| 22 June 2009
Posted in
The Friendship Blueprint - Psychology
I’m going to start a new series of articles today focusing on the six principles of influence delineated by Cialdini. I am going to focus on teaching you how to make friends by using those principles.
Today we are going to talk about social proof.
The principle of social proof states that we find out what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. You might realize this whenever you’re having a discussion with your friends in a bar. The person that gets the most people to agree with her (I’m no dummy, it is usually a girl :P), wins the argument.
But we can exploit this trait in human society in order to make people like us more and more. How do we do that?
Well, it depends on your goal. If you want to become popular, you should befriend the most popular person in your social network. If you want to get a promotion, you should make your boss laugh in front of other executives, and so on. In order for you to achieve your goals both in your personal as well as in your professional life, you must befriend the social hubs, the people most connected and/or most powerful:
But I’m jumping ahead of a couple of things you should know first…
Let’s take a look at social proof as a whole by examining the extreme case: celebrities. Even though sometimes they aren’t particularly nice, or particularly funny, they attract the attention of a lot of people all around the globe. And it is not just about their looks either, just think about Robert de Niro.
Why is that?
Well, most movies portray the celebrity as a funny, intelligent, courageous person. So people will tend to believe that the actor himself has those traits, even though it is all an act. This attracts huge amounts of fans to the celebrity. Which in turn, transform themselves into 'social proof'-robots. They will spread the actor's area of influence all across the U.S.
How do we use it to our advantage?
Well, if we act funny, cool and befriend the social-hubs in your social network, we’ll instantly get both social proof as a funny, friendly person and at the same time we’ll befriend all of the people that are their friends. We'll get instant access to their network of influence.
Imagine it as being a subtle form of preconception, a subtle favorable unconscious bias towards your favor.
The best thing about this is that we can even use this concept in order to befriend the social-hub! We just befriend their (less notorious) best friend. It will be a lot easier and we will instantly get social proof for when we’ll befriend the social-hub. Just like the second path in the drawing. If you really want to do this, write down a map of your social network, find the hubs and the people that can get you to befriend them as quickly as possible and map out your strategy. You won't regret it!
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