Invisible Influence (10 page)

But if Asian Spider Monkey gets popular, all bets are off.

When they hit the cover of
Rolling Stone
, lots of people start listening. Everyone from indie music heads to fair weather fans. And now a band that was yours and yours alone is everyone's. What once was a sign of uniqueness is now generic and widespread.

What's a true Asian Spider Monkey fan to do?

One option is to drop the band completely. To throw out your concert T-shirt and delete their songs from your playlist.

But that's a bit drastic. After all, you still like their music. And you were there first!

So, rather than dropping the band, many people find a way to
maintain their allegiance while finding a new source of distinction: saying they prefer the older stuff.

By saying they like the Spider Monkey's early music, people can maintain their fandom and still be different. And they can one-up all the Johnny-come-lately listeners with an additional source of social currency. Not only do they like the popular band's stuff, just like everyone else, but they are so in the know that they knew about the band before everyone else.

In some instances, a backlash starts even before the thing gets popular. The mere hint that something is gaining steam is enough to make some people dislike it. Might as well get there first before everyone else does.
^II

When America sits down to turkey and stuffing every Thanksgiving, most people give little thought to where this holiday came from. If encouraged to think about it, we conjure up what we learned in kindergarten: Pilgrims and Indians, or Plymouth Rock and the
Mayflower
. But beyond the cranberry sauce and prim white bonnets, these early settlers actually had a surprisingly strong impact on American values today.

In September 1620, some one hundred people set sail from England to the New World seeking religious freedom. Many
were part of the English Separatist church, a radical Puritan faction that was unhappy with the limited extent of the Reformation and what they saw as the Roman Catholic practices of the Church of England. After a stint in the Netherlands, these Protestants were looking for a new place to settle. Somewhere with better economic prospects and where they would not lose the English language.

At the time, the clergy mediated almost all relationships between individuals and God. Priests were the only people who had a direct line to the holy. They gave out penance and absolution, interpreted and supplemented scripture, and generally acted as intermediaries. Ritual and ceremony ruled the day.

These early Americans, and the ones that arrived soon after, had a different view. They wanted to empower the common person to take control over his or her destiny, both in the next world, and this one as well.

Rather than simply take the word of priests, they called for men and women to study the Bible and interpret it for themselves. Every person could communicate directly with God through his or her faith, and every person could be his or her own priest. Instead of mindlessly following authority, people were encouraged to think and feel for themselves. To be independent.
¹⁶

This notion of independence, or individualism, proved impactful. It shaped not only the settlers' religious beliefs, but how they interacted with their peers. It influenced not only the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Harbor whom we celebrate today) but also the broader roots of American culture that grew from this early seed.

People were free to pursue their own ends, independently of others. To make their own path and go their own way.

Years later, when French historian Alexis de Tocqueville surveyed the New World's burgeoning democratic order, individualism was one of the key themes that emerged. Not a negative selfishness or egotism but “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows.”
¹⁷
This carried through the Declaration of Independence and the protection of civil liberties outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. People's right to be free of undue influence, and to make their own choices.

To this day, questions of individual independence underlie most of the country's political discourse. How far should the government go to protect people's right to express their individual opinions? At what point does protecting one individual's freedom impinge on another's?

Given the historical premium placed on independence and autonomy, it's not surprising that Americans have come to value differentiation. The freedom to do something different than one's peers. Whether that difference comes in interpreting the word of God or picking a different beer.
^III

Rather than reflecting external considerations, in America, choice is seen as reflecting one's inner preferences, one's personal wants and desires. But with that freedom comes added responsibility. If choice reflects who someone is, it becomes even more
important to choose in culturally significant ways. Clothes are not just clothes, they're a statement of who we are. And how better to express independence than to choose something different.

Imagine showing up to a party wearing the same dress as another guest. Or going to work one day and finding yourself wearing the exact same tie as your boss.

Most people would be a good sport about it and laugh, but they'd also probably be embarrassed or find the situation mildly uncomfortable. Because, whether due to one person or one million, feeling overly similar to others often generates a negative emotional reaction. It makes people upset or uneasy.

So we choose things that create a sense of difference. Brands that no one else has heard of or apartments in areas that have yet to become gentrified. Limited-edition T-shirts or vacations to obscure Polynesian islands that are only reachable by outrigger canoe.
¹⁸

Distinction even helps explains the adoption of niche high-tech gadgets. Google Glass was supposed to be the future of wearable computing. An optical head-mounted display that placed a small screen in the user's field of vision, it was labeled one of the best inventions of 2012. It promised to take notes, snap pictures, or get directions, all while being hands-free and liberating people to do what they do best.

This promise, however, ran into obstacles. There were privacy concerns and ethical questions about recording people without their permission. Studies raised issue with the device being distracting and states moved to ban Glass while driving. Some early adopters bragged so much that wearers were termed “glassho%$s” for showing off. Soon, Google Glass began to be seen as a solution in search of a problem (rather than the other way around).

Yet, with all these flaws, people still clamored for the device.
They angled for an invite (it was never publicly available) or bid close to $100,000 just to get their hands on one.

Because buying Glass was more than just about whether it was useful or not. For high-tech innovators, the newest gadget isn't just a productivity tool, it's a tool for differentiation. A way to show they are ahead of everyone else:
Other people might look, act, and sound the same, but not me! I'm a rugged individualist. I'm a special snowflake. I'm different.

There are often rewards for being different. Being more attractive gets you more dates. Being taller gets you picked earlier in pickup basketball.

But uniqueness is about more than just being better than others. Sure, standing out in a positive way feels good. Getting asked out frequently or being picked first makes people feel special. But it's more than that.

Suppose you just got a new job. The first day is orientation and you and the other new hires start by doing a little getting to know each other. An icebreaker to begin the day. The group goes around the room, people introduce themselves, and say a little bit about who they are.

I'm a thirty-six-year-old mother of two.

I'm a Baltimore native who loves the Orioles.

I'm the son of a doctor and an art historian.

How would you introduce yourself? More fundamentally, who are you?

This question is both deeply philosophical and extremely practical, and it's a query we answer either implicitly or explicitly all the time.

From the first day of school to a new job, we're constantly introducing ourselves to others. Providing our name and a little bit of information about how we see our identity.

In today's digital world, introductions are often virtual. One's bio on a website or details on the “About” section of a social media profile. A digital overview that offers a quick sense of who someone is, even without meeting them face-to-face.

Twitter barely provides enough room for a full sentence for people to describe themselves, but users tend to use that limited real estate space in particular ways. Love, for example, is the most frequently used word.
¹⁹

But it's not that people are hopeless romantics. They're using the verb to express their preferences. What they like and what they like doing:
I love dogs. I love watching football I love my kids
.

Other frequent categories include occupations and roles:
I'm a social media manager. A family man. A professor.

These introductions are more than just pleasantries. On a deeper level, they're a window into how we see ourselves. How we define who we are among the billions of other people in the world.

While no one likes being categorized, objects and even people gain meaning in relation to other things. If you'd never seen an apple before, someone telling you it was an apple wouldn't be useful. It's only when they describe it in relation to other things you know—
It's a small red or green fruit
—that the nature of an apple becomes clearer. By evoking the category to which an apple belongs (a fruit), meaning is communicated.

Fruit tends to be edible, so an apple must be edible. Fruit tends to be sweet, so an apple is probably sweet. By saying that an apple is a fruit, it implies that it grows out of the ground, can be eaten, and probably has a decent number of vitamins.

But meaning comes not only from what an apple is, but also from what it isn't. Saying an apple is a fruit also implies that an apple is distinct from things that are
not
fruits. It probably doesn't have legs, for instance, and would be bad to use as a piece of furniture. Without some sense of distinction, meaning is unclear.

The same principles apply to how we describe ourselves. If someone says that they are a professor, that provides some sense of who they are. It implies that they have qualities in common with other people who describe themselves as professors. That they probably like reading, enjoy thinking, and may spend a little too much time indoors.

But it also suggests that they are different from those who do not describe themselves as professors. They are probably shorter than people who describe themselves as basketball players and less creative than people that describe themselves as artists.

Because if everyone were a professor, “professor” would be a meaningless category. Simply saying
I'm a human being
doesn't provide much information. It doesn't distinguish someone from the billions of others out there.

Distinction is valuable, then, because it provides definition. If everyone were identical, it would be hard to have any sense of self. Where would that self start and others end? Differentiation helps establish a sense of identity. Delineating both who someone is and isn't.

This often plays out as children become young adults. Up until age twelve or thirteen, children are essentially extensions of their parents. They dress the way their parents dress them, eat what their parents cooked, and live where their parents live. They're not clones of their parents (children certainly talk back or hate particular foods), but they've done little to differentiate themselves.

Part of becoming an adult, though, is about defining a unique self. One that's separate from one's parents. So teens rebel. They become vegan, date bad boys or girls, and generally look bored or revolted whenever their parents pick them up from school.

Teens aren't just trying to piss off their parents (although it might seem that way); they're trying to define themselves as unique and distinct. Creating a boundary where their identity starts and their parents' ends.

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a lawyer. He asked what I was working on, and when I told him I was writing a book on social influence, he lamented its impact on his colleagues.

“Everyone wants to be the same,” he said. “Young lawyers get a bonus and one of the first things most of them do is buy a BMW.”

When I pointed out that he, too, drove a BMW, he took issue with my comment. “Sure,” he said, “but they all drive silver BMWs. I drive a
blue
one.”

Every choice or decision has different attributes or aspects to it. Cars can be described by their brand, model, color, or a variety of other features. Vacations can be described by what city, state, or country you went to, what hotel you stayed at, and what you did while you were there.

The desire to be different may encourage people to buy more unusual cars (a Volkswagen bus rather than a Toyota Camry)
or take more unusual vacations (Anguilla rather than Orlando). But desires for differentiation also encourage people to focus on aspects of their choices that make them
feel
more unique. Even if the actual choices are the same.

Women who wear the same dress to a party may focus on the fact that they are wearing different shoes or are carrying different handbags. BMW drivers may focus on the unique color or feature package that they bought. We attend to, and remember, information that supports our need for differentiation.