Influencing Influencers – Rule 1 – Social Proof

What makes someone think that the pinnacle of contribution they can make to the world, at any particular moment, is to offer up a picture of their face?

I’m not trying to be mean; this is meant as a parody introduction – and I have to write this so the following hurty words don’t earn me the label ‘bad man’.

With the world recovering from a pandemic, political unrest (nothing new there, I guess), anxiety and depression rates climbing all over us, but particularly amongst dentists and their teams, there are lots of things we can do to help. You can call friends, support colleagues, do random acts of kindness, share interesting and novel information, ask after each other’s family, congratulate people for something you admire about them, visit lonely people, care for animals… anything really.

You can also help by doing something charitable. Sadly, such help is devalued almost in its entirety if it is widely advertised across all platforms to sell the real product, i.e. you, to the adoring masses you feel you so richly deserve.

Charity work is for people in need and for your inner soul, not your outer appearance. I guess at least dental celebrity charity work raises some money for someone in greater need somewhere. It would be just infinitely classier if the people partaking were a tad more subtle, anonymous and humble.

Ironically, reading this will feel offensive and too abstract to them however, and I’ll be attacked for attacking, LOLZ!!!

But a picture of your face… that’s it? That’s what the world gets today, and tomorrow and the next day. What, forever?

You offer up, for a reason I’m interested to understand, a picture of… wait for it… here it comes… it’s a picture of… you. F@#k*ng great, thanks. Thanks a million.

What… what is it for? Seriously, what should I do with it?

I know: I know it took ages to compose and filter and retouch, but it looks like all your other ones. And you are vaguely good looking, but not nearly as much as your mummy told you you are. Head tilted, mouth pouting, designer clothing tagged in… but I still don’t see what it’s for.

Perhaps it’s because you love it so much that you are certain everyone else will too. When you look at it, it feels so nice and positive and amazing that you believe others will feel the same when they get to look at it.

You know who you are because you post a version of it every day.

You are either:

– exercising
– meditating
– journaling
– helping someone
– looking pensively into the future
– staring at a blank wall whilst your slave takes a fiftieth attempt to get it right

And. I think you know it’s deeply vain. I think you know that, so that’s why you pre-empt criticism by burying the picture in words which cannot be criticised.

Love. Positivity. Sharing the joy. Super excited. Feelz. Sistaz. Family. Grateful.

No haterz. OMG am I a hater? Ha ha, I don’t think so. But I confess to a macabre fascination with the relentless need people have to dangle a photo of their face on Instagram, like a fishing line baited with your best angle and lashes – trying to hook as many likes, hearts and positive messages as they possibly can. The relentless daily burden of this must be awful.

The message of positivity is like armour plating, so anyone who dares call out the poster’s vanity is seen to be attacking a message of love and togetherness.

My question also still stands, though: What is the picture for?

A picture of you with friends. That’s a public display of bonding. Like team colours. I get that. Same if it’s a picture with your lover. Public declarations of exclusivity can be authentic and perhaps will abate insecurities.

A picture of you next to the Great Pyramid/Eiffel Tower/Dunn’s River Falls/with Keanu Reeves… again, all of these show you as a lucky adjunct to the main meal. It’s just when you clearly believe you are the only thing on the menu that it gets a little weird…

A picture of you as the face of a product. I get that too. Pascal Magne has a book coming out this year. Yes, I expect a picture of him on the back cover is entirely correct.

Anyway. Influencers. Good for them. It’s not in my DNA to pimp myself out there like that, but perhaps that’s a flaw in me, and the riches and effortless accolades that come their way are an opportunity simply beyond my reach. In the same way Nicola Sturgeon was never going to be the next Bond girl, maybe I just don’t have what it takes.

Such is life.

And I also defer to a vastly superior writer to me regarding the celebrity status some people crave. I really do NOT mean harm to them:

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts. – Stephen Fry.

But the science, the lovely churning, rich, luscious and seductive science of influence. How to make people think and behave in certain ways by influencing them…well that is very well understood.

It’s surprisingly simple, actually. Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler are the best-known authors in this area.

The books Pre-suasion and Nudge, written respectively by them, are worth a look for you in 2021.

Nudges are small, subtle, usually visual prompts that steer us towards a particular path of action. The goalposts in the bottom of a men’s urinal make him point his pee where the designer wants him to (ideally to reduce mess).

The ashtray in the shape of a coffin. Stairs painted as piano keys mean children drag their parents up them and away from the lifts. Dead animals on the side of supermarket carrier bags means if you take one you are holding a dead baby turtle by the neck.

All of them play with your emotions and make you either want to do the right thing or at least be seen to do the right thing (there is evidence that the latter is more important to many than the former).

Nudges play with your awareness of society’s moral judgement of you.

If you place healthy food and non-healthy food in two separate but adjacent offerings on a table and encourage passers-by to take one item for free, people take the tasty sweet treats and leave the broccoli behind… right up until you drop a mirror behind the tables and then it switches massively. People, it seems, even want to see themselves making the ‘better choice’ and the mirror makes them alter their decision and take the healthy food. Add a fit athletic young person there, next to both offerings, and almost no one ever takes the doughnuts.

Cover the world in mirrors and fill it with fit athletic people, make natural wholefoods readily available to all and begin a daily televised campaign to educate and encourage people to live healthily… and perhaps the rising type 2 diabetes pandemic that arrived long before Covid would begin to reverse. Now that would be a shove rather than a nudge!

But… that’s not the point here. The point is to recognise what nudges do in your brain. They play on your fears of social isolation and fears of nature and a desire to be seen to do good.

We are inherently social creatures. Many years ago, social isolation used to mean death. That is why exile and the death sentence were comparable punishments for our ancestors. If you were excluded from the tribe then you were vulnerable to the elements, predators and other people. You became prey.

A human is a relatively weak primate with small weapons (teeth, nails and limbs). A group of humans is unstoppable and all-conquering and can survive in any environment on Earth and will quickly eradicate all other species that threaten their ability to thrive.

We evolved to cooperate. We have white sclera in our eyes so we can see what direction other people are looking. It means we can see their intent (their attention is their intent). We help strangers in need. We get enormous dopamine releases from successful teamwork. We feel sad when we part from our closest friends.

So if social fear, social power and social need are inherent to our sense of being, it’s not surprising to find that social proof forms the first of the rules of influence this blog series will discuss.

The Power of Social Proof

Imagine walking through a town. You walk past the shops and offices and come across a person. This person is there just standing looking across the street at the roof of a building on the opposite side of the road.

You may glance up and over… but then just walk on, going about your day.

Now imagine there were five people standing there staring. Perhaps one is pointing to the roof.
You’d almost certainly wonder what they are looking at and your glance becomes a look, a question has appeared in your mind and you wonder what they are all looking at. Nevertheless, a few seconds pass and you walk on.

Now imagine there are fifty people. Many are pointing. They are excited and you can feel the energy. Several are holding cameras.

Wow.

Bearing in mind the roof opposite is empty, unchanging, covered in pigeon shit and fag ends. Nothing more.

But now this influence of the crowd, this SOCIAL PROOF will probably change your behaviour. You may stop walking. You may end the conversation you were having. You stop and join the group. Waiting. Looking. For… another pigeon?

Social proof: The psychological and social phenomenon that our own behaviour is impacted by the influence of the actions, attitudes, and beliefs of other people (online or in-person).

All that has happened with the group staring at the roof is that our collective sense of social behaviour has recruited you.

The power of social proof is enormous and was an historical evolutionary advantage. It meant we formed groups that could quickly align goals and behaviours. We cooperated fast.

Here are some other examples:

– This influencer has 200k followers….I should follow too
– Lots of people agree with me and no one agrees with you
– Everyone is wearing “xxx” this season – fashion is the epitome of social proof
– Your mum, your dad, your brother, all your uncles and aunties and everyone we know believes this… so now so do you.
– Selling fast when you go to book your flight online – ‘just one seat left’
– Google reviews = Social Proof with some faux clout (sadly google reviews have been weaponised by malicious, demanding dental patients as a mechanism of threat against dentists whom they decide to attack)
– Long queues are willingly joined – even if the queuer doesn’t know what they are queuing for
– When everyone changes lane ahead of you on the motorway, you change lane too
– Testimonials

Jeff Bezos knows the social proof in the image below keeps the dollars flowing (I know there’s much, much more to Amazon than that!).

So, social proof is one of our first rules.

Now let’s apply it to dentistry.

Firstly, remember this is about the Aspire goals and nothing else. They patient is happy and healthy. Not a patient tricked or manipulated. Not a patient bewildered by clever words and psychologically devastating arguments that leave them helplessly throwing money at your face.

Our goal is to have a patient who is biologically (medically and dentally) healthy, and psychologically happy.

So I’ll walk a well-trodden path. The molar tooth at risk of fracture and an almost zero risk of harm from the investment in an onlay.

An e.max onlay is the right thing to do. Ignore costs, and it’s hard to argue back.
Minimal intervention returns the fracture resistance, prognosis, appearance.

So is it right that we leverage social proof to convince patients of this? It’s a tough one morally as if you get good at this it is properly powerful. We train very few people as we have to trust you completely and that trust will have to be earned.

But you can use sentences like this:

“Most people don’t like the idea of having gaps in their mouth, and those who are proactive in relation to this usually think ahead – they want to prevent their teeth from coming to harm rather than waiting for the harm to arrive and then fixing it.

There is a way of making your weak at-risk tooth almost as good as new. It does essentially zero harm to the tooth and out of the last 500 I have fitted, absolutely no one regretted it and all of those patients liked the decision they made. I can show you some examples, if you wish.”

“Almost nobody grows up hoping that one day they will have gummy gaps in their mouth, and for lots of people having good teeth so they enjoy eating all foods and smiling socially is something they love.

All the people that feel that way tend to be good at preventing their teeth from going downhill, becoming loose or breaking. That’s why they ask to see the hygienist for a few sessions, so they know how to be that way. Once they start seeing her/them/him they never regret it.”

Nearly all our delegates (see what I did there) will explain that we build these psychological models and methods into real-life dental scenarios at the end of all our hands-on days and when we are doing live problem-solving sessions.

See if you can come up with some more dental applications for the power of social proof, and next we explore Rule 2 – Reciprocation!