 In the course we discussed our failure to recognise the extent to which our interpretations are shaped by our prior knowledge and experiences. We called this the fundamental cognitive error. We also discussed another failure in which we don't account for the multiple ways in which a situation could be viewed. Now this is related to something we learnt later on which was the false consensus effect where we tend to think that other people think the same way that we do, that other people have the same beliefs and opinions as we do, but it's just not true. Now we have the fundamental attribution error and that's another failure to recognise the power of the situation in making predictions about human behaviour. That's exactly right. It is fundamental and it's not easy though. What is easy are personality traits. So saying that somebody's laid back or generous or honest or messy. These sorts of things just roll off the tongue and it's a knee-jerk response that we use to explain people's behaviour in new situations. And again, we've just seen several landmark demonstrations of the power of the situation that I think do a far better job of explaining and predicting people's behaviour. But it's not easy. It's a fundamental shift in how we think about people and predicting behaviour. And so I think this is related to something called channel factors. What is it? What is it about the situation, about the context, the circumstance that needs to be in place in order for that behaviour or that action, that communication? What is it that's going to make the thing happen or not? And it's not easy to identify. It's the entire pursuit of social psychology essentially to figure out what these small components are and how to put them into place in order to elicit these different types of behaviours. Yep. Let's go through them then. So what were the channel factors in the experiments that we just discussed? So in the Good Samaritan, it seems to be the amount of time people had available to help. If they had time, they were more likely to help. In the Milgram experiment, there were a couple of channel factors operating there. One of them was gradual escalation. So just putting the shocks up by 15 volts each time was probably a channel factor that led to them going all the way to the end, to the triple X. If you asked people to go from 15 up to triple X in one go, they were probably unlikely to make it. Another one was there wasn't a clear way to exit the experiment. There wasn't a big red button for you to press to say, look, the experiment is over. There's a third one in Milgram that I'm forgetting. Yeah. Essentially, the fact that he was in a lab coat, I think is a big one as well. Yeah. Yeah. Like an authority one. Yeah. So he's there in a lab coat and it's a sort of diffusion of responsibility again on to this experiment. So you're not taking responsibility for that learner's shock and pain. The third one we looked at was the bystander effect. The channel factor there seems to be the number, the presence or absence of people in the room. Now we spoke to Richard Nisbet and Lee Ross about the role of channel factors in predicting behavior and here's what they had to say.