The Social Animal
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. Aristotle Politics, c. 328 BC
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Note: Quote.
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Note: C.
Our definition of social psychology, therefore, is the scientific study of the influence of the real, imagined, or implied presence of others upon our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behavior — and of how we influence others.
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Note: Imp.
it’s also likely that you are acting on the hindsight bias, which refers to our tendency to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of a given event.
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Note: Term.
People Who Do Crazy Things Are Not Necessarily Crazy
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Note: C.
Aronson’s first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.
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Note: Imp.
One central discovery of social psychology is that people are prone to explain unpleasant behavior by assigning personality traits to the perpetrator, such as “psychotic,” “sadistic,” or “evil.”
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Note: Fundamental attribution error
This dispositional view of human actions refers to the assumptions that people who do crazy things have a personality disposition to be crazy, people who do stupid things must be stupid, only evil people do evil things, people who do nice things are nice, and so on.
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Note: Imp.
Much of the time, we use reason, facts, and critical analysis not to form our opinions but to confirm what we already see, feel, or believe.
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Note: Confirmation bias
Evolution and the Biased Brain
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Note: C.
One of the primary proponents of this view was Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who wrote that people decide the moral status of their behavior or choices — what’s good or bad, right or wrong — by creating a happiness calculation.
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Note: Utilitarianism
John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, went so far as to claim that with sufficient control over the environment and the right combination of rewards and punishments, he could shape a randomly selected healthy baby into virtually anything: a doctor, lawyer, beggar, or thief.
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Note: Term. Behaviorism
Babies enter the world with a mind that has had a great deal of preprogramming, with a temperament, a readiness for learning language and culture, and even innate expectations of how the physical and social world works.
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Note: Imp.
In humans it makes up over three-fourths of the brain’s volume, and within its many folds lie the regions responsible for higher-order processes, such as self-awareness, conscious thought, problem solving, self-control, and language. The especially large size and complexity of the neocortex, and the abilities it gave early humans, enabled us to form larger cooperative groups than other mammals and transmit our knowledge through culture.
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Note: Neocortex and groups
Dunbar discovered that our brain size appears to set a limit of about 150 people with whom we can have stable, meaningful relationships; human communities function optimally when they do not exceed this number by much.
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Note: Imp. 150
A useful implication of knowing the 150-person limit is that human organizations function better when they don’t get too large — when they can operate like communities rather than bureaucracies. Small schools have lower rates of violence and absences, better relationships, and higher-quality learning than larger, impersonal schools do.
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Note: Imp.
The rules of the game have changed, but our evolutionary predispositions have not.
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Note: Imp.
These tendencies helped keep us alive when we fought with stones and clubs, but over the millennia the human tendency to see the world in tribal, us-and-them terms has laid the foundation for conflict, political division, hatred, and war.
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Note: Imp.
A characteristic one is the bias blind spot, the belief that we are more objective and less biased than most other people. We are biased to think we aren’t biased! This blind spot arises from the fact that many of our beliefs operate implicitly, hidden beneath conscious awareness. When we see our own behavior, we know the context and can make excuses for it; we know what we feel, after all. But when we see others’ behavior, we miss the full context. That’s why it is easy to see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves.
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Note: Term. Fundamental Attribution Error
Worse yet, we are subject to naïve realism, the propensity to believe that our subjective interpretation of reality is reality. We see things as they really are; those other folks are biased. This belief makes it easier to think that anybody who doesn’t share our perspective is misguided, ignorant, selfish — or evil.
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Note: Term. Imp.
Of all the mind’s biases, the confirmation bias is central to how we see the world and process information: We notice, remember, and accept information that confirms what we already believe, and tend to ignore, forget, and reject information that disconfirms what we believe.
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Note: Term.
In our evolutionary past, this bias would have been adaptive, leading our forebears to have an “if it works, stay with it” strategy. But in the modern world, sometimes that strategy can lead us into dark alleys and dead ends.
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Note: Imp.
The Egocentric Bias Human beings are a social species, but we are also egocentric: We tend to place ourselves in the center of our own universes. That’s why people remember new information better when they can apply it to themselves than if they think it only affects other people.20 If they are working in groups, they tend to focus on and recall their own performance better than the performance of their teammates. And when people play an active role in generating information, they recall that information
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Note: Term. Egocentric bias
People feel as though the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it actually does, a bias Thomas Gilovich and his associates named the spotlight effect.
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Note: Term.
We may feel we’re in the spotlight when imagining how others see us, but we also feel that we notice and observe others more than they notice and observe us — a form of egocentrism that’s called the cloak of invisibility illusion.
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Note: Term.
The Barnum Effect refers to the fact that when people are given vague, all-purpose descriptions of themselves that could apply to almost anyone, they usually say “Incredible! That’s me exactly!” This effect helps explain why so many people mistakenly believe in the accuracy of astrology, fortune telling, and even some pop-psych personality tests.
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Note: Term.
A curious feature of the evolved human mind is that it is oriented toward negativity: We tend to focus more on potential threats than blessings, a tendency often called the negativity bias.
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Note: Term.
When given a choice, people are more likely to try to avoid loss than to try to achieve gains, a phenomenon known as loss aversion
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Note: Term.
We can learn to focus on the things we are grateful for and do kind things for others, habits that offset the negativity bias by generating satisfaction.
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Note: Imp.
Most decisions involve a two-step process. Our automatic system first produces a quick-and-dirty assessment of reality — an intuition, a feeling, an unthinking preference. Then, if we are motivated and if we have access to valid information, we use more controlled or deliberate thinking to modify the initial impressions.
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Note: Imp. Very
Evolution and the Social Brain
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Note: C.
Emotional pain served the purpose of making sure people cared when social connections were broken or at risk; individuals untouched by separation or rejection wouldn’t have lasted long.
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Note: The pain of breakup. Its all an llusion in the brain
An old Bedouin proverb says, “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger.” This proverb perfectly captures how our tribal minds divide the world into gradations of us and them.
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Note: Imp. Quote
he developed social identity theory, which described how our most important memberships in religious, political, regional, national, or occupational groups (e.g., Baptist, Muslim, Jewish? Texan or Hoosier? Firefighter or nurse?) feed a sense of belonging and self-worth and shape our thinking about people in and beyond our group. Tajfel’s
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Note: Term.
You can imagine how this bias might impair accurate eyewitness identification: White eyewitnesses are significantly more likely to mistakenly confuse one black person for another.
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Note: Own race bias
We are also far more charitable in judging members of our own group than when judging “them.” We not only see people in our group as being more varied; we see our group as being better and more deserving. This ingroup bias confers feelings of pride and esteem: We distort our perceptions of the world so that our group looks better than others, and we feel better because we are part of it.
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Note: Imp.
Yet human beings are so naturally inclined to divide the world into us and them that ingroup bias emerges even when group membership is based on differences that are trivial, even meaningless.
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Note: Point.
Why are we so ready to discriminate so much on the basis of so little? Because it’s in our DNA. For hunter-gatherers, it paid to be vigilant for differences between members of their own tribe, who might be competitors, and for outsiders, who would likely be attackers.
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Note: Imp.
Rather, music exists everywhere because of its power to organize individuals into a coordinated group or team in a way that nothing else quite can, transmitting information about a group’s mood or intended purpose to many people at once.
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Note: Imp. Very
Control Certainty, even unhappy certainty, satisfies a third strong social motive: the need for control, the feeling that we have the autonomy and competence to direct our own actions and make things happen.
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Note: Imp.
For many people, a sense of control is so central to well-being that they act as though they have control when they don’t. They
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Note: The tenets of Stoicism
Trust As social animals, we cannot survive without trusting other people. Although evolution endowed us with the negativity bias — “the bad is stronger than the good” effect — we are highly motivated to trust that the world is safe, benevolent, and fair.
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Note: Imp.
In a common but unfortunate attempt to feel better and assure ourselves that such a thing could never happen to us, we may resort to blaming the victim, trying to find reasons that the victim did something to invite such treatment.
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Note: Victim blaming
these social motives provides a lens through which to view social cognition and behavior. We do our best work when we feel that we belong, when we can predict results, when we are free to make choices and be in control, when we get to do work that makes us feel useful, and when we trust our loved ones and colleagues.
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Note: Imp. Core social motives
Arie Kruglanski, an expert on terrorism, has found several commonalities among terrorists, and three central motives stand out.63 First, they have an intense desire to belong, to be part of a larger group that provides them with an identity and purpose. Second, they have a high need for certainty, order, and structure; the black-and-white dogma of fundamentalist groups provides them with clear answers — with the certainty they crave in an uncertain world. Third, belonging to a terrorist group resolves their feeling that their lives are trivial and meaningless; it provides them with significance, an intense feeling that their lives matter.
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Note: Terrorism and motives
Perceiving and Explaining Our Social Worlds
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Note: C.
According to attribution theory, people make one of two kinds of causal explanations before they answer: One explanation has to do with the person’s typical personality (a dispositional attribution); the other has to do with the situation the person is in (a situational attribution).
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Note: Imp.
attribution theory: a theory that describes the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior
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Note: Imp.
The term fundamental attribution error refers to a human tendency to overestimate the importance of personality or dispositional factors relative to situational or environmental influences when describing and explaining why people do what they do.
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Note: Term.
the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Of all the attributions we make, those about success and failure are among the most important, because they affect our sense of control. When children have trouble in school or fail their tests, the explanations they tell themselves and others about the reasons will determine whether they continue to fail — or eventually succeed.
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Note: Term.
self-fulfilling prophecy: the process that occurs when people (1) have an expectation about what another person is like, which then (2) influences how they act toward that person, and (3) causes that person to behave in a way that confirms those people’s original expectations
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Note: Term.
This effect was primarily found in first and second grades, which suggests that children are particularly susceptible to their teachers’ expectations of them when they are new to school and their academic self-concepts are still forming. In later grades, the score differences were smaller or nonexistent. However, for students belonging to minority groups, the impact of teacher expectations was larger and spanned more grades, suggesting that minority status leaves children especially sensitive to the way their teachers treat them.
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Note: Teachets impact students
The Effects of Context on Social Judgments
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Note: C.
A basic principle of social cognition is that all judgment is relative; how we perceive and think about a person or an event depends on its social context.
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Note: Imp. Term.
The principle behind the use of such decoys is the contrast effect, a change in how good something looks to you in contrast to a similar item.
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Note: Term.
Important judgments we make about ourselves can also be influenced by contrast effects. One of the most potent sources of information about ourselves is social comparison, the process by which we evaluate our abilities, achievements, attitudes, and other attributes by comparing ourselves to others. Depending on whom we compare ourselves to, the results can be informative
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Note: Imp. Term.
And many people suffer from the “Facebook blues,” the vague depression that follows from checking on friends and learning how perfect their lives are — or seem to be with all those vacations they take, the cute puppies they have, their perfect families, the parties, etc.
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Note: Term.
We can also avoid painful comparisons with others by cultivating what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, the belief in the human ability to grow and the commitment to self-improvement. We can, she says, learn to see other people as sources of inspiration and knowledge rather than as opportunities to feel inadequate.
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Note: Term.
priming: a procedure based on the notion that ideas that have been recently encountered or frequently activated are more likely to come to mind and thus will be used in interpreting social events
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Note: Term. Imp.
primacy effect: the effect that occurs when information encountered first has more impact on our impressions or beliefs than subsequent information
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Note: Term.
The Representativeness Heuristic When we focus on surface similarities to make inferences, we are using the representativeness heuristic.
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Note: Term.
The Availability Heuristic The availability heuristic is the tendency to predict the likelihood of an event, or judge how risky it is, based on how easy it is to bring specific examples to mind.
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Note: Term.
Priming can increase the images that are available to us. If you ask people to estimate the number of violent crimes committed each year in the United States, you will get very different answers, depending on how much media they consume and what shows they watch. TV news is often based on the mantra “If it bleeds, it leads”
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Note: Media priming
The availability heuristic also affects how we see ourselves and the things we believe. If we can remember and process information fluently or easily, it seems “truer” to us than if we have to struggle to assess its veracity.
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Note: Imp.
Simply hearing a statement repeated over and over — even the basest lie — makes it more familiar to people, increasing their belief that if it is familiar, it must be true.
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Note: Goebbels propaganda quote
The Affect Heuristic Do I like this person? How do I feel about that idea? Our feelings are valuable sources of information so when we tap into our feelings to shape our evaluations of people or ideas, we are using an affect heuristic.
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Note: Term.
This phenomenon is sometimes called the halo effect, a bias in which a favorable or unfavorable feeling colors specific inferences and future expectations about a person.
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Note: Term.
Mental Time Travel: Biases in Predicting the Future and Recalling the Past
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Note: C.
Constructive Prediction Predicting how certain outcomes will make us feel determines the goals we set and the risks we are willing to take.
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Note: Term.
On the contrary, remembering is a reconstructive process. Our memories are most strongly influenced not by what actually happened in the past but by what we are thinking about those events in the present. We recreate our memories from bits and pieces of actual events filtered through and modified by our notions of what might have been, what should have been, or the way we would like things to have been.
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Note: Imp. About Fallibility of memories
Autobiographical Memory Memory is not only reconstructive when it involves quick, snapshot-like events, such as the details of an automobile accident, but also when it involves something more enduring, such as our own history.
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Note: Term.
Rather, we construct memories to fit the picture we have of ourselves. Thanks to the confirmation bias, we are more likely to recall memories that confirm our belief.
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Note: Imp.
I find one aspect of autobiographical memory is especially useful to students. Recall the discussion of the egocentric bias? There’s a lesson in here for you: One of the best ways to recall material from this book is to relate it to your personal experiences — to think how it applies to you.
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Note: Using egocengric ias as learning aod
Living with the Cognitive Miser Within
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Note: C.
People are motivated to justify their own actions, beliefs, and feelings. When they do something, they will try, if at all possible, to convince themselves (and others) that it was a logical, reasonable thing to do.
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Note: Imp.
much of our behavior is governed by factors of which we are unaware. Then, when pressed to explain our actions, we attempt to construct a story that makes sense but at the same time satisfies our desire to look good to ourselves and to others. That’s the essence of self-justification
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Note: Term.
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
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Note: C.
Festinger described cognitive dissonance as a state of tension that occurs when an individual simultaneously holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. Two cognitions are dissonant if the opposite of one follows from the other.
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Note: Term. Imp.
How do we convince ourselves that our lives are not absurd? That is, how do we reduce cognitive dissonance? We do this by changing one or both cognitions in such a way as to render them more compatible (more consonant) with each other or by adding more cognitions that help bridge the gap between the original cognitions.
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Note: Imp.
But if you are so convinced of the existence of a spaceship that you’re ready to die to ride on it, and yet your telescope doesn’t reveal it, then obviously there must
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Note: Irony!
But if you are so convinced of the existence of a spaceship that you’re ready to die to ride on it, and yet your telescope doesn’t reveal it, then obviously there must be something wrong with the telescope!
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Note: Hahaha
Not unlike members of cults, whenever we feel a strong allegiance to a religion, political party, charismatic leader, or ideology, we too are capable of coming up with all kinds of distortions of the evidence when those loyalties are challenged by facts.
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Note: Modern day politics imp.
And then I realized that each group loved their candidate so that a guy would have to be this blatant — he would have to look into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a crook, do you hear me? I am the worst choice you could ever make for the presidency!” And even then his following would say, “Now there’s an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind of guy we need for president.”
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Note: Cult of politics
Dissonance Reduction and Irrational Behavior
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Note: C.
By “irrational,” I mean their maladaptive behavior can prevent them from learning essential facts or from finding real solutions to their problems.
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Note: Imp.
Dissonance theory predicts that people will remember the plausible arguments agreeing with their own position and the implausible arguments agreeing with the opposing position.
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Note: Imp.
This process probably accounts for the fact that, on issues like politics and religion, people who are deeply committed will almost never come to see things our way, no matter how powerful and balanced our arguments are.15 This study illuminates the state of polarized political discourse in America today.
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Note: Polarisation Of politics
Dissonance as a Consequence of Making a Decision
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Note: C.
Following a decision — especially a difficult one or one that involves a significant amount of time or money — people almost always experience dissonance. They do because their choice is seldom entirely positive and the rejected alternatives are seldom entirely negative.
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Note: Imp.
Whether we are talking about appliances or romantic partners, once you have made a firm commitment, you will tend to focus on the positive aspects of your choices and downplay the appeal of the alternatives.
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Note: Imp.
This is not to say we never have regrets. But given the countless decisions we make in our lives, it is remarkable how seldom we have them — thanks to our ability to reduce dissonance.
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Note: Regret and dissonance
lowballing: an unscrupulous strategy in which a customer agrees to purchase a product at a very low cost, after which the salesperson claims that price was an error and then raises the price, betting that the customer will agree to make the purchase at the inflated price, which he or she often does
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Note: Term.
In this instance, the most efficient way to reduce dissonance would be to change your attitude about cheating. If you cheat, you will adopt a more lenient attitude. Your reasoning might go something like this: “Cheating isn’t so bad under some circumstances. As long as nobody gets hurt, it’s really not very immoral. Anybody would do it. Therefore, it’s a part of human nature — so how could it be bad? Since it is only human, those who get caught cheating should not be severely punished but should be treated with understanding.”
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Note: Imp.
entrapment: the process by which people make a small decision, justify it, and over time find themselves increasingly committed to a belief or activity
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Note: Term.
One possibility is to get the person involved in a much smaller aspect of the job, one so easy that he or she wouldn’t dream of turning it down. This action serves to commit the individual to “the cause.” Once people are thus committed, the likelihood of their complying with the larger request increases.
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Note: This can be used
This process of using small favors to encourage people to accede to larger requests has been dubbed the foot-in-the-door technique. It is effective because having done the smaller favor provides justification in advance for agreeing to do the larger favor
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Note: Term.
The Psychology of Insufficient Justification
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Note: C.
external justification: a person’s justification for his or her dissonant behavior that is situation-determined
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Note: Term.
But what happens if there is not ample justification in the situation itself? In such cases we need to create internal justification, a change in attitude used to justify behavior. If you do or say something that is difficult to justify externally, you will attempt to justify it internally by making your attitudes more consistent with what you did or said.
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Note: Term.
Thus, dissonance theory predicts that we begin to believe the things we say — but only if we don’t have enough external justification for saying them. The smaller the bribe used to get you to give a speech, the more likely it is that you will feel the need to justify delivering it by convincing yourself that the things you said were true.
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Note: Imp.
The more severe the threat, the more likely that the boy will mend his ways while you are watching him. But he will probably hit his sister again as soon as you turn your back.
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Note: Imp.
The child in the mild-threat situation feels dissonance, too. But when he asks himself, “How come I’m not beating up my little sister?” he doesn’t have a good answer because the threat is so mild that it does not provide abundant justification. The child isn’t doing something he wants to do — and while he does have some justification for not doing it, he lacks complete justification. In this situation, he continues to experience dissonance, but he can’t reduce it by simply blaming his inaction on a severe threat. The child must find a way to justify the fact that he is not aggressing against his little sister, and the best way is to try to convince himself that he really doesn’t like to beat his sister up, that he didn’t want to do it in the first place, and that beating up little kids isn’t fun anyway.
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Note: Child bearing psychology
By and large, if you want someone to do something just once (or refrain from doing it), while you are standing there watching them, then by all means provide them with the largest incentive (or the most severe punishment) you can deliver. If you offer that person a million dollars to say that the North Korean dictator is a great humanitarian, or if you put a gun to their head and threaten to pull the trigger six times, chances are that person will say what you want — but they won’t believe it. But if you want that person to develop a set of values or beliefs that they will act on even when you aren’t there, then offer the person the smallest award that will bring about the behavior you want. That gets them to do the work of persuading themselves, which ensures that they will continue to do those things (or refrain from doing those things) for years after you have left the room.
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Note: Imp. Persuasion
Dissonance, the Self-Concept, and Self-Esteem
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Note: C.
These findings suggest that parents and teachers should be alert to the potentially far-reaching consequences of their own behavior as it affects the self-esteem of their children and students. If high self-esteem can serve as a buffer against dishonest behavior and promote desirable behavior, then it might seem reasonable to do everything possible to help individuals learn to respect themselves
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Note: Imp.
if a person goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive — a process called the justification of effort
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Note: Term.
Here’s the irony: It is precisely because I think I am such a nice person that, if I do something that causes you pain, I must convince myself you are a rat. Because nice guys like me don’t go around hurting innocent people, you must have deserved every nasty thing I did to you.
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Note: Imp.
dehumanize: the process of seeing victims as nonhumans, which lowers inhibitions against aggressive actions, and also makes continued aggression easier and more likely
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Note: Term.
system justification: Many people who were born into the highest levels of society, who have the greatest wealth and power, justify that position by believing they are entitled to it by virtue of their superior abilities and native talent, whereas all those poor and struggling people are just too unable or unmotivated to succeed.
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Note: Term.
Dissonance theory suggests that if scientists want to motivate people into taking immediate action on global warming, it will be vital to also convince them that doing something about it is within their control. Simply stoking up their fears is likely to make them either deny its existence or actively disregard the scientific evidence.
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Note: Imp.
Practical Applications of Dissonance Theory
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Note: C.
Living with the Rationalizer Within
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Note: C.
That’s why, when people are forced to apologize, what they say usually rings hollow: “If I offended anyone …” Of course you did! That’s why we want you to apologize! Only by stepping back and recognizing how prone we are to rationalizing and justifying ourselves can we take the first step to being able to apologize and really mean it — and thereby maintain healthy relationships.
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Note: Imp.
When such groups are called upon to make decisions, they can fall prey to what Irving Janis called groupthink,6 a way of thinking that occurs in cohesive groups in which the members’ need for agreement overrides their ability to realistically assess a course of action and its alternatives.
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Note: Term.
Conformity can be defined as a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from another person or group of people.
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Note: Term.
When people talk to each other, they often mirror one another’s nonverbal behaviors and mannerisms, a phenomenon called the chameleon effect.
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Note: Term.
Although many animals imitate others of their kind, humans are exceptionally prone to it. Some neuroscientists attribute this fact to mirror neurons, highly specialized brain cells that are activated both when we perform an action and when we witness another person performing the same action.
Page: 166, Location: 2531-2533
Note: Imp.
If you are in a dark room and you stare at a fixed point of light from a distance, after a while the light will appear to move, a visual illusion called the autokinetic effect.
Page: 169, Location: 2585-2586
Note: Term.
One is nicely illustrated by this contrast in folk wisdom: In America, people say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” (meaning, “Speak up! Be heard!”); in Japan they say, “The nail that sticks up gets pounded down” (meaning, “Don’t deviate from your group”). In their analysis of 133 experiments using the Asch procedure in 17 different countries, Rod Bond and Peter Smith22 found that conformity is more prevalent in collectivist societies, which explicitly value group harmony (like Japan and China), than in individualistic societies (like the United States and France).
Page: 172, Location: 2626-2631
Note: Imp.
Nevertheless, for human beings anywhere, resisting group pressure is very difficult, and the pain of nonconformity shows up not only on their faces but also in their neurological activity.
Page: 172, Location: 2632-2633
Note: Imp.
Factors That Increase or Decrease Conformity
Page: 177, Location: 2714-2714
Note: C.
It only takes one dissenter to seriously diminish the power of the group to induce conformity.
Page: 179, Location: 2743-2743
Note: Imp.
As one expert on teen violence put it, “The stupidest creature to ever walk the face of the earth is an adolescent boy in the company of his peers
Page: 183, Location: 2795-2796
Note: Bwahahwl
You may recognize this setup as a test of the “broken windows theory,” which holds that when the environment sends the message that people don’t care, the disorder spreads to human behavior.52 People seem to say to themselves, “Oh, what the hell. If others are going to behave irresponsibly, I might as well, too.”
Page: 188, Location: 2877-2880
Note: Imp.
The Uninvolved Bystander as Conformist
Page: 189, Location: 2893-2894
Note: C.
In 1964, the New York Times ran a shocking story, one that left a major legacy in the history of social-psychological research.
Page: 189, Location: 2894-2896
Note: Bystander Effect
Acting out an emotion we do not really feel because we believe it is socially appropriate is called emotion work.
Page: 197, Location: 3014-3015
Note: Term.
The term compliance best describes the behavior of a person who is motivated by a desire to gain reward or avoid punishment
Page: 201, Location: 3071-3072
Note: Term.
The term identification describes a level of conformity brought about by an individual’s desire to be like the group or role model they admire. In identification, as in compliance, we do not behave in a particular way because such behavior is intrinsically satisfying; rather, we do it because it puts us in a satisfying relationship with the person or persons with whom we are identifying
Page: 201, Location: 3079-3082
Note: Term.
Thus, if we find a person or a group appealing in some way, we will be inclined to let that person or group influence us by adopting their values and attitudes.
Page: 202, Location: 3083-3084
Note: Social Meida influencer
Finally, the internalization of a value or belief is the most permanent level of conformity. The motivation to internalize a belief is the desire to be right.
Page: 203, Location: 3105-3107
Note: Term.
Obedience as a Form of Compliance
Page: 204, Location: 3124-3124
Note: C.
This behavior is not limited to American men living in Connecticut. Wherever the Milgram procedure has been tried, it has produced a significant degree of obedience. Several replications of the experiment76 have demonstrated that people in Australia, Jordan, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands react in much the same way as the men in Milgram’s original experiment, and women are just as obedient as men.
Page: 207, Location: 3162-3166
Note: Famous stanley milligram experiment
debriefing: the procedure whereby the purpose of the study and exactly what transpired is explained to participants at the end of an experiment
Page: 213, Location: 3256-3257
Note: Term.
5 Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion
Page: 216, Location: 3302-3303
Note: C..
Compared with opinions, attitudes are extremely difficult to change — as we will see when we discuss the complex attitudes called prejudices.
Page: 218, Location: 3330-3331
Note: Imp.
Effects of the Modern Media Landscape
Page: 218, Location: 3342-3342
Note: C.
As Hermann Goering, one of Adolf Hitler’s top aides, said before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg, “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders … all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Page: 227, Location: 3475-3478
Note: Imp. Quote.
The media also exerts its power through a phenomenon known as emotional contagion, which occurs when one person’s emotional behavior triggers similar emotions and behaviors in observers.
Page: 227, Location: 3479-3481
Note: Term.
Effectiveness of Media Appeals
Page: 230, Location: 3525-3525
Note: C.
If only the mere fact of knowing that a communicator is biased protected us from being influenced by the message! Unfortunately, just because we think we are immune to persuasion does not necessarily mean we are immune. Indeed, our sense of immunity can make us more susceptible to persuasion of all kinds.
Page: 232, Location: 3544-3546
Note: Imp.
Education, Propaganda, or Fake News?
Page: 237, Location: 3627-3627
Note: C.
Two Major Routes to Persuasion
Page: 241, Location: 3681-3681
Note: C.
the three key factors that can increase the effectiveness of a communication or persuasive attempt: (1) the source of the communication (who says it), (2) the nature of the communication (how he or she says it), and (3) the characteristics and mindset of the audience (to whom he or she says it).
Page: 245, Location: 3743-3745
Note: Imp.
The Source of the Communication
Page: 245, Location: 3749-3749
Note: C.
The Nature of the Communication
Page: 254, Location: 3890-3890
Note: C.
Daniel Gilbert67 suggests that part of the answer lies in the way our brains work. Our brains evolved to be frightened — and riled to action — by threats of clear and present dangers (like tigers, snakes, or enemies carrying weapons), not gradual ones that might happen later (like droughts, influenza, or more frequent hurricanes).
Page: 260, Location: 3980-3983
Note: Imp.
Thus fear-inducing appeals are especially effective if they resonate with our evolutionary programming to fear being attacked by a threat that feels immediate and intentional.
Page: 261, Location: 3998-3999
Note: Imp.
Because most people are more deeply influenced by one personal example than by an abundance of statistical data, your friend’s Taco Loco story or the thought of a basketball-sized hole in your living room will probably be extraordinarily powerful.
Page: 264, Location: 4040-4042
Note: Imp.
It is also the reason that professional lobbyists are trained in how to persuade members of Congress to vote for some bill: Don’t present a lot of statistics, they are warned; just tell an emotional story about one individual.
Page: 264, Location: 4044-4045
Note: Imp. Vrry
inoculation effect:99 When people receive a brief communication that they are then able to refute, they tend to be “immunized” against a subsequent full-blown presentation of the same argument, in much the same way that a small amount of a weakened virus immunizes people against a full-blown attack by that virus.
Page: 279, Location: 4275-4278
Note: Term.
In science, we don’t get to say, “I don’t like your findings because they go against my values!” and leave the room, slamming the door behind us. We are obligated to use evidence to make a case for why we think they are wrong.
Page: 282, Location: 4316-4318
Note: Science Doesn't care about your feelings
Whereas the chimpanzee will act aggressively with little provocation, the bonobo is one of the least aggressive species on the planet. In fact, bonobos have been called the “make love not war” ape, because whenever a potentially dangerous conflict looms, bonobos have sex, which defuses tension. (They will have sex after a conflict, too, to make up.)
Page: 288, Location: 4406-4408
Note: Be like bonobo. hahaha
Most social psychologists, therefore, believe that aggression is an optional strategy: We humans are born with the capacity for aggressive behavior, but how, whether, when, and where we express it is learned and depends on our circumstances and culture
Page: 289, Location: 4427-4429
Note: Imp.
Catharsis — Does It Work?
Page: 299, Location: 4582-4582
Note: C.
The most acceptable forms of sublimation were generally thought to be art and sports. The psychiatrist William Menninger43 asserted that “competitive games provide an unusually satisfactory outlet for the instinctive aggressive drive.”
Page: 300, Location: 4589-4591
Note: Psychological Sublimation
The message is clear: Physical activity — like punching a punching bag or playing an aggressive sport — neither dissipates anger nor reduces subsequent aggression against the person who provoked it. In fact, the data lead us in precisely the opposite direction: The more that people ventilate anger by behaving aggressively, the angrier they remain and the more aggressive they become. Venting anger — directly or indirectly, verbally or physically — does not reduce hostility; it increases it.
Page: 303, Location: 4631-4635
Note: Imp.
This method of reducing dissonance in the face of an injustice or crime is universal.
Page: 304, Location: 4657-4658
Note: Imp.
These factors help draw the important distinction between frustration and deprivation. Children who don’t have toys (and monkeys who don’t have grapes) do not necessarily become angry or aggressive. Rather, as the toy experiment indicates, it was those children who had every reason to expect to play with the toys who felt frustrated when that expectancy was thwarted; this thwarted hope was what caused the children to behave destructively.
Page: 317, Location: 4852-4855
Note: Imp.
Relative deprivation explains a persistent mystery about most social revolutions: They usually are not started by people whose faces are in the mud. They are most frequently started by people who have recently lifted their faces out of the mud, looked around, and noticed that other people are doing better than they are and that the system is treating them unfairly
Page: 318, Location: 4872-4875
Note: Imp. How social revolutions happens
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote more than 150 years ago, “Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable, become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.”
Page: 319, Location: 4879-4881
Note: Imp. Quote.
social cognitive learning theory: the theory that people learn how to behave through their cognitive processes, such as their perceptions of events and through observation and imitation of others
Page: 320, Location: 4898-4899
Note: Term.
weapons effect: when the mere presence of an object associated with aggression — gun, rifle, or other weapon — serves as a cue for an aggressive response
Page: 322, Location: 4931-4932
Note: Term.
Anonymity induces deindividuation, a state of lessened self-awareness, reduced concern about what other people think of them, and weakened restraints against prohibited forms of behavior. When we are made self-aware, we tend to uphold our own values (e.g., “Thou shalt not harm”); when we are anonymous and not self-aware, we tend to act more on impulse.
Page: 323, Location: 4946-4949
Note: Term. Online Trolling
Violence and the Mass Media
Page: 325, Location: 4979-4979
Note: C.
desensitization: a process whereby we become decreasingly distressed when we see people hurt
Page: 331, Location: 5062-5063
Note: Term.
found that those who played many different violent games were more likely to develop, over time, what’s known as a hostile attribution bias, the tendency to interpret the ambiguous behavior of others in a hostile manner — rather than give others the benefit of the doubt. And by their own admission, they were also getting into more fights with their peers.
Page: 332, Location: 5088-5091
Note: Term.
Ques - are violent games and movies bad?
Taking all this research together, I conclude that frequent exposure to violent media, especially in the form of violent video games, does have an impact on many children and adolescents, although the impact is greatest on those who are already prone to violent behavior.
Page: 333, Location: 5101-5103
Note: Imp. Very imp
The Elements of Aggression: The Case of Sexual Assault
Page: 334, Location: 5116-5117
Note: C.
sexual scripts: implicit rules that specify proper sexual behavior for a person in a given situation, varying with the person’s gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and peer group
Page: 336, Location: 5146-5147
Note: Term.
Toward the Reduction of Violence
Page: 339, Location: 5196-5196
Note: C.
Final Thoughts on the Nature of Human Nature
Page: 351, Location: 5378-5379
Note: C.
The Cognitive Component of Prejudice: Stereotypes
Page: 362, Location: 5540-5540
Note: C.
Babies begin creating categories almost as soon as they are born.12 Newborns show no preference for faces of one race or another, but if they live in a setting that is “mono-racial,” by three months of age they will show a preference for faces of their own race.
Page: 362, Location: 5547-5550
Note: Imp.
A stereotype reflects the belief that a particular attribute is characteristic of the group as a whole, regardless of the actual variation among the group’s members.
Page: 363, Location: 5557-5559
Note: Term.
Moreover, stereotypes can lead us astray when we apply them to an individual group member, and this can be unfair and potentially harmful — even if the stereotype is positive.
Page: 365, Location: 5594-5595
Note: Imp.
around the world, sexism takes two basic forms, which they call hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.
Page: 369, Location: 5644-5646
Note: Term.
The Emotional Component of Prejudice: Gut Feelings and Hatreds
Page: 370, Location: 5670-5671
Note: C.
The Behavioral Component of Prejudice: Discrimination
Page: 373, Location: 5718-5719
Note: C.
Under such circumstances, people tend to fall back on their stereotypes, even if they are highly motivated to get things right.
Page: 383, Location: 5860-5861
Note: When mentally tired state
ingroup bias: when we favor our own group over another
Page: 386, Location: 5905-5906
Note: Term.
In modern times, the term scapegoating describes the process of blaming innocent — and powerless — others for our troubles.
Page: 390, Location: 5970-5971
Note: Term.
stereotype threat: the apprehension experienced by members of a minority group that they might confirm an existing (negative) cultural stereotype; this apprehension has been shown to interfere with intellectual performance
Page: 402, Location: 6150-6152
Note: Term.
Reducing Prejudice Through Contact and Familiarity
Page: 406, Location: 6219-6219
Note: C.
To be sure, sometimes, instead of revising their stereotypes in light of the new evidence, people reduce dissonance by creating a subcategory — such as “competent female” or “African Americans I admire” — allowing them to preserve the stereotype while seeing the person in front of them as a rare exception, perhaps even “the exception that proves the rule.”
Page: 408, Location: 6244-6247
Note: Imp.
Reducing Prejudice Through Cooperation and Interdependence
Page: 412, Location: 6308-6308
Note: C.
jigsaw classroom: a cooperative classroom structure designed to reduce ethnic, race, and gender prejudice and raise the self-esteem and confidence of children by having them work in small, racially mixed, cooperative groups
Page: 416, Location: 6365-6367
Note: Term.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion,” Mandela wrote. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Page: 425, Location: 6505-6507
Note: Quote.
8 Liking, Loving, and Connecting
Page: 425, Location: 6511-6511
Note: C..
It is feeling alone and being isolated that cause the problems.7 People can be surrounded by others and feel lonely; they can live alone and have a rich social life.
Page: 428, Location: 6556-6559
Note: Imp.
Liking: What Attracts Us to Others — and Gets Them to Like Us?
Page: 429, Location: 6571-6571
Note: C.
Moreover, we humans are so certain of the relationship between attitude similarity and liking that if we happen to like someone for some irrelevant reason — we both share an interest in birdwatching, say — we will assume that we share attitudes about politics, religion, and movies, too. Thus, causality works in both directions: We like people whose attitudes are similar to ours, and if we like someone, we attribute attitudes to him or her that are similar to ours.
Page: 434, Location: 6648-6651
Note: Very imp.
the participants who are considered the most competent and have the best ideas tend not to be the ones who are best liked.25 Why? One possibility is that, although we like to be around competent people, those who are too competent make us uncomfortable. They may seem unapproachable, distant, superhuman — and make us look bad (and feel worse) by comparison. If this were true, we might like people more if they reveal some evidence of fallibility. For example, if your friend is a brilliant mathematician, superb athlete, and gourmet cook, you might like him or her better if, every once in a while, they screwed up. I
Page: 436, Location: 6673-6679
Note: Imp. About smsrtnesd and relations
The results confirmed what we called the pratfall effect: The superior person who committed a blunder was rated most attractive; the average person who committed the same blunder was rated least attractive. The perfect person (no blunder) was second in attractiveness, and the mediocre person (no blunder) finished third.
Page: 438, Location: 6704-6707
Note: Term.
And so, being liked makes the heart grow fonder. Furthermore, the greater our insecurity and self-doubt, the fonder we will grow of the person who likes
Page: 447, Location: 6841-6842
Note: Imp.
The Effects of Praise and Favors
Page: 452, Location: 6930-6930
Note: C.
This notion is not new. In 1869, one of the world’s greatest novelists, Leo Tolstoy, wrote in his novel War and Peace, “We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.”
Page: 456, Location: 6981-6982
Note: Imp.
The Gain-Loss Theory of Attraction
Page: 457, Location: 7006-7007
Note: C.
The philosopher Baruch de Spinoza61 may have had something like this process in mind when, about 300 years ago, he observed: Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love, and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it. For he who begins to love a thing which he was wont to hate or regard with pain, from the very fact of loving, feels pleasure. To this pleasure involved in love is added the pleasure arising from aid given to the endeavor to remove the pain involved in hatred.
Page: 460, Location: 7039-7044
Note: Quote.
One tactic in particular — negging — caught my eye, because it depends on the gain-loss phenomenon. To neg someone means to begin the contact with a mild insult, often in the form of a compliment. (For example, “Wow, those shoes must be comfortable, given how ugly they are.”) Theoretically, negging has two effects. First, it distinguishes the speaker from all the other suitors who approach the woman with compliments; this makes him seem interesting. Second, it deals a blow to the woman’s self-esteem, which can make her want the insulter’s approval, which in turn motivates her to try to get it by spending more time with him. She then feels a warm gratification when she is able to change his apparently low opinion of her into a higher one. It’s a devious trick and, according to Strauss, good for starting a conversation with a woman or even getting her to go home with the guy. But is it the basis for a good relationship? I don’t think so. Indeed, at the end of Strauss’s book, he falls in love with a woman, in part because she responded to none of his tactics.
Page: 461, Location: 7058-7066
Note: Term. Negging getting girls yeahhh
In contrast, a communal relationship is one in which neither of the partners is keeping score. Rather, a person will be inclined to give in response to the other’s need and will readily receive the same kind of care when he or she is feeling needy.
Page: 463, Location: 7088-7090
Note: Term.
Someone who counts every little thing they give and every little thing they get back is telling the other person that they want an exchange relationship rather than a communal one.
Page: 465, Location: 7116-7117
Note: Imp.
Love: What Is It and How Does It Happen?
Page: 465, Location: 7121-7121
Note: C.
Passionate love is characterized by strong emotions, exhilaration, unquenchable sexual desire, and intense preoccupation with the beloved. Many describe passionate love as literally an altered state of consciousness, like that produced by marijuana or alcohol.
Page: 465, Location: 7126-7128
Note: Term.
Like all drugs, though, the high of passionate love wears off after about a year to 18 months. If the relationship is solid, companionate love arises to take its place — a milder, more stable experience marked by feelings of mutual trust, dependability, and warmth.
Page: 466, Location: 7135-7137
Note: Term.
Philosopher Robert Solomon73 argued that, “We conceive of [love] falsely … We expect an explosion at the beginning powerful enough to fuel love through all of its ups and downs instead of viewing love as a process over which we have control, a process that tends to increase with time rather than wane.”
Page: 467, Location: 7150-7153
Note: Imp.
Extensive research finds that Ansari’s parents are not unusual;75 they, like most other couples in arranged marriages, turn out to be as happy as couples who start out in a delirium of romantic passion, with stars in their eyes and lust everywhere else.
Page: 469, Location: 7178-7180
Note: Imp.
This process suggests that once we have grown certain of the rewarding behavior of our long-term partner, that person may become less effective as a source of reward than a stranger. We know that gains are important, but a long-term lover or spouse is probably behaving near ceiling level and, therefore, cannot provide us with much of a gain. But a loved one has great potential to hurt us, by withdrawing support, appreciation, and other rewards. The closer the relationship and the greater the past history of invariant esteem and reward, the more devastating is their withdrawal. In effect, then, the long-term lover has more power to inflict loss than to provide additional gain, thereby hurting the one he or she loves.
Page: 474, Location: 7257-7262
Note: Imp. Taking for granted
The first thing a couple has to do is resolve the porcupine’s dilemma: the desire to achieve deep intimacy while remaining invulnerable to hurt.
Page: 475, Location: 7273-7275
Note: Term.
When people suppress their annoyances and keep their negative feelings and true opinions to themselves, they often end up on a fragile plateau that appears stable and positive but that can be devastated by a sudden shift in sentiment.
Page: 477, Location: 7302-7303
Note: Imp.
An exchange of intimate aspects of oneself, both positive and negative, is required. In general, we like a person better after we have disclosed something important about ourselves — even if it is unsavory — and when they honor us by revealing something intimate and negative about themselves.
Page: 477, Location: 7307-7309
Note: Imp. One to follow
straight talk: a clear statement of a person’s feelings and concerns without accusing, blaming, judging, or ridiculing the other person
Page: 484, Location: 7409-7410
Note: Term.
Straight talk seems easy, and it is effective. Why don’t people use it more often? Growing up in a competitive society, most of us have learned how to protect ourselves by making ourselves relatively invulnerable — those quills again. Thus, when we are hurt, we have learned not to show it. Rather, we have learned either to avoid the person who hurt us or to lash out at him or her with anger, judgment, or ridicule, which in turn, as Gottman observed, makes the other person defensive or produces a counterattack, and the argument escalates.
Page: 484, Location: 7411-7414
Note: Imp.
The solution is to be open and, at the same time, to express yourself in a manner that causes a minimum of pain and maximizes the recipient’s ability to understand your complaint. The key to effective communication rests on our willingness to express feelings rather than judgments
Page: 487, Location: 7462-7464
Note: Imp.
Generally, people resent being told what kind of person they are — and for good reason, because such attributions are purely a matter of conjecture.
Page: 489, Location: 7484-7485
Note: Imp.
9 Social Psychology as a Science
Page: 490, Location: 7511-7511
Note: C..
What Is the Scientific Method?
Page: 493, Location: 7548-7549
Note: C.
The first systematic social psychological experiment was conducted by Norman Triplett in 1898 (he measured the effect of competition on performance), but it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that experimental social psychology really took off, primarily under the inspiration of Kurt Lewin and his talented students.
Page: 7, Location: 102-104
What Is Social Psychology? Saul Steinberg, Untitled drawing, ink on paper.
Page: 13, Location: 185-188
What Is Social Psychology?
Page: 13, Location: 185-185
As far as I know, Aristotle was the first serious thinker to call our species “the social animal.”
Page: 13, Location: 189-190
but racial prejudice continues. Most African Americans know the experience of “shopping while black,” which means being followed by salespeople who question their credit, suspect they will steal something, or even deny them service.
Page: 17, Location: 251-252
Young black males in particular continue to be victims of “driving while black” — being stopped for trivial reasons or even for no reason
Page: 17, Location: 252-253
and “walking while black,” as when sixteen-year-old Trayvon Martin was stalked and killed by a neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman.
Page: 17, Location: 253-255
Defining Social Psychology
Page: 17, Location: 261-261
social influence.
Page: 18, Location: 262-262
Rejection is among the most painful experiences for human beings, and it can cause all kinds of self-defeating and destructive behaviors, from overeating to violence
Page: 18, Location: 269-270
But sometimes that conventional wisdom leads us astray. Indeed, when you are reading the results of the research discussed in this volume, you may occasionally find yourself thinking, “That’s obvious — why did they spend time and money to ‘discover’ that one? My grandmother could have told me that.” Maybe she could have, but
Page: 20, Location: 294-297
hindsight bias: our tendency (usually erroneous) to overestimate our powers of prediction once we know the outcome of a given event
Page: 20, Location: 305-306
Nearly all the data presented in this book are based upon experimental evidence. That’s why we want you to understand what constitutes an experiment in social psychology, along with the advantages, disadvantages, ethical problems, excitements, headaches, and heartaches that are associated with the adventure of research.
Page: 21, Location: 322-324
Most people — particularly those of us from Western cultures — do this spontaneously, without intention or conscious awareness, as a way of organizing and categorizing information and satisfying a need to feel in control of events.
Page: 23, Location: 345-346
Dispositionalism
Page: 23, Location: 352-352
The “Jonestown massacre,” as it became known, is a reminder of the often powerful yet frequently hidden role of social influence in determining what human beings think, feel, and do.
Page: 25, Location: 373-374
Helping us appreciate this more complex situational view of human behavior — the many ways social context influences what we do — is the
Page: 25, Location: 375-376
Helping us appreciate this more complex situational view of human behavior — the many ways social context influences what we do — is the central contribution of social psychology,
Page: 25, Location: 375-377
Social Cognition
Page: 25, Location: 381-381
pestilence
Page: 26, Location: 388-388
These superstitions had two notable effects. First, nearly everything and everyone smelled awful. As one writer described it, “The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife; the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.”
Page: 26, Location: 394-396
Second, indoor baths eventually fell into disrepair and citizens lost the skills needed to maintain plumbing. So the primitive sewer systems and chamber pots were, for a time, the best solution to a self-inflicted problem. It would take several hundred years for the “spirit” theory of disease to yield to science, which identified microbes as the invisible culprits that make people sick.
Page: 26, Location: 397-400
We human beings like to see ourselves as rational animals. (We smugly call ourselves homo sapiens, after all: Humans the Wise.) But we are capable of holding on to many unwise beliefs — and we suffer for it.
Page: 27, Location: 406-408
A major area within social psychology is social cognition, the study of how people come to believe what they do; how they explain, remember, predict, make decisions, and evaluate themselves and others; and why these processes so frequently produce errors
Page: 27, Location: 414-416
To a great extent, how we make sense of the world depends on a combination of our intuitions, our personalities and ways of perceiving the world, and a set of fundamental social motives.
Page: 28, Location: 429-431
For centuries, philosophers have held that human cognition is completely rational: All individuals attempt to do their best to be right, to hold correct beliefs, and to maximize their pleasure while minimizing their pain.
Page: 29, Location: 438-440
For Bentham, it was the role of governments and economic systems to ensure “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Others agreed; Bentham’s notion became one of the foundational ideas of modern capitalism.
Page: 30, Location: 445-447
First, no one gets a “God’s-eye” view of the world — a perspective that is all-knowing and free from bias.
Page: 30, Location: 450-451
these conditions do not often exist in everyday life. Why? For two reasons. First, no one gets a “God’s-eye” view of the world — a perspective that is all-knowing and free from bias.
Page: 30, Location: 449-451
Second, even when data are both available and reliable, I simply do not have the time to conduct a full-scale analysis of every problem I encounter.
Page: 30, Location: 456-457
That’s why most of us are cognitive misers: We seek ways to conserve cognitive (mental) energy and simplify complexity. We take shortcuts and use rules of thumb. We ignore some information to reduce our cognitive load; we overuse other information to keep from having to search for more; or we just go with our initial intuitions and accept a less-than-perfect alternative because it is good enough.
Page: 30, Location: 460-464
When describing things we don’t fully understand, we turn to metaphors; we compare things we don’t understand to things we do understand. Metaphors can be helpful, but if embraced uncritically, they can also be misleading.
Page: 31, Location: 470-471
Plato famously described the human psyche as a charioteer steering a chariot pulled by two horses, one horse representing reason, the other desire.
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In the 1800s, the brain was compared to a telegraph and in the 1900s to a telephone switchboard. With the advent of computers, psychologists began to describe the functions of the mind as being comparable to a Mac or PC. Just like a computer, the human brain is said to store and retrieve memories; departures from rational thinking are often described as “bugs” in an operating system, or the result of our “limited processing capacity,” or a reduction in “cognitive bandwidth” due to stress.
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yet our brains don’t really store memories or process information in the same way that computers do.
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Moreover, because computers do not worry about the future, fear death or rejection, experience joy, sorrow, jealousy, or any other emotion, the mind-as-computer metaphor is ultimately an incomplete and unsatisfying account of mental life.
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One long-standing metaphor turns out to have been particularly misleading: John Locke’s portrait (in the 1600s) of the mind as a tabula rasa or blank slate. This metaphor portrays our minds, personalities, and traits as shaped entirely by learning and experience, the way one would draw upon a blank sheet of paper.
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If you are shy, in this view, it is because of experiences with your parents, and the rewards and punishments you received, made you shy.
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This extreme, you-can-become-anything view of human malleability lingers in today’s society, but it has faded among psychologists in light of the scientific evidence on genetic predispositions. Identical twins who are separated at birth and raised in different families nonetheless reveal a striking similarity in mannerisms, behavior, habits, attitudes — even political views; and siblings who grow up in the same family do not become more alike in personality.
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This fascinating research suggests that we come preprogrammed with moral intuitions and the ability to make moral distinctions long before our first playdate.
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Metaphorically, then, our minds are more like sketches than blank pages. Experience doesn’t create us from scratch; it elaborates on what’s already there, revises it, and colors it in with personal, cultural, and social influences
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According to evolutionary psychology, the brain is an organ that has been shaped and programmed by evolution, adapted to challenges that faced our biological hunter-gatherer ancestors in their foraging way of life for hundreds of thousands of years.
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he found a strong relationship between the size of an animal’s group and the size of the animal’s neocortex
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Group life confers tremendous advantages, like food sharing and protection, but it also imposes cognitive challenges, like learning and remembering important information about members of a group — who is apt to steal your food or your mate. It takes a big brain to house all the information about other group members and the variety of ways they act. That’s why, when tribes of hunter-gatherers grew larger than 150 members or so, group life became more difficult and stressful, and the tribes tended to splinter into smaller ones.
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It would be reasonable to assume that with media and technology we could easily enlarge our social circle far beyond this natural limit, now that we can reach thousands of others with a post or a tweet. Still, here’s the question: How many of your online friends or followers do you actually have meaningful interactions with at any given point in time?
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These adaptations exist everywhere because they facilitated living in groups — and living in groups was critical to our survival.
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The impact of the evolutionary view of the human mind cannot be overstated. Only in the last twenty or so years have social scientists fully accepted the argument that many of our illogical, maladaptive tendencies and motivations — as well as generous, compassionate, and touching ones — are rooted in their survival value from the era when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers.
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We are wired to connect, cooperate, conform, and harmonize with members of our group, but also to compete to gain resources and status within our group.
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The confirmation bias helps explain why people cling tenaciously to debunked beliefs. They look for any scrap of evidence to support their wish to be right, so they do not have to “change their minds.”
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The moral of the story is that it is very difficult to move beyond our own perception of reality when we’re estimating how others see things.
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Negative feedback has a more powerful emotional impact than positive feedback. Bad news is shared more readily and frequently than good news.
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People who win money in a lottery will enjoy a spike in happiness but eventually return to their pre-lottery happiness “set-point.”
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We adapt to the new circumstances and our feelings return to baseline. But consistent with evolutionary theory, interviews with lottery winners and accident victims show that, on average, it takes longer to return to baseline after bad experiences than after good ones.
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It is evolutionarily adaptive, they concluded, for bad to be stronger than good, because animals with a heightened alertness to danger, pain, failure, or other negative experiences would have been more likely to survive threats and consequently would have better odds of passing along their
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It is evolutionarily adaptive, they concluded, for bad to be stronger than good, because animals with a heightened alertness to danger, pain, failure, or other negative experiences would have been more likely to survive threats and consequently would have better odds of passing along their genes.
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The human mind is divided according to two forms of processing: automatic and controlled.
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Automatic processing refers to the unconscious (implicit) and involuntary operations that guide most of our behavior: well-learned associations or routines that our mental systems perform effortlessly, without awareness. This is the kind of thinking that animal brains have been doing for half a billion years — fast, efficient responses to sensory input.
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Controlled processing, by contrast, is the conscious (explicit) effort we make in dealing with novel problems, such as learning to drive, solving complex math problems, trying to remember the name of a movie, or answering a question like “Why do you love your boyfriend?” This kind of thinking is evolutionarily more recent, and it is tied to the development of language. It is slower and sequential — we process one thought after another rather than several in parallel.
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Moreover, unlike automatic processing, controlled processing cannot do two things at once. This is why so many studies have shown that, despite what you egocentrically believe about your own abilities, it is impossible to multitask effectively.
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Human beings are usually pretty proud of our controlled-processing skills, but Jonathan Haidt33 estimates that our conscious reasoning — “the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware” — represents only about 1 percent of our thinking. The other 99 percent occurs outside of awareness, but that’s the percentage, he argues, that actually governs most of our behavior.
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People frequently see faces in unlikely places: on the surface of the moon, on potato chips, on a slice of toast, or famously, on a cinnamon bun, which showed the alleged face of Mother Teresa. We connect random stimuli into meaningful patterns, and much of the time those patterns involve people, most likely because people are on our minds.
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Where does your mind go when it goes wandering? Where is it wandering to? What do you think about when you are “off task”? The default mode network is a set of interacting brain regions that are active when not directed to a task or focused on the outside world. This network is also active when we’re explicitly thinking about people. That is why, when our minds wander, they typically wander to social matters: plans we’re making with friends, memories of loved ones, conflicts with a partner, sexual fantasies about all kinds of people, or problems caused by other people. We see human stories in everything because people are never far from our thoughts.
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Thinking in “people terms” improves memory because when a task is framed around people, the default mode network gets involved, which in turn helps store the memories.
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It may be hard to believe this when you are suffering after a breakup, but the ability to feel social pain had survival value for early humans.
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Our large brains require big heads to house them, which means that human babies must be born relatively immature, while their heads can fit through the birth canal. They are unable to feed or fend for themselves while their brains and bodies develop outside the womb. Therefore they must stay close to caregivers for food and protection, and this kind of connection to others remains critical throughout life
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Our large brains require big heads to house them, which means that human babies must be born relatively immature, while their heads can fit through the birth canal. They are unable to feed or fend for themselves while their brains and bodies develop outside the womb. Therefore they must stay close to caregivers for food and protection, and this kind of connection to others remains critical throughout life to ensure safety and access to resources
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The fMRI revealed a pattern of activation in the excluded student’s brain parallel to that seen when people endure pinpricks, electric shock, or other experimentally induced physical pain.
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This result suggests that the mental system involved with human connectedness attached itself to the system already involved with signaling physical pain.
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Children who are rejected or teased in school can suffer severe and enduring effects; in fact, many adults remember experiences of rejection in childhood much more vividly than physical punishment.
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once we divide people into groups, our minds automatically lead us to exaggerate the differences between us and them, rather than notice similarities. Whereas we tend to see people in our group — the ingroup — as a collection of unique individuals, we tend to see those in the outgroup as more alike — “they’re all the same,” people often say, or “they all look alike to me.”
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In fact, “they” often do look alike. That is a common perceptual glitch: white people who evaluate a photo array of faces will have more trouble distinguishing them from one another if the faces are Asian or black than if they are white. Asians have precisely the same trouble distinguishing between the faces of blacks or whites.
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Favoring our own group may seem perfectly reasonable given that we often choose to be in the group based on real differences in tastes, values, beliefs, and political ideology.
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Coalition formation, the grouping of individuals into teams, comes naturally when there is a shared purpose that also benefits each member.
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Unfortunately, we often let our group membership do our thinking for us. Geoffrey Cohen and his colleagues
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Unfortunately, we often let our group membership do our thinking for
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Unfortunately, we often let our group membership do our thinking for us.
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Objective policy content had no effect whatsoever on the judges. Notably, this “party over policy” effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare issues as it was among people who were not.
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Moreover, participants insisted they formed their attitude logically, based on the policy alone, even though it was clear that their preferences were driven by group affiliation.
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argue that we literally think in groups rather than as rational individuals, especially in today’s complex world, where we need the expertise of others for almost everything we do. It may take a tribe to raise a child, but it also takes a tribe to cure a disease or get to the moon or design a self-driving car. From an evolutionary perspective, relying on the knowledge of others has worked well for human beings — except, of course, when it doesn’t.
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The Central Social Motives
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Human beings have many universal physical needs for survival, but we also have certain basic social motives that shape our thinking, emotions, and relationships. All human beings pursue social motives to varying degrees, as dictated by their culture, their individual personalities, and the details of the situation.
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Susan Fiske, a pioneer in social cognition research, has identified a core group of these motives.
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Belonging Of all the motives that govern social life, the most important is belonging: our desire for stable, meaningful connections with others.
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This root social motive is the reason that long periods of involuntary isolation are not only unpleasant; they are also psychologically damaging, generating depression, anxiety, and self-destructive impulses.
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A threatened or diminished sense of belonging also changes the way people process and interpret information, at once making them more open to interaction with others but also more cautious of rejection — and thus hypersensitive to other people’s behavior.55 It’s as if they say to themselves, “I really want to be accepted by this group, but I’ll keep an eagle eye out for signs they don’t want me.”
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The need to belong fosters conformity and smooth relationships and generates many of our customs.
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Music is essential because it connects us, emotionally, with others.
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Uncertainty keeps us in limbo, unable to brace ourselves for what’s coming. Indeed, we feel better knowing for sure that something bad is coming than suspecting that something bad might happen.
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For many people, a sense of control is so central to well-being that they act as though they have control when they don’t.
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Need to Matter Human beings have a strong motive to feel that they are worthy, have social status in their community,
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A Need to Matter Human beings have a strong motive to feel that they are worthy, have social status in their community, and have positive reputations.
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Fiske calls this a motive for “self-enhancement.”
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But we are so inclined to trust that we feel surprised, angered, and hurt when other people cheat or deceive us. Trusting others makes interactions simpler and more pleasant; it frees us from worry that others are out to get us or that they will gossip about us if we reveal our genuine selves.
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The Victorian novelist George Eliot expressed this well when she wrote, “What loneliness is lonelier than distrust?”
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Therefore, when people believe things that aren’t true, or do things that seem crazy, it’s often the case that these core motives have been warped in some way.
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They might not test their hypotheses about behavior as systematically as professional scientists do, but they try to understand why other people act as they do. In this goal, they make causal attributions: They want to know what caused Joe to be mean or Jim to be generous. Do these guys always behave selfishly or generously, or did the situation influence their actions?
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For that reason, social psychologists have identified a number of influences on our attributions and explanations: the fundamental attribution error, self-fulfilling prophecies, and self-serving biases.
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The fundamental attribution error has consequences in our personal, romantic lives, too. If your partner does something thoughtless, for example, you could make a dispositional attribution (“My partner is an inconsiderate slob; we need to break up”) or a situational attribution (“My partner must be under incredible pressure at work; we need a vacation”). Guess which attribution leads to happier relationships?
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I am not saying that criminals shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. And I am definitely not saying that dispositional factors such as laziness, heartlessness, or viciousness don’t exist. They do! But focusing on personal rather than situational factors will result in different policies for reducing poverty and crime. The attribution “this criminal is inherently evil” will lead us to support policies of spending more money on prisons and doling out longer, crueler prison sentences.
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We should take seriously the motto of the English Protestant reformer John Bradford: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
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Over time, people develop a habitual pattern of explaining their successes and failures, and this pattern — called their explanatory style — affects their sense of control and emotional well-being.
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People who have a pessimistic explanatory style are relentlessly gloomy, because they think that the cause of their troubles permeates their lives, can’t be changed, and will haunt them forever
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People who have an optimistic explanatory style attribute unfortunate events to causes that are external, situational, and within their control
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People who have an optimistic explanatory style attribute unfortunate events to causes that are external, situational, and within their control: “Yeah,” they might say, “I blew that particular math test, but I can study harder next time and get better. Besides, that was a really hard test, and I did well on my other exams.”
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The mechanism creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, which occurs when we act on our initial attribution of our behavior and then behave in a way to confirm it: “I failed that test, so I’m stupid. Therefore I won’t study. Therefore, I will fail. See? I told you I was stupid.”
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But we could also create a positive self-fulfilling prophecy: “I failed that test, so clearly I didn’t work hard enough. Therefore, I will study harder and make sure I understand the material. Therefore, I will do better. See? I told you I could.”
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Let’s say there are four merlots, at 14,35, 70,and170 per bottle. Although the restaurant may not sell much of the $170 wine, its existence makes the other wines look cheaper by comparison. And because most people don’t want to appear cheap by ordering the least expensive bottle on the list, the strategic placement of the outrageously pricey decoy allows the restaurant to jack up the price of the second- and third-cheapest bottles, charging you a good deal more than they are worth.
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Important judgments we make about ourselves can also be influenced by contrast effects. One of the most potent sources of information about ourselves is social comparison, the process by which we evaluate our abilities, achievements, attitudes, and other attributes by comparing ourselves to others. Depending on whom we compare ourselves to, the results can be informative, comforting, inspiring, or deflating.
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Sonja Lyubomirsky once observed that social comparisons are primarily to blame for feelings of inadequacy and discontent.
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When she compared the social cognitions of happy and unhappy people, Lyubomirsky found that the happiest people evaluate themselves not by paying attention to what other people are doing but by tuning into and consulting their own internal standards of success.
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As cognitive misers, we are prone to organize and retrieve information by way of schemas, mental models of the world. Schemas can be stereotypes, categories, expectations, attitudes, and mindsets.
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Schemas can be activated through priming
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Schemas can be activated through priming, the use of subtle cues that direct our thinking.
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As political scientist Bernard Cohen79 observed, “The mass media may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”
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“Put your best foot forward” turns out to be excellent advice; the things we learn first about a person are especially influential.
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When you describe yourself on social media or on a job or graduate school application, the words you use first can say as much about you as which words you use.
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Such findings suggest that if teachers are invested in the long-term development of their students (rather than focused on how well they will do on the next test), they should resist making a snap judgment based on a first impression.
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But the tendency toward cognitive miserliness means that first impressions form quickly and endure.
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Navigating Our Social Worlds: Heuristics and Memories
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To help us do this efficiently, our minds usually rely on heuristics, mental operations that provide rules of thumb that guide problem solving and making judgments.
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We know that high-quality products are often costly; therefore, if something is expensive, we infer that it’s better than something cheaper.
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We mistake their availability in memory for their frequency in the
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We mistake their availability in memory for their frequency in the world.
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Statements that rhyme or “roll off the tongue” are judged to be truer than statements that say the same thing but are less felicitous.
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but it has a dark disadvantage when it leads us to decide what is true and right not based on a claim’s logical merit but on its ease of retrieval: an unintended hazard of the internet is that everything from conspiracy claims to pseudoscientific medical advice, endlessly repeated, can flourish unchecked. As William James said in 1890, “There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.” This observation was implemented by the Nazi propaganda machine and became known as the Big Lie.
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We likewise look inward and consult our feelings to predict how others will act. If we don’t know the people involved, we usually assume that they will feel as we feel and do as we do, and that they will agree with us on any issue.
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By being aware of how these heuristics can cause us to make wrong choices, we can take steps to counteract them.
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Psychologists have identified several conditions under which we are more likely to rely on heuristics rather than rational decision making:90 when we don’t have time to think carefully about an issue; when we are so overloaded with information that it becomes impossible to process the information fully; when the issues at stake are not very important to us; when we lack the required knowledge for making a reasoned decision; and when we let our emotions and wishful thinking get in the way.
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We overestimate the emotional impact of future events and how long our reactions will last, whether the events are positive or negative.
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Why do we mispredict? One reason is that we adjust to both happy and sad events in our lives, but we fail to recognize our powers of adjustment when we mentally construct what our futures will look and feel like.
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Another reason is that when we imagine the future, we tend to focus only upon the event in question and fail to consider all the other things that will undoubtedly occur at the same time to take the sting out of failure or to dilute our happiness.
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We imagine the future at an abstract level, and we are more concerned with how desirable our prediction is than with how feasible it is. From a distance, you might think it sounds like a great idea to take three science classes in the same semester and get a big jump ahead on your major, but you are probably not thinking of how hard that might be, logistically and pragmatically.
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When you make plans, you can save yourself a lot of grief if you are mindful of the human tendency to construe the future as rosier than the present.
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Reconstructive Memory People love to believe that memories are accurately embedded or buried somewhere in the mind and can be recalled through drugs or hypnosis.
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Unfortunately, there’s no exact recording of past events in our memories that we can access with a rewind button nor, to use that incorrect computer metaphor, are they digitally encoded. On the contrary,
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Reconstructive Memory People love to believe that memories are accurately embedded or buried somewhere in the mind and can be recalled through drugs or hypnosis. Unfortunately,
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Unfortunately, there’s no exact recording of past events in our memories that we can access with a rewind button nor, to use that incorrect computer metaphor, are they digitally encoded.
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Our memories are undergoing constant revision, and they are influenced by what other people tell us about
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Our memories are undergoing constant revision, and they are influenced by what other people tell us about the past event, by photos, and by hearsay.
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In this manner, all of us rewrite our personal histories. It is not necessarily that we are lying about our past; it is simply that we misremember in a way that fits with our schemas.
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In study after study, confidence in a memory turns out to be a poor guide to its authenticity.
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The take-home message is that we are born with the ability to be both irrational and rational, and that even our biases can be adaptive. Being a cognitive miser brings us an array of benefits, but these benefits come with a price tag: a somewhat distorted picture of yourself and the world
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3 Self-Justification
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Then, when pressed to explain our actions, we attempt to construct a story that makes sense but at the same time satisfies our
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One explanation is that the people were terribly frightened, but because they lacked ample justification for this fear, they invented their own — which spared them feeling foolish.
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Leon Festinger developed a powerful theory of human motivation that he called the theory of cognitive dissonance
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Because the experience of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, people are motivated to reduce it; this is analogous to the processes involved in reducing such drives as hunger or thirst — except that, here, the driving force arises from cognitive discomfort rather than physiological need.
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To hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and as the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus observed, humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd.
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consonant
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cessation
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But what if you are one of the top executives of a major cigarette company and therefore in a situation of maximum commitment to the sales of cigarettes all over the world. If it is true that cigarette smoking causes cancer, then in a sense, you are partially responsible for the illness and death of millions of people. This realization would produce a painful degree of dissonance. Your cognition “I am a decent, kind human being” would be dissonant with your cognition “I am contributing to the early death of millions of people.” To reduce this dissonance, you must try to convince yourself that cigarette smoking is safe — not an easy task given that you are frequently confronted with anti-smoking rhetoric and accusations that you are evil. You must also refute the mountain of scientific evidence documenting a link between cigarettes and disease. Moreover, to bolster your disbelief in the evidence, you might smoke a pack or two a day yourself. If your need is great enough, you might even succeed in convincing yourself that cigarettes are good for people. Thus, to see yourself as wise, good, and right, you take action that is stupid, wrong, and detrimental to your own health.
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shellacking
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Cognitive dissonance results from the clash of two fundamental motives: our striving to be right, which motivates us to pay close attention to what other people are doing and to heed the advice of trustworthy communicators; and our striving to believe we are right (and wise, and decent, and good).
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But the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that more often we seek information and then ignore it if we don’t like what we learn (and keep smoking).
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No matter how smart they are, people who are in the midst of reducing dissonance are so involved with convincing themselves that they are right that they frequently end up behaving irrationally.
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It goes without saying that we are all capable of behaving rationally. But my point is that we are all capable of behaving irrationally when we need to reduce dissonance.
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Today, of course, thanks to social media, people do not have to work hard to get information that is consonant not only with what car they just bought but also what idea they now believe — and avoid any information that is dissonant.
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Again, making a decision produces dissonance: Cognitions about any negative aspects of the preferred object are dissonant with having chosen it, and cognitions about the positive aspects of the unchosen object are dissonant with not having chosen it.
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The tendency to justify our choices is not limited to consumer decisions. In fact, research has demonstrated that similar processes can even affect our romantic relationships and our willingness to imagine becoming involved with other partners.
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The answer is that the process of reducing dissonance is largely unconscious.
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For example, what happens when the person you love dumps you? Over time, you will come to see the person as less lovable — perhaps even as an insufferable narcissist — and come to believe that you deserve better or are better off alone. This process is effective precisely because it happens below the level of conscious awareness and without intention.
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This research suggests that there is an evolutionary benefit to postdecision dissonance, if it led our forebears to stick with a tried-and-true option and reject something new but untested (which, in our species’ past, could be risky or dangerous).
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Drew Westen and his colleagues24 found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when a person is confronted with dissonant information and the emotion circuits of the brain light up happily when consonance is restored. As Westen put it, people twirl the “cognitive kaleidoscope” until the pieces fall into the pattern they want to see, and then the brain repays them by activating circuits involved in pleasure. It seems that the feeling of cognitive dissonance can literally make your brain hurt.
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The Importance of Irrevocability
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A key characteristic of the examples we have discussed is the relative irrevocability of the decision — the person’s inability to undo it
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Again, once a decision is irrevocable, people get busy making themselves feel good about the choice they made. And thus, they frequently become more certain that they have made a wise decision once there is nothing they can do about it.
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That’s how he identified a common and successful ploy called lowballing, or throwing the customer a lowball.
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What is going on in this situation? There are at least three important things to notice. First, while the customer’s decision to buy is certainly reversible, there is an implicit commitment created by the act of signing a check for a down payment. Second, this commitment triggered the anticipation of a pleasant experience: driving out with a new car. To have the anticipated event thwarted (by not going ahead with the deal) would have produced dissonance and disappointment. Third, although the final price is higher than the salesman said it would be, it is only slightly higher than the price somewhere else. Under these circumstances, the customer says, in effect, “Oh, what the hell. I’m already here; I’ve already filled out the forms — why wait?”
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Once they have made their decisions, however, their attitudes toward cheating will diverge sharply as a consequence of their decisions.
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The minute you take a step in one direction or the other, however, you will feel dissonance — and now you will be motivated to justify what you did to reduce it. That justification, in turn, makes it harder for you to change your mind, even when you should. By the time you are at the bottom of the pyramid, you will be very far apart from those who faced the same dilemmas but who made a different decision and stepped off the pyramid in the opposite direction. And you will have convinced yourself that your decision was absolutely, positively the right one, and that those people who slid down on the other side are idiots or crooks. (And how do you think they feel about you?)
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The pyramid metaphor is also useful in helping us understand how attitudes and behavior can change through the process of entrapment, or how people can start off making a small, impulsive decision and, over time, find themselves a long way from their original goals and intentions.
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If you want to get a person to change an attitude, get them to do or say something counter-attitudinal and underpay them for it.
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Experimental social psychologists have shown that, under conditions of high dissonance arousal, ordinary people, with no special skills in hypnosis or meditation, can accomplish the same things for themselves.
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Monetary gain or a forced requirement to do something is not the only form of external justification. People can be persuaded to say or do things that contradict their beliefs or preferences if they are enticed by other rewards, such as praise or the desire to please. Furthermore, most of us would probably agree to do something that we otherwise wouldn’t do if a good friend asked us to do it as a favor.
Page: 119, Location: 1824-1827
One clear form of external justification for behaving a certain way is knowing you’ll be punished if you don’t.
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But does the threat of punishment teach people not to speed or cheat? I don’t think so. I think it teaches them to try to avoid getting caught.
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The severe threat has provided the child ample external justification for not hitting his sister while he’s being watched.
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The less severe the threat, the less external justification; the less external justification, the greater the need for internal justification. Allowing people the opportunity to construct their own internal justification can help them develop a permanent set of values.
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In fact, Mills included this refinement in his experiment, and his results supported the hypothesis: Those who cheated to obtain a small reward tended to soften their attitude about cheating more than those who cheated to obtain a large reward. Moreover, those who refrained from cheating in spite of the temptation of a large reward — a choice that would create a lot of dissonance — hardened their attitude about cheating to a greater extent than those who refrained in the face of a small reward. This was just as predicted.
Page: 125, Location: 1915-1919
Who do you think feels the greatest dissonance after doing something cruel, foolish, or incompetent: a person with high self-esteem or low self-esteem? The answer is the people with the highest self-esteem. They experience the most dissonance when they behave in ways that are contrary to their high opinion of themselves, and they will work harder to reduce it than will those with average levels of self-esteem.
Page: 128, Location: 1955-1958
Psychopaths are fairly immune from dissonance caused by behaving badly, because the cognition “I just treated that person in a cold and heartless way” is consistent with “I’m really good at manipulating all those stupid people who can’t see through me.”
Page: 128, Location: 1961-1963
jilted
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As a function of feeling they are low people, individuals will commit low acts.
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Moreover, it’s important to separate healthy self-esteem from narcissism, having a false sense of grandiosity and superiority to others. A person with healthy, realistically grounded self-esteem, when given constructive criticism, says, “Why, thank you!” This is not so for narcissists.
Page: 130, Location: 1992-1994
when narcissists are threatened by criticism, they often aggress against their critics, in an attempt to get even and restore their threatened self-image.
Page: 131, Location: 1996-1997
This is the kind of self-esteem you find in schoolyard bullies, while youngsters with genuinely high self-esteem are more secure and do not engage in bullying. Indeed, they try to defend the bully’s victims.
Page: 131, Location: 2003-2004
self-aggrandizing
Page: 131, Location: 2003-2003
Dissonance effects are greatest when: (1)people feel personally responsible for their actions, (2)people’s actions conflict with a central aspect of their self-concept, (3)people’s actions have serious consequences, and (4)the action is irrevocable; a person can’t take it back. Under those four conditions, people will feel the most dissonance; and the greater their dissonance, the more their attitudes will change. The fact that dissonance is aroused whenever the self-concept is challenged has many interesting ramifications. Let us look at some of them.
Page: 131, Location: 2005-2012
a general principle about dissonance and the self-concept: Dissonance effects are greatest when: (1)people feel personally responsible for their actions, (2)people’s actions conflict with a central aspect of their self-concept, (3)people’s actions have serious consequences, and (4)the action is irrevocable; a person can’t take it back. Under those four conditions, people will feel the most dissonance; and the greater their dissonance, the more their attitudes will change. The fact that dissonance
Page: 131, Location: 2005-2011
a general principle about dissonance and the self-concept: Dissonance effects are greatest when: (1)people feel personally responsible for their actions, (2)people’s actions conflict with a central aspect of their self-concept, (3)people’s actions have serious consequences, and (4)the action is irrevocable; a person can’t take it back. Under those four conditions, people will feel the most dissonance; and the greater their dissonance, the more their attitudes will change.
Page: 131, Location: 2005-2011
The Justification of Effort
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Another way of making sense of the effort we’ve expended is to revise our memory of the past — that is, to misremember what things were like before we suffered or worked hard.
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The Justification of Cruelty
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comeuppance,
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One condition, however, limits the justification of cruelty: the capacity of the victim to retaliate. If the victim is able and willing to retaliate at some future time, then a harm-doer feels that equity will be restored and thus has no need to justify the action by denigrating the victim.
Page: 139, Location: 2123-2126
This research has serious implications: It shows that people do not perform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed. When we are engaged in a war in which, through our actions, many innocent people are being killed, we might try to blame the victims to justify our complicity — especially civilian victims who can’t retaliate. A sad, though universal, phenomenon is that all cultures are inclined to dehumanize their enemies by calling them cruel names and regarding them as “vermin,” “animals,” “brutes,” and other nonhuman creatures.
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Thus, reducing dissonance in this way increases the likelihood that the atrocities we are willing to commit now will justify our committing more of them over time.
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stultifying
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Victim blaming, it would appear, is rooted in our need to justify ourselves and our attitudes toward those less fortunate, or who are victims of crime, poverty, or tragic events.
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The Psychology of Inevitability
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In a sense, dissonance theory describes the ways people have of making their skeletons dance — of trying to make the best of unpleasant outcomes.
Page: 143, Location: 2183-2184
In short, the cognition “I dislike that vegetable” is dissonant with the cognition “I will be eating that vegetable in the future.” To reduce the dissonance, the children came to believe the vegetable was really not as noxious as they had previously thought.
Page: 143, Location: 2190-2192
The knowledge that one is inevitably going to be spending time with another person enhances the positive aspects of that person — or at least deemphasizes his or her negative aspects.
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Self-justifying responses to dangerous and inevitable events can be comforting in the short run. But when they keep us from taking steps to enhance our safety, such responses can, in the long run, prove deadly.
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This method was so successful that it came to be called the “hypocrisy paradigm.” It rests on the fact that almost all of us are on a personal quest for integrity.
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acquiesce,
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Dissonance on the World Stage
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As White put it, “There was a tendency, when actions were out of line with ideas, for decision-makers to align their ideas with their actions.”
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How can a leader avoid falling into the self-justification trap? Historical examples show us that the way out of this process is for a leader to bring in skilled advisors from outside his or her inner circle, because the advisors will not be caught up in the need to reduce the dissonance created by the leader’s earlier decisions.
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Gentile.
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I can increase the probability of being able to do this in the following ways: Through a greater understanding of my own defensiveness and dissonance-reducing tendencies. Through the realization that doing something foolish, immoral, or hurtful does not necessarily mean that I am an irrevocably foolish, immoral, or cruel person; cheating on one occasion doesn’t inevitably make me a “cheater,” unless I keep justifying what I did. Through the development of enough ego strength to acknowledge and learn from errors in myself.
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4 Conformity
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found that nonconformists are especially disliked if they voice their dissent near a deadline, when groups are feeling the pinch to come to closure, than if they voice dissent earlier in the discussion.
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decision-making groups, we tend to like conformists better than nonconformists. This preference is not irrational. The inclination to harmonize with others by sacrificing personal wishes conferred a tremendous evolutionary advantage for our species; our ability to work in teams and
Page: 160, Location: 2450-2452
Thus, the data indicate that at least in decision-making groups, we tend to like conformists better than nonconformists. This preference is not irrational. The inclination to harmonize with others by sacrificing personal wishes conferred a tremendous evolutionary advantage for our species; our ability to work in teams and transmit culture allowed humans to thrive.
Page: 160, Location: 2450-2452
cavalier
Page: 162, Location: 2484-2484
And this optimism grows when dissent is discouraged. In the face of conformity pressures, group members may come to doubt their own reservations and refrain from voicing them,
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What Is Conformity?
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This finding suggests that we mimic others because doing so both reflects and engenders feelings of closeness, creating a sort of “social glue.”
Page: 165, Location: 2523-2524
But mimicry has to be done naturally; intentional efforts to mimic other people in order to win favor can backfire.
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Most acts of conformity occur without any sense that “pressure” is being applied. For example, laugh tracks on television comedies are so ubiquitous that we scarcely notice them, yet the information they convey — that other people find something funny — profoundly influences our own response to that same something.
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There are two primary reasons for conformity: because other people are sources of valuable information; or because being too different from others is uncomfortable, and conformity secures our place within a group by signaling our similarity and ideological kinship.
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This fundamental predicament — between being right or trying to please the group — lies at the heart of some of our greatest failings.
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they typically underestimate how much they would conform and overestimate how often others will.
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Conformity resulting from the observation of others for the purpose of gaining information about proper behavior tends to have more powerful ramifications than conformity in the interest of being accepted or of avoiding punishment.
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When we are unclear about what is going on in a situation, we are particularly likely to conform to people whose behavior provides the most reliable information.
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When large numbers of people are doing something, it is especially informative.
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So long as the crowd’s judgments are independent from one another — as with the collection of strangers who submit reviews to Yelp — the crowd can provide a far better estimate of what is true and good than our own private guesses.
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It only takes one dissenter to seriously diminish the power of the group to induce conformity.32 Commitment Conformity to group pressure can also be decreased by inducing a person to make some sort of commitment to his or her initial judgment.
Page: 179, Location: 2743-2746
What this suggests is that most people will go along to get along — unless they know that they will be held accountable for a dumb, compliant decision.
Page: 181, Location: 2765-2766
Once we’ve earned a secure place in the group, we relax and express our opinions more freely.
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But conformity pressures are most intense for young people between the ages of 10 and 25. Until then, the brain’s self-control systems — which govern planning, thinking about the future, assessing risk, and suppressing impulses — are still developing.
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Pleasure centers in the brain are activated when peers are present, and without a fully developed prefrontal cortex to impose self-control, young people show a greater tendency to commit hazardous, foolish actions.
Page: 183, Location: 2794-2795
A group is more effective at inducing conformity if (1) it consists of perceived experts, (2) its members are of high social status (for example, the popular kids in a high school), or (3) its members are alike in a significant way, such as age, occupation, political ideology, race, or ethnicity.
Page: 183, Location: 2804-2806
You might anticipate a real-life benefit of that finding: namely, that racial diversity can discourage groupthink.
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Groups that we belong to and identify with — our reference groups — both reflect and shape our identities and behaviors. Often, when we change reference groups, we change our behavior and attitudes as well in order to conform.
Page: 184, Location: 2813-2815
Social Norms
Page: 185, Location: 2832-2832
A norm might simply be descriptive, reflecting our knowledge about what most people do in a given situation.
Page: 185, Location: 2836-2837
Some norms are injunctive, specifying what people should do, often through explicit directives, such as signs prohibiting smoking, cell phone use, or littering.
Page: 185, Location: 2837-2838
If the parking lot is free of litter, most people probably do not even think about the norm and therefore are more likely to litter mindlessly.
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For example, signs in hotel rooms urging guests to reuse their towels work better when they explicitly say that “most other guests in this room have reused theirs.”
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you would tend to receive more assistance from people in Latin countries, which place a higher value on simpático, the willingness to offer help to others, than in the United States.
Page: 190, Location: 2914-2915
A second reason for failing to intervene is that even when people do notice someone in trouble, they may fail to identify it as an emergency.
Page: 191, Location: 2919-2920
Thus we might predict that the very presence of a lot of other people, rather than increasing the likelihood that someone will help, actually decreases the likelihood that anyone will help.
Page: 191, Location: 2928-2930
Thus, the mere presence of another bystander tends to inhibit action, a phenomenon called the bystander effect
Page: 192, Location: 2939-2941
Another reason, besides conformity, that bystanders may fail to intervene is the diffusion of responsibility: Even if people conclude that the event is a genuine emergency, the awareness of other witnesses diffuses the responsibility felt by any one person.
Page: 192, Location: 2944-2946
Specifically, a feeling of “common fate” or mutuality may be engendered among people sharing the same interests, pleasures, hardships, and environmental conditions of a closed environment like a campground, a stronger feeling of mutuality than exists among people who are merely residents of the same country, county, or city.
Page: 194, Location: 2974-2977
In the campground, we were all there together; the campers were going to have to face squarely the next morning whatever they had allowed to happen the night before. It seems that, under these circumstances, individuals are more willing to take responsibility for one another.
Page: 195, Location: 2979-2981
What conditions make apathy or altruism more likely? The sense of a “common fate” is clearly activated, and they are in face-to-face situations with victims. When these conditions are lacking, individuals make a quick, often unconscious assessment of whether or not they should get involved: Is the situation really serious? Does it require my personal intervention? Will helping be difficult or costly for me? Will my help benefit the victim? Can I easily leave? Your response to the situation will depend on your answers to each of these questions.
Page: 196, Location: 3004-3008
Pluralistic Ignorance
Page: 197, Location: 3011-3011
blasé
Page: 198, Location: 3023-3023
This can create a situation that social psychologists call pluralistic ignorance, the collective belief in a false norm created by the ambiguous behavior of others.
Page: 198, Location: 3027-3029
Change the perceived norms and people’s behavior follows suit.
Page: 199, Location: 3050-3050
Kennedy described as the condition where “everybody in a group believes that everybody in the group believes something that nobody in the group believes.”
Page: 200, Location: 3059-3060
Levels of Conformity
Page: 200, Location: 3066-3066
distinguishing among three levels of conformity: compliance, identification, and internalization.
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Typically, the person’s behavior is only as long-lived as the promise of reward or the threat of punishment.
Page: 201, Location: 3072-3073
Compliance is the least enduring and has the least effect on the individual, because the person’s behavior changes as soon as the rewards or punishments change.
Page: 201, Location: 3076-3077
the influence here was durable; it was evident even later when participants were asked to give their opinions about marijuana in private.
Page: 203, Location: 3098-3099
Continuous reward or punishment is not necessary for identification. You can identify with someone who isn’t present at all; you just need to want to be like that person.
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you will continue to hold beliefs similar to theirs as long as (1) they remain important to you, (2) they still hold the same beliefs, and (3) their beliefs are not challenged by counter-opinions that are more convincing to you.
Page: 203, Location: 3101-3103
Milgram’s unwelcome and controversial message was that an astonishingly large proportion of people will cause pain to other people when an authority figure orders them to obey.
Page: 207, Location: 3171-3172
demonstrating that for most people, only legitimate authority can command high obedience, not just any person assuming the role of authority.
Page: 209, Location: 3199-3200
Dunbar’s sensitivity to the potential victims of his bombs is especially poignant given the distance and anonymity afforded by his position high in the sky above the villagers
Page: 210, Location: 3208-3209
But if we look around, we can see that many of us, whether we recognize it or not, are in positions where conforming to the wishes of a group or people in authority will have serious consequences for others.
Page: 211, Location: 3227-3229
But perhaps the great message of the Milgram experiments lies precisely in the discomfort it generates and the reactions of people who think, “I would never do that.”
Page: 213, Location: 3258-3259
Countering Conformity
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that minority positions can prevail under certain conditions. What are they?83 If the people holding a minority view express their position consistently, with confidence, conviction, and dogged persistence If the minority used to agree with the majority position but changed their minds If the minority is willing to compromise, even just a bit If group members who are in the majority are motivated to make an accurate decision rather than a quick one
Page: 214, Location: 3281-3288
Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, organized citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Page: 215, Location: 3297-3298
An opinion is what a person believes to be true:
Page: 217, Location: 3319-3320
An opinion that includes an emotional and an evaluative component is called an attitude
Page: 218, Location: 3329-3330
One observer pointed out, “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.”
Page: 220, Location: 3367-3368
Although electronics — including videogames — can be powerful tools for learning,13 it seems that nothing beats good old face-to-face interactions for learning to read and how to interact with others.
Page: 222, Location: 3402-3404
Socrates lamented the invention of books, which he said would promote “forgetfulness.”
Page: 223, Location: 3409-3409
When comic books were introduced in the 1930s, parents were warned that comics would turn their children into juvenile delinquents (unlike books, which were considered good for young minds).
Page: 223, Location: 3409-3411
Persuasion
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We live not only in an age of mass communication, but also in an age characterized by attempts at mass persuasion. Everywhere we look, someone is trying to educate us; convince us to buy a product or donate to a cause; or persuade us to vote for a candidate or subscribe to some version of what is right, true, or beautiful.
Page: 224, Location: 3431-3433
Just as action events such as football games are more entertaining on television than quiet events such as chess matches, it is more likely that riots, bombings, earthquakes, massacres, and other violent acts will get more air time than stories about people working to prevent violence.
Page: 225, Location: 3444-3446
Moreover, the most violent stories are usually reported earliest in the broadcast — especially on local news programs — creating the message that the violent stories were the essential news of the day. As reporters put it, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Page: 225, Location: 3449-3450
emotional contagion: the rapid transmission of emotions or behaviors through a crowd
Page: 228, Location: 3492-3492
researchers have found that when media stories avoid emphasizing or glamorizing suicide, and don’t make it seem like a simple or inevitable solution for people who are at risk, the contagion effect is reduced.
Page: 229, Location: 3508-3510
only the mere fact of knowing that a communicator is biased protected us from being influenced by
Page: 232, Location: 3544-3544
the commercial goes on to say that government tests have shown that no other pain remedy is stronger or more effective than Brand A. What the maker doesn’t bother to mention is that the government test showed that no brand was any weaker or less effective than any of the others, because all of them were straight aspirin. In other words, all tested brands were equal — except, that is, in price.
Page: 232, Location: 3550-3553
Robert Zajonc35 showed that, all other things being equal, the more familiar an item is, the more attractive it is, even if the item is just a silly nonsense word. We prefer faces we’ve seen 10 times to equally attractive faces we’ve seen only five times,
Page: 232, Location: 3558-3560
contrivance
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When people are scared and angry, facts alone are neither reassuring nor convincing.45 Information can be effective, but only if it is tied to solutions to problems the voters are deeply concerned about.
Page: 236, Location: 3608-3611
What is the difference between propaganda and education? The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines propaganda as “the systematic propagation of a given doctrine” and education as “the act of imparting knowledge or skill.”
Page: 237, Location: 3627-3630
The result is what the internet activist Eli Pariser calls the “filter bubble,” the personalized universe of information that makes it into our social media feeds and therefore gets our attention.
Page: 239, Location: 3652-3653
irate
Page: 240, Location: 3672-3672
According to Richard Petty and John Cacioppo,50 we are inclined to think deeply about an issue if it is one that is relevant to us and if we have the required expertise.
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Petty and Cacioppo argue that there are essentially two ways that people are persuaded — centrally or peripherally.
Page: 241, Location: 3688-3690
The central route to persuasion involves weighing arguments and considering relevant facts, thinking about issues in a systematic fashion, and coming to a decision.
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In contrast, the peripheral route to persuasion is less direct; rather than weighing and considering the strength of arguments, the person responds to simple, often irrelevant cues that suggest the rightness, wrongness, or attractiveness of an argument without giving it much thought.
Page: 241, Location: 3691-3694
The peripheral route to persuasion can be surprisingly subtle — yet surprisingly effective.
Page: 243, Location: 3715-3716
belie
Page: 243, Location: 3723-3723
Politicians and political action groups routinely give policies nicknames that belie the genuine content of the legislation, depending on whether they want it to succeed or fail.
Page: 243, Location: 3722-3723
Words conjure powerful images and emotions that can overwhelm our consideration of the facts.
Page: 244, Location: 3736-3737
but if you want your persuasive message to stick, experiments suggest that persuasion that gets people to process arguments systematically is much more likely to endure than persuasion based solely on peripheral cues.
Page: 244, Location: 3740-3741
Aristotle said we believe “good men,” by which he meant people of high moral caliber. Hovland and Weiss use the term credible, which removes the moral connotations present in the Aristotelian definition.
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How might communicators make themselves seem trustworthy to us? One way is to argue against their own self-interest. If people have nothing to gain (and perhaps something to lose) by convincing us, we will trust them and they will be more effective.
Page: 250, Location: 3820-3822
Another way to increase trustworthiness is to create a situation where people do not think you are trying to persuade them.
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First, we tend to like and trust people whom we find attractive, so unless we are actively processing the fact that they are being paid to endorse a product, we may be persuaded peripherally.
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Second, even though we may not trust the sincerity of the endorsers, that does not mean we don’t buy the products they endorse. Attractiveness and likability are powerful factors in persuasion, even if a source lacks expertise or has something to gain from persuading us.
Page: 252, Location: 3863-3865
To summarize, communicators who are most likely to influence us are those we regard as being both expert and trustworthy. That said, their trustworthiness and effectiveness can be increased if: they take a position that seems opposed to their self-interest. they do not seem to be trying to influence our opinion. they are especially attractive and appealing — at least where our opinions and not our deep-seated attitudes are concerned. they are confident in their assertions, because confidence increases their credibility, unless we have reasons to doubt their motives.
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Communications themselves differ, and how they differ can determine their effectiveness. Here I
Page: 254, Location: 3890-3891
Communications themselves differ, and how they differ can determine their effectiveness. Here I want to consider five dimensions along which they vary: (1) Is a communication more persuasive if it is designed to appeal to the audience’s reasoning ability or if it is aimed at arousing the audience’s emotions? (2) Are people more swayed by a communication if it is tied to a compelling personal experience or if it is bolstered by a stack of unimpeachable statistical evidence? (3) Does the communication resonate with the audience’s way of seeing themselves, that is, with their basic identity? (4) Should the communication present only one side of the argument or should it also present the opposing view? (5) What is the relationship between the effectiveness of the communication and the discrepancy between the audience’s original opinion and the opinion advocated by the communication?
Page: 254, Location: 3890-3896
On the one hand, it suggests that a good scare will motivate people to act; on the other hand, it argues that too much fear can interfere with a person’s ability to pay attention to the message, to comprehend it, and to act upon it. We’ve all believed, at one time or another, that “it only happens to the other guy — it can’t happen to me.” That’s why some people continue to drive and text or to insist on driving after they’ve had a few drinks, even though they know better. Perhaps this is because the risks of accidents are so alarming that people put them out of their minds. Thus we might predict that if a communication really frightens us, we tend not to pay close attention to it. What does the evidence tell us? The
Page: 257, Location: 3928-3933
On the one hand, it suggests that a good scare will motivate people to act; on the other hand, it argues that too much fear can interfere with a person’s ability to pay attention to the message, to comprehend it, and to act upon it.
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What does the evidence tell us? The overwhelming weight of experimental data suggests that, all other things being equal, the more frightened a person is by a communication, the more likely he or she is to take preventive action.
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Is this true for everyone? It is not. There is a reason why common sense suggests that fear blocks us from acting: It does — for certain people, under certain conditions. What “certain people,” for example? Leventhal and his colleagues discovered that people who had a high opinion of themselves were most likely to be motivated to take immediate action when they were frightened.
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Indeed, Leventhal and his associates found that fear-arousing messages containing specific instructions about how, when, and where to take action are much more effective than generalized alarms with no recommendations for dealing with them.
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Conversely, giving them specific things they could do when they had the urge to smoke, but without scaring them about health risks, was relatively ineffective.
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The combination of fear arousal and specific instructions produced the best results;
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Conversely, giving them specific things they could do when they had the urge to smoke, but without scaring them about health risks, was relatively ineffective. The combination of fear arousal and specific instructions produced the best results;
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People who received the pamphlet that described the flu as an active killer were significantly more likely to see the swine flu as frightening, more likely to see themselves as susceptible to it, and more likely to schedule a flu shot.
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Moral emotions can be highly persuasive rhetorical devices — they tend to inspire action and unite like-minded communities — and they tend to be contagious.69 For example, on Twitter, tweets that contain words associated with moral emotions (such as outrageous or disgusting or bad) tend to be re-tweeted more often than non-moral emotion words.
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Generally speaking, people use others’ experiences and opinions to make decisions about what is a good course of action. That is why, as a general rule, we trust large groups of people more than a single person and are more inclined to follow the crowd than a single nonconformist.
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But this reasonable logic often goes out the window when we are faced with a compelling story or example.
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Perhaps, but that one personal story is likely to overwhelm the preponderance of positive Yelp reviews. And the more vivid those personal
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Perhaps, but that one personal story is likely to overwhelm the preponderance of positive Yelp reviews. And the more vivid those personal stories are, the more persuasive they are.
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that people are much more likely to vote if you change the phrasing of a pre-election survey question from one about action (“How important is it for you to vote in the upcoming election?”) to one about fulfilling an identity that people approve of (“How important is it for you to be a voter in the upcoming election?”).
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vacillate,
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Most politicians are well aware of this phenomenon, which is why they tend to present vastly different kinds of speeches, depending upon the audience. When talking to the party faithful, they almost invariably deliver a hell-raising set of arguments favoring their own party platform and candidacy. If they do mention the opposition, it is in a derisive, mocking tone. But when they are appearing on television or speaking to an audience of mixed loyalties, they tend to take a more diplomatic position, giving the opposing view a reasonably accurate airing before proceeding to demolish it.
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the greater the discrepancy with the listeners’ behavior, the more they should change their opinion. Indeed, several investigators have found that this linear relation holds
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the greater the discrepancy with the listeners’ behavior, the more they should change their opinion. Indeed, several investigators have found that this linear relation holds true.
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argued that if a particular communication differs too much from your own position — if it is, in effect, outside of your latitude of acceptance — you will not be much influenced by it.
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People will consider an extremely discrepant communication to be outside their latitude of acceptance — but only if the communicator is not highly credible.
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Characteristics of the Audience
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One personality trait that is most consistently related to persuasibility is self-esteem. Individuals who feel inadequate are more easily influenced by a persuasive communication than individuals who think highly of themselves.
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As a result of such evidence, some evolutionary psychologists maintain that ideological belief systems may have evolved in human societies to be organized along a left–right dimension, consisting of two core sets of attitudes: (1) whether a person advocates social change or supports the system as it is, and (2) whether a person thinks inequality is a result of human policies and can be overcome or is inevitable and should be accepted as part of the natural order.
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Conservatism would have promoted stability, tradition, order, and the benefits of hierarchy, whereas liberalism would have promoted rebelliousness, change, flexibility, and the benefits of equality.88 Conservatives prefer the familiar; liberals prefer the unusual. Every society, to survive, would have done best with both kinds of citizens,
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how you prepare people for a persuasive message is a critical factor in whether persuasion works: “By guiding preliminary attention strategically, it’s possible for a communicator to move recipients into agreement with a message before they experience it.”
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Why? When asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone answered yes. Then, when the request was made, most agreed to participate in order
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Because people like to see themselves as helpful, it makes it difficult — dissonance arousing — to answer yes and then refuse to help.
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found that people who had been given some self-affirming feedback (learning they are well liked on campus) were significantly more receptive to persuasive arguments attacking their beliefs.
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Conversely, members of an audience can be made to be less receptive and less persuadable. One way is simply to warn them about what’s coming.
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Resisting Propaganda and Persuasion
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According to Jack Brehm’s theory of reactance,95 when our sense of freedom is threatened, we attempt to restore it. Have you ever been warned sternly not to do something — “Don’t touch this hot plate! Don’t go out with that person! Don’t smoke grass!” — and then promptly did it anyway? That’s reactance. When people think that someone’s message is too blatant or coercive, thereby intruding on their freedom of choice, they likely activate their defenses to resist it.
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In fact, all other things being equal, when faced with information that runs counter to important beliefs, people have a tendency, whenever feasible, to invent counterarguments on the spot. In this way, they are able to prevent their opinions from being unduly influenced and protect their sense of autonomy.
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inoculating
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Of course, sometimes being open to criticism and a reasoned argument by the opposition might lead to a better alternative: changing our minds! The larger point, in my view, is crucial to the very purpose of education: If we want to lessen the impact of simplistic propaganda, there is no substitute for free inquiry into ideas of all kinds. The person who is easiest to brainwash is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged. For me, the upshot of this research is that having our ideas challenged can have great benefits — either by convincing us that some of our cherished beliefs might be wrong, or by forcing us to think about the reasons for our beliefs and understand those reasons on a deeper level than we had ever done before. That is why I have been saddened to read the stories of protests on college campuses over speakers considered “racist” or “sexist” or any other “ist.” These speakers might well be
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Of course, sometimes being open to criticism and a reasoned argument by the opposition might lead to a better alternative: changing our minds! The larger point, in my view, is crucial to the very purpose of education: If we want to lessen the impact of simplistic propaganda, there is no substitute for free inquiry into ideas of all kinds. The person who is easiest to brainwash is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged.
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When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress … and you
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When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress … and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning.
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Or, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, when we confront ideas based on “fallacies and falsehoods,” we must remember that “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Education is sometimes disquieting — which is as it should
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Or, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, when we confront ideas based on “fallacies and falsehoods,” we must remember that “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Education is sometimes disquieting — which is as it should be.
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6 Human Aggression
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inimitable
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I define aggression as an intentional action aimed at doing harm or causing physical or psychological pain. The action might be physical or verbal. Whether it succeeds in its goal or not, it is still aggression.
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The important thing is your friend’s intention
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wantonly
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For centuries, philosophers have debated why this is: Is aggression an inborn phenomenon, or must it be learned?
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Hobbes’s more pessimistic view was elaborated in the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud,3 who theorized that human beings are born with an instinctual drive toward life, which he called eros, and an instinctual drive toward death, thanatos, leading to aggressive actions. About the death instinct, Freud wrote, “It is at work in every living being and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter.”
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Aggression in Nonhuman Animals
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even though aggressive behavior can be modified by early experience, apparently in some species it needn’t be learned.
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Our closest genetic relatives, with whom we share 98 percent of our DNA, are the chimpanzee and the bonobo.
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Although we humans don’t share the bonobos’ sexual solutions to problems, we are more adept than chimps at cooperating in a way that prevents violent resolution to disputes.
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Culture and Aggression
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Many societies that were once warlike — such as the Scandinavians or Portuguese — have become the most peaceful on the planet.
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rustling
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why Mediterranean and Middle Eastern herding cultures even today place a high value on male aggressiveness. And indeed, when Nisbett looked at agricultural practices within the South, he found that homicide rates were more than twice as high in the hills and dry plains areas (where herding occurs) as in farming regions.
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That means that if certain situational and social conditions can predictably increase aggressive behavior, other conditions can reduce them.
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Gender and Aggression
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The research on cultures of honor suggests that male aggression (“Don’t mess with me”) is encouraged when it fulfills a central part of the male role and identity. When “being a man” is defined by competitiveness and strength, men are constantly trying to “prove” their masculinity and status in displays of aggression.
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Testosterone affects many of the behaviors we stereotypically associate with young males: aggressiveness, competition, and risk-taking. However, the reverse is also true: Aggressive or competitive behavior increases the release of testosterone, presumably to prepare the animal to behave aggressively.
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But all of these findings are correlational, not explanatory.
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Among adults, the sex difference in the willingness to inflict physical harm often vanishes when both sexes feel provoked and entitled to retaliate
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Females are more prone than men to engage in a more social form of aggression, which Nikki Crick and her associates call relational aggression,37 or hurting others by sabotaging their reputations and relationships.
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The report found that the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline, are forms of relational aggression by their peers.
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That belief stems from the psychoanalytic concept of catharsis, or the release of energy. Sigmund Freud believed that aggressive energy must come out somehow, lest it continue to build up and produce illness. His theory rested on the analogy of water pressure building up in a container: Unless aggression is allowed to drain off, it will produce an explosion.
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What happens when acts of aggression are targeted directly against the person who provoked us? Does this satiate our need to aggress and therefore reduce our tendency to hurt that person further? Again, systematic research demonstrates that, as in the punching-bag experiment, exactly the opposite occurs
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The same kind of behavior has also been observed systematically in naturally occurring events in the real world, where verbal acts of aggression served to facilitate further attacks.
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the more you believe that aggression will make you feel better, the more aggressively you will act out, and the less peaceful it will make you.
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Overkill maximizes dissonance. The greater the discrepancy between what the perpetrator did to you and your retaliation, the greater the dissonance. The greater the dissonance, the greater your need to denigrate him and justify your treatment of him.
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In most situations, committing or condoning violence does not reduce the tendency toward violence. Committing acts of violence increases our negative feelings about the victims. Ultimately, this is why violence almost always breeds more violence.
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Experiments confirm that when the retaliation matches the provocation, people do not denigrate or belittle the provocateur.
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There is a major point here that must be emphasized: Most situations in the real world are far messier than this; retaliation almost always exceeds the original offense. Experimental research tells us why: The pain we receive always feels more intense than the pain we inflict. The old joke of “The other guy’s broken leg is trivial; our broken fingernail is serious,”
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Each side justifies what they do as merely evening the score.
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It helps explain why two boys who start out exchanging punches on the arm as a game soon find themselves in a furious fistfight, and why conflicts between nations frequently escalate. Each side justifies what they do as merely evening the score.
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Causes of Aggression
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gregarious
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Intoxicated people often focus upon and respond to the earliest and most obvious aspects of a social situation and tend to miss the subtleties. That means, in practical terms, that if you are sober and someone accidentally steps on your toe, chances are you would know the person didn’t do it on purpose. But if you were drunk, you might miss the subtle cues and respond as if he stomped on your foot with full intent.
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Alcohol is one of the primary reasons for the pervasive miscommunications between women and men in claims of sexual assault, because alcohol significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of the other person’s behavior, sexual negotiations, and memory.
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If an animal experiences pain and cannot flee the scene, it will almost invariably attack; this is true of rats, mice, hamsters, foxes, monkeys, crayfish, snakes, raccoons, alligators, and a host of other animals.59 They will attack members of their own species, members of different species, or anything else in sight, including stuffed dolls and tennis balls.
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It follows that other forms of bodily discomfort, such as heat, humidity, air pollution, and offensive odors, increase anger and thereby lower the threshold for aggressive behavior.61 One potent form of discomfort is hunger,
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It follows that other forms of bodily discomfort, such as heat, humidity, air pollution, and offensive odors, increase anger and thereby lower the threshold for aggressive behavior.61 One potent form of discomfort is hunger, which is accompanied by low blood glucose.
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In a systematic analysis of disturbances occurring in 79 cities between 1967 and 1971, Merrill Carlsmith and Craig Anderson63 found that riots were far more likely to occur during hot days than during cold days.
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Moreover, heat did not increase the incidence of burglary and other property crimes, thus strengthening the linkage between heat and aggression (not simply general criminality).
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Research by Jean Twenge, Roy Baumeister, and others72 demonstrates that being rejected has a plethora of negative effects, not the least of which is a dramatic increase in aggressiveness.
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Of all the unpleasant conditions that provoke aggression — anger, pain, excessive heat, hunger, and rejection — the major instigator of aggression is frustration
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If an individual is thwarted on the way to a goal, the resulting frustration will increase the probability of an aggressive response.
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accentuate
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Frustration tends to be high when a goal is just within reach and in view when you are blocked from it.
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The frustrating experience of perceived unfairness also can provoke aggression,
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In sum, frustration is most pronounced when the goal is within reach, when expectations are high, when the rule of fairness has been violated, and when the goal is blocked without a compelling reason.
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relative deprivation: the feeling that occurs when people notice that other people have more or are doing better than they are, and that the system is treating them unfairly relative to what people around them have
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Countries with the widest gaps in income have higher rates of homicide and other indicators of aggression, if citizens believe that income inequality is unfair.
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Alexis de Tocqueville wrote more than 150 years ago, “Evils which are patiently endured when
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In the former Soviet Union, serious rebellion took place only after 1991, when the government had loosened the chains controlling the population. In South Africa, blacks did not revolt against apartheid as long as they were prevented from hoping for anything better. Clearly, eliminating people’s hopes for better, fairer lives is an undesirable means of reducing aggression
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Demagogues who cynically raise a population’s hopes, without first having explored the means of fulfilling them, are sowing the seeds of revolution.
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Social Learning and Aggression
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Consider the following situations: (1) a considerate person accidentally steps on your toe; (2) a thoughtless person, whom you know doesn’t care about you, steps on your toe. Let us assume the amount of pressure and pain is exactly the same in both cases (and that you haven’t been drinking!). My guess is that the latter situation would evoke an aggressive response, but the former would produce little or no aggression.
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Philip Zimbardo89 has demonstrated that persons who are anonymous, and therefore unidentifiable, tend to act more aggressively than persons who are not anonymous.
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deindividuation: a state of reduced self-awareness, reduced concern over social evaluation, and weakened restraints against prohibited forms of behavior
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the larger the mob, the more heinous the atrocities committed. When people are part of a crowd, they are “faceless,” less self-aware, and less mindful of prohibitions against destructive actions. They are therefore less likely to take responsibility for their behavior.
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The very fact that violence has had to increase in gruesomeness and intensity to get the same reaction from audiences that mild violence once did may be the perfect illustration of the numbing effects of a diet of violence.
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Although psychic numbing may protect us from feeling upset, it may also have the unintended effect of increasing our indifference to real victims of violence and others who need help.
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Finally, another unintended consequence of heavy exposure to media violence is the magnification of danger.
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Watching violence seems to have effects on vulnerable viewers for five reasons: (1) it increases physiological arousal (“I guess I’m really angry rather than stressed”); (2) it triggers a tendency to imitate the hostile or violent characters, weakening previously learned inhibitions (“If they can do it, so can I”); (3) it triggers underlying feelings of anger, fear, or frustration (“I’d better get him before he gets me!”); (4) it promotes psychological numbing and reduces empathy (“Ho hum, another beating — what else is on?”); and (5) it often models approved ways of behaving when we are frustrated, angry, or hurt (“Oh, so that’s how you do it!”).
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Today the Department of Justice has made the definition of rape inclusive: the penetration of any bodily orifice with any part of the body or with any object, without the consent of the victim.
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This may be why sexual violence is more likely to be committed by high-status men, including sports heroes (professional, college, and high school athletic stars), powerful politicians, and celebrities, who could easily find consenting partners. They equate feelings of power with sex, angrily accuse women of provoking them, and endorse rape myths, such as “Women want to be raped.”
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Sexual scripts vary according to one’s culture, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and geographic region, and they change over time. These scripts shape what women and men learn is the “right” way to be sexual and popular, primarily from observations of role models, peers, and media images and messages. Who gets to ask whom out? How many dates before sex is expected? What kind of sex? Who initiates? Is any kind of sex before marriage permitted, discouraged, or forbidden?
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call this indirect communication a “dance of ambiguity,” which protects both parties: His ego is protected in case she says no, and she can accept without having to explicitly admit it’s what she wants or reject the offer without rejecting the suitor and possibly angering him.
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Although these possibilities are hard to test, evidence from a natural experiment suggests that prisons themselves fail to deter crime among the inmates who are released.
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If people are to establish long-term nonaggressive behavior patterns, they must, as children, internalize a set of values that opposes aggressive responses.
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(1) seeing an aggressor rewarded will increase the child’s aggressive behavior, and (2) seeing an aggressor punished will neither increase nor decrease the child’s aggressive behavior. It is just as effective not to expose the child to aggressive models at all.
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An important curb to aggression is the clear indication that it is inappropriate. And the most effective indicator is social — that is, the presence of other people in the same circumstances who choose conciliation over retaliation.
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Empathy is crucial to human life; it is the antidote to dehumanization. If, as we have seen, most individuals dehumanize their victims to justify committing an act of aggression against them, then, by building empathy among people, aggressive acts will become more difficult to commit.
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Altruism makes us feel good. It relieves the unpleasant emotions we feel when we see others suffer, and giving to others is repeatedly found to elevate our mood more reliably than giving to ourselves.
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That is the reason for the final antidote to aggressiveness I want to mention: mindfulness and forms of meditation, which teach people to focus attention on the present moment.
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In practicing mindfulness and meditation, people reduce reflexive, aggressive responses to a perceived provocation or insult, giving a person time to reflect and decide how to respond more calmly and constructively.
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Following the brilliant discoveries of Charles Darwin and the rise of evolutionary approaches to understanding behavior, the pendulum swung to the “naturally aggressive” side. The reasoning was that aggression — between individuals and between groups — is useful and necessary for survival, because dominating and hurting others is an efficient way for people to secure resources and sexual partners.
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The zoologist Konrad Lorenz138 argued that aggression is “an essential part of the life-preserving organization of instincts.”
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More than 100 years ago, the Russian scientist and social reformer Peter Kropotkin140 — a prince who had been born into an aristocratic family — concluded that cooperation and mutual aid have great survival value for most forms of life.
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When sportswriter Grantland Rice said, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game,” he certainly was not describing the dominant theme in American life; he was expressing a hope that we might somehow rid ourselves of our morbid preoccupation with winning at all costs and focus instead on playing with dignity, competence, and generosity of spirit.
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Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, summed it up when he said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” This philosophy implies that the goal of victory justifies whatever means we use to win, even if it’s only a football game — which, after all,
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Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, summed it up when he said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” This philosophy implies that the goal of victory justifies whatever means we use to win, even if it’s only a football game — which, after all, was first conceived as a recreational activity.
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obsequious.
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What Is Prejudice?
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Prejudice is one of the most common and most troubling fixtures of the human experience, yet it is poorly understood.
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This became more than merely an academic debate in 2013. That year, the discrimination-is-over argument was key when the Supreme Court struck down vital protections in the voting rights act of 1964, which had made it illegal for states to prevent African Americans from voting.
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Prejudice, as we shall see, is fundamental to the human condition. In a very real sense, we are built for it. Because prejudice exists in all cultures, it is reasonable to conclude that it helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive by making them wary of strangers. Treating strangers as potential attackers is a better way to survive in a dangerous world than treating them as friends.
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proliferated
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Like aggression, prejudice is endemic to human nature; it ebbs and flows with changes in social conditions; it cycles with the times. Its outward expression can be discouraged by cultural norms and antidiscrimination laws — or encouraged by the public bigotry of others — but it never disappears completely.
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Social psychologists have defined prejudice in a variety of ways, but I will define it as a negative attitude toward all members of a distinguishable group, based solely on their membership in the group.
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Prejudice is complex; like any attitude, it is partly cognitive, partly emotional, and partly behavioral. Thus, when we say an individual is prejudiced against gay people, we mean he or she has preconceived beliefs about them, feels negatively about them, and is disposed to behave toward them with bias or hostility
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Just as we mentally organize the physical world into categories, we group people according to characteristics that matter. The grouping of objects or people by key characteristics is called categorization, a process fundamental to cognition.
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The fundamental category for social animals is us or them.
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Walter Lippmann, the distinguished journalist who was the first to use the term, described the difference between reality — the “world out there” — and the “little pictures in our heads.”
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Because the world is too complicated for us to have a highly differentiated attitude about everything and everyone, we develop elegant, accurate narratives about our own group and all of the variations we see in people who belong to it, while relying on simple, sketchy ideas about other groups.
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, stereotypes are often accurate, and as such can be an adaptive, shorthand way of dealing with complexity.16 Indeed, as Lee Jussim and his colleagues have shown,17 the accuracy of stereotypes turns out to be among the strongest and most reliable findings in social psychology, despite the frequent assumption that they always lead us astray.
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But if your stereotype leads you to believe that these scores reflect immutable, genetic differences in intelligence or math skills, you would be mistaken.
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chagrin.
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In cases where we know little about a person, a stereotype about their group can influence our judgments and assessments of their character or behavior, and to the extent that the stereotype is inaccurate for a particular group member, that will cause misunderstandings and trouble for both parties.
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Obviously, some people do talk more than others, but there is no overall gender difference; the girls-talk-more stereotype is simply false.
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Hostile sexists hold negative stereotypes of women: Women are inferior to men because they are inherently less intelligent, less competent, less brave, less capable of math and science, and so on
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Benevolent sexists hold positive stereotypes of women: Women are kinder than men, more empathic, more nurturing. However, both forms of sexism assume that women are the weaker sex: Benevolent sexists tend to idealize women, seeing them in romantic terms, admiring them as cooks and mothers, and wanting to protect them
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A deeply prejudiced person is virtually immune to information at variance with his or her cherished stereotypes. Famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once compared the mind of a bigot to the pupil of an eye: “The more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.”
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In other words, people didn’t decide to hate and attack Jews because they were communists; they called Jews communists because they hated them.
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Prejudice often leads to discrimination, unfair treatment of members of a stigmatized group.
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Today, in large part because of blind auditions, most symphony orchestras are evenly divided between male and female musicians.
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Identifying Unconscious Prejudices
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The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, measures the speed of people’s positive and negative associations to a target group.
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repudiates.
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suggest that precisely because suppressing prejudices takes effort, people may be particularly attracted to information that justifies their negative feeling and allows them to express it. A valid justification for disliking a group enables us to express prejudice without feeling like bigots — thus avoiding the cognitive dissonance that would be created by “I’m a fair, just, unprejudiced person” and “But I really dislike those people.”
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When white students were led to believe that the student had not worked hard enough at the task, they were more likely to refuse a black student’s request for help than a white student’s. They felt justified in withholding help when the person asking confirmed their stereotype of being lazy, and therefore undeserving.
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Another key factor in justifying our biases is whether we believe an individual has control over his or her situation.
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Another way of saying acceptable is “easily rationalized.” The more easily we can rationalize our prejudice, the more likely we are to hold onto and act upon it. I can feel better about discriminating against you if I’m convinced your disagreeable traits are your own fault.
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Causes of Prejudice
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Once a person differentiates between us and them, the stage is set for stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and the rationalizing that follows.
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That group-protective mechanism and the resulting ingroup bias is a biological survival mechanism inducing us to favor our own kin and tribe, and to be wary of outsiders
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I will look at four basic social-psychological causes of prejudice: (1) economic and political competition or conflict, (2) displaced aggression, (3) maintenance of status or self-image, and (4) conformity to existing social norms.
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According to this view, given that resources are limited, the dominant group might attempt to exploit a minority group to gain some material advantage.
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Prejudiced attitudes tend to increase when groups are in conflict over mutually exclusive goals. This is true whether the goals are economic, political, or ideological.
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In a survey conducted in the 1970s, most anti-black prejudice was found in groups that were just one rung above black people socioeconomically. And this tendency was most pronounced in situations in which whites and blacks were in close competition for jobs.
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Frequently, however, the cause of a person’s frustration is either too big or too vague for direct retaliation. For example, if a 6-year-old boy is humiliated by his teacher, how can he fight back? The teacher has too much power. But this frustration may increase the probability of his aggressing against a less powerful bystander — even if the bystander had nothing to do with his humiliation. By the same token, if there is mass unemployment, who is the frustrated, unemployed worker going to strike out against, the economic system? The system is much too big and much too impersonal. Accordingly, the unemployed worker might try to find a person or group to blame.
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atonement,
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Norms are crucial. People can hold many prejudices but keep them in check when the social rules emphasize civility and kindness. Conversely, an inflammatory politician or preacher may incite followers to break those rules and encourage the ugly, flagrant expression of any and all prejudices. That is what demagogues do,
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dupes.
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Demagogues emerge during conditions of anxiety and uncertainty, appealing especially to those who feel they are falling behind or have lost status in the social order.
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Again, this form of self-justification serves to intensify subsequent brutality. It preserves the self-image but also leads to increased hostility against the target person or group.
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Conversely, if our status is low on the socioeconomic hierarchy, the presence of a downtrodden minority group allows us to feel superior to somebody.
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sororities.
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A great deal of prejudiced behavior is driven by conformity to social norms.
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That is how a society creates prejudiced beliefs, as people conform to the accepted practices of their major institutions.
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Stereotypes and Attributions
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This extra layer of complexity is called attributional ambiguity, and it creates the difficulty that members of minority groups may have in interpreting the feedback they receive about their work.
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When we hold beliefs about others, the self-fulfilling prophecy ensures that we create a social reality in line with our expectations.
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we believe that women are “more emotional” than men, for example, we will tend to notice and recall instances that confirm the stereotype and not count the times we see men roaring in anger or emoting jubilantly at a football game — or the times that female CEOs, politicians, and flight attendants keep their emotions to themselves.
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Such is the power of stereotypes; when people think their behavior may confirm a negative reputation about themselves or their group, the resulting anxiety can interfere with their performance.
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Stereotype threat appears to operate much like other threats to the self-concept in that they can be buffered by focusing on valued aspects of the self.
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This may take the form of the “well-deserved reputation.” It goes something like this: “If the Jews have been victimized throughout their history, they must have been doing something wrong” or “If that woman got raped, she must have been doing something provocative”
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Such a suggestion constitutes a demand that the outgroup conform to standards more stringent than those the majority sets for itself.
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In much of American history equal-status contact has been rare, both because of educational and occupational inequities in our society and because of residential segregation.
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As a matter of fact, once distrust was firmly established, bringing the groups together in noncompetitive situations served to increase the hostility and distrust.
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The key factor seems to be interdependence in reaching mutual goals: a situation in which individuals need one another to succeed
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The Challenge of Diversity
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grimace
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“the clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
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It is feeling alone and being isolated that cause the problems.7 People can be surrounded by others and feel lonely;
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Polls taken of high school students across the decades12 indicate that their most important concern is the way others react to them — and their overwhelming desire is for people to like them more.
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Carnegie’s advice was simple: If you want people to like you, be pleasant, pretend you like them, feign an interest in things they’re interested in, shower them with praise, be agreeable, don’t criticize — and be sure to use their name as often as possible because “the average person is more interested in their own name than in all the other names in the world put together.”
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Is it true? Are these tactics effective? To a limited extent they are, at least in the early stages of becoming acquainted.
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Attraction, in short, is partly determined by our comparison level for alternatives.
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I turn now to five consistent factors that have a profound influence on our choice of friends and lovers: We tend to like people who live in close proximity to us; who we think are similar to us; who like us; and who are physically attractive. And to these I will add a relatively recent phenomenon created by our high-tech world, one that profoundly affects whom we like, whom we choose, and whether we stay: It’s called the paradox of choice.
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Moreover, as I noted in Chapter 3, people become more attractive to us when we expect to interact with them in the future; when we know we will be stuck with someone for a while, dissonance helps us see their good qualities and ignore or deemphasize their flaws.
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Opposites may attract, but they don’t stick.
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First, it is obvious to most of us that people who share our attitudes and opinions on major issues are uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful, and it is always rewarding and interesting to hang out with intelligent and thoughtful people. Of course they are — they agree with us! Second, they provide us with social validation for our beliefs; that is, they satisfy our desire to feel right.
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This experiment gave us evidence to support our contention that, although a high degree of competence does make us more attractive, some evidence of fallibility increases our attractiveness still further.
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Tesser’s research suggests that siblings, close friends, and romantic partners might have an easier time staying close if they establish different domains of excellence.
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found that physical attractiveness mattered, but it was the similarity of the attractiveness of the partners that was crucial in determining whether they stayed together. Many months after the couples started dating, those who were well matched in physical attractiveness had remained more deeply involved with each other than those who were mismatched. Even Beauty’s Beast eventually reveals his handsome self.
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Beauty imparts power, but there is a downside to good looks: People can be harder on beautiful people who are critical of them.
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This study illuminates a dramatic and touching example of the self-fulfilling prophecy: Whether or not a person is physically beautiful, treating them as if they are attractive brings out those desirable qualities.
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Many of us have known the experience of finding a person more beautiful as our liking for them increases, not simply averaging their looks and other qualities into an overall evaluation, but rather, seeing them as being beautiful because our feelings for them have intensified.
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The reverse happens too: People we think of as handsome or gorgeous become less beautiful as we get to know and dislike their annoying personalities or obnoxious beliefs. What is beautiful is good — but what is good becomes beautiful.
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her scheme would have worked like a charm! These researchers led some people to believe that another person liked them and led others to believe that that same person disliked them. In a subsequent interaction, those individuals who thought they were liked behaved in more likable ways:
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Moreover, the people who believed they were liked were, in fact, subsequently liked by the other person, while those who believed they were disliked were disliked by the other person. Another self-fulfilling prophecy in action. Our beliefs, whether right
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Moreover, the people who believed they were liked were, in fact, subsequently liked by the other person, while those who believed they were disliked were disliked by the other person. Another self-fulfilling prophecy in action. Our beliefs, whether right or wrong, play a potent role in shaping reality.
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And so, being liked makes the heart grow fonder. Furthermore, the greater our insecurity and self-doubt, the fonder we will grow of the person who likes us.
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One implication of this experiment is that people who are secure about themselves are less “needy”; that is, they are less likely to accept overtures from just anyone who comes along. Just as a starving person will accept almost any kind of food and a well-fed person can afford to turn down an offer of a soggy cheese sandwich, an insecure person will accept almost anyone who expresses interest, while a secure person will be more selective. Moreover, a person who feels insecure may even seek out a less attractive person to diminish the possibility of being rejected
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While insecurity certainly increases our desire to connect with whomever we expect will have us, in the context of dating we tend to be more romantically attracted to those who seem to like us exclusively — just me, not all those other thousands waiting for a swipe right. Those who seem to like everyone appear to be less discerning with their affections and therefore aren’t nearly as desirable as those who are more choosy.
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This research may explain that heady feeling people have when a flirtation is going well and it feels like there’s no one else in the room but you and that special person. It is an exciting, uplifting, and esteem-building sensation, far more so than watching that “special person” come on to every other person in the room before finally getting to you.
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Schwartz has found, can create a paradox: It’s obviously nice to be able to choose among various alternatives, but it’s not so nice when all those choices impede us from making any decision at
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And there is the paradox of choice in action: Unlimited choice leaves us comparing our current choice to a fantasy. And nobody can compete with a fantasy.
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Some research shows that a negative evaluation generally increases the admiration we feel for the evaluator, so long as he or she is not evaluating us!
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As you can see, people like to be praised and tend to like the person who is complimenting them, but they also dislike being deceived or condescended to. If the praise is too lavish (“That’s the best essay I’ve ever read in my entire life!”), if it suggests surprise (“Great job — I had no idea you were smart!”), or if it seems that the praiser is being ingratiating for an ulterior motive, then praise can backfire.
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Thus the old adage “flattery will get you nowhere” is wrong. As Jones put it, “flattery will get you somewhere” — but not everywhere.
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Favors, like praise, can be considered rewards, and we tend to like people who do us favors — but, as with praise, not if we think those favors come with strings attached. Such strings constitute a threat to the freedom of the receiver.
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That’s why Dale Carnegie’s advice is not always sound. If you want someone to like you, doing them a favor as a technique of ingratiation may not succeed. Instead, you might try to get the other person to do you a favor.
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instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
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The theory predicts that you will like someone most in a gain situation (where the person begins by disliking you and gradually comes to like you more), and you will like the person least in a loss situation (where the person begins by liking you and gradually begins to dislike you).
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gain-loss theory: the theory that increases in positive, rewarding behavior from another person has more impact than constantly rewarding behavior, and that losses in positive behavior have more impact than constant negative behavior from another person
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Communal and Exchange Relationships
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Margaret Clark and Judson Mills65 made an important distinction between two fundamentally different types of relationships, exchange relationships and communal relationships.
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In exchange relationships, the people involved are concerned about reciprocity and making sure that some sort of equity is achieved, that there is fairness in the distribution of the rewards and costs to each of the partners. In this trade-like kind of relationship, if there is a major imbalance, both people become unhappy; the person getting less than they contribute feels angry or depressed, and the person getting more than they contribute usually feels guilty.
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Just about all love researchers draw a distinction between two basic types of romantic love: passionate and companionate.
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“Falling in love” provides a rush that is physiologically not much different from eating chocolate and winning the lottery; indeed, when gamblers win or people are imbibing their favorite chocolate, their brains show increased activity in dopamine-rich areas.
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One is at the peak of the passionate-love phase, when partners in a state of wild excitement dive in headfirst. High on passionate love, wanting to be together every second, they move in together or get married way too quickly. Sometimes these couples are able to transition from the passionate stage to the companionate one. But if, at this crucial moment, they believe that the only real love is the kind defined by obsession, sexual passion, and hot emotion, they may decide they are out of love when the initial phase of attraction fades, as it eventually must — and they will be repeatedly disappointed.
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Implicit Theories of Love
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My friends and I were not unusual in holding that “soul mate” theory of love, the belief that one day the perfect person would come along, the ideal life companion. A lot of young people had that belief then and many have it now. That was our implicit theory of love and relationships, and it governed our behavior and how our romances played out.
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“Destiny” relationships are happiest on smooth seas, but when a storm rises up, their love boat founders. These couples find it difficult to remain satisfied in the relationship when, as inevitably happens, their partner no longer meets their ideal standards.
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contrast, couples who hold an implicit theory about love as growth put more effort into coping strategies. Over time, they remain more satisfied, even when they report that their partner no longer meets their original ideal. They expect their partner to evolve and change over time, and they have a better sense of the temporary nature of relationship slumps.
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Securely attached lovers are rarely jealous or worried about being rejected. They are more compassionate and helpful than insecurely attached people and are quicker to understand and forgive their partners if the partner does something thoughtless or annoying.
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Anxious lovers are always agitated about their relationships; they want to be close but worry that their partners will leave them. Other people often describe them as “clingy,” which may be why they are more likely than secure lovers to complain that they suffer from unrequited love.
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Avoidant people distrust and often avoid intimate attachments altogether. If they are in a relationship, they tend to be distant, signaling the partner to keep away, precisely when intimacy would help them the most, such as after an injury, setback, or failure at work.
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Children who are treated poorly and lack secure attachments may end up on a pathway that makes committed relationships difficult. As children, they have trouble regulating negative emotions; as teenagers, they have trouble dealing with and recovering from conflict with their peers; as adults, they tend to “protect” themselves by becoming the less-committed partner in their relationships.
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which they found that the ability to trust the partner — “to have faith that he or she will treat us, when we’re vulnerable, in a way that’s sensitive to our needs” — predicts a reduction in avoidant tendencies over time.
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The Porcupine’s Dilemma
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In addition to these enormous benefits, however, there is a potential dark side to being in a long-term, close relationship.88 The fundamental irony is aptly expressed in the words of the classic ballad “You Always Hurt the One You Love.”
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found that people react more positively to compliments from strangers than to compliments from friends, and why not? Approval from a stranger is a gain and, according to gain-loss theory, makes us feel better.
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These results suggest a rather bleak picture of the human condition; we seem to be forever seeking favor in the eyes of strangers while being hurt or let down by familiarity with our most intimate friends and lovers. The solution, as the Roman politician Cicero suggested far back as 46 BCE, is to turn those losses and hurt feelings into exciting gains and new understandings.
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The first thing a couple has to do is resolve the porcupine’s dilemma: the desire to achieve deep intimacy while remaining invulnerable to hurt. The term comes from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous parable:
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Living with another person requires innumerable sacrifices and compromises, from what movie to see to how you’ll raise your children. When an event arises that could cause discord, our perceptions of our partner’s regard for us influence how we respond: back away and protect our self-interest or admit vulnerability and pursue connection? Couples must choose between taking a riskier but more honest path that deepens the bond with their partner — and provides many new emotional gains — or taking a path that protects them from further harm — but increases the likelihood of further losses. In relationships, as with many things
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Living with another person requires innumerable sacrifices and compromises, from what movie to see to how you’ll raise your children. When an event arises that could cause discord, our perceptions of our partner’s regard for us influence how we respond: back away and protect our self-interest or admit vulnerability and pursue connection? Couples must choose between taking a riskier but more honest path that deepens the bond with their partner — and provides many new emotional gains — or taking a path that protects them from further harm — but increases the likelihood of further losses. In relationships, as with many things in life, more risk equals more potential reward.
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This bedrock feeling of being understood predicts feelings of well-being, security, and adjustment better than practical behavioral indicators, such as who is doing what around the house.
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Authenticity implies a willingness to communicate a wide range of feelings to our friends and loved ones, under appropriate circumstances, and in ways that reflect our caring.
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Intimacy, Authenticity, and Communication
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Marriage partners who use an intimate, nonaggressive, yet direct method of conflict resolution report higher levels of marital satisfaction.97 Easier said than done, though.
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In particular, he identified four destructive, but entirely too common, forms of communication that are strong indicators that a marriage will fail.
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Hostile criticism, in which each blames the other in angry “you always” or “you never” terms. “You are always late! And you never listen to me!”
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Defensiveness, in which the recipient of a criticism replies with a counter-complaint instead of trying to hear the other person’s real concern. “Late? Late? You’re the one who is obsessive about getting places two days early!”
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Contempt, the most devastating sign, in which one partner mocks the other with ugly names, sneers in disgust, or uses belittling and demeaning language and nonverbal gestures.
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Stonewalling, in which the listener simply withdraws, refusing to talk or even stay in the same room.
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One of the major characteristics that separate humans from other organisms is our ability to communicate complex information.
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Our language gives us truly awesome powers of conversation, yet misunderstandings are frequent, even in relationships that are close and caring.
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Moreover, when we are busy criticizing, we often fail to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. As we have seen, a person’s judgments about another person can take the form of dispositional attributions (attributing the cause of that person’s behavior to a flaw in their personalities) or to situational attributions (attributing the cause to something going on at work or in other outside circumstances).
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The Importance of Immediate Feedback For communication to be effective in a close relationship, we are able to give and receive immediate feedback on how our words and behaviors are interpreted. This give us the information we need to gain insight into the impact of our actions and statements and to consider our options for meeting our own needs, as well as our partner’s.
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The value of immediate feedback is not limited to the recipient. Frequently, in providing feedback, people discover something about themselves.
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Moreover, the direct expression of a feeling helps prevent its escalation that is harder to resolve.
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If my wife has learned to express her anger not by shouting or accusing but by stating her feelings and grievances directly, it keeps our discussion on the issue at hand. If she suppresses the anger but it leaks out
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If my wife has learned to express her anger not by shouting or accusing but by stating her feelings and grievances directly, it keeps our discussion on the issue at hand.
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People are often unaware of how to provide constructive feedback, instead doing it in a way that angers or upsets the recipient, thereby causing more problems than they solve.
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This sounds like a dilemma. Effective communication requires openness, but openness can be hurtful to the recipient.
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In the past, marriages were less about love and more about business arrangements, uniting families, combining resources, or producing children to run the farm. Today’s marriages of love are surely better in many ways.
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The first step in the scientific process is observation.
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The next step is to make a guess as to why that happens
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The next step is to make a guess as to why that happens; this guess is our taking a stab at uncovering the “lawful relationship”
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The third step is to frame that guess as a testable hypothesis.
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The final step is to design an experiment (or a series of experiments) that will either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.
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As my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman,2 once put it, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, then the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
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In my own opinion, this is both the essence of science and its beauty. There are no sacred truths in science.
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