 One of the goals of the course is to at least try to get students to recognize the difference between a distinction that you made on the person and the situation. So if we start with the person, can you tell us what personality factors or how they differ from situational factors and what that difference is? Well, as lay psychologists, as ordinary people walking around, when we're asked to explain events or account for behavior, we characteristically cite things about the actor, the actor's personality. So we talk about some people who are brave and some people who are cowardly or some people who are adventurous or others who are shy. And that's the way we normally think about things. But there's an interesting research tradition in psychology which showed that if you expose people to situations, usually novel situations under well-controlled circumstances and to some extent even if you observe them in their day-to-day life, the degree of cross situational consistency in behavior is relatively low. The people who are kind of boisterous and loud in the dining hall aren't necessarily the people who are outgoing at parties or the people who are willing to put up their hand in class. And that was an observation that was made by Walter Michel in a very famous book almost 50 years ago. And one of the things that Dick Nisben and I began to write about was the way in which getting straight about the power of the situation versus the power or predictive power of individual differences was something about which people commonly had some illusions or errors. I might say that that's partially because in everyday life the person and the situation are usually deeply confounded. We don't just see people responding to a situation. We see people who occupy particular roles, have particular relationships. And so when we see a person behaving in ways that are predictable to us or consistent, it may have as much to do with the consistency of the situations that are impinging on that individual and the kind of commitments they've made as it does with some kind of internal character or internal traits. So this idea of an internal character or internal traits really seems compelling. I think probably from most people would think, I mean when you're explaining that somebody's laid back or honest or something, I mean it feels like that's valuable, that is very predictive of future sorts of situations. So if I describe you as an honest person, I'd expect you to be honest across a whole bunch of different situations and you're saying that that's not the case. Well I'm saying that the research that was done in the case of honesty that looked at people in different situations who might cheat on an exam, who would take more candy than their share from the table, who would perhaps lie, that it just turned out that the degree of predictability was relatively low, I mean the correlation if you want to number is around, usually around 0.15 but part of the illusion however as I said arises from the fact that as we experience people in our lives we see a much more predictability in that. So the people who I deal with and I find honest, first of all they're honest with me. I'm part of the situation and I'm always there in their dealings with me. Secondly they may be honest because they care about their reputation and that may be a factor in all kinds of situations. We like to joke in that if we took let's say a devout person and a kind of low life gambler and we exchanged their roles, we put the white collar on one guy and had him in church and meeting with his parishioners and the other guy out frequenting low haunts as the sociologists like to say. We might find that the guy who has a great reputation for probity cuts loose a little bit and the guy who's seen as a somewhat sketchy character now suddenly seems pious and consistently honest and restrained. So you mentioned the I think it's the heart shorn in May study on honesty. Can you tell us a bit about that experiment exactly what they did? Well I have to try and remember but the main thing is they observed kids in more than one situation and then they looked at the extent to which the kids who showed relatively honest behavior in one situation showed relatively honest behavior in other situations and there is a distinction between reliability and consistency so reliability would be does the same person do the same thing in the same situation the next time that you see him and cross situational consistency would involve the question of whether the person who exhibits a particular trait or a particular characteristic in one situation seems to show the same characteristics in another situation that by the way we think about things should be tapping the same traits. Interesting so little Susie on the playground you know acting up may not act up in every situation but you mentioned predicting behavior in extreme situations would that hold I mean why is why is extreme behaviors better predictors than just kind of average behaviors well we're going to get into some boring statistics if I go very far with this but if we see something really extreme it's likely to be someone who shows more of a given characteristic this is clearest in sports so well if you observe people jogging on the playground you might find that the one person jogs faster one day the other person jogs faster the next day but if it's the Olympics and they're going for a gold medal and you're giving them the most extreme challenge it's going to be a very very fast runner who wins and we can talk about the same thing if we were going to look for who would do something that was particularly pro-social it's going to be someone who has a deep concern and a history even though in less taxing situations and more characteristic ones we may not be able to predict who's going to give the panhandler a five dollar bill or who's going to bring their old clothes to the food to the salvation army center that kind of thing yeah while we're talking about this dispositionism one of the things that's worth noting is that in our culture it's kind of over determined so we get this tendency to overestimate the impact of the situation in part because we observe people in the same situations most of the time in part just because when we see someone act we focus on the actor not on the situation in our particular culture it's almost a theory that people are responsible for their behavior we don't look kindly on people who are fair weather friends or who adjust their trim their behavior to the sale to the prevailing winds we would say but also even our language predisposes us you notice we talk about an honest person but we don't have a term for a situation that prompts honesty we you know if we have to say well this is the kind of situation in which the average person is honest and only very dishonest people will be dishonest in this situation or it's a kind of situation in which most people take some liberties but only the most extremely honest people can be counted on we have to engage in this very complicated language but we can say this is an honest person and that's a shorthand for saying something about what we expect the actor to do across the situations and we can say that how would you how would you characterize the situation in which you expect most people to be brave we literally don't have a word now it isn't that we can't conceive of such a thing we do have one domain one that we care about a great deal in our culture where we do have that now when we talk about a test we can say the test is easy or hard and that's a really useful shorthand for saying we expect most people to do well at it or only exceptionally able people to do well at it and that kind of thing we also have it for emotion words so we can talk about a scary movie or a sexy poster or things like that that again have that property that they're telling us what to expect from the average person but it's interesting that we don't have these terms when it pertains to what we normally think of as personality traits so why do you think that is it seems like a bit of a chicken and the egg problem doesn't it I mean why is it so compelling if it's so not predictive why is personality explanations of of saying that that Johnny's honest or laid back or something I mean if it isn't if most we have a correlation of about point point one five as you said I mean that's not going to get us very far so why do we stick with it well because most of the time we're not given the task of predicting the behavior of a bunch of people in a novel situation most of the time we're looking at people behaving in contexts in which we've observed them often in which they have reputations and relationships so when you say mom is I know mom is going to have a hot apple pie when I come to visit from from where I'm where I'm living or working now that's very predictable but it's not predictable just because your mom has a disposition to make apple pies it's that she always makes an apple pie when you come to visit so the experience of consistency within situations gives rise to the impression that it's reflective of of character or traits what we care about as lay psychologists is knowing the people in our world and we're kind of motivated to see them as consistent and coherent and and even basic perception after all when an act occurs we focus on the act and the actor commits the act they're a unit we see them together we don't see the actor and the situation together normally so it's kind of over determined sure you mentioned that in your book that there doesn't seem to be many sort of landmark studies on on personality like there is with the situation so we know of some very compelling demonstrations of the power of the situation that that don't seem to occur in demonstrations of the power of personality can you tell us a bit about some of those demonstrations for the situation well let's first say when we say that it's given that we expect a great deal of consistency in behavior of people across situations it's very hard to do a study that shows that there's even more consistency than we imagined by contrast since we expect and think we know people well it's easy to design a study in which we use the various tricks and insights of social psychologists and create a situation in which ordinary people behave in ways that we think are extraordinary extraordinarily altruistic or extraordinarily cowardly or extraordinary or extraordinarily foolish and and and the like of course there is ironically one set of studies on consistency of behavior that are pretty impressive and they were ironically done by the same guy Walter Michelle who had done the early studies showing lack of consistency in behavior and what he showed is that the degree to which people seem able to resist temptation the extent to which people seem to have a degree of self-control and the ability to delay gratification and he showed that the behavior of children that in the nursery school predicted rather well things like their success in getting into college and things like that so there are some some exceptions but for the most part social psychology has produced a whole series of classic experiments the point of which is to show that when we manipulate the situation or we produce particular kinds of situations we see behavior which defies our intuitions which surprises us one of the channel factors that I find interesting is this idea of organ donation and it's such a simple tiny manipulation of seemingly tiny manipulation of opting in or opting out of organ donation is that do you know the details or well I I know as much about it as most social psychologists who've read the study and thought about it for many of us it's a very powerful demonstration of what Kurt Levine called a channel factor that is something that made it a little easier to act in a accord with your with your preferences or your values but I think there was a many many interesting features in that but the starting point is just that this is a case of what we might call a natural experiment it wasn't a study in which someone manipulated this although people have followed up on it including me and my colleagues but the finding as I think most people in psychology are aware now is that if you looked at European countries and some of those countries had a policy where you had to sign the back of your license your driver's license to make you a potential organ donor in other places you had to sign if you didn't want to be a potential organ donor so the phenomena was incredibly dramatic I mean you found countries as similar as Austria and Germany or Norway and Sweden having tremendously different rates under 10% of people in some cases and over 95 and others very very dramatic so it's tempting a lot of people look at that and say well just people are lazy but it was subtler than that the institutional arrangements that exist communicate norms so Tom Gilovich and I did a study that was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science in which we showed that the meaning of that act changed so in countries where you had to sign your driver's license to be a potential donor it was seen as something akin to leaving a lot of money in your will to a particular charity in the cases of the opt-out countries it was seen as something very modest like letting other people head of you in line if they were in a hurry so we that was a maybe the lesson of social psychology that's second only to the one about the power of the situation is how important the meaning or the connotations of the situation are to the actor and the extent to which we have to know what the actor means what the situation means to the actor if we want to be able to predict and understand that behavior and it's very interesting to think about what happens when all we know about someone is that they signed their license their back of their license in such a way that made them a potential donor or not we're likely to think it's telling us something deep about their character and unlikely to appreciate the extent to which in both cases they're just doing what they think ordinary citizens do and in one case they think only extreme altruists who don't care about how they desecrate their body after they die might sign up whereas in the other they think it's a normal duty of good citizenship and only misanthropes and bad citizens would refuse given what we know about kind of the weakness of personality factors and the strength of situational factors if I were an employer and hiring a new employee in my company what sort of advice would you have then for what would be the most predictive of their future behavior well obviously if you had evidence about how they've behaved in very very similar situations in the past that would be useful but my advice to a an employer would be to create the kind of context the kind of corporate norms and reinforce them in such a way that they produce the kinds of behavior that you want that is to say I'd try hard to model that kind of behavior I would celebrate it when I saw it I would respond immediately to behavior that was inconsistent with what I wanted we see this in the area that I work in conflict resolution there's often a feeling that you have to find the right guy to make a deal with and the evidence that we find is that the same the same person who might be a terrorist at one point in time can become a heroic peace fighter at another period of time this was true in the work we've done in northern Ireland where we looked at ex-bombers who became peace activists and to some extent it's true even in the life of Nelson Mandela and so lots of times people say we're looking for a Mandela on the other side when what they should be doing is how can we create a context that creates a Mandela on the other side so this idea of channel factors that you mentioned with respect to the Milgram experiment and others it's extremely powerful I mean it's and I think people aren't really kind of taking advantage of it as far as in the Occupy movement or in climate change and so on in in trying to motivate a large number of people to do one particular thing they don't really seem to be taking advantage of of the situation as much as they could is that well I think the message has started to become much better understood actually we're seeing an education a number of really dramatic cases where relatively small changes in the situation facing students just giving messages about whether they belong and whether the institution has confidence that they can succeed and we see big effects of these kinds of manipulations certainly politicians have gotten the message to some extent it's been negative in the sense that they no longer worry about persuading people they just say how can we identify the folks who are likely to be our voters and make them get to the polls it was interesting in the last election I don't think it's a big secret that Barack Obama had the assistance of a number of behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists and who used a number of different techniques to initially identify and then make sure their voters would actually get to the polls they did this in in very very sophisticated ways such that on the night of the election the republican strategists were shocked and were convinced that the prediction models were that they had were correct and the early polling was wrong because they were saying given everything we know about the economy and given what we know about popularity ratings and given what we know about the frequency with which particular ethnic or demographic groups vote what's going to happen and what they didn't realize was that an experimental manipulation had been done some very very clever and powerful techniques had been used to make people who were favorably leading but not likely voters to actually vote and what were those what did they do that's a secret but if you read the history of social psychology you'd be able to predict I mean I could imagine a couple of them yeah so one is getting early commitment getting people who say they're going to vote you say can we count on you can we call you back on election day and make sure you voted or getting them to register instead of saying will you go register you say okay let's do it right now take out your cell phone and make this call and someone will come and pick you up I mean there's many many things that you can do but the point was to to make sure that people who generally were disposed to behave in a particular way but often in history have not done so in this case they would and they could be counted on can you tell us about the fundamental attribution error just what it is and and what we can what we can tell about human behavior on the basis of okay well the term the fundamental attribution error has a kind of strange and interesting history and it's led to some confusion so the first time that I used the term and I think I was the one who coined it it came when Dick Nisbet who I know you've interviewed had done a very important series of studies and written a paper with Ned Jones on actor observer differences and when he showed it to me I said well that's really interesting dick but the fundamental thing is that people overestimate the degree of cross situational consistency and they make trait attributions in general when they shouldn't then in a later paper when I was discussing various kinds of errors and biases in distinguishing my work from what I thought was the central message of social psychology I had said well the fundamental error is the tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation and what I meant by that was it not that it was fundamental in the sense that it was irreducible no what I meant is it was an error in the most fundamental task that we attempt in life which is to say what does that situation tell me about the actor what does that situation tell me about the observer and the the term fundamental attribution error referred to the fact that people characteristically make an error in that fundamental task but that isn't the fundamental failing that human beings have the fundamental failing that that really is much more basic is the tendency to assume that the way we see the world is the way the world really is that other reasonable people should see it the same way and if they don't see it the same way it's because there's something wrong with them some bias that's affecting them it can be there the propaganda to which they've been exposed it can be some failing in their intelligence it can be something about their education but we readily think that when people disagree with us it's because there's something wrong with them not something wrong with us or at least not something that's affecting both of us that's making us simply disagree interesting there was another term that you used a fair bit kind of early on as well and naive realism can you tell us about the the notion of naive well that's what i just described was naive realism and we said naive realism in that human beings necessarily think that the world is the way they perceive it to be if i look around this campus i see walls and windows and grass and to me that is the way the world is einstein memorably said reality is an illusion and what he meant by that is that what we experience in reality is kind of the interaction that occurs between the kind of stardust that we're made of and the kind of stardust that's out there and that to a physicist the world is made up of these infinitesimally tiny strings of matter and energy fields nothing like the way we perceive it to be that's that's what we perceive as reality is our way of responding to that input and that construction so of course we have to assume that the world is the way we perceive it and in many ways we perceive the world similarly and it serves us really well to believe that this naive belief that there's a one-to-one relationship between the way we perceive things and the way they really are but it can get us into trouble particularly when other people come to that world with different histories different needs different goals different biases different experiences related to that you had a student you had a student in i think 1990 Elizabeth Newton right who did a tapping experiment can you tell us about that well i must say the real author of that study was my brother who was a musician really and he he used to do this when i was a kid yes and he showed me this interesting phenomena that if you tap out a tune you think you know for sure what it is it seems really obvious to you and in part that's because when you're tapping the tune you hear the music that accompanies it and you know when you're not tapping whether that's a musical rest or a sustained note this is something you only can appreciate by trying it but i would urge anyone seeing the series to try it on on someone tap some really familiar song you know you can tap the national anthem or you can tap jingle bells or something really familiar and to you it will seem absolutely inevitable but the other person will know and they'll look at you with a a kind of blank look so when elizabeth newton came along i had described this phenomenon to her and she said oh that's great let's make a study of it and became part of her dissertation that's outstanding and there are other things like that if when you know when you've done something very often and it's become easy to you you are surprised that it isn't easy to someone else they ought to know they ought to know the right answer it even pertains to information you know the the books you've read you think most other educated people have surely read that and when someone tells you what a book you don't know you say my they must be really deeply educated or have this esoteric interest there is this overwhelming tendency to to feel that not just the way we see the world but the way we respond to the world our priorities the things we find easy the things we find difficult will be shared by other people that's called the false consensus effect well the false consensus effect follows from naive realism this can get boring when we start going through all these definitions but the false consensus effect just refers to the fact that all things being equal people who behave in a particular way are more likely to think that other people will behave in that way than people who behave in a different way so it follows off from the naive realism but that seems to go all the way down doesn't as far as as far as basic perception the light waves that hit the back of the retina and we initially assume that other people will respond the same way as the way we do when they do we're not surprised but when they don't we think the thing to be understood or explained is why they responded the way they did rather than why we responded the way we did but you're absolutely right it pertains to everything from basic perception to the kinds of political and social judgments we make about what our political priorities are how important it is to help disadvantaged people versus provide good climate for entrepreneurs even in those domains the way we see it seems to us to be the right way to see it and we sometimes even can understand why other people see it that way so in work on conflict resolution that I've done Israeli military leaders are perfectly willing to concede that if they had been born Palestinians they might be Palestinian terrorists or freedom fighters depending on how you want to label it and vice versa by that they don't mean that the other person is right is just as right or righteous as they are but they believe that had they been in that other context they would have been misled the same way the other person was misled so the title of the course is the science of everyday thinking what advice do you have for the students who are taking the course to improve the way that they think every day well I think paying attention to the message of Danny Kahneman's book is a starting point and that is there are many many sources of error or bias that we learn about in psychology we also learn about some things that people do really well and quickly and we tend not to study those enough so the message is when we're doing one of the tasks that we know that people have difficulty with or are subject to particular biases just take a little time reconsider it the equivalent to not pressing the send button when you've when you've written a message that you're not sure about it's a good idea just to stop and take a little time and reflect sometimes ask someone else how does this seem when you experience it not as an actor but as an observer how would you respond if you received it sometimes very importantly just thinking about the difference between the experience we have as an actor and an observer and I'll give you an example most people I know would say that they rarely if ever have deliberately given offense to another person that they've deliberately tried to hurt the feelings of another person most of us as observers or at least as the targets of action can think of lots of cases where people said things to us that were hurtful or painful and so the message is when you're an actor stop and think has that kind of thing ever made you unhappy or uncomfortable conversely when you are the target say well when you've said or done that kind of thing did you intend to to be hurtful or do harm so shifting that actor and observer perspective as well as taking a little bit of time can can save you a lot of pain and misunderstanding and interpersonal settings so it seems like put yourself in the shoes of others when kind of considering well I hate I I hate what my students sometimes call moccasin and I wear metaphors it isn't so much a matter of putting yourself in that other situation I don't think the other person shoes I don't think I think that's a metaphor but you can essentially say what has my own experience been when I was in that situation that's an important distinction yeah social psychology is is with kind of the things like blink and Danny Kahneman's book seems to be pretty hot at the moment do you have what do you think is kind of the most interesting and worthy things to be kind of pursuing at the moment in social psychology well there's two answers two kinds of answers to that question so one is what's changing in social psychology and I think what's changing is that we're increasingly getting beyond the laboratory classic social psychology experiment where you take people expose them for a short period of time to something novel and see what they do increasingly we're getting interested in the kind of behavior that occurs in familiar contexts where people know each other and have a existing role in institutional relationships and we see behavior unfold over time in ways that have cumulative consequences much more interest in natural experiments that occur where different people different institutions do things in different ways and looking at what we can learn from those so that's a change that I think is occurring in the field for someone like me a little bit sadly that the the kind of experiment the kind of experimental tradition that I grew up with I think has passed its has passed its noon and is nearing its nearing its night but in terms of the content of psychology and it's not just social psychology what has become increasingly obvious and important is the extent to which we're influenced by processes that are implicit that we don't have conscious access to so to some extent we are rediscovering if not the unconscious then the non-conscious and we're really getting impressed by how much cognitive work how much reasoning how much learning occurs in context where we're not aware of the fact that we're doing it how much we're influenced by things that we're not aware of and the work of john barge and others on priming I think are having a kind of transformative effect on the field the area is quite new and we're making mistakes and we're over we're sometimes showing what shakespeare called vaunting ambition that overlaps itself in this area but there's no doubt that that's going to that beast is going to get tamed and it's going to be a fairly important and central feature of psychology in future it's going to be in some ways rediscovering what floyd was interested in the importance of non-conscious processes but whereas floyd thought that this was something that happened because of primarily for motivational reasons and protecting the ego or or the like we're now discovering there's nothing that exotic about it it's simply that the focus of attention is very narrow and the amount of information we're inputting at any one point in time is enormous so we're teaching this course the science for everyday thinking think 101 we have hundreds of thousands of students across the planet who are taking it do you have any advice for us obviously there have been several attempts before to kind of improve people's thinking to make them less prone to superstition and so on that haven't succeeded very well i know you and dick have written before about for example ways of trying to get people to think make better decisions think better do better do you have any advice for us on how we might succeed well it's ironic i just i've used the word ironic several times i realize but there's a lot of ironic things in psychology just as i said that the experiment the classic experiment is kind of fading and it's important i think its role in education is absolutely central and i think that much of the most important research we ever did and described really consisted of demonstration experiments they didn't make some huge theoretical point that was very very specific they demonstrated to us not what must happen but what can happen and i think that in education we learn through experience and so having someone see for themselves to experience for themselves the kinds of things that we've typically had people do in laboratory studies can be very useful so we talked about the milgram experiment which is very controversial i'm not sure i would try and put every student through the milgram experiment but having the experience of being in a powerful role versus being in a powerless role and showing how that changes the way you think and the way you feel many years ago i did a study in which we had some people ask difficult general knowledge questions that they came up with to another person and the person answering those questions thought that the person asking them was much more knowledgeable than they were and they were very impressed by that person when we switched roles we got the opposite experience so coming to be aware of the way in which our position of power or lack of power having a particular motive or not having a particular motive the experience of seeing how that influences us is a powerful one and so i would say don't omit the possibility of having people when i talked about the tapping study we can describe it but it's nowhere near as good as simply doing the experiment for yourself so i would say build in lots of opportunities for people to have the kinds of experiences that you're trying to teach them about interesting at the end of human inference which you and dick wrote in 1980 you had a few slogans a few maxims which i thought was quite clever and really quite good i think we call them fortune fortune that's right that's right so to remind you a couple of them uh were uh it's an empirical question or what do the other three cells look like have you thought about others that you might have included since then or i think that's what dick nizbets book is yeah is about the new book that he's uh working on is what are the most useful insights uh you can have uh you're working on a new book what is what's that book about at the moment well the new one we're working on is called has a very similar goal to your course it's called the wisest in the room and we're saying what have been the most uh powerful and useful insights in social psychology and how can they be used not so much to get what you want in life but to do a better job of understanding what's going on around you what's going around on in your family what's going on uh in your workplace what's going on uh politically in your in your community or in the larger world interesting so yeah on the didactics do you have any any kind of nuggets of insight that that that students might be able to use at least i particularly like we're talking in the course about checklist diagrams and what are the other three cells look like um uh well one uh would i would borrow from solomon ash from 50 years ago and that is when someone behaves in a way that surprises you when someone makes a judgment or assessment that seems surprising consider the possibility that what you were wrong about was not their judgment of the object but what the object of judgment was that is to say if someone behaves in ways that are surprising to you take seriously the possibility that you're wrong about what the situation meant to that other person and that will help you do a better job if you're trying to influence people if you're trying to influence people and it isn't working it may be because the thing you're doing is being understood very differently by the other person that what you then what you intend so pay attention to the possibility to what the object of judgment is or at least what the actors construal of the object of judgment uh when i uh pay my children for doing well in school am i is that a bonus or is it a bribe if it's a bonus it's wonderful if it's a bribe uh then the message is when the bribe is there do it when the bribe isn't there don't do it if it's a bonus it's great uh isn't the world a wonderful place when you do the right thing good things happen to you yeah my name is lee i think about wisdom