 We have a long history in psychology of people influencing the behavior of others without being aware of it. There's a study by Rosenthal and Jacobson back in 1968 called the Pygmalion Effect. Pygmalion in the classroom was the name of the study and it's named after the George Bernard Shaw play, right? And and what they did was they they brought an experimenter into a classroom in an elementary school classroom and they went through and they you know wrote down a bunch of stuff and gave the kids a bunch of tests and they came back to the teacher and said little Jimmy and Jane and Ralphie and so on they picked out a bunch of kids and said they're due for an intellectual growth spurt right so the idea was these kids were about to blossom right they're about to have this big like a physical growth spurt only intellectual and then they came back at the end of the year and they tested all the kids again and lo and behold these kids that they said were due for an intellectual growth spurt in fact had advanced significantly more than the rest of the kids in the class. The hitch is they just pulled those names out of a hat. They had no way of predicting intellectual growth spurt or anything like that they just made it all up. So what happened? Well the argument was that the teachers although they claimed not to be we're treating these kids differently right so if you know little Jimmy's ready for an intellectual growth spurt right and he's not quite getting something well you spend a little bit of extra time you know because you have these higher expectations of them and we know if you have higher expectations the kids they're gonna live up to them right or at least they're gonna attempt to live up to them right and so a little bit higher expectations get a little bit higher results right a little bit higher performance and that's what that's what happened right and so that's an experimental expectancy effect the experimenters were kind of expecting this this outcome in this case the experimenters are the teachers in the classroom it's their expectations that the kids are living up to. It sounds very similar to the clever Hans effect is that can't remember the details exactly but something about a horse being able to read the the signals provided by the trainer you know that example. Yeah back in the late 1800s so the turn of the previous century a guy named Wilhelm von Austin who was a retired school teacher he thought the so-called dumb animals as they were called at the time were getting short shrifted they were a lot smarter than people thought they were and so he trained his horse to do all kinds of amazing things so the horse could tell you what time it was he could do arithmetic he could convert fractions to decimals and decimals to fractions you could ask him questions like well if it's 25 to 8 where's the little hand on the clock what numbers is it between right and so on and they had these big commissions of inquiry who who who you know came to check out Hans and make sure that there wasn't some fraud going on and so on and he passed all the tests how does the how does the horse respond in this case well actually a psychologist named Oscar funks came along and figured out what was going on and what was going on in this case I mean Hans was very clever but he couldn't talk right yeah it wasn't Mr. Ed so what he would do is he would just tap his foot to answer a question what Oscar funks established was that Hans could answer the questions if anybody in the audience knew what the answer was Vaughan Austin didn't need didn't need to be there right but someone had to know the answer to the question and the way he tested this is he would ask one person to whisper a number in Hans's ear another person to whisper a number in the other here say three and two right and they would ask Hans add those two numbers what's the sum of those two numbers and Hans would go just keep going because no one was telling him when to stop someone always told him when to stop and the way they did that Hans was very clever not in the way that that people thought but he was very tuned to very subtle movements of people so as Hans started to approach the right answer people just lean forward a little bit in anticipation of that answer and so if he's going to five you know the answer is five you go one two three four oh man you're gonna make it there five now not nearly as big but there were very subtle movements but that's what Hans was picking up on and once funks figured this out or he could haunts to give whatever answer he wanted simply by making these movements deliberately so Hans was picking up on these subtle cues from the people around him none of whom knew they were doing this right there's no reason to believe that Vaughan Austin who was the guy that was who had trained hands knew that he was queuing Hans the answers right he was he had he had a point to make sure but he wasn't a fraud he wasn't making money off this he just thought Hans was as clever as he was and didn't realize that he was doing the the actual queuing himself or other people in the audience were doing the queuing when Vaughan Austin wasn't there because they'd often test without Vaughan Austin being there as you would think well maybe he's up to something fishy take him out of the room test Hans, Hans works just fine right as long as somebody knows the answer because they give those subtle little cues as to where you should be going and if you think about facilitated communication you got someone holding on to your sleeve or holding on to your arm helping you reach out and point and touch a keyboard very easy for that person without meaning to to be guiding your hand in a particular direction and so the the client is simply sort of passing on the movements that have been started by the facilitator so that's how you get the information from the facilitator out through the client do you have any advice for the people who are taking the course on how to improve their everyday thinking I think at least part of the answer is a healthy skepticism the the rallying cry of the cynic is bullshit right that I just don't believe anything that's not what I'm suggesting what I'm suggesting is being skeptical so let's see some proof I want to see some evidence so particularly when you see these kinds of claims where's the evidence how can we know this for sure I think part of being skeptical is keeping an open mind right but demanding evidence and not jumping to conclusions not not making up your mind too early that either this is you know a wonderful thing or it's completely bogus right my name is Scott I think about evidence