Category: Social psychology

The Stanford prison experiment asks timeless questions about human nature, like what makes a person evil?

Can a good person commit evil acts?

If so, what can make people cross the line?

Is there some set-point which when crossed unleashes the evil?

Or is it something about the situations in which people are placed that determines our behaviour?

The famous ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ – argues a strong case for the power of the situation (Zimbardo, 1971).

Not only that but the experiment has also inspired a novel, two films, countless TV programs, re-enactments and even a band.

More on that later, first the experiment.

The procedure of the Stanford prison experiment

The idea was simple: to see how ordinary men, chosen to be the most healthy and ‘normal’ would respond to a radical change to their normal roles in life.

Half were to become prison guards, the other half their prisoners. In this experiment there were no half-measures, for it to be effective it had to closely approximate the real experience of prisoners and guards.

These participants in the Stanford prison experiment were in for the ride of their lives.

‘Prisoners’ were ‘arrested’ by a police car with sirens wailing while they were out going about their everyday business.

Then they were fingerprinted, blindfolded and put in a cell, then stripped naked, searched, deloused, given a uniform, a number and had a chain placed around one foot.

The other participants were made into guards who wore uniforms and were given clubs.

A prison was mocked up in the basement of a Stanford University building.

And so the Stanford prison experiment began.

Rebellion crushed

All was quiet until the second day when the ‘prisoners’ rebelled against their incarceration.

The guard’s retaliation was swift and brutal.

Guards stripped the prisoners naked, removed the beds from the prison, placed the rebellion’s ringleader in solitary confinement and began harassing all the ‘prisoners’.

Soon the ‘prisoners’ began behaving with blind obedience towards the prison guards.

After only a few day’s realistic role-playing participants reported it felt as though their old identities had been erased.

They had become their numbers.

So too had the ‘guards’ taken on their roles – taunting and abusing their prisoners.

Even the lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, admits he became submerged in his role as the ‘prison superintendent’.

In fact, Zimbardo believes the most powerful result of the Stanford prison experiment was his own transformation into a rigid institutional figure, more concerned with his prison’s security than the welfare of his participants.

Other members of the experimental team became engrossed in their new role.

Craig Haney, like Zimbardo, explained he became completely engaged in the day-to-day crises they were facing in running the ‘prison’ and forgot about the aim of the Stanford prison experiment.

Playing the roles

It was only when one of his colleagues intervened that the Stanford prison experiment was finally stopped.

In total it only lasted six of the planned 14 days.

Young men previously found to be pacifists were, in their roles as guards, humiliating and physically assaulting the ‘prisoners’ – some even reported enjoying it.

The ‘prisoners’, meanwhile, quickly began to show classic signs of emotional breakdown.

Five had to leave the ‘prison’ even before the experiment was prematurely terminated.

The psychological explanation for the participant’s behaviour was that they were taking on the social roles assigned to them.

This included adopting the implicit social norms associated with those roles: guards should be authoritarian and abuse prisoners while prisoners should become servile and take their punishment.

Inevitably the Stanford prison experiment has attracted criticism for being unethical, involving a small sample size, lack of ecological validity and so on.

Despite this it’s hard to deny that the experiment provides important insights in to human behaviour, perhaps helping to explain the abuses that occurred in situations like the Abu Ghraib Prison.

Conclusions of the Stanford prison experiment

The Stanford prison experiment showed how people are ready to conform to the roles they are given and expected to play.

They lost their identity within the group, taking the cue from what other people were doing.

The situation of the prison turned guards into sadists and reduced their sense of identity and personality responsibility.

The prisoners were also surprised how much it changed their behaviour.

Even assertive types became submissive and weak when placed in the role of a prisoner in the Stanford prison experiment.

In this sense it showed that the situation was more powerful in guiding people’s behaviour than their personality.

Is the Stanford prison experiment realistic?

Does this Stanford prison experiment mirror what occurs in real prisons?

Probably.

Writing in Inside Rikers: Stories from the World’s Largest Penal Colony, Jennifer Wynn interviews prison guards from New York City’s largest penal colony, Rikers Island.

One captain explained that guards easily become used to the level of violence inflicted on inmates – it’s part of the job and they soon become immune.

Some can’t understand how they become different people at work.

Levels of violence against prisoners were so bad in one unit, called the ‘Central Punitive Segregation Unit’ of Rikers’, that almost a dozen guards were officially charged with assaulting inmates in 1995.

Eventually the inmates won $1.6 million dollars in compensation.

This is just one example.

Criticism of the Stanford prison experiment

Other the years, many criticism have been thrown at the Stanford prison experiment, including:

• The guards later claimed they were acting in the Stanford prison experiment: psychologists refer to this as the demand characteristics of the study.
• The prisoners and guards were playing a role so you cannot generalise to real life. Different factors may affect people’s behaviour in real life. The Stanford prison experiment’s prison itself was not that realistic and people knew they were not in prison.
• Because of its ethics, the study could not be conducted nowadays. It would not pass any standard psychological ethics committees. For example, participants did not agree to be ‘arrested’ at their homes.
• Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the validity of the Stanford prison experiment, suggesting that participants ‘faked’ their behaviour and tried to help the experimenters (Texier, 2019).

Popular culture and the Stanford Prison Experiment

The study is now so well-known it has crossed over into popular culture. It has inspired a novel, Das Experiment by Mario Giordano, which was later filmed, and a new movie by the writer of the Usual Suspects is slated for filming.

The experiment has also been covered or recreated in countless TV shows, most notably on the BBC.

Not only this, but the experiment has even inspired the name of a band.

‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ released their first eponymously titled album in 1994, following up a year later with ‘The Gato Hunch’.

What other psychology study can say it’s got a band named after it?

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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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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The Milgram experiment is a classic social psychology study revealing the dangers of obedience to authority and how the situation affects behaviour.

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 the Milgram experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The experimental procedure left some people sweating and trembling, leaving 10 percent extremely upset, while others broke into unexplained hysterical laughter.

What finding could be so powerful that it sent many psychologists into frenzied rebuttals?

This study has come in for considerable criticism with some saying its claims are wildly overblown.

Obedience to authority

Stanley Milgram’s now famous experiments were designed to test obedience to authority (Milgram, 1963).

What Milgram wanted to know was how far humans will go when an authority figure orders them to hurt another human being.

Many wondered after the horrors of WWII, and not for the first time, how people could be motivated to commit acts of such brutality towards each other.

Not just those in the armed forces, but ordinary people were coerced into carrying out the most cruel and gruesome acts.

But Milgram didn’t investigate the extreme situation of war, he wanted to see how people would react under relatively ‘ordinary’ conditions in the lab.

How would people behave when told to give an electrical shock to another person?

To what extent would people obey the dictates of the situation and ignore their own misgivings about what they were doing?

The Milgram experiment procedure

The experimental situation into which people were put was initially straightforward.

Participants in the Milgram experiment were told they were involved in a learning experiment, that they were to administer electrical shocks and that they should continue to the end of the experiment.

Told they would be the ‘teacher and another person the ‘learner’, they sat in front of a machine with a number of dials labelled with steadily increasing voltages.

This was the famous ‘shock machine’ in the Milgram experiment.

The third switch from the top was labelled: “Danger: Severe Shock”, the last two simply: “XXX”.

During the course of the Milgram experiment, each time the ‘learner’ made a mistake the participant was ordered to administer ever-increasing electrical shocks.

Of course the learner kept making mistakes so the teacher (the poor participant) had to keep giving higher and higher electrical shocks, and hearing the resultant screams of pain until finally the learner went quiet.

Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks, the learner in the Milgram experiment was actually an actor following a rehearsed script.

The learner was kept out of sight of the participants so they came to their own assumptions about the pain they were causing.

They were, however, left in little doubt that towards the end of the experiment the shocks were extremely painful and the learner might well have been rendered unconscious.

When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter – an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat – ordered them to continue.

Results of the Milgram shock experiments

Before I explain the results, try to imagine yourself as the participant in the Milgram experiment.

How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory?

What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labelled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”?

Honestly.

How far would you go?

How ever far you think, you’re probably underestimating as that’s what most people do.

Like the Milgram experiment itself, the results shocked.

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

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent.

These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for the Milgram experiment.

Explanation of the Milgram experiment

At the time the Milgram experiment was big news.

Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation.

This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people’s behaviour.

The Milgram experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world.

Were the findings of the Milgram experiment still true in different cultures, in slightly varying situations and in different genders (only men were in the original study)?

By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient.

One exception was that one study found Australian women were much less obedient.

Make of that what you will.

Criticism of the Milgram experiment

Now think again.

Sure, the experiment relies on the situation to influence people’s behaviour, but how real is the situation?

If it was you, surely you would understand on some level that this wasn’t real, that you weren’t really electrocuting someone, that knocking someone unconscious would not be allowed in a university study like this Milgram experiment?

Also, people pick up considerable nonverbal cues from each other.

How good would the actors have to be in the Milgram experiment in order to avoid giving away the fact they were actors?

People are adept at playing along even with those situations they know in their heart-of-hearts to be fake.

The more we find out about human psychology, the more we discover about the power of unconscious processes, both emotional and cognitive.

These can have massive influences on our behaviour without our awareness.

Alternative explanation of the Milgram experiment

Assuming people were not utterly convinced on an unconscious level that the experiment was for real, an alternative explanation is in order.

Perhaps the Milgram experiment really demonstrates the power of conformity.

The pull we all feel to please the experimenter, to fit in with the situation, to do what is expected of us.

While this is still a powerful interpretation from a brilliant experiment, it isn’t what Milgram was really looking for.

The influence of the Milgram experiment

Whether you believe the experiment shows what it purports to or not, there is no doubting that the Milgram experiment was some of the most influential and impressive carried out in psychology.

It is also an experiment very unlikely to be repeated nowadays (outside of virtual reality) because of modern ethical standards.

Certainly when I first came across it, my view of human nature was changed irrevocably.

Now, thinking critically, I’m not so sure.

Milgram experiment repeated

The Milgram experiment has since been repeated by Doliński et al. (2017), with the same weird result.

Of the 80 people in the study, fully 90% went all the way to the maximum level of electrocution after being ‘ordered’ to by the experimenter.

Dr Tomasz Grzyb, a study author, said:

“…half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.”

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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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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The Duchenne marker is supposed to be the key to a genuine smile, but experiments cast doubt on the classic finding.

For years psychologists have thought that a real smile, known as a ‘Duchenne smile’ which reflects felt, positive emotion, is signalled by upturned lips and crinkly eyes.

People are highly tuned to the Duchenne smile and some think that people can easily spot a fake smile, which tends to involve only the mouth and not the eyes.

Or, at least, so it was thought…

What is the Duchenne smile?

This genuine smile is named after the French physician Guillaume Duchenne, who passed electrical currents through live subjects and took photos of their weirdly contorted faces.

Oddly enough when some people try to fake a smile they look like one of Duchenne’s subjects: in pain.

It has been suggested that 80 percent of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don’t have voluntary control over the muscles around our eyes which signal the Duchenne smile.

Why a Duchenne smile matters

Others, though, may well be much better at faking a real Duchenne smile, which is a handy trick because people automatically trust, like and want to be with those who appear to be showing real emotion.

One study, for example, has found that smiling is one of the best ways to make people instantly like you (Campos et al., 2015).

A genuine smile is a strong sign of cooperation and affiliation.

A smile makes people feel emotionally closer to strangers.

Other benefits of smiling include:

• Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation.
• Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically.
• Smiles can be used to hide what we really think.
• Smiling waitresses make more in tips.
• We treat people who’ve broken the rules with more leniency if they smile afterwards.

In fact, most people can fake a Duchenne smile

However, Krumhuber and Manstead (2009) question whether this 80 percent estimate is anywhere near the mark.

In the first of a series of experiments on the Duchenne smile, they found that 83 percent of the people in their study could produce fake smiles that others mistook for a real smile in photographs.

The researchers also explored how people perceived a genuine Duchenne smile and fake smiles when they saw videos rather than just static pictures.

Then, it emerged that fake smiles were easier to spot, but the supposedly crucial crinkling around the eyes didn’t help much.

Dynamic processes in smiling

Instead, telling a real Duchenne smile from a fake smile relied more on dynamic processes such as how long people hold it, the symmetry of the expression and whether conflicting emotions are communicated by other facial areas.

So, the smile has taken a bit of bashing in this research, which suggests that most people can fake crinkly eyes.

Not only that but the crinkly eyes aren’t as crucial for us in judging the sincerity of a smile as other factors.

Rather than just the crinkly eyes, it’s the whole movement of the face which tells a tale either of deception or of genuine, felt emotion.

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