CHAPTER 1

Swayed, Nudged, and Driven: Influence Is Constant

A New Zealand bank helpfully nudges customers to save money on impulse by justpressing a button on their iPhone. Apparently there is an app for that.

School cafeterias across the United States are experimenting with thepresentation of healthier food choices—making fruit and vegetables moreappealing than the more popular fried food by improving their lighting,positioning, and names (carrots called "X-ray veggies," anyone?)

New York taxicabs have a touchscreen on the back of the front seat suggestinghow much passengers should tip the driver upon arriving at a destination. Big,colorful buttons give the option of paying $2, $3, or $4 if the fare is lessthan $15. If your fare is more than $15, the buttons display percentages from 20to 25 to 30 percent. Clearly counting on people's laziness or inability tocalculate and self-select a fair tip, cabbies are happy to report thatgratuities have shot way up, again due in part to these highly suggestivebuttons that are tilted toward generosity.

We face tens of thousands of minor and major interactions every day that guideor steer us in one direction or another. While all this influencing and nudgingis perhaps becoming more obvious as we get older, it's been a factor from themoment we released our first gut-wrenching screams upon entering this life.

We Are Born to Influence

These days, it's impossible to walk down the street without experiencing thepower of influence. Even if the street is completely empty, beckonings,warnings, sales pitches, and opinions fill every conceivable angle of ourvision. This exposure to influence begins with our earliest sense of self, atthe moment we acknowledge we are not alone and experience desire in some form.For most of us, this begins at birth.

With that first infantile desire emerges a natural instinct as to how to obtainwhat we want. We cry, we wail, and we adopt this technique long before we learnthat we can also get what we want by smiling and laughing. Infants are not ableto rationalize, prioritize, or otherwise communicate outside of their owndesires, yet they get what they want by opening their cute little mouths andletting it rip.

Just as instinctual is the parental need to notice and respond from a context ofproviding care and/or learning. The need to nurture is as hardwired as thebaby's wailing and brings the earliest hint of nature's intention for us toexert and perceive a full circle of lifelong influence. According to a 1968study on this interaction, this parent-child exchange is precisely the stuff ofattachment, even love. Children and parents begin their journey together througha dance of influence and response, played out on a stage of interaction. Fromthe first frame, verbal and nonverbal clues fill the family room and quicklydefine a dynamic that will set the tone for an entire childhood.

This first taste of the power of influence begins a process of developing andunderstanding our inherent powers in that regard. While social and domesticvariables conspire to take this ability to different places and levels, theuniversal fact is that it is there within us, always available as a power to bereckoned with. Whether that power emerges as harnessing influence to get what wewant or succumbing to it and becoming helpless against the desires of othersremains an issue not so much of fate as of comprehension.

In other words, some get it and some don't.

A Never-Ending Battle for Rewards and Resources

As natural as it is for us to exert and respond to influence, it is a testamentto the power of influence that it takes on so many forms and levels amongadults. The constant battle for rewards and the pressures of competition forresources are woven into the fabric of any organization that's populated withgoal-oriented professionals. They're a virtual petri dish of human psychologythat elevates influence to nothing short of the currency of success.

In trying to cash in this currency, people sometimes overstep ethical and legalboundaries. A recent explosive article in Rolling Stone magazinedetailed how the U.S. Army may have misused some of its "psychologicaloperations" specialists (or PSYOPs, as they're commonly known) to influence U.S.senators who stopped by for visits. These specialists usually train their sightson hostile foreign organizations and individuals to manipulate various beliefs,value systems, and emotions for strategic gains in conflict situations andterritories. In this case, however, the magazine's writer reported that PSYOPstargeted U.S. lawmakers making an appearance in the field, in a calculatedeffort to sway them toward sanctioning additional troops and other resources.Scandal ensued.

Competition for resources is intrinsic to the evolution of any survivingspecies, and the ability to adapt it to the prevailing environment has, for themajority of life on earth, defined who lives and who dies. In the human realm,competition is the fuel of pretty much all that is political, economic, andrelational. We compete for votes; we vie for jobs and money; we battle formarket share; we score the best talent; we strive for prestige, badges of honor,and achievement; and on a global level, we wage war for power, advantage, andthe promulgation of our belief systems. The urge to influence is as old asrecorded history, and thus it comprises the very essence of human dynamics andevolution.

Winning the Battle with Influence

Whether by carrot or stick or any of the more nuanced forms of influence alongthe spectrum, everything we desire, negotiate, measure, and reward is theproduct of our ability to exert influence successfully. As our species hasevolved, our brains have literally grown larger, actually tripling in size overthe past two million years, according to a study by David Geary, professor ofpsychological studies at the University of Missouri College of Arts and Science.Natural selection drove this evolution as the complexity of needs became more,well, complex over the centuries. This phenomenon among humans is...