 In today's episode, we're going to be introducing an idea that we've essentially been building up to over the last 10 episodes. Now we promised people since the beginning that we'd give them the tools to be able to change the world, but this very idea, the one that we're going to be talking and focusing on today, we couldn't have just introduced on day one. We had to lay the groundwork first, but certainly I think it's the most powerful idea that we can introduce. But we need to do a little bit of myth-busting first of all. Sure, we'll start off with some situations where we need to make predictions. So if you, again, in a job interview, you need to predict whether this person will perform well in their job. You want to know whether you should go on a date with somebody. You're trying to predict whether people will buy a product that you're developing. Whether to trust somebody with a secret or not. And more important things like deciding whether or predicting whether a criminal is likely to re-offend or not. Now, when you ask people what information do you want that will help you make that decision? What do you think will give you the power to make an accurate prediction? Most people ask for personality or character information, like is she trustworthy? What was her upbringing? Things like that. Yes, all those personality character things. Now, in fact, we started off this episode by giving people a scenario. A person is walking between two buildings and they encountered a shabbily dressed man slumped in a doorway with his head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning. Please list one piece of information that you would like to have in order to predict whether the person would stop to help the man. Now, we'll tell you the responses that our online students give to this question, but we've already asked our on-campus students. And again, they tend to list character traits. They ask for information about the person. They want to know whether the person is male or female. They want to know about their occupation, the history of their upbringing, whether the person is religious or not. That's right. Now, this example might sound familiar to people. In fact, it's a parable straight out of the Bible told by Jesus. And the idea is you have a man who's lying in distress on the side of the road. He was beaten by a bunch of robbers. And people are passing on the road and see the man who's in distress. And it starts with the priest who just keeps walking right past the man. Then a temple assistant comes and walks right past the man. And finally, a Samaritan comes, sees the man and lends assistance. He puts him on a horse, takes him to and in, and takes care of him. Hence the good Samaritan. Hence the good Samaritan. That's right. And you would think that it would have been the priest if most people would think that it would have been the priest that would have helped as a very religious person and so on. But that's not what happened. And in fact, a couple of researchers at Princeton tried to put this into practice in modern days and see whether the good Samaritan experiment would actually hold up now. And so they designed an experiment where they had a bunch of Princeton theological students in the seminary who came and they filled out a bunch of questionnaires in an office before actually conducting the real experiment where they were going to see whether the good Samaritan would actually hold. Yep. So the experimenters were Dali and Batson. And what they had, so after students, after the participants completed their questionnaire, they were moving to the other room in order to give their presentation on the good Samaritan. Now, halfway through in a hallway, they noticed a man who was, again, crouched over. His eyes were closed. He was coughing and spluttering. The question is, would they stop to help the man? Now, it turned out that how religious a person was didn't matter at all. Didn't predict whether they would help or not. The thing that predicted whether the students would help or not was whether they were in a hurry or not. So what the researchers did just before they left the room, the experimenter said, you better hurry up. You are already late. You need to give that presentation. And another group of students, they said, oh, you've got all the time in the world. Don't worry. Take your time. So the participants that were in a hurry, only 10% of them stopped to help the man. The participants who weren't in a hurry, who had all the time in the world, 66% of those stopped to help the man. 63%, I think it was. That's right. But you're exactly right. And this is a massive effect between 53% difference between these two. But it's really good. I mean, this is a whopping effect, and it doesn't get much bigger than that. And the motivating factor, the thing that actually determined whether they were going to help or not was whether they were in a hurry. But we gave another example at the beginning of this episode as well. We asked people to rate honesty. So this was an experiment by what's called Hart-Shorn in May. Now this is way back. I think it was actually 1928. And in this experiment, we asked people to do at the beginning of the episode was rate. Their job was to imagine themselves looking at a group of primary and secondary students. And they were trying to measure the honesty of these students across a bunch of different scenarios. And so this is in athletic performance. So how many laps the kids ran around a track? And then they had to report. But they actually knew how many laps they ran around the track. And whether or not they'd peek at the answers or cheat at a puzzle, at solving a puzzle. Now we asked people whether these two things are related, reporting athletic performance and whether they solved a puzzle. And again, we'll tally up these results. But the results were that around campus students and in the actual experiment was that most people thought, yes, they were indeed related, definitely related. In fact, on a scale of about one to 100, they said the relationship between those two measures would be about 60. And I suspect our students will be the same. But that didn't pan out. So Hart-Shorn and May did the original experiment. And they showed, no, it wasn't even close. In fact, the actual relationship between whether they would cheat in one circumstance or another was about 0.15. That is 15 on that rating from 0 to 100. So it was very little relationship whatsoever between these two measures of cheating. So can you make that more concrete for me? So if a person cheated on their, if a participant cheated by saying that they ran more laps around the oval than they actually did, versus whether they cheated by peaking at the answer to a puzzle, that link was not strong. Exactly. So people think that once a cheater, always a cheater. And this measure of honesty, this stable trait, this essence of honesty is kind of exuding from the person. And there was nothing there, essentially. So what did seem to predict whether they cheat or not was whether they cheat in that particular situation across multiple instances, as opposed to across situations. Now, this is really important. Now, we talked with Lee Ross. Now, he was an author of an experiment. Jennings, Ammabil, and Ross, he was the last author on this paper. And they actually looked at all sorts of measures of these correlations, these relationships. And if you have a correlation of 0.15, or even less than about 30, which seems to be the cap, the maximum relationship between these sort of personality traits, you can't detect a relationship of about 0.5 if you see it in the real world. If it's smacking you right in the face. If you see a correlation of about 0.15, a relationship of these personality characteristics, it just looks like noise. It looks like nothing that's going on whatsoever. Sometimes the person's going to cheat in one circumstance and not in another, and you just can't tell. So this is, I think, really important. This is the lesson, essentially, of the first part of today's episode, that personality characteristics, character traits, morals, the things that we normally think of as exuding from the person, how nice, or honest, or generous, or extroverted, or introverted a person is. We think that they're going to be predictive, and this is the sort of information we want to know, as you said, but they don't seem to be predictive at all. Now, this is really counterintuitive. Instead, what does seem to be predictive are things like the situation, exactly as you said, whether the person is in a hurry or not. We're going to talk a lot more about different examples of how the person and the situation can be contrasted. But we talked with Lee Ross and Richard Nisbet about this distinction between the person and the situation. And here's what they had to say.