This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Influence" by Robert B. Cialdini. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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Do you ever see people doing something and think you should join in? Have you ever gone along with something a group wanted to do only to regret it? Maybe you realize, “I should think for myself” only after it’s too late. If you want to avoid the fallacy of social proof, you need to think for yourself.
The Social Proof Principle is a theory stating that you decide what’s correct based on what other people think is correct. This isn’t always the best course of action and this principle can lead to manipulation. Think for yourself and avoid being persuaded to do something you don’t agree with.
Why Do We Imitate Others?
If lots of other people are doing something or thinking something, then it must be good and worthy of imitation. You might expect that you would think for yourself, but it doesn’t always work that way.
The motive, then, is clear for compliance practitioners. If they can convince you that lots of other people are doing something, they can make you do it too. So, why do we imitate others? Because it’s our natural instinct.
Think for Yourself: Pushing Back Against Social Proof
How can you push back against the social proof manipulations of compliance practitioners? Knowing the explanation for why do we imitate others, how can you overcome the overwhelming instinct to conform to group behavior?
Social proof acts like an autopilot: usually it steers us right, but it can land us in trouble if it’s being fed the wrong data. You need to recognize situations where your social proof instinct is being triggered based on manufactured or faulty evidence. Once you recognize that this is happening, you’ll know to think for yourself.
See Through the Fakery
There are “person-on-the-street” commercials and canned laughter in sitcoms that we know are manipulative strategies. But they still work. Why do we imitate others even when we know it’s fake? It bears repeating: compliance practitioners want to convince you that lots of people are behaving the way the manipulators want you to behave.
But ruses like fake “real people” or artificial laugh tracks are often comically transparent in their phoniness. So keep repeating, “think for myself.” (Shortform note: So are other “tells” like implausibly high statistics (“99 percent of dentists agree”) or, in online shopping, companies buying positive, fake user reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp.) Treat any over-the-top praise from a “neutral” observer with skepticism. You have to think for yourself.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Influence summary :
- How professional manipulators use your psychology against you
- The six key biases you need to be aware of
- How learning your own biases will help you beat the con men around you
