Invisible Influence

Invisible Influence will help you make better choices by revealing and reducing the effect that others have on your actions, thoughts, and preferences.

A study by psychologist Richard Moreland proves the power of invisible influence. Four women of similar attractiveness attended a big college class, acting like regular students. Each attended a different number of class sessions ranging from 0 to 15.

After the semester finished, Moreland had class members review photos of the women. The majority preferred the girl that had been to the most class sessions, without even being aware they’d ever seen her!

We prefer familiar people, even if we don’t realize that they are familiar to us. This is only one example of the unseen effect that others have on us. But simply knowing about this influence will help it impact you less.

Take a young girl who is bullied by students who hate bookworms, for example. At first, she might feel discouragement at their despising her love of books. But once she realizes that they are affecting her thoughts, their power diminishes.

As the girl considers if it’s true that people who read a lot are losers, she’ll recognize that these bullies are wrong. She may look to all of the successful people that reading has made and realize that she’s right to like books.

Even if you feel like you’re a pretty independent thinker, you’re likely wrong. We’re highly inclined to adopt behaviors and opinions from the people who are around us. The first reason we do this is simple: it saves us time. We don’t have to figure our opinions about everything out for ourselves. Remember the time your friend told you that a new restaurant was terrible? You probably didn’t bother going there. Or maybe you adopted the same political views as your parents before you really took the time to study out what you really believed. Sometimes we just adopt other’s opinions to save ourselves time. Another reason that we adopt others’ opinions is because of social pressure that makes us feel the need to conform. In a study, researchers asked participants to match the length of a line shown to them on a card with one of three other lines shown on a different card. The answer was very obvious, but six out of the seven in each group were actors who gave the same wrong answer. In one-third of cases, participants conformed and gave the wrong answer due to peer pressure. Social influence even explains why people like certain media. In a study, teens listened to songs by unknown artists and were asked to download what they liked. One group did this without any outside influence, but the second…