're not interested, they'll just say, no, all those things seem more like orders or commands to the people that you're suggesting or asking. And if you underestimate that and underestimate your influence, you can put people in really uncomfortable positions who don't feel comfortable saying no to you, who don't feel comfortable as challenging you want to suggestion that you've made. Okay, and Vanessa, can you provide some practical tips on how listeners can become more aware of their influence in their daily lives?

Sure, so I talk in the book about three things that you can do just become more aware of the influence you have, and I call it getting better at seeing your influence, feeling your influence and experiencing your influence. So one is to, as much as possible, use strategies, visualizations, vignettes, and ways of think, reframes of how you think about things to get out of your own head. So if you think about it, one reason we underestimate our influence is that we by necessity look at the world, our own two eyes.

So we see everybody else and the things they do that affect us. We see how they're affecting one another, but we don't see ourselves in that scene. We don't see the ways in which we are contributing to a situation. And so if we can take a moment to try to get out of our own head, picture a scene as if you're a fly in the wall, picture it as if someone else was observing it and then reporting it back to you, or you were talking about it to a friend,

what would they say? Anything that gets you to see yourself in that scenario can help you to be aware of the ways in which you might be impacting dynamics that you can help you to be aware of the ways in which you might be impacting dynamics that you didn't realize you were contributing to. So that's one another is feeling your influence. And so even if we see the things we do that doesn't mean we understand how, for example, a throwaway comment really felt to another person. And so one way to do that is something called getting perspective. So people

are often told to take perspective and even deal Carnegie of how to win friends and influence. People said that you should take people's perspective more. But we're really bad at that. We're really bad at perspective taking. And so a better way is to what researchers call get perspective. And the easiest way to do that, and it's disarmingly simple, is just to ask people how they feel about something, get feedback, listen, because when we try to take someone's perspective, we're guessing from our own head, our own experience.

But when we actually get out of our own heads and get outside information from either that person directly or people around them, we actually get new information that we couldn't have come up with ourselves and that can help us understand how someone's really feeling. And then the last one is to experience your influence. And so this is just little kind of activities or tasks you can do to test out your influence on a daily basis. It could be writing a gratitude letter to someone you really appreciate.

It could be giving a compliment when to someone you really appreciate. It could be giving a compliment when you think something nice about another person. It could be asking for help on something that you wouldn't ordinarily have asked for. You would have tried to do it yourself even though it would have taken you twice as long. And so as you do these kind of little things and incorporate them into your life, you start to realize that actually my words really did impact that person or they were totally willing to help me. And you start to realize that actually my words really did impact that person or they were totally willing to help me and you start to realize that you really do have this kind of agency in the world and with other people.

Thank you so much for sharing those and Vanessa if a listener wanted to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? So I have a website which is vinesabons.com. You can also check out my book which is available everywhere. Bronsonobile, Amazon, etc. And I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Profbonds. Well, Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such an honor to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Vanessa Bonds and I wanted to thank Vanessa and W.W. Norton Books for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today's show. Links to all things Vanessa will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you

purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on YouTube at both Johnner Miles and PassionStruck Clips. I have some extremely exciting news that my new book PassionStruck, 12 powerful principles to unlock your purpose and ignite your most intentional life, is now available for pre-order. Anywhere that you buy books, links will also be in the show notes. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community at passionstruck.com slash deals. You can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter work intentionally. You can also find me on all the social platforms at John Armiles, and lastly,

you can sign up for my personal newsletter live intentionally at either JohnArmiles.com or PassionStruct.com. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruct podcast interview that I did with my friend Rusty Shelton. It was a best-selling author, dynamic keynote speaker, and successful entrepreneur, who has focused his career on helping leaders

build thought leadership focused on impact, not ego, writing three acclaimed books and speaking around the world from events such as South by Southwest Interactive de Forbes. This is not just a look how smart John is, Brian, you had done completely the opposite, which is what I wholeheartedly recommend to your audience. And that is, I want them to be the messenger, not the message.

In other words, this is not about building some kind of an ego-driven brand. This is about you've got a message to get out. If you're going to make an impact at scale, it's going to go further quicker, cheaper, more effectively. If you as the leader are willing to be the messenger, if you're willing to be vulnerable, if you're willing to be authentic. The fee for willing to be vulnerable, if you're willing to be authentic. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful. If you know someone who is looking for more information on consent and influence,

then definitely share Vanessa's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Now go out there this week and become PassionStruck.