Category: Social psychology

Research in the psychology of attitudes reveals why people say one thing, but do another.

The word for when someone says one thing but does another is hypocrisy.

But why are people often so hypocritical?

It’s only natural to think a person’s attitudes and behaviours are directly related.

If someone says, while truly believing it, that they’re not a racist, you’d expect them to behave consistently with that statement.

Despite this, psychologists have found that the link between a person’s attitudes and their behaviours is not always that strong.

People frequently say one thing but do another.

In fact, people have a nasty habit of saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite, even with the best of intentions.

You see it all the time:

• People say they’re worried about global warming and yet they drive around in a big gas guzzler.
• They say that money isn’t their God, yet they work all the hours.
• They say they want to be fit but they don’t do any exercise.

Say one thing, do another

The discovery of the extent of people’s blatant hypocrisy goes back to 1930s America and the work of a Stanford sociology professor, Richard LaPiere (LaPiere, 1934).

In the early 30s he was on a tour across California with some close friends who happened to be Chinese.

LaPiere was worried that they would encounter problems finding welcoming restaurants and hotels because of his Chinese friends.

At that time in the US there had been lots of stories in the media about how prejudiced people were against Chinese people.

LaPiere and his friends were, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that out of the 128 restaurants and hotels they visited, all but one served them courteously.

Nowadays the fact that one place refused to serve them would rightly be considered an outrage – but those were different times.

So it sounds like a happy ending: perhaps the papers had just exaggerated people’s negative attitudes towards Chinese people?

The gap between attitudes and behaviour

But when LaPiere got home he started to wonder why there was such a gap between what the newspapers were reporting about people’s attitudes and their actual behaviour.

Why do people say one thing, then do another?

To check this out he decided to send out a questionnaire to the restaurants and hotels they had visited along with other similar places in the area.

The questionnaire asked the owners about their attitudes, with the most important question being: “Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?”

The answers they could give were:

• Yes.
• No.
• Depends upon the circumstances.

Incredibly, 90 percent of respondents answered, no, they wouldn’t accept members of the Chinese race into their establishments.

Imagine LaPiere’s surprise when he looked at the results.

People genuinely did say one thing and do the complete reverse.

They didn’t even select ‘it depends’.

What on Earth was going on?

Problems with the study

LaPiere himself argued that the problem lay in the questionnaire.

The questions themselves cannot represent reality in all its confusing glory.

What probably happened when people were asked if they accept Chinese people was that they conjured up a highly prejudiced view of the Chinese which bore little relation with what they were presented with in reality.

Here was a polite, well-dressed, well-off couple in the company of a Stanford University professor.

Not the rude, job-stealing, yobbish stereotype they had in mind when they answered the questionnaire.

This study has actually been subsequently criticised for all sorts of reasons.

Nevertheless its main finding – that people say one thing and do another in many situations – has been backed up by countless later studies, although in more sophisticated fashion.

The question is: why?

Snapshot of prejudices

Many psychologists effectively agree with LaPiere that it all depends on how you ask the questions and what stereotypes people are currently imagining when they give their answers.

In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned.

This has led to a whole raft of studies and theories searching for connections between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.

Many a lengthy tome has been dedicated to explaining the divergence.

Some of the factors that have been found important are:

• Social norms.
• Accessibility of the attitude.
• Perceived control over behaviour.

Despite these findings, the picture is extremely complicated and frustratingly inconclusive.

Perhaps as a result interest in this area has been waning amongst psychologists.

The exact way in which people’s attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery.

All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.

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The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating.

Despite all the advice about lie detection going around, study after study has found that it is very difficult to spot when someone is lying.

Previous tests involving watching videos of suspects typically find that both experts and non-experts come in at around 50/50: in other words you might as well flip a coin.

A study published in Human Communication Research, though, has found that a process of active questioning yielded almost perfect results, with 97.8 percent of liars successfully detected (Levine et al., 2014).

The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating, and everything to do with the way the suspect is questioned.

The Reid Technique

In the series of studies, participants played a trivia game in which they were secretly offered a chance to cheat.

In one experiment 12 percent cheated and in another 44.9 percent chose to cheat.

Participants were then interviewed using a variety of active questioning techniques.

One group were interrogated using the Reid Technique, which is employed by many law enforcement professionals in North America.

It involves tactics like presuming the suspect is guilty, shifting the blame away from the suspect and asking loaded questions like “Did you plan this or did it just happen?”

This technique was 100 percent effective with all 33 guilty participants owning up to their ‘crime’.

A second group were interviewed by US federal agents with substantial experience of interrogation.

They were able to detect 97.8 percent of people that cheated — in reality all but two of 89 people.

Bear two things in mind, though:

• The Reid Techniques’ detractors say that it can lead to false confessions.
• Participants in this study did not have that much to lose by admitting their guilt. It wasn’t as if they’d murdered their spouses.

Active questioning

Across the different types of interrogation, though, the important factor was that the questioning was active and of the kind used in real interrogations.

Professor Timothy Levine of Michigan State University, who led the study, said:

“This research suggests that effective questioning is critical to deception detection.”

Asking bad questions can actually make people worse than chance at lie detection, and you can make honest people appear guilty.

But, fairly minor changes in the questions can really improve accuracy, even in brief interviews.

This has huge implications for intelligence and law enforcement.”

Presumption of honesty

Professor Levine believes lies are partly so difficult to detect because in normal, everyday life we have a presumption of honesty.

“The presumption of honesty is highly adaptive.

It enables efficient communication, and this presumption of honesty makes sense because most communication is honest most of the time.

However, the presumption of honesty makes humans vulnerable to occasional deceit.”

The key, then, to detecting lies may be to assume someone is lying and then question them on that basis.

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Middlemist et al. designed a psychology experiment to test how men’s urination in public was affected by invasions of personal space.

Here’s a weird study that sometimes gets a mention in ethical discussions about psychology, and it’s not hard to see why.

Middlemist, Knowles & Matter (1976) designed an experiment to test how the speed and flow of men’s urination in a public lavatory was affected by invasions of personal space.

Personal space

To gather some preliminary data on men’s toilet habits, a pilot study stationed an observer in a public toilet at a US university.

He was instructed to look like he was grooming himself in the mirror, but was actually keeping a record of which urinals men stood at and their patterns of urination.

Timing them on his wristwatch, our intrepid toilet researcher measured the onset delay in micturition along with persistence of flow.

If you’re wondering how our correspondent measured these, it was by sound – which must have been no mean feat when there was multiple micturition in progress.

Sure enough the pilot study revealed men prefer not to stand next to each other in the urinals, and the closer other men are to each other, the longer it takes for them to begin urinating, and the shorter the persistence of their stream.

Spot the ethical issues

Middlemist et al. were not satisfied with this observational data, however, and decided to carry out a proper psychology experiment.

For this they required a more complicated setup, and a little covert action.

They forced unknowing urinators to spend their pennies in one (out of three) urinals that was closest to a single stall.

A confederate (who was in on the experiment) then either stood directly next to the various experimental subjects, one urinal away, or was not present at all.

Hidden in the stall was our urine measurement officer (grad students get all the best jobs).

Chief amongst his weapons was a specially designed periscope hidden in a stack of books so that the stream of urine could be directly observed.

The experimental version of the pilot study confirmed earlier findings.

With no one present, unselfconscious urinators’ average onset was 4.8 seconds, with a confederate present one urinal away, mildly self-conscious urinators’ average micturition onset was pushed up to 6.2 seconds.

Finally, with the confederate in the next urinal, it was 8.4 seconds before our bashful toilet-goer’s blessed relief began.

Urination and personality?

Rather than being left with the feeling, as you may be, that this was not only distasteful but also a bit of a waste of time, the psychologist in me comes out.

I’m wondering about personality correlates and personal space.

For example, is neuroticism positively correlated with increasing micturition onset, while extroversion is negatively correlated?

The problem is then you’ve got to get urinators to fill in a personality measure on the way out, which will expose all the periscope business, which in turn may lead on to a variety of uncomfortable conversations — both with participants and with ethics committees.

Perhaps we’ll just leave this one as it is.

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Unfortunately, this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.

Our personalities certainly have an influence on what situations we get into and how we deal with them, but situational factors — even relatively subtle ones — can completely obliterate the effects of personality.

Example of the fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error, sometimes called the correspondence bias or over-attribution effect, helps explain why people blame others for things over which they have no control.

For example, people who have been the victim of an assault are frequently blamed by others for not taking precautions or failing to foresee the calamitous event, even when there was nothing the victim could do about it.

Don’t take my word for it, though, consider a modern take on an ancient bible story.

The fundamental attribution error and the good Samaritan

Prominent social psychologists Darley & Batson (1973) were interested in what influences people’s helping behaviours and decided to test the parable of the good Samaritan.

The parable is about a Jewish man travelling to Jericho who has been attacked by bandits and lies half dead at the side of the road.

A priest and temple assistant pass him by before finally a Samaritan (who stereotypically hated Jews) stops to offer his assistance.

The moral of the story is clear enough but, wondered Darley and Batson, have we judged the priest and the temple assistant too quickly, perhaps they were just in a hurry?

Taking the ‘Good Samaritan’ test

In their classic social psychology study the experimenters recruited 67 students from the Princeton Theological Seminary and told them it was a study about religious education and vocations.

They were asked to fill in some personality questionnaires and told they were going to give a brief talk in a nearby room.

Some were asked to give a short talk about the types of jobs that seminary graduates would be suited for, while the others were asked to talk about the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’.

Unknown to the study’s participants, they were to experience their very own ‘Good Samaritan’ test.

For, after filling out their questionnaires and while making their way to the other office to give their talk, they would encounter an experimental confederate lying in a doorway, doubled over, eyes closed and coughing.

Participants would have to pass the apparently highly distressed man, but would they stop to help?

The situation affects behaviour

The experimenters thought it would depend on how much participants were hurried, so they manipulated this by giving them a map and one of the following three instructions:

1. “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving…”
2. “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.”
3. “…It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over…”

This created three conditions: high, medium and low hurry.

So some students left the office thinking they needed to go quickly, others less so, while some were relaxed.

Each of these conditions was also split into two: half about to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan, the other half on job prospects for seminary graduates.

This meant that the experimenters could assess both the effect of hurry as well as the talk they were giving on the students’ helping behaviours.

Would having a relevant parable uppermost in their minds nudge participants into helping?

Before I give you the results try to predict them for yourself.

How many future priests do you think would stop to see if the man was OK?

Would you stop?

What will be the effects of the situation compared with the individual personalities of the seminarians?

Situation beats personality in explaining behaviour

Here’s what happened.

On average just 40 percent of the seminary students offered help (with a few stepping over the apparently injured man) but crucially the amount of hurry they were in had a large influence on behaviour.

Here is the percentage of participants who offered help by condition:

• Low hurry: 63 percent
• Medium hurry: 45 percent
• High hurry: 10 percent

The type of talk they were giving also had an effect on whether they offered help.

Of those asked to talk about careers for seminarians, just 29 percent offered help, while of those asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, fully 53 percent gave assistance.

What these figures show is the large effect that subtle aspects of the situation have on the way people behave.

Recall that the experimenters also measured personality variables, specifically the ‘religiosity’ of the seminarians.

When the effect of personality was compared with situation, i.e. how much of a hurry they happened to be in or whether they were thinking about a relevant parable, the effect of religiosity was almost insignificant.

In this context, then, situation is easily trumping personality.

Fundamental attribution error

Before I asked you to imagine what the results might be, were you close?

Perhaps you were surprised by how little effect personality had on whether the seminarians stopped?

That is what catches most people out because of what psychologists call the ‘fundamental attribution error’.

This is the tendency to assume that other people’s behaviour reflects on their personality rather than on the situation they are in.

Contrary to our instincts, however, studies such as this one demonstrate that it is frequently the situation that controls our actions more strongly than personality.

If you saw the trainee priest stepping over the moaning man, what would you think?

Perhaps time for them to switch to a career in investment banking?

Maybe, but in the light of the fundamental attribution error it’s probably unfair on the priest (and the investment bankers) because we all of us have situational pressures on us that can easily drown out the influence of our personalities (see also the bystander effect).

‘Bad’ actions don’t necessarily mean ‘bad’ people just as ‘good’ actions don’t issue forth solely from ‘good’ people, or so the fundamental attribution error suggests.

The old adage that a person can be judged on their actions isn’t the whole truth.

Often people’s behaviour, and our own, may say very little about our personalities and much more about the complexities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Avoid the fundamental attribution error

One way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to actively think about a similar situation than you have been in yourself.

For example, when judging someone who was in a hurry for not stopping to help, think about how you behave when you are in a hurry.

Is it possible you have acted in a similar way in similar circumstances.

Another way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to generate alternate explanations for someone’s behaviour.

For example, if someone is rude to you, could it possibly be that they are not a nasty person, but rather are in a bad mood because something that has happened to them.

Alternatively, they may be preoccupied in a busy environment and have simply not seen you.

Finally, simply understanding the fundamental attribution error can help to combat it.

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Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures.

Why do good people sometimes act evil?

Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment, led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

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Critical thinking skills are difficult to acquire because the mind is a believing machine, as this classic psychology study demonstrates.

What is the mind’s default position to critical thinking: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible?

As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions?

Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who applied critical thinking, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally?

Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or do we use critical thinking processes?

Can we ignore the claims of adverts, do we lap up what politicians tell us, do we believe our lover’s promises?

It’s not just that some people do think critically and some people don’t think critically; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information.

But what is it: do we believe first or do we first understand, so that belief (or disbelief) comes later?

Critical thinking skills: Descartes vs. Spinoza

This argument about whether belief is automatic when we are first exposed to an idea or whether belief is a separate process that follows understanding has been going on for at least 400 years.

The French philosopher, mathematician and physicist René Descartes (below, right) argued that understanding and believing are two separate processes.

First, people take in some information by paying attention to it, then they decide what to do with that information, which includes believing or disbelieving it.

Descartes’ view is intuitively attractive and seems to accord with the way our minds work, or at least the way we would like our minds to work.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes, took a quite different view.

He thought that the very act of understanding information was believing it.

We may, he thought, be able to change our minds afterwards, say when we come across evidence to the contrary, but until that time we believe everything.

Spinoza’s approach is unappealing because it suggests we have to waste our energy using critical thinking to root out falsities that other people have randomly sprayed in our direction, whether by word of mouth, TV, the internet or any other medium of communication.

So who was right, Spinoza or Descartes?

Research on critical thinking skills

Daniel Gilbert and colleagues put these two theories head-to-head in a series of experiments to test whether understanding and belief operate together or whether belief (or disbelief) comes later (Gilbert et al., 1993).

In their classic social psychology experiment on critical thinking, seventy-one participants read statements about two robberies then gave the robber a jail sentence.

Some of the statements were designed to make the crime seem worse, for example the robber had a gun, and others to make it look less serious, for example the robber had starving children to feed.

The twist was that only some of the statements were true, while others were false.

Participants were told that all the statements that were true would be displayed in green type, while the false statement would be in red.

Here’s the clever bit: half the participants where purposefully distracted while they were reading the false statements while the other half weren’t.

In theory, if Spinoza was correct, then those who were distracted while reading the false statements wouldn’t have time to process the additional fact that the statement was written in red and therefore not true, and consequently would be influenced by it in the jail term they gave to the criminal.

On the other hand, if Descartes was right then the distraction would make no difference as participants wouldn’t have time to believe or not believe the false statements so it wouldn’t make any difference to the jail term.

The reason critical thinking is difficult

The results showed that when the false statements made the crime seem much worse rather than less serious, the participants who were interrupted gave the criminals almost twice as long in jail, up from about 6 years to around 11 years.

In contrast, the group in which participants hadn’t been interrupted managed to ignore the false statements.

Consequently, there was no significant difference between jail terms depending on whether false statements made the crime seem worse or less serious.

This meant that only when given time to think about it did people behave as though the false statements were actually false.

On the other hand, without time for reflection, people simply believed what they read.

Gilbert and colleagues carried out further experiments to successfully counter some alternative explanations of their results.

These confirmed their previous findings and led them to the rather disquieting conclusion that Descartes was in error and Spinoza was right.

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing.

Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind.

We really do want to believe, just like Agent Mulder and naturally lack the critical thinking skills of Agent Scully.

Believe first, ask questions later

Not only that, but their conclusions, and those of Spinoza, also explain other behaviours that people regularly display:

• The fundamental attribution error: this is people’s assumption that others’ behaviour reflects their personality, when really it reflects the situation.
• Truthfulness bias: people tend to assume that others are telling the truth, even when they are lying.
• The persuasion effect: when people are distracted it increases the persuasiveness of a message.
• Denial-innuendo effect: people tend to positively believe in things that are being categorically denied.
• Hypothesis testing bias: when testing a theory, instead of trying to prove it wrong people tend to look for information that confirms it. This, of course, isn’t very effective hypothesis testing!

When looked at in light of Spinoza’s claim that understanding is believing, these biases and effects could result from our tendency to believe first and ask questions later.

Take the fundamental attribution error: when meeting someone who is nervous we may assume they are a nervous person because this is the most obvious inference to make.

It only occurs to us later, when applying critical thinking skills, that they might have been worried because they were waiting for important test results.

If all this is making your feel rather uncomfortable then you’re not alone.

Gilbert and colleagues concede that our credulous mentality seems like bad news.

It may even be an argument for limiting freedom of speech.

After all, if people automatically believe everything they see and hear, we have to be very careful about what people see and hear.

Disadvantages of too much critical thinking

Gilbert and colleagues counter this by arguing that too much critical thinking or even cynicism is not a good thing.

Minds working on a Descartian model would only believe things for which they had hard evidence.

Everything else would be neither believed or not believed, but in a state of limbo.

The problem is that a lot of the information we are exposed to is actually true, and some of it is vital for our survival.

If we had to go around applying critical thinking to our beliefs all the time, we’d never get anything done and miss out on some great opportunities.

Minds that work on a Spinozan model, however, can happily believe as a general rule of thumb, then check out anything that seems dodgy later.

Yes, they will often believe things that aren’t true, but it’s better to believe too much and be caught out once in a while than be too cynical and fail to capitalise on the useful and beneficial information that is actually true.

Or maybe by going along with this argument I’m being gullible and the harsh truth is that it’s a basic human failing that we are all too quick to take things at face value and too slow to engage our critical thinking.

I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

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Group polarization is the finding in psychology that group decisions tend towards the extreme rather than averaging out the preferences of participants.

The definition of group polarization in psychology is that there is a trend to extreme decision-making in groups.

For example, say you put 10 people in a room and asked them to design a car.

Would they design something average or something wacky?

Would they be more likely to come up with a standard looking Ford or ‘The Homer’, designed by Homer Simpson in this classic episode of The Simpsons?

To help you decide, it’s handy to know that ‘The Homer’ has a number of forward-thinking design features including three horns, all of which play “La Cucaracha”, optional restraints and muzzles for the children and an engine noise that will make people think “the world is coming to an end”.

And the cost? A mere $82,000.

We tend to think that group decisions average out the preferences of participants so they would come up with something closer to a standard Ford.

But the psychological research doesn’t support this conclusion.

Definition of group polarization

In fact group discussions tend to polarize groups so that, rather than people’s views always being averaged, their initial preferences can become exaggerated and their final position is often more extreme than it was initially.

In an early set of studies on group polarization all about risk, decision-making was shown to shift either towards the cautious or the risky depending on the type of problem (Stoner, 1968).

Since then hundreds of studies from around the world have shown the phenomenon of group polarization in action.

For example, after a group discussion, people already supportive of a war become more supportive, people with an initial tendency towards racism become more racist and a group with a slight preference for one job candidate will come out with a much stronger preference.

Naturally this shift towards the extreme seen in group polarization has all sorts of implications for government, religion, commerce and the justice system.

A real-world example

In fact one of the neatest pieces of real-world group polarization research examines the US legal system.

Main and Walker (1973) analysed the decisions of Federal district court judges sitting either alone or in groups of three to see if group discussions were a factor.

In the 1,500 cases where judges sat alone they took an extreme course of action only 30 percent of the time.

However when sitting in a group of 3 this figure more than doubled to 65 percent.

It seems even trained, professional decision-makers are subject to the forces of group polarization.

Explaining group polarization

Psychologists have three main theories for why group polarization occurs — persuasion, comparison and differentiation — but all of them have much the same cause.

In any group trying to make a decision there is likely to be an initial preference in one particular direction.

Those who don’t initially agree with that decision are likely to change their mind to agree with the majority.

The processes involved, though, are different:

1. Persuasion: people change their mind as a result of the rational arguments presented by others.
2. Comparison: people change their mind to conform with group norms as in the Asch conformity experiment, especially when those norms are socially desirable.
3. Differentiation: a variation on comparison where people change their mind to fit in with their view of the sort of decisions their group should make.

As you can see these are all slightly different mechanisms involved in group polarization, each which probably operates independently, for producing much the same effect: decisions are pushed further towards the extreme.

Avoid group polarization

It’s worth pointing out that not all groups do polarize in this way and, indeed, a few of the studies have not observed the polarizing effect of groups on decision-making.

Well-established groups probably suffer less from group polarization, as do groups discussing problems that are well-known to them.

That said, though, where groups are relatively newly formed and tasks are novel, group polarization can emerge as an important factor in decision-making.

Psychologists have been less keen to offer ‘solutions’ to group polarization than they have other phenomena in group decision-making such as groupthink or the failure of groups to share information.

However, because groupthink has similar causes to group polarization, much the same approach can be used.

This is all about nurturing dissent in a group by encouraging the discussion of multiple perspectives and critical viewpoints.

Indeed research conducted by Fishkin and Luskin (1999) has shown that diverse groups do not polarize.

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Eye contact is so important: psychologist have found that it can signal love, hate, intelligence, creepiness, persuasion, sarcasm and sometimes lies.

The stories of Bill Clinton’s charisma are legend.

Much of that charisma was communicated through eye contact.

Those who have met him say that when he looks at you, it’s a very intimate experience.

His eye contact is said to be deep and personal, almost mesmerising; it’s as though there are only two people in the room: him and you.

And he doesn’t just seduce women, he seduces everyone.

Clearly the eyes have enormous power, such that they can have an almost magical effect on other people.

Of course you can’t just go around staring deeply into everyone’s eyes; like smiling, it sends all sorts of signals depending on content and context.

You’ve got to know how to use it…

1. The normal amount of eye contact

The amount of direct eye contact that’s normal depends on the situation.

For example, people usually make more direct eye contact when talking one-to-one than in groups.

In groups people tend to look directly at another person for about 3-5 seconds, but when it’s one-to-one this increases to 7-10 seconds before they glance away.

There’s also the percentage of time spent looking at someone, compared with looking away from them.

Using self-tracking technologies, it seems the normal amount is anything between 30 percent to 60 percent.

It will generally be more when you are listening and less when you are talking.

If you’re looking less than that, perhaps you’re not showing enough interest, if it’s more maybe you’re showing too much!

2. Deep eye contact for love

When someone stares at you, without the context it can be difficult to know if they love you or want to kill you.

Prolonged eye contact displays an intense feeling, but on its own you can’t tell which one.

That’s one of the great mysteries of body language: so much depends on context.

Often, though, the context will be obvious.

Couples making deep eye contact with each other over a candlelit dinner are (usually) not about to kill each other.

Indeed research shows that couples who are in love tend to make deep eye contact for longer than those who aren’t.

3. Too much eye contact

In the wrong context, though, a hopeful lover’s long eye contact can turn into creepy staring.

In one study, while participants were given an unrelated test, the researcher stared intently into their eyes.

People found it so off-putting that their test performance plummeted.

Whether eye contact is creepy or even aggressive also depends on culture.

East Asians, for example, typically expect less eye contact.

One recent study found that:

“…individuals from an East Asian culture perceive another’s face as being angrier, unapproachable, and unpleasant when making eye contact as compared to individuals from a Western European culture.” (Akechi et al., 2013)

The Japanese, for example, see the avoidance of eye contact as a sign of respect, whereas Westerners might interpret it as shifty or untrustworthy.

Westerners do not have the monopoly on high levels of eye contact, though: in some Arab countries people often look much more intently into each other’s eyes than many Westerners would.

4. Eye contact for confidence, leadership and aggression

Although there are cultural differences, people make all kinds of judgements about others based on their eye contact.

Westerners usually see those who make more eye contact as confident (as long as it’s not the creepy variety).

They also tend to associate greater eye contact with stronger leadership abilities, greater aggression and strength (Brooks et al., 1985).

On top of that, they’re seen as less anxious and more intelligent.

Indeed, it’s those with higher self-esteem and more power who are more likely to hold eye contact, rather than break it (Vandromme et al., 2009).

5. Using eye contact to persuade

Perhaps partly because of all the positive characteristics we associate with people who keep our eye contact, we find them more persuasive.

A whole raft of research shows the persuasive power of looking into someone’s eyes when making a request for compliance.

Just one example is Guegeun and Jacob (2010) who found people were more likely to agree to a marketing survey if looked in the eye.

However, too much eye contact can make other people more resistant to persuasion (Chen et al., 2013).

People in the study were even less persuaded by eye contact when they held particularly strong opposing views.

The results of this study fly in the face of the common advice to make strong eye contact with another person when you want to persuade them.

People in the study were even less persuaded by eye contact when they held particularly strong opposing views.

The study’s lead author, Frances Chen, said:

“There is a lot of cultural lore about the power of eye contact as an influence tool.

But our findings show that direct eye contact makes skeptical listeners less likely to change their minds, not more, as previously believed.”

6. Eye contact and lying

The old folk wisdom goes that you can tell when someone is lying because they avoid eye contact.

Psychological research has found this is not true, or at least it’s not a reliable sign for everyone.

Not only is the folk wisdom wrong, it’s positively misleading as sometimes people look at you more when they are lying.

According to this study, it’s because they want to monitor your face to see if you believe the tales they are telling (Jundi et al., 2013):

“Liars took some money from a purse, and were asked to pretend that instead of taking the money, they had been to a nearby restaurant together for lunch. Pairs of liars […] displayed more eye contact with the interviewer than pairs of truth tellers.”

7. Looking away signals sarcasm

While the connections between eye contact and lying are fraught with difficulties, one study has found a clear link with sarcasm.

When making sarcastic statements, participants were more likely to look away from their conversational partner than if the statements were sincere (Williams et al., 2009).

It’s another clue that looking directly at someone signals sincerity.

8. Appear smarter

Maintaining eye contact while talking is one of the easiest ways to appear smarter, research finds (Murphy, 2007).

The handy tip comes from a study in which people were recorded while trying to act smart discussing an assigned topic.

Maintaining eye contact while speaking was rated as giving the smartest appearance.

Indeed, intelligence tests revealed that people who maintained eye contact were actually smarter.

The study’s authors concluded:

“Looking while speaking was a key behavior: It significantly correlated with IQ, was successfully manipulated by impression-managing targets, and contributed to higher perceived intelligence ratings.”

9. Eye contact vs verbal signals

The power of nonverbal signals like eye contact in general is demonstrated by one study which pitted verbal against nonverbal signals.

This found that when they contradict each other, we are five times more likely to believe the nonverbal signal (Argyle et al., 1971):

“When verbal and non-verbal signals were inconsistent, the performance was rated as insincere, unstable and confusing.”

Not only do our eyes sometimes send stronger signals than what we say, they can also be as informative as the whole of the rest of our face put together.

Baron-Cohen et al., (1997) had individuals trying to read emotions from photographs, sometimes seeing the whole face and sometimes just the eyes:

“For complex mental states, seeing the eye alone produced significantly better performance than seeing the mouth alone, and was as informative as the rest of the face.”

(All that said, though, beware the oft-repeated myth that 93% of communication is nonverbal.)

10. Eyeball action

There’s little doubt that being able to maintain the right level of eye contact in the right situation is crucial to making the best impression on others.

In my experience most people could do with upping their eye contact a little.

As we’ve seen, too much is creepy, but looking into other people’s eyes has so many benefits that a little more eyeball action is no bad thing.

→ Find out more about what dilated pupils means.

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