Dr. Amanda Nimon-Peters is a force to be reckoned with. Not only is she a Professor of Leadership at Hult International Business School, but she also holds a First-Class Honours Degree in Psychology from the University of Adelaide and a Ph.D. in Behavioural Science from the University of Cambridge.

So it’ll come as no surprise she has also written a book: Working with Influence, Nine Principles of Persuasion to Accelerate your Career. Luckily for us, and you as an AllBright EDIT reader, Amanda granted us the privilege of sharing a snippet of said book with you. So, ready to be an influencer at work? We thought so...

Principle Two Social Imitation (The Unseen Influence of Community)

It is common to hear that we choose our own path in life, and we tend to think of ourselves as fully in control of our own behaviour. We see our decisions as a matter of personal values, and our ability to exercise discipline as just a matter of willpower. In stark contrast, behavioural science demonstrates that the community of people around us has a profound, unconscious, and uninvited effect on our behaviour. Our community influences our choices, what goals we set, and how we behave to gain social approval. These influences are not just unconscious – they can even cause us to act in ways that directly contradict our stated values and opinions. As you read about social imitation effects in this chapter, ask yourself if you can think of any specific examples in your workplace, college, or social life. The greater your ability to detect the presence of social imitation influences, the better your opportunity to resist conforming to norms that run against your personal values and might even harm your productivity. Of course, you should also aim to apply your understanding to increase your own influence over people and outcomes in your workplace. 

‘Monkey see, monkey do’ makes a happy monkey

All primates learn through imitating the behaviour of those around them. This is a paradigm that creates common practices among a community and is certainly valuable and adaptive. If you imagine yourself returning from a foraging trip to find your family/tribe/ gorilla troop fleeing from camp, it is probably wise to assume they have good reasons for their behaviour and that you should do the same. It also makes sense that our choices would be influenced by the choices of those who have gone ahead of us – for example, when deciding which restaurant to try, app or download or movie to watch. Social imitation is both a widespread phenomenon and a form of brain processing shortcut that enables your central processing unit to avoid the hard work of having to think for itself. Thus, it should come as no surprise that research shows we modify our behaviour and our choices to align with those of our community. For example, we keep eating for longer when other people around us keep eating2 and we engage in anti-social behaviour at work if that is how the people around us behave.3

Moreover, there is neurological evidence that aligning our choices with those of our peers makes us happy. One study of hungry male and female undergraduate students used magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity.4 Students were asked to rate how much they wanted to eat healthy food (e.g., fruit and vegetables) as well as unhealthy food (e.g., chips and candy). After making their own ratings, they were shown what they thought were the average ratings of 200 other undergraduates at the same university. This data had been manipulated so that half of the participants saw data in which their peers preferred healthy foods and half saw data in which their peers preferred unhealthy foods. As we would expect, when students rated these foods again after exposure to the fake peer data, their ratings moved in the direction of what had been most popular with others – whether that was the healthy or the unhealthy choice. However, more than just affecting their subsequent choices, their brain activity revealed how they responded to the information about their peers’ choices.

Those who discovered that their original ratings were aligned with those of their (fake) community experienced activity in the region of the brain associated with reward. Further, when students rated the food choices after seeing what their peers had chosen, their neural patterns indicated they were re-valuing that food type. In other words, they were not pretending to like the food liked by their peers, they were genuinely changing their preferences so that what they believed they liked was more in line with the perceived choices of their community. This is just one of the self-inflicted brainwashing techniques through which our community influences our behaviour.

All the ways in which social imitation affects us

We imitate choices because it makes decisions easier.

Making your own decision is harder than you think. If you’ve heard of the term ‘decision fatigue’ you may be aware that our ability to make effective decisions is a limited resource which runs out as we become more tired. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had multiple copies of the same clothes because wearing the same thing each day helped reserve decision energy for more important matters. Decision fatigue as a relationship between increased tiredness and reduced objectivity has been measured in the decisions made by orthopaedic surgeons, 5 judges, 6 and consumers, 7 resulting in fewer scheduled operations for patients seen at the end of the week, fewer paroles granted for prisoners seen just before a lunch break and a higher likelihood of impulse purchases after more substantial purchasing decisions that required greater thought.

Mimicking another person’s decisions becomes even more likely when you have limited mental energy to expend. In one set of experiments, American students were asked to choose between different brands of Korean tea.8 Each participant in the experiment was paired with someone whom they thought was a peer but was in fact an actor. As expected, the brand choice of the actor (who chose first) significantly affected the brand choice of the real participant – but this effect became stronger when the participant had also been given a memory task to perform during the experiment. In other words, when their brains were preoccupied with one task, it was easier just to copy someone else on the secondary task.

A follow-up experiment significantly reduced the effect of social mimicry by raising the consequences of the choice: when told they would have to consume the chosen product on the spot, participants did not simply imitate the choice of the person ahead of them. The researchers concluded that people are more likely to mimic other people’s choices when they are not thinking too hard – either because they are busy on other things, or because the stakes are relatively low.

We aim to do what is normal and expected

You might think of yourself as a rebel who rejects society’s expectations – and this may be true – but it is not true for most people most of the time. The term ‘social norm’ refers to information we hold (consciously or unconsciously) about the behaviour expected of us in a given situation. For example, when you get into a lift, it is likely you will turn around to face the door and then watch the floor indicator panel (expected behaviour), instead of standing with your back to the door and staring at the people already in the lift (just weird).

When used appropriately, social norms can be powerful tools of influence that are vastly more effective than our logical beliefs about what will influence others to take action. For example, if you wanted to influence guests at your hotel to re-use their towels, you might think it’s a good idea to provide reasons why they should do so. It seems logical that providing people with good reasons for an action will influence them to take that action. However – as we shall learn in Chapter Six (Principle Six: Reasoning) – providing people with good reasons to do something isn’t anywhere near as effective in influencing them as you probably believe. Instead, social normative information provided in the right way at the right time can do the job for you.

If you enjoyed this excerpt from Dr Amanda Nimon-Peters' new book, Working with Influence, Nine Principles of Persuasion to Accelerate your Career, then get the full copy here. 

What’s more, all AllBright Plus members can attend (or watch on-demand later) our event, How To Get What You Want By Becoming An Influencer At Work, hosted by Amanda on Friday 10 June at 12pm BST. 

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