Psychology anyone?

[Maron]

The following is my interpretation of a lecture given to my Psychology class at Auburn University by our
instructor Bill Buskist. I found the story to be most amusing, and I hope you will as well.

This is an example of a technique that you can use to manipulate people to perform certain behaviors
that would go against their normal behavior.

I know you're thinking . But this is a psychologically proven method.

The foot-in-the-door technique is a method of increasing compliance by making a small request first.
Thus increasing the chances that a person will comply with a larger (and sometimes unreasonable) request.

A study was done in two almost identical neighborhoods in a suburb of Los Angeles. Researchers in both
cases posed as workers of an organization looking to encourage safe driving in an attempt to lower the amount of
car acidents in the area.

Residents of the first neighborhood were approached without any previous contact. They were asked if they would
be interested in erecting a 20ft. X 40ft. billboard in their front yards that read "Be a Safe Driver"

17 percent of the people who were asked said that they would have no problem putting up a billboard.

This is not out of the ordinary. On average, around 20 precent of people will say "YES" to almost anything.
(Not the same 20 percent in every case mind you. Different requests will draw different supporters).

Residents of the second neighborhood were apporoached, and told the situation of the recent increase in car
accidents. They were then asked to place a small 3x5in. placard in their front window that read "Be a Safe Driver"
to show that they support the cause of promoting safe driving.

100 percent of those asked agreed to place the placard in their window, and 100 percent actually followed through
and displayed it.

people really do care about safe driving!!!!

Two weeks later, the researchers revisited the second neighborhood. They went back to every house, and
told the residents of the success of their campaign to promote safe driving. They then asked every resident of that
neighborhood to place a 20ft. X 40ft. billboard in their front yards to show how much they were committed to the cause
of 'safe driving.'

76 percent of residents of neighborhood 2 now agreed to have a billboard placed in their yard.

We are taught from childhood not to quit, and to follow through with any commitments that we make. This makes us
automatically obligated to say "Yes" if we have already given in to a lesser request. What you should learn from this is
that you do not have to always give in. We do not want to come off as mean people or quitters, so we make ourselves
vulnerable to people who wish to manipulate us. Charities and "Non-profit organizations" use this technique quite often.
If you donate once, there is greater than a 75 percent chance that you will donate again. Even if you dont really want to.
You feel obligated to.

From now on, Just say "No thank you".

Hope you enjoyed it,
-Maron

[Spiff]

Yeah i always think studies like these are interesting, its a shame they dont let them do studies like the Milgram one anymore..

[bthizle1]

Yeah i always think studies like these are interesting, its a shame they dont let them do studies like the Milgram one anymore..

Bah, causes stress to the participants. Seems like an excuse by those who want to control us to silence those of us who know that.

[Katrina]

Excellent post, Maron. Deffinetly makes me think of all the times I find myself comlying to manipulation. It is hard to say no, dissapointment can do worse damage than anger. I fear dissapointing others. I enjoy hearing about what you learn in this new class of yours, since I aspire to become a psychologist one day. Keep the lectures coming.

[carl-the-conqueror]

yeah it is hard to dissapoint, but i think there is a limit to how far you can be pushed.

[Oldgamer]

yeah it is hard to dissapoint, but i think there is a limit to how far you can be pushed.

I agree that there is a limit to how far a person can be pushed. However, if the person doesn't know that he's being pushed, how can there be a limit?

I've been doing a lot of reading in the current thread on the Holocaust, and Maron's post reminded me of something that I've encountered in my reading on those terrible events.

First, the German government took away the civil rights of Jewish people.

Then, in the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, the National Socialists took away the Jews humanity. They became untermenschen.

Then came the event known as Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops and Synogogues were systematically attacked. Billions of Reichsmarks of damage was done, and this damage had to be paid for. The President of the Reichstag, Herr Goring, came up with an idea that pleased Hitler very much. Since Kristallnacht wouldn't have happened if the Jews weren't living in Germany, they should have to pay for the damage themselves.

Over the years, Jews were beaten and publicly humiliated on the streets, their homes and businesses stripped from them, they were imprisoned and enslaved, and finally sent to the ghettoes in the "Eastern territories". Every month, tens of thousands of them were put on trains for "resettlement". They were told that they would go to work camps and, if they proved themselves, be settled on land that they could work on their own.

Once they arrived in the camps, they "freely" gave up the last of their possessions. They were stripped of their clothes for "cleaning and sanitation". Women had their hair cut off to make slippers for U-Boat crewmen ... they were helping with the war effort, you see. A small orchestra played soothing music for them, to reassure them. SS officers told them that they were going to take a shower, to delouse them. He told them to breathe deeply ... deep breathing helps the action of their lungs and increases their health. Then, they headed for the showers ....

... It was only at the last seconds that these dehumanized and brutalized people realized that they were going to their deaths.

There was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But it was too little, and too late.

The point of all this is that a little bit of psychological conditioning and pressure can go a long way.

[bdh]

told the residents of the success of their campaign to promote safe driving. They then asked every resident of that

The bolded, to me at least, seems to be a potential flaw in the reasoning. I don't think the initial request had nearly as much effect on the outcome as did the sense of satisfaction of having done something good. If they hadn't reported about any success, just asked to do more, the outcome may have been different.

[LSJ]

I noticed that flaw too...
If someone sees that something small they did is good and potentially saving lives, they are very likely to go further.
If I ask a bunch of people to donate to a charity jar, they might do it. Two months later, I can go back, say that the charity has been able to afford more food and shelters for poor people, and ask them to donate again. The people are likely to donate a larger amount the second time. Of course, there are the people who donated the first time to make me think better of them, but the rest feel morally obligated to send aid.


I like speech psychology. Especially with people you get to talk to many times. Guidance counsellors and psychologists are generally predictable in their methods. If they think you need help, they'll try the foot-in-the-door stuff. Usually ask if you want to go to a meeting, make scheduled appointments.
If you say something along the lines of "I don't know", they'll say, "Perhaps you may prefer a short visit some time when you are available." OR "Would you like to go to one meeting just to see what it is like? You don't have to do it of course".
If you go to the meeting, they are hopeful, and will ask you again, "Would you like to join the group, just for a few sessions?" or something similar.
Its also a foot-in-the-pond approach; if you stand in the water for any length of time they will ask you to go deeper. If you pull your foot out quickly (say I don't want to go. Goodbye.) they will stop trying.
I almost laughed the last time I talked to a counsellor; I predicted every word...
Speech is different for everyone, but you can get to understand how certain people talk after a while. You can analyze their methods and figure out, depending on the topic of discussion, what will be said when and how.

[Oldgamer]

Darkprophet, have you ever taken a Rohrshach test? The last time I took one of them, I had the psychologist terrified that he was sitting in a room alone with a psychotic murdering Nazi. After the whole thing was over, I had to apologize profusely for my "sense of humor". Especially so, since I was applying for a professorship! They decided to forego the inkblots ...

[Da Skinna]

Darkprophet, have you ever taken a Rohrshach test? The last time I took one of them, I had the psychologist terrified that he was sitting in a room alone with a psychotic murdering Nazi. After the whole thing was over, I had to apologize profusely for my "sense of humor". Especially so, since I was applying for a professorship! They decided to forego the inkblots ...

Lol, I always wanted to take a test like that and put down the worst most sickest possible answers and just sit there twiddling my thumbs and humming...

[LSJ]

I have what many call a "dark sarcastic nature" to my humour...
I bet the psychologist would think I need help desparately if I ever took a test.

[Garbarsardar]

@Maron:

The problem(?) with this study is that the gimmick (safe driving) is something we'd all agree with. Perhaps it would be more interesting to see how people can be influenced when they don't agree with an issue or as we say in academic terms, they experience cognitive dissonance:

In the late 1950s, Festinger and James Carlsmith recruited Stanford University men to participate in a psychological study of unknown purpose. As each man arrived at the lab, he was assigned the boring and repetitive task of sorting a batch of spools into lots of twelve and turning square pegs a quarter turn to the right. The procedure was designed to be both monotonous and tiring. At the end of an hour the experimenter approached the subject and made a request. A student assistant had supposedly failed to show up, and the researcher needed someone to fill in by telling a potential female subject in the waiting room how much fun the experiment was. Dissonance researchers call this ‘‘counter-attitudinal advocacy." We’d call it lying.

Some of the men were promised $1 to express enthusiasm about the task; others were offered $20. It is comforting to know that six of the men refused to take part in the deception, but most students tried to recruit the young woman. The typical conversation was similar for both payment conditions:

she: ‘‘I heard it was boring."

he: ‘‘Oh no, it’s really quite interesting."

What did differ were privately expressed attitudes after the study was over. Students who lied for $20 confessed that they thought the task of sorting spools was dull. Those who lied for $1 maintained that it was much more enjoyable. (Festinger and Carlsmith practiced their own form of deception in the study—subjects never received the promised money.)

By now you should have a pretty good idea of how dissonance theorists analyze the results. They note that $20 was a huge sum of money (worth more than $50 in today’s economy). If a student felt qualms about telling a ‘‘white lie," the cash was a ready justification. Thus he felt little or no tension between his action and attitude. But the men who lied for a dollar had lots of cognitive work to do. The logical inconsistency of saying a boring task was interesting had to be explained away through an internal dialogue:

I’m a Stanford man. Am I the kind of guy who would lie for a dollar? No way. Actually what I told the girl was true. The experiment was a lot of fun.

Festinger says that $1 was just barely enough to induce compliance to the experimenter’s request, so students had to create another justification. They changed their attitudes toward the task to bring it into line with their behavior.

You can probably think of alternative ways to account for Festinger and Carlsmith’s findings. The study has been replicated and modified many times in an effort to close off loopholes that would admit other explanations. The results have made it necessary to qualify Festinger’s minimal justification hypothesis. Today most persuasion researchers accept a revised version of cognitive dissonance theory. http://www.afirstlook.com/archive/cogdiss.cfm?

@Oldgamer

What you describe about the Holocaust has also been experimentally modelled: It is the famous learned helplessness theory:

In early 1965, Martin E. P. Seligman and his collegues, while studying the relationship between fear and learning, accidentally discovered an unexpected phenomenon while doing experiments on dogs using Pavlovian (classical conditioning). As you may observe in yourselves or a dog, when you are presented with food, you have a tendency to salivate. Pavlov discovered that if a ringing bell or tone is repeatedly paired with this presentation of food, the dog salivates. Later, all you have to do is ring the bell and the dog salivates. However, in Seligman's experiment, instead of pairing the tone with food, he paired it with a harmless shock, restraining the dog in a hammock during the learning phase. The idea, then, was that after the dog learned this, the dog would feel fear on the presentation of a tone, and would then run away or do some other behavior.

Next, they put the conditioned dog into a shuttlebox, which consists of a low fence dividing the box into two compartments. The dog can easily see over the fence, and jump over if it wishes. So they rang the bell. Surprisingly, nothing happened! (They were expecting the dog to jump over the fence.) Then, they decided to shock the conditioned dog, and again nothing happened! The dog just pathetically laid there! Hey, what's going! When they put a normal dog into the shuttlebox, who never experienced inescapable shock, the dog, as expected, immediately jumped over the fence to the other side. Apparently, what the conditioned dog learned in the hammock, was that trying to escape from the shocks is futile. This dog learned to be helpless! This result was opposite to that predicted by B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, which argued that the dog must have been given a positive reward (like a yummy dog biscuit) to just lie there. (In order to salvage their position, they even went so far as to suggest that the cessation of pain acted as the reward for the dog to sit, but this was not a very good argument. One could alternately argue that when the shock went on while the dog was sitting, it was being punished for sitting. Reminds me of that old joke, "Q: Why did the man pound his thumb with a hammer? A: Because it felt so good to stop.) These observations started a scientific revolution resulting in the displacement of behaviorism by cognitive psychology. What you are thinking, determines your behavior (not only the visible rewards or punishments).http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/dis...plessness.html

P.S. I wouldn't pay too much attention to Rorsach if I were you. Besides the fact that it is very open to interpretation, you need to be lucky with the analyst in terms of practice and experience...

[engtjuay]

well this is believable and not "yeah right" at all, talking about charity, this human psychology thingy make those people who refuse to donate continue on while those who donate continue donating therefore its pretty unfair that some ppl keep donating while some don't even give a penny but if you encourage those ppl who keep donating to stop donating then where will all the donations come from? .. besides its from a good cause and its better to feed the hungry than use it to buy candy floss