So let's start with our first strategy. Strategy of how do you protect yourself from the unwanted influence of other people? The first strategy that we're gonna talk about is how do you minimize the biases, the psychological biases that all human beings have that enable others to influence them? In our earlier segment, you talked about a number of influence tactics.
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To illustrate or demonstrate this particular strategy of how to minimize those biases, I'm gonna give a few examples. Using some of the very specific strategies and tactics that you talked about and learned about in the earlier segment. We'll talk about social proof, for example, we'll talk about the availability tactic that you can use, and we'll talk about the liking tactic that is used to influence other people. So, let's dive in. Let's dive into some of these examples so we can illustrate, how do you specifically minimize the biases that enable others to influence you? Especially when that influence is unwanted or undesirable for yourself or for your group.
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So here's the first tactic that we're gonna illustrate with. You'll recall, you talked about social proof and conformity, this is the Asch Experiment from 1956. You'll recall that individuals were brought into a room and asked to indicate which of these lines, A, B, or C, was the same length or distance as the line on the left.
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Interestingly, when individuals were given the opportunity to compare these lines, participants provided the correct response in more than 99% of cases. So, when it was left up just to the individual, asked alone by yourself, 99% plus of the cases, you got the answer correct. However, when we put you in a group where other people are giving their answers, and then you'll recall in the Asch Experiment it was such that other people were giving the incorrect answer. So in this case the correct answer would be C, and other people were giving either A or B as the same distance or length as the other line. Under group pressure, 76% of participants gave the wrong answer at least once.
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So that's the tactic, social proof using this peer pressure, if you will, to influence the minority, the lone individual in this case. To give a wrong answer to what is seemingly a really objective task with a clear right answer.
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So how do we protect ourselves from that group pressure, from the use of social proof to influence us? Well, you have to remember that in the Asch Experiment, when participants wrote down their opinion or their answer independently from the group, the number of wrong answers actually dropped by over two-thirds.
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You also have to remember from that Asch Experiment, that when there were at least two people in the group that gave the correct response, 95% of participants gave the correct answer. So, if, given the opportunity to write down your opinion independently, privately, you're much less susceptible to the peer pressure or the group pressure of that social proof.
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It's also true that if you have someone else in the group who supports your point of view, you're much less likely to fall trap to that group pressure. So what do we learn from that? Well first is, a tactic that we can use to protect ourselves from the pressure of social proof is to minimize that pressure by asking individuals, in the group, in your team, to record their opinions independently. This is the power of the private vote. This is also exactly why current research on brainstorming and creativity is finding that if you ask people to document their ideas independently, privately, prior to any group discussion or group brainstorming, the creativity of the ideas actually increases significantly. So you can minimize this group think, this social pressure, by really taking advantage of the opportunity to record your opinions, record your decisions independently with a private vote, or a private documentation, prior to that group discussion which then applies that group pressure. So that's a very clear strategy that you can use to protect yourself from that group pressure, that social proof. Another one is to ensure you are not the single minority.
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This is the idea of building coalitions in advance of any group discussion. You wanna make sure that there's at least someone in that room, someone in that group who, even if that person doesn't entirely share your opinion, is willing to play devil's advocate to the majority, or is willing to support your idea before actually making a decision of his or her own. You wanna build your coalitions in advance of any group discussion so that you are not ever the single minority in a group, because it's when you're that single minority that you are most susceptible. Let's look at another example that you talked about. You learned about the availability heuristic that can be used to influence people. This is the idea that we as human beings tend to be particularly influenced by extremely vivid, extremely salient, or re