Invisible Influence (2 page)

And two hundred and seven dinners, ninety-two long walks, three vacations, and one short-lived breakup later, you find yourself getting married to the only person you could ever see yourself spending the rest of your life with.

The idea of a soul mate has existed for thousands of years. In
The Symposium
, Plato wrote that humans originally had four legs, four arms, and a head made of two faces. They could walk equally well backward and forward, and so terrible was their might and strength that they threatened the very gods who were supposed to be ruling over them. Something had to be done.

The gods discussed various solutions. Some wanted to annihilate the human race—wipe them out forever. But one of the
gods, Zeus, had a more creative idea. Humans provided gods with various tributes and offerings, so why kill them off entirely? Instead, each human would be split in half. This would teach them a lesson. It would diminish humanity's strength and punish humans for their pride.

And so it went. Each human was divided down the middle. Like a tree trunk cut in two.

Not surprisingly, these split humans were miserable. Even when their wounds healed, they cast about, longing for their other half. Forever searching for the piece that would make them whole.

A lot has changed since Plato's time, but the notion of a one, true love for each of us has remained. Tinder swipes may have supplanted love letters and hooking up may have replaced elaborate courtships, but most people still believe that there is a Mr. or Ms. Right out there, waiting to be found. Like two halves of a circle, or two peas in a pod, someone, somewhere out there will complete you. Your missing puzzle piece, your perfect fit. R&B songs and romantic comedies reinforce this idea again and again. If you've been unlucky in love, don't fret: you just haven't met your soul mate yet.

Scan the wedding section of a newspaper, or ask most married people how they met, and you'll get a similar answer:
From the moment I saw him, I just knew . . . There was a chemistry I'd never felt with anyone else . . . A spark went off and I could tell she was the right one for me. . . .

Most people find any other possibility slightly upsetting. Want to make a happily married friend angry with you? Try suggesting that they might have been equally happy with someone else.

Our partners may not be perfect, but they are ours. And we are 110 percent certain that it couldn't have been anyone else.

We are all princes with a glass slipper, searching for that one and only Cinderella whose foot will fit.

Look at how most Americans meet their future spouse, though, and you'll notice something interesting. There are more than 320 million people in the United States. Drop the married ones and you are left with around 160 million. Prefer one gender more than another and you are left with around 80 million people that could be right for you.

Some of those are the wrong age, support the wrong political party, or—heaven forbid—love polka music; but even once you filter out all of these mismatches, you are left with millions of people. A lot of folks who could potentially be Mr. or Ms. Right.

Do this same exercise with the world population and there are hundreds of millions of people. Any of whom might be your soul mate.

Look at where people end up meeting their future spouse, though, and it's pretty narrowly concentrated. In fact, over a third of Americans meet their husband or wife at one of two places: work or school.
⁴

Now, that by itself isn't surprising. People spend a lot of time at work and school, and it's tough to fall in love with someone you never got the chance to meet.

But step back for a moment and consider what that means. Sure, there might be only one right person for each of us. Out of hundreds of millions of people, just one soul mate. But what's the chance that this person just happened to start bagging groceries at the same time we did? Can all of us be that lucky?

Professor Richard Moreland's undergraduate personality psychology course at the University of Pittsburgh was like many courses you might have taken in college. It was held in a large, fan-shaped lecture hall with stadium seating. The space had close to two hundred seats, filled with mostly freshman and sophomores, with a few juniors and seniors mixed in. Around half the students were men, half were women, and there was the usual array of jocks and geeks, slackers and go-getters.

Psychology classes often offer extra credit for participating in academic research, and Professor Moreland's course was no different. At the end of the semester, students were asked if they wanted to complete a short survey. Most said yes.

The survey was simple. Students, both male and female, were shown photos of four women (labeled A, B, C, and D) and asked to answer a few questions about each. How attractive did they find each woman? Did they think they would enjoy spending time with her? Would they like to become friends with her?

None of the four women were particularly distinctive. All looked like typical college students. They were similar in age, dressed casually, and looked like someone who could have been sitting in the next seat over all semester.

Which, in fact, they had. Unbeknownst to them, the students in Professor Moreland's course had been part of an elaborate experiment.

Throughout the course of the semester, the women pictured in the survey had posed as students in the course. They arrived a few minutes before the lectures began, walked slowly down to the front of the room, and sat where they could be seen by most of their classmates. During the lectures, they sat quietly, listened,
and took notes. When the lectures ended, they packed up their things and left the room with everyone else. Other than not being enrolled in the class, there was little that separated them from the rest of the students.

There was one more important detail. Each woman attended a different number of class sessions. Professor Moreland's course met forty times over the course of the semester. Woman A showed up to zero classes, Woman B showed up to five, Woman C showed up to ten, and Woman D showed up to fifteen.

It goes without saying that different people find different things attractive. Some people prefer blondes, while others prefer brunettes. Some women like their men tall, dark, and handsome, but others have different preferences (which is good news for the short, pale, and less handsome among us).

So it's not surprising that different students saw the various women differently. Some thought Woman A was a fox, while others preferred Woman C. Some liked Woman B's eyes, while others found Woman D more appealing.

But even with everyone's idiosyncratic opinions, there was a distinct pattern.

Women who had come to class more often were seen as more attractive. The woman who had come to fifteen classes was seen as more attractive than the woman who had come to ten, who was seen as more attractive than the woman who had come to five, and so on.

Seeing someone more frequently made people like them more.

You might wonder whether the woman who came to fifteen classes just happened to be better looking. Maybe she was just
naturally more attractive. But this wasn't the case. Students who were not in the class found all of the women equally attractive. Without differential exposure, the four women looked the same.

Could students have gotten to know the frequent attendees better? No again. While the women attended class, they never interacted, verbally or nonverbally, with any of the other students.

Instead, students liked certain women more because they had seen those women more frequently. Students thought the frequent attendees were more attractive and were more interested in getting to know them. All from happening to see those women a few more times in class.

The idea that mere exposure increases liking may seem strange at first, but it has actually been shown in hundreds of experiments. Whether considering faces in a college yearbook, advertising messages, made-up words, fruit juices, and even buildings, the more people see something, the more they like it. Familiarity leads to liking.
⁵

And while the notion that seeing something more times makes us like it more is intriguing in itself, there is another aspect of mere exposure that makes it even more interesting. We are completely unaware it occurs.

When students in Moreland's class were asked whether they had seen any of the women before, almost none of them realized they had. And if someone had asked the students whether seeing the women more frequently shaped their opinions, the students would have looked at that person like they were crazy.
Of course not,
the students would have said.
Why would simply seeing someone a couple times more make them seem more attractive?
And yet it did.

Because, whether we realize it or not, we are all students in Moreland's class. We underestimate how much social influence affects our behavior because we don't realize it is happening.

When we look for evidence that social influence shaped our behavior, we often don't see any. We aren't aware of being influenced one way or another, so we assume it didn't happen. But not being aware of influence doesn't mean it didn't occur.

Play a quick game with me for a moment. I'm going to give you a memory test. Below is a list of seven words and I want to see how many you can remember. Take as much time as you need to read the list.

Reckless

Furniture

Conceited

Corner

Aloof

Stapler

Stubborn

Before you take the memory test, I'd like you to do something else. Below is a brief description of someone named Donald. Please read the passage and then answer a few quick questions about him.

Donald spent a great amount of his time in search of what he liked to call excitement. He has climbed Mount McKinley, shot the Colorado rapids in a kayak, driven in a demolition derby, and piloted a jet-powered boat—without knowing much about boats. He has risked injury, and even death, a number of times. Now he was in search of new excitement. He was thinking, perhaps, he would do some
skydiving or maybe cross the Atlantic in a sailboat. By the way he acted one could readily guess that Donald was perfectly aware of his ability to do many things well. Other than business engagements, Donald's contacts with people were rather limited. He felt he didn't really need to rely on anyone. Once Donald made up his mind to do something, it was as good as done no matter how long it might take or how difficult it might be. Only rarely did he change his mind, even when it might well have been better if he had.

I realize you've never met Donald before, but based on this description, if you had to pick one word to describe Donald, what would that word be?

When asked a similar question, most people described Donald somewhat negatively. They thought he was reckless and a bit conceited. Crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat is pretty risky, after all, and the fact that he was “aware of his abilities to do many things well” makes him sound a bit full of himself. Others described Donald as stubborn (based on his unwillingness to change his mind) and somewhat aloof (because he didn't rely on anyone). It's not surprising if you described him negatively as well.

But what if I had asked you to remember a different list of words beforehand? Rather than the list above, what if you'd been asked to remember a completely separate set? The description of Donald would be the same, but the memory list would be different. Would your perceptions of Donald have changed?

Of course not,
you'd say.
That random list of words has nothing to do with Donald. It's entirely unrelated.
As long as the description of Donald was the same, you would have seen him similarly.

And you'd be wrong.

Because when a different set of people was asked to remember words like “adventurous,” “self-confident,” “independent,” and “persistent” before reading about Donald, it changed how they saw him. Donald now seemed like a much more positive guy. Rather than seeing his crossing the Atlantic as risky, they saw it as adventurous. Rather than seeing his lack of needing others as signaling his aloofness, they saw it as indicating that he was independent.

Same Donald, judged completely differently. Why?

Even though people didn't realize it, thinking about different words while reading about Donald colored the way he seemed. The words activated different ideas in people's minds, which then spilled over to affect their perceptions of him. All without their awareness. And all driven by the power of nonconscious influence.

This book is about the simple, subtle, and often surprising ways that others affect our behavior.

When people think of science, they tend to think about physics or chemistry. Test tubes and microscopes and molecules twisting together to form a double helix. Laboratories with people in white coats and blackboards filled with chicken-scratch equations that look like a Martian took up calligraphy. Ideas you have to be . . . well, a rocket scientist to understand.

But science doesn't just happen in fancy labs. It's happening all around us, each and every day.

We make riskier decisions because someone patted us on the shoulder. We name our child Mia because names like Madison and Sophia were popular recently. Even strangers, or people we
may never meet, have a startling impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes towards a welfare policy totally shift if we're told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same in both cases).

Just like atoms bouncing off each other, our social interactions are constantly shaping who we are and what we do. This science, this social science, determines everything from how you got your name to how you ended up picking up this book.