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Influence Is Your Superpower
Zoe Chance
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What is Influence Is Your Superpower 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.
Key ideas of Influence Is Your Superpower
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.
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Influence Is Your Superpower
It is the fall of 2009, and Ellen DeGeneres has just introduced a new product to her studio audience. The item is called the Shake Weight. It is a dumbbell that vibrates. The promotional video plays on the screen behind her, and Ellen does not say much. She does not need to. The audience erupts. Ellen picks up the Shake Weight, holds it at waist height, and gives it a single shake. The building comes apart. Within forty-eight hours, the clip is everywhere. The Shake Weight segment becomes one of the most shared pieces of television of that year, and sales of the product -- which had been respectable but unremarkable -- skyrocket to $40 million.
The company that made the Shake Weight did not plan that moment. They sent a product, Ellen responded to it the only way anyone could, and the world did the rest. But Zoe Chance, who was working in marketing at the time and would later spend years at Yale analyzing exactly this kind of phenomenon, noticed something that most people missed. The viral moment had nothing to do with the product's actual fitness claims. It had everything to do with the fact that Ellen, and the audience, and eventually the entire internet, found the thing genuinely funny and genuinely fascinating. They were pulled in, not pushed.
That distinction -- pulled in versus pushed -- sits at the center of 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. The course sells out every semester. Students from finance, law, medicine, and the arts compete for seats. 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.
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Continue in the appWho is it 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.
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