Transcript for Innovation 2.0: The Influence You Have

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Philip Zimbardo grew up poor in New York City in the South Bronx. As he went to school and played in his neighborhood, he noticed something. There were lots of ways for kids from poor families to get into trouble.

Was some kids smarter, tougher? Lots of people might draw such conclusions, but from an early age, Phil found himself interested in another explanation. The context in which a good kid would do something bad. The situation. At school, James Romero High School also in the Bronx, Phil got close to a classmate who was interested in the same questions.

If you know anything about psychology, you will know that these teenagers went on to become two of the most influential psychologists in history. Phil became famous for conducting the Stanford Prison experiment where he turned the University's psychology department into a makeshift prison. Stanley Milgram made his mark with a study that examined the power of situations to seduce good people to do bad things. It involved asking a volunteer to administer a memory test to another person. If the answers were wrong, the volunteer was told to deliver a series of electrical shocks as punishment. The study has invited a great deal of admiration and a great deal of criticism over the years. We're going to begin today's show by taking you through this famous experiment. As you listen, pay attention to how you're responding to the scene that unfolds, what you think about the different characters and how you relate to them. Once it's done, we're going to talk with the psychologists who realized that most people overlook something in the experiment.

Today on the show, we continue our innovation 2.0 series by looking at the underappreciated power we exert on others and how this knowledge can transform our relationships, both at work and in our personal lives. Flipping the script this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Ultra Beauty. This AAPI Heritage Month, Ultra Beauty is celebrating the joy of belonging. Belonging to a community composed of intricate connections, belonging to the heritage and birthright that is beauty. Altaburi spotlights the AAPI community, passing the mic to brand founders and creators to tell their stories centered on heritage, joy and beauty. Shop AAPI owned and founded brands at AltaburiStores and Altar.com.

Stanley Milgram grew up in a world that seemed bent on destroying itself. World War II was raging in Europe in Asia, and by the time he was eight, the US was swept up in the conflict.

The fields of battle were far from Stanley's home, but as he grew older, he couldn't stop thinking about the war and its implications. Stanley was consumed by some big questions. Why did so many people willingly kill Jews in the Holocaust? Was everyone who followed Nazi orders inherently evil? Here he is in an educational film.

Phil Zimbardo remembers his classmate asking those same questions at James Monroe High School.

How do you know how you would act unless you're in the situation? Stanley's theory was that the context that people found themselves in shaped their behavior. This went for Nazis, but it went for ordinary people too. Most of us never get to find out if we will behave like Nazis, because most of us never find ourselves in situations where we're asked to behave like Nazis. By the early 1960s, as a psychology professor at Yale, Stanley decided to test this idea.

Stanley wanted to put volunteers in a situation where they would be asked to do something that was clearly wrong. Would they do it? Follow instructions? Or be orders? He came up with a scenario that was simple, ingenious, and widely controversial. an experimenter wearing a lab coat invited volunteers into a room. The volunteers were told they were part of a study about learning and memory. Some would play the role of teacher while others would play a student. What you're going to hear next is a recreation of the study using voice actors. The dialogue is drawn from a 1962 documentary that describes the experiment. Before we begin, we should know that some listeners may find the section upsetting, because it involves descriptions of someone inflicting pain on another person. Also, there are two liberties we've taken in this recreation. First, in the real version of this experiment, the student responded to the teacher's questions by silently flipping a switch. We've given voice to those actions. Second, we've imagined the internal monologues of some of the people in the experiment. Those inner voices sound different from the things they say allowed and you'll hear them both throughout the scene. So, that's a setup for the experiment. Remember, there was an experimenter and two volunteers, one playing the role of teacher and the other playing the role of student. The experimenter began by explaining the purpose of the memory test.

The experimenter told the person playing the role of student to sit in a chair. The experimenter strapped down the student's arms and attached an electrode to his wrist. The electrode the student was told was connected to a shock generator. Then the experimenter explained

The student was asked to remember the second half of the word pair. The experimenter made sure to ask.

Next, the experimental usher devolenture are playing the role of teacher into another room. He gave him a set of instructions.

Blue. Girl, right so far. Nice. I think day. Fat.

But when the person in the other room made a mistake. Fat. Was it hat? No. Wet. The volunteer playing the role of teacher would tell the learner that he was wrong. As punishment, he would administer an electric jolt.

The experimenter in the lab coat meanwhile was observing the process.

The student strapped to the chair in the other room, kept making mistakes. Each time, the experimental urged the volunteer playing the role of teacher to keep going. To administer a stronger jolt of electricity.

please continue as a shock increased so did the pain and so did the protests coming from the next room he's got a hard condition in there i'm i'm gonna go your choice please continue now i got a shock

The volunteer being asked to administer electric shocks is in a difficult position. The experimenter is urging him to continue, even as the person in the next room begs to be spared. Should he keep going or stop?

As the experiment progressed, the memory test became more demanding. Next one.

After the study reached about 330 volts, this cream's from the next room went silent.

In all, Stanley Milgram ran about 20 different iterations of this study over a span of several years. In this version, many of the volunteers playing the role of teacher showed discomfort, but continued with the experiment. More than half went all the way to 450 roles, even when the screams from the next room went silent, and the student was presumably unconscious. Why didn't the volunteer stop?

If you're familiar with the study, you already know that the student in the other room was an actor and not actually given electric shocks. The screams and cries of protest were carefully timed recordings. The only target of the experiment were the volunteers who played the role of teacher, the people who had to administer the shocks. Stanley Milgram studied generated enormous attention and controversy. Admires drew parallels between the experiment and what happened in Nazi Germany. They said, look, people are sheep. They can be easily misled by demagogues and dictators. Critics of the study said, no, those conclusions are vastly exaggerated. They question whether the volunteers actually behave the way the experiment suggested. Some critics said that many volunteers simply refuse to go along. Beyond the academic debates, the study prompted an entire sub-genre of books and movies. Even today, people find the study fascinating and they find it fascinating for one reason. How they ask, good people who know that something is wrong, go along with it. Are such people typical? Is everyone susceptible to such influence? Am I? As we listen to the details of the study, we can't help but ask, what would I do? Would I follow orders and zap the person screaming in the other room?

But Vanessa Barnes, a psychologist at Cornell University, realized there was something no one was paying attention to. Everyone was asking what was going on in the minds of the volunteers and how difficult the situation was for them.

No one was asking whether it was difficult for the experiment or wearing the lab coat to tell the volunteers to administer electric shocks. To the extent we think of the experiment read all, we might imagine someone who enjoyed putting people in difficult situations, a sort of mad scientist. Venezuela asked a deceptively simple question.

Venezuela's insight was radical. What if you looked at the experiment, not from the point of view of the students screaming in the next room, and not from the point of view of the volunteer administering the shocks, but from the point of view of the person giving the instructions?

I see, going to keep going.

What if you treated the experimenter as the object of study wants to quit?

Why do so few of us put ourselves in the shoes of the experimenter? Why don't we ask how difficult it was for him to issue those instructions? Why is it when we hear the story, we automatically put ourselves in the shoes of the volunteers, the people receiving the instructions. Vanessa realized that we all naturally gravitate to the point of view of the volunteers and not the point of view of the experimenter because we all instinctively know what it feels like to have other people put us in uncomfortable situations. We think of our bosses, our partners, our co-workers and how the effect our lives and change our moods. We think of the aggressive driver next to us or the other patrons of the restaurant who are so loud and obnoxious that they ruin our meal. refueled buffeted and pushed and pulled by those around us. The one thing we don't ask, what effect do I have on other people?

When we are intensely focused on how the world affects us and not how we affect the world, this can have profound consequences for both good and evil. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from T-Mobile. The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for business. The BGA of America is helping lower scores and elevate fan experiences with AI coaching tools and 5G connected cameras. Triple A is getting more drivers back on the road fast with location telematics. And the Las Vegas Grand Prix is powering race day operations with 5G connectivity, giving fans and experience at the speed they deserve. This is accelerating innovation with T-Mobile for business. Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. When Vanessa Barnes was a graduate student at Columbia University, she walks on a study. Every day, she would leave her apartment in the Morningside Heights neighborhood and take the subway from 116th Street to Penn Station. Once she was there, she had to do something she found very difficult.

Vanessa no longer remembers what the questionnaire was about, but she can still recall what it felt like to make such requests of total strangers.

It felt incredibly awkward, stepping into someone's space, disturbing them, asking them to stop doing what they were doing, and to do something she wanted them to do. As Vanessa asks for help and waited for an answer, her palms began to sweat. Her hearts started beating faster.

Looking back on the moment now, it reminds her of another Stanley Milgram study, one that's less famous than the obedience experiment.

Many of his students couldn't complete the task.

And so, to prove his students wrong, the famous researchers set out for the subway himself. He would do what his students couldn't. Walk up to strangers and ask them for their seats.

Why is it so hard to make such requests? Well, one obvious explanation is that we know that people will reject us, and that rejection is painful. Vanessa remembers being hugely relieved when she was done giving out questionnaires at Penn Station and could head back to her lab at Columbia University. Once there, she and her professor Frank Flynn analyzed the responses to the questionnaire. They noticed something intriguing.

Total strangers disrupted from reading that newspaper or reading a sandwich or watching the crowds of people in the busy station. They were like, sure. I'll respond to your questionnaire.

What began as a simple observation turned into something much more important and insight about our minds. Here's the chain of thought that led to the discovery. The reason Frank and Vanessa was surprised that so many people said yes is because they expected people to say no. If lots of people said yes, that meant that Vanessa's fears about rejection were misplaced. Her perception of the influence she actually had on other people was wrong. Like most of us, Vanessa had long felt that others had a big effect on her. As she gazed at the data, she realized that she had a big effect on other people. If she was blind to this power, what consequences could it have on her behavior? As researchers, the first thing that Vanessa and Frank decided to do was test if that personal experience was generalizable.

So it wasn't just Vanessa and Frank. People in general seem to have a poor assessment of their power over others. People thought that others would find it easy to turn down their requests. Vanessa connected the seeming blind spot in our thinking to Stanley Milgram's famous obedience study. She realized this might be why everyone always saw the experiment from the perspective of the volunteers asked to administer shocks, the people being influenced. No one saw the experiment from the point of view of the experimenter. The person exercising influence. We don't ask, was it hard for him to issue those crazy instructions because we don't identify with people exercising such influence? We think that kind of person must be very different from us because we don't feel we have such power.

So it's interesting when people think about the Stanley Milgram study, I think this is true for myself as well. I always imagine myself being in the role of the volunteer in the experiment, hearing the instructions from the experimenter saying, you must shock this other person. I never put myself in the shoes of the experimenter.

Vanessa went back to her experience at Penn Station. It felt difficult because she had seen the interaction only from the point of view of her own insecurities. She hadn't seen the encounters through the point of view of the people she was asking for help. From their perspective, an anxious young woman was asking for something trivial. They had to weigh whether to put aside what they were doing and help her for a few minutes. If they said no, it could make them look like jerks.

People in these encounters experience what psychologists call an egocentric bias. They are so consumed with their own perceptions that they fail to see what the interaction feels like for the other person. It's absolutely true that many of us are influenced by situations that many of us will do things because the situation prompts it. But there is another problem too and it might be a deeper problem. The people who put us in those situations It's not like they are all powerful gods. They are humans just like us. And they may not realize the extent of the power they have over us. In fact, they may be thinking, I'm sure this portion is going to turn down my request. They might assume falsely that it's easy to refuse instructions. Vanessa realized that this bias could have all sorts of important consequences.

Vanessa has now a psychologist at Cornell University. In a series of experiments, she has demonstrated how people are often oblivious to the power that they have over others. In one study, she asked volunteers mostly college students to make a simple request of others.

She walked them through how to approach someone and gave them instructions for what to do once people agreed to let them use their phones.

Before the volunteers went out to begin the study, Vanessa asked them a question. How many people would they have to ask to get three people to say yes?

What Vanessa found was similar to her own experience at Penn Station. Many more people said yes, then the volunteers expected.

Maybe you think the students had a high success rate because they were requesting something trivial. But Vanessa has also conducted a version of the study where volunteers had to ask for something more consequential. Money. For that study, she enlisted the help of the leukemia and lymphoma societies team in training program.

Vanessa asked participants how many people they would have to solicit to meet their fundraising goals, which would typically thousands of dollars. They estimated they would need to ask about 200 people to meet the goal.

Just as in Venice as phone study, her participants doubled the number of people they thought they had to ask to reach their goal. Their egocentric bias caused them to focus so much on their own anxieties that they ignored the influence they actually had over other people.

At the University of Chicago, economists John List has also studied the relationship between social pressure and charitable giving. John ran a study where experimenters knocked on the doors of some 8,000 houses in the Chicago area. They were trying to raise money for a children's hospital. John asked me to imagine the scenario from the point of view of the person receiving the request. Let's say it's a Sunday afternoon. I've just made myself something to eat. I'm relaxed.

John added a very interesting twist to the study. Some households were told ahead of time that a fundraising volunteer would come and knock on the door. Others were not told ahead of time. They just received an unexpected knock.

Put another way, people understand how they are going to feel when they put on the spot. They often will go to great lengths to avoid getting in such situations. What this also means is that some significant portion of the money that charities raise might not come from altruism.

John's research reminds Vanessa of a classic study where researchers set up two boots on a college campus. One booth was clearly asking people for something while the other did not ask for anything. What the researchers found was similar to John's donation study.

We've seen how egocentric bias can cause us to act in helpful ways to others. We learn phones to people who need them or donate money to charity. Unfortunately though, there's another side to the story.

When we come back, the sinister side of our inability to recognize our power over other people. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantan. When we interact with others, we are often intensely focused on how we feel. Our anxieties, our embarrassments, our fears. As a result, we're often blind to the effect we have on others. Their anxieties, their embarrassments, and their fears. Psychologist Vanessa Bonsis studied how such egocentric bias can keep people from asking for help. but that's not the whole story.

As Vanessa says, the volunteers were asking people to tell a trivial lie. And perhaps you could say, what's the big deal in signing a note that says someone gave you a pitch that they didn't? There are no real moral consequences. So Vanessa raised the stakes.

They still did it. And again, that finding went completely against the intuitions of the volunteers doing the asking. People significantly underestimated how much influence they possessed to get others to do something unethical.

I mean, that's actually pretty astonishing that 64% of people would say yes. I mean, I would not have predicted it would be as high a number as that.

The scenarios in which egocentric bias could play a role in our behavior seem endless. We share the answers to our homework with a friend who asks to see our work. We don't push back when a colleague suggests bending the rules on a time sheet. We agree to keep a friend's infidelity a secret, even when it makes us uncomfortable. Listening to Vanessa made me realize why there is a vast gulf between what we predict we might do and what we actually do when we are confronted with problematic behavior.

Hidden brain listener Anna Aburus, called in with a story that illustrates how egocentric bias can affect workplace behavior. She was training to be an air traffic controller, and so examples of bullying and harassing behavior all around her. She says the trainers had a clear message for trainees.

I now recalled one painful incident.

Anna says seeing such incidents made her fearful. She didn't feel she could complain since such behaviors appear to be the norm. Who could she complain to? The people who would themselves acting badly?

One time when she was directing aircraft, this was in real life not a simulation, she found herself sitting next to one of the trainers, who she says had acted abusively toward trainees. By this point, Anna was no longer a trainee. She was directing to aircraft. One was a thousand feet above the other.

She told the aircraft that was at a higher altitude to descend, directly into the path of the lower altitude aircraft.

I told Vanessa Barnes what Anna described, how the mere presence of the trainer had disrupted her to the point where she made a mistake that could have been catastrophic. Vanessa said, look, it's certainly the case that there are lots of unethical people who know they are unethical and lots of bullies who know their bullies. Maybe that was the case here. But there is a deeper problem in the workplace that we often forget. The bullies and harassers who don't know that they are bullies and harassers.

These same dynamics play out in another common occurrence in the workplace unwanted romantic attention.

In some ways, we underestimate the pressure that we exert another people. In some ways, that's the moral of the whole story here, isn't it?

Like many psychological biases, the tendency we have to downplay the influence we have on others can have far-reaching consequences. It can keep us from asking for help that would be forthcoming. It can keep us from reaching out and making friends with strangers. And it can also lead us to give into unethical demands or make improper demands of other people. I asked Vanessa how her research had prompted her to do things differently in her own life.

And what's interesting, of course, is when that happens, you're actually giving people an opportunity to do something nice. It's not just that you're imposing on them, presumably some of them are actually happy to say, you know, I was just writing to work and now I actually got to do this nice thing for this other person. I feel as little warm glow.

Psychologists once conducted a light-hearted version of Stanley Melgram's Obedian study. In the 1970s, they had research assistants Stan and the streets of New York City. their jobs to look skyward. At nothing. The question the researchers wanted to know was whether innocent passers by would also stop to look up to see what was going on. They found that when more people were in on the gag, more pedestrian stopped and looked up. I've seen video of that study many times and always found this scene funny. One to 15 people just staring off into the sky. Recently, I rewatched it, and this time, I did what Vanessa had done. I flipped the script. Instead of seeing the experiment from the point of view of the passersby, and asking myself whether I would be similarly influenced, I looked at the experiment from the point of view of the research assistants. Did they expect so many people to join them in looking at nothing? We've seen throughout this episode how all of us as individuals have great power to shape how others behave. If each of us has this hidden power, then collectively as groups, as communities, as tribes, we are going to have even more influence. How we choose to use that influence, that's up to each of us. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Audemars, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister's show, My Uncunk Hero. It's brought to you by team mobile for business. Our story comes from Bethany Renfrey.

Bethany Renfrey lives in Sutter Creek, California. When she was 27, she went back to school and earned undergraduate and master's degrees. She is now a legislative director in the California State Senate. Today's my unsung hero story was brought to you by T-Mobile for business. If you enjoy hidden brain, please take a moment and share your favorite episode with two or three people in your life. Word of math recommendations really make a huge difference in introducing new listeners to our work. We truly appreciate your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.