Book Review: Jonah Berger,Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior

The choices people make are influenced by the behaviour of other people. Individuals often make faulty decisions that are biased due to their ignorance. People think that their decisions are based on their own tastes, opinions and personality, but that is not the case; decisions are influenced by behaviour of others around us. This book helps people choose when to defy social influence and when to grasp social influence. Introduction part of the book states that choices, such as retirement, investment, donation and others, are affected by social influence. People look for social desirability while making decisions. Social influence is such a hidden force that people cannot even realize when social factors influence their decisions. People underestimate how much social influence affects them.

Berger divides his book into five parts. First part of the book ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’ explains auto-kinetic effect that states how people rely on others when facing uncertainty. People conform to group members when asked to provide rough estimates about some phenomena. This conforming behaviour is a challenge to principles of free thought and independence. To further elaborate, author explained Asch’s concept of conformity which states that people conform to each other because they are uncertain about an event; but in contrast to this, Sheriff explained that people imitate even when they are clear. The power of conformity is explained by factors such as culture, language, and location where people have grown up. Conformity is also common among animals. People save time and effort by conformity to each other. Assortative mating also explains why people conform to each other. Every human’s mind and muscles also show signs of conformity to others; author explained it with the help of concept of mirror neuron. Behavioural mimicry helps in negotiation; behavioural mimicry is based on concept of conformity among people. For example, the place where the first visitor parks his vehicle impacts the parking preferences of people subsequently coming to same parking. Behaviour mimicry explains why kids follow eating habits of their parents and why waiters can increase tips by 70 per cent by only echoing customer’s orders. Mimicry is a powerful tool in the hands of people. Other people shape our behaviour without our awareness; this may lead to doing the same things or different things.

The second part of the book ‘A Horse of Different Color’ states that sometimes people have a drive for difference. Author explained how failure can be a source of motivation for 12-year-old Morgan Brian (a soccer player). Having an older sibling affects the sports performance of younger sibling. Majority of winners in games are later born kids. The reasons for better performance of younger kids include early adoption of game, source of inspiration, and competition against each other. In this high-performance scenario, it is not necessary that younger and older kids play the same game. First born kids perform better in academics. Siblings differ in terms of their political and social beliefs. Difference in siblings is huge among same sex siblings. Siblings are confidants. All these findings are averages. Snob effect, which explains that one individual’s demand is inversely related to market demand, strengthens the idea that sometimes people do like to look different. People get uneasy when they feel excessively similar to each other because a negative emotional reaction is observed when people feel excessively similar to others. People always look for information which makes them believe that they look different from others. But not everyone wants to look different. The choice to look different depends on individual’s preference which is derived from context. Some contexts encourage to look different while other encourage to look similar. For example, the working-class people prefer less differentiation because they consider better to share experiences with other people than being alone. When people differentiate, it depends on who others are; consequently, the choice to differentiate or to look similar is affected.

In third part of the book ‘Not if they are doing it’ author describes why one of Gucci’s competitor gifted a Gucci bag to Snooki who was famous for trash clothes and diminutive statue. A Company does not want such a customer to use its product, instead it compels such customers to use its competitor’s product and such a strategy is one of the advertising and signalling tools. This example proves how people behave when they do not do something because others are doing it. This technique of advertising is opposite of choosing a celebrity to advertise product. Berger explains how people want to look different from Geeks. People have a tendency to diverge to avoid being misidentified with undesired identities. Companies signal customers to buy from them and companies signal in such a way that customers do not buy a product rather they buy a life style. But the biggest question is- do companies have full control over what their brand signals? Because if too many people act on a given signal; the meaning of that signal changes. It happens because something which signals a particular position may start signalling something else. Author provided example of Stanford’s students to show how signalling affects the choices people make. In this example, students from Stanford’s Cancer Awareness Group wanted to educate the community by asking people to wear yellow wrist bands and they raised money for cancer research by selling these band. Students did this by going from dorm to dorm. Students living in a particular dorm were considered Geek. When Geeks started wearing same wrist band, other students abandoned the band. It shows that students did not want to look like a Geek. People should understand when and why they diverge. Author also addresses the question that when is divergence most likely to happen. Divergence is dependent on the communication of identity which is related to observability. People diverge when choices are seen as signals of identity. Costs signal a lot because the costlier the item, more difficult its adoption gets.

In part four ‘Similar but different’, author takes the example of deciding the colour of the year to describe the importance of the fact that what is popular presently influences what will be popular the next time. Similar pattern is found in the colour of the year. Predicting trend is difficult because people have a tendency to follow others. Berger studies how the trend of a particular name changed over time. People showed moderate similarity while naming their kids. The trend of a name is also dependent on how often we hear that name and how it sounds. It is true that the more we see something, the more we like it and as a result, the more we start liking other similar things. Exposure increases the liking of the same thing. Professor Morland conducted an experiment in his psychology class by showing pictures of women to students and proved that seeing someone more frequently make people like them more. The one reason for such liking is familiarity. Another reason is that people look for novelty. By nature, humans love to explore original, fresh and unexperienced things. But novelty brings mild negative reaction in the beginning and it can be scary as well. For some people, a positive familiarity might also become boring; actually, the level of interaction matters a lot. A very high level of interaction can make something boring. To sum it up, we can say that too novel is too unfamiliar, too familiar is too boring but somewhere in between is just right. People like the names which are neither highly familiar nor very unfamiliar. People often prefer to look similar and different at the same time; for example, people prefer same brand but want different colour or style. People do not buy new product in case it is either too similar to or too different from existing one. In case of automobiles, people were not willing to adopt automobiles in the beginning as it was a radical change. People do not even realize that what they buy, do or think is influenced by others.

Berger explains Triplett’s concept of social psychology in part five ‘Come on baby, light my fire’ to prove that when people compete with each other, their productivity improves. For example, cyclists perform better, as compared to their individual performance, when they race. As a practice, people perform better when others are around. Author also discussed concept of social facilitation which explains that presence of peers make people perform better. In contrast, in some cases performance of people falls in presence of others. Actually, it depends on whether people are performing easy/repetitive task or difficult/complex task. When people are performing easy/repetitive task, performance increases with other people around while the performance decreases when task is difficult/complex. Whether the performance increases or decreases, it actually depends on the complexity of the task. An example is that when people do easy task with other people like tying shoes their performance increases while in tasks like tying a bootie makes most people slower when they work with other people. The reason for social facilitation is that other people (peers) can be distracting, presence of other people increases impression management and there is an increase in physical arousal, so the design of social comparison decides whether it leads to improvement in performance or not.

In conclusion, author addresses the question of nature versus nurture because this question has important policy implications. Author discusses experiments done in New York city to resolve problem of housing in the 1990s to describe that nurture affects outcome more than nature because the place where people have lived has a great impact on their lives (neighbourhood effect). We are constantly shaped by people around us. So, understanding where and how we get influenced helps us to make better decisions.