It's Friday, June 17th, 2016, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Indravis Gantus.

And I'm Kishore Hari.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to endeavor, and why it all matters.

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So the big decisions in your life, like, for example, who you married, whether or not you bought a house or which house you bought if you did buy one, where you live and where you think

you might live for the next short while or long while,

whether not to have kids. How much of these decisions do you think came from you?

Oh, a lot. Me and my wife together in a lot of these cases. Like she had something to say

about us getting married. Sure. Okay, so partnership. Well,

this week, Jonah Berger released a book called Invisible Influence. He's the author of a very popular

bestselling book called Contagious, essentially about how things take off. And in this book,

he talks about social influence and how, in fact, we make a lot of decisions

on the basis of society and these social influences as opposed to simply thinking that we are

the ones making the decisions. Okay, A, I don't believe that. And B, does this boil down to

like peer pressure type stuff or something more

nuanced than that? It's much more nuanced than that. So there are all kinds of ways in which

social influences can change and alter the decisions that you make. And he talks about them really

...