Episode 67 – Jonah Berger M.D. – Invisible Influence

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We are the intimate strangers. Thank you for listening. The human experience is invisibly influencing you as we welcome our guest, Jonah Berger, onto the show. Jonah, welcome back to HXP. Great to be here again. Jonah so I mean I think your book Invisible Influence your latest book has hit the New York Times bestseller it has yes wow congratulations that's two in a two in a row for you oh thank you I couldn't be more excited and it's great to see so many people interested in the in the topic in the book that's amazing I mean uh you might have some lightning in a bottle over there that maybe we can use that you can teach us about in this conversation.

I hope so. Okay, so why don't we start with a little bit about how you got from Contagious to this, to Invisible Influence? I mean, what decided you to kind of craft the idea for this book? Yeah, so, you know, after Contagious came out, I had the opportunity to talk to hundreds over the years from, you know, a thousand steep conferences with major associations to small startups and everybody in between.

And it was really exciting to share why things catch on, how word of mouth works. And I always got some great questions after the talk and some of them really related to contagious, but some didn't. So people would sometimes ask things like, oh, this is really great. You know, when I, if I have an idea I want to catch on or something I want to spread, this is perfect. But what if I just want to change one person's behavior?

What if I want influence my boss or influence my employees? What if I want to motivate people or motivate myself?

How can I use influence to do that? And I'd usually try to think about, you know, part of the book that might be relevant, part of Contagious that might be relevant. But often without fail, I realized, you know what, that just really wasn't the right book for them. There needed to be something else. And I looked around and there really wasn't something out there that fit the bill.

And that's when I put Invisible Influence together. So really in response to a lot of people's comments and to know more about. Interesting. So, I mean, with this book, Invisible Influence, we're talking about the subtle things that kind of influence the way that we see and the things that affect us and how we make decisions, how we make choices, how we kind of dive into this sense of conformity.

I mean, where am I with this? You're somewhat right, but it's even more than that. So, From the simple things we buy and do, like what breakfast cereal to consume or what movie to watch this weekend, to the more complicated stuff, like which house to get or whether to take a new job or which firm to hire. We often think that we make those decisions. Our preferences, our likes and dislikes drive what ends up happening.

And very simply, we're wrong. Without realizing it, others have a subtle and often surprising impact on what we do. As you noted, sometimes that leads to imitation. Sometimes we do the same thing as others without realizing it. But just as often, it leads to the opposite. We actually avoid something and are less likely to do it because others are doing it. So when do others lead us to do the same thing?

When do they lead us to do something different? When do others motivate us to work harder? And when do they cause us to give up? And how by understanding these various effects and how they combine, can we live happier and healthier lives? And so that's what Invisible Influence is all about, how that science works and how we can use it to be better off. So how powerful is this sort of idea that we are affected by the choices that we see our friends making, that we see our other people making? How much of a draw is there with this?

what's so interesting to me in doing research for the book is uh you know i pulled together an example here and a study there and things from psychology and marketing and organizational behavior and sociology and and after looking through it all you know at one point i said you know let me see if i can find a domain that's not affected by social influence that uh something where we're not affected by our peers and and literally i couldn't it was impossible to find an area of life where we weren't affected by others.

You know, 99.9999% of the things we do are shaped by others. And sometimes those others are folks we know, you know, our friends, our colleagues at work, or our family members. Other times we may not even realize that influence is occurring. You know, the person that sits next to us on the bus or, you know, the person that's running on the treadmill next to us on the gym can actually have an impact on how we behave.

And so the idea of the book is, one, you know, how do we see influence, helping us recognize around us. And two, by recognizing it, helping us choose how to be influenced, choose whether we want to be influenced or not, and choose it in ways that make us better off. I mean, what was the scariest aspect of this book for you and researching it?

I mean, I know that mirror neurons play a big role in learning, but as far as marketing, advertising, and conformity, what scared you the most about this book? I think what scares me the most is how worried people are about influence and wrongfully so. I think people, Americans in particular, are so sure that one, influence is a bad thing and two, it means imitating others.

And so as a result, we say, oh, well, you know, I avoided what they're doing. I'm not influenced.

That's completely wrong. You know, when we avoid what someone else is doing because we don't want and somehow be influenced, we're being influenced just in the opposite direction. And so what I found so striking is people's inability to realize how their behavior is being affected, and as a result, kind of the unwillingness to come to terms with it. And so, you know, influence is not a bad thing.

I think we tend to think influence is negative. We tend to treat it almost like a four-letter word. You know, we think of conformity as a bad thing. But imagine, for example, if you couldn't figure out what restaurant to try or what, I don't know, asking others, life would be pretty hard, right? It would be much more difficult and much more time consuming.

And so often we rely on others as a helpful shortcut to help us make faster and better decisions. It's not necessarily a bad thing to be influenced. And so really the goal of the book is to help us understand influence and how we can use it. Yeah, I noticed that.

I mean, I noticed that you didn't color it as a sort of negative thing, which was a positive thing for me to see you kind of just addressing it in a sort of neutral way.

Yeah, I mean, there's this notion that somehow being a nonconformist is a good thing. That sort of, you know, oh, the best people are the ones that don't go with the crowd. First of all, you know, often those people are going just with a different crowd. If you look at, you know, hipsters, for example, or people that are against the mainstream, they often dress the same way and listen to similar music and do similar things.

And so we're all being similar to some set of people, whether that's the groups we want to look like or the groups we're actually a part of. And it's not bad. It's just human nature. So, I mean, when we're talking about social influence and how it affects us, what was something that you, through your research with this book, what was something that you found was the biggest factor in determining our behavior?

Well, you know, there's no one factor that's bigger than all the others, but we can start talking about a few of them. You mentioned the idea of mirror neurons. You know, there's some exciting research that looks at how we might biologically be set up to imitate others, almost like a chameleon. If you think about how we think of chameleons, we think of them as sort of fitting in their environment, changing their color to fit.

We do this all the time. If we're in a meeting and someone crosses their arms, well, we're more likely to cross our arms. If a person starts speaking in a certain accent, we're more likely to adopt a similar accent. And so without even realizing it, we're subtly fitting in to our surrounding environment. But that has some important implications for becoming more influential or being more influential.

It turns out we can harness that tool to be more effective. If you want to shape others' behavior, for example, mimicry or being chameleon is a useful way to do it. Some researchers looked at what makes great negotiators. Most of us don't like negotiating, myself included. It's not particularly fun. It's difficult to do. We don't trust a negotiating partner. We think we want to get the most out of it. How do we do that without upsetting them? It's quite difficult.

So they looked at over 100 negotiations and they looked at what separated the successful folks from the less successful folks. And what they found is that one simple trick made negotiators five times as likely to be successful, five times as likely to reach a deal when all might seem that it was lost. And that trick very simply was being a chameleon or mimicking or mirroring the behavior of their peers.

If the person they were talking to tilted their head to the side, they subtly did so as well. Subtly so. And that subtle mimicry led them to be more likely to make a deal. It's not just negotiating them. Same thing shows up in all sorts of contexts. If a waiter or waitress mimics your order, so you say, you know, I'd like the steak medium rare with a side of mashed potatoes. And they say, okay, you'd like the steak medium rare with a side of mashed potatoes.

that waiter waitress just got a 70% higher tip. Daters whose language more mimics one another are more likely to go on a second date. So across these various domains, mimicry is a way to engender liking, trust and facilitate social interactions. It's, you know, if you and I found out we went to the same high school or had the same birthday, we'd feel more in common, like we have a kinship and we trust each other a little more. And that's exactly what mimicry does.

Right, right. So, I mean, were you getting into the aspects of NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, and building rapport such as that while you were researching this? You know, I'm most interested, I think we have this belief, and talk about influence, we have this belief that if we look into the mind, somehow we have more understanding of something. But it's very funny, I mean, there's some great research showing if you just include pictures of the brain in research, people feel like they've learned more, even if they haven't.

a great example, again, of where, sure, there's some great research from neuroscience that deepens our understanding of the world, but neuroscience isn't the only way to look at things. And more often, it's really important to look to the field and see how these things actually play out in our surrounding environments. And so, what was great in getting a chance to write this book is, you know, I surveyed hundreds of studies that I and my colleagues have done, but also a bunch of research from the micro to the macro that helps us understand influence more effectively.

I mean, you're a professor. That's what you do by trade, right? That is, yes. My day job, I like to say, is I'm a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Okay. So, I mean, there was an experiment that you did where you were playing with the attractiveness or the ranking of attractiveness of certain women based on a photo. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so this wasn't actually my study. It was a study of a friend of mine. But imagine you're a student in class in college. And at the end of the semester, the professor says, thanks for a great semester. By the way, would you be willing to help me out with a little bit of research?

and that research is very simply looking at a couple of pictures of people and rating how much you like them and how attractive they seem. And this is really easy, not difficult at all. You know, people have their preferences. They rated each of the people they looked at one way or another. What's interesting is they were actually part of a very subtle experiment that they didn't necessarily realize.

The people that they rated were actually actors that had been attending their class over the course of the semester. And so the professor picked a few actors that looked like students before the class started, and he asked those actors to show up to class different numbers of times.

So one actor showed up to class almost all the time, one actor showed up to class almost none of the time, and a couple other actors showed up in between.

And then he gave those photos to the students to rate how attractive they found them. What did he find? Well, what's interesting is I think we all think, just like we've been talking about that we make our own decisions. Who do we find attractive? Who do we like? Well, it's our own personal preferences.

Some people like blondes, some people like brunettes, some people like tall, dark, and handsome, some like, you know, short, pale, and less handsome. Everybody has their preferences. And everybody thinks that there's one right person out there for them, that if they find that one right person, they will be happy.

What's interesting is we tend to meet that one right person in one particular place or two, actually, we tend to meet them at work or at school? You know, out of all the places we go, that one special someone for us, most people tend to meet them at the office or at school.

What's the chance that that person, that one person out there that's right for you, happened to take the same 9 a.m. class or, I don't know, you know, happened to have the same cubicle or be on the same floor of the office? And I think this research speaks to that, right? Why do we end up marrying and liking people that we end up working with or being around?

Well, what this professor found in his work was that he found, look, the people that shown up to class more often, they were seen as more attractive and liked more. Merely showing up to class more often, people thought the person was more attractive, controlling for all everything else. The mere fact that people have seen them more made them seem more familiar and made them like them more.

And so more broadly, there's a bunch of research on this topic. It's called mere exposure. The more you see something, the more you like it. But exposure generates familiarity.

And we've all had this happen with songs. You hear a song on the radio, you hate it. Then you hear it a second or third time and suddenly you find yourself tapping your feet. And the reason is exposure leads to liking, even without realizing it, the number of times we've seen something changes how much we like it. Wow, that's intriguing. I mean, it really does kind of make you wonder how much of your life has been your choice or not, doesn't it?

It definitely does. And, you know, there's no one answer to that question. And there's no way to how much of your life is your own. But what I think is so interesting is to uncover these influences. You know, I was just talking to someone who was saying, oh, you know, I bought these chairs and I thought I loved them and I picked them because of my own personal preference.

And then I went over to a couple of friends' houses and realized that they have the exact same chairs, but I never would have realized that before reading the book. And often, you know, it's really influence spotting that we're talking about, right? Part of understanding these ideas is to help people spot influence in the world around them. Yeah, no, keep going. No, that's exactly it.

And so, you know, to me, it's by spotting it, we can start to understand it and we can start to harness its power. So, I mean, how would you say that we would spot it then? Well, just like the example I'm just talking about. So, you know, we just talked about how seeing someone more frequently might make you like them more. Well, if you're out there dating and you find someone attractive, Think about, well, do I like them because of them or might I like them because I had seen them more often?

If I'm making another decision, you know, let's say we're out to dinner and someone else chooses the entree we're thinking. We tend to pick a different entree. We tend to avoid it to be different. We don't want to pick the same thing. We want to stand out. And it turns out that makes us less happier as a result. Well, okay, now that we know that, we can say, well, look, you know, if I'm going to be less happy by picking a different entree, avoiding something because someone else picked it, maybe I shouldn't switch.

I have this tendency to want to switch because I want to pick something different. Let me avoid that tendency because it won't make me happy. And so by understanding that influence, by recognizing in the environment, we can take advantage of its power. That's intriguing. I just, I find it so fascinating. I mean, so a lot of this seems to be angled or surrounds social approval. I mean, am I right in that regard?

Some of it is. You know, particularly we have a motivation to fit in. For example, you know, we may not want to be the vanguard of everything, but we definitely don't want to be the only one standing out. So we definitely have a motivation to fit in. But interestingly, we also have this competing motivation to be different. We don't want to be the same as everybody else. We kind of want to be in the middle or what's called optimally distinct or similar but different at the same time.

And so part of it's about social approval, but it also is part about these competing motives that combine to shape who we are. Hmm. Okay. So, I mean, okay, so let's dig into your writing style a bit. I mean, you've hit two New York Times bestseller lists with two different books. What did, I mean, how did you accomplish that? What did you do to get there? You know, I think it has very little to do with me and a lot to do with the subject matter.

You know, in writing these books, I tried to listen to what students in my classes found interesting, what folks in my speaking engagements found interesting, or when I work with companies and organizations, the questions and the issues they had. You know, all I'm doing is really channeling some of the great social science that's out there and putting in a form that folks can read and understand. You know, I'm an academic by training, but I have this experience all the time where I read an article from a different discipline and I sit there going, God, I don't have any understanding of what they did or why it matters.

And so academic research has so much power in helping us understand the world and learn better and live happier and healthier lives. But we have to see how it works for us. And so in both Contagious and Invisible Influence, I really tried hard to mix both science and stories. There's some authors out there that aren't scientists, that are great writers, but sometimes the challenge is they misinterpret the science.

And I think it's really important for the science to be right, particularly if we're going to change our behavior based on what we're learning about. And so I'll never be as great a storyteller as some journalists are. And whenever I'm writing, I'm always looking to journalists to figure out that craft and how I'll be a better writer. It's not something I'm naturally good at.

But what I do have some insight into is the scientific method and some research that's interesting and relevant, particularly around influence. And so it's been great to share this research with folks. And, you know, also, I very much applied it when marketing the books. You know, I thought a lot about what did we learn about influence and how can we use it to help these things catch on.

right yeah it's very intelligent i mean so so put us through a day in life of jonah berger in right writing mode in author mode what is what is kind of your i mean you've you've you have two bestsellers i mean how can i not ask you this so i mean what is your process what is the i mean give us you wake up in the morning you grab a cup a cup of coffee or i mean what's your what's your what's your muse?

How do you find that creativity? You know, I wish I had a deep secret. I don't drink coffee. I have a wonderful dog that's an endless source of joy. But for me, what really gets me fired up and excited is doing research. I like writing about it also. But doing the research for me is, you know, one of the most interesting things. We did a study that I talked about in the book about how losing can lead to winning.

And so, you know, I'd been a soccer coach, actually youth boys soccer out in California, U12 boys, you know, lots of fun.

Coach was sort of a glorified, it was more a glorified camp counselor. But I noticed that we didn't always win, but we were more likely to win, it seemed like, if we were down at halftime. So even though you think, well, if you're ahead, you should be more likely to win, you're doing better off. We seem to do better when we were behind. Whatever speech I made didn't matter if it was just to be behind. So I said, okay, you know, how can we study this? How can we bottle this phenomenon with a great collaborator of mine named Devin Pope. We actually went out there, we put together data on tens of thousands of basketball games, and we analyzed them.

Not soccer, because scoring is sort of infrequent, but basketball where scoring is more frequent. And we were able to say, okay, how does being ahead or behind at halftime affect performance? And so for me, it was a great opportunity.

And I'm an okay writer, but I think what I enjoy is that process of seeing puzzles in the world around us, like noticing our team might be more like a win when it's behind, and then getting the opportunity to study that and try to quantify it and see if it's really true. Yeah, it's really intriguing. I mean, I find it, I find, I found the whole book fascinating. And I mean, it was easy to read, just like contagious.

And I found that I could apply it to not only understanding my social choices and kind of my life choices, but also my business choices? And how, I mean, how would you kind of relate this in a marketing and business perspective? You know, we've talked about a few ways already. We talked about how to increase your influence by being a chameleon. That's one great tool. I just alluded to sort the motivating effect of peers.

But there's some great research that looks at, okay, can peers be a powerful motivational tool? In particular, proximal peers or people that are near to us, people that are doing just a little bit better than we are, for example, can be a powerful source of motivation. And that's exactly what we found in that basketball data. We found that in general, you'd be smarter to bet on the team that's ahead.

On average, teams that are ahead, they're more likely to win except just one place, and that is teams that are behind by one. Teams behind by one are actually more likely to win than teams ahead by one. Why? Because they're a little bit behind. They get motivated. They come out in that second half. They're fired up, and they do better. Even NBA athletes are paid tens of millions of dollars already.

They should be extremely motivated. You wouldn't think they need any extra push, but being behind is a motivating force for them. Okay, great. Neat to know that. Well, how can we apply that science? Well, first, you know, rather than trying to motivate people by using money, NBA players are already paid, for example, or by punishment, you know, you got to do this or else I'm going to fire you.

We should compare them to people that are just a little bit ahead of them. Proximal peers, for example, rather than having, you know, someone win employee of the month by doing the most sales, why not compare each person as someone who's doing just a little bit better than them? That push, that comparison work harder and make them perform better as a result. Same thing for us.

You know, when I go running, for example, I always try to go running with friends of mine that are just a little bit better than me. Not a lot better because I might get demotivated and give up, but a little bit better will cause me to work harder and perform better as a result. And so whether we're trying to motivate employees or motivate ourselves to do better at home or at work, peers are a great way to do that.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it fits. I mean, I feel like I do that all the time.

I mean, I'm measuring myself through what I've accomplished through my peers. I'm looking at the people around me and measuring that. So, I mean, that fits. I mean, was there any one single thing that kind of struck out to you the most as the most surprising or the most kind of revelatory that you found during the research of this book that you could share with us? I mean, I think we've talked a bunch of number already.

The fact that being behind actually makes us more like it a win, even though we tend to be worse off than we are. I don't think any of us would have predicted that. Or the fact that merely mimicking someone else's behavior can make us more effective and have them like us more. There are a whole host of different things.

There's a whole chapter on identity signaling or communicating identity where we think about how our choices communicate things about us. And you might say, well, that makes sense. But it has some interesting implications. There's a great example where Snooki, the character from the Jersey Shore, got a free handbag in the mail from Gucci. And that makes sense. Celebrities often get free handbags with the hope that they'll wear them and they'll show up in the press wearing them.

And that'll make Gucci sell more handbags. actually Gucci that sent it to her. It was actually a competitor that sent her a handbag. Why would someone, a competitor, send a celebrity their competing brand's handbag? And actually, it wasn't just her. Mike, the situation Sorrentino, also of Jersey Shore fame, had a similar occasion where Abercrombie & Fitch sent him a letter offering to pay him money, but it wasn't offering to pay him to wear their clothes. It was actually offering to pay him not to wear their clothes.

And so why would a brand pay someone not to wear their clothes? And again, sense. But if we look at it through the right lens, it actually does. Because what both of those brands were thinking is, look, people don't just want to be like others. Sometimes they want to avoid what others are doing.

And so if Mike, the situation's wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, or Snooki's carrying Gucci, other people may be less likely to purchase those brands and even get rid of the stuff that they have. And so those brands are saying, look, by associating identities with desired behaviors or undired desired behaviors, we can shift people's behavior in in an amazing and powerful way. Wow. That's so, that's so brilliant. I love it.

I mean, it, it just fits, just makes sense. Um, I mean, Jonah, like, I mean, where, okay, so where are you headed next? I mean, you've, you've covered contagious, you're, you're, you're getting into the invisible things that are around us. I mean, what's the, what's the next thing that you're working on? You know, uh, invisible influence just came out a couple weeks ago.

It's already been a New York Times bestseller, but it's really taking off and I'm getting the opportunity to share these ideas with lots of folks. So in the near term, I'm doing a lot of speaking and consulting around the ideas in this book, but always working on new academic research, everything from the language we use in word of mouth and how it shapes our behavior to why we don't use products that we keep around the home.

We all have things that we like, yet we never seem to use them.

And so why don't we use those products or things that we have? So a whole bunch of research and consulting around these ideas and really trying to understand the why behind human behavior. I thought you were going to say we're going to take a vacation for a little while.

I'm looking forward to doing that too. Well, Jonah, where can people find your work, man? Yeah, so the best place to find me is just my website. It's Jonah, J-O-N-A-H, burger, B-E-R-G-E-R dot com. Uh, there's a, the book is there, but also a bunch of free resources on how you can be more influential, how you can make better group decisions, how you can motivate yourself and others. Uh, and if you have any questions, people can feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at J1Burger.

Jonah, thank you so much for your time. Uh, this is the human experience. Thank you guys so much for listening. We will see you guys next week.