Hidden Brain - The Influence You Have

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn't stop to think about the pressure you were exerting on that person. This week, we revisit a favorite episode about a phenomenon known as "egocentric bias," and look at how this bias can lead us astray. If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at support.hiddenbrain.org. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Philip Zimbardo grew up poor. I was born in New York City in the South Bronx. And as he went to school and played in his neighborhood, he noticed something. There were lots of ways for kids from poor families to get into trouble. One of the things about growing up poor is you're surrounded by evil, meaning people whose job it is to get good kids to do bad things for money. And even as a little kid, I was always curious about why some kids got

seduced and other kids like me were able to resist. Was some kids smarter, tougher? Lots of people might draw such conclusions, but from an early age, Phil found himself interested in another explanation. The context in which a good kid would do something bad, the situation. At school, James Monroe High School also in the Bronx, Phil got close to a classmate who was interested in the same questions. And it was a little Jewish kid named Stanley Milgram. We were in the same class, we sat side by side. He was the smartest kid in the class. He won all the medals at graduation, so obviously nobody liked him because we were all envious

of him, but he was super smart and super serious. If you know anything about psychology, you will know that these teenagers went on to become two of the most influential psychologists in history. Phil became famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where he turned the University Psychology Department into a makeshift prison. Stanley Milgram made his mark with a study that examined the power of situations to seduce good people to do bad things. It involved asking a volunteer to administer a memory test to another person.

If the answers were wrong, the volunteer was told to deliver a series of electrical shocks as punishment. The study has invited a great deal of admiration and a great deal of criticism over the years. We're going to begin today's show by taking you through this famous experiment. As you listen, pay attention to how you're responding to the scene that unfolds, what you think about the different characters, and how you relate to them. Once it's done, we're going to talk with a psychologist who realized that most people overlook something in the experiment.

We so often sort of simulate if I was in that Milgram shock experiment what would I do if I was the the study participant, right? Would I actually stand up and go against these directives and say no? But we kind of flipped that idea on its head. Stopping to notice what she noticed can lead us to a vital insight about the mind. The power we exert over others, and the perils of living too much inside our own heads, this week on destroying itself. World War II was raging in Europe and Asia, and by the time he was 8, the US was swept up in the conflict.

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. A White House announces Japanese attack on 1941, a date which will limp in infamy. By tomorrow morning, the members of Congress will have a four-fourth and be ready for action. The fields of battle were far from Stanley's home, but as he grew older, he couldn't stop thinking about the war and its implications. Stanley was consumed by some big questions. Why did so many people willingly kill Jews in the Holocaust? Was everyone who followed Nazi orders inherently evil?

Here he is in an educational film. How was it possible I asked myself that ordinary people were courteous and decent in everyday life, can act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience? Phil Zimbardo remembers his classmate asking those same questions at James Monroe High School. As a high school student he was worried that the Holocaust could happen again in America. And everybody said, Stanley, that was Nazi Germany, that was then, we're not that kind of people. And he would say, I bet they saw it the same thing.

And the bottom line, he says, how do you know how you would act unless you're in the situation? How do you know how you would act unless you're in the situation? Stanley's theory was that the context that people found themselves in shaped their behavior. This went for Nazis, but it went for ordinary people too. Most of us never get to find out if we will behave like Nazis because most of us never find ourselves in situations where we're asked to behave like Nazis. By the early 1960s, as a psychology professor at Yale, Stanley decided to test this idea.

Stanley wanted to put volunteers in a situation where they would be asked to do something that was clearly wrong. Would they do it? Follow instructions? Obey orders? He came up with a scenario that was simple, ingenious, and wildly controversial. An experimenter wearing a lab coat invited volunteers into a room. The volunteers were told they were part of a study about learning and memory. Some would play the role of teacher, while others would play a student. What you're going to hear next is a recreation of the study using voice actors.

The dialogue is drawn from a 1962 documentary that describes the experiment. Before we begin, we should know that some listeners may find this section upsetting because it involves descriptions of someone inflicting pain on another person. Also, there are two liberties we've taken in this recreation. First, in the real version of this experiment, the student responded to the teacher's questions by silently flipping a switch. We've given voice to those actions. Second, we've imagined the internal monologues of some of the people in the experiment.

Those inner voices sound different from the things they say aloud, and you'll hear them both throughout the scene. So, that's a setup for the experiment. Remember, there was an experimenter and two volunteers one playing the role of teacher and the other playing the role of student. The experimenter began by explaining the purpose of the memory test. We want to find out just what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners and also what effect punishment will have on the learning in this situation.

The experimenter told the person playing the role of student to sit in a chair. The experimenter strapped down the student's arms and attached an electrode to his wrist. The electrode, the student was told, was connected to a shock generator. Then the experimenter explained. The teacher will read a list of word pairs to you like these. Blue, girl, nice day, fat neck and so forth. You are to try to remember each pair. For the next time through the teacher will read only the first word or the first half of the word pair. The student was asked to remember the second half of the word pair. The experimenter made sure to ask do you have any questions now before we go to the next room

no but i think i should say this uh... about two years ago i was at the veterans hospital in west haven and while there they detected a heart condition there's nothing serious but as long as i'm having these shocks how strong are they how dangerous are they will know although they may be painful they? How dangerous are they? Well, no. Although they may be painful, they're not dangerous. Next, the experimental usher the volunteer playing the role of teacher into another room. He gave him a set of instructions.

You will read each pair of words in this list once to the learner until you've read the entire list. Direct your voice toward the microphone as the rooms are only partly soundproof. Now, if he gives the correct answer, you say correct and go on to the next line. The correct answer is indicated in the right margin. I see. All right. Looks easy enough. The experiment got on the way. Attention learner, your teacher is about to begin the test. Try and remember the word pairs. Ready? Begin. Blue. Girl. Right so far.

Nice. I think day. Fat. But when the person in the other room made a mistake, fat. Was it hat? No. Wet.

The volunteer playing the role of teacher would tell the learner that he was wrong. As punishment, he would administer an electric jolt. Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of 75 volts. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. You'll now get a shock of 75 volts. Oh! This seems nervous. The experimenter in the lab coat, meanwhile, was observing the process.

Please continue. Cool. Okay, I'm pretty sure it's today. Wrong. It's head. 105 volts. Ow! Come on. Can I write it? I don't want to shock you.

Teacher, please continue. What should I do? Boat. Wondering how far I go. 5 volts. BOTE. The students trapped in the chair in the other room kept making mistakes. Each time, the experimenter urged the volunteer playing the role of teacher to keep going. To administer a stronger jolt of electricity. Wrong. It's harsh. 150 volts. How? Experimenter, get me out of here. That's all I want.

He wants to quit. I told you I had harsh stuff breaking. My heart is starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart is starting to bother me. Continue, teacher. Please go on. Confused to go on.

He refused to go on. You want me to keep going? The experiment requires you to continue, teacher. Please continue. The next word is sad. Are you gonna stop? Hi, hello. Next word sad. Get this right. Get shot.

I don't know. Day. Wrong. I'm up to 185. It's like 180. You're gonna stop. Please continue. As the shock increased,

so did the pain. And so did the protests coming from the next room. He's got a heart condition in there. I'm going to go. Your choice. Please continue. Now, I got a shock.

A hundred and eighty volts. I can't stand it. I'm not going to kill a man. So are you going to keep shocking him? Poor guy. He's in there screaming. I said before, the shocks may be painful, but they're not dangerous, but he's in there hollering so I can't stand up. What is something happening? You don't have to keep going

The volunteer being asked to administer electric shocks is in a difficult position The experimenter is urging him to continue even as the person in the next room begs to be spared Should he keep going? Or stop? The experiment requires that you continue teacher, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he's learned all the word pairs. I refuse to take responsibility of him getting hurt. I say you don't want the responsibility.

It's absolutely essential that you continue to. There is too many of them left. Please go on. Who's going to take the responsibility of anything that happens to the gentleman? I am responsible for anything that happens here. Please. As the experiment progressed, the memory test became more demanding. Slow, walk, dance, truck, music, answer Plzmonk. Get this right. I know it's for science, but I don't want to hurt you. Wrong. 195 votes. Let me out of here.

Continually. I don't know. Well, you've got me. I know it does sir, but I mean you do know what he's getting in for he's up to 195 that's pretty high After the study reached about 330 volts the screams from the next room went silent about 330 volts, the screams from the next room went silent. If the learner doesn't answer in a reasonable time, about 4 or 5 seconds consider the answer wrong and follow the same procedures you had been doing for wrong answers, say wrong, tell them the number of volts, give him the punishment. Go on please with the experiment. Please continue.

He's breaking. Soft, rug, pillow, hair, grass. Answer, please. Go on, teacher. 360 vaults. I think something's happened to that fellow in there. I didn't get no answer. Definitely. He was ho get no answer. Definitely.

He was hollering at less voltage. Can you check to see if he's all right, please? Not once we've started. Please, continue, teacher. In all, Stanley Milgram ran about 20 different iterations of this study over a span of several years. In this version, many of the volunteers playing the role of teacher showed discomfort,

but continued with the experiment. More than half went all the way to 450 Vols, even when the screams from the next room went silent, and the student was presumably unconscious. Why didn't the volunteer stop? Stanley later debriefed some of the volunteers. Why didn't you stop anyway? I did stop, but he kept on, keep on. debrief some of the volunteers. If you're familiar with the study, you already know that the student in the other room was an actor and not actually given electric shocks. The screams and cries of protest were carefully timed recordings.

The only target of the experiment were the volunteers who played the role of teacher, the people who had to administer the shocks. Stanley Milgram's study generated enormous attention and controversy. Admirers drew parallels between the experiment and what happened in Nazi Germany. They said, look, people are sheep. They can be easily misled by demagogues and dictators. Critics of the study said, no, those conclusions are vastly exaggerated. They questioned whether the volunteers actually behave the way the experiment suggested.

Some critics said that many volunteers simply refused to go along. Beyond the academic debates, the study prompted an entire sub-jandra of books and movies. Even today, people find the study fascinating, and they find it fascinating for one reason. How, they ask, could people who know that something is wrong go along with it? Are such people typical? Is everyone susceptible to such influence? Am I? As we listen to the details of the study, we can't help but ask, what would I do? Would I follow orders and zap the person screaming in the other room? 105 volts.

Ow! Come on, get it right. I don't want to shock you. Peter, please continue. What should I do? But Vanessa Barnes, a psychologist at Cornell University, realized there was something no one was paying attention to. Everyone was asking what was going on in the minds of the volunteers and how difficult the situation was for them. We so often sort of simulate if I was in that Milgram shock experiment, what would I do if I was the study participant, right? Would I actually stand up and go against these directives and say no? No one was asking whether it was difficult for the experiment or wearing the lab coat

to tell the volunteers to administer electric shocks. To the extent we think of the experiment at all, we might imagine someone who enjoyed putting people in difficult situations, a sort of mad scientist. Vanessa asked a deceptively simple question. Was he surprised to see these people going along with this crazy request he was making of them? Vanessa's insight was radical. What if you looked at the experiment,

not from the point of view of the students screaming in the next room, and not from the point of view of the volunteer administering the shocks, but from the point of view of the person giving the instructions. Teacher, please continue. Is he gonna keep going?

Oh, I wonder how far I can go. What if you treated the experimenter as the object of studying once equipped? Continue, teacher. Please go on. The experiment requires you to continue, teacher. Please continue. I said before, the shocks may be painful, but they're not so... Are you going to keep shocking him?

So, stop, stop. You don't have to keep going. Why do so few of us put ourselves in the shoes of the experimenter? Why don't we ask how difficult it was for him to issue those instructions? Why is it, when we hear the story, we automatically put ourselves in the shoes of the volunteers, the people receiving the instructions? Vanessa realized that we all naturally gravitate to the point of view of the volunteers and not the point of view of the experimenter, because we all instinctively know what it feels like to have other people put us in uncomfortable situations.

We think of our bosses, our partners, our co-workers, and how they affect our lives and change our moods. We think of the aggressive driver next to us or the other patrons of the restaurant who are so loud and obnoxious that they ruin our meal. Referee buffeted and pushed and pulled by those around us. The one thing we don't ask, what effect do I have on other people? There's been a long history of research on social influence and persuasion so we do know a lot about how other people influence us, but we don't know so much about how we experience our influence of other people.

When we are intensely focused on how the world affects us and not how we affect the world, for both good and evil. When Vanessa Barnes was a graduate student at Columbia University, she worked on a study. Every day, she would leave her apartment in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, get on the subway, and take the one train from 116th Street to Penn Station. Once she was there, she had to do something she found very difficult. Basically, I would just go up to random people on Penn Station, say, hey, we felt this questionnaire. Vanessa no longer remembers what the questionnaire was about, but she can still recall what it felt like to make such requests of total strangers. Yeah, I mean, I still have flashbacks of going down to Penn Station because it was so distressing.

I would walk in, people kind of walking all over the place, and then there'd be people just sitting down waiting for their trains. So I'd usually go up to the person who was sitting there waiting for their train, you know, doing whatever they do to kind of occupy their time. And I would say, excuse me, what you please fill out the survey. It felt incredibly awkward, stepping into someone's space, disturbing them, asking them to stop doing what they were doing and to do something she wanted them to do. As Vanessa asked for help and waited for an answer, her palms began to sweat. Her heart started beating faster.

It was a really sort of palpable fear that they were going to reject me or worse, right? Say something mean. I don't even know what, but I expected them to say something terrible. Looking back on the moment now, it reminds her of another Stanley Milgram study, one that's less famous than the obedience experiment.

He had his research assistants go on to New York City subways and ask people for their seats. Many of the students couldn't complete the task. His students started coming back to him saying, I can't do this, this is just so upsetting, this is the most, you know, distressing thing you've ever asked me to do. And he was like, you guys are being babies. I don't understand why this is so upsetting. And so, to prove his students wrong, the famous researcher set out for the subway himself. He would do what his students couldn't, walk up to strangers, and ask them for their seats.

He found the experience so much more distressing than he expected it to be, and all of a sudden he understood why they have been complaining so much. Why is it so hard to make such requests? Well, one obvious explanation is that we know that people will reject us, and that rejection is painful. Vanessa remembers being hugely relieved when she was done giving out questionnaires at Penn Station and could head back to her lab at Columbia University. Once there, she and her professor, Frank Flynn, analyzed the responses to the questionnaire. They noticed something intriguing.

Frank was like, I can't believe how many people are actually saying yes to you. Total strangers disrupted from reading their newspaper or eating a sandwich or watching the crowds of people in the busy station, they were like, sure, I'll respond to your questionnaire. We were really surprised by how many people were agreeing in New York Penn Station to do this survey. What began as a simple observation turned into something much more important and insight about our minds.

Here's the chain of thought that led to the discovery. The reason Frank and Vanessa was surprised that so many people said yes is because they expected people to say no. If lots of people said yes, that meant that Vanessa's fears about rejection were misplaced, her perception of the influence she actually had on other people was wrong. Like most of us, Vanessa had long felt that others had a big effect on her. As she gazed at the data, she realized that she had a big effect on other people. If she was blind to this power, what consequences could it have on her behavior?

As researchers, the first thing that Vanessa and Frank decided to do was test if that personal experience was generalizable. We decided to bring participants into the lab and have them do basically what I had done on those number of days. So we brought them into the lab. We said, hey, we're going to have you go out and ask people to as our first step fill out a survey just like I had

done. And how many people do you think are going to say yes to you? We made them estimate how many people they thought would agree, go out and actually ask people, and what we found was that they really underestimated the number of people who would agree to that request. So it wasn't just Vanessa and Frank. People in general seem to have a poor assessment of their power over others. People thought that others would find it easy to turn down their requests. Vanessa connected the seeming blind spot in our thinking to Stanley Milgram's famous obedience study. She realized this might be why everyone

always saw the experiment from the perspective of the volunteers asked to administer shocks, the people being influenced. No one saw the experiment from the point of view of the experimenter, the person exercising influence. We don't ask, was it hard for him to issue those crazy instructions because we don't identify with people exercising such influence? We think that kind of person must be very different from us because we don't feel we have such power. Was he surprised to see these people going along with this crazy request he was making

of them? So it's interesting when people think about the Stanley Milgram study, I think this is true for myself as well. I always imagine myself being in the role of the volunteer in the experiment, hearing the instructions from the experimenter saying, you must shock this other person, I never put myself in the shoes of the experimenter. Exactly. So that was something that we started to wonder about. So we so often sort of simulate if I was in that Milgram shock experiment,. So we so often sort of simulate, if I was in that Milgram shock experiment, what would I do if I was the study participant, right?

Would I actually stand up and go against these directives and say no? But we kind of flipped that idea on its head. Vanessa went back to her experience at Penn Station. It felt difficult because she had seen the interaction only from the point of view of her own insecurities. She hadn't seen the encounters through the point of view of the people she was asking for help. From their perspective, an anxious young woman was asking for something trivial.

They had to weigh whether to put aside what they were doing and help her for a few minutes. If they said no, it could make them look like jerks. It's this really interesting phenomenon where you have these two people interacting with one another and they're both so focused on their own personal anxieties and insecurities and concerns with embarrassment that they don't realize that the other person is feeling that way too.

So it's this really interesting situation where being so inwardly focused on your own anxieties makes it so difficult for you to recognize what the situation really is for itself. People in these encounters experience what psychologists call an egocentric bias. They are so consumed with their own perceptions that they fail to see what the interaction feels like for the other person. It's absolutely true that many of us are influenced by situations that many of us will do things because the situation prompts it. But there is another problem too, and it might be a deeper problem. The people who put us in those situations,

it's not like they are all powerful gods. They are humans just like us, and they may not realize the extent of the power they have over us. In fact, they may be thinking, I'm sure this person is going to turn down my request. They might assume falsely that it's easy to refuse instructions. When I said realized that this bias could have all sorts of important consequences. So what we started looking at about over a decade now ago, we started to look at whether we recognize when we're the ones who are influencing someone else. When we recognize that someone else, for example,

can't say no to something that we've asked them. Vanessa has now a psychologist at Cornell University. In a series of experiments, she has demonstrated how people are often oblivious to the power that they have over others. In one study, she asked volunteers, mostly college students, to make a simple request of others. We brought people into the lab and we told them you're going to go out into campus and ask people to borrow their phones. She walked them through how to approach someone and gave them instructions for what to do once people agreed to let them use their phones. They would call us back at the lab and say, I have this person's phone, this is where I'm located, we'd mark it down and then they go on and ask somebody else. Before the volunteers went out to begin the study,

Vanessa asked them a question. How many people would they have to ask to get three people to say yes? And at this time, participants are kind of freaked out by this whole thought. They are convinced everyone's gonna say no, they're not gonna be able to do the task. And before they actually go out onto campus to do the task,

they often would ask us, well, what if no one agrees? do I come back? What do I do? They have all these concerns about not being able to complete the task. What Vanessa found was similar to her own experience at Penn Station. Many more people said yes, than the volunteers expected. They thought they had to ask a little over 10. They actually had to ask more like six. In fact, every other person was agreeing to this request. Maybe you think the students had a high success rate because they were requesting something trivial. But Vanessa has also conducted a version of the study where volunteers had

to ask for something more consequential. Money. For that study, she enlisted the help of the leukemia and lymphoma societies team in training program. What people do when they participate in a fundraising activity for team in training is they ask people for donations so that they can participate in some sort of race like a triathlon or a marathon. They get some training and some travel money to be able to do that and the rest of the money actually goes to the organization. Vanessa asked participants how many people they would have to solicit to meet their fundraising

goals, which were typically thousands of dollars. They estimated they would need to ask about 200 people to meet the goal. What we found is that they actually only had to ask about half that, so they only had to ask about 100 people in order to reach their fundraising goals. Just as in Vanessa's phone study, her participants doubled the number of people they thought they had to ask to reach their goal. Their egocentric bias caused them to focus so much on their own anxieties that they ignored the influence they actually had over other people.

You're thinking about what you're asking. I'm asking this person for money. Will this person give me money? What you're not doing is thinking about what if you were sitting there, you know, potentially in your cubicle and a co-worker came up to you and said, hey, I'm participating in a race. Would you be willing to sponsor me? If you were sitting there, it'd be really hard to say no to your co-worker, right? It'd be really hard to let them down. It'd be really awkward. What would you even say? And so people are kind of put on the spot and they find it really difficult to say no, so they go ahead and agree. At the University of Chicago, economists John List has also studied the relationship between social pressure and charitable giving.

John ran a study where experimenters knocked on the doors of some 8,000 houses in the Chicago area. They were trying to raise money for a children's hospital. John asked me to imagine the scenario from the point of view of the person receiving the request. Let's say it's a Sunday afternoon. I just made myself something to eat. I'm relaxed. You're sitting on the couch watching a football game and you hear somebody knocking on the door.

And you think, okay, should I get up or should I stay watching the football games? Of course, a lot of people get up and answer the door. But once they see that there's a solicitor at the door, they say, oh my God, I wish I would have stayed on the couch watching the football game. Too late. If they tell the solicitor, no, then they have this very negative or dis-utility from letting someone down. So they're weighing that off versus just giving them $20 and having them go on their way. John added a very interesting twist to the study. Some households were told ahead of time that a fundraising volunteer would come and knock

on the door. Others were not told ahead of time, they just received an unexpected knock. What we find is that when we warn them, of course, many people just stay on the couch or they leave the house. They never answer the house. They never answer the door. The people who do answer the door, they do tend to give money. And much of that is because of altruistic reasons.

But the people who we do not warn, they end up answering the door more often and they give more. Put another way. People understand how they are going to feel when they put on the spot. They often will go to great lengths to avoid getting in such situations. What this also means is that some significant portion of the money that charities raise might not come from altruism. In the case of the children's hospital fundraiser, for example, what you find is that roughly three quarters of the dollars given are due to social pressure and a quarter of the dollars given is actually due to altruism. So a very small component of what we observe in our door to door fundraising drive is actually driven by altruism.

in our door to door fundraising drive is actually driven by altruism. John's research reminds Vanessa of a classic study where researchers set up two boots on a college campus. One booth was clearly asking people for something while the other did not ask for anything. What the researchers found was similar to John's donation study. They measured how far away people walked from the booth as they walked by this path. And if people knew that they were going to be asked for something, their distance from the booth was much further than if they didn't think they were going to be asked for something, we just kind of avoid any chance of having to say no to somebody. We've seen how egocentric buyers can cause us to act in helpful ways to others.

We lend phones to people who need them or donate money to charity. Unfortunately though, there's another side to the story. They grabbed that headset and they threw it across the room. When we come back, the sinister side of our inability to recognize our power over other people. When we interact with others, we are often intensely focused on how we feel. Our anxieties, our embarrassments, our fears. As a result, we are often blind to the effect we have on others, their anxieties, their embarrassments, and their fears.

Psychologists venous abons a studied how such egocentric bias can keep people from asking for help. But that's not the whole story. There's kind of the happy story, which is that people will help us more than we think. And then there's kind of the darker story that people will do a lot of other things for us more so than we think.

So we've run some studies where we started out kind of asking people if they could get someone to lie for them. So our original studies involved, you know, just filling something out. We said, what if we just have them ask if they'll, you know, sign their name to say to something saying that you gave them a pitch that you didn't actually give them. Just kind of a white lie. And so once again, we had people guess how many people they would have to ask this or make this request of before a certain number said yes, they went out onto campus, they asked people you know, I'm supposed to be doing this pitch, I really don't feel like doing it, were you just sign this saying that I gave you the pitch? And again, most people wound up signing it even though our participants thought that most people would say no.

As Vanessa says, the volunteers were asking people to tell a trivia lie. And perhaps you could say, what's the big deal in signing a note that says someone gave you a pitch that they didn't? There are no real moral consequences. So Vanessa raised the stakes. We kind of upped the stakes. We kind of up the ante. And so what we did is we created these fake library books. We took a bunch of books off my bookshelf and just, you know, put some library codes on them. And we gave them to participants and we said,

we're going to have you go into the libraries on campus and ask people to vandalize these library books. And so they were to tell people, I'm playing a prank on my friend, but they know my handwriting. Will you please just write pickle in this library book and pen? And they left it at that and looked at whether or not

people agreed. And what we found is that the people they approached, so they kept track of sort of the things that people said when they made this request of them. And people would say things like, this is wrong, you shouldn't be doing this, we could get in trouble, they were clearly uncomfortable with the prospect

of vandalizing this purported library book, but they still did it. They still did it. And again, that finding went completely against the intuitions of the volunteers doing the asking. People significantly underestimated how much influence they possessed to get others to do something unethical. So our participants, before they went out

and started asking people, they thought about 28% of people would agree to do this, right? So they thought the vast majority of people would say no. But when they actually went out and made this request of people, 64%, a majority of the people they asked actually agreed to vandalize this library book. I mean, that's actually pretty astonishing that 64% of people would say yes. I mean, I would not have predicted it would be as high a number as that. Yeah, I mean, this was a task we designed and we were like, this is never going to work.

There's no way people are actually going to agree to do this. And we ourselves were completely surprised that that people did agree. As much as it was uncomfortable for them to do this unethical thing and analyze a library book, it was way more uncomfortable for them to say no to the person who was asking. The scenarios in which eco-centric bias could play a role in our behavior seem endless. We share the answers to our homework with a friend who asked to see our work. We don't push back when a colleague suggests bending the rules on a time sheet. We agree to keep a friend's infidelity a secret even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Listening to Vanessa made me realize why there is a vast gulf between what we predict we might do and what we actually do when we are confronted with problematic behavior. We look as outsiders at the situation and we say why would you tolerate this? Why wouldn't you just stand up and say I'm not going to do this? I'm not going to hurt another person or you know, I need to be able to do my job and you're affecting my ability to do my job. But in fact, the social pressure,

the concern about offending another person, the social anxiety in that situation is so palpable to that individual, but it feels almost impossible for them to stand up and say something and get about it and reject the sort of behavior that they're encountering. Hidden Brain Lysner Anna Aburus called in with a story that illustrates how egocentric bias can affect workplace behavior. She was training to be an air traffic controller and saw examples of bullying and harassing behavior all around her. She says the trainers had a clear message for trainees.

Don't be soft. Or you know you got to have thick skin to survive in air traffic. That was a common one for sure. You have to have thick skin to survive in air traffic. I've heard that over a hundred times. Anna recalled one painful incident. There was a trainee that was trying

to clear an aircraft for landing. And the trainer in that moment grabbed the headset of the trainee. And this headset is plugged in to the radar. And they grabbed that headset and they threw it across the room, which would fly off of the training. They would actually tell them, hey hurry up and go grab it

so that you can plug back in and clear this aircraft for landing. Anna says seeing such incidents made her fearful. She didn't feel she could complain since such behaviors appear to be the norm. Who could she complain to? The people who were themselves acting badly? They would just say things like, what are you doing? Um, stop f***ing up.

You f***ing idiot. If you do that again, I swear f***ing God. One time when she was directing aircraft, this was in real life, not a simulation. She found herself sitting next to one of the trainers who she says had acted abusively to her trainees. By this point, Anna was no longer a trainee. She was directing to aircraft.

One was a thousand feet above the other. I got the names of the aircraft mixed up. And I, because I was so nervous, I think, and I descended the wrong aircraft. I descended the one on top instead of the one on the bottom, because I got those call signs messed up. She told the aircraft that was at a higher altitude to descend directly into the path

of the lower altitude aircraft. Luckily, the pilot could see the aircraft, so the pilot was just said, no, we're not going to descend. And I immediately knew what I had just done. And I thought today was a clear day. It was clear skies. There was no clouds in the way. There was no storm clouds in the way.

But had there been storm clouds? Or had there been some other kind of visual obstruction, this plane would have descended, and they would have hit that aircraft. And I would have been responsible for hundreds of deaths. And it wasn't because I didn't know how to control the traffic I did, and I had done this a million times. It was because of the social stress that I was in at that time that didn't make me think clearly.

I told Vanessa Barnes what Anna described, how the mere presence of the trainer had disrupted her to the point where she made a mistake that could have been catastrophic. Vanessa said, look, it's certainly the case that there are lots of unethical people who know they are unethical and lots of bullies who know they are bullies. Maybe that was the case here, but there is a deeper problem in the workplace that we often forget.

The bullies and harassers who don't know that they are bullies and harassers. Often, when we're the person causing someone else to stress, we can't see that distress. It's invisible to us. And it's not to let anybody off the hook because clearly it's the people creating this toxic cultures, responsibility to kind of fix it and to not cause these things to happen.

But there's also this cognitive bias there where we may not realize the extent to which we're interfering with somebody else's performance. These same dynamics play out in another common occurrence in the workplace, unwanted romantic attention. We ran a couple of studies where we asked people about their experiences being asked out at work or asking someone out at work. And we asked people to imagine situations where they weren't interested in the other person

or the other person wasn't interested in them. And what we found is that people who asked somebody out at work and were rejected thought that it was pretty easy for that person to reject them. They didn't think that that person experienced a whole lot of distress and they didn't think that they changed their behavior very much after being asked out. But when people were called situations where they were asked out by someone at work who they weren't interested in, they described feeling obligated to say yes, feeling much more uncomfortable saying no to the person. And they reported doing all sorts of things to try to avoid that person that the other person didn't realize that they were doing. sorts of things to try to avoid that person that

the other person didn't realize that they were doing. So in fact, this little request, you know, we tell people to just go for it and ask this person out, it actually puts a lot more pressure on the other person than we tend to realize when we're the ones doing the asking. In some ways, we underestimate the pressure that we exert on other people. In some ways, that's the moral of the whole story, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah, we underestimate the influence that we have over other people,

and we underestimate the extent to which asking them for something really puts them in an awkward position, because now they have to say no, and that's just a really hard thing for people to do. Like many psychological biases, the tendency we have to downplay the influence we have on others can have far-reaching consequences. It can keep us from asking for help that would be forthcoming. It can keep us from reaching out and making friends with strangers. And it can also lead us to give into unethical demands or making proper demands of other people. I asked Vanessa how her research had prompted her to do things differently in her own life. It has made a huge difference in the little things.

So for example, when I was pregnant, if I needed a seat on the subway or on a train, I would kind of stand there and look around and try to look my most pathetic so that someone would give me their seat, thinking that someone would step up and do it because they were nice, right? But in fact, everyone's all involved in their own stuff. They're not necessarily looking around and paying attention. And maybe they'd be perfectly happy to give up their seat, but they're not going to think of it unless you actually ask. And so I tried to take that into account, so when I was pregnant, I would go up to people and be like, hey, can I sit down? I'd really love to sit. And then of course people are incredibly happy to just pop up and say yes. And what's interesting, of course, is when that happens, you're actually giving people

an opportunity to do something nice. It's not just that you're imposing on them. Presumably some of them are actually happy to say, you know, I was just writing to work and now I actually got to do this nice thing for this other person. I feel this little warm glow. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people wonder about the takeaway. So if people agree to help us out of obligation because I feel like they can't say no, then do you really want to ask them for things? But people are really good at justifying their behaviors and ways that make them feel good about themselves. So they may agree to help because I feel like they can't say no, but pretty quickly after that, they're going to be convincing themselves that they helped because they're a really wonderful person.

And so everyone's going to walk away feeling good about the interaction. You got the help that you needed and the other person gets to feel like a good person. Psychologists once conducted a light-hearted version of Stanley Milkrim's obedience study. In the 1970s, they had research assistants tan on the streets of New York City. Their jobs? To look skyward? At nothing. The question the researchers wanted to know was whether innocent passers-by would also stop to look up to see what was going on. They found that when more people were in on the gag, more pedestrian stopped and looked up.

I've seen video of that study many times and always found this scene funny. One to fifteen people just staring off into the sky. Recently, I rewatched it, and this time I did what Vanessa had done. I flipped the script. Instead of seeing the experiment from the point of view of the passers-by and asking myself whether I would be similarly influenced, I looked at the experiment from the point of view of the research assistance. Did they expect so many people to join them in looking at nothing? We've seen throughout this episode how all of us as individuals have great power to shape how others behave. If each of us has this hidden power then

collectively as groups, as communities, as tribes, we are going to have even more influence. The force we collectively exert can be nearly impossible for any one person to overcome. This can explain good things like the social norms that hold communities together. But it can also lead to terrible things. When we are part of a mob, the effects can be monstrous. This week's show was produced by Thomas Liu and Laura Quarell. It was edited by Tara Boyle and Raina Cohen.

We had engineering support from Patrick Boyd. Our team includes Parth Shah, Jenny Schmidt, Kat Shuknecht, and Lushik Waba. Our voice actors for this episode were Jacob Conrad, James Delahousi, and Jared M. Gare. Our unsung hero this week is Juan Yu-Jong. Juan Yu works for NPR's marketing and branding team. Every week she comes up with creative ways to promote NPR shows and podcasts like Hidden

Brain. Her careful planning helps us reach a diverse audience, new and old. Thank you Juan Yu. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend or neighbor. If they are new to podcasting, please tell them how they can subscribe to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vidantam and this is NPR. you