Lecture 15 & 16: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Nonverbal Communication & Social Influence

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (Rosenthal & Jacobsen)

• Teachers were told that a test revealed who would be a late “bloomer”

• Bloomer’s were actually chosen randomly

• Measure IQ at beginning and end of year

• Teachers think test was predicting, not causing

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Self-fulfilling Prophecy

When an originally false social belief leads to its own fulfillment

Maze-Dull & Maze-Bright Rats

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• Graduate students cared for the rats and were told which kind of rat they had 

• Grad students who thought they had a bright rat had lower fail % of completing the maze compared to the grad students who had the maze dull rat, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS NO SUCH THING as maze bright or maze dull rats

Snyder, Tanke & Berscheid

• Men led to believe they are about to talk to an attractive or unattractive woman

• Have phone conversation with woman who is unaware of the manipulation

• ‘Attractive’ women are rated by judges (not subjects) to be more friendly, likable and sociable

Non-verbal communication

• Anything but the words themselves

• Appearance

• Facial expressions

• Tone of voice

• Gestures

• Posture

• seems to drive self-fulfilling prophecies

Why is nonverbal communication important?

• Our basic mode of communicating social and emotional information to others

  • Nonverbal is older than verbal communication

  • How often do we say “I don’t like you” verbally

  • We are less able to control our nonverbal communication so it often reflects our true feelings

• We are unaware of the nonverbal dance so it is powerful

  • Nonverbal mimicry without awareness

Oliver Sack’s “The President’s Speech”

Aphasic’s patients understood President’s gestures, tone, expressions, etc. but not his words

Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior (Ambady & Rosenthal)

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• Rate how good a professor teaches based on a  number of seconds of watching a clip of them teaching 

• Even when completely distracted, they are able to judge the teacher’s ability just as well as the people who sat through the whole course 

Why do people conform in the absence of authority?

Information and norms lead to conformity

• Informational Pressure → Internalization

  • The Desire to be Right (hypothesis 5) 

  • Sherif - ambiguous stimuli, calm subjects

• Normative Pressure → Compliance (behaving like you agree, but not actually changing opinions internally just don't want to say it out loud and be different) 

  • The Desire to be Accepted

  • Asch - clear stimuli, tense subjects

  • Harmonizing

Conformity

• INFORMATION:

  • Don’t want to miss something

  • We think others know something that we don’t know

  • We look to others to define the situation 

• NORMS:

  • Don’t want to stand out or be rejected

Auto-Kinetic Effect (Sherif)

• See dot on the wall and supposed to determine how far the dot was moving on the screen 

• Even though the dot isn’t moving, we perceive that it is so we just take our best guess 

• As the rounds go on, the answers start converge with all the participants 

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• Transfer of effect from one group to the next

• Model of cultural norm transmission

• Works after norm creators are gone

Conformity (Asch)

• There was only one obvious correct answer, task was to choose which line is most similar to the standard line

• Participant goes last from the group and confederates go first and they all say the wrong answers

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• Mostly everyone conforms and says the wrong answer too

Cyberball (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams)

• You and two subjects are throwing the ball back and forth on the computer 

• Then all of a sudden they stop throwing it to you and you feel bad 
  

• Same areas where physical pain were activated when left out of the game

• When the stronger people said they felt bad and rejected, the stronger the activity in that part of the brain 

• When people experience social pain, their brain shows that it is in the same place as where physical pain occurs in the brain

How does Tylenol affect social pain?

Tylenol reduces social pain!

Medicine taken for headaches can help with a broken heart too

It diminishes the activity in the dACC, where physical pain causes activation in this area

Why do we want to be accepted?

• It may literally “hurt” to be left out

• Language - “she broke my heart”, “he hurt me”

• Mammals need social bonds to survive

• Infants can’t get food, water, and shelter

  • Need connection to mother

  • Loss of connection triggers pain so that you’ll cry to restore the connection

• Loneliness is as big a health risk as smoking

Still Face Experiment

• Mother interacts with baby and responds to the baby 

• Then mother is asked to not respond at all to the baby 

• The baby then tries everything to get the mother to respond and starts to scream and point and wave her hands 

• When she doesn’t get the emotions she wants from the mother they experience stress and start to display negative emotions

Rejection increases conformity (Williams, Cheung, & Choi)

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  • More likely to conform if you are part of the excluded group and are rejected

  • Go out of your way to get approval so more likely to conform after rejection, even if they are strangers

Compliance Techniques

• Norm of reciprocity

• Foot-in-the-door

• Low-ball

• Door-in-the-face

• These all work because we don’t realize they are happening

Reciprocity

• Car dealer gives you a cup of coffee

• Now you owe him something

• We hate to owe people, particularly strangers

• Reciprocity - someone does you a favor and you feel indebted to return the favor 

  • We don’t do it as much for people we get closed to 

• Regan

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    • If you do the favor they ask, then they will buy more raffle tickets because they feel indebted even though the cost of raffle tickets is a lot more than the cup of coffee

Foot-in-the-door

• Small request followed by larger request

• Week 1: Half of the households are asked to put a small tasteful sign (3”x 3”) in the window “DRIVE CAREFULLY”. Half get nothing.

• Week 2: All asked to put big ugly “DRIVE CAREFULLY” sign in window

• Just big request: 17% compliance

• Small, then big request: 76% compliance

  • different cause still gets 47%

Low-ball technique

• Only reveal part of the obligation at first

• Commit to great deal, then accept worse

• Here’s a new BMW for $25,000

  • Let me just make sure my manager will approve it

  • You’re thinking you’ve got this great deal

• “my manager won’t allow me to make that deal”

• “Would you participate in an experiment at 7am?”

  • 25% compliance

• “Would you participate in an experiment?” Get yes/no. Then, “you’ll be scheduled for 7am. Is that okay?”

  • 55% compliance

Low-Ball vs. Foot-in-the-Door

• Foot-in-the-door

  • Separate requests (small favor, then big)

• Low-ball

  • Different parts of a single request/purchase

    • Commit to small, then find out its bigger

• Both are done to make you feel committed in order to make you feel like a helpful person and continue to carry out what you are being asked to do

Door-in-the-face technique

• Make a big request and then scale it down.

• Show most overpriced car first

• “this one gives you more for your money”

  • response defined by first response, rather than objective value

• “Would you volunteer an hour?”

  • 17% compliance

• “Would you volunteer 10 hours?” No.

• “How about an hour, then?”

  • 50% compliance

• Latter group shows up more often (85% vs. 50%)

• Mechanisms

  • Anchoring: respond to relative difference (“its cheaper”) than absolute value (“its expensive”)

  • Reciprocity: The persuader is already compromising so you should too

Rejection increases compliance

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• People are more likely to comply with our requests if they have been rejected with all of these techniques too because want to be included

Revisiting the Five Hypotheses

• Situations are powerful (because they are invisible)

  • Self-fulfilling prophecies

  • Conformity

  • Attribution

• We don’t know other minds and our minds very well

  • Fundamental Attribution Error

  • Naïve realism

  • Implicit Stereotyping

  • Cognitive Dissonance Reduction

  • Self-serving biases

• We don’t know what we don’t know

  • Introspection

  • Affective Forecasting

• Given all that, we do pretty well

  • Circumscribed Accuracy

  • Nonverbal Decoding

• We have a need to belong (be liked) and a need to be authentic (and known)

  • Conformity

  • social rejection

  • Self-enhancement

  • Self-verification

  • Cognitive dissonance

  • Foot-in-the-Door