This podcast argues that we don’t understand the effect our influence has on others. In some cases, regarding whether individuals would obey callous orders or the words of one who instructs you to do something wrong, going against your conscience and moral sense. At some point, it covered the fact that the people of Germany who once fell under the bracket of “good” later yielded to Hitler’s orders. In Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience Experiment”, the objective was to emphasize how people can still be influenced this way, even when they knew something was wrong, and how susceptible they can be to such influence. And while the experiment would have been expected to test the “student” taking part in it, the experiment was made to test those who volunteered as the “teacher” in control of the shocks. This was to highlight how people can’t claim they wouldn’t be subject to such orders until they’re in that position. The topic of how we wouldn’t put ourselves in the shoes of the experimenter came up because we‘re aware of how it feels to be put in such uncomfortable situations, thinking of our own encounters and fears, and not the issue at hand. According to the podcast, people tend to focus on and center life around how other people influence themselves but don’t give much attention to how much they influence others. Another Milgram experiment/study included him asking his research assistants to go to NYC subway stations, asking people for their seats. They couldn’t carry this out and reported how they found it beyond distressing and upsetting. Milgram decided to do it himself, walking up to strangers and asking them himself. He realized it was so much easier to order his students but harder to do it himself. Cornell psychologist, Vanessa Bohns, conducted her own experiment similar to this, where she would stop people from doing what they were doing to fill out a questionnaire, but with the expectation for them to say no. So Bohns, along with her professor Frank Flynn, were caught by surprise with the number of people saying yes. The discovery was that although she initially entered the experiment thinking too much about how other people would reject her, she left the experiment realizing her effect on others and the level of influence she had. This brought Bohns to the realization that people primarily saw the “Obedience Experiment” through the lens of the volunteers who were asked to shock the “students” and not the experimenter who was responsible for that level of influence. The moral of the experiments and experiences throughout this podcast is that we underestimate the power of our influence on other people, along with the extent of us asking them for something and putting them in a difficult situation (EX: having to say no). We tend to downplay the influence we have on others and how we can have such effects, with Bohns labeling this as “psychological bias”, and can lead us to give in to unethical requests/pressure or the failure to make decisions of our own.

Being an instinctively sensitive and reflective individual who tends to take things seriously, I’ve found myself in this situation countless times before. With this, an instance where I was left impacted and hurt was when 2 (former) friends commented on my straightened hair. Due to my natural hair’s shrinkage, this came at a price, with one of them commenting “Is that a weave? Is it even real?”, both slowly walking away and dissolving into laughter. Now while they probably thought this was a funny remark, I went home that day and the rest of the week attempting to style my hair differently to make my hair look as “natural” as possible. Now while I know better than to seek validation from others, to hear that from someone I thought was my friend and see the other contributing, the thoughts of “Do they think I can’t have long hair?”, “Is this how everyone perceives me?”, “How/Why did I even leave the house confident this morning?” began to flood my mind. As a girl who treasures my hair, curly or straight, and feels like it’s part of who I am, it felt like an attack on who I was. Writing about this now, especially after this exercise, evokes the influence that individuals and their words have, along with how it can linger, despite whether there was hurtful intention present behind those words or not.