 So we just heard Richard and Lee talk about the difference between the person and the situation and they provided a few really good cognitive processes reasons for these For this distinction and one of them was selective attention So we only have a certain amount of information that we can process and my efforts are focused on you on what it is that you're saying How you're behaving to the exclusion of the context another that Richard made reference to was the cultural difference between for example, Easterners pay attention to the context and the person is situated within that context but the context comes first and then the person is Located or situated somewhere within that and Relatedly Lee made reference to the language that we use we have a lot of words We have a lot of language for personality characteristics We don't have many words for the situation the situation where you feel brave or something or Yesterday at work. I was in a very honesty situation, right? You almost have to bend over backwards to make Reference to situations that elicit certain behaviors. Yeah, I was sitting in traffic the other day and This car came in and it cut me off and I knew that he was just trying to get to the front of the line to push in front of me and It was outraged. I said What an asshole what kind of person would do that and then I Just been preparing for this episode on the distinction between the person in the situation and I stopped myself I said, okay, hold on here. What if it had been me who cut off somebody else in traffic that the The rationalization for my behavior would have been oh, no, I'm I'm in a rush I can't be late for the third time to work for the third time but When I was sitting there in the kind of somebody else cut me off I attributed their behavior to themselves and this is a common thing We tend to attribute the behavior of other people to Personality situations to two character traits, but we tend to attribute the explanation for our own behavior to Two situational variables So we've spoken about already the weakness of the situation the weakness of personality variables in predicting Future behavior, but let's talk about the strength of the situation in predicting behavior now So we've spoken about the Good Samaritan now. There's a great study by Solomon Ash So imagine you were asked to participate in a vision experiment This is a visual acuity test and you come into a room There's four other people and you sit down at the end of the table The experimenter shows you some lines There's a line on the left of a particular length and then then three lines on the right of differing lengths And your job is just to say okay, which line on the right is the same length as the one on the left Okay, you can see quite clearly in this particular case that the answer is B Those lines are exactly the same length now the first person responds shouts out to the experimenter see The second person responds shouts out to the experimenter see the third person see the fourth person see Now what do you do? Do you stick to your guns? You could quite clearly see the answer is B and you do you shout out B or do you go with the group now? What ash found was that very often people will go with the group They will shout out see even though they can see the answer is is B So this is called social conformity often people will go with the group because they they want to fit in or they think the Group has access to information that they don't that's right. It's a really strong demonstration of social conformity another really Landmark classic Probably the the most well-known experiment in all of psychology and probably the most controversial is one by Stanley Milgram and in this experiment you have a similar sort of setup you have one person who's working for the experimenter and One person who's participating in the experiment and so they come into the lab And they're welcomed by a man in a in a white lab coat very official-looking character the experimenter and he has the two people In in in the experiment he assigns them one is going to be a teacher and one is going to be a learner But in fact, it's rigged the person who's working for the experimenter is always the learner the person that the actual subject is the teacher So he brings them into a room and shows them he he hooks up the learner into it into a chair almost like an electric chair right he straps them in they're completely restrained and hooks the hooks up a bunch of electrodes to that person and so the idea is that He takes the the teacher the participant in the experiment into another room where you can't see the learner They're they're locked away. They're tied to a chair and What they can do is The job of the teacher is to teach that person a bunch of a bunch of word pairs They communicate with the learner over a microphone. That's exactly right And so you're saying over a microphone you read the question the learners in the other room They respond in a particular way if they get it right fine if they get it wrong they get an electric shock Okay, now they the experimenter shows the teacher this switchboard of electric shocks and it goes all the way from five Volts right and you you click a little switch and you click the button and it shocks the learner in the other room Then 10 volts 15 volts 20 volts all the way gradually going up to 450 volts right and so they're reading over the microphone Okay learner they read the word list and they give them the multiple choice Question and if the learner gets it wrong which they did frequently they get an electric shock Okay, and so they're doing this time and time again, so they're up to a hundred volts Sorry learner and they shock the person they get it if they get it wrong the volts increase that's right Each time they get it wrong it increases. That's right Now the the whole point of the experiment in this case is to see How far the teacher will go up this gradually escalating Ranked Set of voltages right so it keeps going up time and time again How many people will actually go to the end and elicit? 450 volts to that learner in the other room didn't you say lethal in brackets as well x x x That's right. It says at the far end. It doesn't even have a label anymore right how many people will actually go to the end and so Clearly when they're going through this experiment often the teachers are very dismayed right they so they Elicit a shock and they hear the learner in the other room saying stop stop This is hurting right and they look past and they look back to the experiment and say I this is the no We can't go on like this is dodgy and all the experimenter does they just sit in the chair and sit back and say The experiment requires that you continue. Please continue. Please continue and and they say well no the guys and Please continue the experiment we insist and so on there's no permanent tissue damage Whatever that means Please continue now how many people are actually going to obey and go right to the end now most people predict that it would be Nobody right maybe one person some psychopath or something right but in fact The vast majority it's quite a few people. I can't remember the exact number I think 30% or something 40% maybe Continued to the very end of the experiment and elicited very lethal shocks to that person You even hear them in the other room going stop the experiment my heart and then they stop responding and they continue to elicit Shocks after the person is completely silent right and and this was a real shock. This is an ethical sort of conundrum this is Moral callousness on on scale right this is this is terrible But in fact just like you or I anyone in that particular situation is going to be Feeling exactly the same sort of thing and will probably elicit sharks just like they did in that experiment Yep a similar one on the power of situation is called the bystander effect now in this experiment the participant comes into a room and they're asked to fill out a questionnaire and The experimenters they're not in the room, but they start Pushing smoke through the bottom of the door and in the other room So the smoke just starts billowing in and when people are in that situation filling out a questionnaire on their own They're most of the people take control of the situation They go outside the room and they they look for help they think it might be a fire or something like that now the tricky part of this experiment here is We set up the same situation again, but this time we have more people in the room filling out a questionnaire There's two more people, you know to the right of you, but unbeknownst to you They're actually working for the experimenter now You're in a room with two other people filling out a questionnaire and you start to see the smoke Billowing through the room again You're looking here and you look to the right and you can see those other participants are still beavering away at their questionnaire You can see that they look at the smoke, but then they look away. They're not too concerned now in this situation People are far less likely to take control of that situation and move outside the room and look for help That's right. This is in each of these cases. That was a perfect example of the bystander effect So we have social conformity obedience bystander. These are three situational factors that are ridiculously robust, right Put pretty much anyone in the same circumstance and you get the same sort of effects robust Yeah, robust in the sense that it's far more likely to predict behavior Yeah, a person personal personality explanation That's right. So robust in the sense that it happens again and again and again whoever is in that particular situation Right, so I think this is what Lee Ross Regarded as he labeled it the fundamental attribution error. It's so fundamental That most of us in the same situation would do exactly the same thing so we talked with Lee and And Richard about that fundamental attribution error and here's what they say