We often don’t know our own strength and that could be physically, mentally but most importantly verbally. You will never truly understand how someone may have resonated with your words and with that we hold great power. “The influence you have” has showed exactly how extreme ones words could influence someone. When they spoke about the word pair experiment the subject would start complaining about being hurt by the voltage after a while. The one who was shocking him was started to get worried that the subject was hurt ,however, as the overseer of the experiment told him to continue he did. Why did he continue if he knew the subject was hurt. The simple answer is that the overseer told him to continue and that was enough influence to keep him going.
Ive seen that I can have a major influence in what my friends wear. I didn’t realize it until my Bestfriend pointed it out to me recently. Not too long ago I seen her brother outside and to my surprise he was wearing Adidas and Nike. That doesn’t seem like much a shocker ( nor do you probably care ) to you but to me its one of the biggest fashion no no’s in my book. NO BRAND MIXING. I hand literally shaken my head him and said, “no way bro, you look crazy right now”. Knowing that he himself loves fashion; I thought he would think nothing of my comment and just forget about what I said, however, the next day my Bestfriend and I were on the phone and she told me that he had taken it extremely seriously. He had started spreading the word that brand mixing is ‘not accepted’ and to this day he doesn’t do it. To me I thought I had just made a funny joke, people could wear whatever they want, it’s their clothes, I don’t really care – to him it became a new rule. All in all I believe we should pay very close attention to what we tell people because you truly don’t know the influence you have over others.
That specific experiment actually really caught me by surprise because I didn’t expect anyone to not have the willpower to ignore orders from someone that influences you to inflict pain on another. But further into the podcast, it became clearer that the extent of one’s influence can’t be measured until put in a position or situation where it’s being tested.
And I agree, because it’s difficult to recognize your influence until you really register it or someone addresses it to you, but I see that you were able to give thought to your words and reflect on your influence on another.
When listening to the first experiment it also really shocked how the volunteer kept going just because the person conducting said to kept going. What if the person was really getting shocked and had a heart problem. The person could of literally die.
And Kayla, I understand where you coming from, sometimes when we think we just doing jokes we actually hurting other people or making people overthink their decisions and the way the like to do some stuff.