How Other People Subtly Influence You
People will do anything to fit in, suicide contagion, the rat race
People will do anything to fit in.
Even if it means becoming stupider.
In a study, 99% of participants answered a vision test correctly when tested individually.
However, these same participants were put in a room with other people who were instructed to give wrong answers to most questions.
In this case, only 25% of participants answered correctly and didn’t conform to the wrong answers of the majority.
(One-third of people fell to the majority pressure and answered all wrong. 75% did so at least once)
From 99% of people getting answers right, it became 25%.
Participants changed their answers to match answers that didn’t make sense; purely because other people did so.
This happens for two reasons.
One is because they might’ve thought the majority was smarter.
Two because they didn’t want to stand out or seem peculiar.
“Social approval is the enemy of clear thinking”- Naval Ravikant
It reminds me of a story I read in the book ‘Influence’
The train station blind flock incident
It is an incident where this Danish man waiting for a train in London.
There the train was halted and no announcement was given as to why. A few people decided to go to the train on the opposite side of the platform. Soon enough more people followed and 200 people, including this man, went to the other train.
A few minutes later, a few people decided to return to the previous train, and soon enough, the crowd returned to where they had started—the first train.
People blindly switched trains and back for no reason other than because others were doing so.
Switching trains and a vision test are petty things, but a similar effect was found even in a smoke-filled room.
Smoky Room Experiment
In the smoky room experiment, participants were seated in a waiting room and were given a questionnaire to fill out.
Some participants were made to sit alone in the waiting room, while other participants were made to wait with two other people.
As they began to fill out the questionnaire, enough smoke was let into the room, it was enough to affect vision and breathing.
Researchers wanted to see how likely participants would leave the room and report the smoke.
The participants who were seated alone, reported the smoke 75% of the time.
While, participants reported the smoke only 10% of the time when they were in a room with two other people who didn’t react to the smoke.
This is the power of social proof.
These two factors that make social proof work:
1. First is the factor of many, more the people doing something, the more influenced we get to do it.
2. The second factor is uncertainty. When we are uncertain we look to others to see what to do. Nobody knew what happened in the train station so blindly followed one another. A smoky room isn’t an everyday situation either, so participants looked at others to decide what to do.
(Read: The greatest human desire: To be together)
The rat race
People don’t know what they want to do with their lives(uncertainty), so they do what most people do (factor of many) and do typical college degrees and desk jobs.
The power of social proof blew my mind, especially after this one:
The suicide contagion
After a famous suicide is shown in front-page newspapers. The rates of suicide significantly increase in that region.
The real benefit of Ivy League
Social proof has lots of problems.
It makes us irrational, but it can be used to our advantage.
In fact, The real benefit of the Ivy League is not the knowledge. The same things can be learned in any other college. The real benefit is the peer group of high-performers.
We’re always mimicking people, so choose your role models wisely.
We can’t stop comparing ourselves so choose who you compare yourself to.
We will always think of others’ opinions, so choose whose opinions you listen to.
More studies on Peer influence:
Smoking and Peer Influence (Simons-Morton & Farhat, 2010)
Peer Influence and Social Media Use (Valkenburg, 2016)
Peer Influence and Prosocial Behavior (Foulkes, 2018)
Peer Influence and Academic Achievement (Ryan, 2001)
That’s it for this article, see you in the next one :)