Experiments With People summary

We make countless choices every day, from how to spend our free time to what to eat for dinner. But what psychological processes impact these decisions?

Well, we tend to value things more if we’ve invested a lot to get them – even if they’re not actually very good. Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills show this in a 1951 study: participants were made to endure an embarrassing initiation by reading a lewd passage out loud to an experimenter, as a means to gain entry into a fictitious sex discussion group.

Would you describe yourself as always willing to help a fellow human in need? Well, if you answered yes, the truth might not be so clear-cut. In the end, even the most pious or compassionate among us will ignore suffering when in a hurry.

A good example is a 1973 study conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson, in which theology students were asked to give a brief presentation in an adjacent building. Some of them were told to take their time, while others were told that they were already running late.

Every day, we encounter new and strange situations. So how do we deal with these encounters, and do our strategies work?

At first, we always take things at face value. According to a study done in 1993 by Daniel Gilbert et al, we accept everything we see and only later return to question its accuracy. It’s at this point that we decide whether we should continue accepting it or change our minds.

You just learned how people habitually misjudge new situations, but what other processes assist us in dealing with the world, for better or for worse?

For starters, people tend to deceive themselves into believing everything is fine. Imagine that you suspect you have a serious illness. You’ve read that one symptom of the disease is a loss of appetite and it would be logical to go to the doctor once you suspect something.

Do you act differently when you’re alone compared to when you’re with others? Most people do, which is why we view the world through the eyes of the group we belong to.

Consider a study conducted by Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril in 1954. The experiment asked Princeton and Dartmouth students for their views on a recent contentious football game between the two schools. Of the Princeton fans, 90 percent blamed Dartmouth for the instigation of foul play, while the Dartmouth fans blamed Princeton in comparably high numbers.

It’s clear that human behavior is different in groups, and group pressure can easily force us to do bad things.

For starters, the more people we’re around, the less likely we are to be of help, primarily because we diffuse responsibility. If someone is gasping for air on the street, the more people there are around to help, the less responsible each of them will feel.

It’s pretty obvious that we like some people and aren’t so excited about others. But why is this?

As it turns out, we often prefer certain people just because we spend time with them. This phenomenon is known as the exposure effect: the more we’re exposed to a person or thing, the more we enjoy it. This concept was demonstrated by Theodore Mita in his 1977 study on people’s faces.

We often wish we could get people to do or think what we want, and there are a few good tactics to actually make this happen.

For starters, we can change people’s opinions by getting them to willingly take an action that contradicts their views. These contradictions between what we do and what we believe create a feeling of cognitive dissonance.

Humans can clearly be made to do horrible things – but is there no saving grace for the human species? When you give a homeless person some spare change, are you actually acting altruistically, or do you just want to feel better about yourself?

Well, you can rest assured that altruism does exist. Consider C. Daniel Batson et al.’s 1988 study, which instructed participants to listen empathetically to a recording of a woman named Katie relating the struggles of her life. Afterward, they had the option to commit to helping her for a certain number of hours.