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PROFESSOR: So last time, we
talked about spectacular
things about human nature
in terms of problems or
difficulties when we overly
obey, when we're overly
conformist, and the tendency
for us to do that much more
than we imagine we would.
And the experimental
evidence is pretty
powerful, that is true.
You could call that the dark
side of things like obedience
a and conformity.
The upside of it is that's how
we work together and get along
as a society.
And today, I'm going to focus
more on individual, everyday
experiences.
But again, I think you'll see
in terms of self-concept and
impressions of others,
those are more
everyday kinds of things.
But you'll see how they populate
our lives, how we
think about ourselves, how we
think about people in everyday
interactions, impressions
of others.
We've talked a little bit,
just a little bit, about
cultural differences.
Our course has been very focused
on American, European
type cultures.
We talked a little about
different ones.
I'll say a bit more
about that.
And then, I'll talk about maybe
the most thought about
disorder of social interaction,
autism.
So enhancing our views
of ourselves, OK?
So most US college students rank
themselves as better than
average students.
So you can sit there in your
chair and you could go, no,
I'm a pretty modest person.
But really, I'm probably
better than the average
student, right?
And by the way, I'll tell you
faculty are the same.
So a million high school
students rated their
leadership ability
in one example.
28% said they were average.
70% rated themselves as above
average in leadership.
You understand that only 50%
could be at most above
average, or 49%.
Only 2% said they were
below average.
60% of the high school students
of these million said
were in the top 10% in
their ability to
get along with others.
And by the way, just in case
you think it's picking on
students, 94% of college
instructors rated themselves
as better than average
teachers.
So whether you're sitting there
or standing here, we all
polish our image to ourselves.
And we can decide, is
that a bad thing?
Is that vanity or egoism?
Or is that maybe a pretty
healthy way to
bump through life?
Is overrating yourself, short
of putting yourself in
destructive situations, is that
a way to be happy and
optimistic?
Are we resilient?
So people call this
self-serving
attributional biases.
And this will play out
a little bit like the
fundamental attribution error.
Let me remind you
of what that is.
The fundamental attribution
error is when other people do
things, it's their character,
and especially failings are
because of failings of
their character.
When we do things we're not
especially proud of or don't
think are awesome, that's the
situation that made us do it.
And we don't provide that same
understanding of the situation
to understand the behaviors
of others.
It's not intuitive to do so.
So they did experiments where
the experimenter set up how
well you would do on tests.
They made a test super difficult
or easier, sensory
or perceptual discrimination,
social sensitivity,
competitive games.
It's all set up by
the experimenter.
They can make tests brutally
hard or pretty easy.
They can make you do well
or make you do badly.
And when people did well and
they were asked to say why
they thought they did well,
the usual description was,
because I'm a particularly
social person.
I'm very competitive.
I'm extra good at sensory
perception.
You pick it.
When they did badly, that
was a tough test.
It's rare for people to say,
that was an easy test!
Who wouldn't do well?
If you do well, people tend to
ascribe it to their character,
and when they do badly,
the situation.
even within ourselves.
And it extends to families,
social and political groups,
and sports teams.
You may know I'm very proud and
happy to be a member of
the MIT community.
Something happens bad
at MIT, I don't go,
well, then, MIT stinks.
I go, oh, there was a situation
that wasn't
well-handled by an individual.
Same thing you might
think about the
country you belong to.
We don't say, US did
something bad.
Most of us don't go, well,
the US stinks.
We go, that's situation
wasn't very good.
We've got to change things.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Do you think this is
saying more about how people
explain things to others
or about what
they actually believe?
PROFESSOR: So the question was,
is it what they actually
believe, or say to others?
I think the evidence is it's
about what they say to
themselves truly about how they
explain success or failure.
OK?
People are biased to attribute
their successes to their
wonderful traits and their
failures to situations.
But we talked earlier that that
can be a healthy thing.
Because then, you
can bounce back.
You can say, well,
I did badly.
But, hey, I'm a winner.
And tomorrow morning,
I'll get up.
And I'm back at bat, right?
Instead of saying,
oh, I'm a loser.
It's all just pointless.
So in what sense is it
good to have this?
It's not a good thing
or a bad thing.
It's probably a thing of
positive mental health but it
can make us overlook
causes of things.
So an example of that as we
construct social realities,
and you may know this is
the original study.
But there's a million since.
An undefeated Princeton
team played Dartmouth
in a football game.
Princeton won.
And then, they looked
at the newspaper
accounts of the games--
totally different.
They showed the film
to students
from the two campuses.
And depending on which team
you were rooting for, you
tended to view the other team
as dirty, not playing fair,
not doing the right thing.
You don't have to be much of a
sports fan to notice things
where the other team is not
doing the right thing and your
team, when it doesn't do the
right thing, well, they were
under pressure.
It was atypical.
And that makes it, of
course, hard for
people to get together.
We don't too much worry about
Princeton/Dartmouth
tension in the world.
But we do worry about tensions
in the Middle East between
Palestinians and Israelis.
When they see the same news
story, how do they interpret
what happened in that
news story?
So this question of if we have
illusions that we're better
than we are a little bit, is
that a bad thing or is that a
good thing was tested in an
ironic study by Alloy and
Abramson looking at patients
with actual clinical
depression.
So they gave depressed and
non-depressed students tasks
that varied in the degree of
contingency, that is how much
the performance of the
participant actually
influenced the outcome.
They controlled that.
And then, they asked people
afterwards to estimate the
degree of contingency between
a button press and a green
light going on.
How much of it was you, and how
much of it seemed to be
randomly done by the
experimenter?
Depressed students in this
particular setting were more
accurate in knowing when it
would depend on them.
And non-depressed students
overestimated the contingency.
They overestimated their
influence on the situation
when the outcomes
were desired.
Awesome, that's because
I'm awesome.
And when things didn't go so
well, again, not really under
their control.
But they don't know that.
It's the situation.
Something was screwed up
with the experiment.
So they're more variable--
they interpret the situation
much more,
again, on these things.
And you could say they're
less accurate.
But you could also say that's
a way, again, to have
confidence in yourself and
optimism about the future.
Another way in which we believe
and justify our
choices but a way in which we're
socially influenced is
this, the phenomenon called
false consensus.
People choose to engage in a
behavior that those people who
do that believe that it's more
common and that more people do
that, that when you do
something, the more you do it,
the more you think other
people do it, too.
What's the big deal?
You might know that feeling.
So the original experiment on
the Stanford campus for this
phenomenon from Lee Ross was he
asked people carry around a
sign on campus that said "Eat
at Joe's" for 30 minutes.
Some people said
no, thank you.
Some people said yes because
they were obedient.
Compliance.
Now, of the people who said yes,
I'll carry that sign for
30 minutes, they thought the
majority of other people when
asked to do so will do so.
They thought, well, that's
the way most people are.
And I'm going to behave
like most people.
That's a false consensus.
The people who said no, I won't
do it, they thought the
majority would not do it.
So part of their thinking about
deciding if they'll do
something or not is their
estimate of whether people in
general would do it.
But what you can see happens
is that driven by whether
they're going to do it or not.
So for example, teenage smokers
estimate higher rates
of smoking than nonsmokers.
Domestically abusive men
estimate that about 28% of men
have violently thrown things
at their partner.
Best estimates are
it's down to 12%.
So we tend to overly believe
that other people will do the
same behaviors that we do.
And that's part of justifying
those behaviors.
A demonstration of that was from
Phil Zimbardo, the social
psychologist who did the
prison experiment.
This has some of the same
flavor, not quite as dramatic.
But he worked in New York before
he moved to Stanford.
So he compared the Bronx
to Palo Alto.
In 1980, the paper
was published.
And he left out cars, one in
upper middle class Palo Alto--
very suburban area if you
haven't been there-- and one
in a tough Bronx area.
As you could imagine, you
leave a car out there by
itself in the Bronx area without
a license plate and
the hood was up, it was
stripped within a day.
So you park the car, you push
up the hood, no license
plate-- stripped within a day.
In Palo Alto, it's untouched
for a week.
So that's obviously to do with
the environment you're in.
But here's the false
consensus.
So then, they smash a window.
And within an hour,
it's stripped.
As soon as you smash the
window-- we talked about
broken windows.
Here it is literally.
Soon as somebody says,
all rules are off.
This car is smash, wrecked--
that's the behavior
I can engage in.
What you perceive as the
relevance, the environment of
behaviors are appropriate,
hugely influences and
justifies and drives
your own behavior.
Now one of the tasks people have
to try to convince people
to do public goods
in various ways--
and this is an ad that when I
was younger was very famous.
For you, it's so long ago
in history that you may
not even know it.
But it was one of the most
famous ones when the United
states was first confronting
issues with environmental
problems and pollution.
You may not believe this, but
there was an era when there
was fantastic pollution in the
air and the water and the land
and nobody seemed to care about
it at all because land
seemed endless.
It wasn't even a thought.
So Earth Day was
from the 1970s.
That was the marking of a wider
consciousness of the
consequence of ruining
the environment.
And so in the very earliest
stages, when people weren't
used almost any discussions of
that, there was this ad with a
Native American with a tear
running down his face.
And let me show you the ad.
A very powerful ad at a time,
and one that I'll show you in
a minute that social
psychologists believe was
completely counterproductive
to the goal of reducing
pollution--
exactly the thing you don't
want to do because we just
talked about false consensus and
about these environmental
justifications.
So I'll tell you, but
what does that mean?
So if you see a lot of people
throwing garbage onto the
beach, onto the street, into
the river, what are you
allowed to do?
Pollute yourself.
Hey, everybody else
is doing it.
What's the big deal?
That's the mode of
behavior, right?
Broken window, steal the car.
Litter everywhere, OK,
somebody is saying
it's not a good idea.
But the behavior that I see is
littering, littering, littering.
It's OK to litter.
So they literally showed
this in experiments.
They took people into
areas, into parks.
They surrounded them with
different amounts of trash.
Here's the percentage of
people who litter.
Here's how much trash
was around them.
They went into parks and they
put a little trash and they
watched somebody come by.
Still, some people
are littering.
Maybe less would now.
I don't know.
But as soon as there was four
pieces or eight pieces of
littering, then you more than
double the littering when
there's zero.
So the very example of showing
littering drives littering.
You say, nobody's saying
it's a good thing.
But hey, it's what everybody's
doing.
And why do we litter?
Because we're lazy and most of
us just don't want to bother
to walk to the garbage can.
So they did an experiment with
public service announcements
where they said the important
thing is to see behavior, the
behavior you want.
Like in this case, it was
a recycling thing.
And then, you show one example
of a person who doesn't do it.
And you say, bad person!
You don't say bad person, but
you send that message.
You say, here's the
behavior we want.
There's somebody doing that.
Uh-uh.
And what they found
is that 25%--
this is truly in
the community--
increase in recycling.
So if you want to get people to
do things, showing them bad
behavior unfortunately makes
them think that bad behavior
is widespread and an acceptable
way to go.
So you have to show them good
behavior and then give maybe
one example of bad things
because you don't want to be
labeled bad.
But mostly, they have to see the
behavior you want, not the
behavior you're trying
to discourage.
So for a social psychologist,
exactly the opposite outcome
of the intended ad.
So this speaks to a gap
almost all of us have.
Some of you may be more perfect
than I. Many of you
may be more perfect than I.
But here's the gap we face
every morning when we get up,
which is the difference
between our attitudes
and our actions--
the things we know are the way
we wish we were, the right
thing to do, and the way in
which sometimes we don't
always do the rightest thing
we know we could.
So daffodil days, you may know,
occurs in many places
including universities where you
buy a daffodil and there's
a four day campus
event to benefit
American Cancer Society.
So it's a nice thing.
It's buying a flower.
It's a good cause, fighting
cancer, very positive.
So they did a study with
251 Cornell students.
And they asked them, when
daffodil day comes up and you
just spend a tiny bit of money--
it's a very small
amount of money they
ask from students--
will you buy at least
one flower?
And over 80% said,
yes, I will.
For a cause like that, buying
a beautiful flower to fight
cancer, I'll spend $1.
How about the other students?
Well, they're kind of lazy.
And they have good intentions.
But probably only about half
of them will do it.
That's a little bit of
the self-affirmation.
I'm a good person.
Other people will be flawed.
So how many people
actually buy it?
43%.
So what happened to this 40%?
Well, it's a little bit
like the story.
Things were busy.
Things were happening.
They weren't for cancer
and against flowers,
just they got busy.
There were exams.
There was stuff going on.
And how do we explain to
ourselves this gap between the
attitudes we hold
and truly hold?
We want to do good things and
be a good person, and the
actions we do, which are often
a little bit below that?
So this gap between our
attitudes and our actions has
led to the phenomenon of
cognitive dissonance.
You now hear this term
used widely.
Originally, it had a pretty
narrow meaning.
And I'm going to
be just talking
about that narrow meaning.
It's become a term that's
used much more widely.
But here's the original
work from Festinger.
He said that we have a problem
all the time that we have a
gap between our attitudes and
our behaviors and that, as
humans, we have to solve this
because we don't feel good
about that gap.
And so here's how we approached
showing how we
solve that problem.
Of course, the nice thing would
be just to do the right
thing all the time.
But that's not within, most
of us, somehow our grasp.
OK
So here's what he
had people do.
He had people come in and do
a purposefully boring task.
So they would pack and unpack
spools in a tray.
Or they would turn tiny
little screws,
each of them a quarter.
It was purposefully boring.
You could tell it was boring,
and it was boring.
This was the goal.
And then, either nothing
would happen--
that's one group--
or you would get paid $1--
not much money--
or $20--
considerably better--
to lie and tell the next person
who's coming in that
this was an interesting
and worthwhile task.
So you imagine you go in there,
you do something that's
really boring.
Imagine you're in this group.
They say, here, here's $1.
Will you lie to the
next person?
Or here's $20, will you lie to
the next person saying this
was a pretty cool task?
I can't believe how lucky you
are to have the next turn.
And then they say, OK, now we
know you lied to that person.
We asked you to do it.
But really, really,
how was the task?
Really, really, how
was the task?
And here's the amazing
finding.
If you don't lie, you say I
didn't like it very much at
all, here's zero,
less than zero.
If you are paid $1 to lie,
whoa, it really was good!
If you're paid $20 to lie, you
pretty much agree it stinks.
So how does that work?
You have to see the irony
of this, right?
So the interpretation is this.
If somebody pays you $20 to make
a white lie-- you don't
see this as a brutal lie, just
telling the next student that
this is a pretty cool task--
is $20 worth a white lie?
You can live with that.
You know why you did it.
But $1?
Would you sacrifice your
integrity for $1?
You understand--
$1?
How cheap can you be?
So their idea is this.
But now they're asking them
really, really, really, really
the way that people put together
their attitudes, like
I lied for a mere dollar, is to
say, hey, it must have been
more interesting than
I first thought.
Come to think of it, it was
pretty interesting.
Boom.
Do you understand that?
So the effort to match up the
discrepancy between your
attitudes and actions,
you solve--
you can't let them
go like this.
You can explain this.
I lied because I got
paid a bunch.
But this, you can't explain.
It's too hard to understand.
And you really create a
rationalization that puts it
all together.
And you really, really report
now that this was
a pretty good task.
Here's another one.
And this is not high
tech experiments.
You can do amazing experiments
without zapping people.
But by the time I tell you the
end of this one experiment--
let's see if I have
one more on this.
Nah, I'll mention it now
and then the next one.
It pretty much ruins it whenever
anybody tells you how
satisfied they are with almost
anything they've
done in their life.
This has ruined it for me.
And I'll tell you why.
Although I know that
you're better off
polishing your happiness.
So here's a simple experiment.
This guy, Jack Brehm, had a
bunch of wedding gifts.
And he took his wedding
gifts to the lab.
It was not very high tech.
And he had people rate how
much they wanted them.
So he had stuff like a desk
lamp, a toaster, a stopwatch,
a radio, a bunch of stuff
you got in the
1950s as wedding gifts.
People rated how much
did they like them.
And then, he picked two that
were in the middle of the list
and rated right next
to each other.
And he said, will you pick
one of these two?
You get to take it home.
Will you pick one of these two
that you rated in the middle
right next to each other?
And you pick one.
He says, OK, do one more thing
before you take it home.
Tell me again your rating for
the different things here.
And here's what they find,
that the items that
you chose move up.
You already have it.
But let's say it was rated one
to 10, it was rated a five, it
now becomes a two.
Man, that stopwatch, that's
pretty awesome.
I thought it was a five.
But it's a two, maybe a one.
I can't believe how lucky
I am that I picked that.
And how about the one
you didn't pick?
Say the toaster was number
six or number four.
That moved to nine or 10.
That toaster stinks.
That would have been such a bad
choice to attend Harvard.
It would have been a disaster.
Thank goodness I picked MIT.
So the idea is even something
like this-- and everything
they do, college
choices, cars--
any experiment you do, if you
have people rate after they
made a decision about what
they're going to do, they
always rate the thing they
picked as awesome on average
and the thing they didn't pick
as much worse than they
initially rated it.
And again, you can say,
is that a way we can
have a happy life?
Would you want to be at MIT
every day going, if only I'd
gone to Princeton!
Would you want to get married
to somebody and say, if only
I'd waited a little
bit longer.
For your career, could you have
said, I went right to
medical school or law school
or engineering.
If only I waited longer!
So you want to say no,
thank goodness
I picked that college.
Thank goodness I picked
that career.
Thank goodness I picked that
spouse or partner because the
other choices that were vaguely
in my head were awful.
I don't know how I was even
thinking about them.
So this has ruined it for me
every time anyone tells me how
happy they are with a choice
they've made in their life
because I look at this and go,
yeah, once you make that
choice, you're going to rate it
as awesome no matter what.
And a famous example is now many
of you are taking pretty
tough courses.
Years later when you come back
for alumni events-- and
hopefully many of you will have
good feelings about MIT
and come back and see
your classmates--
and you'll get around and say,
oh, that course was so brutal.
I know that won't
be this course.
That course was so brutal
with the problem sets.
But it made me a stronger
person, a better person.
Thank goodness I did it.
And maybe it does.
But let me tell you
why you will think
that in large numbers.
So 1959, there's a little bit
of a sociological experiment
in the sense you have to think
of people in 1959.
And they were told to qualify
for a research study, some
women were required to read
aloud a list of obscene words
which are seen as extremely
embarrassing and
inappropriate in 1959.
Nowadays, it might be
the preferred mode.
But in 1959, it was like,
I don't know.
This is not right--
or mild words.
So that's the experimenter.
Then, you got the privilege, if
you did this, to listen to
a lecture on mating habits
of lower animals.
But they made it the most
boring they could.
This could go a couple different
ways, mating habits
of lower animals.
They made it super boring
on purpose.
Lecture's over.
And they ask the students
to rate the lecture, an
intentionally super
boring lecture.
And the women were either in the
group with the unpleasant
experience of having to read
aloud uncomfortable word lists
or just neutral words,
no big deal.
Who rated the lecture better?
The women who read the obscene
list of words because they
were saying, well, why would
I do this if the
lecture weren't terrific?
So the worse the experience
where you've had some sense of
choice in it, the more people
will explain to themselves I
took it for an extremely
good reason.
I would not do a
painful thing.
I'm not that incompetent.
It must've been a
wise decision.
And in fact, I should tell you
that if the examiner picks
these items, you don't have
much of an effect.
So if you rate items four and
five or five and six and the
examiner gives you the
stopwatch, it doesn't change
your ratings because you
didn't choose it.
The examiner did.
The stopwatch is a
mediocre gift?
It's still a mediocre gift.
But if you chose it, you have
to justify the choice.
And there's 1,000 experiments
like this.
Why did I do something
so painful?
It must've been for a
very good reason.
And then, you figure out what
that reason was, like the
lecture was more awesome
than I thought.
That physics course, that math
course, that computer science
course just made me the
person I am today.
We're going to switch gears
now, first impressions.
So there's a book from Malcolm
Gladwell, Blink, which is
really driven by this
phenomenon.
The first impressions we take
of other people, how
powerful are they?
How valid are they?
How accurate are they?
So here's how we're going to
start the story, all the way
back in 1966.
They had students rate people's
personality on the
first day of class before
they met each other.
So if we had done this in this
course, imagine the first day
of this course, imagine you're
not sitting with a friend and
you're asked to people around
you on various personality
dimensions.
And the two that popped
out were sociable and
responsibility.
The people who said they were
sociable people tended to rate
them as sociable just from
sitting next to them for a
moment or as highly
responsible.
So this is outgoingness and
personality psychology or
extraversion.
And this is something like
conscientiousness.
Just talk to a person for
a couple of moments.
You rate them pretty much like
they rate themselves.
You don't know anything about
their background.
You haven't had a
big interaction.
Literally, it's moments next
to each in a course.
Here's another one, 250 students
divided into groups
of four who didn't know each
other and had not spoken.
And they rated each other.
And there was pretty good
correlations between moments
of sitting together and how
sociable or extroverted people
were, how responsible,
or conscientiousness.
So a few moments with somebody
correlates pretty well your
rating, on average, with how
they know themselves from a
lifetime of personal
experience-- a few moments,
pretty well.
Now, we could say how well
do we rate ourselves?
You could already pretty well
because it's pretty well
adjusted with what other
people think.
But here's another example where
they put strangers into
groups, videotaped them, had
other people later on view the
video tapes and rate things
like how extroverted they
were, how much time did they
talk, how many arm movements.
The impressions of the judges
watching the videotape
correlated pretty well with
self-ratings and with ratings
of other people who saw them
just for a few moments
personally.
So all these things line up.
Just from a few moments of
experience, you get a
surprisingly strong consensus
about how outgoing somebody is
and how conscientious or
responsible they are.
And it lines up pretty much with
the person's own judgment
about themselves that way.
So this reached a huge moment
from Nalani Ambady who's now
at Tufts having this famous
experiment, thin slices.
And it's a fantastic
experiment.
And if you ever teach,
it makes you nervous.
Then, we'll discuss whether
it should or not.
So at Harvard, here's
what she did.
She took videotapes of 13
graduate teaching assistants.
And they were horrible
video tapes.
This is 1990.
They were horrible videotape.
I'm just going to tell you--
you don't even see them around
very much because the quality,
when you see them, you can't
believe people even
saw things in them.
And she got a random 10 second
clip, 30 seconds per teaching
assistant, 30 seconds.
She shows a silent
clip to students.
There's no sound even.
You're just seeing silently
some teaching assistant in
front of students saying
something.
And then, she has these students
rate from the silent
film clip how accepting,
active, competent, or
confident the teaching assistant
is who they've never
met and, of course,
they don't know.
And they don't know
what the teaching
assistant's talking about.
Here's the impressive thing.
Then, they correlate the ratings
with the actual end of
semester rating with students.
They take the students who sat
through the entire course with
a teaching assistant, that's
one set of values.
They take the students
who see 30 seconds of
silent, grainy videotape.
And they say, how well do these
things do together?
And they correlate 0.76,
which is really high.
It's really high in our
field of research.
That momentary, uninformed
impression correlates
extremely high with what
students rate the teaching
assistant after a full semester,
back and forth,
seeing the teaching assistant
day in, day out, week in, week
out for an entire semester and
all the interactions--
super high correlation.
And it stays if it's cut
from 30 seconds to
15, or even six seconds.
So this is a thin slice, a tiny
viewing of somebody, has
this profound effect.
So one impression you can have
from this is something like,
gee, we form our first
impression--
and I'll come back to that--
and once we form that first
impression, that's it.
The ship has sailed to
a remarkable degree.
We can learn new things
about people.
We can change our impressions.
It's not that we can't.
But to a remarkable degree,
we've set our final impression
of that person within seconds
of interaction.
Now, you could say, and of
course that's going to be
fraught with every kind of
social prejudice you can
imagine and complicating
prejudice you can imagine.
Six seconds?
Not a lot to sort through
intellectually.
And it shows up in real life.
For example, listen to 20
seconds of a physician
speaking during a routine
office visit, they tape
recorded them.
Above chance prediction of who
was sued for malpractice or
not because if you like a
doctor, you tend to forgive an
error as a human error.
If you don't like a doctor,
you're going to sue that
person because you're
pretty mad at them.
So do you give them
the benefit of the
doubt they made a mistake?
Or do you think they ought to
be sued and punished for the
bad thing they did to you?
Depends how much you like the
person to start with.
Now, so one thing could
be that we go by first
impressions.
What's the other possibility
you could imagine?
The pessimistic view
of this is--
and it's somewhere, I think,
really in the middle, it's
just human nature.
The pessimistic view
is six seconds?
When we talk about this, the
teaching assistants and I as
we'd be in the course go, oh,
please, have that first six
seconds go OK because that's
going to be 3/4 of your
teaching evaluations--
which are due Monday
by 9:00 AM.
So please fill those out, by
the way, this reminds me.
The first six seconds, and
that's pretty much it.
And everything we do for the
rest of the semester,
everything we do for the rest of
the semester, is only going
to be about a quarter
of your rating.
That's hard to believe, right?
So one thing is it's all a big
confusion and humans just--
what's the other possibility
that's a little bit more
optimistic and maybe accurate?
We know what we like.
We know what we like, OK?
And amazingly, we can tell
within seconds under many
circumstance whether there's
something about a person that
we like or don't.
It's not that the six
seconds are just
superficial in a dumb way.
It's that we detect things about
that person that truly
are something about
who they are.
And that tends to carry all
the way through our human
interactions with them.
So I think it's somewhere
in that range.
And does it matter?
Is it all just about popularity
contests?
Or does it affect
other things?
So just staying within the realm
of teaching, they asked
if you perceive somebody as more
likable or conscientious,
are they more effective
teachers?
Does it circle around
like that?
So they have five students
in random groups.
One was randomly chosen
to be a teacher.
And these teachers prepared
brief math lessons.
The students then
took the test.
And strangers rated 10 seconds
of videos of these teachers.
So people prepared
math lessons.
Some better, some worse,
as you would imagine.
The higher these were rated in
these 10 second thin slice
videos by an external group, the
better the test scores of
the actual participants because
something about
effective teaching is something
about engaging students.
Something about engaging
students is something about
being outgoing or something like
that to a certain degree.
So it's not just arbitrary.
There's something real in
the world that happens.
And here's a few examples
where people have messed
around with that because there's
two things that happen
that are tricky.
One is we know what we like
and we detect it amazingly
quickly in people on average
to a large extent--
certainly with error, but to a
surprisingly vigorous extent.
On the other hand-- and we'll
come back to this--
once we have that first
impression, as faulty as it
may be in part, we keep
interpreting things in terms
of that first impression.
We give you the benefit of the
doubt or we don't behavior
after behavior.
So this was a study that
was done at MIT.
Now, you're going to get
some prior information.
Half the students were told,
the lecture you're about to
have, people know him and
consider him to be--
and then here's the--
you're in the group that's told
he's a very warm person,
industrious, critical,
practical, and determined.
Or half of you would get the
information that he's a cold
person, industrious, critical,
practical, and determined.
So you just got an impression,
a warm or cold person.
You haven't even seen
the person.
Person gets up and leads
a 20 minute discussion.
Then, you're asked to fill
out evaluations.
Let me just pick the example
of the warm person.
The lecturer is rated
as better.
But here's the really
cool part--
students took more part
in discussion.
And do you see how
that probably
made the section better?
Because if you think this
is a nice person, so
I can make a comment.
I won't get my head bit off that
I didn't do the reading
or whatever, it makes
a section better.
They think it's better, but they
make it better because
they think the person's a person
they want to interact
with simply because they were
told on a piece of paper the
person's warm or cold.
The person's identical
time after time.
So the first impression,
we know what we like.
It's surprisingly accurate
in certain ways.
But it's hard to change because
new information is
interpreted to be consistent
with already formed
impressions.
So first impressions are
unbelievably interesting
because they seem to be so
powerful in how we choose who
we like and don't like, who we
hire and don't hire, who we
work with and don't work with,
who we have relationships and
don't have relationships with.
And they're based on incredibly
little bits of
information which are
tantalizingly
accurate in one sense.
But once we have them, it's
hard to override them.
So here's a famous experiment
on the self-fulfilling
prophecy that happens from this
first impression that you
create, or the experimenter
creates.
So a famous study where
elementary school children
gave a test to students.
The researchers said, we're
going to tell you whether this
student is going to have-- we
believe, based on our research
at Harvard--
a good or bad year.
So you're an elementary
school teacher.
And then, you wonder.
But they say, oh,
no, we've done
fantastic research at Harvard.
We're the top scholars
in the field.
And we've developed an algorithm
that tells you is
this student going to have a
good year or a bad year?
The teacher gets that
information back.
And at the end of the year,
better scores for those kids
randomly described as going to
have a good year, worse scores
for those kids randomly
described as they're going to
have a bad year.
Now, they didn't tape
everything.
Nowadays, we could
tape everything.
But what do you guess
that happened?
And this might remind you of an
experiment we talked about
with rats, except now
it's children in
school in real life.
First impression, right?
When you've been told by
a crack team of Harvard
researchers that some kid is
going to be slumpy, when they
make a mistake answering a math
question, you go, oh, why
am I spending my time
on this student?
It's not worth my
teaching skills.
Somebody else gives
a good answer or
makes the same mistake.
And you go, oh, we're going
to help this student.
They're one inch away from
being perfect on their
multiplication table.
So the very same behavior gets
interpreted as pretty different.
Or maybe just remember when
they gave the right answer
really well because you think,
that's that student that got
three and four correctly.
But once you that first
impression, all of the other
behaviors start to be
interpreted in that context.
So one category of things mixed
into first impressions
that have been studied a lot
is consensus physical
attractiveness.
Of course, different people
think differently about
physical attractiveness.
But in the cultures we live
in, there tends to be
consensus about the average
movie star or beauty
contestant or whatever
is the era's way of a
people being seen.
So people have shown again and
again, this will not surprise
you, that physically attractive
people are judged
as more intelligent, competent,
social, and moral.
Now, why is that?
So here's an example.
Fifth grade teachers were
given report cards and
photographs of children
they did not know.
The photographs were picked to
be of children who looked, by
consensus, to be attractive or,
by consensus, to be not so
attractive.
And they're asked to rate, based
on the report cards and
the photos, the intelligence
and
achievement of the children.
The attractive children ended
up on average rated as
brighter and more successful
than the unattractive children
with identical report cards.
They're sitting there with
all the information.
They're making these
vague judgments.
And the attractiveness element,
even from the photo,
is coming in to the teachers.
A child's misbehavior is
attributed to environmental
circumstances if it's a more
attractive child and to
personality if it's a less
attractive child.
Again, this trade off between
character and situation.
The attractive child
did something bad.
Oh, there must have been
something in this situation
that wasn't well done.
The less attractive child
does poorly, and you
go, oh, that loser!
Right?
I'm overstating, but you see
how what's happening is
basically-- well, we'll
talk about it in a
moment, court cases.
People have done studies
on court cases.
Shorter sentence for more
attractive people, longer
sentence for less attractive
people for what seem to be
comparable crimes.
So people call this a halo
effect, that you take one
positive dimension
of a person--
it could be any.
Physical attractiveness is one
of the easiest ones to
experimentally study.
And once you say one thing is
positive, you tend to rate
other things as positive.
It's just human nature.
She's likable, so she's
intelligent.
He's attractive,
so he's smart.
People do this.
You could argue it's not a wise
thing to, an accurate
thing to do, definitely not.
But people tend to do it.
They'd leak categories.
Once they have positive
information in one dimension,
they start to make positive
assumptions in other
dimensions.
And there's all kinds
of examples.
There's 1,000 of these studies
because they're easy to do and
they're popular to do.
But anyway, so here's one
example where they were told
that the goal was to study
teacher evaluations.
And what they really saw were
videos of a lecture of a
person with a strong
Belgian accent.
This accent matters for this.
And they saw the videos of a
person answering questions in
a warm and friendly manner or
a cold and distant manner.
This was done on purpose.
Now, in these two videos, they
rated the person in the warm--
the same person, in one set of
videos they were warm in
answering and the other, they
were cold and distance.
So same person, but
in two videos.
Now, they're asked to rate other
dimensions besides the
warmness of the person.
They said, oh, the person who
is warm was more attractive.
Now, it's run the other way.
The nicer person was
more attractive,
more likable, and--
kind of impressively--
had less of an accent.
You understand?
Because accents, the challenge
of accents is sometimes
they're a little hard
to understand.
So you say, how hard was
it to understand?
Oh, that nice person?
Handsome and pretty easy
to understand.
Less nice person, on purpose
acting out, not so attractive.
And who could understand that
thick Belgian accent?
They pick the accent because
they say that's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous that an accent
would differ on the basis of
whether a person's
nice or not.
But this is thought to be the
reason why you see so many
athletes and movie stars doing
ads because they're asking you
to leak that same way.
Oh, if Kobe Bryant uses that
deodorant, that deodorant must
be awesome.
So that's why they care that
actors, celebrities, that's
why they have those ads because
many people have
positive feelings about them.
And if they can leak into
actions, they can certainly
leak into what beer you drink
or what make up you get.
So now, the problems with
these what we might call
shortcuts to judging people,
first impressions and that
kind of stuff, is when we're
making judgements of other
people is that we do this very
quickly and unconsciously.
Nobody thinks, if you ask them,
that they go around
misjudging people by the basis
of very superficial things.
But 1,000 experiments show
that, on average,
we tend to do that.
So these stereotypes
have effects.
Once we make the decision,
in influences our actual
behavioral.
So here's one example where
people tried to show this idea
that we might have some sort of
negative idea of somebody
for some reason.
Now, here's the self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Because we have a negative
thought about them, we don't
behave with them as nicely
as we might.
Now, that person who we haven't
treated nicely, of
course, is responding to feeling
like they're not
treated nicely.
And they go, aha!
Just what I thought.
This person stinks.
And so you have this circle, a
positive or a negative spiral,
in how you treat somebody, how
they respond to how you treat
them, and how you think
more about them.
So an example they did
of this, again using
attractiveness, the dating
discussion, is they gave in
this case male participants a
picture that suggested a woman
they were talking who they did
not see was either more or
less conventionally
attractive.
And then, they had a 10 minute
conversation back and forth.
Then, they brought in some other
males in this study.
And they asked them to listen.
They don't know anything
about the experiment.
They just hear a conversation.
And they say, listen to this
conversation with this woman.
Tell us from your impression,
how animated is she?
How enthusiastic is she?
How much is she enjoying herself
in this conversation?
And this will not
surprise you.
In fact, in some sense
it's almost trivial.
But in the more attractive
condition-- now, the raters
don't know that.
They don't know anything.
They just hear a discussion
going back and forth.
The women were more sociable,
poised, humorous,
and socially adept.
They were rated that
way by the raters.
Why?
Because the men who got the more
attractive pictures were
being nicer in their
conversational style.
The women were responding,
having a better conversation
back and forth.
And so this is an example of
the cycle between, in this
case, random and misleading
information and the
behavior you have.
And then once you have that
thing, you really start to
alter the situation.
That impression changes
how you behave.
The other person responds
to that behavior.
And that's a self-fulfilling
style.
Let me switch for just a couple
minutes to talk about
this idea we mentioned before
that the vast majority of
experimental psychology of the
kind I just described to you
is conducted in what people call
WEIRD societies, Western,
Educated, Industrial, Rich,
and Democratic.
There's not a lot of research
in impoverished countries.
There's no research.
There's no places to do it
or support to do it.
So a tremendous amount of
research comes from some
countries like the
United states,
Europe, Australia, Japan.
And in the coming years, more
and more will come of course
from China and India, South
America and Africa probably
after that.
Now, it happens that the
countries that produce a lot
of the research are the
countries that, when people
study societal attitudes towards
individuality versus
fitting in, United States, parts
of Europe, Australia,
are in the extreme in the
world in emphasizing
individuality.
In fact, the United states is
seen as a fantastic outlier
among other cultures.
Maybe Canada's close.
And here's a model that social
psychologists talk about.
It's a very simple
story in a way.
And certainly it's averaging
across lots of people.
So a trouble with cultural
psychology--
which is where we're at now--
you can do one or two things.
You can say culture doesn't
matter, which we think is
probably unlikely.
Cultures are huge, the culture
of your home, your community,
your country, your religion.
All those things influence
people.
But then, when you study it,
you tend to reduce it to
simple things that people
can experimentalize.
And you tend to, in some
sense, stereotype it.
But anyway, the idea is that
cultures that emphasize
individuality say you've
got to be yourself.
And then, you have some
people around you
you've got to deal with.
But be yourself!
Move across the country.
Follow that opportunity.
Be the one.
And that countries that
emphasize interdependent
relations are much more talking
about, you'll fulfill
yourself to the extent that you
find some sort of synergy
with those people who
surround you.
And so when they've done more
organized studies-- and I'll
show you now on ads,
on average--
most of this research previously
has been in Japan
and South Korea relative
to the United states.
But it's spreading to
other countries.
Many ads in Japan will focus on
groups enjoying themselves.
And the US version is you're
special, you're the one.
Be all that you can be.
It's you, you, you,
and individuation.
And most of us on average are
brought up in this culture
where we zip across the country
leaving people and
pursuing opportunities
to be ourselves.
Sleeping arrangements in other
countries or in the US tend to
emphasize this.
Beginning textbook Dick.
See Dick.
See Dick run.
Jane is somewhere
in this story.
And so I'll leave these
notes for you.
But it's this idea, again, what
counts is that you're
independent or what counts is
that you fit in with others.
What's the important thing?
So it's very hard in these kinds
of studies like with ads
or anything else to talk about
cultures as a whole.
Things are very complicated.
The worlds are different
in different
countries and all that.
So people have tried to
do these very simple
experiments--
I'll show you-- to try to
convince you that at the most
fundamental level, very
fundamental levels, depending
on the culture you come from,
your mind is tuned to see the
world one way or the other
way relatively speaking.
And there's variations within
cultures of course.
But here's a very simple
experiment.
They show you a box like
this with a line.
The size of the box and
the line change
from trial to trial.
They take it away.
And now, you see an empty box.
The empty box could
be the same size,
or bigger, or smaller.
And they say, draw a line that
either has the absolute same
size as this, even though
the box is different.
Or in other trials, they'll say
draw it so it has the same
relative, the same ratio,
the same relative size.
Does that makes sense?
So here, this would be the same
absolute size, the same
relative size.
Here, this would be the same
relative size or absolute.
Does that makes sense?
That's all your job
is, draw a line.
And you're told as it's taken
away, draw the same absolute
size in the box or the same
relative size, same
ratio, to the box.
So here's the first thing to
show you, which is that on
average people in Japan are
more accurate when they're
drawing-- this is mean error,
so it's good to be low--
they're more accurate for
the relative size.
People in the US, for
the absolute size.
And I think that's amazing,
a line in a box.
And we know that's not
culturally taught.
In United States, we don't have
anybody getting up and
saying, be all that
you can be!
Draw that line in
absolute length!
So the idea is it's not
a taught thing.
It's a way of thinking.
And when you get a new example,
you apply your
culture's way of thinking, many
people much of the time.
How malleable is that?
Is that fixed in you
from birth or not?
And then, you will help
me discover the one
flaw in this study.
So here's again the
absolute size.
Here's the Americans in America
having the reverse direction.
Here's Americans who
are students--
graduate students typically--
who have been in Japan
for a year or two.
Here's Japanese graduate
students who've been in the
United states for a year
or two for studies.
And you can see that just
a year or two makes the
Americans look like the
Japanese in Japan.
And a year or two makes the
Japanese look like Americans
in America.
Does that make sense?
So one interpretation is this
is shockingly malleable.
20 years, 24 years of one
culture, and one or two years
later, you're shifted into the
mindset of the other culture.
And maybe that's true.
If you're a very hard nosed
researcher, what do you wish
would have happened
in the study to
convince you that's true?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Would they
have gone back?
PROFESSOR: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: Would they have gone
back when they [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: You could
think about that.
That's not the way
I'm thinking.
I know I'm doing 20 questions.
So that would be a part
of the story.
Let me ask you this one.
If you go to MIT and say,
please, all students from
Japan, come and participate.
Or you go somewhere in Tokyo and
say, please, all students
from the US come and
participate, is that a random
assignment?
No.
Maybe the American students
who want to spend time in
Japan are kind of culturally
attuned with Japan.
That's why they went there.
And maybe they are easily swayed
by that because that's
why they're there.
And maybe these Japanese
students on average are swayed
by American mores because they
came to the US because they
like that way of thinking.
So to really convince yourself
this is really true, you'd
want to do random assignment
where two people come up to
you from the US and go,
OK, you go to Japan.
You stay in Flagstaff.
But nobody will agree to
do that reasonably.
So we just have to make
this impression.
But it's a suggestion that
cultural things could be
pretty malleable.
And a brain imaging study that
suggests for this line and box
task that it's harder work for
people from East Asia to do
the absolute task.
There's more activation, working
harder, to do the
absolute task.
And for people from the United
States, working harder to do
the relative task.
It's not that you
can't see both.
As you sit there, you understand
what a relative
size and what an absolute
size is.
It's just harder to take the
culturally non-preferred
perspective.
So here's a kind of weird
experiment like this.
So knowing now what you know,
imagine you walked up to
people, on average, from Japan,
South Korea, China, or
on average born and grew up
in the United states.
And you said to them, here's
a funny question.
Which is your favorite
shape here, the
diamond or the square?
If you're a rugged United
States Marine Corps
individualist, which
one do you like?
Who's the individualist
in this picture?
The diamond.
I'm a diamond, now
just stand back.
Who's the we're all trying to
get along here correctly, help
each other be interdependent and
form a greater shape from
our synergy?
The squares.
As ridiculous as that is--
or here's the triangle.
Here's one shape wrong,
different.
Here's the triangles.
As ridiculous as that question
is, as simple, non-cultural as
it feels, people from the US
like the outstanding figure.
People from Korea tend to like
the more typical figure.
Here's another one.
This was done in the airport.
Imagine you're in an airport.
This was in the days before 9/11
so we weren't as worried
about people running around
airports running up to us.
Here's how they literally
did it.
At the San Francisco airport,
they would ask you where
you're from.
And if you were from the US or
from Japan or Korea, they
would open a pencil box
like you might have
had as a little kid.
And there'd be a set of
pencils in there.
And they go, please take one.
And your first thought is,
OK, what's the deal?
What's the scam?
Are there any security
people around?
They go, no, no, just please
take a pencil.
And you go, OK.
And you take one.
And you think something
bad's going to
happen, and it doesn't.
All they want to know is this.
Do you take the out, the
individualist pencil or the
collectivist pencil?
And there's a one in
four condition or a
two in three condition.
Which pencil do you take?
Ridiculous as this experiment
is, it depends
where you come from.
East Asians on average picked
the majority pen.
And people born in the US,
European Americans, picked the
minority pen, the stand-out
individual pen.
So to a ludicrous degree,
the experiments
are almost too cute.
But the idea is they want
to get rid of a
lot of cultural overlay.
And so you're just
picking a pencil.
It's not something that anybody
taught you at home or
in school how to be
or how to do.
There's a similar one.
They would show a picture
like this.
This is an example picture.
First, they would ask people
to describe the picture.
And they noticed that the North
Americans tended to
focus on the fish.
There's a really big one.
He's going to eat the
really small one.
That's the way of capitalism.
I'm being facetious.
But their story was on
the fish on average.
And on average, the people they
studied from Japan talked
about not only the fish, but the
plants in the background
and things like this
on average.
That's just the average
description.
Then, they give them a memory
test for the fish where the
fish had the same background,
the same context they were in,
or no background, or they
got a new background.
And take a look at
the accuracy.
If it's the original background,
so if you took in
the fish with that background,
the context, people from Japan
did better than people from
the United States.
If it's no background, the
individual fish, you stripped
away the background, it
exactly reverses.
And who does better with
no background?
The people from the
United States.
So such a simple thing like
this, again, seems to be
driven by this.
Here's one more.
You could say, which is
more similar to this?
So this is similar
by one standout
rule, the common stem.
These actually share more
similarities if you talk about
the shape of the flower,
the shape of the petal.
But they're different
one from the other.
And again, the European
Americans go for
the one stand out.
That stem looks solid to me.
That's the European American.
And here's the East Asians, not
completely reversed, but
tending to pick the ones that
have the more contextual
similarity.
So here's a half
dozen examples.
And there's 100 more.
And it's just a reminder that
many of the conclusions
throughout this course,
including the ones in social
psychology, focused on people
from North American
universities.
So let's talk about some
of these ones.
So for example, we talked
about the fundamental
attribution error.
It turns out the US is
really big on this.
It's a little bit worldwide,
but the US is an outlier.
We really like to attribute the
actions of others to their
characters and not
their situations.
The attractiveness bias, very
pronounced in the United
States compared to
East Asians.
So we really just find that
one outstanding thing and
generalize it.
Then, of course, there's
variations within
each culture of course.
But there's cultural teachings
that seem to manifest
themselves in these
experiments.
Any questions on that?
OK, for the last few minutes,
I want to talk about a
disorder that you hear
a lot about.
And if you have questions, I can
answer some questions on
it, autism.
When I was a graduate student
here, you practically never
heard of it.
Now when you go to the
pediatrician's office,
practically every parent
is worried about
it for their child.
It used to be thought of as
a very rare disorder.
Autism spectrum disorders are
now thought to occur one out
of every something like
that, approaching 1%.
Have you seen the ads on TV
about the odds of having
autism versus the odds
of making the NBA?
Have any of you seen that?
Incredibly higher by far to have
autism than to make the
NBA or many other things
you can think of.
That's autism awareness efforts
to make people realize
it's shockingly common.
Lots of arguments about
why there's
been a dramatic increase.
I can tell you that for a while
they thought it was
awareness only, that people
didn't realize that certain
children were best understood
as having autism spectrum
disorders, a range of disorders
that share some
properties of difficulties
in social cognition,
communication, and
stereotyped, repetitive movements.
But now, most epidemiologic--
you can't really do
the experiment.
But most people think there
truly is an increasing number
for reasons that are not well
understood on top of
increasing awareness.
Nowadays, they can diagnose
it by age three.
A huge mystery is why there's
four boys to every girl with
autism as far as people have
observed, total mystery.
Nobody has any idea
why that is.
So I'm just going to show you
a few things that have been
found with individuals
with autism.
So one thing is in terms of the
individual with autism,
they don't seem to have a
natural desire to socially
interact with their parents,
their siblings, their
caretakers.
It's hard to get them to do
what's easy for most infants,
which is interact with
people around you.
That's easy for most infants,
hard for people with autism.
This is eye tracking.
When people--
so this is a path that you
look at when you look at
somebody else.
And what's very common as we
look at people is that we
focus a lot of our attention
to other people's eyes.
Well, that makes sense.
You know that from your
everyday experience.
OK, you look at the mouth and
the ear here and there.
But it's the eyes of the other
person that seem very
communicative socially.
And so you see this triangle
where people go between the
mouth, the speaking mouth, and
the eyes naturally to figure
out what's going on
with the person.
Here's a typical person
with autism.
You see it's like they don't
even look at this eye, don't
focus on the eyes, don't
focus on the eyes.
The original interpretation of
this was a lack of interest in
looking at these faces
as social targets.
There's an additional thought
that maybe, for some
individuals or many with autism,
there's something
uncomfortable with
dealing with a
social agent or a person.
So that's eye tracking.
And by the way, the same
thing when they were--
this is spontaneous,
the first picture,
wherever you want to look.
Now they said, tell us what
the expression is.
So you have a task to do.
And again, pretty much like
before, typically developing
people focus on the eyes, a
little bit on the mouth.
And again, you can see these
very wayward locations of
where individuals with autism
put their glances.
So you can just imagine a very
different social interaction
if somebody's looking here or
here at somebody versus the
person's eyes.
There's been a fantastic amount
of research about what
are brain differences in people
with autism spectrum
disorders and those without.
There's a fantastic variation
among every disorder, but you
might say autism even
more, or every
difference, autism even more.
It seems like there's just a
fantastic variation among
people with autism.
But the one finding that's held
up is this, which is that
if you measure the total
brain size--
which is a very gross measure
of the brain--
that there seems to be early in
development, up until age
five, an overgrowth of the brain
size in individuals with
autism that gets back
in development
to the typical size.
This is the most replicated.
Every number here is a different
research study.
So you can see all of these
up here are clumped here.
This is the single
most replicable
finding by far in autism.
There's an early, apparent
overgrowth of the brain.
What that means, why that's
associated with difficulties
in social interaction or
repetitive movements,
stereotyped interests
is hard to know.
Early in the course, we
mentioned and we talked about
theory of mind, understanding
what thoughts
another person holds.
And sometimes it's not even
consistent with the physical,
real world.
I mentioned to you that it's
severely delayed in autism,
years later.
So this is comparing
four-year-olds typically
developing versus 6 to
12-year-olds with autism.
And the four-year-olds
outperform the individuals
with autism on theory
of mind tasks.
So huge delay in understanding
what the independent mental
life is like of another
person.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: How do you find, in
general, IQs of people with
autism compared to--?
PROFESSOR: So the question
is how are IQs in autism?
So the answer is you measure--
so half of individuals with
autism are non-verbal.
You can't even give
them a test.
Those are not the ones who
tend to be represented in
research, behavioral research or
brain research, because you
can't even ask them
to do things.
So all the research is skewed
towards the higher functioning
individuals with autism.
If you just took their average
IQ, it would be lowish.
But there's many individuals
with very high IQs also.
And in fact, what's called
Asperger's syndrome
specifically refers to
individuals who have the
social difficulties
characteristic of autism, but
have a very high functioning
cognitive and IQ level.
So it runs the whole range.
If you just took the average,
it'd be low.
But there's many individuals
who are very high in IQ.
And so in this study, for
example, they matched IQ by
having, in this case,
four year olds and
six to 12 year olds.
The IQ was even.
And still, the theory of mind
was much weaker in the
individuals with autism.
But it's incredibly
variable, the IQs.
So here's another way that
people have studied two things
at once we talk about--
the human nature to ascribe
social things, social stories
to things and then how
that plays out
differently in autism.
So this is famous work from
Heider and Simmel.
And you're going to see these
two triangles do something.
And I want you to figure
out what they're doing.
What happened there, socially?
I need somebody to put their
hand up, and the other
people-- help me out.
Somebody, put your hand
up and tell me what
you thought you saw.
Second last quarter left
of the whole course.
We gotta have somebody put--
OK, what do you think you saw?
AUDIENCE: They were dancing.
PROFESSOR: They were
kind of dancing.
Anything else?
Yeah?
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: That the big one was
trying to get the little one
to go outside, but the little
one was scared.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, there's no
right answer, by the way.
But one I heard, which is
coaxing, that the little one
was scared.
They were playing together.
They're having a nice
relationship.
Then, the little one doesn't
want to go outside the box.
Then, the big one has to
coax and support them.
Were you going to
say that, too?
Any other thoughts
or feelings?
So yeah, the most common
interpretation of this-- and
Heider and Simmel, their
original point was that humans
want to give social descriptions
to everything.
Two triangles, what are
you talking about?
But almost, if we just let our
mind go just a little bit,
we're almost giving
them animacy.
They're moving themselves
around.
They're having social
interactions.
They have stories where
sometimes there's a bully
beating up the little, big
circle beating up a little
circle or dot.
And we tend to make up these
little stories very easily.
So the first thing to tell you
is that individuals with
autism on average, again a big
range on average, don't see
these stories so much.
They say on average the two
triangles, what do you mean?
And you could say that's
not even wrong.
It's just not the way people
typically interpret things
that we typically look
for socially.
And then, you look
in the brain.
And what happens is this.
This is brain responses to these
social stories where we
tend to give it a social
explanation
versus random displays.
They can also display where
things whizzing around and
nobody thinks anything's
happening.
And what they see is in the
visual cortex, this part of
the brain that sees the
things, there's equal
activation in the two groups.
But in parts of the brain that
we think are involved in
social interaction, like the
superior temporal sulcus,
medial prefrontal cortex, areas
from a lot of research
that we believe is involved in
thinking about other people
and their feelings and thoughts,
there's very little
engagement of these areas in
individuals with autism in
this study.
So they don't see the
same stories.
And they don't turn on social
parts of the brain that are
spontaneously turned on by
typically developing people.
And here's the last experiment
I'll show you which is this.
So it turns out our brains
respond and our minds respond
very strongly to where people
are looking, where their gaze
is falling.
So imagine that you're
talking to somebody.
You're telling them something.
And their eyes are here.
Does that bother you?
OK, yes because we think their
eyes tell us where their
attention is.
And if they're not focused on
us, they're not interested.
And we're offended.
So here's the experiment now
where they have a computer
model like this.
And they throw on suddenly
a display.
And the person either
looks this way
or looks the opposite.
Which would you think is the
natural way a person would
look naturally if something
interesting
happened over here?
They would look towards it.
It'd be kind of weird to
look away from it.
And when you look at brain
imaging at what happens in
those conditions in the superior
temporal sulcus and
other places, typically
developing people for the
weird looking away, it's like
a mystery to be solved.
What's going on?
Why aren't they looking
at this?
Are they angry?
Is there something better
over there?
it's a social mystery.
Why is this person
not looking?
And there's no difference in
those two conditions in the
study for individuals with
autism as if eyes are looking
here, eyes are looking there.
It's just where eyes
are looking.
What's the difference?
There's not the spontaneous
social interpretation or
mystery that needs
to be understood.
So these are just some of the
differences that people have
observed looking at the
brains and behavior
of people with autism.
Any questions about autism?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
in the brain activates
[INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
PROFESSOR: That's
a good question.
Do those parts of the brain,
the areas that in typical
people are turned on for social
cognition, when we
think about what another
person's thinking or feeling,
do they ever turn on in
individuals with autism?
The answer is yes, they do.
I can tell you that I'm showing
you some of the
simplest things and probably
roughly correct.
But there's such a fantastic
variety among people with
autism and even within
the person.
Just a very little bit of
different of a condition, all
of a sudden, some of these
areas will turn on.
It's been a very big mystery.
And we don't know whether that's
because we just don't
understand it right or whether
the variety among patients is
so great that we're making the
wrong conclusions, saying
autism is like this.
And that may be true of 5% of
individuals with autism.
So it's a huge mystery in many
ways, and an important one
because all of a sudden, it's
almost 1%, one out of every
100 children.
