The NPR podcast heavily talks about how people are too focused on their own anxieties and insecurities to realize that other people are also having those feelings. Because of the egocentric bias that many people have, they also don’t realize the influence they have over others. During an interaction where one person is asking the other for a favor, that person is feeling anxious and is already expecting rejection. The other person is now being put into an uncomfortable situation where they are concerned with how they will be perceived based on their response. If they say no they seem selfish and if they say yes, they’re not doing so because of altruistic reason but mainly because of social pressures. The person who asked for the favor was so focused on their own anxieties and while doing so, they underestimated the amount of influence they had over the other person.

During the podcast, Vanessa Bohns mentions that people will do many different things, including things that are unethical, just from being asked. Bohns conducted studies where they created fake library books and gave them to participants to go to the libraries on campus and ask people to vandalize the books. What they found from this study was that people would say things like “this is wrong” and “you shouldn’t be doing this”, but they still did it. The participants who did the asking significantly underestimated the power that they possessed to get others to do something unethical.

About a few months ago I unintentionally hurt my boyfriend’s feelings. My boyfriend and I would always joke around with each other and this time I had said something that hurt his feelings. At the time, I didn’t see an issue with what I said and he didn’t tell me that it hurt him. He just laughed along and pretended that it was okay. A week or two goes by and during that time I had made the same joke a few more times. Eventually, he finally opens up and says that he wasn’t okay with the joke. I remember being so sad that this whole time I was hurting him and he didn’t say anything. I, of course, immediately apologized and never made that joke ever again. This shows that in certain situations, especially when it involves someone they are close to, people will put off their own feelings for the sake of not making the situation uncomfortable for everyone involved. My boyfriend’s reasoning for not telling me how he truly felt was that he didn’t want to make me mad or change my opinion of him, which wouldn’t have happened at all. In the NPR podcast, they mentioned that people’s tendency to underestimate the influence they have over others can lead to many consequences. In this case, my boyfriend underestimated his influence over me which kept him from telling me how he truly felt.