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Influence Is Your Superpower
What It’s About
Why ethical influence is more powerful than manipulation. Yale behavioral scientist Zoe Chance replaces the dark-arts playbook with one built on trust, kindness, and clarity. A modern field guide for getting what you want in a way the other person also wants. Learn the small moves that quietly bend reality your way.
Three Key Ideas
The Gator Brain Decides First
People's fast, automatic nervous system responses determine most decisions before conscious reasoning even begins, making emotional and environmental factors more powerful than logic.
Reduce Friction, Not Resistance
Removing obstacles and making the desired action easy is more effective than adding more arguments, because the brain defaults to the path of least resistance.
Ethical Influence Outlasts Manipulation
Genuine curiosity, real permission to say no, and mutual benefit build the social trust that makes influence durable, while manipulation corrodes it over time.
Read a Sample
Influence Is Your Superpower
The distinction between pulling people in and pushing them sits at the center of Zoe Chance's 2022 book, published while she was a professor at the Yale School of Management teaching what students consistently rank among the most popular courses in the building: Mastering Influence and Persuasion. They come expecting to learn negotiation tactics and leave with something they did not expect: a different model of what human beings actually are and how they actually work.
Chance has spent her career at the intersection of behavioral economics, consumer psychology, and negotiation. She has studied how people actually make decisions, not how they say they make decisions. And what she found, after years of research and thousands of classroom hours, is this: most of what we believe about persuasion is wrong, and the people who are genuinely good at it are not doing what we think they are doing.
They are not pushing harder. They are removing friction. They are not being more forceful. They are making it easier for people to say yes. They are not manipulating anyone. They are aligning what they want with what the other person already wants. Influence, as Chance teaches it, is not a hammer. It is a key. And nearly all of us have the wrong image in our heads of what that key looks like.
The Gator Brain and the Judge
Who It’s For
- Anyone who wants to become more persuasive at work without resorting to pressure or manipulation.
- Anyone who struggles to ask for what they want, whether in salary talks or everyday requests.
- Anyone managing a team, building a product, or designing policies where changing behavior at scale matters.
- Anyone curious about why people actually make decisions and how behavioral science applies to daily life.
About the Author: Zoe Chance
Zoe Chance is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Yale School of Management, where she teaches a course on influence and persuasion that consistently ranks among the most popular in the school. Her work sits at the intersection of consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and negotiation.
Before joining Yale, she worked in marketing and spent years studying how people make decisions in practice rather than in theory. Her research draws on findings from figures including Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Robert Cialdini.
