Science: Human Behavior

Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam was online Monday, Sept. 18 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his weekly series of stories about the sociology and psychology behind news events.

In today's story he explores ideas related to political psychology and persuasion in the article: In Politics, Aim for the Heart, Not the Head and last week he wrote about how people live and die in groups during disasters .

The transcript follows.

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Shankar Vedantam: Welcome everyone to the science online chat. We will be talking about my recent series of Monday articles on Page Two that explore questions of human behavior related to news events. Today's article looked at political psychology and persuasion, and why Adrian Fenty walked away with the Democratic primary for mayor in Washington. Last Monday, on Sept 11, I looked at some very interesting research that shows that in disasters, people are greatly influenced by those around them. People seem to have a hard wired need to understand what is happening when an alarm goes off -- talking to friends coworkers etc -- rather than just reacting to the alarm and escaping. The larger the groups that people belong to, the more time it seems to take to reach consensus about a course of action. Please keep the questions coming; I would be happy to take them in any order, and also about any of the previous articles in the series, which are accessible here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2006/07/17/LI2006071700444.html

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Memphis, Tenn.: "Live or Die" was interesting. Could we mistake reports of heroism for average behavior? Forensics of plane crashes show smaller people tend to get trampled. At Columbine, those who thought to barricade doors with furniture survived. Restaurant help too often think health rules are for dorks. I've seen people gather close outside plate glass windows while a bomb squad was searching inside. I've seen bank tellers openly fake records, as if everyone does. So, how much "kindness of strangers" would you teach your teenager to expect?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks very much for your question, Memphis. My story last Monday about group behavior in crises suggested that people often don't push others out of their way in a desperate desire to escape -- the stereotypical view of mob behavior. I am not suggesting that people do not panic and that panicked people don't behave in such ways; they do (remember that funny scene from Seinfeld with George pushing elderly people and children out of his way because he thinks the place is on fire?)

But I am more interested in what people do in the interval between the siren of disaster and disaster itself. Once a disaster is upon us, I think much of our actions take place on autopilot, we flee or fight or freeze. But when danger is ambiguous, we seem to actually slow down instead of using the opportunity to escape. We slow down to talk to one another, to reach a shared consensus about what is going on. This has less to do with "kindness of strangers" and just more to do with our desire to understand what is happening, to not "waste time" exiting a workplace, for instance, if the fire alarm is going to shut down in a minute anyway. But where the kindness of strangers certainly kicks in is in evidence that people do help one another, that people will return to sites of danger to try to rescue others they know, and that people are reluctant to escape if others they know don't want to take an alarm seriously.

Here's an excerpt from the story. -- How the disaster starts does not matter: It could be a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, it could be the sea receding rapidly ahead of an advancing tsunami, it could be smoke billowing through a nightclub.

Human beings in New York, Sri Lanka and Rhode Island all do the same thing in such situations. They turn to each other. They talk. They hang around, trying to arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening.

When we look back on such events with the benefit of hindsight, this apparent inactivity can be horrifying.

"Get out now!" we want to scream at those people in the upper stories of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, as they huddle around trying to understand what caused an explosion in the North Tower at 8:46 on a Tuesday morning in September. "You only have 16 minutes before your exit will be cut off," we want to tell them. "Don't try to understand what is happening. Just go."

"What the sea is doing is not marvelous," we want to tell those fishermen in Sri Lanka, as they gather together to discuss the amazing phenomenon of the receding waters. "You only have a few minutes to get to higher ground before the tsunami arrives."

"Please," we pray, as we watch video of patrons at a Rhode Island nightclub in 2003 putting their heads together to figure out whether the pyrotechnic display on stage is just very dramatic or a stunt that is out of control. "In 60 seconds, it will be too late."

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Upstate: Shankar - as it says here on this page and as the weeklies themselves demonstrate, your stories track current events. I'm not sure when, or what, might inspire a piece on prejudice - in the way we instantly 'read' an individual and subconsciously decide our action/reaction to them, without realizing the prejudice at work. I was hoping you might give an off-the-cuff, 3-sentence synopsis on that. For example, if you had to, how would you characterize the human trait(s) in George Allen's macaca incident and his denial of prejudice in his action(s)?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks for the question, Upstate. The George Allen snafu does cry out for a piece related to human behavior, doesn't it? I have been thinking about this for a while, and will probably get to it this fall, since the issue seems to be playing a continuing role in the Virginia Senate race. As a general note, my column avoids political opinion; in other words, whether Allen is prejudiced is grist for political writers and the oped pages as far as I am concerned. But I agree with you that the incident has rich implications for human behavior.

As to your general question, I have written quite a few articles on research into prejudice, including a science notebook item today that I will attach to the end of this note and a Sunday magazine cover story last year called SEE NO BIAS. I am hoping we can get a link to that story posted on this forum. Very briefly, there has been an enormous amount of psychological research into the nature of what Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji calls "ordinary prejudice" -- the kind of bias triggered not by malice, but by what she calls "mind bugs." Charges of racism, of course, especially in the context of a political race get very emotional, and no one wants to be associated with bias of any kind, implicit or explicit!

Here's the science notebook item from today's paper ...

SCIENCE Notebook, Monday, September 18, 2006; A08

Diversity in Grade School Appears to Help Reduce Bias

White children in first and fourth grades who live in areas and attend schools with little ethnic diversity are more likely to blame a black child than a white child when presented with ambiguous information involving potential misbehavior, according to a study released last week that explores the origins of bias.

Researchers showed 138 white children attending a rural Mid-Atlantic school a number of pictures and then asked them what they thought was happening. One set of pictures, for example, showed a child sitting on the ground with a pained expression, while another child stood behind a swing -- suggesting that the child on the ground might have been pushed. Another interpretation would be that the child on the ground had fallen off.

In every case, the pictures showed children of different races. In some, a white child stood behind the swing and a black child was on the ground. In other pictures, a black child was the potential perpetrator, and the white child the potential victim.

While 71 percent of the 7- and 10-year-old children said the pictures showed evidence of wrongdoing when the child behind the swing was black, only 60 percent guessed that the white child had pushed the black child when the roles were reversed, University of Maryland researchers Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen reported last week in the journal Child Development.

The paper noted that white children at a more diverse school had not shown such a bias in a previous experiment, suggesting that greater social contact among children of different ethnicities may prevent or reduce bias among youngsters. -- Shankar Vedantam

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Arlington, Va.: Why are people reluctant to change their minds on an issue? Do people generally want to pick a side and stay on it because they don't want it to appear they were wrong?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks for the question, Arlington. I am guessing your question was prompted by a couple of earlier articles in the series that explored the nature of the partisan mind. We will try to get a link to the articles, especially the one from July 31, posted on this forum.

Briefly, what it found was that rather than collect information in order to make up their minds, large numbers of people make up their minds (on politics, for instance) and then cherry pick what facts they listen to in order to back up their preexisting beliefs.

The desire not to appear wrong is clearly a motivating factor, but what seems especially interesting about this phenomenon is that much of it is happening outside conscious awareness. Partisans, for instance, genuinely believe they are being even-handed, even as you can show through clever experiments that they are discounting negative information when it applies to their side, and accentuating negative information about the opposition!

-- Psychological experiments in recent years have shown that people are not evenhanded when they process information, even though they believe they are. (When people are asked whether they are biased, they say no. But when asked whether they think other people are biased, they say yes.) Partisans who watch presidential debates invariably think their guy won. When talking heads provide opinions after the debate, partisans regularly feel the people with whom they agree are making careful, reasoned arguments, whereas the people they disagree with sound like they have cloth for brains.

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washingtonpost.com: How the Brain Helps Partisans Admit No Gray -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/30/AR2006073000579.html

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Bowie, Md.: Is a negative political ad a form of cognitive behavioral manipulation that goes beyond voting?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, Bowie. There are a great many reasons for negative advertising, of course, but one of the reasons these ads have an effect is because they get our emotions riled up. George Marcus, the professor of political science at Williams College in Massachusetts whom I quoted today, draws an analogy with driving. Most of the time, you can get from work to home (for example) largely without thinking about what you are doing. You know your way, you know how to drive, you spend your time thinking about dinner. But let's say, as you drive through your neighborhood, a child's soccer ball comes rolling across the street. You instantly know that a child may come after the ball, and you switch from autopilot to alert. Your conscious brain says, "I cannot do this on autopilot; I need to pay attention because something important (or different) is happening." That transition is triggered by a burst of emotion, because you are afraid of hitting a child. In exactly the same way, Marcus argues that the emotional burst triggered by a negative ad gets us to pay attention in an entirely different way. Suddenly we listen to what a candidate is saying, rather than drift through the commercial on autopilot ...

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washingtonpost.com: Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Biases (July 24) -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300512.html

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Arlington, Va.: With regards to your most recent column, the success of appealing to voters' emotions seems quite natural and obvious. That's how Bush pulled off his last victory -- appealing to voters' fears of terrorism. A charismatic candidate will tend to win over a stoic candidate, even if he/she can talk the talk more about the "issues." Look at populist leaders throughout Latin American history. The most charismatic prevail.

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, Arlington. Most modern political campaigns understand the role of emotions very, very well. (This goes for both the winning side and the losing side!) I think it is less clear that voters understand the same thing. Or at least, even if they do realize that their emotions are being toyed with, people still get all riled up during campaigns, and let their strings get pulled. Knowing someone is trying to manipulate you doesn't always mean you can resist being manipulated!

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Munich, Germany: Is it generally accepted that groups of people react more strongly to emotional persuasion than individuals? Is this part of mankind's hardwired group instincts, that factual persuasion is less effective in group situations?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks for joining us, Munich. I think it would be fair to say that messages that try to reach groups of people are more likely to be effective and popular if they are emotional, than if they are cold and factual. (This is why the fiction of movies and novels are often far more powerful than the facts of journalism or documentaries!) I think you are smart to think of this as an evolutionary mechanism. It may not serve us so well in an election campaigns, but the shorthand of emotions -- think of them as mental shortcuts -- have served our ancestors very well. Neural circuitry for emotions such as fear, for example, are highly conserved across species. This is not to say, of course, that people cannot be persuaded by reason. We are rational creatures; our constant error, however, is in imagining that just because we are capable of reason, we are always reasonable!

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New York: Hello there - what's your take on the way some of the 'spectators' (e.g. those watching the news footage on TV) react to the disaster victims, especially when they're of a different extraction? i.e. there was a lot of the 'THOSE PEOPLE' rhetoric as if there was something intrinsically (e.g. due to race) wrong w/ the tsunami fishermen who stood around marveling at the sea, or the few New Orleans people who were reported to have shot at the helicopters or looted?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, New York. Call me naive, but I think the first reaction of people when they see other people in danger is empathy. You can see yourself in the same nightclub as those poor people in Rhode Island, or those people on the upper stories of the World Trade Center who were trapped on Sept 11. I think the worldwide response to the tsunami was compassion, first and foremost. I wonder whether some of the thinking you describe comes later, as we try to understand (or rationalize) what happened. Perhaps blaming victims for their plight is a way to persuade ourselves that the same thing could not happen to us, when in fact it could?

I think the Katrina example is somewhat afield; there was a lot of confusion in the immediate aftermath, which allowed rumors to get out of control. But am I wrong in thinking most people immediately -- even instinctively -- felt sorry for the victims of New Orleans?

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DC area: Often in an emergency, it's not clear what the best thing to do even is -- in my building, for example, we have a "shelter in place" procedure for what we're supposed to do in the event of a gas or radiological attack. The instructions are to go to the basement. I will not be going. It might be mustard-gas, which sinks the the lowest level. I'm safer in the interior of an upper floor.

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, DC. Yes, you raise an excellent point. If there is a chemical spill on K Street, it hardly makes sense to run out of the building. So some of what people do after the alarm goes off makes sense; they want to understand the threat in order to mount the right response. My article last week was really talking about how group size seems to make a difference as people work through such questions. The larger the group, the slower it seems to take to figure out a course of action. And as the story notes, if someone in a group doesn't agree, that person could end up slowing down the entire group. My article was not trying to make the case that group psychology is right or wrong; merely that it exists, exerts a powerful if subtle influence on us, and needs to be reckoned with by disaster planners. Here's an excerpt from the story that speaks to that point:

Experts who study disasters are slowly coming to realize that rather than try to change human behavior to adapt to building codes and workplace rules, it may be necessary to adapt technology and rules to human behavior: In the narrow window between the siren of disaster and disaster itself, people always want to understand what is happening.

You can see this yourself the next time the fire alarm goes off at work, school or home. People will look at one another. They will ask each other: "Is it a drill? Shall we give it 30 seconds to see if it shuts off on its own? Can I just finish sending this e-mail?"

For all the disaster preparations put in place since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the behavior of people confronted with ambiguous new information remains one of the most serious challenges for disaster planners.

Computer models assume that people will flow out of a building like water, emptying through every possible exit. But the reality is far different. People talk. They confer. They go back to their desk. They change their mind. They try to exit the building the way they came in, rather than through the nearest door.

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Washington, D.C.: Wow! That children's bias story is interesting considering how there is a push to return to neighborhood schools, which generally decreases diversity since most neighborhoods are not -truly- diverse. Your thoughts?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, Washington. I agree that the research is very interesting. It certainly does seem to have implications for education, but it must be said there are many other variables (economic, demographic, cultural etc) in such larger questions. But here is something that I think most city planners and school boards are not thinking about.

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Arlington, Va.: I wonder if there is an element in trust in authority that affects the behavior of people in disasters. I've been in movie theaters where the movie is stopped, the lights come on and someone says "it's time to exit the building". And of course, everyone leaves in an extremely speedy and orderly fashion. Whereas in Metro, there are constant "SPECIAL SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENTS" that are really the same announcement over and over again to report abandoned bags to the police. After a while, I just tune them out. In my building, I'm used to false fire alarms, which make me tend to react slower to the real ones. I've had security officers tell me all sorts of stupid things because they don't themselves even understand what's going on, whereas a Movie Theater manager is only going to ask me to evacuate in a real emergency.

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks, Arlington, you raise some wonderful points. Leadership is a very important component of how people react to disasters; the theater manager who knows what to do is likely to get more organized results than the security guard who is clueless about what is happening. Just as interesting is what happens when there are no authority figures in uniforms around; groups often coalesce around individuals, who end up exercising great influence over everyone else (for both good and bad). But I think the point that you are making, that the kind of leadership and info given to people is very important, is something that is often ignored. A taped message played every 15 minutes by rote is hardly the kind of thing you need in an emergency, and could end up being counterproductive because they give the illusion of leadership and communication without the real things.

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Washington, D.C.: This group think is an interesting phenomenon. For example, when the folks were torturing the prisoners in Abu Ghraib I wondered "who does that? Who goes along with that kind of behaviour?!" but I suspect it was harder to say no than it was to just go along with the crowd, which is just sad.

Shankar Vedantam: Yes, I think you are right. Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo (of Stanford prison experiment fame) has a new book coming out next year that looks at this question in the context of Abu Ghraib. One of the interesting ideas in "The Lucifer Effect" is that heroes and villains in times of crises are often unremarkable people who do extraordinary things for both good and evil.

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SS, Md.: Have you done any articles on the correlation between science and spirituality?

Shankar Vedantam: I am running out of time on the chat, and will have to wrap up soon. Thanks for the question, Maryland. I recently wrote a Sunday magazine cover story called Eden and Evolution; we will try to post a link on this forum. Also, a couple of the earlier articles in this series have looked at questions at least tangentially related to spirituality or religion. The July 10 column looked at the science of forgiveness, and the July 3 article looked at the relationship between money and happiness. We will try to post links. A couple of excerpts from both stories here:

Lay's death has uncovered a world of hurt and anger among many victims of Houston-based Enron's demise. And it brings to the fore an unusual challenge for those interested in the psychological nature of pain and forgiveness: What happens to victims when wrongdoers die before they are punished?

An explosion of research into the nature of forgiveness in recent years has proved that letting bitterness go is generally correlated with better mental health -- but not always. And while most religious traditions have long sung the praises of forgiveness, there are important differences among faiths on what can and cannot be forgiven. --

A wealth of data in recent decades has shown that once personal wealth exceeds about $12,000 a year, more money produces virtually no increase in life satisfaction. From 1958 to 1987, for example, income in Japan grew fivefold, but researchers could find no corresponding increase in happiness.

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"Those People":: I think the "those people" mentality is a defense mechanism of sorts. If we look at those affected by tragedy as "others", then we can rationalize that it will not happen to our own selves. It's a way of mitigating the fear that life is random, bad things do happen to those undeserving...we justify that there is a reason things happen to others when bad things happen and likewise say other people are "lucky" when good things happen to them. If bad things happen to us we say we are "unlucky" and if good things happen, well then, deserving.

Shankar Vedantam: This is my sense, too. Of course, there is also the possibility of naked prejudice, that we simply don't care about some lives, but I think such attitudes may be more the exception than the rule.

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New Haven, Conn.: Dr. Vedantam - What an interesting subject! One of the things I found fascinating about the WTC disaster is that groups of people rushed past opened doors because they assumed the person before them already checked them. Would you call this a herd behavior? What about a reluctance to leave the home, a place of safety, even when it isn't (like horses in a burning barn)? Thank you!

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks for the comment (and the doctorate), New Haven.

You make some excellent points. I have often found myself asking the person at the end of a line at an airport whether the line is for such and such an airline when, of course, that person may himself or herself have picked up that information from the person in front of them! The blind following the blind, no?

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Bethesda, Md.: I remember once going to an exhibit at the National Archives about political persuasion and subliminal messages dating back to the 1800s or so - what kind of methods have prevailed and aside from the leaflets you mention in your story, how are modern day campaigns banking on our psychological behaviors to obtain our votes?

Shankar Vedantam: Thanks for the question, Bethesda. Sorry for not getting to it earlier. The business of political persuasion goes back a long, long way. After all, humans are a social species, and the ability to persuade others to think or act in certain ways has always had value. Today's story explored one aspect of such persuasion, the importance of engaging people's emotions in a campaign.

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Shankar Vedantam: Thanks very much to everyone who contributed questions, and to everyone who listened. This was an excellent conversation. Please keep those ideas coming in, and look for a new column on Page Two every Monday in the Post. I am hoping this experiment will help us think about the news in a fresh way, and show how everyday events often reveal interesting things about human behavior.

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