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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Question: Why do people do horrible things?
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Slave owners, and Nazis, any of the perpetrators of history’s atrocities. How do they so successfully
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dehumanize other people for so long? At a smaller scale, how do bullies in the lunchroom
00:15
manage to treat other kids with such cruelty and then go home and pet their dog and call
00:18
their grandma and say “happy birthday?”
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Most of what we’ve been studying so far has focused on the individual. We’ve covered sub-fields
00:24
of psychology like cognitive, personality, and clinical psychology, which tend to address
00:29
the phenomena contained within a single person’s mind. But there’s also social psychology,
00:33
which focuses on the power of the situation. It examines how we think about, influence,
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and relate to one another in certain conditions. And it’s better equipped to answer this question
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about people doing horrible things.
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Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people
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behave brutally, it can also help us understand why we sometimes act heroically.
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Like why did Jean Valjean reveal his true identity to save some stranger from being
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tried in his place? And why did Nazi Oskar Schindler risk his own hide to save over a
01:00
thousand Jewish people? What made Darth Vader throw the Emperor down that hole, even as
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he was being electrocuted?
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I can’t say there are any easy answers about humanity’s greatness or it’s horribleness.
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Certainly, there aren’t any that we can find in the next ten minutes. But we can point
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ourselves in the right direction, and it starts with social thinking.
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When we’re trying to understand why people act like villains or heroes, one of the things
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we’re really asking is, “Did they do what they did because of their personality? Or
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their situation?” Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider began plumbing the depths of this question
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in the 1920s when he was developing what’s now known as the Attribution Theory.
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This theory simply suggests that we can explain someone’s behavior by crediting either their
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stable, enduring traits – also known as their disposition – or the situation at hand. And
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we tend to attribute people’s behavior to either one or the other. Sounds pretty simple,
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but it can be surprisingly hard to tell whether someone’s behavior is dispositional or situational.
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Say you see Bruno at a party and he’s acting like a wallflower all night. You might assume
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that he just has a shy personality. But maybe he doesn’t; maybe he’d ordinarily be re-enacting
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all the moves from Footloose at this party but on this night, he had a twisted ankle
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or a headache or he’d just seen his ex with somebody new – those are all situational explanations.
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Overestimating the forces of personality while underestimating the power of the situation
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is called the Fundamental Attribution Error. And as you can imagine, making this kind of
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error can really end up warping your opinion of another person and lead to false snap judgments.
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This might not be such a big deal when it comes to Bruno and his awesome dance moves
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but according to one study of college students, 7 in 10 women report that men have misread
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their polite friendliness – which would be appropriate for the situation – as a sexual come-on.
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We choose how we explain other people’s behavior everyday and what we choose to believe can
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have big consequences. For example, our political views will likely be strongly influenced by
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whether we decide to attribute poverty or homelessness to personal dispositions, like
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being lazy and looking for a hand-out, or social circumstances like lack of education and opportunity.
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And these attitudes can, in turn, affect our actions. Activists and politicians know this
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well and they can use it to their advantage to persuade people in different ways.
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In the late 1970s and 80s, psychologist Richard Petty and John Cacioppo developed a dual process
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theory of understanding how persuasion works. The first part of their model is known as
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the Central Route Persuasion and it involves calling on basic thinking and reasoning to convince people.
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This is what’s at work when interested people focus on the evidence and arguments at hand,
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and are persuaded by the actual content of the message. So when you’re watching a political
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debate, you might be persuaded by a candidate’s particular policies, positions or voting history.
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That is, the stuff they’re actually sayin’.
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But we all know that persuasion involves more than that. There is also Peripheral Route
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Persuasion at work. This influences people by the way of incidental cues, like a speaker’s
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physical attractiveness or personal relatability.
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There’s not a lot of hard thinking going on here, it’s more of a gut reaction. So you might decide
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to vote for a particular candidate because you think they’re cute or they’re from your home town.
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Peripheral Route Persuasion happens more readily when you’re not paying a ton of attention,
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which is why billboards and television ads can be scarily effective. So that’s how politicians
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and advertisers and maybe bosses and teachers and pushy friends try to change our behavior
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by changing our attitudes.
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But, it turns out that the reverse is true too. Our attitudes can be affected by our
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behaviors. You might have heard about the phrase, “Fake it till you make it.” Meaning,
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if you smile when you’re actually sad the act of smiling may carry you through an attitude
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change until you actually feel better.
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Sometimes we can manipulate ourselves this way, but it’s also an incredibly effective
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method people use to persuade each other. It generally works best in increments, through
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what psychologists call the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. People tend to more readily comply
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with a big request after they’ve first agreed to smaller more innocuous requests.
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Like Darth Vader didn’t just go from “Go get ’em Anakin,” to Dark Lord overnight. He was
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slowly enticed to the dark side, by a series of escalating actions and attitude changes.
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Do this favor for me, now run this errand, now kill these Padawans. Now blow up a planet!
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What started this small actions went on to become big ones, suddenly transforming Vader’s
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belief’s about himself and others.
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There’s plenty of experimental evidence that moral action really does strengthens moral
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convictions, just as amoral action strengthen amoral attitudes. And there is perhaps no
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better example of this than the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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Back in 1971 Stanford psych professor Philip Zimbardo and his team put an ad in the local
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paper looking for volunteers to participate in a 14 day experiment. After screening around
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70 applicants, 24 male college students were deemed physically and mentally fit enough
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to participate in the study. For their troubles they’d each be given $15 a day.
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The participants didn’t know the exact nature of the experiment, just that it involved a
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fake prison situation. And with a coin flip, half were randomly deemed prisoners and the
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other half guards. The guards were told that it was the prisoner’s behavior that was being
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studied. The prisoners weren’t told much of anything, aside from that they had been arrested
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and taken to prison. Other than that neither group had many specific instructions.
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Zimbardo wanted to observe how each party adapted to their roles, and so, on a quiet
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Sunday summer morning in Palo Alto, real cops swooped in and arrested the prisoners in their
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homes under charges of robbery. They were frisked, handcuffed, and read their rights.
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Back at the station, they were formally booked and then blindfolded in a holding cell wearing
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only hospital gowns. The researchers had taken great care to make sure that the setting was
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extremely realistic, which is one reason they used real cops in the arrest before handing
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the prisoners over to the fake guards. And it took no time at all for this role-playing
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to become really, really real.
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The initial trauma of the humiliation of the arrest, the booking, strip-searching and waiting,
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immediately kicked off a loss of identity in the prisoners. A few prisoners only made
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it through the first night before they became too emotionally distressed and had to be released.
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Things only went downhill from there. Though the guards could act any way they wanted as
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long as they didn’t physically hurt anyone, encounters quickly became cruel, hostile,
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and dehumanizing. Guards hurled insults and commands, referred to the prisoners only by
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number, and put some of them in solitary confinement. Prisoners started breaking down, others rebelled,
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and still others became passively resigned as if they deserved to be treated so badly.
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Things got bad enough that the experiment ended after only six days, causing relief
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in the fake prisoners, while interestingly leaving some fake guards feeling angry.
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Luckily, everyone involved bounced back to normal once out of the prison setting. All
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of those negative moods and abusive behaviors were situational, and that fact reinforced
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the important concept that the power of a given situation can easily override individual
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differences in personality. Although it would never fly by today’s ethical standards, Zimbardo’s
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famous study remains influential today because it sheds such a harsh light on the nature
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of power and corruption.
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And yet, people differ. Many people succumb and become compliant in terrible situations,
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but not everyone does. Lots of people risked their lives to hide Jewish people in World
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War II, help runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad, keep Tutsi refugees safe during
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the Rwandan genocide, or generally refuse to comply or participate in actions they didn’t
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believe in. Some people can, and do resist turning to the dark side, even when it seems
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like everyone around them is going mad. And yet, the fact is, these people tend to be in the minority.
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So why? Why does it seem so easy to rationalize a negative action or attitude and so hard
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to muster the positive ones? One partial explanation comes from American social psychologist Leon
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Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. It’s one of the most important concepts in psychology.
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Festinger’s theory begins with the notion that we experience discomfort – or dissonance
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– when our thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors are inconsistent with each other.
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Basically, we don’t like to confuse ourselves.
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For example, if Bruno was generally considered a peaceful person but finds himself suddenly
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punching at his friend over a fender-bender, he’s likely experiencing some level of cognitive dissonance.
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So, by Festinger’s thinking, Bruno might relieve this tension by actually modifying his beliefs
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in order to match the action’s he’s already committed, like telling himself, “Turns out,
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I’m not such a nice guy after all, maybe I’m actually a bully.” On the other hand, he might
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resolve his internal tension by changing how he thinks about the situation. He might still
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think of himself as a peaceful person, but realize that an unusual situation led to an
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unusual action, like, he’d had a bad day and it was his mom’s new car, or his friend was
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just really askin’ for it. So, he can keep being the ordinarily peaceful guy he was before.
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It’s kind of an inverted fundamental attribution error if you think about it. Attributing a
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person’s actions mainly to the situation, instead of his personality. The point is that
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this mismatch between what we do and who we think we are induces tension – cognitive dissonance
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– and that we tend to want to resolve that tension. That’s part of what turns an Anakin
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into a Darth Vader, and then, if we’re lucky, back into an Anakin.
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Today you learned that social psychology studies how people relate to each other. We discussed
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Fritz Heider’s attribution theory, and fundamental attribution error. You also learned how attitudes
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can affect actions, like through the duel-process theory of persuasion, and also how behavior
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can change attitudes, like through the foot-in-the-door phenomenon. The Stanford prison experiment
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illustrated how a situation can override individual differences in personality, while Leon Festinger’s
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theory of cognitive dissonance explained how we ease the tension between conflicting thoughts and actions.
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Thank you for watching, especially to all of our Subbable subscribers, who make Crash Course
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possible for them, but also for everyone else.
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To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com.
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This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
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is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor
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and sound designer is Michael Aranda, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.