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So today I want to talk with you about how it is that we can do research of a scientific kind for something as complex as human behavior. You know, as opposed to things that you measure out in space or test tubes or under microscopes. People are complex organisms, right?
And to do research on them to understand human nature, how the mind works, how the brain supports it, is a challenging story. So usual thing is an experiment. You have a group of participants, and we'll talk about that.
But in the reading for today, and I know for the first time we've done this, so you may not have read it, but if you have, that'd be great, is kind of another thread of the kind of way that people are studied, which is dramatic individual stories, case studies, single stories, that are illustrative of something that we think are broader principles. And a lot of our biggest discoveries, and we'll come to that later in the course, have been made on very unusual single individuals who turn out to have a lesson that's pretty broad, for example, for the organization of the human brain. So in the Oliver Sacks book, there's a story about Donald. And what did Donald do that got him in big trouble? Yeah, he murdered his girlfriend while he was on PCP.
He's in a psychiatric hospital. They try hypnosis to help him remember it. He says he doesn't remember it. Many of you may know that an astounding number of criminals under interrogation tell you they don't remember anything about Donald.
the episode involved. So people are suspicious at first for many reasons, because the easiest thing to say is, I don't remember what happened. And then you can't catch yourself in a lie or any complexity, right? Because you don't remember what happened. And sometimes you don't remember, and sometimes you do.
But in this case, they try hypnosis. That doesn't help. He's in there for four years. And then he knows conceptually that he murdered his girlfriend.
And he says, I'm not fit for society. So it's a test. terrible thing he did. But it's kind of like an intellectual knowledge, right?
It's not a feeling. It's not a memory. And then he goes biking and something happens, which is he gets hit by a car.
And so there's what appears to be a drug-induced amnesia of the original murderous episode. He gets hit by a car. He has a severe head injury. He's in a coma for two weeks. He has left-sided weakness as he comes out of it, which means the biggest injury was in the right side of his brain, weakness and numbness.
And he has frontal lobe contusions. He has injury and bleeding around the frontal lobes, the cortex that sits in the front of the brain. But now a remarkable thing happens.
It's as if two insults, two wrongs made a right, the first wrong being the PCP, the second wrong being the accident, and now what happens? He remembers. In vivid and florid detail, the horror that he actually committed this murder.
It's as if two insults to the brain, one drug-induced, one a focal injury, repressed the memory and then unrepressed the memory. And one of the first things they have to do is discover whether he really has this memory or he just thinks he has this memory. And how do they figure out, to their satisfaction, whether it's a really recovered memory or a fabrication of his mind?
Right, that's really important. He remembers details of the murder that are not publicly available, that were not in the information that was given to him. That's a really huge issue in these kinds of memories.
So this is a really recovered memory, not an inadvertently fabricated memory. And they discover he has deep seizure activity in his limbic structures. The parts of his brain that are involved in emotion are having seizures. So in epilepsy, neurons are firing for no good reason.
And that's part of his disorder. They give him medications to help with that. But here's the question for you for a moment to think about, and it's now such a common question because our society is moving that way that it's on many TV shows. I see it like every couple of weeks there's a Law & Order episode that has something like this, which is the more you know about the biology that underlies that really criminal, terrible behavior, should that be a cost for understanding it or not? Okay, so in this case he took the drugs, he killed the person, you think he's pretty responsible.
But how about somebody who kills somebody and it turns out in such a case a man with no history, a grown man with no history of criminal activity of any kind, shoved his wife out of a high window to her death in the course of a standard argument. Then they discovered that he has a big tumor growing in the basal part of his frontal cortex. Now is the man responsible for what he did?
It's a really interesting question, right? And the more we understand about the neuroscience of our brains, what makes us do things which lets us control impulses, what makes us murderous. There's a guy, Kent Keel, University of Mexico.
He's driving around in a big van with an MRI scanner. He goes from penitentiary to penitentiary, and he images the brains of serial murderers, of psychopathic murderers. And he's getting things that are pretty systematically different about their brains.
And the question is, you know, what does that mean? Does that mean those people were prone to do it? it for reasons of their early environment or genes or some incident that happened? If that's the case, do you forgive them differently?
Should we have a different moral code or legal code as we discover the brain basis for some of these things? Or is that irrelevant, what counts as the action? So this is the kind of thing you could think about, maybe discuss in your section some.
The more we understand about the human brain, the more we'll understand about behaviors that we find terrible. And what does that mean about legal and moral decisions about how to punish those or think about those? So that's coming in your. your lifetime, because there's steady progress on this, and understand how to think about that is a really big question.
So I'm going to talk with you today about research and psychology. And a funny thing about psychology, and I'll come back to this, is everybody is an amateur psychologist. They have to be. If you deal with people, you're an amateur psychologist. Moreover, we live in a world with Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil, right?
So in case you're only an amateur one, you hear all kinds of stuff, newspaper, Internet, magazines, everywhere you go. You might as well. tell you stuff about psychologists have found this or psychologists have found that, right? So you have your own intuitions to deal with people in everyday life. And here's a kind of a sentence from Time magazine, you know, that, you know, drives psychologists crazy if you take it seriously.
So here's this literal sentence. Almost half of children of divorces enter adulthood as worried, underachieving, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry young men and women. Okay, so that's how... It sounds kind of like a psychological study of some kind. Kind of, right?
You know, somebody who wants to argue about the importance of divorce and breakdown of the family. This is the kind of thing. So let's think about this for a moment. Almost half of children of divorce enter adulthood as worried. Are you guys worried about global warming?
A little. Are you worried about peace in the Middle East and how that influences the Middle East and the U.S.? A little. Are you worried about an economy that may not have jobs waiting for you? A little.
Okay. Who's not worried? A little bit of the time.
So it doesn't even tell you what half of children in the world, for example, are who come from families without divorce, right? Because that's the only relevant question. It's not, are people worried about stuff? Underachieving, compared to what?
How would you prove somebody's underachieving? Scientifically, okay? I mean, most of you probably have had days where you've underachieved and days where you've achieved pretty well. But how would you measure and prove that?
Self-deprecating. Well, sometimes we think it's actually kind of nice if a person's modest, okay? What's the difference?
between modest and self-deprecation. And I like this one. Sometimes angry young men and women. I mean, you know, I mean, are you sometimes angry about something or another?
Okay. And if you are, does that tell us that society is breaking down and your parents did something bad? That you're sometimes...
I mean, who as a human being is not sometimes angry? So here's a kind of psychology-sounding sentence on a serious topic, which is, you know, what is divorce, consequences of divorces in families, and, you know, should we be thinking about things that encourage marriages to stay stable and things like that. But there's really no information in it at all. So from a researcher science perspective.
So I'm going to talk about a little bit just reminding you what science is. We're a university obviously that thinks about science and does science all the time. Remind you of what an experiment is, a very brief history of psychology experimentation.
And then walk you through a few experiments that I find kind of interesting and then some topics related to psychology. So let me start with this. How do you. How do you know what is true? How do you know what is true, that you take to be true?
What is the answer? Everyone's looking all like, how do I know? Please tell me. OK. Well, when people try to analyze this, and you can think about it for your own self, one of them is authority.
Parents, teachers, textbooks, scientists, professors in courses, we tell you this is the truth. And if you remember the truth correctly, you get an A. So authority is a huge source.
It would be costly to go around and have your own idea about everything. Twelve inches in a foot? I'm not taking that piece of information without skeptic.
You couldn't lead your life without kind of believing a lot of stuff, but you know you don't want to believe everything, just because you hear it. Repetition or tenacity. You hear something often enough, and you're And people tend to believe stuff.
A priori, what's reasonable? You think things through just by thought. What's possible, rational, and so on? And then maybe a fourth brand of knowledge to something is scientific analysis, where we have hypotheses and we test them in some version of experiments, or at least correlations among data.
Now there's another view, which is that whatever we think makes something science is what the scientific community. decides as a community is true. Roughly speaking, that is the mainstay of faculty at places like MIT and Stanford and Harvard and so on and around the world at universities tell you this is how science works.
You go, OK, that's how science works. And I remember some years ago, there was a lot of excitement about a satirical article written by a scientist where he said, oh, this is all just societal authority. Scientists tell you what's true just because they believe in it, just like a sports writer says the Celtics are the best. You don't really think that the sports writer knows scientifically the Celtics are the best, right? OK.
So he wrote a paper saying that gravity is simply a consensus among scientists and a particular view they're foisting on society. But none of us would want to really go up there and jump out the window going, well, gravity is one person's opinion, and here's my opinion, right? But it's kind of interesting because for those of you who go to medical school, for example, you learn lots of procedures and so on that the medical community believes is true.
Where there's not much scientific evidence behind it, but they have to use it every day. So, you know, you're used to hearing about the scientific method. It applies to psychology in many ways, just like it applies to chemistry, physics, or biology. We have to test things that are falsifiable. We have to deal in probabilities of outcomes in terms of statistics in some sense.
The kinds of data we can have are descriptive or correlative or experimental. I'll talk about those in a moment. are always trying to disprove the null hypothesis statistically, as you know.
We can't prove that something is true, but we can prove that it's not true. And then finally, like all fields of science, today's most exciting breakthroughs are tomorrows, things that have to be apologized for and rediscovered. What makes something breaking science is not that it's known with certainty. What's known with certainty is what's in your textbook, kind of. What makes something breaking science is it moves the field forward.
So what's the difference between the cutting edge and the bleeding edge is a very close call. So here's a cartoon that says he's constantly proving his experiments wrong. And the guy's kind of glum looking over.
He's proving the null hypothesis to be correct. Now, that's sort of funny for scientists. But it's sort of funny in the sense that, no, we don't really go around going, I hope with all my heart for this research project I've worked on for the last five years that it will prove.
the null hypothesis. There's no difference between things I'm studying. In fact, scientists, like all humans, have agendas and hopes, like everybody else.
So they observe, hypothesize, experiment, assess data, and it doesn't always go perfectly, right? And the last thing I want to say is I'm going to emphasize today a scientific approach to the human mind and behavior, but of course, there's many other paths of knowledge for important things in our life, religion, philosophy, arts, and so on. There's many things that science cannot address, and I don't want to pretend that it does. That's not a problem too much when you think about chemistry.
It's kind of an interesting problem when you think about psychology, because when we think about happiness or values or things like that, those topics cut across psychology and things like religion, philosophy, and topics like that. So what makes something an experiment is you have to have two things, conceptually especially, the dependent variable, what you measure, the outcome, and the independent variable, what you vary. Once you have those things in an experiment, you're kind of in an experiment in a broad sense.
So in psychology, it took a long time. It wasn't until the 1800s that people had kind of an approach to doing experiments in psychology and figuring out, for example, how to use the simple measurement of time to measure how long a mental operation lasts in your mind. So that's pretty cool.
If you were to come to a fifth grader and say, how would you measure not a brick or a stone, but how long a thought... takes, you'd say, well, that'd be pretty hard. But it turns out it's not as hard in a simple way. So Wilhelm, who was a big figure in psychology, first textbook in psychology, first laboratory in psychology, did the following test of mental chronometry, simply measuring how long it takes you to do things. So he would show you a light, and you'd simply press the button, and that would take about 1 5 of a second.
And then he would say, instead, you do this. If the light turns on and it's red, you push one button. And if it's green, you push another. So his idea was, the motor system to push the button is about the same. The time to observe the light is about the same.
But the difference between these two is how long it takes to make a choice. How long it takes to make a choice. And that difference, when he subtracts them, took about a tenth of a second by that measurement. So all of a sudden you can start to measure, in an objective sense, how long a mental operation takes in your mind. Then psychology went a lot of different directions.
A famous one from Titchener, who worked with Wundt, developed a psychology department at Cornell, was introspection. Look inside yourself and think very carefully. When you think about a topic, how do I think about it? That lost its way as a scientific method.
Trouble is, one person thinks one way, and one person thinks another way. And you can't really settle it, right? So introspection about your thoughts is a private process.
It's not a public measure that you can exchange among scientists, like time or measurements. But we still introspect a lot when we think about psychology, whether it feels right to us, what are the questions to ask. It's still just being human. You can't help but introspect about psychology topics.
In the US, there was a sort of a huge response to introspection as being too loose, too loosey-goosey. One famous name, and this is John Watson, he said the mind is unobservable, so we can only study behavior, things that people do, actions they take, their mouth moves, their hand buttons, presses, and then we identify what in the environment influences those behaviors. The principles of the mind should be similar between animals and humans, and that the only thing responsible experimental scientists can do is relate environmental factors to actions. And so there's a stimulus, and you can control the stimulus as a scientist.
There's a response, you measure the response, and that's your psychology experiment. And then the 1980s became the cognitive revolution. Partly this path led to not, after a while, to not very interesting science. That was the biggest problem.
And people said, no, we can make inferences about the mind as it translates what it hears or sees into what a person does. So, ideas of representations or knowledge in the mind or in the brain later on, and how that translates what's out there and how you act upon it. So, I'll remind you of a couple more things and we'll get to specifics.
So, correlations are, you can only get in an experiment, right, where you have an independent variable, sorry, correlations you can look at all the time. Experiments only, experiments allows us to infer causation. So, let's pick an example that, when I read it, struck me as... slightly relevant.
So age of parent and risk for disease in a child. So most of you are young enough that you're not too worried about this yet, and you have no reason to be. But for those of us who are in my generation and some generations back, many people are postponing childbirth as they do their careers and complete different tasks.
And they're getting older, and parents are getting older and older. They don't only seem old, they are old. It's true, it's the case statistically that the older the mother is, the higher the risk of Down syndrome. So the statistics are for mothers aged 20 to 24 it's very rare to have Down syndrome and the number goes up dramatically if the mother is over age 42. So this is simple observation and measurement but it's something a lot of women giving birth in their 30s and 40s are thinking about and worrying about and it's a thing on their mind.
Up until relatively recently Men said, oh, it's too bad for those women, but no problem for us. So you have the movie star who's 90 years old and marries a 20-year-old actress, that kind of model that you see all the time in the news, because it doesn't matter how old the guy is. Well, it turns out it does matter, and here's some data for that.
So here's the probability of developing schizophrenia, a disease that's typically diagnosed in a person's late adolescence or 20s, depending on the... age of the father. And you can see if the father is less than 25, it's 1 out of 141. If the father is in his 50s, it becomes 1 out of 50. A dramatic growth in the likelihood of an offspring child having schizophrenia depending on the age of the father. Okay, so now there's a correlation between age and whether a child expresses schizophrenia. So let's guess about the possible causes of that.
I can tell you it's unknown, but let's even begin to guess about it. Let me ask you to guess about it. Yeah?
Maybe the damage by aging up to the lack of normalization. Yeah, bad sperm, right? Okay, for some reason in some way.
And sperm that leads more likely to be risk for schizophrenia. So that's a good, that's... That's your first intuition, and that may turn out to be right, problematic, something problematic about the sperm from the male. Here's another one, though, and this shows you, you know, You know, the challenges with correlational research on something even so important as this, which is, how about alternative, which is, who marries later in life?
Okay? You know, maybe the desirable men are plucked off the market, on average, in large statistics, by age 30 or something. And a bunch of us, and I'm a late marrier, you know, limp to find some woman around the world who will accept us.
Okay? And finally, out of pity, some woman says, okay, drag yourself into your 50s and I'll take you. You know, so, right, because it's not random probably, and this is, we're averaging over many people, but it's not random probably who marries a 25 in a given society and who marriages a 50. It's not random. It could be big differences among, okay, and how could we tell that difference? Maybe it's nothing to do with the sperm, maybe it's something to do with the, something about the genes and environment that goes with marrying, you know, being a parent in your 50s versus being a parent in your 20s.
Completely different explanations. Someday maybe we'll know. But we don't know now, all right?
So this is the limits of correlations. And both could be true. Neither could be a third story altogether.
So that was about me, my becoming a parent late in life and marrying late in life. Let's talk about you, all right? So let's talk about the level of stress you have and how empathetic you are on average your college generation relative to ones five or 10 or 20 years ago. So let's ask that question.
Why would people want to know such a thing? Well, you might want to understand, what pressures are we putting young people under as they go through grade school and high school and college? What's the world like?
Is it pretty much the same? Is it pretty much changing? How would we begin to measure that? It's a very simple question. Are you more stressed than people 10 years ago at MIT, on average, across the country?
And now you're more or less empathetic towards other people. How might one answer that kind of a question? Yeah? That would be a very interesting path. It's a tough research path, but you're right.
If we had some biological signature of stress, that would be a good one. But let's ask this question. Let's say I measured everybody in here and got your average stress hormone or something like that.
Now what's my answer about whether 10 years ago people were more or less stressed? Yeah? We could look at suicide rates.
That would be an outcome. Yeah, that would be, sadly, an extreme outcome of stress of a kind. But there's a lot of things that go in. OK, so we have to worry about two things.
One thing we know is, let me ask you another one. You could compare your level of stress to people who are 10 years older than you or 20 years older than you. What do you think about that? No. Yeah.
Yeah. It would actually be more accurate if you wanted to know college students. Yeah, because maybe people who are 30 or 40 are more stressed for other reasons, because they have more bills and mortgages to pay, or less stress for other reasons or whatever, right?
Maybe that's not about the generation you're in. Maybe it's about being a person with more responsibilities at 40. For some things, you get some luck. And you have it in your hand.
So here's an emotional health questionnaire where students across the country for the last 25 years have been given the identical questionnaire. It's a questionnaire. It's not a biology measure.
About their self-reported measure of stress. And this was on the New York Times just a few weeks ago. It's you guys on average across the country, US college students are. all-time high level of self-reported stress. Sorry about that.
So now it's not the perfect measurement in every way, but it's the same questionnaire to college students year in and year out. By self-report, people say, I feel more stressed. You can also see that there's a difference between men and women. Women, on average, report feeling more stressed.
And it may be relevant. And on average, for example, there's a higher rate of depression among women than men. There's a much higher rate of autism among men than women.
Being one sex or the other is not a gift certificate of avoiding mental health challenges. So you're more stressed than ever. Good luck. We'll try to do the best we can in this course to not make that way worse. But it's something to think about.
I got a call the other day from somebody who said, there's a lot of curiosity. About whether the shift from book learning and book reading to internet worlds and Twitter and Facebook worlds are fundamentally changing how people think. And that sounds kind of possible.
And there are people who give amazingly entertaining lectures about these things. Scientifically it's unbelievably hard to imagine how we would ever answer that. So when I get occasional phone call like you know what what do neuroscientists know about that?
What could they know about it? You know is that an even an answerable question? If I take you now and say, well, you've probably done more Facebook than a 50-year-old, and compare you to a 50-year-old on some other thing, is that going to answer the question of how you think about ideas given the world you live in versus the world a 50-year-old lived in?
No. So there's just a lot of huge, deep things about changes in the world that we can't even begin to get at. Sometimes we get lucky if people have been giving some particular measure for some time.
Empathy. ...by self-report, and now you, if this, you don't, I wouldn't fill it out now, but you can take a look just to get a feeling, fill your leisure. This is the questionnaire they used for self-reported empathy.
It's self-report. 40% lower today than 20 years ago. Yeah, so on average, you guys, literally in college, on average by these measures, are more stressed and less empathetic towards others. Okay, and those two, sorry.
And those things, this is not an individual, this is an average, right? So at the level that society operates, things are going on and moving for some reason. By the way, I can tell you that when I'm stressed, I have less room to be empathetic.
So maybe these things are related. If you're feeling stressed, your first thought is not how can I help others, but like how can I just get through the day? So these things might be related.
So let's turn a little bit to experimentation. So And some of the challenges of relating psychology to real world policies that are meant to make the world better or safer in some way. So there's a famous broken window theory from the political scientist James Wilson and the criminologist George Kelling.
And their idea was this, that especially in neighborhoods that are not immaculately kept, or to say it the other way, where there's a lot of damage around you, things like broken windows is the phrase they used, that this promotes in people who live in that community or work around that community a sense that, you know, The rules don't count. Anybody can do anything. And then it fosters the growth of petty crimes. And once you do a petty crime, you're more vulnerable or willing to do a major crime.
A slippery slope. And in fact, Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Breton employed this. They asked the police to write lots of tickets and make lots of minor arrests for things where people weren't upkeeping the environment or where they were littering. or things like that.
And this is a huge debate, because in a police department, you can only do so much. So if they have a person working on jaywalking and littering, that's a person not working on major crime rings. So they're trying to make a choice where they think they can make communities safer in the most effective way.
And the crimes went way down in New York. In most cities now, you don't hear crime discussed as a big topic nationally. In some local areas, like in Boston, in some specific areas you do.
You know, I don't think in the State of the Union there was a word about crime that I can remember a week ago, okay? It's not a big national topic. In some local places it is a big topic, but not nationally.
So you don't know, some years ago when people said New York City was a horrible place to go because there was so much crime that you'd walk out from your airplane and get mugged before you made it to your taxi. No, it was, you know, it was like the whole country was saying big cities were just crime, you know, crime-ridden and dangerous. They do this policy, things get better.
Some of you said, hmm, that sounds pretty good, but of course it's not an experiment, it's a real life policy. And then people had these kind of incredibly clever reinterpretations of why crime went down. So the wildest one was in Freakonomics, was discussed in that, which said, well, abortion was legalized in 1973. That gave women who didn't have access to legal abortions the ability to have them.
And children in. on average in these communities that at least access to safe and legal abortions would be poor and stable addiction-ridden communities, statistically. And that's so that if you imagine the reduced abortion rate in poor areas could, when you count out the number of possible criminals in those areas, account for the reduction in crime all by itself. A completely different interpretation that has nothing to do with the policy.
It just said we're going to have a demographic shift. which will have a weird, unexpected consequence of lowering the crime rate because it's the finding that young men in particular are most likely to engage in violent criminal activity. It's not all rule but a statistical average. Or there was a big crack epidemic that reduced, or lots of states put in laws that put people into jail for much higher, longer periods, much more severe penalties with new drug laws.
So it's very hard to know. if the policy that was initiated really worked, or whether completely other things were happening that moved the crime rates. And here's some very perverse or other explanations. So that left the question is, is broken windows even a good idea?
Just because a Harvard, and we know Harvard is always right, but just because a Harvard psychologist says, pretty interestingly, that sounds right to me, is that even a right idea? Okay, so let's take a step back. Can we test that experimentally? So here's the experiment.
And the idea is, again, that when people observe that others violate a social norm or legitimate rule, are they more likely to violate it? If you see people around you breaking rules, are you more likely to do it? And you could say, it seems like it is, but let's do the science. So, here's an independent measure.
I'll show you the environment. The dependent measure is the number of people who perform a violation. Now, you can't go getting people murdering each other and stuff for an experiment, but you can do this.
You can have two conditions. So, in the top condition, Do you ever go back to your car or bike, usually cars I think, and they put leaflets in your car, and now what are you going to do? You're running away, there's a leaflet on your windshield wiper.
So they put it out, and they either had a wall like this, which was clean, there's a sign that says no graffiti, and they put on those white pieces of paper onto the bikes, or they put a lot of graffiti on the wall. And people came out from their classes, they went in their glasses, they parked their bikes, they ran into class, they came out, and they got all these white leaflets. And what they did is watched. And they said, how many people put the leaflet away, and how many people crumpled it up and threw it right on the ground?
OK? So we don't know what they're going to do with the leaflet if they put it away, but we could hope they're going to throw it out. One thing we know for sure, if you crumple it up and throw it on the ground, it's littering and not a good social norm.
And sure enough, a third of the people littered if the wall had no graffiti, but it more than doubled if the wall had graffiti. So that's a small thing. That's not a broken down, complicated neighborhood. But just at that moment, as you roar out a class, You get that piece of paper on your bike, and you see like, wow, this is a pretty crummy place.
People are breaking the rules all the time. Twice as likely to throw a piece of paper on the ground. So that shows that people very easily are influenced by very mild perceptions of whether people are following rules or not, and will be their better selves or their worse selves, depending on that sense of, you know, are all rules on or are all rules off? And there's a pretty good bet they're not thinking about it, right?
They're not thinking, they're saying, okay, here's littering, you know. Not as bad as killing somebody, right? Here's the wall, well there's 30% graffiti. I mean, nobody does that.
They have an emotion, quick response. But the environment makes a difference in that regard. So an important thing about studies are this. So let me tell you about this one.
Here's a study to look at a drug that was supposed to lower mortality from coronary artery disease. So those who took the drug, 80% or more, because people follow whether you take the drug. If you don't take the drug, of course, the drug won't work. I had a 15% mortality rate within five years.
Those who took the drug less than 80% had a 25% mortality. So you'd say, well, 10% better chance of living for five years, that's worth it. The nice thing is they had a placebo, and there was no difference whatsoever between those who took the active drug and those who took the placebo.
The difference was between those who followed the instructions to take the pill and those who didn't. So what does that mean? How do you interpret that? It's not the drug. Yeah?
It could be the stress. It means it's not working the way it's supposed to. It could be that.
It could be the stress. It could be that. Let me make a guess. There's no scientific answer to this.
People who tend not to follow instructions, are they mostly stressed by not following instructions? No. Mostly, the intuition is they're blowing it off.
They're like, yeah, that's the instructions, but I've got things to do and places to go. But you could be right. So anyway, the idea is What you pick up is, are people who try to take care of themselves.
They have a health condition, and the people who are following the pill instruction are probably also doing the best they can in terms of exercise, diet, all the things they could do to maximize their health, right? And they're taking their placebo or they're taking the drug, they don't know. But they're doing everything they can.
And the people who are blowing off stuff... They're the ones who are doing all the things that aren't healthy, including not even taking your pills. I mean, if you don't even take your pills, right?
I mean, exercise is work, diet is work. Popping a pill that's been handed to you that you're told might help you is probably not that much work. So it's what's called self-selection bias, that you stand out if you tend to take care of yourself or not. OK.
So when we run experiments at universities that involve people, a huge issue for us is the idea is this, that we randomly recruit people. And we'll come back to this in a moment. Then we randomly assign them to one condition or another. For example, the placebo condition or the drug condition. Or we randomly assign them to the messy wall or the clean wall.
We discover something, and then we try to generalize it as far as we can to people as a whole. We've discovered something fundamental about how humans work, generalizable principles of human mind and behavior. So what really happens in the world?
And you're in between the best possible world and the world we actually live in. So is it really random who participates in research studies in psychology departments where a lot of the research gets done? Is it really random? No. So who volunteers?
Have any of you volunteered to be a subject in an experiment anywhere? Yeah. Okay, so it's not random, you know, it's not some people who they either need to make a few bucks or they're very curious about psychology or they have a friend who's in psychology or you know, it's not random and in fact population-wide people have said that psychology can be described as weird research for the following reason that the vast majority of the findings you'll read about everywhere including in your textbook, but everywhere are from nations that are westernized, educated, industrialized and relatively rich. democracies.
The vast majority are between 17 and 25. They're undergraduates or graduate students who participate in research. It's been estimated if you're a US college student you're 4,000 times more likely to show up in a scientifically reported experiment than if you're a person anywhere else on the planet. 4,000 times. Because why?
Because it's changing a little bit, but for many many years, a huge amount of research happened in the US at universities. Pretty much at better universities, pretty much at highly selected students. And then we never publish that. We never say MIT students did the following thing.
Because people say, yeah, MIT students, because then we've got a different report from Stanford or from UMass or from Michigan or Texas. We say, no, humans did an experiment, and humans are like this. And that could make you, you know, it's just something to think about as you see studies and stuff like that. And people are more and more sensitized to that as the more and more of the world gets somewhat industrialized. There's more and more research around the world, but still the vast majority of findings are you guys.
Okay. Now, that's just to start with who's in the subject pool or the participant pool. How normal are you when you do an experiment? And then they say, are you like yourself, or are you doing weird stuff?
And people use this idea that you're really weird when you do an experiment in another sense, because you don't know what's going on, you're following instructions. So they do experiments to show how ridiculously people behave when they're doing an experiment like they would never do it. So they ask them to come in and they say, would you fill out 200 sheets of paper filled with random digits, add them pairwise, and I'll come back in a few hours. Now, if a friend asks you to do that, add random digits for a couple hours.
He was like, no, thank you. I've got about 8 million better things to do than that, right? I could multiply random digits to start with. But people will do it for hours because they're in this weird like, that's the instruction and that's what my mission is. Or even more ridiculous, they pick up a card after each page, they've added all these numbers for no good reason, and the instruction tells them, when you've done the page, tear the page up into 32 pieces.
And here's the next page. And the next page. It's obviously fruitless and pointless, ridiculously so. But because you're in an experiment and somebody told you to do that, you just keep barreling forward.
So how much are we who we are when we do experiments versus people following weird instructions? And we'll come back to that in some serious context. That's the subjects. How about experimenters? Experimenters are never objective.
We try to be, as scientists, as objective as we can. We believe certain hypotheses. We have certain goals.
We recognize results that would be super exciting. We recognize results that would be boring. We're humans, too.
We want to do stuff that matters. We want to do stuff that people. Reward us for it. I mean, it's just human. So here's a lowest case example of how, once you're an experimenter, you produce your own results.
And believe me, it's much more when your result matters for things like your career advancement or your status in the field. So students were told that rats were either maze bright or maze dull. They were told that these rats were bred to be smart learners or not so smart.
The rats were all just random rats. It's a fake story to undergraduates. Then they had them. test on a maze, and they said, for your laboratory exercise, write down how quickly the rat runs the maze.
And amazingly, the smart rats did way better than the dull rats. Now these are not students trying to become famous or have a career. They're handing in an assignment.
And how did that happen? Well, they went back, and it wasn't that anybody fake did or anything like that. But when they looked at films or discussed stuff with kids, students in the course. Every little thing that the students did that moved the data in little tiny, tiny ways always favored finding the maze-bright rats being brilliant maze runners. So, for example, you know, they would put the rat...
If you've ever run a rat in a maze, has anybody run a rat in a maze? Is it easy? If you pick them up and put them in the maze, that's when they're more automated now. Is it physically easy?
Are rats like, please, show me the starting line? I'm ready to go? No.
What are they like, help me out here for you guys who've done this? Are they kind of squirming? Are they kind of really acting? And they don't like to be handled that much, really. Even ones in Leon, they're fighting.
And these are undergraduates who have hardly ever touched a rat. They're like, please don't attack me or something. So they're holding it up like that, and the rat's fighting back. And because it's really uncomfortable, the rat's really unhappy, and the student's like really...
So what happens is... And then they plunk the rat down, and they go, oh my gosh, it's facing the wrong direction, and it's a smart one. Wait, let's start, stop the clock. Let's get him, you know, but if it's a dull one facing the wrong direction, it's OK. It's a dull one.
Let the maze run. So lots of little things. Are you sure you wrote this down?
Was it 12 seconds or 11? I guess it was 11. Oh, because it's a smart one. OK?
So completely innocently, completely innocently, as far as we understand, they made the result to match up with what the expectation was. And it's not just that. And if you know this example, cognitive psychologies have studied a phenomenon like this. So try this at your desk. Each card is a letter on one side and a number on the other side.
Your job is to figure out what's the smallest number of cards you have to pick up to discover if this rule is right. If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side. So think about this for a moment.
If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has to have an even number on the other side. What's the smallest number of cards you can pick up to test that hypothesis? So here's what people have found.
The correct answer is E and 7, and about 10% of people on average come up with that. Many, many more people pick E alone or E and 6. Why? Well, everybody gets that you have to look at E because it's an even number, right?
So you flip E over, and if that one turns out to have a vowel, if it has an odd number, the hypothesis is wrong, right? Everybody gets that you should check e. Pretty much everybody gets that j is irrelevant because it's a consonant.
Now comes the interesting six and seven. Because the sentence is talking about a vowel and an even number, sometimes people feel, I've got to check the even number. But it doesn't say anything about even numbers couldn't go with consonants. It doesn't tell you anything. That's not part of the hypothesis.
But if you flipped over Number seven, and you discovered a vowel, you'd violate the rule. So what happens is they're tempted to go for things that feel like they confirm the question. And it feels like E confirms it, and it feels like 6 confirms it. It's what's called confirmatory bias.
When you look at stuff, if you see what you think confirms it, then you tend to go for that, even when there's evidence in front of you that could contradict your expectation. OK. So now I'm going to give you a practical suggestion for how to win somebody over if you have a brewing romantic interest in that person.
So finally we get practical. Everything was like, I'm not running rats. I'm not taking. And I think it's really interesting because I think when we think about how people make decisions in their lives, we tend to think intuitively about big decisions, like what's my career going to be?
Where do I go to college? We think those are the big decisions. But a huge amount of life is little decisions.
Moment to moment, if somebody asks you for something, do you say yes or no? Somebody walks up to you at a party, they want to talk with you. Do you feel like talking or not feel like talking?
Maybe you talk with them as a lifetime friend or romantic partner or whatever. So I think we make constantly little decisions that turn out to have big effects in our lives. So here's some evidence about things like that that influence that. And this is work done at Yale.
So we describe people as warm. Or we can define them as cold or aloof, right? And we could think those words are kind of arbitrary. And most of us, if you met somebody at a party, would you rather hang out with somebody who's warm or cold? Warm.
OK. All right. Just checking that we're OK. Now, sometimes there's an idea of embodied cognition.
And here's what it is. We can't really know how warm or cold that person is. Or that's even an abstract idea.
But we know we're comfortable when we're kind of warm, and we know we're not comfortable physically inside us when we're kind of cold. So there's an idea that when we think about other people's feelings, other people's thoughts, or abstract things in the world, we base them on physical experiences that we have inside. That there's a more direct link. between what we know inside us, and we use that to interpret the world out there.
Embodied cognition, your body is the vehicle for understanding things out there. So here's the experiment, it's really clever. There's two temperature conditions. So what happens is you go into a building and the examiner, an undergraduate usually or graduate student, meets a subject in the lobby, and she's carrying or he's carrying a cup of coffee.
Sometimes it's hot coffee, sometimes it's cold coffee. A clipboard, two textbooks. So you can imagine, it's a setup, right? Person's walking, they're juggling with the coffee, the textbook, all the clipboard. And on the elevator it says, could you just hold my cup while I write down your name on my list of subjects in the experiment?
It's very innocent, right? On the elevator. And so you hold the cup of coffee, which half the people get a hot cup, half the people get a cold cup.
Then you read a description of a person. It's just a paragraph. And you have to rate whether you find the person described as warm or cold.
And if you had the warm cup of coffee, you're more likely to describe that person as a warm kind of a person. Now, these subjects have no idea. They held a cup of coffee. They probably didn't even think whether it was warm or cold. But something in their body that got warmed up to the least degree possible.
That thought is still in their head. So when they read a description of something, they go, this seems like a warm person. Or if it was a cold cup of coffee, they say, oh, this seems like a cold, aloof kind of person as far as I can tell.
That little bit of difference. So. So here's the lesson, just so you got it.
If you want to take somebody because you have a possible friendship or romantic interest in that person, are you better off going out for a warm cup of coffee or giving them a cold glass of beer? For that first impression, scientific research shows something warm will work. It's not that powerful.
You're not going to be able to control the world. But what it says is When we are in ambiguous situations, we first meet somebody, we don't really know them, little things can start us off on one path or can start us off on another path. Surprisingly little things. Now, then they have to worry about a confound.
Can you imagine a confound here? Think of the rats. Who knows if the cup is cold or hot besides the person holding it?
The examiner, right? Now maybe the examiner doesn't try to do this, but maybe the examiner, no matter what, says. Oh, we're in the warm condition and I'm smiling, and this is going to be nice, I'm helping this person feel good. And here's the aloof condition, and we're all going to be miserable.
And the examiner knows it because they know if they have a hot or cold cup of coffee. So maybe the person's not vibing to the coffee, they're vibing to the expression or feeling or sentiment of the examiner, right? Who understands what's going on.
So they do one more experiment where they give, have you seen these hot and icy therapeutic packs that you can make hot or cold? Now somebody else makes it hot or cold. The experimenter has no idea whether it was hot or cold. So it's what we call double blind. The person doesn't know it's relevant, the experimenter.
They rate the pad. And now, this moves a little bit. They either get, after this thing is over, they're told it's a product evaluation of the pad. But they either got a hot pad or a cold pad.
And they could either choose to, one of two rewards, a Snapple beverage or a dollar gift certificate, whichever you like better. Okay, you had two little things you could do. But here's the big decision. Do you get it for yourself?
Or we can send it for you to a friend. We can send them. The Snapplet or the certificate.
If the people got a cold pad, 75% of the times they say, please give it to me right now, I'll take it. If they had a warm pad, 46% of the time, the majority of the time they actually send it to their friend. That pad difference moved quite substantially the likelihood that you take it for yourself or you give it away, quite substantially.
If you're a charity trying to get people to donate or you want to get help from somebody, a 25% success rate. is a lot worse than a 54% rate. It's a doubling, a doubling of whether you keep it for yourself or you're generous to your friend. Just that cup of coffee. It's just that therapeutic pad.
I'm going to do two more and then go to the other. How about money? When you think about money, I don't mean traumatic things about money, just a little bit about money. How does it influence how you relate to other people? OK, here's the experiment.
The idea is that money on average, when you just think a little bit about it, and I'll show you how ridiculously little they think about it. They think, their hypothesis is that money makes you think about self-reliance, you earn your money, you have your bank account, you know, compared to situations where you're not thinking about money. So here's what they did. They had people come in in three conditions. They either, and they had to unscramble sentences.
So you have no idea what's going on, right? You got a sentence like, cold it desk outside is, which you would make into a good sentence, or high-salary desk paying. Okay, so you just make those, you scramble those words around, but the money condition has a word like salary in it. Or, You get the neutral sentences that have no money reference, and you see monopoly money in the corner of the room.
So we're not talking like people just sent you your tuition bill, or whatever, or you just found out that something terrible happened financially, or you won the lottery. It's monopoly money. It's just like the idea of money.
And then they give you a task to do. And the experimenter, as he or she leaves the room, they say, it's a pretty hard task. You may want some help. So just come and get me.
I'm glad to help you. Not a problem. So what happens?
Here's the probability of getting help. And it's incredibly more for the control groups that did the sentences without money, and way less, not only for the people who unscrambled the sentence with the word salary, but also way less if they saw monopoly money in the corner. The mere idea of money, not money given to you, not financial trauma or financial gain, the mere idea of money makes you less willing to get up and get help.
So the positive, it makes you more self-reliant. The negative is people were less willing to help somebody. Now the end is the examiner comes in and says, I'm an undergraduate like you. I've got huge pressure to get this paper in. Can you help me code?
Can you help me score up a few sheets? People were twice as much willing to help if they just did the neutral things than if they unscrambled the money sentences or saw the monopoly money in the corner of the room. Because just that thought about money goes like, man, OK, self-reliance, we're all in it for ourselves. OK, I've got my money, you've got your money.
Good luck. We're all, we're all, we're all. OK, self-reliance can be a good thing.
But it doesn't necessarily go with helping people very much also. Yeah? It's just a lot of money in there. That's why you're not going to help. It could be.
Yeah, the monopoly money, I agree with you. Maybe that's why they also had the one where you just get the scrambled sentences. OK.
I agree with you. These are all, you know, you could think, there's many, many ways to think about this. OK.
The last example of this kind I want to show you is dating behavior. And the way, again, an experiment can challenge various ideas. And this is specifically about dating between men and women. The story, to the extent it's been studied, would be a little bit different if you're dating within a sex.
So for dating between men and women, who is more selective in their dating choices, do you think? Who's more willing to date widely? or a lot, or less. What's your thought, if you have to generalize about men and women on average in your? Men.
OK, thank you. OK, so an evolutionary psychologist, and I love evolutionary psychology, but it drives me crazy too. Evolutionary psychologists will go, well, because by evolutionary theory, men have to go and make as many offspring as they can to keep their genes going.
Women have to be more selective. It takes nine months to bear a baby. It takes nine seconds to do the male part.
OK. Estimated. So this might or might not be true. It's kind of fun. We all laugh about it.
All of us find it kind of amusing to sort of think about it. But how would we actually know if this is vaguely true on average? How would we actually know if men for dating behavior are more?
How would we even on average? Is that true? Is that a bad myth, bad rap, or whatever? Yeah? Do you have my sites?
Yeah, thank you very much. So there's an entire research enterprise out there now that uses online dating sites, which of course, it's only in the last 20 years or something that they've existed, I think. So it wasn't before. And the other one that's been a treasure trove of data is speed dating environments, where you can observe things and measure things. And those studies have shown, for example, That online dating, on average, men are one and a half times more likely to send email offerings, dates to a woman than the other way around compared to women.
And in speed dating, too, men are more likely to indicate they would be happy to date a person they met than women. So there's objective evidence that this is true, on average, in this society at this time. And so everybody goes, oh yeah, this shows the evolutionary psychology.
The evolutionary psychology drives you crazy because on the one hand, it's certainly the case that our minds and brains evolved. Through evolution. So there's something about the history we went through as a species that matters for who we are now. That's got to be the case. On the other hand, it was a different world before internet dating and speed dating.
It's hard to know how those things line up exactly. So here's the fun thing. It turns out that on average in speed dating, a typical speed dating event will have like four minutes.
So you typically have women sitting at desks. Almost always they set it up that way. And the men are sitting in chairs in front of the desk. And they meet and they talk for four minutes. The bell rings.
The men jump up and they shift over one station. And then what happens is, for each time you meet a person, you fill out a card that says yes or no, I'd be willing to have a date with the person. And if you have two yeses from the man and the woman, the speed dating organizer.
exchanges the information so they can make direct contact. Does that sound OK? And men make more US responses. And it turns out, it doesn't have to be this way, but almost, from my reading, that almost every speed dating thing has the men rotating around. And the women sitting there waiting for the men to rotate around.
So let's just ask this question. What happens if the women rotate? Which almost never happens, but they did this experimentally. They said, for half of the speed dating sessions, The men will be sitting at the table, and the women will stand up and move a chair over every four minutes. The bell rings, so the women are moving and rotating.
And here's the results. Basically what's showing on the left are when the men rotate, the standard condition, the first is romantic desire. Men feel more romantic desire on average for the partner they sit with.
They feel that more chemistry is happening with the person they sit with. And on the bottom left corner, they Also, I'm more likely to give a yes response, I would like a date with this person. But reverse the roles, have the women rotating, and look at these bars, there's no difference at all. You completely wipe out the male-female difference in self-reported romantic desire per person, self-reported chemistry they think is happening, and the yes-no responses that I would have a date.
You completely eliminate it when the women are rotating. It's flat even. So that's the result.
What does it suggest? What happened to the evolutionary psychology? It disappeared just by having the women rotate around the room. And we don't know this with certainty, but people are following this up who are interested in this. It suggests that there's something about getting up and approaching that person, your body going, here I come.
I'm not sitting in my chair, hanging out, you know, it's like, here I come. That makes a person energized, feel more romantic, feel more chemistry is happening, and more likely to ask on a date. And it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman at all.
It's the getting up and that physical approach, just you're more invested, you're more out there, who knows what it is, completely eliminates what everybody had said is an ancient, inevitable, evolutionary difference between men and women. And this isn't to say there might not be some of those streaks in us. Who knows? But speed dating is not showing that. All you've got to do is have the women rotate, and you completely eliminate what's thought to be some hardwired biological difference on this dimension.
Now, talking about that, when we do experiments like this that look at sort of fun things like dating around a thing, or age, the difference between a five-year-old and a 20-year-old, or a 20-year-old and an 80-year-old, cultures, there's lots of experiments to compare, say, Western cultures versus a Eastern Asian cultures, we'll talk about that later in the course in terms of behaviors. Genes, whether you have one gene or another, all those things, are those independent variables? No. We can't assign you randomly to be a man or a woman, young or old, to come from the United States or Japan or China, or to have this gene or that gene.
It's not that we couldn't do stuff. you know, in some monstrous world, but not ethically, and it's never going to happen, right? So whenever you have science that talks about differences between men and women, or young and old, or cultures, or genes, it's not really a completely independent manipulation.
We can't assign you randomly. And so it means everything in the world about what it means to be a man or a woman, a 20-year-old or an 80-year-old, come from this continent or that continent, have this gene or that gene, those are not things we can freely manipulate. And you have to be extra cautious.
and interpreting those kinds of studies, because we can't randomly assign you to condition. We just can't. And I didn't talk about the fact that up until this moment we've made every conclusion a complete generality about human nature.
And people are different, one from the other, individual differences. We'll talk about that later in the course, too. So for the last couple of minutes, I want to talk about this, folk psychology.
Everybody has ideas about psychology. So if you have this piece of paper, if you would zoom through it, ideas about people in psychology. And just where there is some scientific evidence, if you just zoom down and mark yes or no, on average, do opposites attract?
On average, does familiarity breed contempt? On average, are more people present in an emergency, are you more likely to get some help? On average, are there such things as visual learners and verbal learners, and if they got the right kind of instruction, that would help them in school? Is hypnosis baloney?
Does subliminal advertising work? You know, when things are presented so you don't see them. Below consciousness, does it help you buy something? Does playing Mozart to an infant boost their intelligence, Mozart effect? Is old age on average associated with dissatisfaction?
If you're unsure of your answer when taking a test, I'm going to tell you the science about this. It's best to stick with your first hunch. Practically every website tells you that. Have you heard that many times?
OK. I'm going to tell you what the actual evidence is about that and how they get that in a moment. Ulcers are caused primarily by stress, a positive attitude can stave off cancer. Raising children similarly leads to similarities in their adult personalities. Low self-esteem is a major cause of psychological problems.
People's responses on the ink block tests tell us a lot about their personalities. Interviews. help identify those most likely to succeed in medical school. OK? I'll give you a minute.
A bunch of these we'll come back to in the course. The answer for all these is this. And there's evidence to it all.
So I'm going to tell you about four of them for 10 minutes. One of the ones you might want to know most about is the changing your initial hunch answer. How do you know that? So that people have gone back over test scores and looked where people crossed out an answer or erased an answer. That's the best source of evidence they have in large samples, and people are twice as likely to give a better the correct answer than to move to a wrong answer.
That's the empirical evidence. So it's a fantastically interesting disconnect that you see so many places and teachers advise you. Go with your first hunch when you're unsure. The empirical evidence is you're much more likely to be correct when you go with your best final answer.
All right. Of course, you're not sure, so you're going to miss a fair bit, but you're twice as likely to come out with the correct answer when you go with your best possible answer, so that people who crossed out their answers or erased their answers, they were twice as likely to move to a good answer than leave behind a good answer. Yeah? You know that maybe it's not, like, you pick an answer, and you just switch their answer, and then picking the advice and going back to taking the Yeah, that's an excellent question. We don't know.
They could have gone like five times back and forth. The assumption has been on average that people will once back and forth, but you're right. But ask yourself the other question, too.
What's the evidence ever that going with your hunch is? And nobody's been able to show that. So where there's evidence, it's all in favor of best answer, and nobody's shown evidence that hunch is the best answer.
is the best way to go, empirically. That doesn't mean that sometimes it doesn't happen, but on average, that's the way that ends up. But your point's excellent.
OK. So how about Rorschach tests? Every psychology program clinical psychologist in the country is required to learn how to administer and evaluate a Rorschach.
This obviously shows some sort of horrible sex act between animals and no. No, it's a, yeah. You know these kinds of tests. You're supposed to read it, and then the examiner listens to you, and they figure out something, right? There's been about 10,000 publications about this.
There's no evidence that there's anything predictive or correct about this test. None, zero, none. People argue it.
People give it. People have to learn how to give this test. So this is a disconnect that happens a lot between clinical stuff and experimental work.
I mean, researchers can't grasp why people still give this. Medical school interviews. Those of you who will apply to medical school, will get interviews. You get interviews for jobs.
You get interviews for all kinds of things in your life. What's the evidence that interviews are any good for anything? How could you know whether interviews are good for anything? A company interviews you. A university interviews you.
How would you even decide whether? So I can tell you that socialist psychologists have shown repeatedly that interviews are cesspools. For discrimination, because people tend to like people who are like them. Oh, you went to MIT? Yeah, course nine.
Then you go, oh man, this is going to be good. Or I went to Caltech. We didn't like MIT people.
We thought they were a little bit snobby or something. Oh, that's not going to be so good. So social psychologists have shown that if you just vary information and practice interviews, people tend to like people who are like them by background, by appearance, and so on. On average, they try not to.
They try to be fair. OK, so we know that. But how about me? OK, so here's what they did. Yale compared students who were accepted or rejected on the basis of an interview.
So they all had scores that got them to the interview. And then they looked at them where they went in pairs or larger than pairs to other medical schools. So let's say you got accepted by Yale, and you were accepted or rejected on the interview, but you ended up as two students at Penn or two students at Michigan.
OK? You're sitting next to each other. One of you was accepted by an interview at Yale, one of you was not.
Who does better at that other place? They're dead even. The interview added nothing for predicting grade point average or completion of medical school. Here's one more example. University of Texas at Houston, in the midst of their interviews, it enlarged from 150 to 200 students.
They had interviewed 800. The 150 who came were among the top ones. They interviewed them. They liked them.
They came. And then all of a sudden, because the state legislator said, by law, mandate that you take 50 more, they took 50 more who didn't do so well in the interview. Those 50 more performed identically. to the ones who got in with a successful interview. They couldn't find a difference between them.
Now there's at least one thing you might think the interview might have done, but we don't know. But what do you think it might have done? So the outcome was your grades in medical school and your likelihood of completing medical school.
What else could an interview have been relevant for? Maybe, maybe, maybe something about bedside manner or how you relate to people. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but there's no evidence that that's true. Now you're starting to grasp at straws.
So there's no evidence that interview processes make any difference anywhere, but everybody does interviews all the ways, because we always think we're kind of good judges of human nature or something. So interviews, it's very hard to tell that they ever do anything. So here's my last thing, self-esteem.
You cannot watch Oprah or Dr. Phil without some discussion of self-esteem at some moment. And it sounds good to everybody. Nobody would wish for you as a parent or friend for you to have low self-esteem. And in fact, higher self-esteem is correlated with higher initiative and persistence, happiness and emotional resilience, and also, unfortunately, with people who are narcissistic and bullies.
Okay? I mean, and how they measure it, just so you know, because this is a problem too, like how do you measure it? You have, there's several scales, but the most widely used scale is this Rosenberg scale, so you have that too if you want to try it out on yourself, okay?
Okay, self-report. And when they reviewed 15,000 studies some years ago, they could find no evidence that higher self-esteem leads to better things. It all seemed the other way around. That like doing better at things led to higher self-esteem. They could never find that pushing your self-esteem up does it.
Having said that, I can tell you as a parent of two young kids, or if you have friends and you care about them and you know this, we like to praise people to build up their self-esteem. We tell you, you're awesome. Someday you'll go to MIT.
I know you will. You're a wonderful person. And you're smart.
And you're beautiful. Parents want their children, and teachers too, to grow up and thrive and build up that self-esteem. And the easiest way to do that is praise, just telling your kid how awesome he or she is, or your younger sibling how awesome he or she is. Get their self-esteem up. So the last thing I'm going to tell you, and then we'll be done in about three minutes, is work from Carol Dweck that shows you how dangerous it is and how counterproductive it is to have.
You know, praise where you don't think through its relation to people. And in one sentence we'll talk about, are you going to succeed in life by your effort or by your talent? You know, what's a bigger question than that? Wherever you get to in your life, it's going to be based on your effort or your talent or both. I'll just have a sentence about that now.
So here's the experiment she did with fifth graders. She had them perform a pretty hard task. And afterwards, randomly, they were either praised for their intelligence.
So a person said to them, you, fifth grader. You are so smart, I can't believe how great you did on that. Okay, all right.
Or they were praised for their hard work. This shows a lot of hard work, okay, different kid. And some kids got no praise at all.
In this experiment, okay? Now, then they get a task that's even a little bit harder. How does the different kind of praise influence things?
And here was the finding. If you were praised for your intelligence, you did worse on the second test. If you were praised for your hard work, you did better.
If nobody said anything. your performance didn't change. And the idea is this. You understand, praise for your intelligence, you did worse on a hard task. Praise for your effort, you did better.
And here's the idea, that if we praise people for their intelligence to build up their self-esteem, they start to care more about how their performance reflects on them than the performance itself. Because if you're trying to prove that you're an intelligent person, you care less, the students who get that kind of praise for their intelligence, they persist less in a difficult task. They say they don't enjoy challenges.
Why? They just want to ace everything to keep proving they're smart. The kids who get praised for effort, they're kind of like, OK, I'm going to make some mistakes, but I'm just going to keep going because with effort I can do things sometimes.
And it turns out that it makes a remarkable thing. And so Dweck, and we'll come back to this, talks about you can view your intelligence as a trait, I have only so much, or as a growth. The harder I work, the smarter I get, but I have to do the hard work to get there. And we live in a society that often goes by fixed traits. American Idol, the harder to work, the better you sing, or who has the talent is discovered.
Who has the talent that's discovered, right? Because the idea is you have a certain amount of musical talent, and now the judges show, and you break into the world, and you're a famous singer. So ask yourself this.
When you are good at what you do, is it because something in your genes or in your environment made you good at it, or is it because you tried really hard? So Malcolm Gladwell has this statement that's floating around, gets a lot of attention, that anybody can become great at anything if they work on it for 10 thousand hours. So how much of your success in the past, currently, and in the future is going to be based on your effort? And how much is it going to be based on your talents?
And how would we know that? And we're a very talent-oriented society. And it seems like the more we encourage effort, maybe, the more people might flourish.
So we talked about how psychology and science, experiments, brief history of psychology experimentation. Some issues in experimentation, then there's some psychological topics, and some practical information for being generous and kind and winning friends rapidly. OK, thanks very much.