By Dennis Sale
IN this series, I outline key findings from different areas of the work of psychologists and explore how this helps our understanding of human behaviour in everyday situations. In summary, psychology is the scientific study of the mind and how it works in determining people’s behaviour – especially in relation to how people think, feel, and act, and the factors that influence these processes. Psychology is an increasing field of scientific inquiry and one that I feel should be an essential part of the school curriculum – if well constituted.
In this first column I summarise some key experiments from social psychology, an area that focuses specifically on how human perception, thinking, and feelings are influenced by the presence and behaviour of others. Critics have raised ethical concerns about experimentation involving humans, but they highlight both worrying and amusing aspects of human behaviour.
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How assumptions influence perception and behaviour
Have you ever been on a packed train and wanted to get a seat easily? Well, you probably can if you have the enough “sass”. Sass has variable meanings, and I am using it here to include such attitudes as confident, playfulness and a cheeky attitude. The psychologist Stanley Milgram did an experiment in the 1970s in which he got his students to approach strangers on the New York subway and ask them to give up their seats. Many of the students found having to make what they considered an unreasonable request very challenging – and I don’t think I need to explain why. However, the significant finding was that for the students who took part in the experiment, around 68% of the people they asked for a seat complied with the request.
We can learn much from this experiment, but the thing I feel is most significant is that many people will make the assumption that most would not behave in such an overtly selfish manner unless there are genuine underlying reasons (for example, a significant but not directly visible health issue) for such behaviour, and it would be very embarrassing to challenge them to reveal these issues. Hence, as humans, our perception of situations and the behaviour of other people is significantly influenced by our culturally determined learned norms of human conduct.
Another series of interesting experiments, which demonstrated the powerful influence of other people on our perception and behaviour, were conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. These studied conformity in groups. In these experiments, participants were asked to judge the length of lines compared to a standard line. However, the participants were placed in a group with several confederates (actors/stooges) who were instructed to give incorrect answers. Asch found that a significant number of participants conformed to the incorrect majority response, even when it was clearly wrong, demonstrating the power of group influences on perception and behaviour. Is it surprising, therefore, that many youngsters get drawn into non-productive behaviours because of their peer group memberships both in the physical world and, perhaps even more dangerously, in the online environment?
Whether we like it or not, the natural order of the mind is not one of sustained good thinking and common sense. For example, the psychologist Michael Apter (2001), describes the mind in these terms: “…everyday life, as it is experienced, is a tangled web of changing desires, perceptions, feelings, and emotions that filter in and out of awareness in a perceptual swirl.”
Similarly, Bandler and Grinder (1999), noted writers in the field of neurolinguistic programming, made the summative point: “It’s important to understand that most people are very chaotically organised on the inside.”
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The dangers of conformity and the nuances of human perception
Stanley Milgram also conducted a series of experiments in the 1960s to study obedience to authority. In these experiments, participants were instructed by an authority figure to administer electric shocks to another person, who was a stooge working with the experimenter. The shocks were gradually increased in intensity, and the confederate would react with increasingly painful cries.
Despite the apparent distress of the “victim”, a significant number of participants continued to administer shocks to the maximum level, demonstrating a high degree of obedience to authority. Milgram’s work provides both valuable and worrying insights into the nature of obedience and the conditions under which people are likely to follow orders, even when their actions are very harmful to other people. A worrying conclusion from such studies is that many individuals in these situations can psychologically abandon their individual responsibility by transferring it to the perceived higher authority.
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Subliminal Influences
Subliminal perception is the processing of information by the brain without conscious awareness. It occurs mainly when stimuli are presented at a level below the threshold of conscious perception. However, it can also occur when people are not fully conscious of something that is physically visible but is processed sub/unconsciously.
For example, Mlodinow (2012) documented an experiment that was conducted in a work environment whereby free refreshments were provided for staff, but included a notice that invited voluntary contributions. The experimenters did periodic alternating changes of two pictures above the refreshment area – one depicting a pleasant bunch of flowers and the other, a pair of watchful eyes.
They measured the amount of money contributed by staff between the exposure of these two images and found an interesting difference. Significantly more money was contributed when the eyes were in position rather than the flowers.
Another interesting experiment was conducted in France, where young men were designated to approach women in the street, compliment them, give their telephone numbers, and invite a call for a future date. The men used the same scripting and communication style, with the exception that they added a slight hand touch on the shoulder of randomly selected ladies at the end of the brief conversation.
In the cases where a slight touch on the shoulder was administered, there were significantly more telephone responses by the women. This slight physical action seemed to have a subliminally positive perceptual impact and influenced subsequent behaviour.
Much research shows that the act of smiling has a positive impact on perception and feelings. If you smile at people, they are likely to smile back, and that’s because certain neurons in our brains (called mirror neurons) react that way – it’s like when we cry watching sad films – even though we know it’s a Hollywood movie and the actors are being paid millions of dollars.
In my first few weeks after moving to Singapore, there was a national smile campaign, as it was felt that local people did not smile enough, and more smiling would be a good thing for the community. This provided me, a cheeky chappie from East London, to conduct a social psychology experiment.
The basic experimental design was simple: I would smile at everybody I walked past in the area where I lived and would say “hello”. I conducted the smiling experiment and held firm with the methodology, despite the majority looking at me, for the first few days, as though I was from another world.
Persistence is another trait of social psychologists, so I continued the daily smiling routine, and, guess what? Some started smiling back at me and, over the two-week period (my designated timeframe), I had several friendly conversations with local Singaporeans – some even invited me to have a coffee with them. The most surprising feature was that a few even congratulated me on my bravery in doing this – interesting, right? It may well be that, sadly in my view, smiling is not particularly easy for many people in some cultural contexts, or for certain personality types.
In contrast, and this is a generalisation, if you visit the Philippines, where I have worked extensively, you will notice that most people will smile at you, and I think it’s quite delightful.
In summary, there is much to learn from the field of social psychology, but the days of the cheeky chappies is probably over. In the next column, I will explore my favourite area of psychology: cognitive neuroscience. That, and artificial intelligence, will be the future of learning.
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Dennis Sale worked in the Singapore education system for 25 years as adviser, researcher and examiner. He coached over 15,000 teaching professionals and provided 100-plus consultancies in the Asian region. Dennis is the author of the books Creative Teachers: Self-directed Learners (Springer 2020) and Creative Teaching: An Evidence-Based Approach (Springer, 2015). To contact him, visit dennissale.com.
