As a psych major, I frequently encounter the glamorous question: “So do you know what I’m thinking right now?” Er, no. But I, like many psych majors, know exactly how to modify your attitudes and behaviour without you even realizing what we’re doing. There’s this girl on Igmur pulling a Pavlov on her crush by giving him his favourite brand of candy, to begin with. This YouTube video on change blindness that makes you howl with laughter towards the end. And then there’s this photo of a psych textbook listing the function of the hypothalamus, taking over the internet because of its unexpected humour. Hint hint, all psych students have heard of the 4 F’s and we don’t give an F after profs grilling it into our minds for the fifth time in our life!
But the art of psychology is so much more complex and intricate. So much so that after taking PSYC 215, my friend and I gave the course a slogan: Social Psychology – branding common sense with terminology.
And now, let’s delve into five of these common sense concepts and be astonished about just how amazing, yet underappreciated, they are! (Spoiler alert: this will not sound as exciting if you’re in psych, or have taken PSYC 215)
Planning Fallacy
Planning fallacy refers to the tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a particular project, even when fully aware that they have often failed to complete similar projects on time in the past. Think you’re gonna nail that essay even though you start three hours before it’s due? That’s planning fallacy for you! Research has shown that a major reason we commit such errors in planning is that we rarely consider how to actually complete a project. In other words, we spend more time in picturing what would happen once we complete the project, rather than how to complete it. But don’t worry, because it’s only human to make these mistakes. After all, the city of Montreal predicted the entire Olympiad would cost $120 million and construction would be completed by the 1976 Games. Well, the stadium itself cost $120 million and it remained roofless till 1989. So give yourself a pat on the shoulder. At least you didn’t expose thousands of spectators to the elements for two full weeks!
Pluralistic Ignorance
Ever been in a class where the prof is brewing glue out of your brain but everyone else seems on track? That’s because they aren’t. More likely than not, they’re completely lost, just like you. And just like you, they feel like they are the only one who’s not getting it… Until someone raises their hand and asks the question and the entire Leacock 132 lets out a collective breath of relief. That feeling of everyone else getting it while you’re completely lost is called pluralistic ignorance, a referring to the misconception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences. Those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm.
And I’ve just managed to lose you. No problem, because, prepare your sigh of relief, I’m introducing another example: on-campus drinking. This is actually a study done on Princeton campus, where the researchers asked students how comfortable they were with campus drinking habits, how comfortable they thought their friends were, and how comfortable they thought the average undergrad was. The results were in line with pluralistic ignorance: students believed others were more comfortable with drinking than they are. In other words, you think everyone just loves drinking, except that everyone thinks everyone else loves drinking, so you just fake your love for alcohol as a group and feel uncomfortable inside. The solution? Bust the myth. One study in which the students saw each other’s responses projected on the screen later reported consuming less alcohol.
Foot-In-The-Door Technique
Foot-in-the-door is when you ask for a small favour first in order to ask the same person to do you a bigger favour later. It’s quite common sense, but it’s a technique that goes beyond the persuasion dimension. Why do you think the participants in Milgram’s obedience experiment failed to resist the order to press the XXX button? Part of the reason rests in the fact that the experimenter asked the participants to increment their shock delivery by 15V at a time. The results would have been vastly different if they’re asked to deliver the shock at 450V right away. Similarly, the Nazi regime saw little resistance from Jews in Germany compared to Jews in Poland, France, and other countries it invaded. This boiling-the-frog-in-tepid-water phenomenon is to blame.
Door-In-The-Face Technique
Like foot-in-the-door, this is a persuasion technique that will make your life a lot easier if you master it. Unlike foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face is when you demand something out of proportion first and then makes a “compromise” to get what you really want. A really bad example would be if I walk up to a person and asks them to help me deal with a dead body, and when they’re ready to call the cops, I flash out my smile and say, “actually, may I just borrow your phone for like 5 minutes to call my mom?” You get it. Now be creative.
Big Brother Is Watching You
I’m introducing a much more general idea here and it is certainly not called “Big brother is watching you”. The study I’m talking about is where the researchers taped a picture of a pair of eyes on top of a coffee stand where you drop coins into a basket to pay. They found out that when there’s a picture of eyes, people tended to be more honest in paying for their coffee. But the craziness of this concept doesn’t just stop there. Another research team found out that if you present three dots with two on the top and one at the bottom (thus making the three dots resembling a face with two eyes and a mouth), and print it at the top of a test, participants were less likely to cheat. A third one gave people a questionnaire measuring their attitude on climate change and concluded that people were less likely to be deniers when the room they sat in was uncomfortably hot. All these experiments demonstrated how our behaviours and attitudes are constantly modified by factors that are barely registered by our consciousness. So, want your roommates to do their own dishes? Make a meme with a face in the middle and a witty line like “What if I told you leaving your dishes to soak doesn’t clean them?” Got frustrated by climate deniers? Turn their heater to 30 degrees or ship them to India. Problem solved.
Ok. The above may not work 100%, as human behaviour is much more complex than a bunch of concepts and theories, and changing people’s attitudes and behaviours are not as easy as using one technique or another. But at least with these things, you know how to better convince your friends to go out during finals week – I’ll let you figure out which one to use!
Images from:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5sCyAMKOpwE/maxresdefault.jpg