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- 1: Peer Pressure -
In 2011, the clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch offered money to Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino, one of the stars of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore.

Abercombie didn't want Sorrentino to wear its brand, but the opposite: the company was willing to pay him to wear anything but its clothing. Another cast member, Nicole 'Snooki' Polizzi, was sent a Gucci handbag – allegedly by one of the luxury brand's competitors.

"It turns out influence is very much like a magnet...but it just as well repels us," says Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. "And the idea here is, well, if Mike 'The Situation' is wearing Abercrombie & Fitch, maybe other people aren't going to want to wear it anymore. Or if Snooki is hanging on to a Gucci handbag, maybe that will help their competitors because no one will want to wear Gucci anymore. So we need to understand how social influence attracts, but also how it repels."

Berger says we tend to be pretty good at recognizing how social influence and peer pressure affect other people's choices. But we're not so good at recognizing those forces in our own decision-making.

"We dress pretty similarly. We drive similar cars. We buy similar things. And so indeed when we look around we see a lot of people acting similarly and we see influence and assume it's happening," he says.

"When we look to ourselves, though, we look to our introspections. We look for evidence that there's a reason that we behave that way. And because when we think about it, [we say], 'Well, I don't think I bought that car to fit in. I wasn't sitting there going, 'Oh God, I really want to keep up with the Joneses.' You thought you bought it because of price or you thought you bought it because you liked how it looked. So you don't think it affected your own behavior even though at the end of the day it actually did."

Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

- 2: Invisible Influence -


VEDANTAM: [...] Even when it comes to our understanding of the facts, we're biased by the thoughts and opinions of those around us. I asked Jonah Berger if this was part of the world of invisible influence.

BERGER: A colleague of mine did a great study a few years ago looking at exactly this. So he gave both liberals and conservatives a number of different policy propositions. So one was about helping disadvantaged people, one was about taxes, a bunch of different policies. And he told them that those policies were either supported by Democrats or Republicans. And what he found, very much along the lines of what you just mentioned, is that when conservatives saw a policy - the same policy - if they thought that policy was supported by conservatives, they loved the policy. They thought it was great. They supported it. You know, even if it was a welfare policy, even if it was a generous welfare policy, the fact that conservatives seemed to like it - the fact they were told that other conservative leaders support it - they thought it was great. They thought it was terrible, though, if that same policy, that same liberal welfare policy, was supported by liberals. Oh, the liberals. They're always doing this, you know, helpful stuff for welfare. I'm totally, totally against it. Same policy, completely different reaction.

Liberals did exactly the same thing. When liberals were told that policy was supported by liberals, they loved it. When liberals were told conservatives liked the policy, they hated it. And so the simple idea here is it's often party over policy. Even the same policy - even the same actual thing, we interpret that thing based on who's supporting it - right? - based on the identity it signals. And this actually happened to me just a few months ago. So was doing a consulting project with messaging for an organization that wanted help - clean energy catch on among conservatives. And clean energy is something that they thought conservatives would support. After all, it saves tax dollars. It reduces the size of government. All things that conservatives should like. Yet when they surveyed conservatives, they found that conservatives weren't supporting clean energy. And so they dug a little deeper, and they found that there was a clear reason why.

When they asked conservatives, particularly conservative leaders, why conservative leaders weren't supporting the policy, they said, oh, yeah, clean energy, you know, solar power, wind power. Well, isn't that something that Al Gore likes? And if Al Gore likes it, it's probably not for me. And what's so interesting there again is same policy, right? Yet the mere fact that it was associated with a prominent liberal like Al Gore made them not want to do it. And so we really need to think about the politics, not just of actual politics, but the politics of identity. What does it mean to engage in a certain behavior? What does it signal about me to do something or not do something? And how can we use that to help people do better things?

VEDANTAM: I mean, there are a lot of political scientists who talk about our affiliation with political parties as being very analogous to our support for various sports teams. You know, so I'm a devout fan of a football team. And, of course, every year the players on that team change. And it's completely irrational to support the team when all the people playing for the team have changed. But there's a famous line from Jerry Seinfeld, you know, what we're really doing is we're rooting for laundry. And at some level, we're doing that with politics, too. I mean, we're - what we're really doing is we're rooting for laundry.

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