Why Other People Have So Much Power Over You | John R. Miles - EP 807

Why do other people's opinions, approval, and behavior have so much power over you? In this solo episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles explores the behavioral science and neuroscience of belonging, revealing why our need to matter can shape what we believe, who we trust, and how much power we give other people over our lives.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. Somewhere out there is a stranger you've never met, who will never meet you, who is quietly deciding what you're allowed to believe,

• 0:47John R. Miles?

  not through an argument, not through evidence, just by being part of your group. Researchers measured this across 105 different groups in society, and the single biggest predictor of which prejudices someone was willing to admit to holding wasn't their politics, their upbringing, or the facts in front of them. It was one thing. What they believed the people around them already thought. The correlation was .95. Almost perfect.

• 1:22John R. Miles?

  It's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough.

• 1:42John R. Miles?

  If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:02John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to episode 807 of Passion Struck. We're in week two of our August series, The Adaptive Brain, studying how your mind learns, changes, and heals. Last week was about the brain you build on your own. This week is about something almost more fundamental, the brain you build with other people. I'm gonna be straight with you about why I wanted to do this episode. A number of years ago, a colleague pulled me aside after a meeting and said something that should have felt like a compliment, except I didn't hear it that way. I heard it as a threat. And I spent months acting on a story my brain made up in about two seconds, based on nothing.

• 2:46John R. Miles?

  I'll tell you the whole thing later in the episode, because I think almost every one of you has had your own version of it. Here's what today is really about. A huge amount of what you believe, who you trust, and even how you see yourself, isn't coming from evidence. It's coming from your brain's oldest, most stubborn survival instinct, the drive to belong. And I'm not just going to hand you the research today. By the end of this episode, you're gonna walk away with one tool. I'm calling it the Mattering Check. A single question you can ask yourself in the moment, whenever you feel that pulled a shrink, defend, or write someone off.

• 3:29John R. Miles?

  I'll give it to you in full in a few minutes. And then, we're gonna use it together on every story in this episode. So keep a hand near your notes app. Here's what's ahead, a number so strong, it should scare you a little. What happens to your mind when antimattering sets in and makes you feel completely invisible? I'll discuss my own story about the sentence that cost me three months of unnecessary friction. And we'll go into a study about a train, a stranger, and a conversation almost nobody wanted to start, but almost everybody was glad they had. By the end, I want you to walk away with something most people never examine, and one thing they'll actually do tonight. Let's get into it.

• 4:14John R. Miles?

  Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:29John R. Miles?

  I want to start today with that number from today's teaser, because it's worth sitting with. Social psychologist Jay Van Bavel, who I sat down with earlier this week, ran an experiment early in his career, going into high schools to talk to teenagers about bias. His assumption going in was simple. Correct someone's false stereotype with facts, and they update their belief. Case closed. However, that is not what happened. When his team corrected a stereotype, the students didn't abandon it. They swapped it for a different stereotype about the same group and kept going. Correct that one, they just find another. The belief barely moved.

• 5:10John R. Miles?

  What was actually driving it wasn't information, it was allegiance. That observation led to the bigger study, the one behind that .95 number. Across 105 different social groups, researchers found that the strongest predictor of what prejudices a person was willing to express wasn't what they'd learned, it was what they believed their own community already believed. Here's why that should stop you for a second. It means a meaningful amount of what feels like your opinion isn't a conclusion you've reached.

• 5:51John R. Miles?

  It's a membership card you're renewing over and over, without ever checking the fine print. And this brings us directly to the tool I promised you, the Mattering Check. Here is how it works. Whenever you notice yourself locking into a strong opinion, an ancient grudge, or a snap judgment about someone, you pause and ask one question. Whose approval am I actually protecting right now? That is the Mattering Check. It shifts you out of defensive survival mode and forces you to examine whether you are acting on actual facts or just trying to protect your perceived status and belonging in a group.

• 6:35John R. Miles?

  It doesn't ask you to abandon your values. It simply reveals whose voice is sitting in the room with you before you mistake it for your own. And here is the hopeful part buried in that same research. If belief is largely social, belief is also movable, not by dropping heavier facts, but by widening belonging. The single most effective way researchers found to help someone reject misinformation wasn't a fact check. It was letting them know that people in their own group found it misleading. Which means the Mattering Check works in both directions.

• 7:18John R. Miles?

  It can catch you when your tribe is narrowing your world, and it can be the thing you offer someone else when you want to widen theirs.

• 7:29John R. Miles?

  That same pivot, shifting from defending or standing to making others feel seen, is the core framework behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. It's how we transform an ancient survival instinct into a force that builds people up instead of shutting them out.

• 7:48John R. Miles?

  Let's take a quick break. If you want to dive deeper into these frameworks, you can preorder The Mattering Effect right now wherever books are sold, or head over to matteringeffect.com. When we come back, what happens to your body when that sense of mattering goes completely missing? And what happens overnight when an entire city gets it back? But first, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 8:20John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. So, 105 groups, one number, .95, and one question to run against it. Whose approval am I protecting? Now, let's talk about what happens when there's no one left to protect it for. We tend to talk about loneliness like it's just a mood, a quiet, sad feeling that settles in on a Sunday night. But my friend, Dr. Gordon Flett, one of the world's leading researchers on this topic, argues that what we're actually experiencing today isn't just a loneliness epidemic. It's an epidemic of antimattering.

• 9:00John R. Miles?

  Anti-mattering isn't just being by yourself. It's the deep, terrifying feeling of being invisible. It's looking around a room, a workplace, or even a family dinner, and feeling like you are unseen, unheard, and completely nonessential. It's the belief that if you didn't show up tomorrow, nobody would notice, and nobody would miss you. When your mind locks into anti-mattering, your nervous system interprets that invisibility as an active threat. It puts you on high alert, making you retreat,

• 9:38John R. Miles?

  pardon your stance, and assume that every neutral interaction is a sign of rejection. Now, run the mattering check against that feeling. When anti-mattering creeps in and whispers, "You don't matter here, so why bother?" You pause and ask, "Whose approval am I actually protecting right now? And am I really invisible, or am I just hiding?" Here is the leverage Gordon Flett points out. Because our need to matter is universal, our sense of significance can be activated fast. You don't have to wait for someone to come validate you. You can break anti-mattering instantly by extending mattering to someone else.

• 10:23John R. Miles?

  Take a city like New York this past year. The Knicks, long-suffering underdogs, went on an improbable championship run. And something happened that longtime residents said that they'd never seen before. Strangers high-fiving each other on the subway. Entire blocks singing together. Watch parties spilling onto the sidewalk. Researchers call this collective effervescence, collective joy. And it isn't just a nice feeling. During that run, overall crime in the city, especially violent crime, actually dropped. A shared identity formed almost overnight around a basketball team, briefly dissolved the usual walls between strangers.

• 11:07John R. Miles?

  A few months later, the same thing happened during the World Cup. A birthday party at a restaurant turned into Brazil fans and Morocco fans singing and dancing together, dressed in each other's colors, celebrating a game between two countries neither of them was from. None of these people shared a political background or a neighborhood. What they shared was mutual significance. The realization that they mattered to each other in that moment. When you run the mattering check, you realize your brain is keeping score on a very small tribe. The moment you ask, "Whose approval am I trying to protect? And who else can I make feel seen right now?"

• 11:51John R. Miles?

  You shatter the illusion of anti-mattering. You don't have to wait for a sports run to choose that shift. You can choose it today. I want to tell you my own story now, because I think almost everyone listening has lived some version of it. And because Neil Shore, who I sat down with yesterday, told me almost the same identical thing happened to him, which is exactly why I wanted to share mine. I was young, running one of my first real team meetings. A colleague about 10 years older than me pulled me aside afterward and said one sentence, "You're really powerful, John." And then she walked away. I was mortified.

• 12:35John R. Miles?

  I spent the next few months trying not to be powerful, softening myself, over-including people, forcing team outings, second-guessing every word I said in meetings. Because I decided instantly and without checking that powerful was an insult. That she meant I was overbearing, domineering, too much. Months of a problem I manufactured myself. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, and I asked her directly what she'd meant. Her answer stopped me in my tracks. "You sit tall in your chair. You explain things clearly. You have this patience about you. It's empowering."

• 13:19John R. Miles?

  That's all she said. That's all she meant, a compliment. I'd spent months at war with a threat that never existed. Here's the part that made me want to build this whole episode around it. I never once asked myself the mattering check in real time. I never asked, "Whose approval am I protecting right now?" Because if I had, the honest answer would have been hers. And I don't even know what she actually thinks. I was defending myself against a version of her opinion I invented, not the one she had.

• 14:00John R. Miles?

  Neil's version of this story lands the same place mine does. His brain didn't fill in the worst-case meaning because he's paranoid. It filled in the worst case because that's what a threat-detection system built for tribal survival does by default. When you're standing in the group, feels uncertain. Ambiguous information gets treated as danger until proven otherwise. Powerful got run through the same ancient circuitry. "Is there going to cast me out?" It took one honest question to shut the alarm off. So here's the mattering check version two for exactly this moment. Before you spend three months at war with an assumption,

• 14:44John R. Miles?

  ask the person, not your imagination of the person, the actual person. That's the whole move. How much of what you're carrying right now? A cold email, a flat tone of voice, a friend who didn't text back? Is data you've never actually checked? You're probably not reacting to what was said. You're reacting to whether you still belong. And that's a guess, dressed up as a fact almost every single time. So if belonging can be hijacked by a misread sentence or borrowed instantly from a basketball team, here's the encouraging part. It can also be built deliberately in small, unglamorous raps,

• 15:26John R. Miles?

  starting with people you've never met. I want to bring back a conversation I had earlier this year with Dr. Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist who spent over a decade studying exactly this. He told me about the morning that started it all. Sitting on a silent train, surrounded by people, and having a kind of eureka moment. Here we are, some of the most social creatures on the planet, made happier and healthier by connecting with each other, and every single one of us riding to work in total silence. So he ran an experiment. Commuters were randomly assigned to one of three things on their train ride.

• 16:11John R. Miles?

  They could keep to themselves. They could act like they normally would. Or they could actually try to talk to the stranger who sat down next to them. Before it started, he asked people to predict how each option would feel. Almost everyone guessed solitude would be the best commute, and conversation would be the worst. They were wrong, in the opposite direction across the board. The people who talked to a stranger had the most positive commute of the three groups. The people who kept to themselves had the least positive. Here's the detail that stuck with me most. Nick told me the mistake wasn't that people misjudged themselves.

• 16:53John R. Miles?

  Deep down, most of us know a good conversation would lift our mood. The mistake was that we misjudge everyone else. We assume the stranger doesn't want to be bothered, isn't interested, would rather be left alone. Almost always, we're wrong about that, too. That's the mattering check running backwards on us. We assume we don't matter enough to that stranger to be worth their time. And we're wrong almost every time we check. And here's the part of the story that's almost a punchline. After the research came out, Nick ended up talking to the head of marketing at Chicago's train system. She told him she completely agreed with the findings.

• 17:35John R. Miles?

  Some of her favorite commutes were the ones where she talked to someone. Then she told him what the transit system was about to roll out anyway. A designated quiet car, because that's what riders said they wanted. Nick then asked her the obvious question. "Had they ever tried the opposite? A car built for conversation?" She said, "No." But then she mentioned something else. For years, they actually had bar cars, where commuters gathered, drank, and talked. And those had quietly disappeared, too. Not because of any incident, just because the trains got so overly crowded

• 18:18John R. Miles?

  that they decided they needed to shut them down. Twice in one system, the option built for connection lost out to the option built for being left alone, even though the data said connection was what actually made people happier.

• 18:37John R. Miles?

  There's a phrase for what actually holds all of this together. And I think it's the best answer to the question this whole episode has been circling. It's not tolerance. It's not diversity for its own sake. It's mattering. The sense that you have real value inside a group and that the group has real value to you. Jay Van Bavel put it to me this way. Mattering is what allows people to expand their circle of concern to include people outside their usual tribe without feeling like they're losing their own identity in the process. You don't have to stop belonging to your group to start belonging a little to a bigger one.

• 19:21John R. Miles?

  When you use the mattering check, you break the illusion that you are invisible or unwanted. You realize that reaching out doesn't diminish your standing. It extends it. So let's come back to where we started. There's a stranger out there quietly shaping what you're willing to believe just by being part of your group. That part of you isn't going away. It's wired in and it's not a flaw. It's what kept our ancestors alive. But here's what today should have made clear. That circle isn't locked. 105 groups in a 0.95 correlation proved how powerfully belonging can narrow what you believe.

• 20:05John R. Miles?

  But the same research showed that reframing who your people are can loosen it just as fast. A whole city didn't need years of policy to feel like a we. It needed one championship run and a few weeks of shared joy. Months of my own life went sideways over a compliment I never checked. And a train full of strangers proved that the connection we avoid most is usually the one we have enjoyed most. None of that is fixed. All of it is a circle you can get to redraw. And you now have the tool to do it. The mattering check. Whose approval am I actually protecting right now?

• 20:50John R. Miles?

  Is this the actual person or my invention of them? And do I actually matter less here than I think I do? Here's your assignment, and I want you to actually do this, not just not along. Before you go to bed tonight, not this week, not when things come down, tonight, you're going to do two things. First, identify one opinion, grudge, or story you're currently holding on to and run the mattering check. Ask yourself directly, whose approval am I actually protecting here? And is this story backed by facts or just my fear of not fitting in? Second, make one deliberate point of connection

• 21:35John R. Miles?

  with a stranger or someone on the periphery of your life. A brief word of appreciation to a coworker. A genuine question to someone in line at the supermarket or a thoughtful note to a friend. Show up with the quiet confidence that your presence matters and give them the gift of feeling that they matter too. When you practice this, you aren't just changing your own mindset. You're subtly shifting the culture around you. It won't feel like it's doing much. Do it anyway. The commuters on that train didn't think it would do much either. Next week, we're going a layer deeper into what actually shapes the brain we've been talking about.

• 22:18John R. Miles?

  Because it turns out the beliefs running your life were never chosen as carefully as you think. They were written as internal stories and adaptations. And most of us have never gone back to check who wrote them or whether they're still serving us. I'm sitting down with the one and only Mark Manson for a powerful conversation on how to spot the stories that hold us back, why we protect our mental models so fiercely, and how to rewrite them. That's next as we continue the adaptive brain week three. The stories we believe.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  For a human to actually be different than they were before, it requires you to do one of two things. It requires you to behave in ways that are new and uncomfortable, or it requires you to let go of beliefs and perceptions you had about yourself, which is also not fun because that's a form of grief. By definition, change requires either destruction of former behavior or former identity. Both of those things suck. If you're smiling about it, it probably didn't really change your life.

• 23:29John R. Miles?

  If today's episode changed how you think about who let define you, share it with someone who needs to hear that their circle isn't as fixed as it feels. Follow Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and find this week's companion workbook through the Ignited Life on Substack. For more strategies on how to build a life of genuine significance, preorder my new book, The Mattering Effect, available now wherever books are sold. Until then, remember, the life you leave behind will always be shaped by who you decide gets to belong in it, starting with you. I'm John Miles, and until next time, live passion struck.