INSIGHTS
Ideas worth stealing.
Articles, videos and conversations on the behavioural science of influence — sharp, practical and filled with tangible insights and action steps.
The Chameleon Effect: How Unconscious Mimicry Builds Rapport and Influence
In the late 90s, professors Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh ran a study with psychology undergrads at NYU. The goal was to answer a simple question: does copying…
Why We Fall in Love With What We Build
The popular story goes that in the early 1950’s General Mills started selling cake mix with little success, it just did not get the reach and sales they…
Why Being a Bit Imperfect Makes You More Likeable
With the rise of AI and people flaunting their Instagram lives and moments on social media, there is a sense of perfection and exceptionally high standards which everybody…
Why Some People Become the “Go-To” Person at Work
Some people just end up being the “go-to” person in an Organisation. Everyone asks them for advice, everyone seems to know them, and somehow they end up more…
Successful Leaders Are Not Who You Think They Are.
I’ve been doing some research recently for an upcoming keynote on Influence targeted at a C-Suite audience and I stumbled across the CEO Genome Project by Elen Botelho…
Why Agreement in the Room Doesn’t Always Survive the Journey Home
In 1955, Deutsch and Gerard ran a follow-up to Asch’s famous conformity experiment. Asch had shown that people cave to a unanimous wrong group on a simple task,…
Why the Outnumbered Sometimes Win the Room
In the late 1960s, the Romanian-French psychologist Serge Moscovici challenged one of psychology’s most settled ideas: that influence only flows downward from the majority. He thought it could…
Why Small Rewards Change Minds More Effectively Than Big Ones
In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith ran an experiment on Stanford students that still holds up. Students spent an hour doing something deliberately mundane, turning pegs a quarter turn,…
Two Studies From 1968 Explain Why Most Persuasion Attempts Fall Flat
In 1968, two unrelated studies landed within months of each other. Neither was about sales or persuasion directly, but together they explain why most attempts at influence don’t…
65% Went All the Way. Would You?
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who’d worked under Solomon Asch, ran a study at Yale on obedience. Around 40 people signed up believing it…