100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

99. People Think Others are More Easily Influenced than they are Themselves

I do a lot of writing and speaking on the topic of persuasion. I often talk about John Bargh’s research (1996), which shows how much we’re influenced by factors that we’re not aware of. Bargh had people unscramble sets of words to make sentences. For example, he would ask people to choose four out of five words and make a sentence out of them:

“he florida today lives in”

would become:

“He lives in Florida.”

Some people got sets of words that had a theme of “old,” such as Florida, retired, old, and elderly. Other people got sets of words that had a young theme, such as youth, energy, and lively. A third group got neutral words that were neither old nor young. After unscrambling ...