Normal
Human Behavior
Human behavior varies tremendously by culture. If you pick a behavioral feature or characteristic of one culture, especially from the United States, it is almost certain that there are other cultures that behave differently. There is really only one phrase or concept that can tie all of the cultures together. This concept is the Self-serving Bias.
Self-Serving
Bias:
The Self-serving Bias can be explained as our personal viewpoint of the world. The way we describe, see, or interact with people/things around us always correlates to the Self-Serving Bias. What this means is we tend to always see ourselves in the best possible light when comparing ourselves to others regarding points that we find important. For example, if you think morals are very important, you compare your morals and ethical behavior to others and you always come out ahead.
We find that other cultures tend to react very similarly to certain situations. You can describe how a culture is by talking about their Self-serving Bias. For the U.S.A., the self-serving bias is, “I’m great; you suck.” That’s the way Americans tend to use this self-serving bias. The United States is the most individualistic country in the world. When you point out something to me that disconfirms my attitudes, I’ll say I don’t believe it. Not everybody is the same in every culture but you can generally find yourself in other cultures.
If you’re depressed, you tend to see a much more objective reality than non-depressed people, which is why you’re depressed. This is missing the typical Self-serving Bias. The ‘objective’ part of that reality is that you are not always right, or the best at something.
Ways we use our self-serving
bias:
We manifest our Self-Serving Bias in several ways, including,
1) Attributions
Attributions are the ways that we describe a person’s behaviors and
their motives. We can judge
other people very quickly in comparison to us and not have to do any research
to find anything about them. There are
two types of these attributions: Situational and Dispositional.
Situational – We give credit of the happenings of an individual to their situation at the time, and we always view ourselves favorably. This means if something good happens to someone else, we think it was just the situation the person was in at the time. If something bad happens to us, it was just the situation we were in at the time (not our fault).
Dispositional – This is a character flaw we impose upon the individual. This means that if something bad happens to someone else we think, bad things happen to bad people! For example, people who beg for money on the side of the road: we think, “Get a job deadbeat” or we might hear, “If they can stand on the same corner everyday, why can’t they go across the street and apply for a job?”
Still, some people assume “They make about $600.00 a day.” Get real! If we could make that kind of money begging, we’d be out there doing it, too. The truth is, we don’t now anything about them but we’ve all got a viewpoint on them. If something good happens to us we think, good things happen to good people! “There is cosmic justice in this world and I’m good and I have good things happen to me.”
What the use of attributes allows us to do is justify doing anything to someone whom we consider beneath us. We don’t have to actively justify anything now because it’s already justified for us with attributions. We are easily swayed because our emotions kick in causing us to bring in irrelevant information to help prove our point. We don’t care about the truth; we care about how we relate to others. The only way we can see the world is through our eyes. For example, it’s hard for us to admit something such as ‘I lost my job to a better, qualified candidate.’ Instead, we will say that ‘they had to hire a woman’ or ‘it’s the good ole boy system’ but it’s never that we lost our job to a better-qualified candidate. It’s hard for us to admit, but we find ways to explain just about everything so long as it satisfies our self-serving bias.
If you notice, any time you see someone that you think is bad, the first thing you do is dehumanize them; you make some statement that makes them less human than you. We do this as a society, too. Think of Michael Jackson, because of his eccentricities, we dehumanize him (by calling him Wacko-Jacko, etc.). We think he’s weird, and therefore, we are a better person than Michael Jackson.
The same thing happens in a war. We didn’t fight the Vietnamese; we fought the gooks. We didn’t fight the Germans; we fought the krauts. We dehumanize them because that makes it easier to fire a gun and kill them. The truth is, there is not one biological marker that distinguishes anything in race, yet we create all these categories. We give them attributes because it makes the world a much easier place to deal with and makes us all feel better about ourselves. In America, we believe that nobody has the right to disagree with what we think is right. We try to justify doing anything to anybody we want to, and we do this using attributes.
2) Confirmation
Bias
Confirmation Bias is when we confirm something based on our own beliefs, instead of on fact. We do this by distorting the environment in order to make it meet with our schema/beliefs. We think, “My attitudes are correct and when you point out something to me that doesn’t confirm my attitudes, something that disconfirms my attitudes, I’m just going to say I don’t believe it.” That settles that and so therefore, I’m right. Where we conceive our attitudes is mostly biological, and not derived from fact. We have an early impact from culture that reinstates the notion that ‘we know we’re good because our attitudes are correct’ by us having to show or display this notion to those around us all the time.
3) Illusion of Control
Illusion of control represents our belief that we are so important; we can cause good luck (or favorable events) to happen whenever we want it to. For example, have you ever seen people who do rituals in Las Vegas, thinking they can control the dice or the cards? Or known someone who swears by his or her lucky socks or their lucky shirt? That’s superstition. Superstition maintains our illusion of control of things and events around us.
4) Illusory Correlations
Our brain is designed to see cause and effect. Illusory Correlation is seeing things in the world, and assigning cause and effect to those things. For example, many people are sure that abuse causes criminal behavior. In fact, this is not true. Many criminals were abused, many were not, and many non-criminals were abused, and are productive citizens. When you see 2 events happen and you think you can strongly say that event A caused event B (without actual fact), you are demonstrating illusory correlation.
Effort
Justification
You can use other peoples’ self-serving bias to your advantage. You can do this by envoking their Effort Justification. Get someone to do you a favor. If you do someone a favor, you make him or her think, “I’m good, my time is valuable, and I’m helping them? Well, they must be better than the rest.” So, what is the best thing you can do to get your boss to really like you? Get them to do you a favor. Effort Justification is when a person convinces himself that all their effort, or the beneficiary of their effort is well worth it because he/it is better than any other.
Other
Facets of Human Behavior:
Solomon
Asch Study:
This study shows how group pressure can cause you to change your perceptions.
You go to take a study and there are 5 other people there who are secretly part of the experiment. An experimenter comes in and says you’re going to draw to see where you sit at the table. You draw number 5 so you sit at number 5. The experimenter says that this is a study on perception. He’s going to show you cards with lines on them, one will be a target, and then you’ll have 3 choices: A, B, or C and you’ll choose which one of those lines is closest to the target. The 1st 4 answers are all B. On the 5th card the 5 other people whom are ‘in’ on the experiment are choosing C, so what do you do? Half the time you said C (against your better judgment). That is called Conformity. At the end of the experiment the unsuspecting people were asked why they chose “C” and over half the time they said, “Because that was the correct answer.”
This means that you conform to these people you don’t even know, you’ve never seen before & you’ll probably never see again. That group put enough pressure on the person to fundamentally change how they saw the environment. It was not only conformity, but it also changed the person’s entire perception of what was going on. Another interesting thing about conformity is that the cuter the person, the more people will conform to them.
This study strongly shows us that a person or a group of people can change another person’s perception of their environment.
Altruism:
Altruism is selflessness, or a willingness to put others before yourself. Parents say, “I’m going to teach my kid to be respectful” or “teach them to share” when they themselves are not respectful and don’t share with others.
Kitty Genovese – This event took place in Manhattan. Kitty Genovese was walking home at night, got under a streetlight and was mugged and stabbed several times. He got the purse and ran away. She yells for help. He came back 20 minutes later and stabbed her until she died. Although she cried out for help, no one helped her, even as she was stabbed to death. It was a couple of hours later before a routine patrol found her body. There were about 150 people who witnessed the event but no one helped her because they said that they thought someone else would.
This happens in every major city in the U.S. People will not help when there are a large number of people around because they think others will help. In a smaller crowd, you are much more likely to get help. Although, if you are male, it is more likely you will not get help at all. People don’t help males.
This case showed us a lot about the altruism of human
beings. By and large, we are not that altruistic.
Changing Your Perceptions:
Making you behave
differently changes your perceptions.
Patty Hearst – She was a sophomore at the University of Berkeley in California. Daddy was William Randolph Hearst. He was the ‘Bill Gates’ of the 1970’s and was filthy rich. He owned most of the newspapers in the U.S.A. at that time. One day, Patty was walking home from school and was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They took her to a house in Southern California, stripped her naked, and put her in a closet. For her to get out of the closet for anything, she had to make statements that were consistent with the SLA’s beliefs. Humans need to interact with other humans, so it wasn’t long before she was making all kinds of statements. In addition, she was raped every day. It took less than a week before she started to enjoy it. It was no longer rape or something that she found distasteful, it was something she relished because it gave her human contact.
She was gone about 30 days when a tape comes to some radio station with Patty talking; denouncing her capitalist pig of a father and saying how he is some type of scum back and that he should sell all his assets and give his money away to the poor.
On the 2nd month after her kidnapping, they got another tape and Patty is saying that she is disgusted with her capitalistic pig of a father so much that she changed her name to Tanya, with no last name, stating that she’s a citizen of the world…. Within 6 months, she helps the SLA rob a bank with an AK47.
Finally, the FBI found out where she was living. She was captured and tried for bank robbery. Her defense was that she had been brain washed, but she got sent to jail anyway. So, was she brain washed? Yes, she was.
If you put a person into a situation that they desperately want to get out of, and the only way to get out of it is to make statements consistent with somebody else’s beliefs, most people will make the statements. If you keep saying statements that are totally against what you believe, you will find that you start questioning your own beliefs very quickly, unless you fight it.
Just making you do something, changing the way you behave, will completely change how you perceive everything.
Hearst showed us how easy it is to be brainwashed and change your behavior. It worked like that in Korea too, when our POW’s were brain washed. That was the process they described. If we keep hearing something over and over, we start believing it to be true; especially if it comes from a source that you think is credible, and you don’t refute it.
(Patty’s father was a huge republican donor. Even so, neither Nixon nor Ford intervened for Patty. Jimmy Carter got her out on parole. She was a huge republican; Reagan and Bush (#1) didn’t do anything for her. Bill Clinton (Dem) pardoned her. Here she was, a fundraiser for the Republican Party, and the Democrats get her out and pardon her.)
Cognitive Dissonance:
Cognitive
dissonance means if a person has attitudes and behaviors that are in direct
conflict with each other, they will change one or the other (either the
attitude or the behavior).
Festinger – This was an experiment that took place in 1958 or 1959 at Stanford University. In this experiment, the ‘human rat’ was employed (in the form of Intro to Psychology students).
You’re a student. You go into this room for the experiment and strike up a conversation with someone already there. The person tells you how fun and exciting the study was, so you get all excited about doing the study. They come and get you, and sit you in front of these knobs. They have you turn the knobs for 45 minutes. You discover the study is boring. At the end, they tell you that the person in the lobby was a plant, and was a very important part of the study. They tell you that the person had to leave on a family emergency, and ask if you would like to take their place by trying to convince the next person coming in for the experiment that this experiment was great. They would offer you something as compensation if you would just agree to do it. They would either offer you an ‘atta-boy’, $1, or $20. They videotaped you and how good of a job you did, and they asked you to rate how much you enjoyed the task.
One group only slightly disliked it; another group definitely disliked it; and the other group liked it. So which one of those groups is which?
-The ones who slightly disliked it got the ‘atta-boy’.
-The ones who didn’t like it at all got the $20.
-The ones who liked it got the $1.
It is an example of Cognitive Dissonance.
You think, “I didn’t enjoy this task very much and you’re going to give me $20? This task must be a lot less enjoyable than I thought if you’re giving me so much money for it!”
Or,
“You’re going to give me one measly dollar? I must have missed something; this must have been more fun than I thought.”
Once we point out the conflict between our behavior and attitudes, something has to change. Until we point that out, we could have behaviors and attitudes that are in conflict, or 2 attitudes that are in conflict, very easily.
That’s what they
did with the money groups. The people who got the $20, and the people who got
the $1 and enjoyed the task, even gave the money back when asked. This means
that a lot of the time, our attitude doesn’t predict what our behavior will
be.
For example, in a study done on jury decisions, a case on sexual harassment had the closing arguments presented 2 different ways: One version was just as it was, but the second version had one sentence added at the end. The sentence was, “Examine your beliefs about sexual harassment”. The award the jurors that didn’t hear the sentence gave was something like $20,000. The award the jurors that did hear it gave something like 3 million. It made a huge difference.
We seem to think that our attitudes dominate us and they don’t. If you say that you are concerned about the environment, it’s 50/50 as to whether you recycle. A strange thing about attitudes is that we attribute attitudes to people we don’t even know. For example, if you see someone really hot, you just know the two of you will really get along, and you’ll attribute a lot of the things that you desire in a person to them.
·Myth: Attitudes generally lead to our behavior.
·Truth: Behavior
affects attitudes and perceptions.
·Behavior that is contrary to your attitude will change your attitude. The more you hear things, the truer they get within your mind/ schema.
Stanley
Milgram:
This was a famous study done in the early 1960's at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. You see an ad in the paper for a study that pays $15/hour to test a new way of people learning. You walk in, and there’s an older man there. You start talking and find out that he’s a grandfather who had a heart attack about 3 months ago, but is doing fine now. He really loves his grandkids and talks a lot about them. The experimenter comes in and flips a coin to see who will be a ‘learner’ and who will be a ‘teacher’. Gramps wins and he chooses to be a learner. You go into one room where they’re putting little electrodes on gramps. Then you go in another room where you sit in front of a box that has switches, with each switch being labeled stating a number of volts, and a description of the effect of that many volts. 15 volts is ‘mild’ and 485 volts is ‘tissue damage’.
Your task is to read a list of items/questions that gramps will have to answer. If he gets the answer wrong, you are to shock him with the 15 volts; the next wrong answer, 30 volts, and so on. Gramps chooses the wrong answer, so you zap him. He continues to pick the wrong answers, and you continue to zap him. You’re up to about 260 volts and all of the sudden gramps says he doesn’t want to do it anymore because it hurts, and he’s having a heart attack. Then he doesn’t say anything else. The experimenter (dressed very formally in doctor’s attire) tells you to go on and when Gramps doesn’t say anything, you are told to continue shocking him anyway.
2/3 of the
‘teachers’ went all the way up to 485 volts (the highest possible amount).
All these ‘teachers’ told the experimenter that if Gramps is dead, the experimenter was responsible. The other interesting thing was that the more people dehumanized Gramps and made comments about his lack of intelligence, the more likely they would go all the way with the shock treatments. This study has been done in many different ways and with many different variables. One variable was that they would make the ‘teacher’ a female and the ‘learner’ a male, and have him make a pass at her before the experiment. Females then had no problem shocking the hell outta him, after all, he was a jerk. We learned that we tend to do what a legitimate authority figure tells us to do. What this tells us is that, once there is someone else to take responsibility, you can do a lot of things to a lot of people. This is especially true if you demean the other person; the more you demean someone the more you damage that person. When we demean someone, we make him or her ‘non-human’.
Phil Zimbardo:
Phil Zimbardo conducted an experiment using normal people. He decided to run a mock prison in the basement of a psychology department at Stanford University. He advertised for students to come in and be paid $15/day to be subjects in this experiment for 2 weeks. He got 8,000 applications, but went through and screened all of them. He came up with 42 of the most psychologically healthy and the most compassionate students that he can find. He brings the participants in and has them draw straws: 6 are ‘prisoners’ and the remaining 36 are the ‘prison guards’. All the participants go through an orientation where their rights are explained, the rules are explained, limitations on what guards could do were explained; everything was explained, the experiment was to start at a later date. One of the rules was that if someone wanted to leave, all they had to do was say, “Kings X, I’m out of here.”
The 6 chosen as ‘prisoners’ were sitting at home when the Palo Alto police department comes roaring up, arrests them, cuffs them, puts them in the squad car, takes them to the Palo Alto Police Department, mug shots them, finger prints them, and takes them to the basement of the mock prison at Stanford. Once there, the ‘prisoners’ got a little linen cap and house slippers to wear, and were put into a linen smock with a number on it.
Two hours into the experiment, one prisoner says, “I want out of here!” and the guards say, “no! you’re staying here.” At that point the ‘guards’ decided that all of the ‘prisoner’ rights became a privilege that had to be earned. The ‘prisoners’ had to earn the privilege to go to the bathroom; the guards hit several of the inmates. The ‘guards’ convinced Phil Zimbardo that the ‘prisoners’ were plotting an escape. They then took the ‘prisoners’ to the 7th floor of the Psychology building where they locked the door so the ‘prisoners’ couldn’t escape. Someone pointed out to Phil Zimbardo that the ‘prisoners’ could leave anytime they wanted to, so why would they try to escape? So they took them back down to the basement. The guards started calling roll call (Z. told them not to do that, but they did it anyway) Every 3 hours, the ‘guards’ decided to do a head count. Instead of just going around and looking to see if everyone was there (after all there were only 6 ‘prisoners’), the ‘guards’ held a roll call and required the ‘prisoners’ to answer to their number. By day 2, Phil Zimbardo called an end to the experiment. It had gotten so violent that he was afraid that someone was going to be hurt very badly.
These were 42 of the most psychologically healthy, compassionate students at Stanford University in the early 1970’s. So why did things turn so violent? One reason was that the ‘prisoners’ did not have names, only numbers, they were dehumanized. Six months after the study was completed, 2 ex-prisoners beat up one of the former guards and the study was later under investigation.
What Phil Zimbardo’s experiment showed us first is; we do have a dark side. What it also shows us is that when you’re given a role to play, you will play it. You will meet the expectations given to you for your job. The interesting thing about this is, just as adults do, kids respond better to expectations that are given to them subtlety and they respond very well to these expectations. Children are very quick at pointing out, looking at, and seeing, inconsistencies in what you say and what you do. They figure out very quickly what is important. If you tell them that school is important, but you don’t help them with their homework, or go to PTA meetings, they catch on very quickly.
Jane Elliott:
This was a study conducted in the mid 1960's by a 2nd grade teacher. She used her classroom and students to conduct the experiment. She talks to the class about what it must feel like to be discriminated against. She asked her students to participate in an experiment. They agreed. She divided the class into 2 groups: brown-eyes and blue-eyes. She tells them that the blue-eyed kids are smarter and faster then the brown-eyed kids. She tells them that the blue-eyes get 5 extra minutes at recess. Brown-eyes have to drink out of paper cups and are not to use the water fountain the regular way. Within 15 minutes, she had the blue-eyed kids convinced that they were better than the brown-eyes. She then hands out a special collar the brown-eyes must wear to identify them from a distance, and says that they can’t play with the blue-eyed kids. On this day, the brown-eyed kids took longer to finish tasks and got into fights with the blue-eyed kids. The blue-eyed kids called the brown-eyed kids names.
The next day she reversed it; she told them that she had lied the day before and that the brown-eyed people were the better ones and the smarter ones. She set new rules and let the brown-eyed kids put their collars on the blue-eyed kids. The same thing happened with the Brown eyed kids as with the blue-eyes the previous day. The brown-eyes thought they were better, the blue-eyes performed poorly, etc. What was also interesting was that she had several measures of academic performance that she kept both before and after this exercise.
Here’s an example of what she found: When you were wearing a collar your performance went way down, and when you weren’t wearing the collar, your performance went way up. In 15 minutes a child will start to demean the other group/person. (It takes an adult only 10 minutes to start to demean the other group/person.) When we categorize, we assign values to the categories. Assigned values make it easier to dehumanize a category of people. This shows us how we go about establishing a dark side. It is very easy to dehumanize. All it takes is pointing out something negative, and people will start labeling people negatively. These findings got a guy named Claude Steel started thinking.
Claude Steel:
This was a study done at the University of Michigan using students’ SAT scores. Claude Steel decided to look at how instructions on the SAT’s might affect a student’s performance on the test.
We’ve always heard that men are better at math than women, and women are better at verbal skills than men (False, by the way). Well, after 7 years of doing study after study, Claude found that when you bubble in the F (female) on the SAT, the math scores went down by about 100 points, and when you bubble in the M (male), the verbal scores went down by about 100 points. He almost got fired for lack of publication with this study because he was afraid to publish this data, although he kept doing study after study. Finally, he had to admit that the data was right and he published it. What finally caused him to publish his findings was this: He and a friend went to Berkeley and got graduate students in math, and graduate students in English. They did these studies using the GRE, and got the same results. The females working on their PhD’s in math, once they bubbled in the F, their math scores went down. The men working on their PhD’s in English, when they bubbled in the M, their verbal skills went down.
This phenomenon is called a Stereotypical threat. This means, because I bubble in the gender, I am now being made aware of my gender. I realize that I’m being compared to the opposite sex; I’ll live up to the stereotype. If you don’t bubble in anything, surprisingly, everyone scores higher. It is because you hear all of these stereotypes all the time.
Stereotypical Threat means that once you stereotype a group of people, an individual in that group tends to live up to the expectations given to the group.
It is because we are
affected by subtleties very greatly.
Framing effect is how you present something or its appearance.
We are not information processors. Subtleties are what really influence us.
Group Think Is a phenomenon that occurs when you and
some group decide that you are right and you begin to feel that you are so
right that anything you do to get your way is justified. For example, in the abortion debate, both
sides are so convinced that they are right that they overlook the large
middle ground, which could be compromised on, like the right to choose. So what happens? Sometimes violence and murder on the part of
the pro-life side. That’s extreme Group
Think: Murder is wrong, these people are murdering unborn children, and
therefore, I am justified in murdering them.
Group
Think doesn’t have to make sense.
We’ve had 2 big examples of Group Think in our government:
Those folks were so convinced that Nixon had to be re-elected that anything they did was justified. Nixon’s team basically rigged all the Democratic primaries so they could get the one opponent they wanted to govern. They broke all kinds of campaign election laws, campaign finance laws, performed breaking and entering, and attempted murder in some cases; anything goes because our guy has to win. They then had all this ‘hush money’ floating around to bribe people and get things done, and they still wanted to bug the Democratic Party Headquarters. McGovern didn’t have a chance.
Reagan knew about Iran Contra, everyone in the Oval Office knew. Congress passed a law that said ‘you cannot aid anybody in Latin America in the fight between the Contras and the Sandinistas’. Oliver North disagreed; he felt that he couldn’t obey this law. He said it was wrong and that we had to help the Contras because the Sandinistas were communists. This was a colonel in the Marine Corp working in the National Securities Advisors Department, saying that he couldn’t follow a law! That’s pretty scary.
North had to figure out how to get money for guns, and how to get the guns to the Contras. Well, it turns out that some militant groups in Iran were kidnapping Americans. President Reagan said that we would ‘not deal with terrorists’. North took advantage of this. He went and cut deals with the Iranians who were kidnapping Americans; he negotiated with terrorists. Realistically what he did was he got these people released, gave the Iranians some money, got some arms in return, and had the arms shipped to the Contras. That’s all fine and good but how did he keep the arms coming? He essentially cut a deal with the Iranians. In this deal, Iranians would kidnap Americans, North would then pay the Iranians money to “free” the Americans, and get arms in exchange, from the Iranians, to send to the Contras. That’s crazy! We’re going to be terrorists and kidnap our citizens? All North did was keep arguing with the terrorists over how many people they were going to kidnap, because that depended on how many guns the Contras needed.
The Hamas and some of those groups in the Middle East are convinced that we are a terrorist nation that’s trying to destroy their culture. Their Group Think is just as bad as the Israelis, thinking that the Palestinians are out to destroy them. Even Osama Bin Laden’s group is firmly convinced that we are trying to smash their culture, just as we are firmly convinced that they are terrorists: that’s Group Think.
·When we are in a group, we think others are lazy and we are the hard working ones.
·People can look at the same situation and draw radically different conclusions from it.
·You know it is Group Think when people will not even listen
to the arguments of the other side.
Advertising usually uses one of two methods, the Central Route or the Peripheral Route. These methods are geared toward attitude change.
Central
Route:
You get known experts to say things like, “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest.”
Peripheral
Route:
You associate cues along with your product. I.e., you show shapely models walking around in Guess jeans and the implication is that you will look good in them, too.
Which one is more effective? Peripheral Route is the best.
The most successful ad campaign was by Miller Brewing Company, who came out with Miller Lite Beer. Their problem was that about 90% of beer was sold to males between the ages of 18-25. Females would like it but they don’t consume enough beer. So, they faced the problem of how to get males to buy their product. What they did was hire jocks for their commercials. The ad would have the jocks at a bar. The first jock would say, “I really like this Miller Lite. I drink it because it’s less filling.” The second jock would say, “I drink it because it tastes great.” Then they’d get into a shouting match on whether it tastes great or is less filling. It took about 3-4 weeks until everyone was drinking Miller Lite. Miller Lite made it okay for a male to drink the ‘wimp beer’.
When Miller Lite came on the market, the best selling beer worldwide was Schlitz. Within 7 years, Schlitz was bankrupt and bought-out by a regional brewer in Ohio, whom changed the formula of the beer. All of that occured because of Miller Lite's ad.
The second most successful campaign was the ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ ad campaign. Somebody noticed that males between the ages of 18-25 were the biggest litterbugs. Texas started this campaign to clean up the environment by making it masculine not to litter. They got jocks to say, “Don’t mess with Texas!” It has cleaned up the litter on Texas highways by about 75%. Texas knew their audience, and they knew what they had to do to persuade them.
There has been 1 public service announcement that has really worked. The government had Brooke Shields come on TV and say that she would ‘never kiss a male who smokes’. Male smoking rates shot down dramatically. It worked so well, the cigarette companies went to the government pleading that if the government pulled that ad, they would put stronger warning labels on their packages; but who reads those things.
They pulled the ad and smoking rates went back up.
If you screw up, be the first one to tell your boss! By the time the other person gets in there to tell your boss, the problem is going to be portrayed to him/her a lot worse than what it truly is. Here is a good example of what that is like:
In the 1988 Presidential Campaign with H.W Bush v. Dukakis, Dukakis had a 30-point lead in the polls. Bush came on TV and said that you cannot elect Dukakis because he’s a Liberal (The definition of a Liberal is someone who’s willing to try new ways). When Bush came out and said this, Dukakis dropped 20 points in the polls. Then Bush started running these ads of criminals going through a prison, and turning around and coming back out; because when Dukakis was Governor, prison got so crowded that they were paroling prisoners quicker so that there would be more room for prisoners. One guy who had been paroled, Willy Anderson, got out and killed somebody. It didn’t matter that the Republican Parole board had paroled him. Dukakis dropped another 20 points in the polls. Dukakis finally came up towards the end and said, “Yes, I’m a Liberal in the mold of FDR” but he had kept quiet about it already for 3 weeks. When Dukakis made that statement he actually rose 15 points in the polls. If Dukakis had come out at the very beginning with that statement, Bush’s ads wouldn’t have hurt him nearly as much.
Let’s contrast that with Bush v. Clinton. In 1992, we had Bush v. Clinton. Bush was behind in the polls and said that you can’t elect Clinton because he’s a liberal. Clinton goes up in the polls. Why? Close your eyes and picture a stereotypical person from Arkansas: overalls, straw coming out of their mouth, held together by the 2 teeth they have left. You just can’t say there’s a liberal in Arkansas; it doesn’t fit the stereotype. Clinton said, “I’m much more liberal than him; I believe people are good!” and he goes up in the polls. So, even if something is half true, take responsibility for it because people really respect that. Don’t try to defend yourself or turn it away, even if it’s a half truth; take responsibility for it.
Spin is a person’s ability to put a positive light on something negative. Say you lost a job one place, and someone wants to ask you about it in another job interview. You had better be ready to tell the interviewer a version that sounds good. Something such as, “I was misguided and too immature. I did things that were wrong but I’ve learned from my mistakes.” Take a situation and make it look best for you.
Sales/Persuasion Behaviors:
Salespeople use this technique often. They get you to concede some minor point in the beginning, and that makes it easier for you to concede more points later on down the line. For example, when they are giving you their sales pitch on the phone, they say, “Now doesn’t that sound like a great plan” or “isn’t that a great idea.” Once you say yes, you’re that much closer to saying yes about their product.
This technique can also be a good model for procrastination: you have something big you want to do, but you keep doing little things instead. For example, “before I read, I’d better dust the house; before I do my homework, I’d better do the dishes.” Soon you discover it’s too late to do the reading or the homework.
This is when you ask for something outlandish and then accept a lot less, making it sound like a bargain to the other person. For example, you ask your Dad for $500; he says he only has $10 so you say, OK. People use this technique in contract negotiations: one side high balls and the other side low balls, and then the two work it out somewhere in the middle. This is also used in courtrooms when a lawyer asks for $50 Million in punitive damages and the jury returns a verdict giving ‘only’ $10 million.
This technique works on the notion that, if I give you something, you’ll expect to have to return the favor. A company will send you something, such as free address labels, in support of a certain group, and they include a donation envelope for you to ‘return the favor’.
This is what a lot of car salesmen use and mortgage companies use this all the time. This is when they say that if you buy this model, they’ll throw something in for free. Mortgage companies will say, “No points, no loan or origination fee”. The truth is, these fees are rolled into the loan. That’s the only way the mortgage company makes money.
You think you’re getting something for free but you’re not.
…And that’s Not All
This is where some company is
selling something and they say, “You buy these 36 knives for $19.99…and that’s
not all!” Then they tell you what else
they will ‘throw in’ for that unbelievable price. You don’t really get anything free. If it sounds too good to be true; it is.
First Impressions
First impressions are very important to humans. If you remind me of someone I hate, everything you say will be wrong. If you remind me of someone I like, everything you say will be positive. We are that subtle of a system. Appearance is greatly important. Attractive people don’t get convicted nearly as often as unattractive people do. When attractive people do get convicted, they don’t get as harsh a sentence as unattractive people. You will listen much more intently to someone who is attractive than to someone who is not. So, you need to find a way to accent your positives. If I get a good impression of you, I tend to give you what’s called a Halo Effect.
Halo Effect
If you come in for a job interview and I give you the Halo
Effect, I’ll hear much more positive responses from you. If you come in and I don’t give you the Halo
Effect, I hear much more negative responses from you. The responses could be identical, but because
the messenger is more important than the message, those first impressions
are crucial.
Mate selection
We tend to choose a person with similar major attitudes as ourselves. If you are a good Southern Baptist, you cannot marry an Atheist, because you cannot stand the challenge of that major attitude difference. If a person’s attitude contradicts yours, you think that person is an idiot, and you do not find them attractive.
Propinquity (nearness)
This is the situation that, if you stay around somebody for a while, he/she will start to become more attractive to you. This happens because you get to know their face better, and you may find something you like in their personality. On the contrary, if they are attractive to you to begin with, they will become less attractive to you.
Decisions based on issues
There were 2 things that swayed the election of Bush v. Clinton, ruining Bush’s chances of re-election:
1) Bush went into a store and didn’t know what a scanner was.
2) There was a forum in North Carolina where a woman asked what the price of a half-gallon of milk was. Bush said he didn’t know. Clinton said that, at a certain store in Little Rock, it was X amount of dollars. People felt that Bush had lost touch with the average American.
We
want people to be like us.
This is when we place attributions on a category of people in order to theorize the reason they do something, or behave in such a way. I.e., with the issue of welfare, we often hear that ‘low-income people have babies just to get an extra welfare check’. This is really not true. The average welfare check per child is about $49 per month (surely not worth the extra expense!). But, this is how we make decisions. We stick to what we think is right. We use it so that we can justify cutting off welfare. So, why would low-income women have a lot of kids? Because of a concept called the Social Clock.
The Social Clock is when society has decided it’s time for you to do something. The lower your socioeconomic status, the earlier you’re ‘supposed’ to do things. People in low socioeconomic status tend to find being old around age 55. They tell women, ‘you have babies early and have them often’. High socioeconomic status says you have very few babies and have them later in life. Middle-class tells a woman that sometime in her early to mid 20’s, she should be getting married. The middle-class woman may hear things like, “Is there anyone special?” or “Are you making plans?” She may begin to notice that all her friends are getting married, and that married couples don’t hang out with single people. So she starts to feel a little bit of pressure to get married, and she weds. Once she’s married, they start putting pressure on her to have children and her friends start having babies. Married couples with babies don’t hang out with childless couples, so she starts having babies.
Society puts pressure on you when they expect you to do things. By your mid 20s, you’re expected to be in a career. You know this because when you’re about 18, people start asking you what you’re going to do when you grow up, or what your major is. If you’re Middle-class and you don’t have babies by the time you’re 30, people start asking you why not.