How we get influenced in our daily lives

At a time when many brands are coming forward asking their customers and employees to donate for COVID-19, I really liked this communication by Redbus.

What is hidden here is an excellent example of the impact of deliberative thought on donations to statistical victims. And what would follow will explain the art and science of influencing others. Let me explain how.

Assume you receive these two requests for donations. Which one do you think would generate higher average donations? 

a) ~3 million people have been affected by the novel coronavirus creating a pandemic of the scale the world has never seen and impacting thousands of lives either due to disease or hunger. Consider donating for this to help humanity fight against it.

b) A young girl named Laxmi, 8 yrs old is struggling to find food since last 2 weeks as her parents got diagnosed with coronavirus and are hospitalized. She does not have any other family to take care of her. Our team of volunteers found her in the Phulera village and brought her to our relief center. Consider donating for Laxmi so that she can see her parents once they get well.

If you feel this is hypothetical, it is not true. University of Pennsylvania did a very similar randomized control trial which was focused on poverty and not on COVID. (Source below)

The reason for such a response can be summed in two ways:

1. Feeling of desperation in case a - We feel that any money that we will donate will be a drop in the ocean and may not create any impact as the problem is too complex and challenging that governments across the world are trying to solve it. 
2. Feeling of concern in case b - We feel concerned and emotionally attached to the example of the Laxmi and want to be generous to help Laxmi. We channel our positivity leading us to contribute in whichever way we can.

This dual response of our brain to the same problem when exposed to different messaging has been studied by many psychiatrists and is often illustrated by brands in their advertisements, by governments in their political motions and others alike.

The practice of creating a hero figure (which is a 3rd party and not the brand or the recipient of the message) and addressing the message with emotions (instead of logic and data) forms the perfect recipe for convincing someone to act or change. While this may be unacceptable to many of the analytical people reading this, this is indeed true. Our brain has limited capacity to continuously digest data but emotions flow intuitively. 

The question is how does this matter to you in your daily life. I wanted to illustrate the way our brains make decisions. Decisions which have dire consequences like where to invest our resources, whom to vote etc. I feel it is important that one understands the way we influence others and get influenced and in the process make many of our decisions. There is a lot of depth in the art and science of influencing and I have not even scratched the surface. But hopefully motivated you to be more cognizant of it in future and perhaps a few to go read more on this topic. 

Source: Research by University of Pennsylvania team - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download/doi=10.1.1.565.1812andrep=rep1andtype=pdf