Alright, week six, we're cruising along. things are get really a lot of fun from here on in, as it's starting, you know, really from this week. because we're going to make an interesting transition here. What we've been talking about so far has been largely, you could kind of think of it as taking a single individual. And trying to understand their mind and how it works. But of course, every one of us lives within a complex social structure, and the inf, others influence us, we influence other people. We are very much social creatures. In fact, you know, let me give you one thing to think about with respect to that. If you look at the animal kingdom, and you look at how long an average animal spends nurturing their young before their young are weaned and left on their own. There is no animal that comes even close to human beings. We spend much, much more time, you know, sometimes, well, people would say 15, 20 years, sometimes it seems like 30 years. you know, there are people whose children still live with them very long into their lifespan. but even in the most dramatic cases, you know, we can imagine not thinking of a human child as mature until their late teens. That's a lot of years to spend. And it really means that right from birth we are very dependent on other people, you know, our primary care givers especially. So we're very social creatures, and that effects the way we interact with everything and it affects our mind in very profound ways. That will be the topic for this week. Let's get at it. Alright, Week 6, Lecture 1. So I'm going to begin this exploration of social psychology by talking about conformity. But let's, let's hold off for a second and start here. again, I just want to highlight that point, that we're very social creatures. you know, back in the day, we actually hung out together in person. we would be close to other people. Now maybe it's more like, you know, Facebook, social media. and of course I hope we're actually using the Facebook account quite a bit in this course now. And you know, even though we're not physically together we still are socially interacting. We're sharing ideas, we're sharing views, we're having influences on one another. And we're trying to impress one another. that is who we are at our core. We know that somehow we succeed as human beings, partly on our own merits. But also very much on the extent to which we can work with others, manipulate others. And I want to use that not necessarily in, in a negative sense, but kind of, get what we want. And sometimes that means finding successful ways to interact with the other human beings around us. Okay, so we live in this social world. Now, there's interesting and what we're going to focus on in this lecture, is a an interesting sort of push-pull that happens. And I want to start with the, with the prison situation. So imagine a situation. these are, look like really old prisoners to me. kind of a ragtag group of prisoners, but nonetheless, imagine the situation where You are in a context where you're made to be the same as everybody else. So these people get the exact same outfits and literally they're being homogonized, for lack of a better word. They're being made to be, the same, and the idea of course. And we're, and we're going to revisit this when we talk about the Stanford Prison Experiment in a few lectures. But the idea is we want to let these prisoners know, you are prisoners, these guys are also relitively homogenous. They dress the same, they have a relative similar behavior and it creates a split. So we sometimes use our similarity and our differences with other individuals to signal things. And, you know, even within a prison situation, yes we have a big divide between how these people look and act, and how these people look and act. But even within here, what you see in prisons, is that often there's a desire within this homogeneous group, to somehow and individual. So sometimes we want to be an individual. And yet we want to be part of a group and that's the push pull. In fact, [LAUGH] some of you are probably wondering why, why do I have this picture over her of a guy's butt half hanging out. Well if you're like me, you've probably wondered what in heck, what caused this phenomenon? So, you know, when I started seeing young boys especially with their pants like this, I thought like, seriously? You have your, your, your belt tied around your legs, and your butt hanging out? Where did that come from, who started that? Well, you know what, these guys started that. if you're in a prison situation and you don't have a lot of choice in terms of making yourself stand out. You're given the same outfit. Well then it's not about the outfit, but how you wear it. So at some point in the prison culture, some prisoners started wearing their prison outfits in this way. And we have to think that those people were very influential, that they were the tough. They were the you know, the, the ones that somehow were looked up to within the prison situation. And this became a fashion and when they left prison they kind of took that fashion with them. and then it migrated, which is an important point. So they were actually trying to do this initially to individuate, what we call it, to stand out, to somehow say, I'm different. and we all seem to have that goal. And yet as it migrated, we see things like this. Lots of people start doing it. this individuation, this fashion spreads. And you end up with a group of people who have the same style and, and so they've kind of individuated and then grouped. Okay so this is a fascinating tendency of human behaviors this push-pull. And it was studied a lot by Solomon Asch and I'm going to show you some videos at the end or at least guide you to some. But I want to tell you about one of Asch's most well known experiments that looks at this phenomenon, and it's kind of an interesting simple little experiment. It would work like this, you would come into the lab as a subject and when you got there, there were other people. Maybe some were already there, maybe some came after you, and as far as you could tell, they were all participants in the experiment as well. You know other students who had come to the experiment, but in fact they were what we call confederates. And what that means is they were actually working with the experimentor. You were in fact the only real participant in the experiment. But you didn't know that. Okay, so there's a bunch of people at a table. So, imagine everybody lined up at a table, and imagine you're, like say, the fourth person in from the right, we'll say. and maybe there's even a person after you, so you're sitting there. And what Solomon Asch says is, here's what I'm going to do, guys, I'm going to put up slides like this one where I'm going to show you some line and then I'm going to show you three other lines. And what I want you to do is just tell me which of these A, B or C is the same length as the first line that I showed you, easy right? I mean, you look at that, it's got to be C, right? However, here's the hitch, as our participants were answering, they would consistently pick another one. So, you would be, say, the fourth one to answer, but the first person would say something like e, confidently, perhaps. The next person would say B. The next person would say B. And now it's your turn. What do you do? Do you go with your original impression that was probably C, or do you go with the group and say B. Well, what Asch found was that very often, people went with the group. Okay, there was this strong pressure to give that answer that everybody else gave. And Asch called that conformity, so we have the individuation we want to stand out sometimes. But in certain situations, even when we think everyone else is wrong and we are right, we don't like to stand out. That's that push-pull, okay? And if he actually asked, or when he actually asked people after the experiment. He took them aside, the real subjects and he told them about the experiment and he said, you know, they were just playing along but you answered the same thing as they did, you picked B, why? And he found out that people would give one of two different answers to that for the most part. Some of them would actually say, you know what, I really started to doubt my senses, like it looked like C to me. But everybody else said B, so I started thinking maybe it was B. Okay, and so there's that group of people. And then there's this other group of people. This other group of people said, I knew I was right. I knew it was C all along, but I felt kind of odd, I felt uncomfortable. I didn't want to, you know, make them look odd or I didn't want to produce any sort of conflict. And so I just said what they said because it was easier to do, okay? A simple experiment, and of course there was trial after trial of this. I don't want to imply that there was just one trial. They would do this to a person over and over again. and, and sometimes these people would say the right answer. But then there were those critical trials where they would all agree on the wrong answer before it was your turn. so, it's a simple experiment. But it actually shows a very profound tendency that we have, this conformity tendency. and, and, it can be really problematic. If you think of times, for example, when slavery was dominant, and the majority of people kind of seemed to believe that slavery was okay. What if you didn't believe slavery was okay. What if you actually felt it was unethical. Well when you're surrounded by people who believe in that, then you might be like a subject in the Asch experiment. It might be very hard for you to stand up for what you believe in and say I think all of you are wrong. I think this is the right opinion to have in this situation. and so what Asch's experiment shows is that's very hard. That can be very difficult for a human to do. Which means we can sometimes follow the herd even when we think the herd's going the wrong way. Simple but profound. Okay, there's some cool stuff to check out here. So, first of all here's a link to the actual Asch experiment, so you can actually see it going on. Think about the implications it has. this one is a much funnier version of the same thing. So, this is a candid camera tape where they show things like, again, they have confederates, they have a bunch of people in an elevator that are playing along. Some poor person walks into that elevator and at some point, everybody else in the elevator turns to the right. What does this poor person do? What you'll see is they often do what everybody else does, even when what everybody else is doing is ridiculous. They will still often follow along. It's funny and it's kind of creepy, if you think about it that way. Alright here's another one to show you sort of the implications of this a little bit more. So this is a reading all about comformity in the workplace and how it can be good. but again think about this as, as you go. And think about how other people are acting around you generally and do you think it's right or not. Now I, I will give you one of my controversial views. I think a lot of us eat meat in general and eat as much meat as we do because everybody around us does. But if we ever took the time to look into whether we should be eating meat or, you know, where it came from. When you look at the data you start to go hmm, I don't know. And so you know, you yourself maybe somebody who's living in a slave like era, where a bunch of people are doing things just because everybody does it. But when you look into it, you might come to a different opinion and then what do you do? Okay, so interesting things there and here's the actual Asch experiment if you want to go to that and check it out. There's all the details there, okay? Cool, the beginning of a fascinating set of lectures on social psychology. Some of the most controversial and interesting experiments within psychology waiting for you this week. Check the out. Alrighty, have a great week. Bye-bye.
