Ability to Influence

What are the benefits to me?

Entering the world of another person is the first step in having influence over that other. This requires putting your own viewpoint to the side and considering the event from the point of view of another individual.

Keep in mind that every single person is special and, as a result, views the world in a different way. You cannot always presume that the individuals you are speaking with understand what is obvious to you simply because it is obvious to you.

In a nutshell, you need to be able to provide them with a response to the following question: “what’s in it for me?”

Knowing what is essential to the other person(s) includes being aware of their values, interests, and preferences. This is what it means to “see the other side.” Do they hold strong feelings that are opposed to what you are trying to sell to them? What kind of effort would be required on their part to overcome their resistance? Which of these people’s features, personality traits, social standing, or vocations can you use to make your point more compelling and win others over to your side?

You can improve your ability to “see the other side” by engaging in research, active listening, and sharp observation.  Take a look at the following example:

How can we encourage women who live and work in cities to grow their own medicinal plants rather than purchasing medications produced in a factory?

If you don’t put in the effort to develop the ability to “see things from other people’s perspectives,” you could be tempted to claim that it is more convenient to keep some common medicines on hand at home rather than to make frequent trips to the pharmacy when someone in your household is ill.

However, if you take into consideration the context in which city-based working women live, this argument might not be as convincing. For working mothers who live in cities and have full-time jobs, purchasing items from a drugstore is probably going to be a lot more handy than trying to find space in their apartments or condos for indoor plants. In addition to this, the requirement that you must provide the plants with daily sunlight and water is an excessive amount of additional duty.

On the other hand, mothers will always prioritize one primary value, which is the safety and well being of their offspring above everything else. Working mothers are frequently the ones who are forced to pursue full-time jobs against their will in order to provide for their children through challenging times. These mothers most likely feel guilty about the fact that they are unable to be present for their children around the clock. You may be able to build a stronger case for planting medicinal plants at home if you can present evidence that pollution in the city, chemical-based food and drugs, and the fact that natural medicines are both a way to improve the health of children and show love are all factors that lower disease resistance in children.

The Role of Perception in Interpersonal Influence

“The process of experiencing your surroundings and then creating sense out of what you experience” is what we mean when we talk about perception. Both sides are responsible for participating in the perceptual process during interpersonal exchanges. As a result, even if the process of communicating with other people is an essential component, you have a limited amount of influence over it because it is largely habitual and unintentional.

The way an individual perceives you influences both what that individual believes about you and how that individual interacts with you, and vice versa. The vast majority of studies on interpersonal communication look at perception as a three-step process.

1. The stage known as “selection” is the one in which you choose the stimuli that you will concentrate on.
2. The step known as “organization” refers to the process of arranging stimuli into patterns.
3. The next step is interpretation, which is the process by which you give your observations a meaning.

There are many different theories regarding how our brains actually process the information that we take in, despite the fact that the one presented above explains how perception works.

• According to the implicit personality hypothesis, when we contact with other people, we subconsciously compile a mental list of characteristics that we ascribe to each of those people. This enables us to speculate about a person’s personality based on the information that we currently have about that person, regardless of what that information may be. For instance, if someone tells you that your new boss is clever, you may assume that s/he is also committed, industrious, punctual, outgoing, etc., even though you have no foundation for these conclusions. This is because intelligence is correlated with other desirable traits. The majority of people have a propensity to combine positive features together (a phenomenon known as the halo effect), while also grouping negative characteristics together (horn effect).
• According to the idea of impression formation, we acquire opinions about other people based on their outward characteristics and behaviours, the information they share with us about themselves, and the information that other people share with us about them. The proponents of this viewpoint contend that the information we acquired about an individual for the first time and the information we learned most recently about that individual are the two pieces of information that are most relevant when it comes to developing our opinions of that individual. The primacy effect and the recency effect are two names for this phenomenon. For instance, if you remember what your employer wore the first time you met him or her, you can use that information to build an opinion on how formal or informal an individual is.
• According to the attribution theory, we are always trying to put a reason or an explanation for the actions of other people in our heads. To be more specific, we have three possibilities to choose from when evaluating the cause of the behaviours of another person: the setting, some kind of stimulation, or the individual him or herself. People who were brought up in the United States are more likely to ascribe reasons to internal variables, whereas people reared in other cultures may be more likely to attribute the behaviour of others to external circumstances than to internal factors.
• According to the standpoint theory, each person has a unique perspective on the world because they observe it from a unique vantage point, which is distinct from that of other people. As a result of the fact that your experiences are distinct from those of everyone else’s, you hold a perspective that is one of a kind when you look at the world. Your gender, age, religious upbringing, educational level, nationality, and other factors all play a role in how you perceive other people.
• The premise of the politeness theory is that people of all different cultures share a common wish that others around them will be kind to them. Therefore, our impressions of people who are polite to us will be more favourable than our impressions of those who are unpleasant to us.

It is essential to bear in mind that these theories describe processes that take place in your brain, of which you are typically ignorant, and it is these processes that are being described. You also need to take into consideration the fact that these processes interact with one another. There is a possibility that the implicit aspects of your personality that are at play in a specific circumstance are related with the expectations of politeness.