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  • Professor Paul Bloom: This is going to begin a

  • two-lecture sequence on social psychology on how we think about

  • ourselves, how we think about other people,

  • how we think about other groups of people.

  • We've talked a lot about the capacities of the human mind and

  • some of these capacities involve adapting and dealing with the

  • material world. So, we have to choose foods,

  • we have to navigate around the world, we have to recognize

  • objects, we have to be able to

  • understand physical interactions.

  • But probably the most interesting aspect of our

  • evolved minds is our capacity to understand and deal with other

  • people. We are intensely interested in

  • how other people work. The story that was a dominant

  • news story in 2005 was this. And some of you--this--for

  • those of you who aren't seeing the screen, is the separation of

  • Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. I remember where I was when I

  • first heard about this. [laughter]

  • And it's an interesting sight. Just remember--stepping back.

  • As psychologists we have to question the natural.

  • We have to take things that are commonsense and explore them.

  • And one thing which just happens is, we're fascinated by

  • this stuff. We're fascinated by the lives

  • of celebrities. We're fascinated by the social

  • lives of other people. And it's an interesting

  • question to ask why. And this is one of the

  • questions which I'm going to deal with in the next couple of

  • lectures but before I get to the theory of social psychology I

  • want to talk about an individual difference.

  • So, we devoted a lecture early on--of a couple of weeks ago,

  • to individual differences across people in intelligence

  • and personality. I want to talk a little bit

  • about an individual difference in our social natures and then I

  • want people to do a test that will explore where you stand on

  • a continuum. That test is the piece of paper

  • you have in front of you. Anybody who doesn't have it

  • please raise your hand and one of the teaching fellows will

  • bring it to you. You don't know what to do yet

  • with it so don't worry. The test was developed actually

  • by Malcolm Gladwell who is a science writer--in his wonderful

  • book The Tipping Point. And as he introduces the test,

  • Gladwell recounts another experiment done by Stanley

  • Milgram, of course famous for his obedience work but he did a

  • lot of interesting things. And one classic study he did

  • was he gave a package to 160 people randomly chosen in Omaha,

  • Nebraska and he asked these people to get the package

  • somehowand this was many years ago before the internet,

  • before e-mailto get the package to a stockbroker who

  • worked in Boston but lived in Sharon,

  • Massachusetts. What he found was that most

  • people were able to do it. Nobody, of course,

  • knew this man but they knew people who might know people who

  • would know this man. So, most people succeeded.

  • Most people were able to get the packages to this man and it

  • took at maximum six degrees of separation,

  • which is where the famous phrase comes about that we're

  • all separated from another person by six degrees of

  • separation. This is not true in general.

  • This was a very--a single experiment done within the

  • United States, but the idea is appealing,

  • that people are connected to one another via chains of

  • people. But what Milgram found that was

  • particularly interesting was that in about half of the cases

  • these packages went through two people.

  • That is, if you plot the relationships between people--We

  • can take each person in this room,

  • find everybody you know and who knows you and draw a line,

  • but if we were to do this you wouldn't find an even mesh of

  • wires. Rather, you'd find that some

  • people are clusters. Some people are what Gladwell

  • calls "connectors." It's like air traffic.

  • Air traffic used to be everything flew to places local

  • to it but now there's a system of hubs,

  • Chicago O'Hare for instance or Newark where planes fly through.

  • Some people are hubs. Some people are the sort of

  • people who know a lot of people. Some people in this room might

  • be hubs, and it is not impossible to find out.

  • The piece of paper you have here is 250 names chosen

  • randomly from a Manhattan phone book.

  • They capture a range of ethnicities, different parts of

  • the world, different national origins.

  • Here's what I'd like you to do. And I'll give about five

  • minutes for this. Go through these names and

  • circle how many people you know. Now, the rules of this are,

  • to know somebody you have to--they have to know you back.

  • So, if it's a celebrity--Well, here--one of the names here is

  • Johnson. Now, I've heard of Magic

  • Johnson but Magic Johnson has never heard of me,

  • so I cannot circle it. On the other hand,

  • our department chair is Marcia Johnson.

  • She has heard of me, so I could circle it.

  • Go through and circle it. Circle all the people you know

  • who know you. Those are the people you're

  • connected to. If you know more than one

  • person with the same last name, circle it twice.

  • If you don't have this piece of paper and you want to

  • participate, please raise your hand and one of the teaching

  • fellows will bring it to you.

  • I'm going to talk a little bit more about this while people go

  • through this. The issue of connections

  • between people is intellectually interesting for many reasons and

  • might allow us to develop some generalizations about how people

  • interact. The game of Six Degrees of

  • Separation has, of course, turned into a famous

  • movie trivia thing revolving around the actor Kevin Bacon,

  • I think chosen just because it rhymes with "separation."

  • And the game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" is played by taking

  • any actor and computing how many steps it would take to get to

  • Kevin Bacon. And some computer scientists

  • have developed this. They've gone through each of

  • the quarter million actors and actresses on the international

  • movie database and computed their "Bacon number."

  • And the Bacon number is the number of steps it takes for

  • them to get to Kevin Bacon. So for instance,

  • Ed Asner was in the movie Change of--;"JFK" with Kevin

  • Bacon. So, Ed Asner has a Bacon number

  • of one. Elvis Presley was in the movie

  • "Change of Habit" with Ed Asner and that's his closest

  • connection to Kevin Bacon. So, Elvis Presley has a Bacon

  • number of two. It turns out that if you look

  • at the 2.5--sorry, the quarter million people on

  • the movie database and compute their Bacon number,

  • the average Bacon number is 2.8. That's how many steps your

  • average person is away from Kevin Bacon.

  • You could then, for any actor or actress,

  • compute the most connected one. So, the most connected one

  • would be the one for whom the quarter million are,

  • on average, the most connected to.

  • And the answer of the most connected actor or actress is

  • reasonably surprising. Does anybody want to guess?

  • I'll start you off with the wrong answer and this,

  • by the way, can be found on this web site.

  • It's not John Wayne. John Wayne has been in many

  • movies, 180 movies, in fact, over sixty years,

  • but he isn't well connected at all because mostly he was in

  • westerns so we saw the same people over and over again.

  • Meryl Streep also isn't it because Meryl Streep has the

  • misfortune of playing only in good movies.

  • [laughter] So, she has no connection with

  • people like Adam Sandler and John-Claude Van Damme.

  • [laughter] Guess. Any guesses?

  • Student: Christopher Walken

  • Student: Nicholas Cage Professor Paul

  • Bloom: Christopher Walken is a good one.

  • We could look it up. I only know a few names here.

  • Christopher Walken is not a finalist.

  • Nicolas Cage is an interesting case.

  • Has Nicolas Cage been in good movies?

  • I don't want to get--I'm going to get more controversial than I

  • want to. Student:

  • A guy who is one step above an extra.

  • He's like a B-list actor at best.

  • The most connected guy, and I think this shows that

  • you're right, is Rod Steiger.

  • He's the most connected actor in the history of acting because

  • it isn't that he's been in more movies than everybody else.

  • Michael Caine has probably been in the most movies of any person

  • on earth, but he's been in all sorts of movies.

  • He was in "On the Waterfront," "In the Heat of the Night," and

  • really bad movies like "Carpool."

  • He's been in dramas and crime serials, thrillers,

  • westerns, horror movies, science fiction,

  • musicals. Now, some people are like Rod

  • Steiger. So, some people in their

  • day-to-day lives have many interactions and I think one of

  • the things we know from interacting with people is we

  • can distinguish them from other people.

  • How many people have finished their things right now?

  • Okay. I know one person in the

  • department who is one of the most connected people I know on

  • earth. If I wanted--If I really had to

  • talk to Rumsfeld, I'd go to this person and say,

  • "Can you get me in touch with Rumsfeld?"

  • If I wanted to get somebody whacked, I'd ask this guy.

  • [laughter] Then I know someone else in the

  • department and, as best I know,

  • I'm the only person she knows. [laughter]

  • So, how many people scores below ten on this?

  • How many between ten and twenty? Between twenty and thirty?

  • Thirty and forty? Between forty and fifty?

  • Fifty and sixty? How many people scored above

  • sixty? Anybody above sixty?

  • Gladwell has done this in a lot of places.

  • The average is twenty-one among a college crowd.

  • Some people score as high as over 100.

  • The older you are, the more--the higher you tend

  • to score, maybe obviously, not--the longer you've been in

  • the country the higher you tend to score.

  • Journalists tend to score reasonably high,

  • academics not so high, and--but what Gladwell points

  • out is some people have the gift.

  • Some people are more social than others and this connects in

  • all sorts of interesting ways. The issue of connection has

  • social factors and it's one answer that sociologists give

  • for why it's good to go to Yale. So, one answer is,

  • well, because of the great intellectual benefits.

  • Put that aside. Let's be more cynical here.

  • Another answer is that you develop powerful friends.

  • And that's closer, but the interesting answer

  • sociologists come to is it's not so much you develop powerful

  • friends; rather, you develop powerful

  • acquaintances. Through Yale you know a lot of

  • people and they don't have to be close friends but they are

  • acquaintances. And sociologists point out that

  • for a lot of aspects of your life, like getting a job,

  • acquaintances matter, connections matter,

  • and the connections you establish by going to a place

  • like Yale hold you in good stead for the rest of your life,

  • above and beyond any intellectual qualities that this

  • place may offer.

  • Here's what we're going to do for the next lecture and a half,

  • two lectures. We're first going to talk about

  • the self. Then we're going to talk about

  • the self and other; basically, differences between

  • how we think of ourselves and how we think about other people.

  • Then we're going to talk exclusively about how we think

  • about other people and then we'll talk about how we think

  • about groups like Harvard students or gay people or black

  • people.

  • I'll start with my favorite finding of all time and this is

  • about the self. And this is about the spotlight

  • effect. So, my mornings are often

  • rushed because I have two kids. So, I get up and sometimes I

  • don't set the alarm and I get up late;

  • I stagger out of bed; I wake the kids;

  • I greet the servants; I get ready;

  • [laughter] I make breakfast. I run out of the house and then

  • usually around 3 o'clock somebody points out,

  • in one case a homeless man, that I have a big glob of

  • shaving cream in my ear or--because I neglected to

  • actually look in the mirror while I shaved.

  • Or I have once been to a party and I found my shirt was

  • misaligned, seriously misaligned,

  • not one button but--Anyway, [laughter]

  • so--and so I feel when this happens I'm very immature.

  • And I basically feel this is the end of the world,

  • this is humiliating and everybody notices.

  • And so the question is, how many people notice when

  • something happens? And the spotlight effect--Well,

  • before talking about my favorite experiment ever,

  • there is an episode of "The Simpsons" that provides a

  • beautiful illustration of the spotlight effect.

  • And then it has a beautiful illustration of psychological

  • testing, so I'll give you them quickly one after the other.

  • So, Tom Gilovich, a social psychologist,

  • was interested in the question of the spotlight effect,

  • which is when we wear a pink shirt to work,

  • shaving cream in our ear or whatever,

  • do we systematically overestimate how much other

  • people notice? He did a series of experiments.

  • And in one experiment what he did was he got in the subjects

  • standard Intro Psych drilland said,

  • "I want you to wear a T-shirt for the next day and I want it

  • to have a picture on it," and he got them to wear

  • T-shirts that had pictures on it that were the most embarrassing

  • pictures that they could have on it.

  • It turns out that if you ask people what's the worst picture

  • to have on the T-shirt that you are wearing,

  • the number one answer is Hitler tied with Barry Manilow.

  • [laughter] The best pictures to have on

  • your T-shirt are Martin Luther King Jr.

  • and Jerry Seinfeld. It turns out that people--And

  • then he had them go about their day and asked them,

  • "How many people noticed your T-shirt?"

  • And then the psychologists went around and they asked the

  • people, "How many of you noticed this person's T-shirt?"

  • And it turned out they got it wrong by a factor of about two.

  • They thought, say, 100 noticed,

  • but fifty people noticed. And across study after study

  • after study Gilovich and his colleagues have found support

  • for the spotlight effect, which is that you believe that

  • people are noticing you all the time but they aren't.

  • They're busy noticing themselves.

  • And this is actually a useful thing to know.

  • Gilovich got interested in this because he's interested in the

  • psychology of regret. And it turns out that if you

  • actually ask dying people, or really old people basically,

  • "What do you regret from your life?"

  • they regret the things as a rule that they didn't try.

  • But when you asked them why they didn't try it the answers

  • tended to be "I would look silly."

  • And it turns out, interesting to know,

  • that people just don't care as much as other people think you

  • are. You could take that as good

  • news or bad news but the spotlight is not on us as much

  • as we think it is. There's a second effect

  • Gilovich discovers called "the transparency effect."

  • And the transparency effect is quite interesting.

  • The transparency effect is that we believe that we're more

  • transparent than we are. I need somebody up here who

  • thinks that he or she is a bad liar.

  • Just--I just need you to say three sentences.

  • I'll even tell you what it is ahead of time.

  • I'm going to ask you three questions: "Have you been in

  • London? Do you have a younger sibling?"

  • and "Do you like sushi?" I want you to answer with one

  • of those answers there. I want you to lie about one of

  • them. The task will be for everybody

  • else to recognize and guess which one you're lying about.

  • Do you want to go up? Yeah.

  • And I will even write down which one you should lie on.

  • So, I want you to lie as to that number.

  • Okay?

  • Have you ever been in London? Student:

  • No, I have not been in London. Professor Paul Bloom:

  • Do you have a younger sibling? Student:

  • Yes, I have a younger sibling. Professor Paul Bloom:

  • Do you like sushi? Student:

  • No, I do not like sushi. Professor Paul Bloom:

  • Okay. Let's have a vote.

  • She was lying about one of them. Who votes for one?

  • Who votes for two? Who votes for three?

  • Pretty much of a tie between two and three.

  • You could say which one you were lying.

  • Student: Three. Professor Paul Bloom:

  • The effect--there are two aspects of the effect.

  • One aspect is people are actually quite good at lying.

  • It is a rare person who couldn't stand up there and

  • everybody would figure out what they're lying about,

  • but the transparency effect is we don't feel that way.

  • We often feel like things bleed out of us and so people will

  • systematically overestimate the extent to which other people

  • notice their secrets. And this is actually,

  • in general, why it's sometimes difficult to teach or to tell

  • stories because we constantly overestimate how much other

  • people know. We think of ourselves as more

  • transparent than we are. A second social psychological

  • phenomena is you think you're terrific.

  • If I asked people, "How well are you doing in

  • Intro Psych this semester?" and I asked you to give

  • yourself a percentage rating relative to the rest of the

  • class, then if everybody was accurate,

  • or at least not systematically biased, the number should add up

  • to 50%. Roughly half of you are doing

  • better than average and roughly half of you are doing worse than

  • average. It turns out though that people

  • will systematically and dramatically view themselves as

  • better than average. They will view themselves as

  • better than average when asked how good they are as a student,

  • as a teacher, as a lover, and particularly,

  • as a driver. [laughter]

  • Everybody who drives thinks that he or she is a wonderful

  • driver. This has been called the "Lake

  • Wobegon effect" based on Garrison Keillor's story about a

  • place where all the children are above average.

  • And the Lake Wobegon effect in psychology involves a systematic

  • bias to see ourselves as better than average.

  • What psychologists don't really know is why the Lake Wobegon

  • effect exists, and there are a couple of

  • proposals. One is the nature of the

  • feedback we get. So, for a lot of aspects of

  • your life you only get feedback when you're good,

  • when you do something good. In a normal,

  • productive, healthy, happy environment,

  • people don't scream at you about how bad you're doing but

  • they compliment how good you are and that could lead to an

  • inflated self-esteem on the part of people in certain domains.

  • Another possibility is there's different criteria for goodness.

  • For a driver, for instance,

  • when I ask you to rank how good you are as a driver,

  • what people often do is they think--they say,

  • "I'm better than average," but what they do is they focus on

  • one aspect of their driving. So, some of you might say,

  • "Hey, I'm just a great parallel parker so I'm a great driver."

  • Others might say, "I'm very careful,

  • great driver." Others might say,

  • "I take chances no one else will--great driver," [laughter]

  • but above and beyond that there does seem to be a psychological

  • effect manifested here and manifested elsewhere,

  • which is a motivation to feel good about yourself.

  • You think you're important, which is why the spotlight

  • effect exists. You think your thoughts bleed

  • out, which is why the transparency effect exists.

  • But above and beyond that, in a normal,

  • healthy mind you think you're terrific.

  • And so, this shows up in all sorts of ways.

  • It shows up as well in what's been called "the self-serving

  • bias." Half of you did above average

  • on the Midterm; half of you did below average

  • on the Midterm, but if I went up and asked each

  • of you why the answers would not be symmetrical.

  • People who did well in the Midterm would describe it in

  • terms of their capacities or abilities.

  • They'd say, "It's because I'm smart, hardworking,

  • brilliant." People who did poorly would

  • say, "The Midterm was unfair. I was busy.

  • I have better things to do with my time."

  • Professors as well--When people get papers accepted it is

  • because the papers are brilliant.

  • When they got them rejected it's because there's a

  • conspiracy against them by jealous editors and reviewers.

  • There is this asymmetry all the time.

  • The asymmetry has been found in athletes, in CEOs and in

  • accident reports. And again, this is sort of a

  • positive enhancement technique. You think that you're terrific

  • and because you're terrific the good things that happen to you

  • are due to your terrific-ness; the bad things are due to

  • accident and misfortune.

  • The final aspect of self that I want to talk about is the idea

  • that what you do makes sense. And this is one of the more

  • interesting sub domains of social psychology.

  • The idea was developed by the social psychologist Leon

  • Festinger and it's called "Cognitive Dissonance Theory."

  • And what Festinger was interested in was the idea that

  • what happens when people experience an inconsistency in

  • their heads. And he claimed it causes an

  • unpleasant emotional state, what he described as

  • "dissonance." And he argued that we act so as

  • to reduce dissonance. When there's a contradiction in

  • our heads we're not happy and will take steps to make the

  • contradiction go away. This all sounds very general

  • but there are some striking demonstrations of this and how

  • it could work in everyday life. So, this very simple example is

  • that--is the confirmation bias. Some of you are politically

  • right wing. Some of you are politically

  • left wing. If I asked you what magazines

  • you read, it turns out people who are right wing read right

  • wing magazines, people who are left wing read

  • left wing magazines, because people don't as a rule

  • enjoy getting information that disconfirms what they believe

  • in. They want to have information

  • that confirms what they believe in and that supports it.

  • If you support Bush you're going to be looking for good

  • news about Bush, if you don't support him you'll

  • be looking for bad news. And this manifests itself in

  • all sorts of interesting ways. I'll tell you about a very

  • simple experiment. I'll--It was done by Louisa

  • Egan here at Yale and it illustrates a point which is

  • going to--which--and then I'll talk about real world

  • implications of this. Very simple.

  • You have three M&Ms. You pretest to make sure that

  • the person doesn't like any M&M more than the other.

  • And there are three M&Ms. Who cares?

  • But then you ask them to choose between two of them.

  • So, suppose they choose the red one.

  • You've got to choose one. So, they get to eat the red one.

  • Now, they're offered--You take the red one away and now they're

  • offered a choice between the two remaining ones.

  • It turns out, to a tremendous degree,

  • and you could imagine yourself in that situation,

  • they choose this one, the one that wasn't the one

  • they turned down. And the claim is that when you

  • choose this, in order to justify your decision,

  • you denigrate the one you didn't choose.

  • And so this one you didn't choose is then tainted and you

  • turn and then when compared to a third one you favor that third

  • one. What's particularly interesting

  • is you get this effect easily with undergraduates but you also

  • get it with four-year-olds and with monkeys.

  • So, the same denigration tends to be more general.

  • Well, that's a laboratory effect but there are some more

  • interesting manifestations of cognitive dissonance.

  • One is the insufficient justification effect,

  • which is so famous it had a cartoon based on it.

  • The guys says, "Why should I hire you as my

  • consultant?" The dog--Some dog says,

  • "I use my special--the special process of cognitive dissonance

  • to improve employee morale." "How does it work?"

  • "Well, when people are in an absurd situation their minds

  • rationalize it by inventing a comfortable illusion."

  • Not quite right. When people are--have an

  • internal conflict, when there's something

  • uncomfortable--Well, that's right.

  • So says to this person, "Isn't it strange you have this

  • dead-end job when you're twice as smart as your boss?

  • The hours are long, the pay is mediocre,

  • nobody respects your contribution,

  • yet you freely choose to work here.

  • It's absurd. No.

  • Wait. There must be a reason.

  • I must work here because I love this work, I love this job."

  • [laughter] This actually works. Here is the classic experiment

  • by Festinger. Gave two groups of people a

  • really boring task, paid one of them twenty

  • dollars, which back when this study was

  • done was real money, gave another group of subjects

  • one dollar, which was insultingly small,

  • then asked them later, "What do you think of the

  • task?" It turns out that the group

  • that had--were paid a dollar rated the task as much more fun

  • than the group given twenty dollars.

  • So, think about that for a moment.

  • You might have predicted it the other way around,

  • the twenty dollars, "wow, well,

  • twenty dollars, I must have enjoyed it because

  • I got twenty dollars," but in fact,

  • the logic here is the people with twenty dollars when asked,

  • "What do you think of the task?"

  • could say, "It was boring. I did it for twenty dollars."

  • The people paid one dollar were like the character in the

  • Dilbert cartoon. When paid a dollar they said,

  • "Well, I don't want to be a donkey.

  • I don't want to be some guy who does this boring thing for a

  • dollar. It wasn't that bad really,

  • it was kind of interesting, I learnt a lot," to justify

  • what they did. This has a lot of real world

  • implications. Festinger did a wonderful study

  • with people--a group of people, and he wrote this up in a book

  • called When Prophesy Fails, who were convinced that

  • the world was going to end so they went on a mountain and they

  • waited for the world to end. They had a certain time and

  • date when the world was going to end.

  • He hung out with them and then the time passed and the world

  • didn't end. What people then said,

  • and this is what he was interested in--;So,

  • people's predictions were totally proven wrong and they

  • left their families, they gave away their houses,

  • they gave away all their possessions, they lost all their

  • money, but what Festinger found was

  • they didn't say, "God, I'm such a moron."

  • Rather, they said, "This is fantastic.

  • This is exactly--This shows that us going to the mountain

  • has delayed the ending of the world and this shows that we're

  • doing exactly the right things. I couldn't have been smarter."

  • And in general, when people devote a lot of

  • energy or money or expense to something, they are

  • extraordinarily resistant to having it proven wrong.

  • Now, people have manipulated cognitive dissonance in all

  • sorts of ways and, for instance,

  • hazing. Hazing is cognitive dissonance

  • at work. Fraternities and med schools

  • and other organizations haze people.

  • What they do is when people enter the group they humiliate

  • them, they cause them pain, they cause them various forms

  • of torture and unpleasantness. Why?

  • Well, because it's very successful at getting somebody

  • to like the group. If I join a fraternity--it is

  • also by the way illegal sobut if I were to join a

  • fraternity and they say, "Welcome to the fraternity,

  • Dr. Bloom.

  • Here. Have a mint," and then we have

  • a good time and everything. I'm thinking "okay,

  • sounds like a fun idea." But if I join a fraternity and

  • they pour cow poop on my head and make me stand in the rain

  • for a month wearing pantyhose while they throw rocks at me

  • [laughter] I then think--after it I think

  • "God, I went through a lot of stuff

  • to get into this fraternity. It must be really good."

  • And in fact, hazing through cognitive

  • dissonance draws the inference that this is really,

  • really valuable and this is why it exists.

  • If you are a political--If you are running for office,

  • you will tend to have volunteers and not necessarily

  • pay people. One reason for this is obvious;

  • it's cheaper not to pay people, but the other reason is more

  • interesting. If you don't pay people,

  • they are more committed to the cause.

  • Again, it's cognitive dissonance.

  • If you pay me ten thousand dollars a month to work for you,

  • I'll work for you and I'll think "I'm doing it for ten

  • thousand dollars a month, that makes a lot of sense," but

  • if I do it for nothing then I have to ask myself,

  • "Why am I doing it?" And I will conclude I must

  • think very highly of you. Therapy for free tends to be

  • useless therapy. This is one-- [laughs]

  • Therapists ask for money for all sorts of reasons,

  • including they like money. But one reason why they ask for

  • money is if you don't pay for therapy you don't think it has

  • any value. You have to give up something.

  • So, cognitive dissonance will lead you then to think that what

  • you are giving it up for has some value and then you

  • establish a liking for it.

  • Finally, cognitive dissonance shows up with children.

  • One of the most robust and replicated findings in education

  • or developmental psychology is very simple.

  • You take two groups of kids and you ask them to do something

  • like draw pictures. Half of the kids you reward.

  • Maybe you give them a sticker or a toy.

  • The other half you don't reward. Now, according to sort of a

  • simple-minded view of operant conditioning in behaviorist

  • psychology, the children you reward should do it more.

  • That's how operative conditioning works.

  • In fact though, the children who you reward

  • later on think that this activity has less value and they

  • are less likely to do it when there's no reward present.

  • And the idea, again, is the kids who don't

  • get rewarded say to themselves, "Well,

  • I just spent time doing it, it must have an intrinsic

  • value," while the children who get rewarded say,

  • "I did it for the sticker. I did it for the toy.

  • I don't care much for this." And so, rewarding children has

  • a danger, which is if you give them too much reward and too

  • much a value for what they're doing they will denigrate the

  • activity. Now, we need to be careful here

  • about what's going on. It's not simple inconsistency.

  • So, go back to this insufficient justification

  • effect. So, the dollar group rated a

  • task as more fun than the twenty dollar group.

  • And it's true; each group needed a

  • justification for lying about the task.

  • Each group needed a justification for saying how

  • interesting the task was, but they each had a

  • justification. They were each doing it for

  • money after all. So, cognitive dissonance is a

  • little bit more subtle. It's not just that there's a

  • clash. Rather, we adjust our beliefs

  • to make ourselves look more moral and rational than we are.

  • Go back to hazing. There's a perfectly good reason

  • why I let them do all those things to me.

  • I'm the sort of person who will let people do those things to

  • me. The problem is that's not an

  • answer I could live with. So, cognitive dissonance

  • motivates me to create an answer that's more comfortable for me,

  • an answer such as "This must be a really wonderful group with a

  • wonderful bunch of people." And in other words,

  • we are biased to believe that we are terrific.

  • So, to sum up, there are three main findings

  • about you that come out in social psychology.

  • One is you believe everybody notices you even when they

  • don't. You're the hero of your story.

  • The second one is, you're terrific,

  • you are better than average in every possible way,

  • each one of you. And finally,

  • what you do makes sense. If it doesn't make sense,

  • you'll--If it doesn't make sense or, more to the point,

  • if it's something that you do that's foolish or makes you look

  • manipulative or cheap, you'll distort it in your head

  • so that it does make sense. I want to move now to how we

  • think about self and other, how we think about ourselves

  • relative to how we think about other people.

  • And this brings us to the notion of attribution.

  • So, an attribution is a claim about the cause of somebody's

  • behavior and Heider--;Now, there's all sorts of reasons

  • for somebody's behavior. Suppose you insult me or

  • suppose you're very kind to me. I could say you're a kind

  • person or you're a rude person. I could say "this must be a

  • great day for you" or "you must be a lot of--under a lot of

  • stress or you must want something."

  • There's different sorts of attributions we could make to

  • people but Heider's insight is we tend to attribute other

  • people's actions to their personality characteristics,

  • to long-standing aspects of what they are.

  • And this is known as a person bias.

  • And more generally, people tend to give too much

  • weight to the person and not enough weight to the situation.

  • This is also sometimes known as the fundamental attribution

  • error. The fundamental attribution

  • error, which is one of the core ideas in psychology,

  • is that we tend to over-attribute things to a

  • person's personality or desires or nature and not enough to the

  • situation or the context. There's a lot of demonstrations

  • of this. A lot of the demonstrations

  • have to do with intelligence so, for example,

  • there's actually been studies showing that people tend to

  • overestimate the intelligence of professors.

  • Why? Because I stand up here and I

  • talk about the one or more than one thing I know about and so

  • it's easy to infer that I must know a lot but in fact by the

  • time this semester ends I will have tell you--told you

  • everything I know. [laughter]

  • And if you stood up and started talking about everything you

  • knew you'd look really smart too.

  • The best study to show this is a quiz show study,

  • which is you take two people and you flip a coin.

  • And one of them is the quiz master and the quiz master gets

  • to ask questions, any question he or she wants.

  • And the other person has to answer the questions.

  • And if they play seriously, the quiz master's going to

  • destroy the other person. "What was my dog's name?"

  • [laughter] "Well, I don't know." "What's the capital of the city

  • in which I was born?" "Well, I don't know."

  • And then you'd expect a third person watching this to say,

  • "Who cares? It's just--They're just doing

  • this because of the coin they flipped."

  • But in fact, when the person watching this

  • has to assess their intelligence they give the quiz asker a

  • higher intelligence rating than the other person.

  • After all, "He seemed to know a lot of answers.

  • The other person didn't get much right."

  • We tend to fail to discount the situation.

  • If you were giving a job talk--and this is for people in

  • graduate school particularly--If you were giving a job talk and

  • the slide projector breaks, you're screwed.

  • Nobody is going to say to themselves, "Oh,

  • well, it's not such a good talk because the slide projector

  • broke." They'll say,

  • "It's not such a good talk because of the person."

  • Somebody could give a talk and we could throw smarties at them

  • the whole time and then you could--then the other people

  • would say, "The person looked kind of

  • upset during the whole talk. [laughter]

  • I wonder--They seemed like a nervous type."

  • [laughter] This can be taken to extremes

  • and the biggest extreme is the case of actors,

  • which is if there's ever a case--Anybody know who this is,

  • the actor? [laughter]

  • Have none of you been alive in 1950?

  • [laughter] This is Robert Young. Does anybody know the part he

  • plays? He played an--He played a

  • doctor called Marcus Welby in this famous show "Marcus Welby,

  • M.D.," and Marcus Welby was a wonderful doctor.

  • He was compassionate and kind, he made house calls,

  • he saved lives, he counseled people,

  • and it turned out that Robert Young was then deluged with

  • mail, thousands of pieces of mail,

  • by people asking for his advice on health matters.

  • [laughter] And he then,

  • in a twist, exploited the fundamental attribution

  • error--people confusing the actor for the role--exploited

  • this by going on TV and espousing the benefits of Sanka

  • decaffeinated coffee where he produced the famous line "I am

  • not a doctor but I play one on TV,"

  • [laughter] whereupon people heard this and

  • said, "Well, he must have some authority then about medical

  • matters." [laughter]

  • It turns out that the confusion between actors and their roles

  • is extremely common. Many people,

  • for instance, view Sylvester Stallone as

  • either an actual hero during the Vietnam War or sort of a hero

  • during the Vietnam War given all his Rambo stuff but in fact,

  • of course, he played--he was in a Swiss boarding school teaching

  • girls age twelve through fifteen during the Vietnam War.

  • But it doesn't seem that way because the role infects how we

  • think about the person. When this movie came out twenty

  • years ago they needed a character to play a gay man.

  • According to IMDb, where I get all my information,

  • they hit up all the big stars, Harrison Ford,

  • Michael Douglas, and Richard Gere,

  • and they all turned it down because they didn't want to play

  • a gay man because people would think that they were gay.

  • Finally, they got Harry Hamlin to do it, who was kind of a

  • B-list sort of guy. The biggest extreme of the

  • fundamental attribution error, confusing the actor for his

  • role, is Leonard Nimoy who,

  • because he played the emotionless Vulcan,

  • Spock, on Star Trek, was then repeatedly viewed by

  • people who saw him on the street as if he was an actual Vulcan.

  • [laughter] He got sufficiently upset about

  • this to write a book called I Am Not Spock where he

  • described all the ways in which he was not a Vulcan.

  • [laughter] His career, where he attempted

  • many times to play roles that were different from his Vulcan

  • nature, stalled until finally many

  • years later he gave up and wrote another book called I Am

  • Spock [laughter] where he finally conceded to

  • the fundamental attribution error.

  • [laughter] If I gave this lecture ten

  • years ago, I would say that the fundamental attribution error is

  • a human universal, something that we're born with,

  • a fundamental aspect of human nature.

  • This is not entirely true though and we know that through

  • some very interesting cross-cultural research that

  • compares these biases across different countries,

  • in this study between the United States and India.

  • And it turns out that for whatever reason,

  • and it would take another course to talk about the

  • different explanations, but people start off at,

  • say, age eight not committing the fundamental attribution

  • error but in Western cultures, where there's an ideology

  • perhaps that people are in charge of their own destiny,

  • the error occurs and people over-attribute the role to the

  • person. In some Eastern cultures

  • there's more of a view about faith and more attributions to

  • situation. And this has been shown in many

  • ways. For instance,

  • if you look at newspaper reports about murders,

  • in cultures like the United States the report tends to

  • emphasize the personal characteristics of the person

  • accused of the murder. In countries like India,

  • the reports tend to emphasize, to a greater degree,

  • the situation that the person found himself in that might have

  • driven him to commit a murder. So, this is an important

  • reminder that just because we find something in our culture

  • and just because it might well be pervasive doesn't mean

  • necessarily that it's universal.

  • So, to summarize so far, and we're going to look at this

  • a little bit more for the rest of this lecture,

  • we've talked about two morals in social psychology.

  • One is enhancement of the self but the other is what you can

  • call "oversimplification of the other."

  • So, we know ourselves that our behavior is due to a complicated

  • cluster of the situation and our personal natures.

  • When things go badly, in fact, we'll blame the

  • situation. When things go well,

  • the self-serving attribution bias, we'll credit ourselves.

  • We don't do this for other people.

  • For other people we're a lot less forgiving.

  • You do something stupid, that's--you're a stupid person.

  • I do something stupid, it's an off day.

  • And so, you have this difference between how we think

  • about ourselves and how we think about other people.

  • Let's talk a little bit about what we think about other people

  • and start by talking about why we like other people.

  • And here I'm going to some extent to go over material that

  • was raised earlier in the course in Peter Salovey's wonderful

  • lecture. So, some of this,

  • our liking of other people, is obvious and we talked about

  • it in Dean Salovey's lecture, we talked about it when we

  • talked about sexual attractiveness.

  • We like people who are honest, who are kind,

  • who are smart, who are funny,

  • but study after study finds more fundamental processes are

  • also at work and here is a list of three of them.

  • One is proximity. We tend to like people who

  • we're close to physically, who we are physically and

  • spatially close to, who we spend a lot of time

  • with. In one study they looked at a

  • housing project in Manhattan and they asked people where their

  • best friend was and 90% of them said,

  • "My best friend is in the same building as me," and 50% of them

  • says the same floor. Ask yourself who is your best

  • friend at Yale. For how many of you is it

  • somebody in your same college? Okay.

  • How many in a different college? So, call it a tie but then

  • there's a lot more colleges that aren't yours than the one--How

  • many of you would you--say your best friend is somebody

  • your--currently on your same floor?

  • Yeah. If you were going to marry

  • somebody from this class, it is the person you are

  • sitting next to? [laughter]

  • Now, in some sense this is an--a rather trivial finding.

  • Of course you're going to get more involved in people you

  • encounter frequently. How else is it going to work?

  • But it's actually more than that.

  • The more you see something the more you like it and this is

  • sometimes known as "the mere exposure effect."

  • The mere exposure effect is simply seeing something makes it

  • likable perhaps because it becomes comfortable and safe.

  • In one study by James Cutting, Cutting taught an Introduction

  • to Psychology course and before each lecture he'd flash pictures

  • on the screen. He'd have a screen saver

  • showing pictures on the screen, paintings, and didn't say

  • anything about them. People would sit down,

  • look at them while they prepared their notes.

  • At the end of the semester he then asked people to rate

  • different pictures as to how much they liked them,

  • and even though people had no memory of seeing one or--versus

  • the other they tend to like the pictures more that they had seen

  • before. They were somehow familiar and

  • somehow more likable. If I showed you a picture of

  • yourself versus a mirror image of yourself and asked which one

  • you'd like more, the answer is very strong.

  • You'd like your mirror image more because the mirror image is

  • what you tend to see from day to day.

  • If I showed your best friend a picture of you versus a mirror

  • image picture of you, your best friend would say he

  • or she likes the picture more because that corresponds to what

  • he or she sees each day. Familiarity is itself a desire

  • for liking, a force for liking.

  • Similarity--we like people who are similar to us.

  • Friends tend to be highly similar to one another.

  • So do husbands and wives. Now, to some extent,

  • similarity is hard to pull apart from proximity.

  • So, the fact that you are similar to your friends at Yale

  • might just be because you are close to your friends at Yale

  • and people who are at Yale tend to be fairly similar to one

  • another. But there's a lot of evidence

  • that similarity, above and beyond proximity,

  • has an effect on attractiveness and on liking.

  • Similarity predicts the success of a marriage and through a

  • phenomena people aren't exactly sure about,

  • couples become more and more similar over the course of a

  • relationship. Finally, people like

  • good-looking people. People like attractive people.

  • Physically attractive people are thought to be smarter,

  • more competent, more social and nicer.

  • Now, some of you who are very cynical and/or very good looking

  • might wonder "yes, but good-looking people like me

  • actually are smarter, more competent,

  • more social and morally better."

  • This is not a crazy response. It is--it could be,

  • for instance, that the advantages of being

  • good looking make your life run a lot easier.

  • Teachers are more responsive to you, people treat you better,

  • you have more opportunities to make your way through the world,

  • you make more money, you have more access to things,

  • and that could, in turn,

  • cause you to improve your life. This would be what's known in

  • the Bible as a "Matthew effect." A Matthew effect is a

  • developmental psychology phrase for the sort of thing where,

  • well, as Jesus said, "For unto everyone that hath

  • shall be given and he shall have abundance."

  • That means if you're good looking you'll also be smart but

  • from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he

  • hath. It's a long version of the rich

  • get richer and the poor even lose what they hath.

  • So, there's a variety of studies suggesting that teachers

  • rate attractive children as smarter and higher achieving.

  • Adults think that when an ugly kid misbehaves it's because they

  • have an ugly soul [laughter] while the attractive kid,

  • "oh, that little scamp, somebody must have been

  • bothering him." When I was in the University of

  • Arizona and we lived next--and all I remember of my

  • neighborhood is we lived next to this little boy and his name was

  • Adonis. [laughter]

  • Cute kid, but come on. [laughter]

  • Also in mock trials judges give longer prison sentences to ugly

  • people. [laughter]

  • That's the Matthew effect, those who hath little get even

  • that taken away and thrown into prison.

  • There is a recent study, which I'll tell you about but I

  • am not comfortable with it as an experiment.

  • The study observed people in a shopping--in a parking lot of a

  • supermarket and found that parents were a lot rougher to

  • the kids if their kids are ugly than if their kids are good

  • looking. And they attribute it to the

  • fact that, for all sorts of reasons, the ugly kid just

  • matters less to the parent. I was watching a poker game

  • once on TV and somebody who lost said, and I quote,

  • "They beat me like an ugly stepchild" [laughter]

  • and the fate of the ugly stepchild is,

  • in fact, not a very good fate but this is not a good study.

  • For one thing, and I don't know how to phrase

  • this in a politically correct way,

  • but the parents of ugly kids are likely to themselves be ugly

  • people [laughter] and maybe what they're finding

  • is just ugly people are more violent than good-looking

  • people. [laughter]

  • This is an excellent time to stop the lecture [laughter]

  • so I'm going to stop the lecture and we're going to

  • continue social psychology on Wednesday.

Professor Paul Bloom: This is going to begin a

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16. 人の世界の中の人。自己と他者、前編 (16. A Person in the World of People: Self and Other, Part I)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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