In today's episode, we're going to be introducing an idea that we've, essentially, been building
up to over the last 10 episodes. Now we promised people, since the beginning, that we'd give
them the tools to be able to change the world. This very idea, the one that we're going to
be talking and focusing on today, we couldn't have just introduced on day one. We had to
lay the groundwork first. Certainly I think it's the most powerful idea that we can introduce,
but we need to do a little bit of myth-busting first of all.
Sure. We'll start off with some situations where we need to make predictions. So, if
you—again, in a job interview, you need to predict whether this person will perform
well in their job; you want to know whether you should go on a date with somebody;
you're trying to predict whether people will buy a product that you're developing, whether
to trust somebody with a secret or not; and more important things like deciding whether,
or predicting whether a criminal is likely to reoffend or not.
Now when you ask people, "What information do you want that will make you help that decision?
What do you think will give you the power to make an accurate prediction?" most people
ask for personality or character information like, "Is she trustworthy? What was her upbringing," things like that.
Janice is talkative or generous, and Tom's laid-back.
Yes, all these personality character things. Now in fact we started off this episode by
giving people a scenario: "A person is walking between two buildings and then encountered
a shabbily dressed man slumped in a doorway with his head down, eyes closed, coughing
and groaning. Please list one piece of information that you would like to have in order to predict
whether the person would stop to help the man."
Now, we'll tell you the responses that our online students give to this question, but
we've already asked our on-campus students. And, again, they tend to list character traits;
they ask for information about the person. They want to know whether the person is male
or female. They want to know about their occupation, the history of their upbringing, whether the person is religious or not.
That's right. Now this example might sound familiar to people. In fact, it's a parable
straight out of the Bible, told by Jesus. The idea is you have a man who's lying in
distress on the side of the road. He was beaten by a bunch of robbers. People are passing
on the road and see the man who is in distress. It starts with a priest who just keeps walking
right past the man. Then a temple assistant comes and walks right past the man. Finally,
a Samaritan comes, sees the man, and lends assistance. He puts him on a horse, takes
him to an inn, and takes care of him.
Hence the Good Samaritan.
Hence the Good Samaritan—that's right. You would think that it would have been the priest.
Most people would think that it would have been the priest that would have helped—he's
a very religious person and so on—but that's not what happened.
In fact, a couple of researchers at Princeton tried to put this into practice in modern
days and see whether the Good Samaritan experiment would actually hold up now. They designed
an experiment where they had a bunch of Princeton theological students in the seminary who came,
and they filled out a bunch of questionnaires in an office before actually conducting the
real experiment where they were going to see whether the Good Samaritan would actually hold.
Yep. The experimenters were Darley and Batson. After the participants completed their questionnaire,
they were moving to the other room in order to give their presentation on the Good Samaritan.
Now, halfway through in a hallway, they noticed a man who was, again, crouched over. His eyes
were closed. He was coughing and spluttering. The question is, would they stop to help them man?
Now it turned out that how religious a person was didn't matter at all, didn't predict whether
they would help or not. The thing that predicted whether the students would help or not was
whether they were in a hurry or not.
So what the researchers did, just before they left the room, the experimenter said, "You
better hurry up. You are already late. You need to give that presentation." And another
group of students they said, "You've got all the time in the world. Don't worry. Take your
time." The participants that were in a hurry: only 10 percent of them stopped to help the
man. The participants who weren't in a hurry, who had all the time in the world: 66 percent
of those stopped to help the man.
Sixty-three percent, I think it was.
Sixty-three percent. Yes.
That's right. You're exactly right. This is a massive effect, right? Fifty-three percent
difference between these two. It's really good. I mean, this is a whopping effect, and
it doesn't get much bigger than that. The motivating factor, the thing that actually
determined whether they were going to help or not, was whether they were in a hurry.
We gave another example at the beginning of this episode as well. We asked people to rate honesty.
This was an experiment by Hartshorne and May. This was way back; I think it was actually 1928.
In this experiment, what we asked people to do at the beginning of the episode was rate—
their job was to imagine themselves looking at a group of primary and secondary students.
They were trying to measure the honesty of these students across a bunch of different scenarios.
In athletic performance— so how many laps the kids ran around the track then they had
to report, but they actually knew how many laps they ran around the track—and whether
or not they'd peek at the answers or cheat at a puzzle, at solving a puzzle.
Now we asked people whether these two things are related: reporting athletic performance
and whether they solved the puzzle. Again, we'll tally up these results. The results,
in our own campus students and in the actual experiment, was that most people thought,
"Yes, they were indeed related. Definitely related." In fact, on a scale of about 1 to
100, they said the relationship between those 2 measures would be about 60. I suspect our
students will be the same, but that didn't pan out.
Hartshorne and May did the original experiment and they showed, no, it wasn't even close.
In fact, the actual relationship between whether they would cheat in one circumstance or another
was about 0.15. That is 15 on that rating from 0 to 100. So it was very little relationship
whatsoever between these two measures of cheating.
They can you make that more concrete for me. So, if a person cheated on their—if a participant
cheated by saying that they ran more laps around the oval than they actually did versus
whether they cheated by peeking at the answer to a puzzle, that link was not strong.
Exactly. People think that once a cheater, always a cheater. This measure of honesty—
this stable trait, this essence of honesty—is exuding from the person, and there was nothing
there essentially. What did seem to predict whether they'd cheat or not was whether they'd
cheat in that particular situation across multiple instances as opposed to across situations.
Now this is really important.
Now we talked with Lee Ross. He was an author of an experiment. Jennings, Amabile and Ross—
he was the last author on this paper. They actually looked at all sorts of measures of these correlations,
these relationships. If you have a correlation of 0.15 or even less than about 0.30—which
seems to be the cap, the maximum relationship between these personality traits—you can't
detect a relationship of about 0.5 if you see it in the real world, if it's smacking
you right in the face. If you see a correlation of about 0.15, a relationship of these personality
characteristics, it just looks like noise. It looks like nothing that's going on whatsoever.
Sometimes the person's going to cheat in one circumstance and not in another, and you just can't tell.
This is, I think, really important. This is the lesson, essentially, of the first part
of today's episode: that personality characteristics—character traits, morals—the things that we normally
think of as exuding from the person—how nice or honest or generous or extroverted
or introverted a person is. We think that they're going to be predictive—and this
is the sort of information we want to know, as you said—but they don't seem to be predictive
at all. Now this is really counter-intuitive. Instead, what does seem to be predictive are
things like the situation, exactly as you said, whether the person is in a hurry or not.
We're going to talk a lot more about different examples of how the person and the situation
can be contrasted, but we talked with Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett about this distinction
between the person and the situation, and here's what they had to say.