100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, 2nd Edition

99 People Think Others are more Easily Influenced than they are Themselves

When I give talks about social validation—how much people are influenced by other people’s behavior, such as that regarding ratings and reviews in the previous topic—everyone in the room nods and talks about how it’s true that other people are very influenced by ratings and reviews. However, most people I speak to think that they themselves are not very affected. I talk about how much we’re affected by pictures, images, and words, and that we don’t realize we’re being influenced. And the reaction is always similar: “Yes, other people are affected by these things, but I’m not.”

The Third-Person Effect

In fact, this belief that “others are affected but not me” is so common ...