Understanding Our Power of Influence – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #889

Understanding Our Power of Influence – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #889

Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #889 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans  aims to share knowledge and wisdom from Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Vanessa Bohns

Credit: Mikhail Nilov

Do we understand how much power we have of influencing others? Generally, we have some vague idea with many ifs and buts. Mostly, we tend to think that influencing others is a very difficult task and only people with special skills can do it, not the ordinary people. Although we presently see an army of ‘influencers’ in every category from food to fashion to technology, we still believe we are not the influencing material. For this reason, we do not even try to exert our influence on others.

Venessa Bohns is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She has published a book titled ‘YOU HAVE MORE INFLUENCE THAN YOU THINK – How we underestimate our power of persuasion. And why it matters’. McKinsey’s digital publishing manager Eleni Kostopoulos sat with Ms. Bohns to talk about the subject matter of her book (link at the end). Here are some excerpts.

Reason for Writing this Book

As a social psychologist who has been studying influence for more than fifteen years, I have found that people have tons of influence, but they need to all sorts of bells and whistles and training to be able to exercise influence. I therefore, wanted to write a book that reflected that piece. It is to show all the influence we have but we fail to see and the blind sport that we have for that influence.

I talk about the cognitive biases that lead us to overlook the extent to which people notice us, listen to what we say, and will do things for us. 

Surprises that Came Out of Research

The whole book is an account of all the things that surprised me in my research over the years. My collaborators and I design various experiments in which our participants go out and try to influence people in various ways, some really bizarre. For example, we had had participants ask people for pretty big favors. We even had participants ask other strangers to lie for them or vandalize library books. 

Every time we design a daunting task, we say to ourselves ‘there is no way our participants are going to get people to this’, but our participants go out, and they make these requests, and just by asking, they can make it hard for people to say no to them. It happens much more frequently than we ever anticipate, and it is incredibly surprising. 

Being overconfident or underconfident

An interesting thing that research shows is that we are overconfident in a lot of ways. We think that we are smarter than the average person, but more recent research shows that we are underconfident in a lot of other ways.

We tend to be generally underconfident in interpersonal domains. Due to this, people who are super overconfident in what they believe – because they think they are smart, and they think they are moral, and they think they know the right thing, become underconfident in whether people will buy what they believe, and whether they can actually sell it to them. Such combination of things can lead people to shout and be overly aggressive because they think they really have to shout to get people to believe what they believe in. (The shouting of our political and religious leaders, scholars, presenters, and anchors does not fall in this category; they shout due to hollowness of their diction).

Dynamics at Workplace

A lot of research shows that people in power are particularly bad at taking the perspective of people who are in a lower power position from them.

If you have power, you don’t need to understand what’s going on in the heads of people who don’t have power, as much as the reverse relationship. Because you just don’t need them as much to get ahead and to make things happen. So when you’re in a position of power, you tend not to put yourself in the other person’s perspective.

That means that if I’m someone’s boss and I ask them on a date, or I ask them to do something unethical or something they feel uncomfortable with, or even if I just ask them to stay late at work or to work over the weekend, or something they really would rather not do—I may think that they’ll just say no if they don’t want to do that. And we fail, when we’re in that position, to put ourselves in the heads of the other person, to take that person’s perspective and realize they’re not going to say no to you, because you’re their boss.

Our Influence

The research shows that people are paying attention to you more than you realize; you are not invisible. That you are more effective than you think, and that people are more willing to do things for you than you think. And we are a lot harder on ourselves when we evaluate an interaction, after it happens, than other people tend to be. 

Our influence can work both ways. On the positive side, it should make us more confident when we ask for things. On the negative side, people may act brashly, and may not realize how their comments, their requests, and things like that impact other people.

Three Take Aways

One, that people take some sense of comfort, that in many cases, they were being harder on themselves than they really needed to be and change their perspective.

Two, that people become more mindful of the influence they have on others.

Three, that while it is great to gain influence and use it, there are times when they should just pull back, be more gentle, and not make the request which may put the other person in a difficult corner.

Concluded.

Reference:

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-vanessa-bohns-on-our-hidden-potential-to-persuade?stcr=599B3E0665DC4C04A4BC6E7A85877933&cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=be8ce11756804ec5a8d88caf208b94aa&hctky=2208791&hdpid=ecd76c61-8b1a-4abf-81f8-bdf774499ad2