1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,790 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,790 --> 00:00:04,210 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,210 --> 00:00:07,240 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 4 00:00:07,240 --> 00:00:10,900 offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,900 --> 00:00:13,790 To make a donation or view additional materials from 6 00:00:13,790 --> 00:00:19,620 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 7 00:00:19,620 --> 00:00:20,870 ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:35,140 --> 00:00:38,740 PROFESSOR: So last time, we talked about spectacular 9 00:00:38,740 --> 00:00:41,790 things about human nature in terms of problems or 10 00:00:41,790 --> 00:00:44,990 difficulties when we overly obey, when we're overly 11 00:00:44,990 --> 00:00:47,620 conformist, and the tendency for us to do that much more 12 00:00:47,620 --> 00:00:49,220 than we imagine we would. 13 00:00:49,220 --> 00:00:50,630 And the experimental evidence is pretty 14 00:00:50,630 --> 00:00:52,290 powerful, that is true. 15 00:00:52,290 --> 00:00:54,430 You could call that the dark side of things like obedience 16 00:00:54,430 --> 00:00:55,810 a and conformity. 17 00:00:55,810 --> 00:00:58,750 The upside of it is that's how we work together and get along 18 00:00:58,750 --> 00:01:00,110 as a society. 19 00:01:00,110 --> 00:01:03,160 And today, I'm going to focus more on individual, everyday 20 00:01:03,160 --> 00:01:03,840 experiences. 21 00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:08,940 But again, I think you'll see in terms of self-concept and 22 00:01:08,940 --> 00:01:10,540 impressions of others, those are more 23 00:01:10,540 --> 00:01:11,890 everyday kinds of things. 24 00:01:11,890 --> 00:01:13,990 But you'll see how they populate our lives, how we 25 00:01:13,990 --> 00:01:16,900 think about ourselves, how we think about people in everyday 26 00:01:16,900 --> 00:01:20,970 interactions, impressions of others. 27 00:01:20,970 --> 00:01:22,760 We've talked a little bit, just a little bit, about 28 00:01:22,760 --> 00:01:23,550 cultural differences. 29 00:01:23,550 --> 00:01:27,610 Our course has been very focused on American, European 30 00:01:27,610 --> 00:01:28,250 type cultures. 31 00:01:28,250 --> 00:01:29,590 We talked a little about different ones. 32 00:01:29,590 --> 00:01:31,110 I'll say a bit more about that. 33 00:01:31,110 --> 00:01:33,790 And then, I'll talk about maybe the most thought about 34 00:01:33,790 --> 00:01:38,270 disorder of social interaction, autism. 35 00:01:38,270 --> 00:01:43,120 So enhancing our views of ourselves, OK? 36 00:01:43,120 --> 00:01:46,440 So most US college students rank themselves as better than 37 00:01:46,440 --> 00:01:48,050 average students. 38 00:01:48,050 --> 00:01:49,960 So you can sit there in your chair and you could go, no, 39 00:01:49,960 --> 00:01:50,970 I'm a pretty modest person. 40 00:01:50,970 --> 00:01:53,120 But really, I'm probably better than the average 41 00:01:53,120 --> 00:01:54,040 student, right? 42 00:01:54,040 --> 00:01:57,160 And by the way, I'll tell you faculty are the same. 43 00:01:57,160 --> 00:01:58,950 So a million high school students rated their 44 00:01:58,950 --> 00:02:01,990 leadership ability in one example. 45 00:02:01,990 --> 00:02:04,640 28% said they were average. 46 00:02:04,640 --> 00:02:09,580 70% rated themselves as above average in leadership. 47 00:02:09,580 --> 00:02:12,700 You understand that only 50% could be at most above 48 00:02:12,700 --> 00:02:14,210 average, or 49%. 49 00:02:14,210 --> 00:02:17,660 Only 2% said they were below average. 50 00:02:17,660 --> 00:02:20,260 60% of the high school students of these million said 51 00:02:20,260 --> 00:02:22,370 were in the top 10% in their ability to 52 00:02:22,370 --> 00:02:23,620 get along with others. 53 00:02:26,810 --> 00:02:28,580 And by the way, just in case you think it's picking on 54 00:02:28,580 --> 00:02:32,200 students, 94% of college instructors rated themselves 55 00:02:32,200 --> 00:02:33,370 as better than average teachers. 56 00:02:33,370 --> 00:02:37,640 So whether you're sitting there or standing here, we all 57 00:02:37,640 --> 00:02:39,730 polish our image to ourselves. 58 00:02:39,730 --> 00:02:41,640 And we can decide, is that a bad thing? 59 00:02:41,640 --> 00:02:43,930 Is that vanity or egoism? 60 00:02:43,930 --> 00:02:46,040 Or is that maybe a pretty healthy way to 61 00:02:46,040 --> 00:02:48,220 bump through life? 62 00:02:48,220 --> 00:02:51,950 Is overrating yourself, short of putting yourself in 63 00:02:51,950 --> 00:02:54,430 destructive situations, is that a way to be happy and 64 00:02:54,430 --> 00:02:54,830 optimistic? 65 00:02:54,830 --> 00:02:57,830 Are we resilient? 66 00:02:57,830 --> 00:02:59,700 So people call this self-serving 67 00:02:59,700 --> 00:03:01,140 attributional biases. 68 00:03:01,140 --> 00:03:02,540 And this will play out a little bit like the 69 00:03:02,540 --> 00:03:03,970 fundamental attribution error. 70 00:03:03,970 --> 00:03:05,190 Let me remind you of what that is. 71 00:03:05,190 --> 00:03:08,930 The fundamental attribution error is when other people do 72 00:03:08,930 --> 00:03:12,130 things, it's their character, and especially failings are 73 00:03:12,130 --> 00:03:14,240 because of failings of their character. 74 00:03:14,240 --> 00:03:16,570 When we do things we're not especially proud of or don't 75 00:03:16,570 --> 00:03:19,670 think are awesome, that's the situation that made us do it. 76 00:03:19,670 --> 00:03:23,190 And we don't provide that same understanding of the situation 77 00:03:23,190 --> 00:03:25,030 to understand the behaviors of others. 78 00:03:25,030 --> 00:03:27,410 It's not intuitive to do so. 79 00:03:27,410 --> 00:03:31,650 So they did experiments where the experimenter set up how 80 00:03:31,650 --> 00:03:32,950 well you would do on tests. 81 00:03:32,950 --> 00:03:35,625 They made a test super difficult or easier, sensory 82 00:03:35,625 --> 00:03:38,110 or perceptual discrimination, social sensitivity, 83 00:03:38,110 --> 00:03:39,080 competitive games. 84 00:03:39,080 --> 00:03:40,910 It's all set up by the experimenter. 85 00:03:40,910 --> 00:03:43,820 They can make tests brutally hard or pretty easy. 86 00:03:43,820 --> 00:03:46,800 They can make you do well or make you do badly. 87 00:03:46,800 --> 00:03:49,860 And when people did well and they were asked to say why 88 00:03:49,860 --> 00:03:52,180 they thought they did well, the usual description was, 89 00:03:52,180 --> 00:03:54,570 because I'm a particularly social person. 90 00:03:54,570 --> 00:03:56,110 I'm very competitive. 91 00:03:56,110 --> 00:03:57,890 I'm extra good at sensory perception. 92 00:03:57,890 --> 00:03:59,340 You pick it. 93 00:03:59,340 --> 00:04:03,210 When they did badly, that was a tough test. 94 00:04:03,210 --> 00:04:05,070 It's rare for people to say, that was an easy test! 95 00:04:05,070 --> 00:04:06,940 Who wouldn't do well? 96 00:04:06,940 --> 00:04:10,970 If you do well, people tend to ascribe it to their character, 97 00:04:10,970 --> 00:04:12,900 and when they do badly, the situation. 98 00:04:12,900 --> 00:04:14,150 even within ourselves. 99 00:04:16,910 --> 00:04:19,450 And it extends to families, social and political groups, 100 00:04:19,450 --> 00:04:20,300 and sports teams. 101 00:04:20,300 --> 00:04:24,080 You may know I'm very proud and happy to be a member of 102 00:04:24,080 --> 00:04:24,920 the MIT community. 103 00:04:24,920 --> 00:04:27,800 Something happens bad at MIT, I don't go, 104 00:04:27,800 --> 00:04:29,340 well, then, MIT stinks. 105 00:04:29,340 --> 00:04:32,250 I go, oh, there was a situation that wasn't 106 00:04:32,250 --> 00:04:34,740 well-handled by an individual. 107 00:04:34,740 --> 00:04:36,180 Same thing you might think about the 108 00:04:36,180 --> 00:04:37,570 country you belong to. 109 00:04:37,570 --> 00:04:39,290 We don't say, US did something bad. 110 00:04:39,290 --> 00:04:41,040 Most of us don't go, well, the US stinks. 111 00:04:41,040 --> 00:04:43,200 We go, that's situation wasn't very good. 112 00:04:43,200 --> 00:04:44,600 We've got to change things. 113 00:04:44,600 --> 00:04:44,950 Yeah? 114 00:04:44,950 --> 00:04:47,926 AUDIENCE: Do you think this is saying more about how people 115 00:04:47,926 --> 00:04:49,744 explain things to others or about what 116 00:04:49,744 --> 00:04:51,894 they actually believe? 117 00:04:51,894 --> 00:04:53,810 PROFESSOR: So the question was, is it what they actually 118 00:04:53,810 --> 00:04:54,940 believe, or say to others? 119 00:04:54,940 --> 00:04:57,640 I think the evidence is it's about what they say to 120 00:04:57,640 --> 00:05:00,640 themselves truly about how they 121 00:05:00,640 --> 00:05:03,080 explain success or failure. 122 00:05:03,080 --> 00:05:05,080 OK? 123 00:05:05,080 --> 00:05:09,310 People are biased to attribute their successes to their 124 00:05:09,310 --> 00:05:12,150 wonderful traits and their failures to situations. 125 00:05:12,150 --> 00:05:14,780 But we talked earlier that that can be a healthy thing. 126 00:05:14,780 --> 00:05:16,040 Because then, you can bounce back. 127 00:05:16,040 --> 00:05:17,840 You can say, well, I did badly. 128 00:05:17,840 --> 00:05:19,190 But, hey, I'm a winner. 129 00:05:19,190 --> 00:05:20,490 And tomorrow morning, I'll get up. 130 00:05:20,490 --> 00:05:22,200 And I'm back at bat, right? 131 00:05:22,200 --> 00:05:23,490 Instead of saying, oh, I'm a loser. 132 00:05:23,490 --> 00:05:25,080 It's all just pointless. 133 00:05:25,080 --> 00:05:28,330 So in what sense is it good to have this? 134 00:05:28,330 --> 00:05:29,410 It's not a good thing or a bad thing. 135 00:05:29,410 --> 00:05:32,670 It's probably a thing of positive mental health but it 136 00:05:32,670 --> 00:05:36,790 can make us overlook causes of things. 137 00:05:36,790 --> 00:05:41,030 So an example of that as we construct social realities, 138 00:05:41,030 --> 00:05:42,730 and you may know this is the original study. 139 00:05:42,730 --> 00:05:45,650 But there's a million since. 140 00:05:45,650 --> 00:05:47,650 An undefeated Princeton team played Dartmouth 141 00:05:47,650 --> 00:05:48,780 in a football game. 142 00:05:48,780 --> 00:05:50,110 Princeton won. 143 00:05:50,110 --> 00:05:51,390 And then, they looked at the newspaper 144 00:05:51,390 --> 00:05:52,330 accounts of the games-- 145 00:05:52,330 --> 00:05:53,110 totally different. 146 00:05:53,110 --> 00:05:54,760 They showed the film to students 147 00:05:54,760 --> 00:05:56,030 from the two campuses. 148 00:05:56,030 --> 00:05:58,760 And depending on which team you were rooting for, you 149 00:05:58,760 --> 00:06:02,500 tended to view the other team as dirty, not playing fair, 150 00:06:02,500 --> 00:06:03,580 not doing the right thing. 151 00:06:03,580 --> 00:06:07,680 You don't have to be much of a sports fan to notice things 152 00:06:07,680 --> 00:06:09,890 where the other team is not doing the right thing and your 153 00:06:09,890 --> 00:06:12,440 team, when it doesn't do the right thing, well, they were 154 00:06:12,440 --> 00:06:13,260 under pressure. 155 00:06:13,260 --> 00:06:14,510 It was atypical. 156 00:06:17,130 --> 00:06:18,430 And that makes it, of course, hard for 157 00:06:18,430 --> 00:06:19,220 people to get together. 158 00:06:19,220 --> 00:06:21,160 We don't too much worry about Princeton/Dartmouth 159 00:06:21,160 --> 00:06:22,710 tension in the world. 160 00:06:22,710 --> 00:06:26,110 But we do worry about tensions in the Middle East between 161 00:06:26,110 --> 00:06:27,760 Palestinians and Israelis. 162 00:06:27,760 --> 00:06:30,940 When they see the same news story, how do they interpret 163 00:06:30,940 --> 00:06:32,200 what happened in that news story? 164 00:06:34,900 --> 00:06:38,700 So this question of if we have illusions that we're better 165 00:06:38,700 --> 00:06:40,910 than we are a little bit, is that a bad thing or is that a 166 00:06:40,910 --> 00:06:45,060 good thing was tested in an ironic study by Alloy and 167 00:06:45,060 --> 00:06:47,490 Abramson looking at patients with actual clinical 168 00:06:47,490 --> 00:06:48,730 depression. 169 00:06:48,730 --> 00:06:51,050 So they gave depressed and non-depressed students tasks 170 00:06:51,050 --> 00:06:54,410 that varied in the degree of contingency, that is how much 171 00:06:54,410 --> 00:06:56,820 the performance of the participant actually 172 00:06:56,820 --> 00:06:57,790 influenced the outcome. 173 00:06:57,790 --> 00:06:59,630 They controlled that. 174 00:06:59,630 --> 00:07:01,500 And then, they asked people afterwards to estimate the 175 00:07:01,500 --> 00:07:04,090 degree of contingency between a button press and a green 176 00:07:04,090 --> 00:07:05,190 light going on. 177 00:07:05,190 --> 00:07:07,650 How much of it was you, and how much of it seemed to be 178 00:07:07,650 --> 00:07:11,670 randomly done by the experimenter? 179 00:07:11,670 --> 00:07:14,240 Depressed students in this particular setting were more 180 00:07:14,240 --> 00:07:18,220 accurate in knowing when it would depend on them. 181 00:07:18,220 --> 00:07:20,900 And non-depressed students overestimated the contingency. 182 00:07:20,900 --> 00:07:23,890 They overestimated their influence on the situation 183 00:07:23,890 --> 00:07:25,940 when the outcomes were desired. 184 00:07:25,940 --> 00:07:28,430 Awesome, that's because I'm awesome. 185 00:07:28,430 --> 00:07:30,800 And when things didn't go so well, again, not really under 186 00:07:30,800 --> 00:07:31,300 their control. 187 00:07:31,300 --> 00:07:33,340 But they don't know that. 188 00:07:33,340 --> 00:07:34,290 It's the situation. 189 00:07:34,290 --> 00:07:36,880 Something was screwed up with the experiment. 190 00:07:36,880 --> 00:07:38,200 So they're more variable-- 191 00:07:38,200 --> 00:07:40,030 they interpret the situation much more, 192 00:07:40,030 --> 00:07:40,950 again, on these things. 193 00:07:40,950 --> 00:07:43,040 And you could say they're less accurate. 194 00:07:43,040 --> 00:07:45,450 But you could also say that's a way, again, to have 195 00:07:45,450 --> 00:07:47,970 confidence in yourself and optimism about the future. 196 00:07:51,390 --> 00:07:54,020 Another way in which we believe and justify our 197 00:07:54,020 --> 00:07:56,030 choices but a way in which we're socially influenced is 198 00:07:56,030 --> 00:07:58,290 this, the phenomenon called false consensus. 199 00:07:58,290 --> 00:08:01,410 People choose to engage in a behavior that those people who 200 00:08:01,410 --> 00:08:04,140 do that believe that it's more common and that more people do 201 00:08:04,140 --> 00:08:09,760 that, that when you do something, the more you do it, 202 00:08:09,760 --> 00:08:11,950 the more you think other people do it, too. 203 00:08:11,950 --> 00:08:13,250 What's the big deal? 204 00:08:13,250 --> 00:08:14,650 You might know that feeling. 205 00:08:14,650 --> 00:08:17,500 So the original experiment on the Stanford campus for this 206 00:08:17,500 --> 00:08:20,220 phenomenon from Lee Ross was he asked people carry around a 207 00:08:20,220 --> 00:08:23,350 sign on campus that said "Eat at Joe's" for 30 minutes. 208 00:08:23,350 --> 00:08:25,140 Some people said no, thank you. 209 00:08:25,140 --> 00:08:29,040 Some people said yes because they were obedient. 210 00:08:29,040 --> 00:08:30,670 Compliance. 211 00:08:30,670 --> 00:08:32,539 Now, of the people who said yes, I'll carry that sign for 212 00:08:32,539 --> 00:08:35,559 30 minutes, they thought the majority of other people when 213 00:08:35,559 --> 00:08:39,409 asked to do so will do so. 214 00:08:39,409 --> 00:08:41,210 They thought, well, that's the way most people are. 215 00:08:41,210 --> 00:08:42,730 And I'm going to behave like most people. 216 00:08:42,730 --> 00:08:44,350 That's a false consensus. 217 00:08:44,350 --> 00:08:47,540 The people who said no, I won't do it, they thought the 218 00:08:47,540 --> 00:08:49,280 majority would not do it. 219 00:08:49,280 --> 00:08:51,450 So part of their thinking about deciding if they'll do 220 00:08:51,450 --> 00:08:55,640 something or not is their estimate of whether people in 221 00:08:55,640 --> 00:08:58,250 general would do it. 222 00:08:58,250 --> 00:09:01,380 But what you can see happens is that driven by whether 223 00:09:01,380 --> 00:09:03,140 they're going to do it or not. 224 00:09:03,140 --> 00:09:05,830 So for example, teenage smokers estimate higher rates 225 00:09:05,830 --> 00:09:08,620 of smoking than nonsmokers. 226 00:09:08,620 --> 00:09:11,200 Domestically abusive men estimate that about 28% of men 227 00:09:11,200 --> 00:09:13,300 have violently thrown things at their partner. 228 00:09:13,300 --> 00:09:16,460 Best estimates are it's down to 12%. 229 00:09:16,460 --> 00:09:19,690 So we tend to overly believe that other people will do the 230 00:09:19,690 --> 00:09:21,560 same behaviors that we do. 231 00:09:21,560 --> 00:09:23,155 And that's part of justifying those behaviors. 232 00:09:26,160 --> 00:09:28,630 A demonstration of that was from Phil Zimbardo, the social 233 00:09:28,630 --> 00:09:30,180 psychologist who did the prison experiment. 234 00:09:30,180 --> 00:09:33,020 This has some of the same flavor, not quite as dramatic. 235 00:09:33,020 --> 00:09:36,500 But he worked in New York before he moved to Stanford. 236 00:09:36,500 --> 00:09:38,920 So he compared the Bronx to Palo Alto. 237 00:09:38,920 --> 00:09:41,840 In 1980, the paper was published. 238 00:09:41,840 --> 00:09:46,050 And he left out cars, one in upper middle class Palo Alto-- 239 00:09:46,050 --> 00:09:49,380 very suburban area if you haven't been there-- and one 240 00:09:49,380 --> 00:09:51,180 in a tough Bronx area. 241 00:09:51,180 --> 00:09:53,080 As you could imagine, you leave a car out there by 242 00:09:53,080 --> 00:09:56,520 itself in the Bronx area without a license plate and 243 00:09:56,520 --> 00:09:59,610 the hood was up, it was stripped within a day. 244 00:09:59,610 --> 00:10:02,130 So you park the car, you push up the hood, no license 245 00:10:02,130 --> 00:10:04,160 plate-- stripped within a day. 246 00:10:04,160 --> 00:10:08,000 In Palo Alto, it's untouched for a week. 247 00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:11,530 So that's obviously to do with the environment you're in. 248 00:10:11,530 --> 00:10:13,100 But here's the false consensus. 249 00:10:13,100 --> 00:10:14,550 So then, they smash a window. 250 00:10:14,550 --> 00:10:16,170 And within an hour, it's stripped. 251 00:10:16,170 --> 00:10:18,310 As soon as you smash the window-- we talked about 252 00:10:18,310 --> 00:10:19,000 broken windows. 253 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:19,950 Here it is literally. 254 00:10:19,950 --> 00:10:22,480 Soon as somebody says, all rules are off. 255 00:10:22,480 --> 00:10:24,790 This car is smash, wrecked-- 256 00:10:24,790 --> 00:10:26,370 that's the behavior I can engage in. 257 00:10:29,800 --> 00:10:32,990 What you perceive as the relevance, the environment of 258 00:10:32,990 --> 00:10:36,150 behaviors are appropriate, hugely influences and 259 00:10:36,150 --> 00:10:38,510 justifies and drives your own behavior. 260 00:10:41,910 --> 00:10:45,660 Now one of the tasks people have to try to convince people 261 00:10:45,660 --> 00:10:48,090 to do public goods in various ways-- 262 00:10:48,090 --> 00:10:51,380 and this is an ad that when I was younger was very famous. 263 00:10:51,380 --> 00:10:53,800 For you, it's so long ago in history that you may 264 00:10:53,800 --> 00:10:54,530 not even know it. 265 00:10:54,530 --> 00:10:56,930 But it was one of the most famous ones when the United 266 00:10:56,930 --> 00:10:59,670 states was first confronting issues with environmental 267 00:10:59,670 --> 00:11:01,420 problems and pollution. 268 00:11:01,420 --> 00:11:03,140 You may not believe this, but there was an era when there 269 00:11:03,140 --> 00:11:06,670 was fantastic pollution in the air and the water and the land 270 00:11:06,670 --> 00:11:08,820 and nobody seemed to care about it at all because land 271 00:11:08,820 --> 00:11:09,430 seemed endless. 272 00:11:09,430 --> 00:11:11,460 It wasn't even a thought. 273 00:11:11,460 --> 00:11:14,160 So Earth Day was from the 1970s. 274 00:11:14,160 --> 00:11:17,920 That was the marking of a wider consciousness of the 275 00:11:17,920 --> 00:11:20,970 consequence of ruining the environment. 276 00:11:20,970 --> 00:11:23,270 And so in the very earliest stages, when people weren't 277 00:11:23,270 --> 00:11:27,040 used almost any discussions of that, there was this ad with a 278 00:11:27,040 --> 00:11:29,770 Native American with a tear running down his face. 279 00:11:29,770 --> 00:11:31,020 And let me show you the ad. 280 00:11:39,020 --> 00:11:44,630 A very powerful ad at a time, and one that I'll show you in 281 00:11:44,630 --> 00:11:46,890 a minute that social psychologists believe was 282 00:11:46,890 --> 00:11:49,720 completely counterproductive to the goal of reducing 283 00:11:49,720 --> 00:11:50,840 pollution-- 284 00:11:50,840 --> 00:11:54,200 exactly the thing you don't want to do because we just 285 00:11:54,200 --> 00:11:57,650 talked about false consensus and about these environmental 286 00:11:57,650 --> 00:11:58,800 justifications. 287 00:11:58,800 --> 00:12:01,960 So I'll tell you, but what does that mean? 288 00:12:01,960 --> 00:12:03,960 So if you see a lot of people throwing garbage onto the 289 00:12:03,960 --> 00:12:07,710 beach, onto the street, into the river, what are you 290 00:12:07,710 --> 00:12:10,150 allowed to do? 291 00:12:10,150 --> 00:12:10,900 Pollute yourself. 292 00:12:10,900 --> 00:12:12,490 Hey, everybody else is doing it. 293 00:12:12,490 --> 00:12:13,590 What's the big deal? 294 00:12:13,590 --> 00:12:15,430 That's the mode of behavior, right? 295 00:12:15,430 --> 00:12:17,880 Broken window, steal the car. 296 00:12:17,880 --> 00:12:20,200 Litter everywhere, OK, somebody is saying 297 00:12:20,200 --> 00:12:20,880 it's not a good idea. 298 00:12:20,880 --> 00:12:22,540 But the behavior that I see is 299 00:12:22,540 --> 00:12:24,070 littering, littering, littering. 300 00:12:24,070 --> 00:12:25,500 It's OK to litter. 301 00:12:25,500 --> 00:12:27,550 So they literally showed this in experiments. 302 00:12:27,550 --> 00:12:29,690 They took people into areas, into parks. 303 00:12:29,690 --> 00:12:33,320 They surrounded them with different amounts of trash. 304 00:12:33,320 --> 00:12:35,610 Here's the percentage of people who litter. 305 00:12:35,610 --> 00:12:37,120 Here's how much trash was around them. 306 00:12:37,120 --> 00:12:39,000 They went into parks and they put a little trash and they 307 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:41,140 watched somebody come by. 308 00:12:41,140 --> 00:12:42,620 Still, some people are littering. 309 00:12:42,620 --> 00:12:43,640 Maybe less would now. 310 00:12:43,640 --> 00:12:44,370 I don't know. 311 00:12:44,370 --> 00:12:47,430 But as soon as there was four pieces or eight pieces of 312 00:12:47,430 --> 00:12:50,700 littering, then you more than double the littering when 313 00:12:50,700 --> 00:12:52,330 there's zero. 314 00:12:52,330 --> 00:12:57,800 So the very example of showing littering drives littering. 315 00:12:57,800 --> 00:12:59,890 You say, nobody's saying it's a good thing. 316 00:12:59,890 --> 00:13:02,060 But hey, it's what everybody's doing. 317 00:13:02,060 --> 00:13:02,810 And why do we litter? 318 00:13:02,810 --> 00:13:06,370 Because we're lazy and most of us just don't want to bother 319 00:13:06,370 --> 00:13:09,300 to walk to the garbage can. 320 00:13:09,300 --> 00:13:13,730 So they did an experiment with public service announcements 321 00:13:13,730 --> 00:13:16,310 where they said the important thing is to see behavior, the 322 00:13:16,310 --> 00:13:18,230 behavior you want. 323 00:13:18,230 --> 00:13:21,080 Like in this case, it was a recycling thing. 324 00:13:21,080 --> 00:13:25,460 And then, you show one example of a person who doesn't do it. 325 00:13:25,460 --> 00:13:27,550 And you say, bad person! 326 00:13:27,550 --> 00:13:29,240 You don't say bad person, but you send that message. 327 00:13:29,240 --> 00:13:30,700 You say, here's the behavior we want. 328 00:13:30,700 --> 00:13:31,640 There's somebody doing that. 329 00:13:31,640 --> 00:13:33,890 Uh-uh. 330 00:13:33,890 --> 00:13:36,000 And what they found is that 25%-- 331 00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:37,260 this is truly in the community-- 332 00:13:37,260 --> 00:13:39,180 increase in recycling. 333 00:13:39,180 --> 00:13:42,270 So if you want to get people to do things, showing them bad 334 00:13:42,270 --> 00:13:46,510 behavior unfortunately makes them think that bad behavior 335 00:13:46,510 --> 00:13:49,440 is widespread and an acceptable way to go. 336 00:13:49,440 --> 00:13:52,960 So you have to show them good behavior and then give maybe 337 00:13:52,960 --> 00:13:55,030 one example of bad things because you don't want to be 338 00:13:55,030 --> 00:13:56,040 labeled bad. 339 00:13:56,040 --> 00:13:58,860 But mostly, they have to see the behavior you want, not the 340 00:13:58,860 --> 00:14:01,340 behavior you're trying to discourage. 341 00:14:01,340 --> 00:14:05,970 So for a social psychologist, exactly the opposite outcome 342 00:14:05,970 --> 00:14:08,850 of the intended ad. 343 00:14:08,850 --> 00:14:12,130 So this speaks to a gap almost all of us have. 344 00:14:12,130 --> 00:14:14,980 Some of you may be more perfect than I. Many of you 345 00:14:14,980 --> 00:14:17,080 may be more perfect than I. But here's the gap we face 346 00:14:17,080 --> 00:14:19,140 every morning when we get up, which is the difference 347 00:14:19,140 --> 00:14:20,920 between our attitudes and our actions-- 348 00:14:20,920 --> 00:14:23,120 the things we know are the way we wish we were, the right 349 00:14:23,120 --> 00:14:25,580 thing to do, and the way in which sometimes we don't 350 00:14:25,580 --> 00:14:28,760 always do the rightest thing we know we could. 351 00:14:28,760 --> 00:14:32,260 So daffodil days, you may know, occurs in many places 352 00:14:32,260 --> 00:14:34,510 including universities where you buy a daffodil and there's 353 00:14:34,510 --> 00:14:36,910 a four day campus event to benefit 354 00:14:36,910 --> 00:14:38,320 American Cancer Society. 355 00:14:38,320 --> 00:14:39,840 So it's a nice thing. 356 00:14:39,840 --> 00:14:40,830 It's buying a flower. 357 00:14:40,830 --> 00:14:44,450 It's a good cause, fighting cancer, very positive. 358 00:14:44,450 --> 00:14:49,040 So they did a study with 251 Cornell students. 359 00:14:49,040 --> 00:14:52,370 And they asked them, when daffodil day comes up and you 360 00:14:52,370 --> 00:14:54,020 just spend a tiny bit of money-- it's a very small 361 00:14:54,020 --> 00:14:56,150 amount of money they ask from students-- 362 00:14:56,150 --> 00:14:58,000 will you buy at least one flower? 363 00:14:58,000 --> 00:15:00,190 And over 80% said, yes, I will. 364 00:15:00,190 --> 00:15:02,870 For a cause like that, buying a beautiful flower to fight 365 00:15:02,870 --> 00:15:05,530 cancer, I'll spend $1. 366 00:15:05,530 --> 00:15:07,010 How about the other students? 367 00:15:07,010 --> 00:15:08,510 Well, they're kind of lazy. 368 00:15:08,510 --> 00:15:09,590 And they have good intentions. 369 00:15:09,590 --> 00:15:11,610 But probably only about half of them will do it. 370 00:15:11,610 --> 00:15:14,860 That's a little bit of the self-affirmation. 371 00:15:14,860 --> 00:15:15,520 I'm a good person. 372 00:15:15,520 --> 00:15:17,710 Other people will be flawed. 373 00:15:17,710 --> 00:15:19,130 So how many people actually buy it? 374 00:15:19,130 --> 00:15:20,590 43%. 375 00:15:20,590 --> 00:15:23,140 So what happened to this 40%? 376 00:15:23,140 --> 00:15:24,290 Well, it's a little bit like the story. 377 00:15:24,290 --> 00:15:24,850 Things were busy. 378 00:15:24,850 --> 00:15:25,990 Things were happening. 379 00:15:25,990 --> 00:15:30,020 They weren't for cancer and against flowers, 380 00:15:30,020 --> 00:15:31,200 just they got busy. 381 00:15:31,200 --> 00:15:31,840 There were exams. 382 00:15:31,840 --> 00:15:33,380 There was stuff going on. 383 00:15:36,500 --> 00:15:39,970 And how do we explain to ourselves this gap between the 384 00:15:39,970 --> 00:15:43,480 attitudes we hold and truly hold? 385 00:15:43,480 --> 00:15:45,220 We want to do good things and be a good person, and the 386 00:15:45,220 --> 00:15:50,470 actions we do, which are often a little bit below that? 387 00:15:50,470 --> 00:15:54,080 So this gap between our attitudes and our actions has 388 00:15:54,080 --> 00:15:55,840 led to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. 389 00:15:55,840 --> 00:15:58,460 You now hear this term used widely. 390 00:15:58,460 --> 00:15:59,800 Originally, it had a pretty narrow meaning. 391 00:15:59,800 --> 00:16:01,440 And I'm going to be just talking 392 00:16:01,440 --> 00:16:02,105 about that narrow meaning. 393 00:16:02,105 --> 00:16:04,390 It's become a term that's used much more widely. 394 00:16:04,390 --> 00:16:07,360 But here's the original work from Festinger. 395 00:16:07,360 --> 00:16:10,180 He said that we have a problem all the time that we have a 396 00:16:10,180 --> 00:16:13,820 gap between our attitudes and our behaviors and that, as 397 00:16:13,820 --> 00:16:17,100 humans, we have to solve this because we don't feel good 398 00:16:17,100 --> 00:16:19,510 about that gap. 399 00:16:19,510 --> 00:16:22,980 And so here's how we approached showing how we 400 00:16:22,980 --> 00:16:24,220 solve that problem. 401 00:16:24,220 --> 00:16:26,510 Of course, the nice thing would be just to do the right 402 00:16:26,510 --> 00:16:27,210 thing all the time. 403 00:16:27,210 --> 00:16:29,730 But that's not within, most of us, somehow our grasp. 404 00:16:29,730 --> 00:16:30,580 OK 405 00:16:30,580 --> 00:16:31,930 So here's what he had people do. 406 00:16:31,930 --> 00:16:35,290 He had people come in and do a purposefully boring task. 407 00:16:35,290 --> 00:16:37,860 So they would pack and unpack spools in a tray. 408 00:16:37,860 --> 00:16:40,000 Or they would turn tiny little screws, 409 00:16:40,000 --> 00:16:40,810 each of them a quarter. 410 00:16:40,810 --> 00:16:42,580 It was purposefully boring. 411 00:16:42,580 --> 00:16:44,700 You could tell it was boring, and it was boring. 412 00:16:44,700 --> 00:16:47,430 This was the goal. 413 00:16:47,430 --> 00:16:50,100 And then, either nothing would happen-- 414 00:16:50,100 --> 00:16:51,180 that's one group-- 415 00:16:51,180 --> 00:16:53,180 or you would get paid $1-- 416 00:16:53,180 --> 00:16:54,290 not much money-- 417 00:16:54,290 --> 00:16:55,740 or $20-- 418 00:16:55,740 --> 00:16:57,400 considerably better-- 419 00:16:57,400 --> 00:17:00,235 to lie and tell the next person who's coming in that 420 00:17:00,235 --> 00:17:02,620 this was an interesting and worthwhile task. 421 00:17:02,620 --> 00:17:04,310 So you imagine you go in there, you do something that's 422 00:17:04,310 --> 00:17:05,220 really boring. 423 00:17:05,220 --> 00:17:06,109 Imagine you're in this group. 424 00:17:06,109 --> 00:17:07,880 They say, here, here's $1. 425 00:17:07,880 --> 00:17:10,890 Will you lie to the next person? 426 00:17:10,890 --> 00:17:13,130 Or here's $20, will you lie to the next person saying this 427 00:17:13,130 --> 00:17:14,520 was a pretty cool task? 428 00:17:14,520 --> 00:17:18,260 I can't believe how lucky you are to have the next turn. 429 00:17:18,260 --> 00:17:20,525 And then they say, OK, now we know you lied to that person. 430 00:17:20,525 --> 00:17:21,960 We asked you to do it. 431 00:17:21,960 --> 00:17:23,819 But really, really, how was the task? 432 00:17:23,819 --> 00:17:26,089 Really, really, how was the task? 433 00:17:26,089 --> 00:17:28,730 And here's the amazing finding. 434 00:17:28,730 --> 00:17:31,440 If you don't lie, you say I didn't like it very much at 435 00:17:31,440 --> 00:17:34,020 all, here's zero, less than zero. 436 00:17:34,020 --> 00:17:40,800 If you are paid $1 to lie, whoa, it really was good! 437 00:17:40,800 --> 00:17:45,210 If you're paid $20 to lie, you pretty much agree it stinks. 438 00:17:45,210 --> 00:17:46,670 So how does that work? 439 00:17:46,670 --> 00:17:49,370 You have to see the irony of this, right? 440 00:17:49,370 --> 00:17:52,120 So the interpretation is this. 441 00:17:52,120 --> 00:17:55,590 If somebody pays you $20 to make a white lie-- you don't 442 00:17:55,590 --> 00:17:58,240 see this as a brutal lie, just telling the next student that 443 00:17:58,240 --> 00:18:01,250 this is a pretty cool task-- 444 00:18:01,250 --> 00:18:04,590 is $20 worth a white lie? 445 00:18:04,590 --> 00:18:05,780 You can live with that. 446 00:18:05,780 --> 00:18:08,050 You know why you did it. 447 00:18:08,050 --> 00:18:09,110 But $1? 448 00:18:09,110 --> 00:18:11,330 Would you sacrifice your integrity for $1? 449 00:18:13,980 --> 00:18:14,920 You understand-- 450 00:18:14,920 --> 00:18:16,540 $1? 451 00:18:16,540 --> 00:18:18,970 How cheap can you be? 452 00:18:18,970 --> 00:18:20,430 So their idea is this. 453 00:18:20,430 --> 00:18:22,910 But now they're asking them really, really, really, really 454 00:18:22,910 --> 00:18:26,220 the way that people put together their attitudes, like 455 00:18:26,220 --> 00:18:29,120 I lied for a mere dollar, is to say, hey, it must have been 456 00:18:29,120 --> 00:18:31,200 more interesting than I first thought. 457 00:18:31,200 --> 00:18:34,510 Come to think of it, it was pretty interesting. 458 00:18:34,510 --> 00:18:34,785 Boom. 459 00:18:34,785 --> 00:18:36,000 Do you understand that? 460 00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:39,770 So the effort to match up the discrepancy between your 461 00:18:39,770 --> 00:18:43,000 attitudes and actions, you solve-- 462 00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:44,390 you can't let them go like this. 463 00:18:44,390 --> 00:18:45,350 You can explain this. 464 00:18:45,350 --> 00:18:46,830 I lied because I got paid a bunch. 465 00:18:46,830 --> 00:18:48,280 But this, you can't explain. 466 00:18:48,280 --> 00:18:49,870 It's too hard to understand. 467 00:18:49,870 --> 00:18:52,760 And you really create a rationalization that puts it 468 00:18:52,760 --> 00:18:53,390 all together. 469 00:18:53,390 --> 00:18:55,480 And you really, really report now that this was 470 00:18:55,480 --> 00:18:56,730 a pretty good task. 471 00:18:59,870 --> 00:19:00,590 Here's another one. 472 00:19:00,590 --> 00:19:03,655 And this is not high tech experiments. 473 00:19:03,655 --> 00:19:07,140 You can do amazing experiments without zapping people. 474 00:19:07,140 --> 00:19:10,930 But by the time I tell you the end of this one experiment-- 475 00:19:10,930 --> 00:19:12,540 let's see if I have one more on this. 476 00:19:12,540 --> 00:19:16,270 Nah, I'll mention it now and then the next one. 477 00:19:16,270 --> 00:19:19,790 It pretty much ruins it whenever anybody tells you how 478 00:19:19,790 --> 00:19:22,270 satisfied they are with almost anything they've 479 00:19:22,270 --> 00:19:23,330 done in their life. 480 00:19:23,330 --> 00:19:24,580 This has ruined it for me. 481 00:19:24,580 --> 00:19:26,750 And I'll tell you why. 482 00:19:26,750 --> 00:19:28,640 Although I know that you're better off 483 00:19:28,640 --> 00:19:30,700 polishing your happiness. 484 00:19:30,700 --> 00:19:32,530 So here's a simple experiment. 485 00:19:32,530 --> 00:19:34,880 This guy, Jack Brehm, had a bunch of wedding gifts. 486 00:19:34,880 --> 00:19:36,580 And he took his wedding gifts to the lab. 487 00:19:36,580 --> 00:19:37,980 It was not very high tech. 488 00:19:37,980 --> 00:19:40,970 And he had people rate how much they wanted them. 489 00:19:40,970 --> 00:19:43,590 So he had stuff like a desk lamp, a toaster, a stopwatch, 490 00:19:43,590 --> 00:19:46,100 a radio, a bunch of stuff you got in the 491 00:19:46,100 --> 00:19:48,580 1950s as wedding gifts. 492 00:19:48,580 --> 00:19:51,390 People rated how much did they like them. 493 00:19:51,390 --> 00:19:53,720 And then, he picked two that were in the middle of the list 494 00:19:53,720 --> 00:19:56,160 and rated right next to each other. 495 00:19:56,160 --> 00:19:58,840 And he said, will you pick one of these two? 496 00:19:58,840 --> 00:20:00,090 You get to take it home. 497 00:20:02,760 --> 00:20:04,740 Will you pick one of these two that you rated in the middle 498 00:20:04,740 --> 00:20:06,220 right next to each other? 499 00:20:06,220 --> 00:20:07,120 And you pick one. 500 00:20:07,120 --> 00:20:09,730 He says, OK, do one more thing before you take it home. 501 00:20:09,730 --> 00:20:12,890 Tell me again your rating for the different things here. 502 00:20:12,890 --> 00:20:16,120 And here's what they find, that the items that 503 00:20:16,120 --> 00:20:18,580 you chose move up. 504 00:20:18,580 --> 00:20:19,600 You already have it. 505 00:20:19,600 --> 00:20:22,750 But let's say it was rated one to 10, it was rated a five, it 506 00:20:22,750 --> 00:20:24,680 now becomes a two. 507 00:20:24,680 --> 00:20:28,430 Man, that stopwatch, that's pretty awesome. 508 00:20:28,430 --> 00:20:30,330 I thought it was a five. 509 00:20:30,330 --> 00:20:32,040 But it's a two, maybe a one. 510 00:20:32,040 --> 00:20:34,880 I can't believe how lucky I am that I picked that. 511 00:20:34,880 --> 00:20:36,410 And how about the one you didn't pick? 512 00:20:36,410 --> 00:20:39,260 Say the toaster was number six or number four. 513 00:20:39,260 --> 00:20:40,870 That moved to nine or 10. 514 00:20:40,870 --> 00:20:42,180 That toaster stinks. 515 00:20:42,180 --> 00:20:46,390 That would have been such a bad choice to attend Harvard. 516 00:20:46,390 --> 00:20:47,850 It would have been a disaster. 517 00:20:47,850 --> 00:20:51,150 Thank goodness I picked MIT. 518 00:20:51,150 --> 00:20:53,190 So the idea is even something like this-- and everything 519 00:20:53,190 --> 00:20:55,360 they do, college choices, cars-- 520 00:20:55,360 --> 00:20:58,700 any experiment you do, if you have people rate after they 521 00:20:58,700 --> 00:21:01,230 made a decision about what they're going to do, they 522 00:21:01,230 --> 00:21:04,930 always rate the thing they picked as awesome on average 523 00:21:04,930 --> 00:21:07,380 and the thing they didn't pick as much worse than they 524 00:21:07,380 --> 00:21:09,130 initially rated it. 525 00:21:09,130 --> 00:21:11,110 And again, you can say, is that a way we can 526 00:21:11,110 --> 00:21:12,460 have a happy life? 527 00:21:12,460 --> 00:21:14,940 Would you want to be at MIT every day going, if only I'd 528 00:21:14,940 --> 00:21:16,480 gone to Princeton! 529 00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:19,340 Would you want to get married to somebody and say, if only 530 00:21:19,340 --> 00:21:22,870 I'd waited a little bit longer. 531 00:21:22,870 --> 00:21:25,420 For your career, could you have said, I went right to 532 00:21:25,420 --> 00:21:27,150 medical school or law school or engineering. 533 00:21:27,150 --> 00:21:28,570 If only I waited longer! 534 00:21:28,570 --> 00:21:30,360 So you want to say no, thank goodness 535 00:21:30,360 --> 00:21:31,160 I picked that college. 536 00:21:31,160 --> 00:21:32,510 Thank goodness I picked that career. 537 00:21:32,510 --> 00:21:35,670 Thank goodness I picked that spouse or partner because the 538 00:21:35,670 --> 00:21:38,150 other choices that were vaguely in my head were awful. 539 00:21:38,150 --> 00:21:41,320 I don't know how I was even thinking about them. 540 00:21:41,320 --> 00:21:43,560 So this has ruined it for me every time anyone tells me how 541 00:21:43,560 --> 00:21:45,750 happy they are with a choice they've made in their life 542 00:21:45,750 --> 00:21:47,790 because I look at this and go, yeah, once you make that 543 00:21:47,790 --> 00:21:51,926 choice, you're going to rate it as awesome no matter what. 544 00:21:51,926 --> 00:21:54,520 And a famous example is now many of you are taking pretty 545 00:21:54,520 --> 00:21:55,960 tough courses. 546 00:21:55,960 --> 00:21:59,700 Years later when you come back for alumni events-- and 547 00:21:59,700 --> 00:22:01,830 hopefully many of you will have good feelings about MIT 548 00:22:01,830 --> 00:22:03,550 and come back and see your classmates-- 549 00:22:03,550 --> 00:22:06,870 and you'll get around and say, oh, that course was so brutal. 550 00:22:06,870 --> 00:22:09,220 I know that won't be this course. 551 00:22:09,220 --> 00:22:11,410 That course was so brutal with the problem sets. 552 00:22:11,410 --> 00:22:14,960 But it made me a stronger person, a better person. 553 00:22:14,960 --> 00:22:17,570 Thank goodness I did it. 554 00:22:17,570 --> 00:22:18,490 And maybe it does. 555 00:22:18,490 --> 00:22:21,100 But let me tell you why you will think 556 00:22:21,100 --> 00:22:23,690 that in large numbers. 557 00:22:23,690 --> 00:22:26,880 So 1959, there's a little bit of a sociological experiment 558 00:22:26,880 --> 00:22:29,820 in the sense you have to think of people in 1959. 559 00:22:29,820 --> 00:22:32,260 And they were told to qualify for a research study, some 560 00:22:32,260 --> 00:22:35,250 women were required to read aloud a list of obscene words 561 00:22:35,250 --> 00:22:36,930 which are seen as extremely embarrassing and 562 00:22:36,930 --> 00:22:38,340 inappropriate in 1959. 563 00:22:38,340 --> 00:22:40,560 Nowadays, it might be the preferred mode. 564 00:22:40,560 --> 00:22:42,340 But in 1959, it was like, I don't know. 565 00:22:42,340 --> 00:22:43,930 This is not right-- 566 00:22:43,930 --> 00:22:44,930 or mild words. 567 00:22:44,930 --> 00:22:46,650 So that's the experimenter. 568 00:22:46,650 --> 00:22:49,785 Then, you got the privilege, if you did this, to listen to 569 00:22:49,785 --> 00:22:53,290 a lecture on mating habits of lower animals. 570 00:22:53,290 --> 00:22:56,910 But they made it the most boring they could. 571 00:22:56,910 --> 00:22:58,680 This could go a couple different ways, mating habits 572 00:22:58,680 --> 00:22:59,800 of lower animals. 573 00:22:59,800 --> 00:23:03,180 They made it super boring on purpose. 574 00:23:03,180 --> 00:23:04,130 Lecture's over. 575 00:23:04,130 --> 00:23:07,320 And they ask the students to rate the lecture, an 576 00:23:07,320 --> 00:23:09,870 intentionally super boring lecture. 577 00:23:09,870 --> 00:23:11,980 And the women were either in the group with the unpleasant 578 00:23:11,980 --> 00:23:15,090 experience of having to read aloud uncomfortable word lists 579 00:23:15,090 --> 00:23:16,940 or just neutral words, no big deal. 580 00:23:16,940 --> 00:23:19,680 Who rated the lecture better? 581 00:23:19,680 --> 00:23:24,800 The women who read the obscene list of words because they 582 00:23:24,800 --> 00:23:26,630 were saying, well, why would I do this if the 583 00:23:26,630 --> 00:23:29,000 lecture weren't terrific? 584 00:23:29,000 --> 00:23:33,410 So the worse the experience where you've had some sense of 585 00:23:33,410 --> 00:23:38,290 choice in it, the more people will explain to themselves I 586 00:23:38,290 --> 00:23:40,630 took it for an extremely good reason. 587 00:23:40,630 --> 00:23:43,030 I would not do a painful thing. 588 00:23:43,030 --> 00:23:44,370 I'm not that incompetent. 589 00:23:44,370 --> 00:23:46,070 It must've been a wise decision. 590 00:23:46,070 --> 00:23:48,980 And in fact, I should tell you that if the examiner picks 591 00:23:48,980 --> 00:23:52,350 these items, you don't have much of an effect. 592 00:23:52,350 --> 00:23:54,900 So if you rate items four and five or five and six and the 593 00:23:54,900 --> 00:23:57,480 examiner gives you the stopwatch, it doesn't change 594 00:23:57,480 --> 00:23:59,530 your ratings because you didn't choose it. 595 00:23:59,530 --> 00:24:00,990 The examiner did. 596 00:24:00,990 --> 00:24:03,100 The stopwatch is a mediocre gift? 597 00:24:03,100 --> 00:24:04,630 It's still a mediocre gift. 598 00:24:04,630 --> 00:24:08,500 But if you chose it, you have to justify the choice. 599 00:24:08,500 --> 00:24:11,250 And there's 1,000 experiments like this. 600 00:24:11,250 --> 00:24:13,490 Why did I do something so painful? 601 00:24:13,490 --> 00:24:16,390 It must've been for a very good reason. 602 00:24:16,390 --> 00:24:18,440 And then, you figure out what that reason was, like the 603 00:24:18,440 --> 00:24:20,460 lecture was more awesome than I thought. 604 00:24:20,460 --> 00:24:22,850 That physics course, that math course, that computer science 605 00:24:22,850 --> 00:24:25,330 course just made me the person I am today. 606 00:24:28,070 --> 00:24:30,320 We're going to switch gears now, first impressions. 607 00:24:30,320 --> 00:24:32,850 So there's a book from Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, which is 608 00:24:32,850 --> 00:24:34,900 really driven by this phenomenon. 609 00:24:34,900 --> 00:24:37,590 The first impressions we take of other people, how 610 00:24:37,590 --> 00:24:38,500 powerful are they? 611 00:24:38,500 --> 00:24:41,570 How valid are they? 612 00:24:41,570 --> 00:24:44,520 How accurate are they? 613 00:24:44,520 --> 00:24:47,440 So here's how we're going to start the story, all the way 614 00:24:47,440 --> 00:24:48,510 back in 1966. 615 00:24:48,510 --> 00:24:50,410 They had students rate people's personality on the 616 00:24:50,410 --> 00:24:52,980 first day of class before they met each other. 617 00:24:52,980 --> 00:24:55,250 So if we had done this in this course, imagine the first day 618 00:24:55,250 --> 00:24:58,470 of this course, imagine you're not sitting with a friend and 619 00:24:58,470 --> 00:25:01,050 you're asked to people around you on various personality 620 00:25:01,050 --> 00:25:02,110 dimensions. 621 00:25:02,110 --> 00:25:04,570 And the two that popped out were sociable and 622 00:25:04,570 --> 00:25:05,610 responsibility. 623 00:25:05,610 --> 00:25:08,095 The people who said they were sociable people tended to rate 624 00:25:08,095 --> 00:25:10,600 them as sociable just from sitting next to them for a 625 00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:13,740 moment or as highly responsible. 626 00:25:13,740 --> 00:25:17,490 So this is outgoingness and personality psychology or 627 00:25:17,490 --> 00:25:18,340 extraversion. 628 00:25:18,340 --> 00:25:20,410 And this is something like conscientiousness. 629 00:25:20,410 --> 00:25:22,710 Just talk to a person for a couple of moments. 630 00:25:22,710 --> 00:25:27,600 You rate them pretty much like they rate themselves. 631 00:25:27,600 --> 00:25:29,080 You don't know anything about their background. 632 00:25:29,080 --> 00:25:30,490 You haven't had a big interaction. 633 00:25:30,490 --> 00:25:32,770 Literally, it's moments next to each in a course. 634 00:25:32,770 --> 00:25:36,680 Here's another one, 250 students divided into groups 635 00:25:36,680 --> 00:25:39,810 of four who didn't know each other and had not spoken. 636 00:25:39,810 --> 00:25:41,260 And they rated each other. 637 00:25:41,260 --> 00:25:43,480 And there was pretty good correlations between moments 638 00:25:43,480 --> 00:25:48,230 of sitting together and how sociable or extroverted people 639 00:25:48,230 --> 00:25:50,970 were, how responsible, or conscientiousness. 640 00:25:50,970 --> 00:25:56,050 So a few moments with somebody correlates pretty well your 641 00:25:56,050 --> 00:25:58,580 rating, on average, with how they know themselves from a 642 00:25:58,580 --> 00:26:01,220 lifetime of personal experience-- a few moments, 643 00:26:01,220 --> 00:26:02,470 pretty well. 644 00:26:02,470 --> 00:26:05,010 Now, we could say how well do we rate ourselves? 645 00:26:05,010 --> 00:26:06,950 You could already pretty well because it's pretty well 646 00:26:06,950 --> 00:26:08,410 adjusted with what other people think. 647 00:26:08,410 --> 00:26:11,550 But here's another example where they put strangers into 648 00:26:11,550 --> 00:26:17,040 groups, videotaped them, had other people later on view the 649 00:26:17,040 --> 00:26:19,440 video tapes and rate things like how extroverted they 650 00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:22,620 were, how much time did they talk, how many arm movements. 651 00:26:22,620 --> 00:26:24,850 The impressions of the judges watching the videotape 652 00:26:24,850 --> 00:26:28,240 correlated pretty well with self-ratings and with ratings 653 00:26:28,240 --> 00:26:30,000 of other people who saw them just for a few moments 654 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:30,600 personally. 655 00:26:30,600 --> 00:26:32,340 So all these things line up. 656 00:26:32,340 --> 00:26:34,870 Just from a few moments of experience, you get a 657 00:26:34,870 --> 00:26:39,470 surprisingly strong consensus about how outgoing somebody is 658 00:26:39,470 --> 00:26:43,630 and how conscientious or responsible they are. 659 00:26:43,630 --> 00:26:45,770 And it lines up pretty much with the person's own judgment 660 00:26:45,770 --> 00:26:48,370 about themselves that way. 661 00:26:48,370 --> 00:26:51,835 So this reached a huge moment from Nalani Ambady who's now 662 00:26:51,835 --> 00:26:54,870 at Tufts having this famous experiment, thin slices. 663 00:26:54,870 --> 00:26:56,800 And it's a fantastic experiment. 664 00:26:56,800 --> 00:26:58,620 And if you ever teach, it makes you nervous. 665 00:26:58,620 --> 00:27:00,730 Then, we'll discuss whether it should or not. 666 00:27:00,730 --> 00:27:02,540 So at Harvard, here's what she did. 667 00:27:02,540 --> 00:27:06,350 She took videotapes of 13 graduate teaching assistants. 668 00:27:06,350 --> 00:27:07,940 And they were horrible video tapes. 669 00:27:07,940 --> 00:27:08,840 This is 1990. 670 00:27:08,840 --> 00:27:09,960 They were horrible videotape. 671 00:27:09,960 --> 00:27:11,280 I'm just going to tell you-- 672 00:27:11,280 --> 00:27:13,780 you don't even see them around very much because the quality, 673 00:27:13,780 --> 00:27:15,830 when you see them, you can't believe people even 674 00:27:15,830 --> 00:27:18,500 saw things in them. 675 00:27:18,500 --> 00:27:24,320 And she got a random 10 second clip, 30 seconds per teaching 676 00:27:24,320 --> 00:27:26,940 assistant, 30 seconds. 677 00:27:26,940 --> 00:27:28,620 She shows a silent clip to students. 678 00:27:28,620 --> 00:27:29,605 There's no sound even. 679 00:27:29,605 --> 00:27:32,270 You're just seeing silently some teaching assistant in 680 00:27:32,270 --> 00:27:34,750 front of students saying something. 681 00:27:34,750 --> 00:27:37,840 And then, she has these students rate from the silent 682 00:27:37,840 --> 00:27:40,520 film clip how accepting, active, competent, or 683 00:27:40,520 --> 00:27:44,070 confident the teaching assistant is who they've never 684 00:27:44,070 --> 00:27:45,450 met and, of course, they don't know. 685 00:27:45,450 --> 00:27:46,370 And they don't know what the teaching 686 00:27:46,370 --> 00:27:48,240 assistant's talking about. 687 00:27:48,240 --> 00:27:49,880 Here's the impressive thing. 688 00:27:49,880 --> 00:27:52,410 Then, they correlate the ratings with the actual end of 689 00:27:52,410 --> 00:27:54,720 semester rating with students. 690 00:27:54,720 --> 00:27:57,250 They take the students who sat through the entire course with 691 00:27:57,250 --> 00:28:00,200 a teaching assistant, that's one set of values. 692 00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:03,870 They take the students who see 30 seconds of 693 00:28:03,870 --> 00:28:07,030 silent, grainy videotape. 694 00:28:07,030 --> 00:28:09,510 And they say, how well do these things do together? 695 00:28:09,510 --> 00:28:13,980 And they correlate 0.76, which is really high. 696 00:28:13,980 --> 00:28:16,410 It's really high in our field of research. 697 00:28:16,410 --> 00:28:21,480 That momentary, uninformed impression correlates 698 00:28:21,480 --> 00:28:24,500 extremely high with what students rate the teaching 699 00:28:24,500 --> 00:28:27,030 assistant after a full semester, back and forth, 700 00:28:27,030 --> 00:28:30,030 seeing the teaching assistant day in, day out, week in, week 701 00:28:30,030 --> 00:28:32,420 out for an entire semester and all the interactions-- 702 00:28:32,420 --> 00:28:35,000 super high correlation. 703 00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:37,230 And it stays if it's cut from 30 seconds to 704 00:28:37,230 --> 00:28:39,410 15, or even six seconds. 705 00:28:39,410 --> 00:28:44,180 So this is a thin slice, a tiny viewing of somebody, has 706 00:28:44,180 --> 00:28:45,620 this profound effect. 707 00:28:45,620 --> 00:28:50,160 So one impression you can have from this is something like, 708 00:28:50,160 --> 00:28:53,030 gee, we form our first impression-- 709 00:28:53,030 --> 00:28:55,430 and I'll come back to that-- and once we form that first 710 00:28:55,430 --> 00:28:57,180 impression, that's it. 711 00:28:57,180 --> 00:29:00,980 The ship has sailed to a remarkable degree. 712 00:29:00,980 --> 00:29:02,410 We can learn new things about people. 713 00:29:02,410 --> 00:29:03,520 We can change our impressions. 714 00:29:03,520 --> 00:29:04,720 It's not that we can't. 715 00:29:04,720 --> 00:29:08,450 But to a remarkable degree, we've set our final impression 716 00:29:08,450 --> 00:29:12,970 of that person within seconds of interaction. 717 00:29:12,970 --> 00:29:14,610 Now, you could say, and of course that's going to be 718 00:29:14,610 --> 00:29:17,280 fraught with every kind of social prejudice you can 719 00:29:17,280 --> 00:29:19,010 imagine and complicating prejudice you can imagine. 720 00:29:19,010 --> 00:29:19,750 Six seconds? 721 00:29:19,750 --> 00:29:22,210 Not a lot to sort through intellectually. 722 00:29:22,210 --> 00:29:24,210 And it shows up in real life. 723 00:29:24,210 --> 00:29:26,310 For example, listen to 20 seconds of a physician 724 00:29:26,310 --> 00:29:28,230 speaking during a routine office visit, they tape 725 00:29:28,230 --> 00:29:29,620 recorded them. 726 00:29:29,620 --> 00:29:32,140 Above chance prediction of who was sued for malpractice or 727 00:29:32,140 --> 00:29:35,320 not because if you like a doctor, you tend to forgive an 728 00:29:35,320 --> 00:29:36,740 error as a human error. 729 00:29:36,740 --> 00:29:39,210 If you don't like a doctor, you're going to sue that 730 00:29:39,210 --> 00:29:41,970 person because you're pretty mad at them. 731 00:29:41,970 --> 00:29:43,400 So do you give them the benefit of the 732 00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:44,600 doubt they made a mistake? 733 00:29:44,600 --> 00:29:47,050 Or do you think they ought to be sued and punished for the 734 00:29:47,050 --> 00:29:48,790 bad thing they did to you? 735 00:29:48,790 --> 00:29:51,690 Depends how much you like the person to start with. 736 00:29:51,690 --> 00:29:53,600 Now, so one thing could be that we go by first 737 00:29:53,600 --> 00:29:54,500 impressions. 738 00:29:54,500 --> 00:29:56,300 What's the other possibility you could imagine? 739 00:30:00,510 --> 00:30:02,340 The pessimistic view of this is-- 740 00:30:02,340 --> 00:30:03,820 and it's somewhere, I think, really in the middle, it's 741 00:30:03,820 --> 00:30:04,540 just human nature. 742 00:30:04,540 --> 00:30:07,590 The pessimistic view is six seconds? 743 00:30:07,590 --> 00:30:09,650 When we talk about this, the teaching assistants and I as 744 00:30:09,650 --> 00:30:11,860 we'd be in the course go, oh, please, have that first six 745 00:30:11,860 --> 00:30:14,830 seconds go OK because that's going to be 3/4 of your 746 00:30:14,830 --> 00:30:15,700 teaching evaluations-- 747 00:30:15,700 --> 00:30:17,040 which are due Monday by 9:00 AM. 748 00:30:19,810 --> 00:30:22,790 So please fill those out, by the way, this reminds me. 749 00:30:22,790 --> 00:30:24,480 The first six seconds, and that's pretty much it. 750 00:30:24,480 --> 00:30:26,240 And everything we do for the rest of the semester, 751 00:30:26,240 --> 00:30:28,170 everything we do for the rest of the semester, is only going 752 00:30:28,170 --> 00:30:30,180 to be about a quarter of your rating. 753 00:30:30,180 --> 00:30:32,200 That's hard to believe, right? 754 00:30:32,200 --> 00:30:35,490 So one thing is it's all a big confusion and humans just-- 755 00:30:35,490 --> 00:30:38,310 what's the other possibility that's a little bit more 756 00:30:38,310 --> 00:30:41,900 optimistic and maybe accurate? 757 00:30:41,900 --> 00:30:44,100 We know what we like. 758 00:30:44,100 --> 00:30:46,620 We know what we like, OK? 759 00:30:46,620 --> 00:30:49,850 And amazingly, we can tell within seconds under many 760 00:30:49,850 --> 00:30:52,240 circumstance whether there's something about a person that 761 00:30:52,240 --> 00:30:54,550 we like or don't. 762 00:30:54,550 --> 00:30:55,890 It's not that the six seconds are just 763 00:30:55,890 --> 00:30:58,210 superficial in a dumb way. 764 00:30:58,210 --> 00:31:01,690 It's that we detect things about that person that truly 765 00:31:01,690 --> 00:31:04,170 are something about who they are. 766 00:31:04,170 --> 00:31:06,130 And that tends to carry all the way through our human 767 00:31:06,130 --> 00:31:08,630 interactions with them. 768 00:31:08,630 --> 00:31:13,010 So I think it's somewhere in that range. 769 00:31:13,010 --> 00:31:13,970 And does it matter? 770 00:31:13,970 --> 00:31:15,890 Is it all just about popularity contests? 771 00:31:15,890 --> 00:31:17,140 Or does it affect other things? 772 00:31:17,140 --> 00:31:20,980 So just staying within the realm of teaching, they asked 773 00:31:20,980 --> 00:31:26,670 if you perceive somebody as more likable or conscientious, 774 00:31:26,670 --> 00:31:28,180 are they more effective teachers? 775 00:31:28,180 --> 00:31:30,220 Does it circle around like that? 776 00:31:30,220 --> 00:31:32,220 So they have five students in random groups. 777 00:31:32,220 --> 00:31:34,600 One was randomly chosen to be a teacher. 778 00:31:34,600 --> 00:31:36,630 And these teachers prepared brief math lessons. 779 00:31:36,630 --> 00:31:37,980 The students then took the test. 780 00:31:37,980 --> 00:31:41,155 And strangers rated 10 seconds of videos of these teachers. 781 00:31:41,155 --> 00:31:42,650 So people prepared math lessons. 782 00:31:42,650 --> 00:31:45,250 Some better, some worse, as you would imagine. 783 00:31:45,250 --> 00:31:49,020 The higher these were rated in these 10 second thin slice 784 00:31:49,020 --> 00:31:52,330 videos by an external group, the better the test scores of 785 00:31:52,330 --> 00:31:55,520 the actual participants because something about 786 00:31:55,520 --> 00:31:56,950 effective teaching is something 787 00:31:56,950 --> 00:31:58,320 about engaging students. 788 00:31:58,320 --> 00:32:01,540 Something about engaging students is something about 789 00:32:01,540 --> 00:32:05,130 being outgoing or something like that to a certain degree. 790 00:32:05,130 --> 00:32:07,630 So it's not just arbitrary. 791 00:32:07,630 --> 00:32:11,760 There's something real in the world that happens. 792 00:32:11,760 --> 00:32:14,390 And here's a few examples where people have messed 793 00:32:14,390 --> 00:32:17,140 around with that because there's two things that happen 794 00:32:17,140 --> 00:32:17,670 that are tricky. 795 00:32:17,670 --> 00:32:21,310 One is we know what we like and we detect it amazingly 796 00:32:21,310 --> 00:32:24,130 quickly in people on average to a large extent-- 797 00:32:24,130 --> 00:32:27,920 certainly with error, but to a surprisingly vigorous extent. 798 00:32:27,920 --> 00:32:30,240 On the other hand-- and we'll come back to this-- 799 00:32:30,240 --> 00:32:33,390 once we have that first impression, as faulty as it 800 00:32:33,390 --> 00:32:37,490 may be in part, we keep interpreting things in terms 801 00:32:37,490 --> 00:32:39,550 of that first impression. 802 00:32:39,550 --> 00:32:42,800 We give you the benefit of the doubt or we don't behavior 803 00:32:42,800 --> 00:32:43,390 after behavior. 804 00:32:43,390 --> 00:32:46,530 So this was a study that was done at MIT. 805 00:32:46,530 --> 00:32:49,120 Now, you're going to get some prior information. 806 00:32:49,120 --> 00:32:51,290 Half the students were told, the lecture you're about to 807 00:32:51,290 --> 00:32:54,690 have, people know him and consider him to be-- 808 00:32:54,690 --> 00:32:55,480 and then here's the-- 809 00:32:55,480 --> 00:32:57,690 you're in the group that's told he's a very warm person, 810 00:32:57,690 --> 00:32:59,430 industrious, critical, practical, and determined. 811 00:32:59,430 --> 00:33:03,210 Or half of you would get the information that he's a cold 812 00:33:03,210 --> 00:33:06,920 person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined. 813 00:33:06,920 --> 00:33:09,860 So you just got an impression, a warm or cold person. 814 00:33:09,860 --> 00:33:11,830 You haven't even seen the person. 815 00:33:11,830 --> 00:33:14,450 Person gets up and leads a 20 minute discussion. 816 00:33:14,450 --> 00:33:16,560 Then, you're asked to fill out evaluations. 817 00:33:16,560 --> 00:33:19,230 Let me just pick the example of the warm person. 818 00:33:19,230 --> 00:33:21,450 The lecturer is rated as better. 819 00:33:21,450 --> 00:33:23,470 But here's the really cool part-- 820 00:33:23,470 --> 00:33:27,380 students took more part in discussion. 821 00:33:27,380 --> 00:33:28,450 And do you see how that probably 822 00:33:28,450 --> 00:33:30,530 made the section better? 823 00:33:30,530 --> 00:33:32,320 Because if you think this is a nice person, so 824 00:33:32,320 --> 00:33:33,300 I can make a comment. 825 00:33:33,300 --> 00:33:35,740 I won't get my head bit off that I didn't do the reading 826 00:33:35,740 --> 00:33:38,320 or whatever, it makes a section better. 827 00:33:38,320 --> 00:33:41,360 They think it's better, but they make it better because 828 00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:43,070 they think the person's a person they want to interact 829 00:33:43,070 --> 00:33:45,580 with simply because they were told on a piece of paper the 830 00:33:45,580 --> 00:33:46,650 person's warm or cold. 831 00:33:46,650 --> 00:33:49,470 The person's identical time after time. 832 00:33:49,470 --> 00:33:52,470 So the first impression, we know what we like. 833 00:33:52,470 --> 00:33:54,500 It's surprisingly accurate in certain ways. 834 00:33:54,500 --> 00:33:56,960 But it's hard to change because new information is 835 00:33:56,960 --> 00:33:58,830 interpreted to be consistent with already formed 836 00:33:58,830 --> 00:34:00,080 impressions. 837 00:34:00,080 --> 00:34:02,540 So first impressions are unbelievably interesting 838 00:34:02,540 --> 00:34:05,660 because they seem to be so powerful in how we choose who 839 00:34:05,660 --> 00:34:08,679 we like and don't like, who we hire and don't hire, who we 840 00:34:08,679 --> 00:34:11,230 work with and don't work with, who we have relationships and 841 00:34:11,230 --> 00:34:12,570 don't have relationships with. 842 00:34:12,570 --> 00:34:14,389 And they're based on incredibly little bits of 843 00:34:14,389 --> 00:34:16,469 information which are tantalizingly 844 00:34:16,469 --> 00:34:18,030 accurate in one sense. 845 00:34:18,030 --> 00:34:23,540 But once we have them, it's hard to override them. 846 00:34:23,540 --> 00:34:27,270 So here's a famous experiment on the self-fulfilling 847 00:34:27,270 --> 00:34:29,639 prophecy that happens from this first impression that you 848 00:34:29,639 --> 00:34:31,900 create, or the experimenter creates. 849 00:34:31,900 --> 00:34:34,770 So a famous study where elementary school children 850 00:34:34,770 --> 00:34:36,350 gave a test to students. 851 00:34:36,350 --> 00:34:38,980 The researchers said, we're going to tell you whether this 852 00:34:38,980 --> 00:34:41,870 student is going to have-- we believe, based on our research 853 00:34:41,870 --> 00:34:43,179 at Harvard-- 854 00:34:43,179 --> 00:34:45,590 a good or bad year. 855 00:34:45,590 --> 00:34:47,870 So you're an elementary school teacher. 856 00:34:47,870 --> 00:34:48,850 And then, you wonder. 857 00:34:48,850 --> 00:34:49,840 But they say, oh, no, we've done 858 00:34:49,840 --> 00:34:51,239 fantastic research at Harvard. 859 00:34:51,239 --> 00:34:52,870 We're the top scholars in the field. 860 00:34:52,870 --> 00:34:54,920 And we've developed an algorithm that tells you is 861 00:34:54,920 --> 00:34:57,420 this student going to have a good year or a bad year? 862 00:34:57,420 --> 00:34:59,950 The teacher gets that information back. 863 00:34:59,950 --> 00:35:03,190 And at the end of the year, better scores for those kids 864 00:35:03,190 --> 00:35:07,590 randomly described as going to have a good year, worse scores 865 00:35:07,590 --> 00:35:09,210 for those kids randomly described as they're going to 866 00:35:09,210 --> 00:35:11,580 have a bad year. 867 00:35:11,580 --> 00:35:13,210 Now, they didn't tape everything. 868 00:35:13,210 --> 00:35:15,010 Nowadays, we could tape everything. 869 00:35:15,010 --> 00:35:16,550 But what do you guess that happened? 870 00:35:16,550 --> 00:35:18,520 And this might remind you of an experiment we talked about 871 00:35:18,520 --> 00:35:20,110 with rats, except now it's children in 872 00:35:20,110 --> 00:35:21,360 school in real life. 873 00:35:24,340 --> 00:35:26,690 First impression, right? 874 00:35:26,690 --> 00:35:29,130 When you've been told by a crack team of Harvard 875 00:35:29,130 --> 00:35:31,750 researchers that some kid is going to be slumpy, when they 876 00:35:31,750 --> 00:35:34,690 make a mistake answering a math question, you go, oh, why 877 00:35:34,690 --> 00:35:38,000 am I spending my time on this student? 878 00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:41,420 It's not worth my teaching skills. 879 00:35:41,420 --> 00:35:43,280 Somebody else gives a good answer or 880 00:35:43,280 --> 00:35:44,070 makes the same mistake. 881 00:35:44,070 --> 00:35:46,220 And you go, oh, we're going to help this student. 882 00:35:46,220 --> 00:35:48,660 They're one inch away from being perfect on their 883 00:35:48,660 --> 00:35:50,370 multiplication table. 884 00:35:50,370 --> 00:35:51,780 So the very same behavior gets 885 00:35:51,780 --> 00:35:53,330 interpreted as pretty different. 886 00:35:53,330 --> 00:35:56,260 Or maybe just remember when they gave the right answer 887 00:35:56,260 --> 00:35:58,910 really well because you think, that's that student that got 888 00:35:58,910 --> 00:35:59,890 three and four correctly. 889 00:35:59,890 --> 00:36:02,180 But once you that first impression, all of the other 890 00:36:02,180 --> 00:36:04,035 behaviors start to be interpreted in that context. 891 00:36:08,370 --> 00:36:12,210 So one category of things mixed into first impressions 892 00:36:12,210 --> 00:36:15,330 that have been studied a lot is consensus physical 893 00:36:15,330 --> 00:36:15,900 attractiveness. 894 00:36:15,900 --> 00:36:18,470 Of course, different people think differently about 895 00:36:18,470 --> 00:36:19,400 physical attractiveness. 896 00:36:19,400 --> 00:36:21,070 But in the cultures we live in, there tends to be 897 00:36:21,070 --> 00:36:24,830 consensus about the average movie star or beauty 898 00:36:24,830 --> 00:36:28,360 contestant or whatever is the era's way of a 899 00:36:28,360 --> 00:36:29,670 people being seen. 900 00:36:29,670 --> 00:36:32,045 So people have shown again and again, this will not surprise 901 00:36:32,045 --> 00:36:34,070 you, that physically attractive people are judged 902 00:36:34,070 --> 00:36:38,180 as more intelligent, competent, social, and moral. 903 00:36:38,180 --> 00:36:41,470 Now, why is that? 904 00:36:41,470 --> 00:36:42,430 So here's an example. 905 00:36:42,430 --> 00:36:44,160 Fifth grade teachers were given report cards and 906 00:36:44,160 --> 00:36:46,720 photographs of children they did not know. 907 00:36:46,720 --> 00:36:49,380 The photographs were picked to be of children who looked, by 908 00:36:49,380 --> 00:36:52,060 consensus, to be attractive or, by consensus, to be not so 909 00:36:52,060 --> 00:36:53,650 attractive. 910 00:36:53,650 --> 00:36:55,970 And they're asked to rate, based on the report cards and 911 00:36:55,970 --> 00:36:57,490 the photos, the intelligence and 912 00:36:57,490 --> 00:36:58,990 achievement of the children. 913 00:36:58,990 --> 00:37:01,470 The attractive children ended up on average rated as 914 00:37:01,470 --> 00:37:03,940 brighter and more successful than the unattractive children 915 00:37:03,940 --> 00:37:05,980 with identical report cards. 916 00:37:05,980 --> 00:37:07,640 They're sitting there with all the information. 917 00:37:07,640 --> 00:37:09,360 They're making these vague judgments. 918 00:37:09,360 --> 00:37:11,280 And the attractiveness element, even from the photo, 919 00:37:11,280 --> 00:37:14,300 is coming in to the teachers. 920 00:37:14,300 --> 00:37:18,420 A child's misbehavior is attributed to environmental 921 00:37:18,420 --> 00:37:22,200 circumstances if it's a more attractive child and to 922 00:37:22,200 --> 00:37:24,030 personality if it's a less attractive child. 923 00:37:24,030 --> 00:37:26,900 Again, this trade off between character and situation. 924 00:37:26,900 --> 00:37:28,930 The attractive child did something bad. 925 00:37:28,930 --> 00:37:31,160 Oh, there must have been something in this situation 926 00:37:31,160 --> 00:37:32,760 that wasn't well done. 927 00:37:32,760 --> 00:37:35,060 The less attractive child does poorly, and you 928 00:37:35,060 --> 00:37:38,010 go, oh, that loser! 929 00:37:38,010 --> 00:37:38,770 Right? 930 00:37:38,770 --> 00:37:41,070 I'm overstating, but you see how what's happening is 931 00:37:41,070 --> 00:37:42,170 basically-- well, we'll talk about it in a 932 00:37:42,170 --> 00:37:43,460 moment, court cases. 933 00:37:43,460 --> 00:37:45,370 People have done studies on court cases. 934 00:37:45,370 --> 00:37:47,550 Shorter sentence for more attractive people, longer 935 00:37:47,550 --> 00:37:50,290 sentence for less attractive people for what seem to be 936 00:37:50,290 --> 00:37:53,650 comparable crimes. 937 00:37:53,650 --> 00:37:56,630 So people call this a halo effect, that you take one 938 00:37:56,630 --> 00:37:58,720 positive dimension of a person-- 939 00:37:58,720 --> 00:37:59,470 it could be any. 940 00:37:59,470 --> 00:38:03,200 Physical attractiveness is one of the easiest ones to 941 00:38:03,200 --> 00:38:04,800 experimentally study. 942 00:38:04,800 --> 00:38:07,735 And once you say one thing is positive, you tend to rate 943 00:38:07,735 --> 00:38:08,740 other things as positive. 944 00:38:08,740 --> 00:38:10,410 It's just human nature. 945 00:38:10,410 --> 00:38:12,470 She's likable, so she's intelligent. 946 00:38:12,470 --> 00:38:15,610 He's attractive, so he's smart. 947 00:38:15,610 --> 00:38:17,450 People do this. 948 00:38:17,450 --> 00:38:20,020 You could argue it's not a wise thing to, an accurate 949 00:38:20,020 --> 00:38:21,725 thing to do, definitely not. 950 00:38:21,725 --> 00:38:23,060 But people tend to do it. 951 00:38:23,060 --> 00:38:24,450 They'd leak categories. 952 00:38:24,450 --> 00:38:26,720 Once they have positive information in one dimension, 953 00:38:26,720 --> 00:38:28,230 they start to make positive assumptions in other 954 00:38:28,230 --> 00:38:30,180 dimensions. 955 00:38:30,180 --> 00:38:31,520 And there's all kinds of examples. 956 00:38:31,520 --> 00:38:34,220 There's 1,000 of these studies because they're easy to do and 957 00:38:34,220 --> 00:38:35,670 they're popular to do. 958 00:38:35,670 --> 00:38:39,110 But anyway, so here's one example where they were told 959 00:38:39,110 --> 00:38:43,880 that the goal was to study teacher evaluations. 960 00:38:43,880 --> 00:38:47,600 And what they really saw were videos of a lecture of a 961 00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:49,150 person with a strong Belgian accent. 962 00:38:49,150 --> 00:38:52,760 This accent matters for this. 963 00:38:52,760 --> 00:38:55,280 And they saw the videos of a person answering questions in 964 00:38:55,280 --> 00:38:57,820 a warm and friendly manner or a cold and distant manner. 965 00:38:57,820 --> 00:38:58,810 This was done on purpose. 966 00:38:58,810 --> 00:39:03,510 Now, in these two videos, they rated the person in the warm-- 967 00:39:03,510 --> 00:39:06,940 the same person, in one set of videos they were warm in 968 00:39:06,940 --> 00:39:08,740 answering and the other, they were cold and distance. 969 00:39:08,740 --> 00:39:10,910 So same person, but in two videos. 970 00:39:10,910 --> 00:39:13,740 Now, they're asked to rate other dimensions besides the 971 00:39:13,740 --> 00:39:15,630 warmness of the person. 972 00:39:15,630 --> 00:39:17,785 They said, oh, the person who is warm was more attractive. 973 00:39:17,785 --> 00:39:18,780 Now, it's run the other way. 974 00:39:18,780 --> 00:39:20,540 The nicer person was more attractive, 975 00:39:20,540 --> 00:39:22,450 more likable, and-- 976 00:39:22,450 --> 00:39:23,660 kind of impressively-- 977 00:39:23,660 --> 00:39:26,760 had less of an accent. 978 00:39:26,760 --> 00:39:27,070 You understand? 979 00:39:27,070 --> 00:39:30,250 Because accents, the challenge of accents is sometimes 980 00:39:30,250 --> 00:39:32,010 they're a little hard to understand. 981 00:39:32,010 --> 00:39:33,750 So you say, how hard was it to understand? 982 00:39:33,750 --> 00:39:35,820 Oh, that nice person? 983 00:39:35,820 --> 00:39:39,530 Handsome and pretty easy to understand. 984 00:39:39,530 --> 00:39:44,610 Less nice person, on purpose acting out, not so attractive. 985 00:39:44,610 --> 00:39:48,920 And who could understand that thick Belgian accent? 986 00:39:48,920 --> 00:39:52,020 They pick the accent because they say that's ridiculous. 987 00:39:52,020 --> 00:39:54,120 It's ridiculous that an accent would differ on the basis of 988 00:39:54,120 --> 00:39:55,770 whether a person's nice or not. 989 00:39:55,770 --> 00:39:59,320 But this is thought to be the reason why you see so many 990 00:39:59,320 --> 00:40:03,860 athletes and movie stars doing ads because they're asking you 991 00:40:03,860 --> 00:40:07,740 to leak that same way. 992 00:40:07,740 --> 00:40:11,210 Oh, if Kobe Bryant uses that deodorant, that deodorant must 993 00:40:11,210 --> 00:40:13,450 be awesome. 994 00:40:13,450 --> 00:40:18,190 So that's why they care that actors, celebrities, that's 995 00:40:18,190 --> 00:40:19,990 why they have those ads because many people have 996 00:40:19,990 --> 00:40:21,810 positive feelings about them. 997 00:40:21,810 --> 00:40:23,930 And if they can leak into actions, they can certainly 998 00:40:23,930 --> 00:40:27,890 leak into what beer you drink or what make up you get. 999 00:40:27,890 --> 00:40:36,370 So now, the problems with these what we might call 1000 00:40:36,370 --> 00:40:40,110 shortcuts to judging people, first impressions and that 1001 00:40:40,110 --> 00:40:43,420 kind of stuff, is when we're making judgements of other 1002 00:40:43,420 --> 00:40:47,210 people is that we do this very quickly and unconsciously. 1003 00:40:47,210 --> 00:40:50,200 Nobody thinks, if you ask them, that they go around 1004 00:40:50,200 --> 00:40:53,970 misjudging people by the basis of very superficial things. 1005 00:40:53,970 --> 00:40:56,250 But 1,000 experiments show that, on average, 1006 00:40:56,250 --> 00:40:57,760 we tend to do that. 1007 00:40:57,760 --> 00:41:01,770 So these stereotypes have effects. 1008 00:41:01,770 --> 00:41:03,760 Once we make the decision, in influences our actual 1009 00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:04,840 behavioral. 1010 00:41:04,840 --> 00:41:08,450 So here's one example where people tried to show this idea 1011 00:41:08,450 --> 00:41:12,060 that we might have some sort of negative idea of somebody 1012 00:41:12,060 --> 00:41:14,320 for some reason. 1013 00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:16,640 Now, here's the self-fulfilling prophecy. 1014 00:41:16,640 --> 00:41:19,110 Because we have a negative thought about them, we don't 1015 00:41:19,110 --> 00:41:22,060 behave with them as nicely as we might. 1016 00:41:22,060 --> 00:41:24,460 Now, that person who we haven't treated nicely, of 1017 00:41:24,460 --> 00:41:26,400 course, is responding to feeling like they're not 1018 00:41:26,400 --> 00:41:27,400 treated nicely. 1019 00:41:27,400 --> 00:41:29,720 And they go, aha! 1020 00:41:29,720 --> 00:41:30,520 Just what I thought. 1021 00:41:30,520 --> 00:41:32,260 This person stinks. 1022 00:41:32,260 --> 00:41:35,720 And so you have this circle, a positive or a negative spiral, 1023 00:41:35,720 --> 00:41:38,130 in how you treat somebody, how they respond to how you treat 1024 00:41:38,130 --> 00:41:40,490 them, and how you think more about them. 1025 00:41:40,490 --> 00:41:45,180 So an example they did of this, again using 1026 00:41:45,180 --> 00:41:48,830 attractiveness, the dating discussion, is they gave in 1027 00:41:48,830 --> 00:41:52,050 this case male participants a picture that suggested a woman 1028 00:41:52,050 --> 00:41:54,780 they were talking who they did not see was either more or 1029 00:41:54,780 --> 00:41:56,700 less conventionally attractive. 1030 00:41:56,700 --> 00:42:00,990 And then, they had a 10 minute conversation back and forth. 1031 00:42:00,990 --> 00:42:03,720 Then, they brought in some other males in this study. 1032 00:42:03,720 --> 00:42:05,130 And they asked them to listen. 1033 00:42:05,130 --> 00:42:06,850 They don't know anything about the experiment. 1034 00:42:06,850 --> 00:42:08,850 They just hear a conversation. 1035 00:42:08,850 --> 00:42:11,280 And they say, listen to this conversation with this woman. 1036 00:42:11,280 --> 00:42:13,330 Tell us from your impression, how animated is she? 1037 00:42:13,330 --> 00:42:14,830 How enthusiastic is she? 1038 00:42:14,830 --> 00:42:18,760 How much is she enjoying herself in this conversation? 1039 00:42:18,760 --> 00:42:19,880 And this will not surprise you. 1040 00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:21,670 In fact, in some sense it's almost trivial. 1041 00:42:21,670 --> 00:42:25,030 But in the more attractive condition-- now, the raters 1042 00:42:25,030 --> 00:42:25,650 don't know that. 1043 00:42:25,650 --> 00:42:26,270 They don't know anything. 1044 00:42:26,270 --> 00:42:28,760 They just hear a discussion going back and forth. 1045 00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:31,240 The women were more sociable, poised, humorous, 1046 00:42:31,240 --> 00:42:32,380 and socially adept. 1047 00:42:32,380 --> 00:42:33,750 They were rated that way by the raters. 1048 00:42:33,750 --> 00:42:35,000 Why? 1049 00:42:37,110 --> 00:42:39,370 Because the men who got the more attractive pictures were 1050 00:42:39,370 --> 00:42:41,500 being nicer in their conversational style. 1051 00:42:41,500 --> 00:42:43,610 The women were responding, having a better conversation 1052 00:42:43,610 --> 00:42:44,490 back and forth. 1053 00:42:44,490 --> 00:42:47,390 And so this is an example of the cycle between, in this 1054 00:42:47,390 --> 00:42:51,010 case, random and misleading information and the 1055 00:42:51,010 --> 00:42:52,530 behavior you have. 1056 00:42:52,530 --> 00:42:54,660 And then once you have that thing, you really start to 1057 00:42:54,660 --> 00:42:55,600 alter the situation. 1058 00:42:55,600 --> 00:42:57,720 That impression changes how you behave. 1059 00:42:57,720 --> 00:42:59,130 The other person responds to that behavior. 1060 00:42:59,130 --> 00:43:02,480 And that's a self-fulfilling style. 1061 00:43:06,140 --> 00:43:08,590 Let me switch for just a couple minutes to talk about 1062 00:43:08,590 --> 00:43:11,880 this idea we mentioned before that the vast majority of 1063 00:43:11,880 --> 00:43:14,780 experimental psychology of the kind I just described to you 1064 00:43:14,780 --> 00:43:17,400 is conducted in what people call WEIRD societies, Western, 1065 00:43:17,400 --> 00:43:20,240 Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic. 1066 00:43:20,240 --> 00:43:23,060 There's not a lot of research in impoverished countries. 1067 00:43:23,060 --> 00:43:23,800 There's no research. 1068 00:43:23,800 --> 00:43:27,730 There's no places to do it or support to do it. 1069 00:43:27,730 --> 00:43:30,510 So a tremendous amount of research comes from some 1070 00:43:30,510 --> 00:43:32,730 countries like the United states, 1071 00:43:32,730 --> 00:43:34,800 Europe, Australia, Japan. 1072 00:43:34,800 --> 00:43:38,010 And in the coming years, more and more will come of course 1073 00:43:38,010 --> 00:43:41,400 from China and India, South America and Africa probably 1074 00:43:41,400 --> 00:43:42,790 after that. 1075 00:43:42,790 --> 00:43:46,040 Now, it happens that the countries that produce a lot 1076 00:43:46,040 --> 00:43:47,950 of the research are the countries that, when people 1077 00:43:47,950 --> 00:43:52,120 study societal attitudes towards individuality versus 1078 00:43:52,120 --> 00:43:57,520 fitting in, United States, parts of Europe, Australia, 1079 00:43:57,520 --> 00:44:00,700 are in the extreme in the world in emphasizing 1080 00:44:00,700 --> 00:44:01,800 individuality. 1081 00:44:01,800 --> 00:44:04,460 In fact, the United states is seen as a fantastic outlier 1082 00:44:04,460 --> 00:44:05,940 among other cultures. 1083 00:44:05,940 --> 00:44:07,770 Maybe Canada's close. 1084 00:44:07,770 --> 00:44:11,530 And here's a model that social psychologists talk about. 1085 00:44:11,530 --> 00:44:13,630 It's a very simple story in a way. 1086 00:44:13,630 --> 00:44:15,710 And certainly it's averaging across lots of people. 1087 00:44:15,710 --> 00:44:17,360 So a trouble with cultural psychology-- 1088 00:44:17,360 --> 00:44:19,130 which is where we're at now-- 1089 00:44:19,130 --> 00:44:20,120 you can do one or two things. 1090 00:44:20,120 --> 00:44:22,350 You can say culture doesn't matter, which we think is 1091 00:44:22,350 --> 00:44:23,590 probably unlikely. 1092 00:44:23,590 --> 00:44:26,240 Cultures are huge, the culture of your home, your community, 1093 00:44:26,240 --> 00:44:27,870 your country, your religion. 1094 00:44:27,870 --> 00:44:30,470 All those things influence people. 1095 00:44:30,470 --> 00:44:32,260 But then, when you study it, you tend to reduce it to 1096 00:44:32,260 --> 00:44:34,840 simple things that people can experimentalize. 1097 00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:36,710 And you tend to, in some sense, stereotype it. 1098 00:44:36,710 --> 00:44:39,640 But anyway, the idea is that cultures that emphasize 1099 00:44:39,640 --> 00:44:42,400 individuality say you've got to be yourself. 1100 00:44:42,400 --> 00:44:44,390 And then, you have some people around you 1101 00:44:44,390 --> 00:44:46,000 you've got to deal with. 1102 00:44:46,000 --> 00:44:47,540 But be yourself! 1103 00:44:47,540 --> 00:44:48,420 Move across the country. 1104 00:44:48,420 --> 00:44:49,950 Follow that opportunity. 1105 00:44:49,950 --> 00:44:51,240 Be the one. 1106 00:44:51,240 --> 00:44:53,600 And that countries that emphasize interdependent 1107 00:44:53,600 --> 00:44:56,210 relations are much more talking about, you'll fulfill 1108 00:44:56,210 --> 00:44:58,700 yourself to the extent that you find some sort of synergy 1109 00:44:58,700 --> 00:45:02,150 with those people who surround you. 1110 00:45:02,150 --> 00:45:04,090 And so when they've done more organized studies-- and I'll 1111 00:45:04,090 --> 00:45:07,620 show you now on ads, on average-- 1112 00:45:07,620 --> 00:45:09,740 most of this research previously has been in Japan 1113 00:45:09,740 --> 00:45:11,350 and South Korea relative to the United states. 1114 00:45:11,350 --> 00:45:13,970 But it's spreading to other countries. 1115 00:45:13,970 --> 00:45:18,050 Many ads in Japan will focus on groups enjoying themselves. 1116 00:45:18,050 --> 00:45:21,950 And the US version is you're special, you're the one. 1117 00:45:21,950 --> 00:45:23,320 Be all that you can be. 1118 00:45:23,320 --> 00:45:25,750 It's you, you, you, and individuation. 1119 00:45:25,750 --> 00:45:29,080 And most of us on average are brought up in this culture 1120 00:45:29,080 --> 00:45:32,300 where we zip across the country leaving people and 1121 00:45:32,300 --> 00:45:33,895 pursuing opportunities to be ourselves. 1122 00:45:37,460 --> 00:45:41,430 Sleeping arrangements in other countries or in the US tend to 1123 00:45:41,430 --> 00:45:43,300 emphasize this. 1124 00:45:43,300 --> 00:45:45,750 Beginning textbook Dick. 1125 00:45:45,750 --> 00:45:46,200 See Dick. 1126 00:45:46,200 --> 00:45:47,500 See Dick run. 1127 00:45:47,500 --> 00:45:51,060 Jane is somewhere in this story. 1128 00:45:51,060 --> 00:45:52,900 And so I'll leave these notes for you. 1129 00:45:52,900 --> 00:45:55,730 But it's this idea, again, what counts is that you're 1130 00:45:55,730 --> 00:45:59,000 independent or what counts is that you fit in with others. 1131 00:45:59,000 --> 00:46:00,780 What's the important thing? 1132 00:46:00,780 --> 00:46:04,430 So it's very hard in these kinds of studies like with ads 1133 00:46:04,430 --> 00:46:06,510 or anything else to talk about cultures as a whole. 1134 00:46:06,510 --> 00:46:07,700 Things are very complicated. 1135 00:46:07,700 --> 00:46:08,870 The worlds are different in different 1136 00:46:08,870 --> 00:46:10,000 countries and all that. 1137 00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:11,880 So people have tried to do these very simple 1138 00:46:11,880 --> 00:46:12,280 experiments-- 1139 00:46:12,280 --> 00:46:14,960 I'll show you-- to try to convince you that at the most 1140 00:46:14,960 --> 00:46:18,100 fundamental level, very fundamental levels, depending 1141 00:46:18,100 --> 00:46:21,970 on the culture you come from, your mind is tuned to see the 1142 00:46:21,970 --> 00:46:25,140 world one way or the other way relatively speaking. 1143 00:46:25,140 --> 00:46:27,720 And there's variations within cultures of course. 1144 00:46:27,720 --> 00:46:29,350 But here's a very simple experiment. 1145 00:46:29,350 --> 00:46:31,910 They show you a box like this with a line. 1146 00:46:31,910 --> 00:46:34,270 The size of the box and the line change 1147 00:46:34,270 --> 00:46:36,850 from trial to trial. 1148 00:46:36,850 --> 00:46:38,730 They take it away. 1149 00:46:38,730 --> 00:46:40,070 And now, you see an empty box. 1150 00:46:40,070 --> 00:46:41,530 The empty box could be the same size, 1151 00:46:41,530 --> 00:46:42,910 or bigger, or smaller. 1152 00:46:42,910 --> 00:46:47,560 And they say, draw a line that either has the absolute same 1153 00:46:47,560 --> 00:46:50,390 size as this, even though the box is different. 1154 00:46:50,390 --> 00:46:53,280 Or in other trials, they'll say draw it so it has the same 1155 00:46:53,280 --> 00:46:56,100 relative, the same ratio, the same relative size. 1156 00:46:56,100 --> 00:46:57,610 Does that makes sense? 1157 00:46:57,610 --> 00:47:01,260 So here, this would be the same absolute size, the same 1158 00:47:01,260 --> 00:47:01,990 relative size. 1159 00:47:01,990 --> 00:47:05,300 Here, this would be the same relative size or absolute. 1160 00:47:05,300 --> 00:47:06,640 Does that makes sense? 1161 00:47:06,640 --> 00:47:09,190 That's all your job is, draw a line. 1162 00:47:09,190 --> 00:47:12,570 And you're told as it's taken away, draw the same absolute 1163 00:47:12,570 --> 00:47:15,220 size in the box or the same relative size, same 1164 00:47:15,220 --> 00:47:17,570 ratio, to the box. 1165 00:47:17,570 --> 00:47:20,480 So here's the first thing to show you, which is that on 1166 00:47:20,480 --> 00:47:24,740 average people in Japan are more accurate when they're 1167 00:47:24,740 --> 00:47:27,930 drawing-- this is mean error, so it's good to be low-- 1168 00:47:27,930 --> 00:47:29,770 they're more accurate for the relative size. 1169 00:47:29,770 --> 00:47:32,340 People in the US, for the absolute size. 1170 00:47:32,340 --> 00:47:34,990 And I think that's amazing, a line in a box. 1171 00:47:34,990 --> 00:47:37,610 And we know that's not culturally taught. 1172 00:47:37,610 --> 00:47:39,170 In United States, we don't have anybody getting up and 1173 00:47:39,170 --> 00:47:41,040 saying, be all that you can be! 1174 00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:43,970 Draw that line in absolute length! 1175 00:47:43,970 --> 00:47:45,850 So the idea is it's not a taught thing. 1176 00:47:45,850 --> 00:47:46,950 It's a way of thinking. 1177 00:47:46,950 --> 00:47:49,150 And when you get a new example, you apply your 1178 00:47:49,150 --> 00:47:52,850 culture's way of thinking, many people much of the time. 1179 00:47:56,470 --> 00:47:58,180 How malleable is that? 1180 00:47:58,180 --> 00:48:00,300 Is that fixed in you from birth or not? 1181 00:48:00,300 --> 00:48:01,840 And then, you will help me discover the one 1182 00:48:01,840 --> 00:48:03,190 flaw in this study. 1183 00:48:03,190 --> 00:48:06,010 So here's again the absolute size. 1184 00:48:06,010 --> 00:48:08,650 Here's the Americans in America 1185 00:48:08,650 --> 00:48:11,120 having the reverse direction. 1186 00:48:11,120 --> 00:48:13,470 Here's Americans who are students-- 1187 00:48:13,470 --> 00:48:14,590 graduate students typically-- 1188 00:48:14,590 --> 00:48:16,630 who have been in Japan for a year or two. 1189 00:48:16,630 --> 00:48:18,810 Here's Japanese graduate students who've been in the 1190 00:48:18,810 --> 00:48:20,770 United states for a year or two for studies. 1191 00:48:20,770 --> 00:48:22,620 And you can see that just a year or two makes the 1192 00:48:22,620 --> 00:48:25,000 Americans look like the Japanese in Japan. 1193 00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:28,360 And a year or two makes the Japanese look like Americans 1194 00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:28,890 in America. 1195 00:48:28,890 --> 00:48:30,950 Does that make sense? 1196 00:48:30,950 --> 00:48:34,810 So one interpretation is this is shockingly malleable. 1197 00:48:34,810 --> 00:48:38,920 20 years, 24 years of one culture, and one or two years 1198 00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:41,800 later, you're shifted into the mindset of the other culture. 1199 00:48:41,800 --> 00:48:43,460 And maybe that's true. 1200 00:48:43,460 --> 00:48:46,940 If you're a very hard nosed researcher, what do you wish 1201 00:48:46,940 --> 00:48:47,855 would have happened in the study to 1202 00:48:47,855 --> 00:48:49,105 convince you that's true? 1203 00:48:52,040 --> 00:48:52,500 Yeah? 1204 00:48:52,500 --> 00:48:53,946 AUDIENCE: Would they have gone back? 1205 00:48:53,946 --> 00:48:54,910 PROFESSOR: Sorry? 1206 00:48:54,910 --> 00:48:56,840 AUDIENCE: Would they have gone back when they [INAUDIBLE]? 1207 00:48:56,840 --> 00:48:58,670 PROFESSOR: You could think about that. 1208 00:48:58,670 --> 00:48:59,930 That's not the way I'm thinking. 1209 00:48:59,930 --> 00:49:00,990 I know I'm doing 20 questions. 1210 00:49:00,990 --> 00:49:04,320 So that would be a part of the story. 1211 00:49:04,320 --> 00:49:06,820 Let me ask you this one. 1212 00:49:06,820 --> 00:49:09,570 If you go to MIT and say, please, all students from 1213 00:49:09,570 --> 00:49:10,740 Japan, come and participate. 1214 00:49:10,740 --> 00:49:12,700 Or you go somewhere in Tokyo and say, please, all students 1215 00:49:12,700 --> 00:49:15,410 from the US come and participate, is that a random 1216 00:49:15,410 --> 00:49:16,660 assignment? 1217 00:49:19,390 --> 00:49:19,730 No. 1218 00:49:19,730 --> 00:49:22,800 Maybe the American students who want to spend time in 1219 00:49:22,800 --> 00:49:26,790 Japan are kind of culturally attuned with Japan. 1220 00:49:26,790 --> 00:49:28,010 That's why they went there. 1221 00:49:28,010 --> 00:49:31,820 And maybe they are easily swayed by that because that's 1222 00:49:31,820 --> 00:49:32,630 why they're there. 1223 00:49:32,630 --> 00:49:35,630 And maybe these Japanese students on average are swayed 1224 00:49:35,630 --> 00:49:38,990 by American mores because they came to the US because they 1225 00:49:38,990 --> 00:49:40,510 like that way of thinking. 1226 00:49:40,510 --> 00:49:43,080 So to really convince yourself this is really true, you'd 1227 00:49:43,080 --> 00:49:45,480 want to do random assignment where two people come up to 1228 00:49:45,480 --> 00:49:47,690 you from the US and go, OK, you go to Japan. 1229 00:49:47,690 --> 00:49:51,130 You stay in Flagstaff. 1230 00:49:51,130 --> 00:49:53,670 But nobody will agree to do that reasonably. 1231 00:49:53,670 --> 00:49:56,090 So we just have to make this impression. 1232 00:49:56,090 --> 00:49:58,150 But it's a suggestion that cultural things could be 1233 00:49:58,150 --> 00:50:00,050 pretty malleable. 1234 00:50:00,050 --> 00:50:02,980 And a brain imaging study that suggests for this line and box 1235 00:50:02,980 --> 00:50:09,220 task that it's harder work for people from East Asia to do 1236 00:50:09,220 --> 00:50:10,220 the absolute task. 1237 00:50:10,220 --> 00:50:12,120 There's more activation, working harder, to do the 1238 00:50:12,120 --> 00:50:13,190 absolute task. 1239 00:50:13,190 --> 00:50:15,750 And for people from the United States, working harder to do 1240 00:50:15,750 --> 00:50:17,720 the relative task. 1241 00:50:17,720 --> 00:50:19,480 It's not that you can't see both. 1242 00:50:19,480 --> 00:50:21,040 As you sit there, you understand what a relative 1243 00:50:21,040 --> 00:50:23,370 size and what an absolute size is. 1244 00:50:23,370 --> 00:50:26,670 It's just harder to take the culturally non-preferred 1245 00:50:26,670 --> 00:50:29,170 perspective. 1246 00:50:29,170 --> 00:50:34,780 So here's a kind of weird experiment like this. 1247 00:50:34,780 --> 00:50:37,930 So knowing now what you know, imagine you walked up to 1248 00:50:37,930 --> 00:50:41,960 people, on average, from Japan, South Korea, China, or 1249 00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:45,780 on average born and grew up in the United states. 1250 00:50:45,780 --> 00:50:48,220 And you said to them, here's a funny question. 1251 00:50:48,220 --> 00:50:50,390 Which is your favorite shape here, the 1252 00:50:50,390 --> 00:50:52,060 diamond or the square? 1253 00:50:52,060 --> 00:50:55,620 If you're a rugged United States Marine Corps 1254 00:50:55,620 --> 00:50:59,030 individualist, which one do you like? 1255 00:51:02,570 --> 00:51:04,420 Who's the individualist in this picture? 1256 00:51:04,420 --> 00:51:05,540 The diamond. 1257 00:51:05,540 --> 00:51:08,510 I'm a diamond, now just stand back. 1258 00:51:08,510 --> 00:51:10,740 Who's the we're all trying to get along here correctly, help 1259 00:51:10,740 --> 00:51:13,210 each other be interdependent and form a greater shape from 1260 00:51:13,210 --> 00:51:15,310 our synergy? 1261 00:51:15,310 --> 00:51:16,850 The squares. 1262 00:51:16,850 --> 00:51:18,420 As ridiculous as that is-- 1263 00:51:18,420 --> 00:51:21,880 or here's the triangle. 1264 00:51:21,880 --> 00:51:23,560 Here's one shape wrong, different. 1265 00:51:23,560 --> 00:51:24,440 Here's the triangles. 1266 00:51:24,440 --> 00:51:27,730 As ridiculous as that question is, as simple, non-cultural as 1267 00:51:27,730 --> 00:51:31,920 it feels, people from the US like the outstanding figure. 1268 00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:36,100 People from Korea tend to like the more typical figure. 1269 00:51:36,100 --> 00:51:37,020 Here's another one. 1270 00:51:37,020 --> 00:51:38,270 This was done in the airport. 1271 00:51:38,270 --> 00:51:39,300 Imagine you're in an airport. 1272 00:51:39,300 --> 00:51:42,250 This was in the days before 9/11 so we weren't as worried 1273 00:51:42,250 --> 00:51:44,630 about people running around airports running up to us. 1274 00:51:44,630 --> 00:51:45,460 Here's how they literally did it. 1275 00:51:45,460 --> 00:51:47,450 At the San Francisco airport, they would ask you where 1276 00:51:47,450 --> 00:51:47,960 you're from. 1277 00:51:47,960 --> 00:51:51,290 And if you were from the US or from Japan or Korea, they 1278 00:51:51,290 --> 00:51:53,530 would open a pencil box like you might have 1279 00:51:53,530 --> 00:51:54,830 had as a little kid. 1280 00:51:54,830 --> 00:51:56,070 And there'd be a set of pencils in there. 1281 00:51:56,070 --> 00:51:57,320 And they go, please take one. 1282 00:51:57,320 --> 00:51:59,250 And your first thought is, OK, what's the deal? 1283 00:51:59,250 --> 00:52:01,020 What's the scam? 1284 00:52:01,020 --> 00:52:02,680 Are there any security people around? 1285 00:52:02,680 --> 00:52:04,100 They go, no, no, just please take a pencil. 1286 00:52:04,100 --> 00:52:04,550 And you go, OK. 1287 00:52:04,550 --> 00:52:05,120 And you take one. 1288 00:52:05,120 --> 00:52:06,130 And you think something bad's going to 1289 00:52:06,130 --> 00:52:06,890 happen, and it doesn't. 1290 00:52:06,890 --> 00:52:08,330 All they want to know is this. 1291 00:52:08,330 --> 00:52:11,330 Do you take the out, the individualist pencil or the 1292 00:52:11,330 --> 00:52:14,170 collectivist pencil? 1293 00:52:14,170 --> 00:52:16,360 And there's a one in four condition or a 1294 00:52:16,360 --> 00:52:17,370 two in three condition. 1295 00:52:17,370 --> 00:52:18,730 Which pencil do you take? 1296 00:52:18,730 --> 00:52:22,090 Ridiculous as this experiment is, it depends 1297 00:52:22,090 --> 00:52:23,450 where you come from. 1298 00:52:23,450 --> 00:52:29,680 East Asians on average picked the majority pen. 1299 00:52:29,680 --> 00:52:32,180 And people born in the US, European Americans, picked the 1300 00:52:32,180 --> 00:52:34,610 minority pen, the stand-out individual pen. 1301 00:52:34,610 --> 00:52:37,380 So to a ludicrous degree, the experiments 1302 00:52:37,380 --> 00:52:38,490 are almost too cute. 1303 00:52:38,490 --> 00:52:40,110 But the idea is they want to get rid of a 1304 00:52:40,110 --> 00:52:41,080 lot of cultural overlay. 1305 00:52:41,080 --> 00:52:42,950 And so you're just picking a pencil. 1306 00:52:42,950 --> 00:52:44,610 It's not something that anybody taught you at home or 1307 00:52:44,610 --> 00:52:47,420 in school how to be or how to do. 1308 00:52:47,420 --> 00:52:48,330 There's a similar one. 1309 00:52:48,330 --> 00:52:50,070 They would show a picture like this. 1310 00:52:50,070 --> 00:52:51,590 This is an example picture. 1311 00:52:51,590 --> 00:52:54,170 First, they would ask people to describe the picture. 1312 00:52:54,170 --> 00:52:58,270 And they noticed that the North Americans tended to 1313 00:52:58,270 --> 00:52:59,460 focus on the fish. 1314 00:52:59,460 --> 00:53:00,970 There's a really big one. 1315 00:53:00,970 --> 00:53:02,510 He's going to eat the really small one. 1316 00:53:02,510 --> 00:53:03,840 That's the way of capitalism. 1317 00:53:03,840 --> 00:53:05,050 I'm being facetious. 1318 00:53:05,050 --> 00:53:08,220 But their story was on the fish on average. 1319 00:53:08,220 --> 00:53:11,860 And on average, the people they studied from Japan talked 1320 00:53:11,860 --> 00:53:14,240 about not only the fish, but the plants in the background 1321 00:53:14,240 --> 00:53:15,770 and things like this on average. 1322 00:53:15,770 --> 00:53:17,310 That's just the average description. 1323 00:53:17,310 --> 00:53:20,700 Then, they give them a memory test for the fish where the 1324 00:53:20,700 --> 00:53:23,700 fish had the same background, the same context they were in, 1325 00:53:23,700 --> 00:53:27,840 or no background, or they got a new background. 1326 00:53:27,840 --> 00:53:29,670 And take a look at the accuracy. 1327 00:53:29,670 --> 00:53:32,650 If it's the original background, so if you took in 1328 00:53:32,650 --> 00:53:37,270 the fish with that background, the context, people from Japan 1329 00:53:37,270 --> 00:53:39,390 did better than people from the United States. 1330 00:53:39,390 --> 00:53:42,490 If it's no background, the individual fish, you stripped 1331 00:53:42,490 --> 00:53:45,370 away the background, it exactly reverses. 1332 00:53:45,370 --> 00:53:47,300 And who does better with no background? 1333 00:53:47,300 --> 00:53:50,730 The people from the United States. 1334 00:53:50,730 --> 00:53:54,500 So such a simple thing like this, again, seems to be 1335 00:53:54,500 --> 00:53:56,670 driven by this. 1336 00:53:56,670 --> 00:53:57,620 Here's one more. 1337 00:53:57,620 --> 00:54:01,130 You could say, which is more similar to this? 1338 00:54:01,130 --> 00:54:03,540 So this is similar by one standout 1339 00:54:03,540 --> 00:54:06,300 rule, the common stem. 1340 00:54:06,300 --> 00:54:09,950 These actually share more similarities if you talk about 1341 00:54:09,950 --> 00:54:12,010 the shape of the flower, the shape of the petal. 1342 00:54:12,010 --> 00:54:14,570 But they're different one from the other. 1343 00:54:14,570 --> 00:54:16,610 And again, the European Americans go for 1344 00:54:16,610 --> 00:54:17,790 the one stand out. 1345 00:54:17,790 --> 00:54:20,880 That stem looks solid to me. 1346 00:54:20,880 --> 00:54:22,560 That's the European American. 1347 00:54:22,560 --> 00:54:25,610 And here's the East Asians, not completely reversed, but 1348 00:54:25,610 --> 00:54:28,740 tending to pick the ones that have the more contextual 1349 00:54:28,740 --> 00:54:30,170 similarity. 1350 00:54:30,170 --> 00:54:32,570 So here's a half dozen examples. 1351 00:54:32,570 --> 00:54:34,820 And there's 100 more. 1352 00:54:34,820 --> 00:54:40,910 And it's just a reminder that many of the conclusions 1353 00:54:40,910 --> 00:54:42,980 throughout this course, including the ones in social 1354 00:54:42,980 --> 00:54:47,490 psychology, focused on people from North American 1355 00:54:47,490 --> 00:54:49,400 universities. 1356 00:54:49,400 --> 00:54:50,990 So let's talk about some of these ones. 1357 00:54:50,990 --> 00:54:52,830 So for example, we talked about the fundamental 1358 00:54:52,830 --> 00:54:54,580 attribution error. 1359 00:54:54,580 --> 00:54:57,880 It turns out the US is really big on this. 1360 00:54:57,880 --> 00:55:00,820 It's a little bit worldwide, but the US is an outlier. 1361 00:55:00,820 --> 00:55:03,720 We really like to attribute the actions of others to their 1362 00:55:03,720 --> 00:55:07,470 characters and not their situations. 1363 00:55:07,470 --> 00:55:10,390 The attractiveness bias, very pronounced in the United 1364 00:55:10,390 --> 00:55:13,120 States compared to East Asians. 1365 00:55:13,120 --> 00:55:16,000 So we really just find that one outstanding thing and 1366 00:55:16,000 --> 00:55:19,170 generalize it. 1367 00:55:19,170 --> 00:55:20,580 Then, of course, there's variations within 1368 00:55:20,580 --> 00:55:22,270 each culture of course. 1369 00:55:22,270 --> 00:55:26,510 But there's cultural teachings that seem to manifest 1370 00:55:26,510 --> 00:55:29,660 themselves in these experiments. 1371 00:55:29,660 --> 00:55:33,240 Any questions on that? 1372 00:55:33,240 --> 00:55:36,990 OK, for the last few minutes, I want to talk about a 1373 00:55:36,990 --> 00:55:39,740 disorder that you hear a lot about. 1374 00:55:39,740 --> 00:55:42,660 And if you have questions, I can answer some questions on 1375 00:55:42,660 --> 00:55:45,640 it, autism. 1376 00:55:45,640 --> 00:55:47,940 When I was a graduate student here, you practically never 1377 00:55:47,940 --> 00:55:49,330 heard of it. 1378 00:55:49,330 --> 00:55:51,840 Now when you go to the pediatrician's office, 1379 00:55:51,840 --> 00:55:53,720 practically every parent is worried about 1380 00:55:53,720 --> 00:55:54,490 it for their child. 1381 00:55:54,490 --> 00:55:57,970 It used to be thought of as a very rare disorder. 1382 00:55:57,970 --> 00:56:03,610 Autism spectrum disorders are now thought to occur one out 1383 00:56:03,610 --> 00:56:09,440 of every something like that, approaching 1%. 1384 00:56:09,440 --> 00:56:11,490 Have you seen the ads on TV about the odds of having 1385 00:56:11,490 --> 00:56:14,370 autism versus the odds of making the NBA? 1386 00:56:14,370 --> 00:56:16,470 Have any of you seen that? 1387 00:56:16,470 --> 00:56:21,460 Incredibly higher by far to have autism than to make the 1388 00:56:21,460 --> 00:56:25,070 NBA or many other things you can think of. 1389 00:56:25,070 --> 00:56:28,060 That's autism awareness efforts to make people realize 1390 00:56:28,060 --> 00:56:29,970 it's shockingly common. 1391 00:56:29,970 --> 00:56:31,560 Lots of arguments about why there's 1392 00:56:31,560 --> 00:56:32,490 been a dramatic increase. 1393 00:56:32,490 --> 00:56:34,760 I can tell you that for a while they thought it was 1394 00:56:34,760 --> 00:56:38,830 awareness only, that people didn't realize that certain 1395 00:56:38,830 --> 00:56:42,620 children were best understood as having autism spectrum 1396 00:56:42,620 --> 00:56:45,980 disorders, a range of disorders that share some 1397 00:56:45,980 --> 00:56:48,870 properties of difficulties in social cognition, 1398 00:56:48,870 --> 00:56:49,560 communication, and 1399 00:56:49,560 --> 00:56:52,110 stereotyped, repetitive movements. 1400 00:56:52,110 --> 00:56:55,950 But now, most epidemiologic-- 1401 00:56:55,950 --> 00:56:57,600 you can't really do the experiment. 1402 00:56:57,600 --> 00:57:00,300 But most people think there truly is an increasing number 1403 00:57:00,300 --> 00:57:03,350 for reasons that are not well understood on top of 1404 00:57:03,350 --> 00:57:04,530 increasing awareness. 1405 00:57:04,530 --> 00:57:07,380 Nowadays, they can diagnose it by age three. 1406 00:57:07,380 --> 00:57:11,010 A huge mystery is why there's four boys to every girl with 1407 00:57:11,010 --> 00:57:14,630 autism as far as people have observed, total mystery. 1408 00:57:14,630 --> 00:57:15,880 Nobody has any idea why that is. 1409 00:57:21,470 --> 00:57:23,020 So I'm just going to show you a few things that have been 1410 00:57:23,020 --> 00:57:25,020 found with individuals with autism. 1411 00:57:25,020 --> 00:57:28,330 So one thing is in terms of the individual with autism, 1412 00:57:28,330 --> 00:57:32,190 they don't seem to have a natural desire to socially 1413 00:57:32,190 --> 00:57:34,450 interact with their parents, their siblings, their 1414 00:57:34,450 --> 00:57:35,270 caretakers. 1415 00:57:35,270 --> 00:57:38,160 It's hard to get them to do what's easy for most infants, 1416 00:57:38,160 --> 00:57:39,960 which is interact with people around you. 1417 00:57:39,960 --> 00:57:43,110 That's easy for most infants, hard for people with autism. 1418 00:57:43,110 --> 00:57:44,910 This is eye tracking. 1419 00:57:44,910 --> 00:57:45,690 When people-- 1420 00:57:45,690 --> 00:57:48,020 so this is a path that you look at when you look at 1421 00:57:48,020 --> 00:57:49,500 somebody else. 1422 00:57:49,500 --> 00:57:52,170 And what's very common as we look at people is that we 1423 00:57:52,170 --> 00:57:55,880 focus a lot of our attention to other people's eyes. 1424 00:57:55,880 --> 00:57:57,110 Well, that makes sense. 1425 00:57:57,110 --> 00:57:59,330 You know that from your everyday experience. 1426 00:57:59,330 --> 00:58:01,070 OK, you look at the mouth and the ear here and there. 1427 00:58:01,070 --> 00:58:03,080 But it's the eyes of the other person that seem very 1428 00:58:03,080 --> 00:58:04,760 communicative socially. 1429 00:58:04,760 --> 00:58:07,530 And so you see this triangle where people go between the 1430 00:58:07,530 --> 00:58:10,010 mouth, the speaking mouth, and the eyes naturally to figure 1431 00:58:10,010 --> 00:58:11,510 out what's going on with the person. 1432 00:58:11,510 --> 00:58:13,110 Here's a typical person with autism. 1433 00:58:13,110 --> 00:58:16,340 You see it's like they don't even look at this eye, don't 1434 00:58:16,340 --> 00:58:18,960 focus on the eyes, don't focus on the eyes. 1435 00:58:18,960 --> 00:58:22,910 The original interpretation of this was a lack of interest in 1436 00:58:22,910 --> 00:58:26,360 looking at these faces as social targets. 1437 00:58:26,360 --> 00:58:28,640 There's an additional thought that maybe, for some 1438 00:58:28,640 --> 00:58:30,900 individuals or many with autism, there's something 1439 00:58:30,900 --> 00:58:34,850 uncomfortable with dealing with a 1440 00:58:34,850 --> 00:58:37,140 social agent or a person. 1441 00:58:37,140 --> 00:58:39,580 So that's eye tracking. 1442 00:58:39,580 --> 00:58:42,880 And by the way, the same thing when they were-- 1443 00:58:42,880 --> 00:58:44,830 this is spontaneous, the first picture, 1444 00:58:44,830 --> 00:58:45,590 wherever you want to look. 1445 00:58:45,590 --> 00:58:47,410 Now they said, tell us what the expression is. 1446 00:58:47,410 --> 00:58:49,010 So you have a task to do. 1447 00:58:49,010 --> 00:58:52,040 And again, pretty much like before, typically developing 1448 00:58:52,040 --> 00:58:54,820 people focus on the eyes, a little bit on the mouth. 1449 00:58:54,820 --> 00:58:59,350 And again, you can see these very wayward locations of 1450 00:58:59,350 --> 00:59:03,450 where individuals with autism put their glances. 1451 00:59:03,450 --> 00:59:05,710 So you can just imagine a very different social interaction 1452 00:59:05,710 --> 00:59:08,490 if somebody's looking here or here at somebody versus the 1453 00:59:08,490 --> 00:59:09,740 person's eyes. 1454 00:59:13,020 --> 00:59:15,340 There's been a fantastic amount of research about what 1455 00:59:15,340 --> 00:59:17,870 are brain differences in people with autism spectrum 1456 00:59:17,870 --> 00:59:19,200 disorders and those without. 1457 00:59:19,200 --> 00:59:23,180 There's a fantastic variation among every disorder, but you 1458 00:59:23,180 --> 00:59:24,730 might say autism even more, or every 1459 00:59:24,730 --> 00:59:25,950 difference, autism even more. 1460 00:59:25,950 --> 00:59:28,880 It seems like there's just a fantastic variation among 1461 00:59:28,880 --> 00:59:30,290 people with autism. 1462 00:59:30,290 --> 00:59:33,110 But the one finding that's held up is this, which is that 1463 00:59:33,110 --> 00:59:35,750 if you measure the total brain size-- 1464 00:59:35,750 --> 00:59:37,950 which is a very gross measure of the brain-- 1465 00:59:37,950 --> 00:59:41,120 that there seems to be early in development, up until age 1466 00:59:41,120 --> 00:59:44,630 five, an overgrowth of the brain size in individuals with 1467 00:59:44,630 --> 00:59:47,580 autism that gets back in development 1468 00:59:47,580 --> 00:59:49,390 to the typical size. 1469 00:59:49,390 --> 00:59:50,930 This is the most replicated. 1470 00:59:50,930 --> 00:59:53,830 Every number here is a different research study. 1471 00:59:53,830 --> 00:59:56,900 So you can see all of these up here are clumped here. 1472 00:59:56,900 --> 00:59:58,530 This is the single most replicable 1473 00:59:58,530 --> 01:00:00,350 finding by far in autism. 1474 01:00:00,350 --> 01:00:03,760 There's an early, apparent overgrowth of the brain. 1475 01:00:03,760 --> 01:00:06,700 What that means, why that's associated with difficulties 1476 01:00:06,700 --> 01:00:10,300 in social interaction or repetitive movements, 1477 01:00:10,300 --> 01:00:12,320 stereotyped interests is hard to know. 1478 01:00:15,460 --> 01:00:17,340 Early in the course, we mentioned and we talked about 1479 01:00:17,340 --> 01:00:20,410 theory of mind, understanding what thoughts 1480 01:00:20,410 --> 01:00:21,410 another person holds. 1481 01:00:21,410 --> 01:00:23,690 And sometimes it's not even consistent with the physical, 1482 01:00:23,690 --> 01:00:24,830 real world. 1483 01:00:24,830 --> 01:00:30,490 I mentioned to you that it's severely delayed in autism, 1484 01:00:30,490 --> 01:00:31,770 years later. 1485 01:00:31,770 --> 01:00:33,940 So this is comparing four-year-olds typically 1486 01:00:33,940 --> 01:00:37,230 developing versus 6 to 12-year-olds with autism. 1487 01:00:37,230 --> 01:00:38,865 And the four-year-olds outperform the individuals 1488 01:00:38,865 --> 01:00:40,800 with autism on theory of mind tasks. 1489 01:00:40,800 --> 01:00:46,830 So huge delay in understanding what the independent mental 1490 01:00:46,830 --> 01:00:48,660 life is like of another person. 1491 01:00:48,660 --> 01:00:49,337 Yeah? 1492 01:00:49,337 --> 01:00:52,840 AUDIENCE: How do you find, in general, IQs of people with 1493 01:00:52,840 --> 01:00:54,362 autism compared to--? 1494 01:00:54,362 --> 01:00:57,730 PROFESSOR: So the question is how are IQs in autism? 1495 01:00:57,730 --> 01:01:00,690 So the answer is you measure-- 1496 01:01:00,690 --> 01:01:03,570 so half of individuals with autism are non-verbal. 1497 01:01:03,570 --> 01:01:06,500 You can't even give them a test. 1498 01:01:06,500 --> 01:01:08,360 Those are not the ones who tend to be represented in 1499 01:01:08,360 --> 01:01:12,560 research, behavioral research or brain research, because you 1500 01:01:12,560 --> 01:01:14,620 can't even ask them to do things. 1501 01:01:14,620 --> 01:01:18,430 So all the research is skewed towards the higher functioning 1502 01:01:18,430 --> 01:01:20,610 individuals with autism. 1503 01:01:20,610 --> 01:01:25,210 If you just took their average IQ, it would be lowish. 1504 01:01:25,210 --> 01:01:29,790 But there's many individuals with very high IQs also. 1505 01:01:29,790 --> 01:01:32,860 And in fact, what's called Asperger's syndrome 1506 01:01:32,860 --> 01:01:35,510 specifically refers to individuals who have the 1507 01:01:35,510 --> 01:01:40,240 social difficulties characteristic of autism, but 1508 01:01:40,240 --> 01:01:43,510 have a very high functioning cognitive and IQ level. 1509 01:01:43,510 --> 01:01:46,020 So it runs the whole range. 1510 01:01:46,020 --> 01:01:47,670 If you just took the average, it'd be low. 1511 01:01:47,670 --> 01:01:51,060 But there's many individuals who are very high in IQ. 1512 01:01:51,060 --> 01:01:53,580 And so in this study, for example, they matched IQ by 1513 01:01:53,580 --> 01:01:55,850 having, in this case, four year olds and 1514 01:01:55,850 --> 01:01:56,516 six to 12 year olds. 1515 01:01:56,516 --> 01:01:58,140 The IQ was even. 1516 01:01:58,140 --> 01:02:00,560 And still, the theory of mind was much weaker in the 1517 01:02:00,560 --> 01:02:02,010 individuals with autism. 1518 01:02:02,010 --> 01:02:03,590 But it's incredibly variable, the IQs. 1519 01:02:07,320 --> 01:02:12,060 So here's another way that people have studied two things 1520 01:02:12,060 --> 01:02:13,810 at once we talk about-- 1521 01:02:13,810 --> 01:02:18,790 the human nature to ascribe social things, social stories 1522 01:02:18,790 --> 01:02:20,470 to things and then how that plays out 1523 01:02:20,470 --> 01:02:21,590 differently in autism. 1524 01:02:21,590 --> 01:02:24,980 So this is famous work from Heider and Simmel. 1525 01:02:24,980 --> 01:02:27,970 And you're going to see these two triangles do something. 1526 01:02:27,970 --> 01:02:30,540 And I want you to figure out what they're doing. 1527 01:02:33,110 --> 01:02:34,875 What happened there, socially? 1528 01:02:38,214 --> 01:02:40,340 I need somebody to put their hand up, and the other 1529 01:02:40,340 --> 01:02:41,295 people-- help me out. 1530 01:02:41,295 --> 01:02:42,555 Somebody, put your hand up and tell me what 1531 01:02:42,555 --> 01:02:44,140 you thought you saw. 1532 01:02:44,140 --> 01:02:45,810 Second last quarter left of the whole course. 1533 01:02:45,810 --> 01:02:46,970 We gotta have somebody put-- 1534 01:02:46,970 --> 01:02:48,110 OK, what do you think you saw? 1535 01:02:48,110 --> 01:02:49,050 AUDIENCE: They were dancing. 1536 01:02:49,050 --> 01:02:49,750 PROFESSOR: They were kind of dancing. 1537 01:02:49,750 --> 01:02:51,330 Anything else? 1538 01:02:51,330 --> 01:02:52,908 Yeah? 1539 01:02:52,908 --> 01:02:53,886 Go ahead. 1540 01:02:53,886 --> 01:02:56,036 AUDIENCE: That the big one was trying to get the little one 1541 01:02:56,036 --> 01:02:58,330 to go outside, but the little one was scared. 1542 01:02:58,330 --> 01:03:01,040 PROFESSOR: Yeah, there's no right answer, by the way. 1543 01:03:01,040 --> 01:03:04,270 But one I heard, which is coaxing, that the little one 1544 01:03:04,270 --> 01:03:04,820 was scared. 1545 01:03:04,820 --> 01:03:05,950 They were playing together. 1546 01:03:05,950 --> 01:03:07,880 They're having a nice relationship. 1547 01:03:07,880 --> 01:03:09,590 Then, the little one doesn't want to go outside the box. 1548 01:03:09,590 --> 01:03:11,440 Then, the big one has to coax and support them. 1549 01:03:11,440 --> 01:03:12,910 Were you going to say that, too? 1550 01:03:12,910 --> 01:03:15,980 Any other thoughts or feelings? 1551 01:03:15,980 --> 01:03:17,900 So yeah, the most common interpretation of this-- and 1552 01:03:17,900 --> 01:03:20,120 Heider and Simmel, their original point was that humans 1553 01:03:20,120 --> 01:03:23,580 want to give social descriptions to everything. 1554 01:03:23,580 --> 01:03:25,640 Two triangles, what are you talking about? 1555 01:03:25,640 --> 01:03:28,640 But almost, if we just let our mind go just a little bit, 1556 01:03:28,640 --> 01:03:30,410 we're almost giving them animacy. 1557 01:03:30,410 --> 01:03:32,180 They're moving themselves around. 1558 01:03:32,180 --> 01:03:34,030 They're having social interactions. 1559 01:03:34,030 --> 01:03:36,300 They have stories where sometimes there's a bully 1560 01:03:36,300 --> 01:03:38,930 beating up the little, big circle beating up a little 1561 01:03:38,930 --> 01:03:40,590 circle or dot. 1562 01:03:40,590 --> 01:03:44,140 And we tend to make up these little stories very easily. 1563 01:03:44,140 --> 01:03:45,445 So the first thing to tell you is that individuals with 1564 01:03:45,445 --> 01:03:49,330 autism on average, again a big range on average, don't see 1565 01:03:49,330 --> 01:03:50,920 these stories so much. 1566 01:03:50,920 --> 01:03:55,200 They say on average the two triangles, what do you mean? 1567 01:03:55,200 --> 01:03:57,950 And you could say that's not even wrong. 1568 01:03:57,950 --> 01:04:01,590 It's just not the way people typically interpret things 1569 01:04:01,590 --> 01:04:03,560 that we typically look for socially. 1570 01:04:03,560 --> 01:04:05,620 And then, you look in the brain. 1571 01:04:05,620 --> 01:04:06,620 And what happens is this. 1572 01:04:06,620 --> 01:04:09,490 This is brain responses to these social stories where we 1573 01:04:09,490 --> 01:04:12,090 tend to give it a social explanation 1574 01:04:12,090 --> 01:04:13,080 versus random displays. 1575 01:04:13,080 --> 01:04:14,650 They can also display where things whizzing around and 1576 01:04:14,650 --> 01:04:16,680 nobody thinks anything's happening. 1577 01:04:16,680 --> 01:04:19,230 And what they see is in the visual cortex, this part of 1578 01:04:19,230 --> 01:04:21,790 the brain that sees the things, there's equal 1579 01:04:21,790 --> 01:04:24,130 activation in the two groups. 1580 01:04:24,130 --> 01:04:26,420 But in parts of the brain that we think are involved in 1581 01:04:26,420 --> 01:04:29,740 social interaction, like the superior temporal sulcus, 1582 01:04:29,740 --> 01:04:32,570 medial prefrontal cortex, areas from a lot of research 1583 01:04:32,570 --> 01:04:35,770 that we believe is involved in thinking about other people 1584 01:04:35,770 --> 01:04:38,530 and their feelings and thoughts, there's very little 1585 01:04:38,530 --> 01:04:41,330 engagement of these areas in individuals with autism in 1586 01:04:41,330 --> 01:04:42,630 this study. 1587 01:04:42,630 --> 01:04:44,030 So they don't see the same stories. 1588 01:04:44,030 --> 01:04:47,210 And they don't turn on social parts of the brain that are 1589 01:04:47,210 --> 01:04:50,800 spontaneously turned on by typically developing people. 1590 01:04:50,800 --> 01:04:56,420 And here's the last experiment I'll show you which is this. 1591 01:04:56,420 --> 01:05:00,000 So it turns out our brains respond and our minds respond 1592 01:05:00,000 --> 01:05:04,355 very strongly to where people are looking, where their gaze 1593 01:05:04,355 --> 01:05:05,660 is falling. 1594 01:05:05,660 --> 01:05:08,870 So imagine that you're talking to somebody. 1595 01:05:08,870 --> 01:05:10,370 You're telling them something. 1596 01:05:10,370 --> 01:05:11,410 And their eyes are here. 1597 01:05:11,410 --> 01:05:12,615 Does that bother you? 1598 01:05:12,615 --> 01:05:15,940 OK, yes because we think their eyes tell us where their 1599 01:05:15,940 --> 01:05:17,300 attention is. 1600 01:05:17,300 --> 01:05:20,190 And if they're not focused on us, they're not interested. 1601 01:05:20,190 --> 01:05:21,630 And we're offended. 1602 01:05:21,630 --> 01:05:25,750 So here's the experiment now where they have a computer 1603 01:05:25,750 --> 01:05:26,920 model like this. 1604 01:05:26,920 --> 01:05:29,860 And they throw on suddenly a display. 1605 01:05:29,860 --> 01:05:31,470 And the person either looks this way 1606 01:05:31,470 --> 01:05:32,490 or looks the opposite. 1607 01:05:32,490 --> 01:05:35,310 Which would you think is the natural way a person would 1608 01:05:35,310 --> 01:05:38,210 look naturally if something interesting 1609 01:05:38,210 --> 01:05:40,220 happened over here? 1610 01:05:40,220 --> 01:05:41,610 They would look towards it. 1611 01:05:41,610 --> 01:05:44,340 It'd be kind of weird to look away from it. 1612 01:05:44,340 --> 01:05:46,170 And when you look at brain imaging at what happens in 1613 01:05:46,170 --> 01:05:49,060 those conditions in the superior temporal sulcus and 1614 01:05:49,060 --> 01:05:51,430 other places, typically developing people for the 1615 01:05:51,430 --> 01:05:54,200 weird looking away, it's like a mystery to be solved. 1616 01:05:54,200 --> 01:05:54,730 What's going on? 1617 01:05:54,730 --> 01:05:56,290 Why aren't they looking at this? 1618 01:05:56,290 --> 01:05:56,750 Are they angry? 1619 01:05:56,750 --> 01:05:58,730 Is there something better over there? 1620 01:05:58,730 --> 01:05:59,770 it's a social mystery. 1621 01:05:59,770 --> 01:06:01,550 Why is this person not looking? 1622 01:06:01,550 --> 01:06:03,450 And there's no difference in those two conditions in the 1623 01:06:03,450 --> 01:06:08,000 study for individuals with autism as if eyes are looking 1624 01:06:08,000 --> 01:06:10,440 here, eyes are looking there. 1625 01:06:10,440 --> 01:06:11,540 It's just where eyes are looking. 1626 01:06:11,540 --> 01:06:13,310 What's the difference? 1627 01:06:13,310 --> 01:06:16,640 There's not the spontaneous social interpretation or 1628 01:06:16,640 --> 01:06:18,660 mystery that needs to be understood. 1629 01:06:18,660 --> 01:06:20,470 So these are just some of the differences that people have 1630 01:06:20,470 --> 01:06:23,050 observed looking at the brains and behavior 1631 01:06:23,050 --> 01:06:24,300 of people with autism. 1632 01:06:24,300 --> 01:06:25,870 Any questions about autism? 1633 01:06:32,310 --> 01:06:32,750 Yeah? 1634 01:06:32,750 --> 01:06:34,121 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 1635 01:06:34,121 --> 01:06:36,410 in the brain activates [INAUDIBLE]? 1636 01:06:36,410 --> 01:06:37,170 PROFESSOR: Yes. 1637 01:06:37,170 --> 01:06:39,160 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]? 1638 01:06:39,160 --> 01:06:39,960 PROFESSOR: That's a good question. 1639 01:06:39,960 --> 01:06:43,330 Do those parts of the brain, the areas that in typical 1640 01:06:43,330 --> 01:06:45,880 people are turned on for social cognition, when we 1641 01:06:45,880 --> 01:06:48,070 think about what another person's thinking or feeling, 1642 01:06:48,070 --> 01:06:49,890 do they ever turn on in individuals with autism? 1643 01:06:49,890 --> 01:06:51,800 The answer is yes, they do. 1644 01:06:51,800 --> 01:06:52,960 I can tell you that I'm showing you some of the 1645 01:06:52,960 --> 01:06:55,660 simplest things and probably roughly correct. 1646 01:06:55,660 --> 01:06:58,080 But there's such a fantastic variety among people with 1647 01:06:58,080 --> 01:07:00,770 autism and even within the person. 1648 01:07:00,770 --> 01:07:03,080 Just a very little bit of different of a condition, all 1649 01:07:03,080 --> 01:07:05,060 of a sudden, some of these areas will turn on. 1650 01:07:05,060 --> 01:07:07,340 It's been a very big mystery. 1651 01:07:07,340 --> 01:07:08,930 And we don't know whether that's because we just don't 1652 01:07:08,930 --> 01:07:11,650 understand it right or whether the variety among patients is 1653 01:07:11,650 --> 01:07:13,990 so great that we're making the wrong conclusions, saying 1654 01:07:13,990 --> 01:07:15,970 autism is like this. 1655 01:07:15,970 --> 01:07:18,710 And that may be true of 5% of individuals with autism. 1656 01:07:18,710 --> 01:07:22,300 So it's a huge mystery in many ways, and an important one 1657 01:07:22,300 --> 01:07:26,440 because all of a sudden, it's almost 1%, one out of every 1658 01:07:26,440 --> 01:07:27,690 100 children.