| | I'm going to attempt to mash up a lot of thoughts that have accumulated over the years into a theory about influencing people. I have a lot of free time at work to think about these things. <shrugs> Please, enjoy!
People influence people. We know this. However, we're not completely comfortable with viewing ourselves as influenced by others. So, what's the best way to influence people?
Without them knowing. You probably already knew that. Because people don't like to think of themselves as influenced by others, they may often reject an idea just because they don't recognize it as their own. This is especially true if it's an idea they initially feel some apprehension towards. So, if you can lead a person towards an idea, he'll be more likely to pick it up believing its his own.
We've probably all done that to someone and had that done to us with varying degrees of awareness of what we were doing and having done to us.
OK, now, how do we influence people without them knowing it? Well, we can consciously harness the ways we usually unconsciously influence people. One way we do this is by recognizing how people bring out aspects of other people. I think we're still not discussing anything new here. So, just be patient.
You've noticed how some people bring out different sides of you. Sometimes, you notice it most of all when that person isn't available to you anymore. We miss not just the person, but we miss ourselves with that person. We miss the person we are with that person. Now, you can think of that in two different ways.
1) That other person actually holds that other side of us. Like, we are distributed among the people we know. Social psych tends to frame it that way from what I can remember by listing people as different roles. Ex. Ann is a mother. Ann is a daughter. Ann is a wife. Ann is a boss. This frame separates the individual from these aspects, which is interesting, but may not be useful. So...
2) The access to these different aspects of ourselves is distributed. Maybe, in a similar way to how we can understand memories to work. Memories are there, sitting in our brains, not doing much until they are called on. You hear a song and all of a sudden you remember a specific time in high school. Or you smell something and think of a particular Sunday. Somebody says a name ayou haven't heard in years and an entire person reappears.
Think of your complete self in that way. Other people can hold access to other aspects of ourselves. It's not an exclusive access though. Someone new can call the same number and get that side of ourselves on the phone.
We can go further and say that we distributed to other people our permission to those sides of ourselves. Like, maybe I handed to you the phone number to goofball Skinny. And either I don't know that number myself or I pretend like I don't. I apologize.
Rolling on. I think there are two contradictory ways to bring out other sides of people:
1) Demonstrate what you want and encourage it in the other person. You are a cheerleading mirror. You show it's safe to show that side and the other person may try to match you.
2) Claim a role and the other person gets pushed into a different corresponding role.
You can probably think of examples of these in your life and in the world around you. The differences between how these two ways are applied are subtle, but their results are very different. You don't want to mean to do one and find you did the other.
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| | Posted 1/8/2008 8:07 AM - 274 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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