Sublime

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his

University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley points out that in day-to-day life we have access to the many thoughts that run through our own minds. But we don’t have access to all the thoughts that are running through other people’s minds. We just have access to the tiny portion they speak out loud. This leads to the perception that I am much

We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige).

STUDYING SOCIAL INFLUENCE

You and I may not be polyglot pilots or undercover agents, but we all contain multitudes—every person has encoded multiple peer groups. These codes take turns guiding us, activating in situations that cue them.

The power of such known knowns has been discovered independently in many different fields—linguists call it “common ground,” game theorists call it “common knowledge,” cognitive scientists term it “second-order knowledge,” and psychologists prefer “metacognition.”