Vanessa Bohns studies the difference between how much influence people have and how influence they think they have. On the podcast, we talk about her studies, why people underestimate their influence, and whether this means we should try asking for more than we do now.

If you sit tight until next year, Dr. Bohns has a book coming out called You Have More Influence than You Think.

A few things that come up in our conversation:

• For a general overview of Dr. Bohns’ research on this topic, you can check out this article in Harvard Business Review or her review in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
• People underestimate how many people they have to ask in order to get someone to agree to do something (Flynn & Bohns, 2008).
• People even underestimate their influence in getting people to do ethically questionable things (Bohns, Roghanizad, & Xu, 2014).
• We don’t realize how uncomfortable it is for people to say no to requests (Bohns & Flynn, 2010).
• The influence process is different between in-person versus emailed requests (Roghanizad & Bohns, 2017).
• People’s biases about influence even extend to how they think about unwanted romantic advances (Bohns & DeVincent, 2019).
• We break down the difference between the “spotlight effect” and the “invisibility cloak” bias.
• Tory Higgins’ “saying is believing” effect shows how much power audiences have (Higgins & Rholes, 1978).

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