Can you tell me a little bit about channel factors?
Well, this is an idea that's very old in social psychology. You might be interested to know—
I don't think most social psychologists know this—the field of experimental social psychology
was founded by a physicist. That has everything to do with the fact that social psychologists
are the ones who are telling us what the situations are that people confront that are going to
have an impact on them. His notion was the field, the social psychologist's focus on
the field—and that comes from field theory in Physics. I mean, you need to know what's
going on in the whole field in order to understand how to explain behavior.
He had a notion that sometimes when we want someone to do something or want some kind
of outcome, we would just push. He says, "Look, there may be a channel there through which
you can achieve what you're trying to achieve. Think about what situational barriers you
might remove. Think about how you can give the person a plan that would help them to
go in the direction you want them to go."
One of the channel factors that I find interesting is this idea of organ donation. It's such
a simple, tiny manipulation of—seemingly tiny manipulation of opting in or opting out
of organ donation. Is that—do you know the details or...
Well, I know as much about it as most social psychologists who've read the study and taught
about it. For many of us, it's a very powerful demonstration of what Kurt Lewin calls a channel
factor. That is, something that made it a little easier to act in accord with your preferences or with your values.
I think there was many, many interesting features in that, but the starting point is just that
this was a case of what we might call a natural experiment. It wasn't a study in which someone
manipulated this, although people have followed up on it, including me and my colleagues.
The finding, as I think most people in psychology are aware now, is that if you looked at European
countries, some of those countries have the policy where you had to sign the back of your
driver's license to make you a potential organ donor. In other places, you had to sign if
you didn't want to be a potential organ donor. The phenomena was incredibly dramatic. I mean,
you found countries as similar as Austria and Germany, or Norway and Sweden, having
tremendously different rates, under 10 percent of people in some cases, and over 95 in others.
Very, very dramatic. It's tempting. A lot of people look at that and say, "Well, these
people are lazy," but it was subtler than that.
There's a stunning experiment. It was a very old experiment done with Yale college students.
There was a social psychologist who was scaring the daylights out of these undergraduates
about tetanus. He shows some people in extremes, locked jaw and the terrible kinds of things
that could go on. He says, "Look, it's not just the rusty nail you've heard about. I
mean, it's all over. I mean, you don't recognize how susceptible you are. But not to worry
because you can go to the Health Service, which will be available on Tuesday morning,
and you can get an inoculation." Three percent of students go and get their inoculations.
Even though they're manifestly scared, and they believed it. The other students, he gives
them a map and the Health Service is circled on it.
Now these are, by the way, Yale seniors; they know where the Health Service is. But he circles
it on the map anyway and says, "When will be a convenient time on Tuesday morning for you to get an inoculation?"
"Well, I don't know. Ten o'clock when I'm coming out of my chemistry class."
He said, "Okay. Would you mark where your chemistry class is on the map, and then would
you draw me the line from there to the..." Now, the compliance rate is 29 percent. This
little trivial situational factor, channel that he creates has that massive impact on behavior.
Of course, now to get back to this dispositional versus situational explanation. Here's Joe
who went to get the tetanus inoculation, and Sam who didn't. Why did Joe? "Well, he's
was very conscientious; he's very health-concerned."
Sam, why did he not do it? "Well, he's kind of, he's the sort of guy who doesn't care
that much; he's kind of irresponsible; he's kind of flighty, really." There is the situational
factor that affects what goes on, why a factor of nine, and I'm going to attribute it. As
the observer, I'm going to attribute the difference to their personalities.
This idea of channel factors that you mentioned with respect to the Milgram experiment and
others, it's extremely powerful, and I think that people aren't really taking advantage
of it as far as in the Occupy movement or in climate change and so on. In trying to
motivate a large number of people to do one particular thing, they don't really seem to
be taking advantage of the situation as much as they could. Is that true?
Well, I think the message has started to become much better understood, actually. We're seeing
in education a number of really dramatic cases where relatively small changes in the situation
facing students, just giving messages about whether they belong and whether the institution
has confidence that they can succeed. We see big effects of these kinds of manipulations.
Certainly, politicians have gotten the message. To some extent, it's been negative in the
sense that they no longer worry about persuading people. They just say, "How can we identify
the folks who are likely to be our voters and make them get to the polls?"
It was interesting in the last election. I don't think it's a big secret that Barack
Obama had the assistance of a number of behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists who
used a number of different techniques to initially identify and then make sure their voters would
actually get to the polls. They did this in very, very sophisticated ways, such that on
the night of the election, the Republican strategists were shocked and were convinced
that the prediction models that they had were correct and the early polling was wrong because
they were saying, "Given everything we know about the economy, and given what we know
about popularity ratings, and given what we know about the frequency with which particular
ethnic or demographic groups vote, what's going to happen?" What they didn't realize
was that an experimental manipulation had been done. Some very, very clever and powerful
techniques had been used to make people who were favorably leaning, but not likely voters, to actually vote.
What were those? What were they doing exactly?
That's a secret.
Right.
But if you read the history of social psychology, you'd be able to predict.
I can imagine a couple of them, yes.
Yes. One is getting early commitment, getting people who say that they're going to vote,
you say, "Can we count on you? Can we call you back on Election Day and make sure you
voted." Getting to register, instead of saying, "Will you go register," you say, "Okay, let's
do it right now. Take out your cellphone and make this call, and someone will come and
pick you up." I mean, there's many, many things that you can do but the point was to make
sure that people who generally were disposed to behave in a particular way but, often in
history, have not done so. In this case, they would, and they could be counted on.
My name is Lee. I think about wisdom.