The Truth About Social Proof | Girls Chase

The Truth About Social Proof

Chase Amante

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Chase Amante's picture

Note from Chase: this is our second guest post from Will Legend; Will’s first article here was his piece on social anxiety. This article gives you some solid reasons why guys getting started should not get too hung up worrying about preselection and social proof and use the lack of these as an excuse to not approach new women.


If you haven’t read Robert Cialdini’s Influence, I highly, highly recommend it. It explains the psychology of compliance and what the factors are that drive a person to say “yes”. Cialdini comes up with six factors that influence a person to comply with a request, and one of these six factors is social proof.

social proof

Now, social proof has been talked about as a critical component of seduction, and we’ll get into that in a bit. But first, let’s talk about what social proof is and give some examples of it.

Comments

Anonymous's picture

Chase, man - you are a legend, you've given so much genius advice about seduction on this blog - excellent from top to bottom.

But please, I beg you - can you just stop with the evolutionary metaphors? It's getting really, really annoying - none of you guys know anything about evolutionary psychology or neuroscience, and the metaphors of animals fighting each other to drink clean water at the pool in the desert to enhance the social value of their DNA, or whatever other story you've made up to suit the topic of the post, is so unscientific its embarrassing. Thanks for the awesome posts though, I make sure to read them frequently! :)

Anonymous's picture

Why are you complaining? These are just examples, and they write them in a way so everybody could understand it. Chase had written before in a "5 differences betweeen Naturals and PUA" that 80% of his material is natural, and 20% is PUA. This way almost anyone can understand the main idea.

Michal's picture

First, this post is written by Will Legend, not Chase.

Second, there are numerous experiments with groups where one person was not part of the group and did not know what is going on. Things like set up firealaram while others sit like nothing is happening. And majority of these people just sit there too. Or they gave them some puzzles and then asked them out loud for results. First 4 (knowing people) said something and then the participant had his chance. And they ended asking them with the last one also from the group of knowing people. And after 3 questions almost every participant kept saying the same thing like first 4 did, because he thought: "These 4 are saying the same thing, it must be true."

Also, human civilization like we know it is here "for a split second". Emotions drive humans and that is a system that was evolving for millions of years. Animals have 6 basic emotions: anger, fear (danger), happiness, sadness, disgust and surprise. That is why some guys dont want to go to the gym because they are intimidated by those gorillas with 17 inch arms. They logically know they can not just beat them up, they might laugh at them but that is only possible attack in modern sociaty. Yet, they feel danger. Because he is bigger, they do not know him. It is embedded in us like let's say walking. If I asked you to start walking on your four for rest of your life, you might do it in private at home but then, once you have to pee or someone rang on your door you would just get up of the chair and without thinking, you would stand straight up and walk only with your feet.

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Anon-

Sorry to hear you find site content annoying. As others have stated, this is Will's article, and I don't see this particular example anywhere in the article, but I realize the comment's directed at me in particular.

What would be more helpful would be pointing out specifically what arguments you find flawed, and why you find them flawed, accompanied by either 1.) a well-reasoned counterargument or rebuttal, or 2.) evidence refuting the point.

What makes blanket dismissals unhelpful is that because they provide no argument to analyze, and no evidence to fact-check, they're effectively asking the person you're arguing with to accept he is completely incorrect, and all his views are flawed, without any support for the claim whatsoever. What ends up happening is that they have the opposite effect, forcing your opponent on the defensive, and entrenching him even more firmly in his views. Thus, the religious person whom you approach and say, "You're a fool! The world wasn't made in 7 days! Get your facts straight!" will come away from the experience even more convinced he is right, just as the biologist will when told he's a fool and that no human being could possibly have evolved from an ape.

(another reason why blanket dismissals are ineffective, especially on the Internet, is because over time you build up mountains and mountains of blanket dismissals from any number of anonymous commenters, every single one of whom is absolutely convinced that he is right and you are wrong, and if you simply take these at face value the only logical conclusion is that you've got to quit writing anything on the Internet because you're so wrong about everything. Over the past 12 years, for instance, I have learned that I know nothing about men, women, love, dating, sex, romance, long-term relationships, short-term relationships, psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, evolutionary psychology, evolution, theology, neuroscience, philosophy, history, music, and business. As you can imagine, this has been quite distressing, and has caused me to question what exactly I've been doing with the past several decades to be so poorly informed. Sometimes I wonder if it's all the video game playing coming back to haunt me)

Chase

--'s picture

No, Chase, I wasn't meaning to disrespect you or your knowledge of evolutionary psychology. However, what I was saying is that evolutionary psychology is the sort of field in modern science whose claims are - to put it mildly - unverifiable and untestable - ergo unscientific. Now, what I mean by this is that a great deal of evolutionary psychology is still - it can't help itself - based on theory - it's based on a group of psychologists and scientists who have invented a list of possibilities to explain human behavior, with the desire to prove their assertions later on, when neuroscience is able to prove that form of human behavior x originates from area of brain z, whose evolutionary origin is so and so. However, a great deal of these ideas are simply untestable at the moment - for example, the origin of the creative arts and language - because you can't go back in time and empirically examine exactly how x part of the brain evolved in response to environmental pressures - which means that a great deal of evolutionary psychology has to resort to so-called "just-so" stories, which is basically a phrase for a guy who invented an evolutionary metaphor for a certain facet of human behavior, just so, and without any real scientific rigor or empirical evidence as of yet. Which is not to say that such research is pointless; its necessary, and as we come to learn more about each part of the brain, we will be better able to objectify and elucidate those theories into empirically verifiable explanations that become science, rather than theory. That's all - my gripe at you was that your articles are packed full of this sort of thing - it's true that you bring up a great deal of research to back your assertions up, and this is great, but the problem was that you and the other guys on this blog where using these metaphors from evolutionary psychology in a rather unscientific and carefree manner (another problem with evolutionary psychology, even now - anyone can make up a sort of metaphor to describe a certain form of human behavior and get away with calling it rigorous science because of the word "evolution") which, I thought, diminished the field, and also gave a rather skewed and unnecessarily reductionist view of human nature that was, dare I say, rather unpleasant to read - especially from a person who isn't a scientist.

The tidbit about me being a fanatical creationist is so preposterous that we'll just forget about it, but I repeat: I am in your debt for all of the knowledge that you have showered onto us about seduction and charming women appropriately - it works and it's awesome, thanks again :)

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Anon-

You are correct, I am not a scientist. What you seem to have missed is that this entire website and everything on it lies in the blind spot of science.

What you read when you come here is psychology, evolutionary psychology, and reams and reams of anecdotal evidence and firsthand observation. This is nothing but field reporting and best-guess suppositions about the causes of what’s observed. Evolutionary psychology is one of the most lambasted areas of “science”, and arguably is not real science at all, but rather more philosophy, and psychology is not far behind. Even the DSM is looking more or less discredited these days. The only less scientific “science” than these areas might be much of the field of economics, which struggles to make accurate predictions to save its life. It is very, very hard to test these things in a laboratory setting, and get conclusive peer-reviewed papers written up on them. As others have observed, for every psychological study showing one thing, another one gets published showing something else. Fieldwork and observation for its part is interesting, but hardly “science” in and of itself, without the greater framework of science.

The problem with asking that one unscientific part of an article or another be left out is that pretty quickly you end up with a four-legged table left with three legs, or perhaps none at all. If I have a reasonably good idea how a specific behavior came about - based on reading quite extensively both well-researched science writing and the actual current research in the relevant fields - I can either say, “This seems to be a result of XYZ thing,” or I can say, “I think I know what causes this, but I can’t tell you because I might be wrong.” The same would be true if I left out bits about psychology - you can never REALLY know what another person is thinking - or anecdotal experience, with its irregular and often small sample sizes and uncounted number of uncontrolled variables.

Pretty soon you get “How to Ask a Girl Out” with article content that reads: “I was going to list a bunch of steps, but they were all based on anecdotal evidence, observations, psychology, and evolutionary psych, and that’s all unproven and unscientific. All I can safely write here, instead, is, ‘Science has yet to uncover the answer to how to ask a girl out.’ Best of luck to you all. Yours, Chase”

Or, you can cut out the evolutionary psychology and perhaps regular psychology and just leave anecdote, but without drawing conclusions all you have left is someone’s field journal, which is rather dry to read, and not very useful to any but scientists looking for observations to draw their own inferences from without the journal author’s own biases affecting them, unless it’s structured something like the field experiences of Tucker Max. In fact, I’d argue that fieldwork is more valuable with the field researchers’ thoughts about its underpinnings; when you get some of those scientists in the laboratory testing hypotheses based on earlier fieldwork, and the scientists themselves have nowhere near the level of practical in-field experience to sit down and assemble a high level mental model of the thing from merely reading others’ observations, instead of them scratching their heads and saying, “I wonder how this came about? It may always be a mystery,” they, with the inferences drawn by the man in the field, now have a lead to go off of that they can either prove or disprove. “Well, Jane Goodall thinks that P. troglodytes go to war with one another because of XYZ reason; let’s put it to the test and see if she’s on the mark.”

So. This is not a scientific site. Some of the inferences it draws are no doubt flawed, misleading, and will be disproved by future work in any number of scientific fields, something that I for one would welcome. I would even welcome specific critique pointing out a given statement, conclusion, or inference to be in err, with the reasoning behind why that is, so I might adjust my views. I’m more interested in accurate information prevailing than my always being right; however, in the absence of information to the contrary, and in the presence of seemingly convincing evidence in favor of something, I will draw conclusions, because that is my role, and I leave it to the academics who come after to prove me right or wrong.

Chase

-Daniel-'s picture

Hey Chase,

I just read through this back and forth with Anon, and I was struck by your initial response. When Anon asserted your article was unscientific, your response had no element of indignation whatsoever - instead, you criticized the nature of his criticism and forced him to back-petal. Your entire response was dedicated to explaining why his argument was unsatisfactory ("what would be more helpful would be pointing out specifically what arguments you find flawed, and why you find them flawed, accompanied by either 1.) a well-reasoned counterargument or rebuttal, or 2.) evidence refuting the point") but the whole response was framed as "I want to help you write better critiques so I can respond to you better," and hostility was minimized. Over all, I thought this response was remarkable. I was wondering whether you could devote a full article (or point me to an article that may have already covered it) to this type of response, when it works, and how to execute it properly.

Best,
Daniel

Anonymous's picture

Don't know if you saw my post earlier -- any comments whatsoever would be so helpful.

Chase, HUGE HUGE HUGE favor to ask of you and I'm asking because I literally think you're a genius and I honestly think you might be the only person who can really help me achieve my goal. You're the smartest person I've ever come across by FAR and you have an answer for everything that's always right on point and so much more in depth than what someone else would say. I'm don't know if you were born that way but boy do I wish I could develop your skills. You also do it all in a classy way but enough with the flattering that's not why I wanted to write this comment!

I need a statement of purpose for grad school and I'm torn on how to approach it. It's a finance program at a good school. Ididn't get good grades during undergrad so I need a stellar essay and luckily I have several brand name employers and a plethora of other selling points--I just don't know which angle to take. Their guidelines are pretty vague and imo from the research i've done many essays that are considered "good" don't stand out. I'm very good at captivating people but the problem is my writing skills aren't the best and the word limit is pretty small (~600). I have so many things I want to say but there's no way I can create one coherent essay with so many themes. They ask me to introduce myself, why I'm interested in the program, how does my background fit in and how will it help me in the future.

My main concern is that I don't know what kind of person they are really looking for. Is it a baller? Is it a manager at a fortune 500? A research assistant? The next zuckerberg? Since I don't fit the traditional bill, do I need to take an even edgier approach? (If you could also explain your reasoning this would greatly help me understand value exchange in general when meeting or interacting with others and what's going on at a deeper level).

Here are some themes that I thought of including:

-Personal development and growth w/examples of things I've learned, how I've grown, emphasizing my potential and interest in development and business related skills (very much like the ones you teach). This also includes what I've learned about life in general and the curiosity I've developed about things; I used to be like a little boy who only cared about playing but now I have such a genuine interested in learning and understanding things which is demonstrated by improvement in grades and all the books I read.

sidenote: is it better to talk about developing confidence and clarity contrasting with the past or set a tone of confidence throughout my life?

-My interest in business and finance, which I can possibly intertwine with the first theme, explaining what I've taken away from each experience and how I've grown.
-The organizations I'm in and the people I know. How my interests and background are aligned and how it ties in with their goals. My mom says these schools like people with strong connections and wants me to reference them. Should I take a more "this is what i can do for you" vs. a "these are my qualifications" type approach?
-My personal qualities, great instincts and ability to make a difference for my employers. How I stand out from other people who are so cookie cutter.
-My passion to change the world and how I've been "unemployed" over the past few years so I could start a company which turned out to be a social web app. I don't know how much I should focus on this though since I haven't made tremendous progress although the vision and framework is all there.

There is also an "other" essay but I'm not sure if this is an essay or more like an explanation. I feel like I'm already addressing many of my weaknesses in the SOP.

So, like I said, there's so many things I want to include but I don't think I'll be able to effectively integrate each of those with such little space. Another thing I have to consider is how to give enough to pique their interest and then give more during the interview.

I only have a week left so I would TRULYYYY appreciate your help! I won't ask you for this kind of help EVER again I promise. Just let me know what I have to do to get your help!!! please let me know and thanks for your time and consideration :) YOU DA MAN!!!

-M

Author
Chase Amante's picture

M-

That’s difficult. I very briefly ran an admissions consulting agency, and have studied grad school admissions somewhat and composed essays for several clients, but I’m by no means an expert in the field and there are better people to ask than me.

I would suggest seeing if you can get your hands on this book, which I found immensely useful when working in this field: 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays, Second Edition.

A good way of thinking about graduate schools is that graduate schools are looking for someone who is going to reflect very well on them when he leaves the school, and is likely to become a donor later. That is, they want students who are going to go on to be big successes, so they can then claim his success as their doing. “You know Joe Smith? Guess where he went? Yep - right here. He even donated a wing to the new forum building.” Successful students are both prestige and advertising for their schools.

If you don’t have good grades, that’s something you’ll need to address in your “other” essay. You also want to tell a story with your essay, so that it engages the reader and sucks him in.

My gut would be that you want your narrative in your “other” essay to be something about how you’ve spent time doing the unconventional to discover your passions, with mentions of participating in various organizations, starting a social web app, and a few demonstrations of your natural instincts. I’d mention that as a result of these diverse interests, your grades briefly suffered, before you really kicked your learning into overdrive and rebounded on them. Now, you are pursuing graduate school as the ultimate lens through which to focus your efforts, and amplify them.

The main narrative I would make tell some more narrow, interesting story about you that shows great potential for your future, and great growth of character, since you have the “other” essay to explain the weaknesses. Ideally you would have no overlap between the two, and mention nothing in one that is touched on in another. That might be the personal development angle, if you can tie it into business/finance without making it sound forced. You want the story arc of up, then down, then back up again, looking toward a bright future, if you can muster it in 500 words.

I can’t say much more than that… it’s difficult for a consultant to tell you what to write about, because you know all your best stories, assets, and gems and until another person gets them out of you, he can’t know what they are. So you will have to spend some time thinking about what to write, and it won’t be easy.

I’d also suggest drafting up a good essay and not worrying about length, only parsing it down later once you’ve found the story you want to tell. More important to figure that out first, and figure out the length second.

And, get that book. It will do a far better job showing you how to write these than I can, and it’s chock full of students with unconventional and seemingly ill-suited backgrounds to gain admittance who found ways to craft good essays and make it in anyway. I’d advise reading the whole thing before starting on your own pieces of writing.

Chase

phil-x's picture

Basically in my last year of High School, people were nominating there fellow students and I actually got the geekiest guy award. The thing is (due to my Asperger's), I never made much friends and I have chronic social anxiety. I tried to be a party animal and it ended in me getting a lifelong infection, and pretty much at the same stage mentally then when I started.

The friends that I tried to make just accepted my money and gifts and left me out of their lives. So, is there some hope for me or I'll just have to accept that I'm branded a loser for life?

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Phil-

High school's a passing phase. I've known a few guys with Asperger's who've gone on to lead pretty amazing lives (and one of those guys managed to get himself a lifelong infection being a party animal, too - he said he cried when he got it, but now he just takes medication when it flares up, and otherwise he doesn't worry about it).

The work's harder for you since you can't learn intuitively, but you'll find that once you get the basics of socializing down, you'll be able to do some things socially that others just won't, because they're held back by fear, shame, and over-sensitivity to others' skeptical emotions toward them, and you won't feel these things to the same degree.

High school really doesn't follow you around. It always kind of holds a special place in your heart, but it's also a weird upside-down world unlike anywhere else you'll experience again - sad news if you were the cheerleader or jock (for whom it was frequently the pinnacle of your life), but great news for everybody else. I have plenty of things I can look back on in high school and say, "Wow, THAT was embarrassing! I can't believe I did that / let that happen," but it was a learning phase, and now it's past. If I look at my old high school peers now, they're mostly all living in the same small town, working boring regular-people jobs, and living normal, mundane lives. Most of them have gotten quite flabby around the midsection and round in the face, too.

Your life goes down whatever path you take it down. All high school is is the final chapter of the introduction of that story. The exciting stuff is what comes after. If you want a cool life, go do cool things; you're only a loser if you go do whatever it is that losers do instead.

Chase

Mc's picture

Hi Chase

I could do with your advice on handling interactions with a girl that last a long time and where controlling time etc is out of your hands, specifically speaking with a girl you like.

For instance, I work behind a bar every now and then and last week we had a new girl join me to help out, she was very hot, intelligent, young etc - I liked her.

Now, if I met this girl in the street, or at a bar I was chilling in I reckon I could have had her. I would have followed my process through, making sure I gained enough investment etc etc, making sure I hit all the escalation windows - essentially I would have been in control of the interaction and the time spent with the girl.

And if for instance things started to slow down I would be at liberty to quickly grab her number to arrange a date at a later time. Basically there wouldn't be much space for things to go wrong.

However, working with this girl, and knowing that I was going to be with her all night it crossed my mind that this wasn't going to be a great situation for seduction as I wasn't in control.

Deep diving etc is straightforward when you've just met a girl but once you've been working with her for three hours the whole convo thing just starts to die down you know? It's like 'well we've talked for a while now it's just getting a bit samey and I can't think of anything else to say' another thing that doesn't help is the constant breaks in convo caused by customers needing attention etc.

Of course at this point things start to slow down and we have more awkward silences etc - well just silences actually they are not really awkward it's just we've said all to be said lol (beside mindless banter etc)

It's like seduction requires the man to control the interaction so that he can move forward properly at the right moments.

My questions:

1) How do I handle this kind of situation with a girl where I am not in control of the interaction and it isn't just as simple as hitting the escalation windows at the right times - because I can't.

2) How do I approach conversation in this situation. I am always fine talking to someone and getting to know them when I first meet them - There is simply so much to know, but like three hours in after plenty of deepdiving etc I start to struggle for meaningful convo.

3) Is it just a case that this situation isn't great for seduction and I should just be relatively friendly and not try anything seductive - just stick to day game and clubs/bars when I am not working.

How do I go about achieving optimal result with a girl in this situation.

Thanks a lot Chase.

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Mc-

I haven't worked behind the bar or in the restaurant industry, but I've observed some of the guys who are in these roles, and they seem to eschew building deep rapport altogether and simply stick to playful, flirty banter and horsing around with girls. They'll nudge them, come up behind them and put their arms around their necks like they're playing with their kid sister, etc. Lots of sexual humor and the like.

Deep diving you're best saving for a date where you're planning on closing things out with a girl, or as you're nearing the pull on a same-night or day pick up. When you won't be taking her home until the end of the shift, or another shift altogether, you're probably better just keeping it light the whole time.

If I found myself in a similar situation, I'd probably stay light right up until the point where I knew I had a chance to pull (e.g., we're both hanging around after hours, and almost everyone else is gone), and only then start going into deeper connection.

Chase

Mc's picture

Another thing Chase

What are your thoughts on open comfortable facial expressions v sexy deep ones particularly when it comes to meeting a new girl.

Oftentimes when I go out to meet girls I will use a facial expression similar to the cute sexy one you describe. Eyes open, eyebrows raised, slight smile. It makes me look very open and approachable, and raises the chance of girls opening me and them being more comfortable when I intro myself etc.

My dilemma?

There is another expression I use, which is slightly 'darker' and more sexy. Think bedroom eyes and perhaps slightly less of a smile.

I can't work out which one to use.

Is it worth using an open expression to build slightly more comfort early on whilst taking a slight hit to your sex appeal?

Sometimes I feel cute sexy makes me look a bit too cute and friendly. Could just be me though? I do have good facial hair etc. The other expression is good but sometimes I think too much, but maybe not if I do everything else right

Your thoughts?

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Mc-

'Darker' tends to screen more girls out, but will attract the confident ones who are looking for someone deep and soulful. Cute & sexy is more inclusive, and will get you opened more and get more girls interested in you, but the girls looking for a challenge will read the expression as too daft for their tastes sometimes and write you off. A dark look can also be incongruent for less subtle kinds of opening (e.g., you probably won't be able to pull off a dark expression + a street stop).

When I've played around with the two, I've found darker expressions to get me opened more often during the day than at night. My guess is that women just feel safer, and are in a more reflective mood, out during the day than at night in a party or bar.

Chase

Anonymous's picture

Hi chase, I noticed when I'm acting all beta, my nasal passages are all clogged and I can't breathe clearly. Almost all the time it's the left nostril that's clogged but sometimes it's both or the right one. This is not a hunch. It's been monitoring it for a couple years now. Do you know anything about this? Thank you.

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Anon-

Hmm, I can't say I've heard of this one before. That's interesting.

A clogged nose is due to swollen, inflamed blood vessels in your nostrils, usually by some kind of infection, though sometimes inflammation can be a chronic problem (e.g., autoimmune disease, or something else). When you get a shot of adrenaline, that temporarily constricts the blood vessels in the nose, which clears a clogged nose if you have one. So if you're experiencing nasal passage clearing when you, say, get excited or stressed, it could be that.

Alternately, it's pretty common for people to become tired and rundown when ill, and sometimes this kicks in before other symptoms, so maybe when you start getting ill you feel weak, and a clogged nostril follows not too long after.

These are just guesses, though... not my area of expertise.

Other than that, all I could say is see a doctor and tell him you're suffering from a chronically stuffy nose, and have noticed that weak behavior / low levels of willpower seem to go hand-in-hand. Maybe there's something in the literature about it.

Chase

Anonymous's picture

Hey Chase, what are the top 2 or 3 books you'd recommend to read?

Thanks!

Author
Chase Amante's picture

Anon-

I'd suggest everything on my list here: "Recommended Reading"... but, if I had to pick 2 or 3 I'd say Denial of Death, Lessons of History, and Talent is Overrated. That gives you a nice spread of understanding why people do what they do on a personal and civilizational level (first two books), as well as opening your eyes to how achievable almost anything really is (third book).

Chase

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