Why are we so easily influenced?

The human mind depends on the minds of others

No man is an island — John Donne

I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. — Steve Jobs

I don’t normally start my essays with quotes — but the subject of today’s essay warrants it.

Here, we’re talking about the nexus between yourself and another person, that soft place that surrenders to their influence. Fitting to start off with a couple influential quotes about our interconnectivity.

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Back to the beginning

The history of our “influenceable” nature all starts with one of the most transformational aspects of our species: our cooperation.

As Rutger Bregman puts it in his fascinating book Humankind: A Hopeful History, the gradual iterations of evolution have rendered us inherently sociable, friendly, kind, and cooperative.¹ By default, on the micro level, we typically get along and work together — despite all the times where we disastrously don’t.

However, the takeaway here isn’t simply that we sit around smiling at each other and playing nice all the time. Instead, it’s that we’ve honed a shrewd sense for observing and mimicking the people around us, which allows us to get along, cooperate, and play nice.

Underlying our sociability is a keen ability to read another’s expression, their body language, their tone. To quickly pick up any shreds of context about a person and gum it all together into a unique set of emotions and intentions. We see someone and we immediately dream up what they might be thinking, what they want, what they might do.²

But observing, mentally documenting, and intuitively understanding another is only step one. We don’t stop at observing the other — no, instead, we are influenced or changed by the other. The other leaves an indelible impression on us whether we like it or not. As a young child, this is how we come to understand the world — and it’s how we keep navigating it even after we’ve grown older.

A few summers ago, I was leaving a restaurant and a toddler sitting at another table smiled, waved, and said ‘goodbye!’ to me. The toddler’s parents smiled and shushed her with a few words about how she shouldn’t call out to strangers.

It was a charming moment and has stayed with me. Why? Because those few seconds revealed so much about how the young mind learns. She had clearly watched others wave and call out goodbye when someone left; she had internalized the social etiquette that accompanies someone leaving. But she hadn’t yet crystallized that understanding to know when and when not to call out goodbye to someone.

Social learning, in this way, is a process. It’s piecemeal. You observe a behavior, you decide whether it’s valuable, and then you reproduce it. That toddler was simply imitating a scenario she had seen countless times — without the social finetuning that comes from “growing up.”

Albert Bandura’s classic bobo doll experiments taught us that back in the 1960’s. When watching an adult aggressively attack a toy bobo doll, the kid participants were more likely to do the same. They imitated the behavior that had been modeled to them. So much of our learning emerges from this daily work of observation.

You are, in many ways, a product of all that you’ve witnessed the people around you do.

Bregman’s book does a great job of showing how it’s this evolved capability that transformed our species. Not simply that we can read other people, but that we can easily and intuitively watch them and learn from them.

That’s how although maybe only a fraction of our ancestors would have the flash of insight to fashion a stone into a knife-like tool, everyone else was able and motivated to follow suit. They saw, they absorbed, they did the same. Times millions of people, times thousands of years. And now we’re here.

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Deciding what is valuable in the first place

So, if we observe, consider, and reproduce behaviors on infinite loops throughout our own lives and throughout human history, what goes on during that little ‘consider’ step? How are we determining what merits repetition?

Well, once again… other people.

We’re living in an era of unprecedented influence. We easily see hundreds to thousands of ads each day if we’re consuming any digital media. And those are just the overt ones. Clever product placements, content marketing, and a host of other strategies have carefully positioned us as prime targets of influence.

The modern digital landscape has even crafted the new and well-known profession: the influencer. An individual whose sole professional purpose is to get you to want (and then buy) what they have. In fact, influencers have become so influential that, according to one survey, an astonishing 57% of Gen Zers would opt to become one if given the chance.

In other words, the art of influencing others has taken hold and has proven to be remarkably straightforward. It mostly boils down to if we like you, we’ll listen to you.

With few obstacles, an extraordinary amount of influence is, thus, wielded over us. We’re told very plainly what to value — and then we do.

But although influencer marketing is a recent trend, its power was spotted early by French philosopher, René Girard. His theory of mimetic desire suggests that nearly all of our desires spring from observations of what others desire. You don’t want that big, top-of-the-line car because you actually want it; you want it because other people do.

If we desire what others desire (merely because it’s desired by others), then we are always in the process of imitation. Our desires will converge with others’ to fuel demand and competition for all sorts of scarce and prestigious products. We end up in an ultra-competitive world driven by overconsumption and unexamined desire³.

We’re so deeply attuned to the minds of others that we often, and unconsciously, let them dictate our own lives.

All of this talk of imitation reminds me of a saying that we all hear every so often:

Your life is determined by the five people with whom you spend the most time.

I’ve never liked it. It reduces us to passive receptacles of influence, buffeted around by the winds of other people’s personalities and whims.

But if that saying truly is the case, then aren’t we doing the same back to those five? Are we not just as influential within our social circle? Is there nothing original about who and what we are?⁴ There has to be something mutual here; one can’t always be the influenced party.

We may have evolved highly specialized ways of intuiting other people’s mental states and learning unconsciously from their behavior, but the unique pattern of behaviors and thoughts and responses that make up you must be just as powerful.

Others are watching from you, learning from you, modeling the way you act. Your individual influence is tremendous, rippling out in all directions each time you encounter someone and a little of you rubs off on them.

You have undeniably become a target in the modern, digital world’s influence-driven marketplace — but you are also a beacon of influence yourself.

Don’t let your own power shore up in the shifting tides of what everyone else thinks.

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1. A theory he refers to as “The Rise of Homo Puppy” :-)

2. We can make mistakes here, often relying on dangerous stereotypes and heuristics, but the cognitive tradeoff here favors efficiency. The brain prefers to make quick, cautious judgments over slower, more reasoned ones.

3. Uh oh… sound familiar?

4. Much more to come on this agency versus influence discussion. I’m reading a fascinating and provocative book on a related subject, and I’ll need to share some thoughts about it. Stay tuned.