Social Psychology: Conformity and Helping Behavior | UCLA Lecture 17

[00:00:10]Check. Check. Okay.

[00:00:25][Music] I don't always up here. Well, that's always I'm going to start.

[00:02:19]Okay, we've come to the end, my friends, and we still have a lot left to do.

[00:02:31]I'm just warning you, I might go to 147.

[00:02:35]It could happen.

[00:02:39]And if you want to miss the last slide of the entire class while I'll reveal the most important thing, you can leave at 1:45.

[00:02:49]I'm kidding. There's nothing important on the last slide. Um, okay. Couple of quick announcements.

[00:02:58]The review session for the final will be in here.

[00:03:05]Okay. The review session will be next Monday.

[00:03:09]It will be uh 6 PM in here.

[00:03:15]Okay. There is an exam that goes until 6 PM in here. So, don't barge in. If they're still finishing up, let them finish up. Um, so the review session is in here next Monday, 6 pm.

[00:03:30]Uh, the final exam is in here next Friday at 11:30 a.m.

[00:03:41]According to the form I got saying, your final exam information for fall 09 is listed below. It says, "Our final exam, exam code 14, next Friday, 11:30 to 2:30 p.m. exam location more 100."

[00:04:00]Okay. What else?

[00:04:03]Um, attendance.

[00:04:06]Yeah.

[00:04:08]Uh, I think the review session will be podcast, but again, it's always a little bit up in the air. I think it will be but we have to arrange that still.

[00:04:19]Um attendance my whole goal of making two% of your grade dependent on attendance was to make sure that if I did video podcasting all of you wouldn't just stay home because I hear that that happens. This is the only time I'm doing video podcasting. Um you guys didn't stay home so I'm just giving everyone the two points.

[00:04:45]Unless you want me to call out 350 names. Um, right. Because you want to screw the few people who aren't here today. No, I understand that. Um, and if you're thinking about, you know, this maybe in some way not being fair, I had considered just taking attendance of the people with the top 10 scores in the class. Um, be because if they are all here, the best anyone else can do is just get the same points as them. And I'm guessing the people with the top 10 scores in the class are here, but I'm not going to single them out because they probably don't want to be singled out. Uh, but so the good thing is everybody's getting their two points.

[00:05:25]Um, so I think everybody uh wins. And the last thing I'll say as just sort of a preliminary thing is that all the slides including what I'm going to cover today are already on the website. The attribution lecture, which was missing a few slides, has been updated. Um, everything is updated, but you definitely want to look for where there's big giant X's over the slides.

[00:05:47]That means I didn't cover it this quarter, right? So, the ones that say incomplete should be gone now uh because I updated them this morning, but um I the incomplete ones were usually when I was only partly done with a lecture and then I replace those when I finish with the lecture.

[00:06:11]Uh okay, in about 10 minutes we're going to officially or maybe five minutes do the course evaluations but I'm handing them out now so that it won't take uh more time then uh ordinarily after I talk about stereotyping which we did for uh the last lecture I talk about self-fulfilling prophecies and the ways in which implicit stereotypes can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Uh but I do not have time to do that today. If you are interested in self-fulfilling prophecies, and they are very interesting, my podcast from three months ago in this in the spring, there's a whole lecture on that that you should feel free to go listen to. Um, I wish we had time to do it, but instead, I'm just going to give you the last nugget of what we typically do when we talk about non-verbal communication uh, and self-fulfilling prophecies, but I'm leaving off the self-fulfilling prophecies part. If you will recall, hypothesis 4 is about the fact that despite all the different ways in which we make errors and mistakes when it comes to the social world, there are other ways in which we actually do pretty well. Okay? And so I want to take a few minutes just to um sort of make good on that promise of talking about this. And I'll do it primarily in the form of a demo.

[00:07:35]Um, so, okay. So, you'll have to forgive the fact that this demonstration was created somewhere around the neighborhood of 1975.

[00:07:57]Um, and so the people in this demonstration look like they're from 1975 because they were. Um, and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a series of pictures uh of people well of people. And at the bottom there will be listed options of what something about what might be happening in this picture. And then I'm going to ask everyone to vote just by raising their hands which they think is true of the picture. Okay, so let's just try one.

[00:08:29]Okay, these two people have just met for the first time a few hours ago, have known each other for four years, and are in love, or C are brother and sister.

[00:08:40]Raise your hand if you think A is the right answer. Raise your hand if you think B is the right answer. C. Raise your hand. Okay. Okay. So, um, in reality, the answer is B. these two people really were uh in love for four years, but I'm sure they've been long divorced um because it was the 70s. Um and and in research that's been done, 81% of people get that right. Let's do another one.

[00:09:07]Okay. The same man is in both pictures.

[00:09:10]In one, he is seated with his wife. In the other, he is seated with an old friend. Which picture shows the husband and wife? Picture one. Raise your hand.

[00:09:22]Picture two. Raise your hand.

[00:09:25]Yeah. So, most people get that right.

[00:09:27]And it's picture two.

[00:09:30]Okay. Let's do one more.

[00:09:33]Um, these two people are strangers posing together. Our brother and sister, have been a couple for three months. How many people think A, B, C?

[00:09:47]Yeah, it's C. Now, we're not done with these. We're going to keep going through them. But what should be dawning on you is that in many of these cases, you feel a bit like you're guessing. You have some intuitive guess or gut feeling that one of these answers is right. But this is one of those cases, a lot like the sort of introspective stuff that we've dealt with before where it's hard to put into words how it is that you know. And you probably wouldn't be willing to bet money on the fact that you know, but it turns out that with things like this, people tend to be remarkably accurate even though they don't know how. They don't know how because this is happening automatically pre-reflectively.

[00:10:36]Okay. So, the things that allow us to do this accurately aren't things that involve sort of language and reasoning and so on. There's something that just sort of jumps out at us that gives us a gut feeling. We guess and then you look around and you see that you almost all guess the same way. You probably wouldn't guess that everyone else is going to guess the same way you do.

[00:10:55]Let's do a few more of these. Okay, these two people are a couple together for one year or strangers posing together. How many say a couple together for one year? How many say strangers posing together? Yep, that's right.

[00:11:10]Um, these two people are a married couple or strangers posing together. A married couple. Strangers.

[00:11:19]Yeah. Now, there's nothing intrinsically in this picture. I I I'd like to think that, you know, I could go stand next to someone that I didn't know and how on earth would someone from a still frame picture be able to tell what my relationship was to that person, right?

[00:11:34]It's not like he's kissing her. It's not like he's showing a wedding band, right?

[00:11:39]There's something just about their general emotional standing when they're in this scene that gives us an impression one way or another. Okay. Um, these two people are a couple for five years or a strangers posing together. How many think a couple for five years? Strangers posing together. Yeah, this is like the hardest one in the whole set. So, you know, maybe he's just really good at looking like he's in a relationship with anyone he meets. I I don't know.

[00:12:11]Or she is, right? Sure. But I'd get in trouble if I said that. Um, these two people are a married couple or strangers posing together. How many say a married couple? Strangers.

[00:12:24]Okay. Married couple. Uh, okay. I think we have two more of these. I just want to see. I want to make sure I do the good ones.

[00:12:34]U. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, this woman is waiting waking her husband from a nap, watching an arm wrestling match or playing with her baby daughter. Uh, A, waking her husband from a nap. B, watching an arm wrestling match. C, playing with her baby daughter. How could you know that?

[00:12:57]But she is, and everyone gets that right. We're going to skip that one because I just want to go to the last one here. These two men have just arm wrestled. Who won?

[00:13:10]Who won? Did person did a person one on the left win? Or B, person two on the right win? How many think the person on the left won? How many think the person on the right won? Right. Everyone gets this right. But it's just two guys standing there. Look, if I didn't tell you they had arm wrestled, you wouldn't know. But once you know they just arm wrestled, you know who won. That's crazy. Now, there's other tests that you can do that are hard to do in this kind of setting that I think are even more striking when you see the results of them, but I think this one in particular always jumps out at me as like really. I mean, it's not surprising that one person would get it right, but almost everyone gets it right. Um, okay. So, are we accurate? Yeah, sometimes we are and it comes in the form of non-verbal communication. When we make sense of other people's non-verbal expressions, their tone of voice, their their facial expressions, their posture, these things end up revealing a whole lot about what's going on with other people. Okay?

[00:14:21]So, the old saying is you can't read a book by its cover. Well, it turns out that certain books you can read by their cover. not all books but certain books.

[00:14:30]Um, and if you have read Malcolm Gladwell's other book, Blink, the one that was really, really popular, you know that throughout that book, he talks about thin slices. The fact that we can just see a little thin slice of someone else's behavior. Um, and from that, we can tell uh a lot about that person.

[00:14:50]Now, the term thin slice actually comes from uh Nelony and Bob Rosenthal. These were two of my adviserss in graduate school. And for her dissertation, Nalan Bod's dissertation, she created this idea of the thin slice. And so what she did was she took I'm going to turn the lights back on maybe.

[00:15:13]Um, so what she did was she videotaped teachers like me. Okay. Um, she videotaped them teaching. They're all being videotaped teaching. You can't see the audience. The videotape is sort of a a tight shot from sort of here and just around the person.

[00:15:30]And she played those videos for people who hadn't taken the class, who weren't in the class, who weren't even the same major. So, they didn't know who this person was. They didn't know their reputation or anything like that. And they watched clips of the teachers teaching and the sound was turned off.

[00:15:47]Okay? So, you don't get to hear what the teacher's saying. All you get to do is see their non-verbal behavior. no sound.

[00:15:54]You don't even know what class they're teaching. And you either get to see 30 seconds of them teaching or six seconds of them teaching. And then what she did is she went and got the course evaluation ratings that all of you are going to do in a few minutes. Okay? And she correlated the ratings that students like you had made after having weeks and weeks of experience of listening to the teacher actually teach specific content.

[00:16:21]And she correlated that with the judgments that people who didn't know who this person was, didn't know what they were teaching, and couldn't hear what they were saying made after 30 or six seconds. And what they found were incredibly high correlations between what people could judge about the teacher's teaching ability.

[00:16:41]The judging the teacher's teaching ability after 30 seconds or 6 seconds and these correlations with end of quarter or in this case end of semester ratings were incredibly high. Social psychologists do not see correlations of 7. This is ridiculously strong correlations. Okay. So after 6 seconds, these folks could gauge how much people who had had this person for an entire semester were going to feel about that professor after the semester after six seconds. She also ran a condition where she put people under cognitive load while she watched the six seconds and they also showed remarkable correlations. These are not significantly reduced. Um this is a very very strong result. Doing it under cognitive load indicates that this is an automatic process. People are extracting this information automatically and clearly they're doing it very effectively and accurately.

[00:17:39]Now they also tried to control for all sorts of things like uh how often the professor smiled like how many smiles did they do or how many times did they wave their hands or how attractive was the professor and you can statistically remove all of those effects. And when you remove all of those effects, this all still remains. So this isn't just how many times does the professor smile.

[00:18:01]This isn't just, you know, is the uh professor attractive or not. There's something fundamental about the nature of what the person gives off as a whole in those six seconds that's very revealing. And they've done this now with doctors, with therapists, with various other things.

[00:18:19]And if you're making the rating on the right criteria, you can often after six seconds make a very meaningful rating of how good that person is in that domain.

[00:18:28]Yeah, it's not. These are all statistically the same. There's no statistical difference here. The only thing that's going on here statistically that matters is all of these are enormously different than zero. These are not different from each other statistically.

[00:18:47]Okay. So, okay. This is kind of the big line in the sand. So, so much of social psychology is about all the ways we misunderstand other people and ourselves. And we do. Those things are all true. But this is an extraordinary capacity that we also have that allows us to make sense of other people rapid fire automatically without even knowing we're doing it. We probably share a lot of this with many other animals and that's probably why it's such a good system is that it's evolved over so many sort of different species that it's really a very old effective um automatic system in the brain of lots of species and and being able to know who's good or bad, who's a threat, who's a not who's not a threat. Being able to do those things quickly and accurately is very important for survival. Okay. So, um we're going to do course evaluations now. Okay. So, if you don't have a course evaluation form, raise your hand and Carrie can get you that. And then I'm going to give Megan pencils to give out. Um for people who don't have pencils, uh the course information is here. For those of you who still think my name is Dr. Dr. Liieber. It's not. It's Dr. Liieber. Men, this is the course number. And I need a volunteer to take all of these at the end of the class to the main office in the psych department. Is there someone who will take this over? You will. You will.

[00:20:24]Okay. Thank you. So, at the end of class, we'll just get these or at the end of like the next five minutes or so, we'll just get these all passed up. They can get put in a pile and then if you would take them over to the main office, that would be great. Um, I'll step out for five minutes because I'm not supposed to be here because I might influence you.

[00:20:45]Not like I have flashing things up here subliminally that say give me nines or anything like that. I would never do something like that. See you in a few.

[00:21:14]He was a trench coat and subsequently one other member of our staff will face the ring and you'll see how this man in the trench [Laughter] tries to maintain his individuality.

[00:21:39]Little by little, he looks at his watch, but he's really making an excuse for turning just a little bit more through the wall.

[00:21:55]Now, we'll try it once again. Here's a Here comes up and this and has apparently been.

[00:22:19][Applause] You're going to see a fellow who fights a little bit to withstand the group pressure.

[00:22:35]It expresses his comfort in the way he looks and the way he wiggles a little bit.

[00:22:49]He's right in a groove now.

[00:22:56]The elevator hasn't touched, but the doors open a moment later and this will be fine.

[00:23:20]He's very unhappy. You'll see him. He doesn't know whether to go inside and face front or outside and face.

[00:23:30]But he's one of the group now. Here's a fellow with his hat on in the elevator.

[00:23:37]First, he makes a full turn to the rear and Charlie closes the door. A moment later, they open the door. Everybody's changed positions.

[00:23:54][Applause] I want to see if we can use Now let's see if we can use group pressure for some good. Now in a moment on Charlie signal everybody turns forward.

[00:24:11]Notice they take off their hats and now we can reverse the procedure.

[00:24:34]Okay, so that was real candid camera footage from the 60s. Um, you could smoke on elevators back then, I guess.

[00:24:43]And um what we're going to spend a little time talking about, okay, is why people conform in the absence of authority. Okay, we know people conform when there's an authority figure telling you the experiment must continue. But what these videos illustrate so nicely is that you don't need an authority figure at all. Right?

[00:25:06]all you need is certain other factors to be present and people will sort of step right in line and kind of do what they're supposed to do in order to conform. And uh there's sort of two different kinds of things that that might drive why we conform. On the one hand, there's sort of informationational reasons where we don't want to miss some piece of information that somebody else seems to have that we don't.

[00:25:32]Okay, so that's kind of a a cognitive rationale for doing what everyone else is doing. Maybe they have information that I don't have. Um, but then there's also sort of a more normative re uh reason, which I think is probably at work in the candid camera videos most of the time, although that could be true of some of the clips as well, which is that we don't want to stand out or be rejected. Okay, we're very sensitive to the possibility of being rejected or evaluated negatively by those around us, even when they are complete strangers on an elevator that we will never see again. That says something very deep and profound, I think, about what it is to be a human being, that we care that much about what a stranger might think of us based on what we do in an elevator. And if you think back to sort of Sartra and the look, I think all of that sort of comes back into play. Now, the first classic classic study on conformity um was done by Sharief back in um 1936 and he had people come he'd have people come in in groups to be tested uh for the study and he would take them into a dark room and he would shine a dot of light onto a wall about 10 feet away. So it was sort of a thick dot of light. So he saw a circle of light and it was 10 feet away and it was dark. There were no other cues that could tell you sort of exactly where that dot was. And he would tell the subjects, there'd be three or four people sitting in the room and he would say to them over the next minute, this dot is going to move. What I want you to do at the end of the minute is tell me how far it has moved. Okay, this is a sort of visual psychoysics study and we want to know if you can detect how far the light has moved.

[00:27:21]Now the the critical thing is the light doesn't move at all. Okay, the light is fixed but there's a sense of ambiguity about whether the light moves or not because of something about the way our eyes work, the sacads of our eyes and the fact that we need context to know what's moved and what hasn't moved. So there could be some subjective ambiguity as to whether or not the light has moved or how far it's moved. So he would ask at the end of the the minute period, how far would it move? And uh people would say, "Oh, well, I think it moved eight inches." "Well, I think it moved two inches. I think it moved an inch." And then he would say, "Okay, well, we're going to do it again." And the same three people would sit there. And what was interesting and this is just one group of three people. Okay, so each of these is a participant. But what you find is that very quickly over a couple of repetitions of this, they all basically come together on the same answer. Okay, now remember the light isn't moving at all. There is no right answer other than zero. But depending on essentially what the average is of these first initial responses, everyone converges on that because they somehow think that must be the right answer. So they're conforming to this norm that they've accidentally created. And in other groups of three, you might get instead one person says one, one person says six, and one person says eight to start. And those three people will end up converging on a number up here. Okay?

[00:28:49]because the norm accidentally set up by those three people is different. Now, this is called the autokinetic effect, but that only is because autokinetic refers to something about the way the eye works and and ambiguously makes us think there's motion there. Everyone knows this study by the name the autokinetic effect, but autokinetic has nothing to do with conformity. Okay. Um, now one of the interesting follow-ups that was done to this decades later was a study where instead of just having the same people repeat this trial after trial, they would have three people go here and then one of those people would leave and a new person would come in and those new the the old two people and the new one person would then do it here.

[00:29:36]And then one of the first two people would leave and a new person would come in and they would keep doing this and they would go through about 20 rounds.

[00:29:44]So by 20 rounds in nobody who started out the study had been there, you know, for the last 17 of those rounds. And yet nevertheless, the people at round 20 would still be giving this response that was determined by the first three people who haven't been there in a long, long time. So they're conforming to a norm that's completely irrelevant to them.

[00:30:05]and wasn't even set up by them. Okay.

[00:30:09]And this is potentially a model of sort of how cultural norms get transmitted and also kind of within the workplace, right? Norms get set up in the workplace and then the people who set those norms quit and go get other jobs, but the norms stay because everyone just assumes the norm is the right thing to do, not just an arbitrary convention that was set up. Now, Solomon Ash came along about 10 years later and said, "This study's hogwash." Okay, I don't think that, you know, you know, strong willed American people are just going to conform like this. I think there was a trick in um in Shere's study. I think it was just because he used something so ambiguous, like this light in a dark room where you can't really tell what's going on. I think if you use something that was unambiguous, you would never see this kind of conformity. Okay. So, he did a study where there was no ambiguity whatsoever and and most of you will recognize this study because it is um such a classic. In this study, he brought in usually six people at a time.

[00:31:16]Five of them were confederates working for the experimentter and one was a real subject. But the real subject believed that all six of them were real subjects.

[00:31:25]And they had a very simple task to do.

[00:31:28]They were shown a line like this. And they were asked which of these three lines is the same length as the reference line over here. Right? No ambiguity whatsoever. It is completely and patently obvious that the answer is B.

[00:31:45]Nevertheless, Solomon Ash found okay that when all five of the Confederates said, I think the answer is a. So all five confederates give the same wrong answer and then the real subject has to go last and give their answer. Okay? 35% of the time people would go along with the majority and give the wrong answer. The obviously wrong answer. So 35% of the time if everybody else said A, the real subject would say A as well. And across the study, 75% of subjects conformed at least on one trial. Okay? So most people are susceptible to this kind of conformity at least occasionally.

[00:32:30]And you see it happening on about a third of these trials. Okay. Now, one thing to note is that at the end of this experiment, they took these subjects aside and said, "So what was going on there?" Okay. Did did you know did you really think that A was the same length?

[00:32:48]And people would say, "Oh, God, no. No.

[00:32:51]Of course, the answer is B." But I didn't want to be the only one who said B. I didn't want to look like a crazy person. Of course, the other five people are the ones who look like crazy people, right? Five people just said, "This is the same length as this." But even still, subjects say, "I don't want to be the crazy one. I'm going to go along with the incredibly wrong majority.

[00:33:14]So we have these two very different examples of conformity here. The uh sharif autokinetic effect and the ash effect with the lines and they seem to be leading to conformity. People conforming with the norms of the majority through two different mechanisms that I suggested before we even sort of started talking about this. Um, so in the share study with the uh ambiguous dot that does or doesn't move it, you can't really tell.

[00:33:44]There seems to be more of anformational pressure that's at work here. Okay, I don't know what the right answer is and these people are saying something, so maybe they know what the right answer is. So on the next trial, I'm going to give an answer that sounds more like what they said. I think they might know something that I don't know. And so this taps in to our desire to be right, to be accurate. Remember that's half of hypothesis five, that we're motivated to be right, accurate, consistent.

[00:34:14]And what's interesting is that when you get this kind of conformity, it doesn't stress people out. It actually kind of relaxes people to say, well, look, to me, it was fundamentally ambiguous, so that might make me anxious. But now that I have some other people that I can rely on to guide me in the right direction and give me the right information, that actually calms me down. Now I feel like I'm coming up with the right answer. On the other hand, in the um Solomon Ash study, there's normative pressure. Okay.

[00:34:41]And this leads Oh, sorry, I should say.

[00:34:44]So when you believe that other people are doing the right thing and you're just trying to find out what's right, you actually believe what they say. You internalize what they're doing. So if everyone else is saying two inches and you said eight inches, you don't just say two two inches not to stick out, you say two inches because you think that must be the right answer, which means you've internalized what everyone else is suggesting.

[00:35:09]But in the ASH study, you get compliance, not internalization. And compliance means you sort of shift your behavior to fit with the norm, but you do not shift your beliefs. And remember at the end of the ash study subjects said oh no I believe that B was the right answer but in terms of my behavior in terms of what I said I'm going to go along with the group and the reason is is because we want to be accepted or more importantly we don't want to be rejected we don't want to stick out and be rejected. So here unlike in the um uh sharif study this is a very anxious tense situation for people because it's creating a lot of dissonance for them. I know B is the right answer and here I am saying A is the right answer. That's a high conflict situation.

[00:36:01]Okay. Um I'm going to skip some of the extra things that I used to say uh right here. Uh but what I do want to do is spend a minute on um why it is that we seem to care so much about being accepted. Uh and so I'll tell you a little bit about a study that uh my wife Naomi Eisenberger and I did where um we had people come in and and play while they were having their brains scanned.

[00:36:28]They played a little video game. Um they believe that they were playing a game with two other people who were controlling these players. And so they believe that there were three people in fMRI scanners all at the same time.

[00:36:40]Okay, we do an elaborate cover story to make sure that they believe us. We're social psychologist so we lie. Well, um, and so they think that they're controlling this little hand and there's two other people having their brain scan controlling these two hands. And in the game, they simply toss the ball back and forth to each other. It's a very simple, uninteresting game, except at some point it gets a little more interesting because the other two people stop throwing you the ball. Right. Um, and in the old versions of PowerPoint, I could show you the video of this, but the latest version somehow made it so you can't show um, animated um, images, and so I can't show it to you. But you sit there now for the next two minutes, and these two other people keep throwing each other the ball, and they never throw it to you again.

[00:37:26]Okay? And so what we were interested in is what's going on in the brain to the extent that people feel bad about getting rejected by the other people.

[00:37:35]And what we found um was striking and and um I I think has been a kind of very important finding uh in the field. Uh what we found is that when people get rejected their brain literally looks like they are in physical pain. Okay. So we refer to this as social pain. And it turns out that the brain seems to be evolved so that it doesn't really differentiate between social and physical pain. Okay? And pain is a really good indicator of what is evolutionarily significant for our survival. We have pain when we don't have enough food. We call it hunger. We have pain when we don't have enough liquids, thirst. We have pain when we are exposed to the elements for too long. Um, heat, cold, and so on. Um, and we have pain when someone attacks us, right? Because that's a threat obviously to our well-being. And it turns out that we have pain, physical looking pain. Not that anyone would confuse this for physical pain, but it looks in the brain a lot like physical pain when people get socially rejected. And one of the um sort of quirky implications of this that we really never dreamed would actually work out, but Naomi and and somebody else, my wife Naomi and somebody else went and did these studies and found out. It turns out that you can in fact take Tylenol for social pain. Um and if you take Tylenol for social pain, these neural responses go away when you're rejected. Okay? So it's pretty literal.

[00:39:08]It's not a metaphorical thing. When someone says, "You hurt my feelings. She broke my heart." We think there's a reason why in every language around the world that's been examined, physical pain words are used to describe social pain. So, if we are built or if we are built to feel pain when we are excluded and rejected by others, then we're going to be really motivated, right, to avoid those situations from occurring. Just like we're really motivated to not have someone put our hand into a fire. Okay. So, just to sort of cap this off, there's behavioral work that's been done that actually has people play this what we call cyberball game. And uh they either don't play the game, they get included for the whole game, or they get excluded. And then they look at the ashtype line conformity and you see greater conformity after someone's been excluded. Okay. If I've just been excluded, I'm more motivated to get reconnected to the group. I don't like being excluded. So, if I've just been excluded, I'm going to be more likely to conform. There's a question over here. Yeah.

[00:40:18]Yes. So, there was one group that got placeos and one group that took Tylenol.

[00:40:22]Yeah. Um, yeah, paper is under review right now. Um, but yeah, it's pretty cool. They have two studies on it. Okay.

[00:40:30]So this is sort of your standard uh conformity effects where you're being influenced by the people around you. I do want to just take a minute because these are are kind of fun to talk about some of the um compliance techniques that have been developed over the years.

[00:40:44]Compliance techniques are essentially the use car salement car salesman's techniques, right? So these aren't about conforming to a group norm. These are sort of tricks that you can use to get other people to do things that you want them to do, even when you don't care about them believing the same thing that you believe. You really just want to change their behavior. And that's what car salesmen and realators and so on care about. They just care about you putting down your money and they don't care if you regret it 30 seconds later.

[00:41:12]Um, and so there's a bunch of these and if you're interested in these kinds of techniques for manipulating your friends and family, um, there's this wonderful book by Bob Chowini called Influence that um, it's conceivable that I will assign at some point in this class. I never have because I don't spend enough time on this, but he has actually invented and talks about a lot of these techniques. I'm just going to briefly mention uh, two of them, the foot in the door and the lowball technique. Um, and these tap into our motivations and other processes that we've talked about throughout the quarter. So, the foot in the door technique taps into our desire for consistency.

[00:41:52]And in sort of the classic study on this one, uh, subjects who are just living in their homes, so it's they go up and knock on people's doors and for half of the subjects week one, they go up and knock on the door and they say, "Could we put this little tiny cardboard sign in your front window? It says, "Drive carefully on it." And it's 3 in by 3 in.

[00:42:13]Okay? And most people say, "Yeah, sure.

[00:42:15]Why not?"

[00:42:17]Half of the people get that initial request, half the people don't. A week later, they then go to all the people who did or did not get that initial request. And now they come up and say, "Hey, would you mind putting this sign in your front window, it's this giant sign in garish, ugly colors that says, "Drive carefully."

[00:42:36]Okay. And what they find is that the people who are only approached for the first time at this second point, and the first thing they've ever been asked to do is to put this big sign in their window, they almost all say no. But the people who started out by getting the small little 3 inch by 3 inch request and now get the big request, they say yes. 76% of them say yes.

[00:42:59]Why? Well, because last week I just committed to being someone. I put this little sign in my window. And part of why I did it is because it's uncomfortable to say no. Part of why I did it is because it was so small and unobtrusive. But once I did it, I get to think of myself as someone who cares about driving carefully. and I care about being a good neighborhood citizen.

[00:43:20]And now a week later, you come back and ask me to do something really much more annoying, but I've already encoded myself as being kind of a good neighborhood citizen. So yes, I'm going to do it because I've decided I'm that person. That's my identity. Okay? And it turns out it even works pretty well if the first thing is about drive carefully and the second thing is about give blood. Okay? So it actually transfers and it's a general sense of like I'm the kind of person who's willing to help out with these sorts of things. So that's the foot in the door technique. The lowball technique um is the one that actually car salesmen are pretty famous for where they only reveal part of the obligation first.

[00:44:00]Okay? They get you to commit to what seems like an awesome deal and then you end up accepting a much worse deal a few minutes later. So, there's a couple ways this work. One way it might work is um you know the the salesman says, "Okay, so you want to buy a BMW? That's great. Okay, I can get you into this BMW for uh $25,000." Like, "Wow, $25,000? That's really cheap for a BMW. Uh yeah, I'm definitely for that."

[00:44:27]And he says, "Okay, well, let me go talk to my manager. I'll see if if I can get you this deal. I'm going to go in there and fight for you." And you sit there and you're going, "I'm going to get a BMW for $25,000.

[00:44:38]It's a brand new BMW. This is going to be great. And you sit there for about 10 minutes and the guy, the salesman, comes back and he says, "I fought with my manager, but he will not go for $25,000."

[00:44:52]Turns out it's going to be $90,000. No, let's say he says $35,000.

[00:44:57]He says $35,000.

[00:45:01]Now, if he had started out telling you it was $35,000, you might just say, "Nope. Uh-uh. Not going to do it." But what happens is he leaves you thinking you're going to get this car for $25,000. And in your mind, you've already bought it. You own it now. Now you've owned it. You've already in your mind spent your $25,000 and you own it. And now when he comes back and says, "It's another 10 grand."

[00:45:27]The mental calculus you go through is not now it costs me 35,000. Instead, the calculus is I have to pay $10,000 to not lose my BMW that's already mine.

[00:45:40]Okay, I already own it in my head.

[00:45:43]So, let me give you the the research example that um makes this point.

[00:45:50]So, uh, they go to folks and they want to get them to participate in an experiment. And, uh, in one condition, they just tell them the whole deal all at once. Will you participate in an experiment at 7 a.m.? Only 25% of crazy people say yes. Um, if instead they say, "Would you participate in an experiment?" And then they get your yes or no answer to that. And then they say, "Okay, you'll be scheduled for 7 a.m. Is that okay?" Now you get twice as many people saying yes. I've committed to doing the experiment. So now I've identified myself as that's what I'm going to do. Okay? And now when you tell me the sort of the additional part of the information, it's hard for me to say no. Okay? So comparing these two, just to give you um a little bit of clarity, when you're talking about foot in the door type phenomena, you're talking about separate requests. Would you do this? And then a week later, would you also do this?

[00:46:46]In the low ball technique, you're only trying to get one thing or you're only trying to get someone to buy one thing, but you're only revealing part of the commitment and some of the commitment comes later.

[00:46:59]All right.

[00:47:08]What's that?

[00:47:10]Do you have to know who? What? No. The other two with big giant X's over them, you do not need to know.

[00:47:20]Oh, sorry.

[00:47:26]Okay.

[00:47:44]Okay, so last lecture.

[00:47:49]Oh, we've been here already for an hour or something. Uh, we have 25 minutes left, which turns out to be just enough time, I think. So, um, helping the classic famous famous example that sort of set the helping literature in motion, you already know about. I think you read about it in one of the chapters you read for the tipping point. Um it's the Kennedy Kitty Genevies story. Okay. And this woman um as I'm sure you all know at this point was stabbed to death in front of an apartment building while 38 other people watched and nobody called the police. Nobody did anything. They they watched or they stopped watching and they walked away but nobody helped.

[00:48:37]Okay. And so this led to all of these important ideas like bystander apathy that um you don't get help from people the more people there are around. Okay.

[00:48:48]It led to the concept of diffusion of responsibility that we talked about the first day in here. Um where the more people there are the less responsible any one person feels for acting in a given situation.

[00:49:01]Okay. Um, and importantly for the kinds of concepts that I've been promoting throughout the quarter, our decision to help or not help when we're the observers, when we're the bystanders, it doesn't feel like it's being affected by the other people around us, but it is affected. Um, incidentally, if you think that this is an isolated incident, it's not. Um, this is a woman who uh was killed less than 10 years ago and several neighbors heard her screaming for over 10 minutes and didn't do anything. One of the students in this class uh just last week told me about a case of a woman in Israel u a few months ago where something very similar happened. Um so this is something that obviously doesn't happen all the time, but it has happened uh sort of throughout history a number of different times. So um what I want to tell you about is um kind of the first or one of the first sort of famous studies okay that looked at this bystander apathy effect just to sort of establish whether it's real or not you have to go do experiments to see if we do a controlled study do we see the phenomenon and so in this study uh there were people seated in little cubicles so you'd come in and be in a study with four other people except you're the only real subject.

[00:50:22]That's not true. In this study, there were five subjects at a time and one of them was a Confederate. So, four real subjects, maybe sometimes one real subject. They varied the numbers, but there could be multiple real subjects, one Confederate. Um, it turns out that one Confederate was Dick Nisbbit, the Nisbet and Wilson guy who did all the work on sort of telling more than we can know and not being in able to introspect well um on our own experience. This is when he was an undergraduate. He was a confederate in this study. And uh what would happen is that they were all in their cubicles and they were hooked up by headphones and microphones so they could all hear each other. And they were told that they were supposed to take turns talking about themselves. Each would sort of reveal something about themselves for say 30 seconds or so. And then the next person would go and so they do this a couple of times and Dick Nisbet the Confederate reveals maybe the second time it gets to him that he has epileptic seizures. That it's just something that he's dealt with his whole life. and you know it's been a problem for him, but he tries to manage it. And then a couple turns later, you basically hear him start having an epileptic seizure. And so what they were interested in is who helps. And who helps is a function of how many people are in the study all at once.

[00:51:39]And so it was either just one subject and the confederate in the study, one subject u the person with the seizure and another confederate. So you one other real subject. Okay? Or you and four other people. I'm describing this study wrong. I just realized that everyone's a confederate but you. It's either you and the person who has the seizures, you, one other confederate and the person who has the seizures, or you, the person who has the seizures, and four other confederates. The key thing here is is that they experimentally reproduce exactly what happened in the Kitty Genevie study. The more people there are, the less likely the real subject is to actually get up and go check on the the person who's having a seizure. Okay? So the more other people there are who could help, the less likely the real subject is to help. And among those who actually did help, the more other people that were around, the longer it was before they helped. So this is just the people who did help.

[00:52:46]Among the people who did help, the people who helped, okay, took longer if there were more other people around.

[00:52:53]Maybe because they were waiting to see what happened. All right, we're going to skip some slides here. Uh, okay. So, um, Bib Latine and John Darly did really seinal work on this and they developed a model that looked at the factors that determine whether someone helps or not. And there were more factors than these, but we're just going to focus on these three factors that they said have to happen and probably have to happen in sequence. You have to notice that something's wrong. You have to decide that it's an emergency that requires someone's help. And you have to decide that you are personally responsible for providing that help. So it's not enough to just decide someone needs to help. You have to decide you have to give help.

[00:53:39]And what's important about this and why social psychologists have studied this more than other areas of psychology is that all three of these factors are affected by and undermined by the presence of others. And I mean this both in terms of the fact that when we're with others, we know we might be seen and evaluated by others, but also because we're able to see others and see what they are doing. Okay. Our naive theories of helping, what are we just generally think motivates us to help or doesn't help, motivates us to help or not help, doesn't take these things into account. We think our decision to help or not help is just sort of independently rationally made based on the needs in the situation. And it turns out it's phenomenally dependent on what's going on socially in the situation. So I want to go through uh these three factors, but I just want to take a minute first to talk about the effect of being seen by others and how that might influence us. Okay. One very simple thing, and if you've ever ridden the subway in New York City, you should know this. Um, when others are around, we keep our eyes and ears to ourselves.

[00:54:50]Okay? So, if you're on a crowded subway in New York, people, if you look around, they're all looking down reading. They have their earphones in, right? They're basically shutting themsel off from the crowded world. They don't look up.

[00:55:04]Partly just because you don't know all these people, so you keep to yourself.

[00:55:07]partly because you're afraid of what they might do if you make eye contact with them. First time I I took my wife to New York City, my wife has really ginormous eyes. And we're sitting on the subway and she's just like staring at people like, "Honey, you're going to get us killed.

[00:55:27]You're This is New York. People kill people on the subway here."

[00:55:31]And she's like, "Oh, no." You know, it's just it's it's the nice friendly thing to do. I'm like, "Nice, friendly gets you killed in New York City. Don't do that." And she's like, "Matt, you're crazy. That's ridiculous." So, we get off the subway. We go visit her friend who's living in New York now. And she's like, "Ming, this is what Matt said. He said, "When you're on the subway, you shouldn't look at anyone." And Ming was like, "Naomi, what are you trying to get killed? You don't do that on the subway in New York."

[00:55:57]So, um, so she doesn't do that on the subway anymore, but she thinks you should be able to. Um, so we keep to ourselves, which makes us less able to take in sensory information that might indicate that something's wrong.

[00:56:10]Especially if you've got your iPhone or iPod plugged in, you're not going to hear things. Um, we also might be less willing to help others because we don't want to look foolish or incompetent if we try to help, but we can't do it well.

[00:56:23]And we're less likely to be influenced by this if we're the only one there because there's no one to look foolish or incompetent in front of except for the person who actually needs help and they probably won't mind. Um there's also the effect of seeing others. Okay.

[00:56:38]In the face of ambiguity, we look to others to define the situation for us. I think I told you that on the first day of class. So each of us when there's an emergency, we sort of play it cool till we see somebody else showing the surprise that indicates this is actually an emergency situation. But all those other people that we're waiting to see show that sort of fear or surprise or whatever it is, they're looking around to us to see if we're going to show it, but we're busy looking to them. So then you get a whole bunch of people who aren't showing the emotional reaction and that's what everybody is seeing. And so the situation then gets accidentally defined as less threatening or dangerous than it really is. And this is due to a concept called pluralistic ignorance.

[00:57:22]Okay, this is a really important great concept that leads to lots of really unfortunate things. So pluralistic ignorance occurs when everyone in a group really thinks X is the case. So each person worries that there's an emergency going on right now. So that's X. Okay. But each person believes that everyone else but them believes why that it's not an emergency because I don't see anyone else looking scared or worried. Okay? And so everybody keeps their own belief to themselves.

[00:57:55]And so nobody gets to find out that we all actually think the same thing, which is different than what we're all giving off right now in terms of our non-verbal communication. And the example of this that we've all at one time or another identified with is when you're hearing a professor or a teacher in high school talk about something and you have no idea what they're saying, but you don't want to raise your hand and ask a question because you assume that everybody else understands what the teacher is saying. Why? Because nobody else has their hand raised to ask a question. So if nobody else has their hand raised, the professor must have been clear and I'm an idiot. Okay? But in fact, what you get is, you know, 20 people sitting there all thinking, I don't want to be the only person to reveal that I'm an idiot, so I'm going to keep my hand down. But they're providing evidence to others that this is a situation where the teacher has been clear. So we worry about sort of asking what's the stupid question. But usually most of the time when we ask, we're asking the question that everybody else is thinking, but is kind of too afraid to ask. Okay? So, we assume others would do something if it was a real emergency, but it's ambiguous. They don't know. They're scared just like me, but they're looking to everyone else.

[00:59:08]Okay. So, let's go through those three things. Yeah.

[00:59:17]Sorry. If everyone raises their hand, then what?

[00:59:24]Sure. So if one person raises their hand then everyone goes oh well then it's not a stupid question right so but it's the same that's not the opposite phenomenon that's actually another example of the same thing until someone raises their hand everyone thinks this is the situation that's defined as the professor was clear as soon as hands go up or as soon as people look confused and everyone goes oh I'm I'm in the norm by being confused by this it wasn't me it was the teacher that was being unclear yeah sure So noticing something is wrong. That's the first critical thing you need to do in the context of helping. And um in this study, the confederate was Lee Ross who did all this stuff on false consensus effect and naive realism when he was an undergraduate. He was an undergraduate in the same lab with Dick Nisbbit. They were undergrads together and then they went on to basically take over the world in social psychology. But this is them doing uh their stint as a 196 or whatever it was called back then.

[01:00:21]And in this study, okay, the real subject uh would sit alone in a room or they would sit with two other confederates or they would sit with two other real subjects so that there were three real subjects in the room and they would start to fill out of the ventil out out of the vents where you would heat the room from. There would start to be thick white smoke seeping out into the room. And there's pictures of this in textbooks. It's pretty striking stuff coming out there. And what they measured was how quickly people noticed that there was potentially something wrong in the room. And what they found is that when people were alone, they noticed the smoke. 70% of them would notice within 5 seconds. But when people were with others and they videotaped to see when a person kind of oriented to the smoke, they were much less likely to notice within 5 seconds that the smoke was there. Why? Because when you're with other people, you keep to yourself. You look down. you're not looking around the room, but when you're alone in a room, you're just like, "What's going on?" And remember, there were no texting things or anything like that back then. Um, but when you're alone, you might be looking around, going through the professor's drawers, whatever it is. Um, and then the smoke comes and you're like, "Oh I see smoke. Oh crap." Okay. But with other people there, you're less likely to do that quickly. Okay. Now, what about once you see the smoke deciding it's an emergency? Well, in the same study, which they referred to as does smoke mean fire, those who had been um alone, who had been alone when they saw the smoke, most often reported that the smoke made them worry that there might be a fire. But those who were with others, okay, reported thinking, you know, different things like, "Oh, I just thought that smoke might be steam coming from the ventilator." Okay, now I've seen the pictures of this. It looks nothing like steam. It looks like dangerous, scary smoke. But if you're sitting with Confederates who don't act as if there's something going on that's dangerous, you're going to start thinking, well, what else could it be than something dangerous because it's clearly not dangerous or those people would look more worried and they don't look worried.

[01:02:28]These folks, even though they're coming up with this crazy interpretation that it was just steam coming from the ventilator, they don't realize that they're biased. They think they've come up with a genuine explanation. Okay? And that's because the other people around them define the situation for them as safe.

[01:02:47]Okay. Um so we've talked about this many times. We often let others define the situations for us. I just want to show you briefly uh this very quick study from Mgrim. Um Mgrim is famous for his obedience studies, but he did so many other incredibly creative and important studies that that nobody knows about him for. you know, the six degrees of separation stuff. He's the guy who did that research who showed that if you put a letter in the mail and and the letter arrives somewhere and you say, "If this isn't you, can you put this in the mail and send it to someone who you think might be better able to get it to the person that it's addressed to that within four or five mailings, they typically would arrive at the right person." So, he did that and he did this other study, a bunch of studies. He did these studies in New York City um living in a social world or the individual in the social world. And um in this study what he did is he would have one, two, five, 10 people standing kind of on a street corner and um and some number of them would be looking up, just looking up at nothing, but they're looking up.

[01:03:55]And what they measured was the people who walked by, what percentage of them would look up, too. Okay? And what they found is that with a very small number of people looking up, everybody else took that as a cue. There must be something up there. Must be interesting.

[01:04:09]I'm going to look up. Now, this isn't shocking except for the fact that you don't know these people. They're strangers to you. But we look to them to define the situation for us and we don't even know that we're doing it.

[01:04:23]Okay? So, and I've mentioned this before, you can define ambiguous situations for others. And this is, I think, a very powerful thing to know that you can do this. Okay? Um, even when you don't try, you're always sending a message of some kind or another. If you're doing nothing at all, you're sending a message that this is a safe situation. So, you're always helping to define the situations for others. You can do it in a more intentional way if you so choose. Now, I always like to remind everyone in the class that we're not just talking about crazy people out in the world. we're talking about ourselves. So, I just want to show you a few images. As you know, every year I always start, right, by having people um give me the finger on the first day of class. And so, here's a couple frames of the video I took of one of the classes that I've done this with before. And um and these are people standing in the front row. The people in the front are always most susceptible.

[01:05:20]And she's looking up and she sees that I've now said, "Give me the finger." And she looks to her left. She looks to her right and then she gives me the finger.

[01:05:31]Okay. And um and then here is um all of you hopefully.

[01:05:42]Oh, the video didn't transfer over. Oh, that's very sad. Um I'll try to get the video online somewhere so you can see it. But basically what you see when you see the video and you always see it more in the front row than in the back is that you see the people in the front uh see the the statement and then they look at each other and they see that nobody's giving me the finger and so they just sort of smile and look at each other and then like people start doing this where they give me like their first finger like or the thumbs up, right? People that were sitting right here do that.

[01:06:15]And of course for all of you you think well we just came up with the rational thing. you shouldn't give the finger to your professor. But then, you know, you have to explain why for years this is the response that I happily got from hundreds of students, all of these people giving me the finger. Um, and I hadn't really done anything to offend them just yet. Um, so, you know, this is something where, you know, we're not aware of the way that the others are driving our behavior. Yours to not give me the finger, theirs to give me the finger. I'll have to switch it up. Maybe I'll wear shorts next year the first time I teach. Get people giving me the finger again. Um the last thing you have to do, okay, to to end up being the person who helps is you have to decide that you are personally responsible for helping. Okay, so I'm going to tell you about one study. It's a very clever study. It takes a little bit of time to explain and to to understand. Um and so the way it works is this study was actually conducted on the subway in New York City. And they would do it in a car where um they would so there'd be the the subject would be sitting alone in a car and um one Confederate would go and sit down next to the subject at one stop and then at the next stop somebody else would get in and sit across from the two of them. So what you have is a Confederate sitting across from one Confederate and a real subject. Okay?

[01:07:43]And um the Confederate who was sitting across from the other two would ask for directions to some place, some obvious easy place to get to in New York City that everybody knows the answer to, but he's from out of town. Can you give me the directions? Okay. Um the asker would vary sort of who he directed his question to. So sometimes he would just direct his question to the other Confederate. Sometimes he would sort of look at both of them when he asked the question. and sometimes he would just look at the real subject himself. Now, no matter who he asked the question to, the other Confederate would chime in immediately and give the wrong answer.

[01:08:24]So, if the place you needed to go was over here, the other Confederate would say, "Oh, you go four blocks that way and turn left." Okay? So, the real subject knows absolutely these are the wrong directions. And the question is, do they see they know this person needs help? They know this person has been given incorrect information, but do they see themselves as the person to correct and provide that help that's now needed?

[01:08:49]And what they looked at was how the real subject responded based on who the the asker had directed the question to. If the question had been directed to them and to them alone, when the other person interrupts and gives the wrong answer, they correct it and they say, "No, actually, you want to go that way and it's four blocks that way." So, they're pretty good about doing that. But if the question was initially asked just to the person sitting next to them or asked to the two of them together, they don't not that often anyway. Okay? So there are only certain circumstances under which the person will say I am responsible even though I know okay that this other person needs help and that I could provide it. They only decide that I am going to be the person who provides it under certain circumstances. Um so there's a lot more that can be said about helping to be sure. Uh I used to do a whole half lecture on altruism whether it exists. Um, I think there's actually quite a bit of evidence to suggest that real altruism may exist where people help when there's no actual tangible benefits to the self. Uh, but we don't have time unfortunately to go into that and lots of other cool things.

[01:10:02]We've tried to spend a good deal of this quarter talking about these five hypotheses. And I'm not going to go through and list them all one more time out loud because I I've talked about them a lot. But what I've tried to do here is take many of the topics that we've talked about from throughout the quarter and sort of place them into the different hypotheses where I think that they might be sort of evidence for or relevant to um these hypotheses. And so what I want to do I just want to leave you sort of with a final thought um as we get to the end here. Um lots of people including Rutherford be Hayes have said over the years to have the courage of your convictions. Okay. And it turns out that that's the really easy thing to do because our convictions are really just what our pre-reflective mind tells us is reality out there. And it's easy to sort of have the courage of just I think red is red even when it might not be. Um along actually around almost the same time okay NZ said convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

[01:11:06]Okay. because convictions are often lies or mistruths that we don't recognize as mythtruths. And so a lot of what I've tried to sort of get you to think about this quarter are the ways in which the things that we naturally take to be true and real may not be because of the psychological processes that are at work in us. And so I think there's real benefit from stepping back having a little less confidence in those. And so what I would leave you with is that you should really try to have the courage to challenge your own convictions because that's what's really hard. I'll see you at the review session. Good luck.

[01:11:44]Thank you.

[01:11:55]Yeah.

[01:11:57]Not sure