Nonverbal Behavior and Social Influence

Reminders

  • Final Exam: Wednesday, June 4th, from 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM.
    • CAE students need to take the exam with them.
    • Hypotheses and basic concepts such as subjective construal and naïve realism still apply.
  • Review Session: Monday during class.
  • Office Hours: Friday, May 30th, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM with Dr. Smurda via Zoom.
  • Research Participation: Must be completed by June 5th.
  • Extra Credit: Posted by June 12th on Bruinlearn; requires 70% participation to get poll credit, with no exceptions.

Clever Hans (1907)

  • A case study illustrating the importance of controlled experimentation and the potential for unintentional cuing.

Black Wednesday (1932)

  • Last National Bank: An event illustrating the power of social perception and its impact on reality.
  • Robert Merton: "If men define a situation as real, they are real in their consequences."

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies & Nonverbal Communication

  • Core concepts in social psychology, demonstrating how expectations can influence behavior and outcomes.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  • Rosenthal & Jacobsen (1966):
    • Teachers were told that a test revealed which students would be late "bloomers."
    • Bloomers were actually chosen randomly.
    • IQ was measured at the beginning and end of the year.
  • The study demonstrated that teacher expectations could unintentionally influence student performance.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

  • Definition: When an originally false social belief leads to its own fulfillment.
  • Process:
    • Step 1: Perceiver's expectations (initially incorrect).
    • Step 2: Perceiver's behavior toward the target.
    • Step 3: Target's behavior toward the perceiver.

Maze-Dull & Maze-Bright Rats

  • Rosenthal & Fode (1963):
    • Demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy in animal studies.
    • Researchers told students that they had either "maze-bright" or "maze-dull" rats; in reality, the rats were randomly assigned.
    • The students' expectations affected the rats' performance.

Snyder, Tanke & Berscheid (1977)

  • Men were led to believe they were about to talk to an attractive or unattractive woman.
  • They had a phone conversation with a woman who was unaware of the manipulation.
  • 'Attractive' women were rated by judges (not subjects) to be more friendly, likable, and sociable.
  • This study showed how expectations about attractiveness can influence behavior in social interactions.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  • Driven by nonverbal communication (IQ, rats, implicit prejudice).
  • Nonverbal communication is anything but the words themselves.
  • Edward Sapir: "We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all."

What is Nonverbal Communication?

  • Anything but the words themselves:
    • Appearance
    • Facial expressions
    • Tone of voice
    • Gestures
    • Posture

Why is Nonverbal Communication Important?

  • Our basic mode of communicating social and emotional information to others.
    • Nonverbal communication is older than verbal communication.
    • We are less able to control our nonverbal communication, so it often reflects our true feelings.
  • The pain of withheld nonverbals.
  • We are unaware of the nonverbal dance, so it is powerful.
  • Nonverbal mimicry without awareness.

Oliver Sack’s “The President’s Speech”

  • Aphasic patients understood the President’s gestures, tone, expressions, etc., but not his words.
  • Illustrates the importance of nonverbal cues in communication and understanding.

Are We Accurate?

  • Yes - surprisingly so.
  • Ambady & Rosenthal (1993): Sometimes you can read a book by its cover; thin slices of behavior can be informative.
  • Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior: Ambady & Rosenthal (1992)
    • Correlation with course evaluations using different time intervals (30 seconds, 6 seconds).
    • Even with limited information, people can make surprisingly accurate judgments.

Social Influence

  • Lecture 17

Why Do People Conform in the Absence of Authority?

  • Illustrative examples: Candid Camera clip, Meet the Lemmings!

Conformity

  • INFORMATION: Don’t want to miss something.
  • NORMS: Face the Rear - Candid Camera. Don’t want to stand out or be rejected.

Conformity

  • Sherif (1936):
    • Auto-Kinetic Effect: Participants were placed in a dark room and asked to estimate the movement of a stationary point of light. People's judgments converged over time, even though the light was not actually moving.

Auto-Kinetic Effect

  • Sherif (1936):
    • Transfer of effect from one group to the next.
    • Model of cultural norm transmission.
    • Works after norm creators are gone.

Conformity

  • Asch (1951):
    • Participants were asked to judge which of three comparison lines matched a standard line. Confederates in the group gave incorrect answers, and participants often conformed to the majority opinion, even when it was clearly wrong.

Asch's Conformity (1951)

  • Demonstrated the power of social pressure to influence conformity, even when the correct answer is obvious.

Conformity

  • Asch (1951):
    • 75% conform at least once in the study.
  • Showed a significant percentage of individuals conformed to the incorrect unanimous majority at least once.

Why Do People Conform?

  • Informational Pressure: Internalization
    • The Desire to be Right
    • Sherif - ambiguous stimuli, calm subjects
  • Normative Pressure: Compliance
    • The Desire to be Accepted
    • Asch - clear stimuli, tense subjects
    • Harmonizing?
    • Why do we care about being accepted?

Manipulating Social Rejection

  • Cyberball: Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003
    • Participants play a virtual ball-tossing game and are either included or excluded by the other players.

Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex

  • Brain region associated with the distress of social exclusion.

Tylenol Reduces Social Pain!

  • Studies suggest that acetaminophen can reduce the neural activity associated with social pain.

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

  • A demonstration of the importance of social interaction and responsiveness in early development.
  • Mothers are asked to maintain a still, unresponsive face while interacting with their infants, leading to distress and withdrawal behaviors in the infants.

World Religions & Social Media Platforms

  • Comparison of the number of followers or adherents to major world religions and users of social media platforms.
  • Illustrates the scale and influence of social networks in the modern world.

Rejection Increases Conformity

  • Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000:
    • Subjects who were excluded in Cyberball were more likely to conform on subsequent tasks.

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.
  • Bob Cialdini’s book “Influence” is a great resource for more information on this topic. -Noah Goldstein

Reciprocity

  • Car dealer gives you a cup of coffee.
  • Now you owe him something.
  • We hate to owe people, particularly strangers.

Reciprocity

  • Regan, 1971, JESP:
    • Participants who received a favor (a Coke) were more likely to purchase raffle tickets from the person who gave them the favor.

Foot-in-the-Door

  • Small request followed by a 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 are asked to put big ugly “DRIVE CAREFULLY” sign in the window.

Foot-in-the-Door

  • Small request followed by a larger request.
  • 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 a great deal, then accept worse.
  • Example: "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."
  • Then: “My manager won’t allow me to make that deal.”

Low-Ball Technique

  • “Would you participate in an experiment at 7 am?” – 25% compliance
  • “Would you participate in an experiment?” Get yes/no. Then, “you’ll be scheduled for 7 am. 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

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 the first response, rather than objective value.

Door-in-the-Face Technique

  • “Would you volunteer an hour?” – 17% compliance
  • “Would you volunteer 10 hours?” No. “How about an hour, then?” – 50% compliance
  • The latter group shows up more often (85% vs. 50%).

Door-in-the-Face Technique

  • Mechanisms
    • Anchoring: respond to a relative difference (“it’s cheaper”) than absolute value (“it’s expensive”)
    • Reciprocity: The persuader is already compromising so you should too
      Rejection Increases Compliance
      Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000:
      Subjects who were ostracized in a previous task showed higher compliance rates in subsequent donation requests, particularly with the door-in-the-face technique.

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

Dr. Smurda’s Thoughts for 135

  • “Have the courage of your convictions” (Rutherford B. Hayes, 1890)
    • That’s the easy thing to do
  • “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” (Nietzsche, Human, All too human, 1878)
  • Having the courage to challenge your own conviction is what’s hard