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Coming up next on PassionStruck.
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A lot of the studies I talk about in the book are about these social comparisons we do where we fall short.
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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 than other people.
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But when it comes to these sort of social contexts,
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It turns out that we wind up comparing ourselves to these people who are the absolute most social people you could imagine.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles.
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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.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 366 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast.
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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.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for joining us.
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Or if you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, which we love when you do, we have Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize in a convenient topic to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it last week, I had three great interviews.
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First was with Kara Collier,
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powerhouse in the world of health and nutrition.
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As a registered dietitian-nutritionist and the co-founder, as well as VP of Health at NutriSense, Kara s expertise is reshaping the landscape of personalized health.
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The second was with Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Perfection Trap.
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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.
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Lastly, I interviewed Jeremy Fall, author of the book, Falling Upwards, Living the Dream, One Panic Attack at a Time.
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This interview is a guide to embracing mental health, challenging societal norms, and triumphing over adversity.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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If you loved 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.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners, and these reviews go such a long way in helping us build out the PassionStruck community.
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Today s episode promises to challenge the way you think about a concept that s at the heart of countless social issues.
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That concept?
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Consent.
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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.
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But have you ever considered the psychological dimensions of consent?
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How do our words, actions, and presence influence others without us even realizing it?
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Joining us today is an extraordinary guest, Dr. Vanessa Bonds, a sociopsychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University s ILRR School.
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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 powerful dynamics of consent and influence.
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As we navigate the complexities of consent,
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Vanessa will unravel why we often underestimate the impact we have on others and how this lack of awareness can lead us to miss opportunities or misusing our power inadvertently.
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With compelling stories and cutting-edge science, she answers the questions we all ponder but might be too afraid to ask.
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How much do others take heart what we say?
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Can they push back on our suggestions?
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Do they even notice our presence?
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Will they agree to help us when we ask?
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We ll explore the nuances of consent, recognizing that it s not merely a legal concept but a moral and a psychological one.
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capable of transforming experiences and relationships.
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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.
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So if you ve ever felt invisible, ineffective, or inarticulate, prepare to be enlightened.
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Join us on this thought-provoking journey into the depths of consent and influence with the brilliant Dr. Vanessa Bonds.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited to welcome today, Vanessa Bonds on the Passion Struck Podcast.
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Welcome Vanessa.
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Hi, it s so nice to be here.
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Nice to meet you.
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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?
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So my background, I guess, I was interested in marketing and advertising for a really long time.
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I actually interned in a local ad agency.
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I grew up in a small town in New Jersey and it was this tiny little boutique advertising agency that worked with local companies.
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And I interned there and I had my little ad in the local paper.
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And I had this idea the whole time that I was gonna go into advertising.
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And I went to a college.
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I went to Brown.
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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.
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And really, for him, education was like the end all be all because he had never even completed his high school degree.
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And he really wanted us to go to college.
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And I just felt like I really wanted to go to the best college.
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And I fell in love with Brown.
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I got in there somehow and I wound up going there and experiencing a lot of imposter syndrome, as so many people do.
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And as I now know, looking back and talking to my own students, it doesn t even matter where you re from.
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We all experience it.
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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.
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I felt essentially just really underconfident, I d say, even though I was doing fine.
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My grades were great and I had friends, but I always just had this feeling that I didn t belong.
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In fact, I studied abroad at Ireland in my sophomore year.
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And I went to the registrar to transfer my grades.
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And for a second, they couldn t find me in the system.
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And I was like, I knew it.
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I never got in.
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I never belonged here.
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And then of course they quickly ended up finding my name.
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But I d say I had this idea of advertising.
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Then I had this experience of having imposter syndrome, but getting through college and having a good experience for the most part.
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And then I went and worked in a big ad agency in New York City.
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I worked for Ogilvy and Mather.
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There as well, I had this sense of imposter syndrome and I was working on sort of basic persuasion, but always was feeling underconfident.
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Eventually I left because it just wasn t fulfilling to me and I went back to graduate school after kind of a windy path.
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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.
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I continued to study persuasion.
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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.
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And it was such a horrible experience.
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I always thought everyone was going to say no to me.
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And so I collect all this data.
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I go back to Columbia where I was a graduate student.
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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.
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And it was so devastating to me.
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And I started complaining about it and saying how awful this experience had been.
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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.
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It looks like most people were saying yes to you.
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It actually looks like you had a lot of influence.
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It just wasn t the prediction that we had didn t pan out.
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And so that sort of,
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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.
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And so that kind of changed my perspective on influence.
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So I went from this kind of lifelong way of thinking about marketing and advertising and influence in this traditional way,
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to becoming a psychologist and having this realization and realizing that actually we have a lot more influence than we think.
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We don t need all these persuasive techniques.
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We don t need to.
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We re not advertisers.
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We re not marketers.
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We have influence just by asking for things, just by interacting with people.
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And so that s what I wound up studying ever since.
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And that s what I continue to study today.
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Well, thank you for sharing that.
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And as I was going through the research that you sent,
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you write that consent has not been a core topic of study in psychology.
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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?
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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.
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People agree to do things for us more than we expect.
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And the major reason for that is that people find it so hard to say no.
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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
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the topic of consent because it just wasn t something that the core sort of area of psychology really studied.
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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.
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And my mind was kind of blown.
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And I was like, of course it is.
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How could it possibly be not?
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That makes so much sense.
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And she had been studying consent through a legal lens and pointed to this long history in legal scholarship, studying this concept of consent.
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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.
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And when I did that, I just found like crickets.
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There was a couple of things about experimental consent, because that s what we do.
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We run experiments and we have participants sign consent forms.
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So there was a little bit on that, but even given the fact that every experiment we run has a consent form.
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way less than you would expect.
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There s a little bit in very specific domains, like the sexual domain, which is how most people think about consent.
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But consent, especially law has recognized this for a long time, but consent is such a broad concept.
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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.
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Every time you agree to do something willingly, you re consenting.
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And so it was fascinating to me that it hadn t been given as a central role in psychology.
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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 broader sort of legal implications that are covered in legal scholarship.
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But for some reason, it was a giant overlooked area.
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And so I started to bridge this area between
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compliance and persuasion and consent, like not just getting someone to say yes, but actually getting them to consent voluntarily.
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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
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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.
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How do those two intertwine?
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And I think this is really the crux of the issue and another reason psychologists maybe have overlooked this concept.
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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
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To transforming our interpretation of a situation.
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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 maiming into therapeutic surgery.
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kidnapping into vacation, trespass into hospitality and theft into gift giving.
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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 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
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at harming you, right?
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And actually just having this therapeutic surgery.
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So it s legally, it is such a critical sort of assessment.
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Did this person consent?
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Because this situation is a completely different situation if they did not.
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And so legally, what you want to establish is that someone did it voluntarily, so they didn t feel coerced or forced.
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Someone knew what they were consenting to, so they were fully informed and they were competent.
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So they were able, cognitively capable, so they weren t drunk
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They weren t cognitively declining in some way that they couldn t make a decision.
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And so all of that is super important to determine.
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And as you said, an outside objective, like a judge or a jury would decide that, right?
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This person was competent, informed, and voluntarily consented.
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And so this is hospitality, not trespassing.
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But psychologically, we can, as we all know, we can agree to something and still feel like I didn t really have a choice.
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Like I signed that form, but what was I going to do?
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Not take that job.
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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 or, yeah, I clicked.
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agree on the terms and conditions when I downloaded that app.
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I know I maybe legally consented, but I don t feel like I was informed and I really knew what I was agreeing to.
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And so there s this difference between, okay, legally someone would say, you consented, you re contractually obligated,
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to do whatever you consented to.
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But psychologically, it can feel different.
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It can feel like I felt forced and now I don t trust whoever made me consent.
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Or I feel like if someone used my data in a certain way, that wasn t okay because I didn t fully understand.
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And so there is this difference between legal consent and the experience, the subjective feeling of, yeah, I knew what I was getting into.
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I did it voluntarily.
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And so I totally consented to that.
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So I was reading through the research that you did, and hopefully I pronounced her name correctly, but your peer Rachel Slund.
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Yeah.
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So it was on what you were just describing, basically our perception versus the experience of informed consent.
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And how does our perception influence our informed consent?
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We ve been looking at this idea that if I m the person asking you to sign something.
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So I, for example, I m 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.
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I feel what you re getting into, right?
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You re signing on the dotted line.
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I ve told you everything you need to know about this job, for example.
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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 knew what you were getting into when you signed that contract.
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But as a person who is actually reading and then signing the contract, we often are much less clear on what things mean.
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We might not read it as carefully.
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We might not have as much time to process it.
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We might not understand some of the terms, even if they re explained to us until we experience them.
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And for us,
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That perception might feel very different than what the other person thinks, right?
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They re saying, you knew what you were getting into.
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And we re like, I didn t really know.
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I don t feel like I was truly informed.
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And so that can make me feel like this isn t fair that I m being asked to do this thing.
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Even if I signed a contract saying I would do it.
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One of the examples we use in the paper on informed consent is the example of Taylor Swift.
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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.
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And she was really unhappy with that and she didn t like who now owned her masters.
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And even though she signed a contract, maybe she wasn t fully informed of what could happen or fully understand it.
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Maybe she s changed over time and realized that actually I was
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naive back then, or I didn t realize what I would become back then.
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And now I feel like I know a lot more about what this means.
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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.
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She felt like this isn t right.
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This isn t fair.
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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.
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And so that experience can lead you to feel betrayed and not trust someone.
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In her case, wind up taking profits from that company because she s frustrated with the outcome.
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Yeah.
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And what role do cultural norms and societal attitudes play in shaping our subjective experience when it comes to consent?
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That s a really good question.
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And one, we re so at the beginning of unpacking this that we don t have good answers to it yet.
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But I do think that.
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For example, one thing that s used to determine like competence to consent is age.
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Like at what point are you developmentally capable of being able to consent to something?
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And I think that s something that is constantly evolving about giving autonomy to kids.
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kids versus protecting them from consenting to the things that they really are not capable of doing yet.
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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
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able, they weren t legally of age to be able to consent.
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And so there s this idea.
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So some people would argue, well, they should be able to, they understand they re cognitively capable.
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Other people would argue like that s still their parents role to be able to protect them and to make these medical decisions.
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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.
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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 have access to certain news or apps or whatever it might be.
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They may feel subjectively competent,
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and be seen as not being competent.
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So I think that s one way in which we ve seen conversations around shifting cultural ideas around consent.
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And in your research, you discuss the importance of consent in various contexts.
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And you ve given a bunch of these today from sexual consent to medical procedures, data usage by corporations.
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And I wanted to tackle some of these to go a little bit deeper.
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And I thought maybe we could start
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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
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Let s focus on this data usage that many companies are doing on consumers.
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Facebook is a great one.
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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 service.
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But they re also selling your data to many other sources that you don t even realize when you ve consented to this.
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Can you discuss that and perhaps some of the implications that we don t think about?
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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.
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And in there, they may say, here s how we re going to use your data.
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But how many of us can actually say that first of all,
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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.
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So what if they sell my data here?
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What does that really mean?
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How does that impact me behaviorally?
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Does it actually change my behaviors or the world around me?
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And I think, so one of my colleagues, Leslie John has written about how essentially the idea of consent in those contexts has just become a charade.
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It s just, we don t want to not use the site.
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So it doesn t really feel voluntary.
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If it s social media, for example, what are we going to do?
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Just stop using
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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.
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And we don t really understand exactly what the risks are.
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We re really bad at predicting those risks.
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Another context of data usage is surveillance in companies.
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So not just consumers  data, but also like employees  data.
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And so another colleague of mine, Karen Levy, has studied
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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.
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They just want to do their own thing.
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And they talk about that being an appeal of the job.
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But in the years since, there s been this intense surveillance of their job.
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to the point where they re always being tracked by GPS and their speed and things like that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they ve gotten so frustrated that they ve started to dismantle these tracking devices and try to protest in that way.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so you wind up in these situations where data is being collected and used in ways that we don t understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
The risks are unclear.
2
SPEAKER_00
It feels like a privacy violation, but it s hard to imagine saying, no, I won t use the site.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I won t take that job.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so people wind up rebelling in these other sorts of ways.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s so abstract to think about, well, what can they do with it?
2
SPEAKER_00
And the reality is more concrete, but we don t, we can t really make that sort of connection.
2
SPEAKER_00
Another example, I took my kids to Universal Studios last year and it s an expensive ticket.
2
SPEAKER_00
We fly down there, you wait in a really long line.
2
SPEAKER_00
The kids are like raring to go into the park.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we re waiting, the line finally starts to go.
2
SPEAKER_00
And at the front, before we go through, we give our fingerprints, which I totally did not expect.
2
SPEAKER_00
They said on the ticket, like you may be asked to show ID, but we re actually giving our fingerprints to this theme park.
2
SPEAKER_00
And people are just filing in, not asking any questions.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I quickly, because I studied this, I was like, how long do you keep this?
2
SPEAKER_00
What do you do with this?
2
SPEAKER_00
They tried to reassure me, but I still had no real idea.
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SPEAKER_00
of what they were doing with my fingerprints, besides obviously they re trying to avoid me passing my ticket to someone else.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I didn t feel like I consented to that because we d been waiting in that line.
2
SPEAKER_00
We had bought those tickets.
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SPEAKER_00
My kids were there like, what was I going to do?
2
SPEAKER_00
So now I m going to leave the park now.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that s a great example.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m wondering as I m listening to you say that, what could they possibly need your fingerprints for?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
They say it s each time you go in, you put your fingerprints on with their ticket.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re not passing it to someone else who gets a free pass and gets to say they re you, but it seems extreme to prevent that kind of fraud.
2
SPEAKER_01
It reminds me, I m not sure if you re familiar with Yuri Genizy.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so he admits that let s say it was six years old and they had just turned seven.
2
SPEAKER_01
He told the person that they were six.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then the child overhears it and says, why did you tell them I m six when I m seven?
2
SPEAKER_01
But he was saying that they need a better way to overall police this.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I m just thinking maybe the fingerprints is a way for them to somehow do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Although I don t know how you would tie the fingerprints to the kid s age unless you had some other form of way of identifying them.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I will say 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 they re adults, what could possibly happen by giving your fingerprints out.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, another important area that I wanted to touch on before we explore your book is you and Lauren DeVincent conducted research on unwanted romantic advances.
2
SPEAKER_01
What were some of your most important findings as they relate to consent?
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And for many years, we d explored that basic finding in asking for help, like a favor.
2
SPEAKER_00
So people will agree to do you a favor because it s so awkward to say no.
2
SPEAKER_00
We looked at it in an ethical context, like people will agree to lie on your behalf because
2
SPEAKER_00
they find it hard to say no.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we thought this would also apply to other contexts.
2
SPEAKER_00
We started this actually right before Me Too hit.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it wasn t even inspired by Me Too, but eventually it became a really nice way of explaining some of the dynamics that were coming out in the Me Too movement.
2
SPEAKER_00
But what we found is that similar dynamics occur in unwanted romantic advances.
2
SPEAKER_00
Essentially, if someone isn t interested,
2
SPEAKER_00
they find it harder to say no than the person who s asking realizes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we surveyed a number of people who worked
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
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 how much it affected that person in terms of downstream consequences.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did they avoid you?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did they work on a different area?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did they even maybe switch labs or something like that?
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s this sort of idea that it s easy for people to say no to you.
3
SPEAKER_00
If they don t, you just shoot your shot.
3
SPEAKER_00
You go for it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ask someone out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if they don t want to, you re the one who gets hurt, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You re sad.
3
SPEAKER_00
You gave it a go.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s also really hard to tell someone now it s really hard to be the rejecter.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that wound up affecting people s downstream consequences.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they did have to avoid that person they felt like.
3
SPEAKER_00
They did spend time thinking about that instead of doing other things at work.
3
SPEAKER_00
They did consider switching labs, consider switching projects and things like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so simply by asking someone out, they put them in an awkward position that had these downstream consequences.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we wound up taking from that in terms of
3
SPEAKER_00
practical suggestions is we re all going to be interested in people, even people in our workplace who maybe aren t interested in us.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And also doing things like only asking once.
3
SPEAKER_00
Don t make someone say no twice because even just saying no once tends to be quite hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
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 as indicators of sexual interest.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just found that whole thing that someone who wants to ask someone out and you see this play out all the time, but this other person might be friendly or they might give you eye contact or they might lean into you, which you as the suitor think are indicators of an interest.
3
SPEAKER_01
How do we misinterpret that so often?
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a really powerful force.
3
SPEAKER_00
We want to see ourselves as good and attractive and all these things.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we do tend to.
3
SPEAKER_00
interpret things to make us feel that way.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
They smiled at me.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that must mean that they re actually interested when they re maybe just being friendly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And research has found that this is even more the case when you re in a position of power.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is because people in lower positions of power
3
SPEAKER_00
tend to show deference to people who have power over them or who have power.
3
SPEAKER_00
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 in positions of power, like you learn something from them and
3
SPEAKER_00
They control these resources that you might need access to.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so you get even more of these misperceptions when there s this power imbalance.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, thank you for that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Vanessa, I m now going to switch to your book, which came out, if I have it correct in 2021 titled, you have more influence than you think.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the research was really important to that article because what you show throughout this book.
3
SPEAKER_01
is that people chronically underestimate their influence over others.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why, from a psychological standpoint, does this underestimation occur?
3
SPEAKER_00
There are a couple reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So those incidents loom large in our minds.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so when we think about like, do I have influence?
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SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s one.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the other thing that plays a really big role in a lot of the findings I talk about in the book is that influence doesn t always work the way we think it does.
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SPEAKER_00
So we have this idea that if I influence someone, I will see it.
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SPEAKER_00
It will be immediate.
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SPEAKER_00
It will be a time I m trying to influence them.
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SPEAKER_00
I m actively trying to change someone s mind.
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SPEAKER_00
and I will see it.
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SPEAKER_00
They ll concede the argument.
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SPEAKER_00
They ll say, you really changed my mind.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or they ll say, okay, I m going to do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I promise.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the truth is that influence doesn t work like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Influence often happens, it s often delayed.
3
SPEAKER_00
It often happens in someone s head where we don t have access and we never actually see it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s often cumulative.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we might say something and get no response, but they hear it again a week later and they hear it from someone else.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it adds up
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re bad at perspective taking.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
If we re going to guess, we re going to, I guess I didn t have any influence.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t get any clear signals from that person.
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SPEAKER_00
that I changed their mind, for example.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that also can lead us to underestimate our influence.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why is it that we often refrain from complimenting strangers or expressing gratitude to the most important people in our lives because we underestimate the impact of our words on others?
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is another example of being really focused on the negative experiences that we have had or expect to have.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we asked them what they think is going to happen if they go and compliment people.
3
SPEAKER_00
They actually think that people will be annoyed that they ve
3
SPEAKER_00
interrupted them and stopped them and are bothering them.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they think that the people are not going to be as appreciative of a compliment.
3
SPEAKER_00
They think that they re not going to like it as much.
3
SPEAKER_00
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?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did you appreciate that compliment?
3
SPEAKER_00
How annoyed were you, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
They re actually not
3
SPEAKER_00
People love to get compliments.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re not bothered by it.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
Instead, we focus on
3
SPEAKER_00
the awkwardness we think will deliver the compliment with.
3
SPEAKER_00
We think that we won t be able to phrase it perfectly.
3
SPEAKER_00
It ll be an incompetent delivery is the way we often talk about it, like competence versus warmth.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we often don t care.
3
SPEAKER_00
A compliment is a compliment.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s okay if it s not done articulately.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s okay if you stutter when you deliver it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It still feels really good.
3
SPEAKER_00
That warmth is still there.
3
SPEAKER_00
That good feeling is still there.
3
SPEAKER_00
But when you re the compliment deliverer,
3
SPEAKER_00
you are just so focused on the ways you messed it up.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I didn t say that.
3
SPEAKER_00
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?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just going to make them feel awkward.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s going to make them feel silly when in fact they just feel the warmth of the gratitude.
3
SPEAKER_00
They don t pick apart the words you use to express it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it was in chapter one, you discussed something called the reverse spotlight effect.
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s the spotlight effect, which is when people, we think that we re 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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?
4
SPEAKER_00
And then actually asking the room, how many of you actually noticed that person s t-shirt?
4
SPEAKER_00
They find that this is not true, that you are not in a spotlight.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everyone is not looking at those embarrassing, awkward things that you think that they re looking at.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
We think the only time people pay attention to us are the times where we really don t want them to be noticing us.
4
SPEAKER_00
We want to blend into the background and just hide away in a shadow.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it s the times where we are just doing our own thing that people do notice us more than we realize.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
Even just like throwing my trash out in the right receptacle, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
The person behind me who s not sure where to throw their trash out sees what I do.
4
SPEAKER_00
and they copy it, but we may not be aware of such a sort of mundane moment where we re actually impacting someone else s behavior.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, thank you for sharing that.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
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?
4
SPEAKER_00
There have been a couple experiments that I was just sure wouldn t work.
4
SPEAKER_00
I actually thought that they were so audacious that there was no way this was going to work.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
leave the lab and then go ask people for things.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we started off for many years having them ask people for favors to show that people are willing to help you more than you expect.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s in part because they find it hard to say no to someone who s asking for help.
4
SPEAKER_00
But we wanted to show that this also extended to an ethical context.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we tried some small little things that were unethical, but we re like, they re really not that bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we re not really making the point we want to make.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we gave them a script.
4
SPEAKER_00
We said, you re going to go into libraries and say, hey, I m playing a prank on my friend, but they know my handwriting.
4
SPEAKER_00
We just write the word pickle and pen in this library book.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we came up with this and we said, there is no way this is going to work.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is crazy.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then they went out to these libraries, went up to people, and more than half of the people they asked wound up agreeing and vandalizing these library books exactly as they were asked.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they didn t do it because they didn t think it was a big deal or they didn t think it was bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
They would tell our participants, would come back and say, they really seemed conflicted.
4
SPEAKER_00
They told us that we shouldn t be doing this.
4
SPEAKER_00
They were worried about getting into trouble, but they would still do it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I would even get emails after the fact from people who signed it, even though we debriefed them, we gave them all the info.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was just a study.
4
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t a real library book, all of this.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I would get these emails being like, I can t believe you made me vandalize this library book.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a terrible study.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it was, first of all, you did it.
4
SPEAKER_00
You could have said no, but the whole point of our studies, that s a lot harder than people realize, but also no actual library books were harmed.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I couldn t believe that study worked.
4
SPEAKER_00
I definitely, it was a Hail Mary and we were really surprised when it worked out.
4
SPEAKER_01
In the book, you talk a lot about the importance of getting perspective.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
We compare ourselves to the prototypical social butterfly.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain why we do that?
4
SPEAKER_00
So this is interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
So a lot of the studies I talk about in the book are about these social comparisons we do where we fall short.
4
SPEAKER_00
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 than other people.
4
SPEAKER_00
But when it comes to these sort of social contexts,
4
SPEAKER_00
It turns out that we wind up comparing ourselves to these people who are the absolute most social people you could imagine.
4
SPEAKER_00
A classic example is flipping around like Instagram or whatever social media site you might think of.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you might be home on the couch just having an evening in for whatever reason.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you re going to flip around on Instagram, what do people post, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
They re posting all these parties and dinners and
4
SPEAKER_00
people that they re out socializing with.
4
SPEAKER_00
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 use, they re not posting that.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re not posting about how they re just at home on their phone.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, another interesting area that I thought was how individuals, even in positions of power can underestimate their influence.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And for about a 10 year period, the U.S.
4
SPEAKER_01
Army hired him to retrain all general officers when they put on their first star.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I asked him, what were some of the things that you saw that
4
SPEAKER_01
just stood out to why you needed to retrain them.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, it s interesting, once they went from being a colonel to being a brigadier 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 fail to realize.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I know that this happens not only with generals, it happens in everyday life.
4
SPEAKER_01
How might this phenomenon impact decision-making and interactions within organizations when people in power, like these generals, underestimate their influence?
4
SPEAKER_00
This tendency to underestimate your influence, even when you re in a position of power, it s really fascinating because you would think being in power, you re really aware of the power you hold.
4
SPEAKER_00
But for one, so many of us take our time kind of making our way up the pecking order to the point where we re so used to being in this position of someone being above us that it s hard for us to adjust and realize, actually, now I m the boss and people are looking at me differently.
4
SPEAKER_00
My words carry a different kind of weight.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
The boss doesn t need to understand what s going on in everyone else s head to the same degree.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so you just get this decrease in perspective taking.
4
SPEAKER_00
And with power comes like less constraint.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you don t always have to second guess what you re doing.
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And so you expect that other people have no constraints either.
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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,
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So I recently became department chair here in my department at Cornell.
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And we have these department meetings.
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And first of all, I m a new department chair.
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So there s part of me that s thinking, how do I show that I deserve this position?
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Now I m here.
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I want to prove that I have good ideas and that I understand what s going on.
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And so one of the ways of doing that is to come up with a solution, come up with an idea.
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And so I ll raise a question for the group.
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a whole bunch of people who are much junior to me, and how quickly have this urge to answer my own question, right?
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This to prove that, oh, I m here for a reason.
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I know it.
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I know a good answer.
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And also, I forget
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right, that if I say that, it s totally going to change the conversation.
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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.
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And it s definitely those words are going to hold more weight than someone else s solution.
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And so now everyone s circling around this idea that I threw out there.
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And if I m having this meeting, I don t want to be the one
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coming up with the idea.
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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.
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And so it can affect the most mundane things like you speak in meetings more than you should.
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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 of that.
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But it is hard to hold back.
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But then, of course, it can also affect much more serious things.
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For example, people in positions of power who abuse their power without realizing it.
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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.
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And so even suggesting that someone maybe try 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.
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All those things seem more like orders or commands to the people that you re suggesting or asking.
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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 challenging you in a suggestion that you ve made.
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Okay.
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And Vanessa, can you provide some practical tips on how listeners can become more aware of their influence in their daily lives?
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Sure, so I talk in the book about three things that you can do to just become more aware of the influence you have.
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And I call it getting better at seeing your influence, feeling your influence, and experiencing your influence.
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So one is to, as much as possible, use strategies, visualizations, vignettes, and ways of reframes of how you think about things to get out of your own head.
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So if you think about it, one reason
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we underestimate our influence is that we by necessity look at the world through our own two eyes.
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So we see everybody else and the things they do that affect us.
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We see how they re affecting one another, but we don t see ourselves in that scene.
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We don t see the ways in which we are contributing
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to a situation.
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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 on the wall, picture it as if, you know, 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?
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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 didn t realize you were contributing to.
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So that s one.
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Another is feeling your influence.
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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.
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And so one way to do that is something called getting perspective.
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So people are often told to take perspective and even Dale Carnegie
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of how to win friends and influence people said that you should take people s perspective more.
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But we re really bad at that.
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We re really bad at perspective taking.
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And so a better way is to what researchers call get perspective.
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And the easiest way to do that, and it s
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Disarmingly simple is just to ask people how they feel about something, get feedback, listen.
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Because when we try to take someone s perspective, we re guessing from our own head, our own experience.
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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.
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And that can help us understand how someone s really feeling.
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And then the last one is to experience your influence.
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And so this is just little kind of activities or tasks you can do to test out your influence on a daily basis.
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It could be writing a gratitude letter to someone you really appreciate.
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It could be giving a compliment when you think something nice about another person.
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It could be asking for help on something that you wouldn t ordinarily have asked for.
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You would have tried to do it yourself, even though it would have taken you twice as long.
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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.
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And you start to realize that you really do have this kind of agency in the world and with other people.
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Thank you so much for sharing those.
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And Vanessa, if a listener wanted to learn more about you, where s the best place for them to go?
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So I have a website, which is vanessabonds.com.
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You can also check out my book, which is available everywhere, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, et cetera.
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And I m on Twitter and Instagram at ProfBonds.
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Well, Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us today.
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It was such an honor to have you.
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Thank you so much for inviting me.
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It was a pleasure.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Vanessa Bonds, and I wanted to thank Vanessa and W.W.
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Norton Books for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Vanessa will be in the show notes.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both John or Myles and Passionstruck Clips.
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I have some extremely exciting news that my new book,
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PassionStruck, 12 powerful principles to unlock your purpose and ignite your most intentional life, is now available for pre-order.
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Anywhere that you buy books, links will also be in the show notes.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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You can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter.
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Work intentionally.
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You can also find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles.
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And lastly, you can sign up for my personal newsletter, Live Intentionally, at either johnrmiles.com or passionstruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview that I did with my friend Rusty Shelton, who s a best-selling author, dynamic keynote speaker, and successful entrepreneur who has focused his career on helping leaders build thought leadership focused on impact,
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not ego writing three acclaimed books and speaking around the world from events such as South by Southwest interactive to Forbes.
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This is not just to look how smart John is brand.
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You have done completely the opposite, which is what I wholeheartedly recommend to your audience.
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And that is I want them to be the messenger, not the message.
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In other words, this is not about building some kind of an ego driven brand.
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This is about, you ve got a message to get out.
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If you re going to make an impact at scale.
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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.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful.
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If you know someone who is looking for more information on consent and influence, then definitely share Vanessa s episode with them.
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The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now go out there this week and become PassionStruck.