preferences

Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, has some new and deep insights into how we are influenced at the subconscious level.

On a recent PBS radio interview, I heard Jonah’s interesting take on influence. Here are a few of the lessons gleaned.

1. As Americans, we tend to think of influence as a bad thing.

We like to think of ourselves as lone mavericks, controlling our own destinies unencumbered by outside influences. Yet without influence, life would be more difficult, a series of raw uninfluenced decisions. Contrast America to Japan, where “team” thinking is much more prevalent. There the symbiosis of how one fits into the team, culture and society is given much more weight. Yet, we as the American individualists aren’t nearly as individual as we’d like to think.