 Can you tell me a little bit about channel factors? Well, this is an idea that's very old in social psychology you might be interested to know I don't think most social psychologists know this the field of experimental social psychology was founded by a physicist and That's has everything to do with the fact that social psychologists Are the ones who are telling us what the situations are that people confront that are going to have an impact on them His notion was the field that social psychologists focus on the field that and that comes from field theory and physics I mean you need to know what's going on the whole field. I mean it's just in order to to understand how to explain behavior He had a notion that Sometimes we want someone to do something or want some kind of outcome. We just push Also, I said no wait look there may be a channel there through which you can Which you can you can achieve what you're trying to achieve think about think about what situational barriers you might remove Think about how the you could give the person a plan That would help them to go in a direction you want them to go 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 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 of though 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 are 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 And there's a stunning experiment also very old experiment done with Yale college students There was a social psychologist who Was scaring the daylights out of these undergraduates about Tetanus, I mean he shows them people in the extremes of lockjaw and the terrible kinds of things that you go on He says look, it's not just the rusty nail you've heard about. I mean it's all over. I mean it's just you know You just you don't you don't recognize how susceptible you are but not to worry because you can go to the health service Which will be available on Tuesday morning, and you get an inoculation Three percent of students go and get their inoculation even though they're manifestly scared and they believe this to other students he gives them a map and says And the health services circle on it now these by the way Yale seniors They know where the health service is so but he circles it on the map anyway Says where were you wouldn't be at a convenient time on Tuesday morning for you to go again in an oculation? Ten o'clock when I'm coming out of my chemistry class say, okay Where would you mark where your chemistry? Classy is on that map, and then would you draw me the line from there to? Now the compliance rate is 29 percent. It's this little trivial situational factor Channel that he creates has a massive impact on behavior and of course you know not to get back to the dispositional versus situational Explanation here's Joe who went to get a tetanus inoculation and Sam who didn't Why did Joe do he's very conscientious? He's very health-concerned and Sam what it is? He why did he not do it? Oh, you know, he's kind of He's the sort of doesn't care that much. He's kind of your response kind of flighty really So here's a situational factor that affects that what goes on by a factor of nine And I'm a true and I'm going to attribute it as the observer. I'm going to attribute the difference to their personalities 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 it 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 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 were 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 and 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? 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 yeah one is getting early commitment getting people who say they're gonna 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 my name is Lee I Think about wisdom