The podcast “The Influence You Have” demonstrates how people often underestimate the power their actions and words have on others and how self centered we are. A main topic is how people tend to have an egocentric bias, where we mainly focus on our own feelings while interacting with others, failing to recognize the effect this has on other people. The podcast explained this topic from the following aspects. First, the podcast pointed out how people naturally look at the point of view of those being impacted rather than the ones exerting their dominance. It was interesting to see how most of the discussions of the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment were mainly around the behavior and motives of the experiment participants, rather than the experimenters. Second, the podcast demonstrates how people are often too consumed by their own emotions and problems that they fail to empathize with the problems that other people face. Psychologist Vanessa Bohns had an experiment where participants approached random strangers and asked them to fill out surveys; the participants in general all thought that it would be common for people to refuse the request when that simply wasn’t the case. Consumed by the anxiety of bothering other people and facing rejections, the participants did not see how the strangers were also worried about how they would be negatively perceived after turning the participants down. Finally, the podcast also pointed out how we don’t notice the power our words and actions have on other people. Bohns later conducted a follow-up experiment where she had participants approach strangers, but this time to request the strangers vandalize library books. As you can guess, results showed that the participants significantly underestimated the influence they had to get others to do something unethical. We as people often tend to focus so much on ourselves and how nerve wracking it is to approach people that we completely ignore other people and how they are scared as well. 

Personally, I am open to criticism without feeling like the other person is being offensive or mean because I know that sometimes I can’t see the problem with my own eyes. However there are times when people are just straight up being rude when they don’t even know any prior details or a backstory. When I was a freshman in high school trying out for my school’s JROTC athletic team I had many doubters on the first day of tryouts. It was a very highly selective and respected team with only about fourteen members in the main male team. To give a better perspective, there were about four thousand students in my high school at the time. Therefore to even get through tryouts and be selected was an extremely difficult task. I remember tryouts being extremely competitive, with some students resorting to using derogatory remarks in an attempt to impact the performance of everyone else. As a result, I was a victim of this tactic as this one student who felt more superior than me decided it was a good idea to tell me that I was wasting my time because I was ‘slow and weak’. This statement of course fueled me with rage and I felt extremely determined to prove him wrong. Looking back, I realized that my life could’ve been way different if I wasn’t provoked that day as I met some of my greatest friends while on the team. This exercise really makes me realize the effect words and actions can have on people and their lives.