—
—
Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
Let me tell you about Robber’s Cave. In 1954, a group of 11 boys, all about 12 years old,
00:04
were invited to a special summer camp in the deep woods of southeastern Oklahoma, at a
00:09
place called Robber’s Cave State Park. None of the boys knew each other, although they
00:13
all came from similar backgrounds. They spent their days bonding over things like games
00:18
and swimming and treasure hunts, and in no time, they formed a tight friendly group.
00:22
They even came up with a name for themselves: the Rattlers.
00:24
But soon they began to notice something. No, not a guy in the woods with a hockey mask,
00:30
there was another group of boys also 11 of them, also the same age, that had been staying
00:35
at the other end of the park the whole time. The Rattlers never interacted with these other
00:39
boys, so they didn’t know that those kids were also spending time bonding over games
00:43
and swimming and treasure hunts, and that they’d come up with a name for themselves,
00:47
too: the Eagles. But the Rattlers didn’t like the look of the Eagles, oh, no, they didn’t
00:51
like them using their baseball diamond or their dining hall.
00:55
And the feeling was mutual. It didn’t take long for each group to start complaining to
00:59
the camp’s counselors about the other gang, and eventually, they both said that they wanted
01:03
to set up a contest to determine once and for all which group was better. The counselors
01:07
were only too happy to comply, because as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, those
01:11
counselors were actually researchers.
01:13
The man who set up what would be remembered as the Robber’s Cave Experiment was Turkish
01:17
American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. He was interested in what it would take for
01:21
rivals to overcome their differences and resolve their conflicts. Specifically, Sherif wanted
01:25
to test something called Realistic Conflict Theory. He hypothesized that conflict happens
01:30
when you combine negative prejudices with competition over resources, and the boys at
01:35
Robber’s Cave were well on their way to proving him right.
01:38
Over the next couple of days, the Rattlers and the Eagles competed against each other
01:41
for prizes in a series of games, like tug-of-war and foot races, and soon, what started as
01:46
your basic trash talking and taunting and name-calling morphed into fist-fights, thefts,
01:52
and raids on each others’ cabins. But then their dynamics changed or were changed for them.
01:57
After the games were over, the researchers integrated the groups and gave the kids shared
02:01
goals that they could only achieve through cooperation. The tide quickly turned. All
02:06
22 boys worked together to move a stalled truck that was carrying their food, they took
02:10
care of a partially felled tree that was deemed a danger to the camp, they collaborated in
02:15
setting up tents, even though they weren’t given complete sets of equipment. While isolation
02:20
and competition made enemies of the strangers, shared goals and cooperation turned enemies into friends.
02:26
Over the past 39 weeks, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves, our emotions and our personalities,
02:31
how our minds can get sick, how we can help them get well again, why we can do vicious
02:36
things and then turn around and act like heroes. So maybe it’s fitting that we wrap up this
02:40
course by looking at a couple of opposing forces that some consider the very definition
02:44
of human nature: aggression and altruism. Conflict and cooperation. You might think
02:49
of it as the psychology of war and peace, or simply, what we can all learn from a bunch of 12 year olds.
03:05
In psychology, aggression is defined as “behavior intended to hurt or destroy someone, something,
03:11
or even yourself.” People aggress, as psychologists say, in all kinds of ways, verbally, emotionally,
03:17
and physically, and for lots of different reasons: out of anger, to assert dominance,
03:21
or as a response to fear. But that’s just a glimpse into why someone might become aggressive.
03:26
Where does the aggression actually come from?
03:29
Like a lot of behaviors we’ve talked about it, it seems to emerge from that familiar
03:32
combination of biological factors, like genetic, neurological, and biochemical influences,
03:37
and our environment and experience. In terms of genetic influences, studies of twins, and
03:42
yes, Crash Course Psychology might have been called Crash Course Studies of Twins, showed
03:46
that if one identical twin has a violent temper, often the other one does, too, but fraternal
03:50
twins are much less likely to be so similar.
03:52
Neurologically speaking, no single area of the brain controls aggression, but certain
03:56
areas like the limbic system do appear to facilitate it. Research on violence and criminality
04:01
has also revealed a link between aggression and diminished activity in the frontal lobes,
04:05
which play a vital role in impulse control.
04:07
And finally, our aggressiveness can be influenced by our own biochemistry, hormones like testosterone
04:12
and glucocorticoids and pheromones have all been implicated in animal models of aggression.
04:16
It’s a little trickier in humans, it’s a lot trickier in humans, but it’s highly likely
04:20
that our hormones are intimately linked with feeling and showing aggression.
04:24
Obviously, aggression isn’t just about biology. Psychological and cultural factors also play
04:28
an important role, as does the power of the situation. For example, there’s the Frustration-Aggression
04:33
Hypothesis, the simple idea that people become aggressive when they’re blocked from reaching
04:37
a goal. To demonstrate, consider the not-very aggressive sport of baseball. There’s a study
04:41
that analyzed 44 years worth of baseball stats, and focused on the more than 27,000 incidents
04:46
when a pitcher hit a batter with a ball. It turned out that this was most likely to occur
04:50
if the pitcher was frustrated by a recent home run or if one of his own teammates had
04:55
been hit by a pitch in the previous inning.
04:57
But we also learn aggression by watching others. Like, if you grew up watching your parents
05:00
throw popcorn and jeering lewdly at their most hated soccer team, you might have learned
05:04
something from their behavior. So combine all of those biological factors and funnel
05:08
them through a particular person with a particular history in a particular situation, and you
05:13
can begin to see how aggression can have many roots that grow together.
05:17
Thankfully, though, humans are more than their bad tempers. While some things in people will
05:21
leave us annoyed and angry, others breed friendship and affection. So yes, there are positive
05:26
topics in social psychology, like altruism, our selfless, even self-sacrificing regard
05:32
for the welfare of others. This could be something as simple as jumpstarting a stranger’s car
05:36
or as heroic as running into a burning building to save someone. But if being altruistic is
05:40
so awesome, why aren’t we all that way all the time? Or maybe the better question is,
05:44
why do we ever do anything selfless, like, what’s in it for us?
05:48
In the late 1960s, social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted a series
05:52
of experiments examining when and why we help others. In one experiment, they placed a subject
05:57
in a room, sometimes alone, sometimes with two other subjects, and sometimes with two
06:02
actors posing as subjects. Then, they simulated an emergency by filling the room with smoke
06:07
and waited to see if the subject would do anything to alert the others or help themselves.
06:11
If the subject was alone, they’d report the smoke 75% of the time. But subjects in a group
06:16
of three only spoke up 38% of the time. And when they were stuck in the room with two
06:20
oblivious actors, only 10% of the participants said anything to the others. Darley and Latane
06:25
found that people typically helped others only if they noticed the incident, interpreted
06:30
it as an emergency, and then finally, assumed responsibility, and all of these things were
06:35
much more likely to occur if a person was alone, while the presence of others deterred
06:39
the person from helping.
06:41
This kind of diffusion of responsibility referred to as the bystander effect, can weaken our
06:45
instinct for altruism. The bystander effect is a bit like the concept of social loafing
06:50
that we talked about. If you’re around other people, it’s easier to think that someone
06:54
else is going to pick up the slack or in this case, come to the rescue.
06:57
When people do decide to help others, they may do it for a number of reasons. One perspective
07:01
is that we tend to help others mainly out of self-interest. By this thinking, helping
07:05
really isn’t altruistic at all, and instead, our actions boil down to a sort of cost-benefit
07:10
analysis. Like, maybe we’d turn in a lost wallet because we’re hoping for a reward or
07:14
we pitch in on a project at work because we think we’ll get recognized and promoted by
07:18
our bosses. Social psychologists contextualize these kinds of examples in the broader theory
07:22
of social exchange. When it comes to doing things for other people, we’re always trying
07:25
to maximize our personal rewards while minimizing our costs. But social exchange doesn’t have
07:30
to be as selfish as that, it can also mean that we act altruistically because we expect
07:33
that the people we help will go on to help others, so if we give someone a hand changing
07:37
a tire, maybe they’ll stop next time they see someone else, maybe even us, broken down
07:42
on the side of the road. You might know this concept, sometimes it’s called the norm of
07:45
reciprocity, sometimes it’s called paying it forward.
07:48
And then there’s the social responsibility norm, which is the simple expectation that
07:52
people will help those who depend on them, like any parent can expect to give more help
07:57
than they’re going to receive from young children. That’s just part of being a parent. Naturally,
08:01
the world would be a delightful place if altruism were the standard for human behavior, but
08:06
then, psychology wouldn’t be nearly so interesting.
08:08
In some ways, you might say that what fuels conflict is the opposite of altruism: self-interest.
08:14
Social psychologists view conflict as any perceived incompatibility of actions, goals,
08:18
or ideas. That could mean two nations fighting over a border, sparring religious or political
08:24
groups, or you and your boo fighting over whose turn it is to do the dishes.
08:27
And in a weird conundrum of human behavior a lot of conflicts arise from what psychologists
08:31
call “a social trap,” where people act in their own short term self-interest, even though
08:35
it takes a toll on the larger group and on themselves over the long-term. You see this
08:40
kind of thing all the time on an individual scale, like in a crime movie, when a criminal
08:43
just betrays all of his criminal friends to get the big payout, it doesn’t turn out very
08:47
well for him in the end. But on a larger scale, you can find social traps taking their toll
08:51
on the environment, like when we poach elephants to sell their ivory or cut down old growth
08:56
forests to make a quick buck in the lumber market. Either way, when self-interest succeeds
09:00
in wrecking the collective interest by, say, depleting some limited resource, it becomes
09:05
easy to start viewing our neighbors as competitors, taking us right back to the ingroup vs. outgroup
09:10
mindset that we all know causes big problems.
09:13
So as long as there’s self interest, there’s gonna be conflict.
09:16
But before you get all down on humanity, remember those Robber’s Cave boys. They were ready
09:21
to go full-on Lord of the Flies before shared goals forced them to cooperate and ultimately,
09:26
make peace. The power of cooperation to make friends of former enemies is one of the most
09:30
hopeful areas of psychological research. If greed and self-interest can destroy the world,
09:35
perhaps cooperation can save it.
09:37
Today, you learned about the Robber’s Cave experiment and what it taught us about realistic
09:41
conflict theory and how shared goals can overcome conflict. We looked at the physical and environmental
09:47
triggers of aggression, and the frustration-aggression hypothesis. You also learned about altruism,
09:52
the bystander effect, and when we are more or less likely to help a person in need, and
09:57
also about the social exchange theory, the reciprocity norm, the social responsibility
10:02
norm, and social traps.
10:03
Thanks for watching, especially to all of our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course
10:07
possible. To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to Subbable.com, and please
10:11
remember to go to YouTube.com/CrashCourse and subscribe for more future Crash Courses
10:17
in the future.
10:17
This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
10:21
is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor
10:26
and sound designer is Michael Aranda, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
—
Photo credit: Screenshot from video.