Experiments: - Massachusetts Institute of Technology



HSSP Summer, 2012 Philosophy of Mind Class # 7: The Bystander Effect, Cognitive Dissonance, Justification and Modeling and a return to Theory of Mind and empathyQuestion: How much of what we know, what we feel and what we do is learned from other people? How much do we copy of what we hear or see other people doing?Quick review: Any questions or comments from last week? Today I hope to continue our discussion on social conditioning and consider why some people are bystanders, while others are notCritical Thinking Question: In what ways is conformity good, and in what ways is it not?Picking up from last week: Any questions or comments?My comment: Wow. This class was AWESOME!! I hate to see it end! ThanksHow to make sense of it all? - Critical Thinking tendencies and behaviors. The Critical Thinking checklist - How to look at a study, analyze the data, and make well reasoned conclusions, or expose areasthat are ambiguous and need clarity. Are these experiments relevant today, and in what way?Festinger’s experimentWould you tell a little white lie for one dollar? Is justification the same as telling a little fib? What problems do you see with this? Do you think justification leads to false memory? If you did this experiment today with your friends, would the results be the same?The Bystander Effect: The Diffusion of Responsibility: We ought to help vs. we ought to do what everybody else is doing. We see people conforming with each other every day, yet we don’t put it in the context of the Bystander Effect. How is this similar to the group of students who bullied the lady on the bus, or how is it different. How is it similar to Milgram’s experiment and the willingness to shock people, how is it different?Bobo Doll Experiment: Modeling. How much of what we learn is done by imitating what we see others do? After we watch this famous experiment, think back to the first day of class, and Rebecca Saxe’s experiment with the young children, the pirates and their cheese sandwiches.MIND-MAPPING :=))Vocabulary terms this week:Social cognition studies how people perceive, think about, and remember information about othersSense of Agency: The "sense of agency" (SA) refers to the subjective and personal awareness that you are initiating, executing, and controlling your own volitional actions in the world. It is the sense of ownership.Attitude: A tendency to evaluate things in a certain way, including objects, people or events and are generally learned through experience. Defined as learned, global evaluations of a person, object, place, or issue that influence thought and action; expressions of approval or disapproval, favorability or unfavorability; likes and dislikes. Allows for mixed feelings. The three components are:Emotional: How the object, person, issue or event makes you feel. Cognitive: Your thoughts and beliefs about the subjectBehavioral: How the attitude influences your behavior.Attribution: how we explain behavior, either our own or the behavior of others. There are two basic ways we may explain the behaviors of others.? First, we may explain the behaviors with respect to the person's personality or dispositions.? Second, we may explain the behaviors with respect to situation. -Dispositional Attribution Example: If another student is quiet on the first day of class we may infer that shyness is the cause of the person's quietness. -Situational Attribution Example: If another student is quiet on the first day of class we may infer that the student is having a bad day, or that the lecture on the first day was boring.Bystander intervention: The mere presence of other bystanders greatly decreases intervention Diffusion of responsibility: a person is less likely to take responsibility for an action or inaction when others are present. We ought to help, / we ought to do what everybody else is doingGroup Think: collective thinking defect that is characterized by a premature consensus or an incorrect assumption of consensus, caused by members of a group failing to promote views which are not consistent with the views of other members.Modeling: is a form of learning where individuals ascertain how to act or perform by observing another individual. Learning a new skill by watching or imitating that behavior when they see it another person and without verbal instruction Agency and morality The sense of agency is important to be appreciated in relation to morality in the sense that people can be held responsible for their actions. However, conceptions of human agency have been essentially confined to personal agency exercised individually. Albert Bandura has argued that in many activities individuals do not have direct control over social conditions and institutional practice that affect their lives. Under these circumstances, they seek their well-being and security through the exercise of proxy agency. For instance people try to get other people who have expertise or wield influence and power to act on their behalf to get the outcomes they desireExperiments: Cognitive Dissonance - Festinger and Carlsmith (1959)When someone is forced to do (publicly) something they (privately) really don't want to do, dissonance is created between their cognition (I didn't want to do this) and their behavior (I did it).? Forced compliance occurs when an individual performs an action that is inconsistent with his or her beliefs. The behavior can't be changed, since it is already in the past, so dissonance will need to be reduced by re-evaluating their attitude to what they have done. Aim: investigate if making people perform a dull task would create cognitive dissonance through forced compliance behavior.Method: In their laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour). They were then paid either $1 or $20 to tell a waiting participant (a confederate) that the tasks were really interesting. Almost all of the participants agreed to walk into the waiting room and persuade the confederate that the boring experiment would be fun. Festinger’s theory is that?every person has innate?drives to keep all his cognitions in a harmonious state and avoid a state of tension or dissonance. If a person encounters a state of dissonance, the discomfort brought by the conflict of cognition leads to an alteration in one of the involved cognitions to reduce the conflict and bring a harmonious state once again.Initially, subjects will be told that they will be participating in a two-hour experiment. Participants will be briefed that the experiment aims to observe the relationship between expectations and the actual experience of a task. With no other introduction about the experiment, the subject will be shown the first task which involves putting 12 spools into a tray, emptying it again, refilling the tray and so on. The subject will be instructed to do this for thirty minutes. After the said time, the experimenter will approach the subject and ask him to turn 48 square pegs a quarter turn in a clockwise direction, then another quarter, and so on. Bored to hell, the subject must finish the task. The subjects will be advised to work on both experiments on their own preferred speed. While the subject is doing the tasks, the experimenter acts as if recording the progress of the subject and timing him accordingly.Up to this point of the experiment, all the treatment conditions were identical. Divergence occurs after this point; conditions divide into control, One Dollar and Twenty Dollars. The following step of the experimenter is the master deception of all. After debriefing the subject, he then acts as if he is very nervous and it is the first time that he will do this.He then tells the subjects that the other group needs someone who will give them a background about the experiment. For some reason, the student the experimenters hired was not available for the given day. The subject will be told that he will be given (One Dollar or Twenty Dollars) if he will do the request. After agreeing, the subject will be handed a piece of paper containing the vital points that he needs to impart to the next subjects of the other groups. The notes include: It was very enjoyable, very exciting, I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed myself. It was very interesting. It was really intriguing.After this part, all the treatment conditions will be proceeding similarly again. After briefing the subjects in the other group, the subject will be interviewed to know his thoughts about the experiment. The questions include:Were the tasks interesting and enjoyable? Would you rate how you feel about them on a scale from -5 to +5 where -5 means they were extremely dull and boring, +5 means they were extremely interesting and enjoyable, and zero means they were neutral.Did the experiment give you an opportunity to learn about your own ability to perform these tasks? Would you rate how you feel about this on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 means you learned nothing and 10 means you learned a great deal.Do you think the results of the experiment may have scientific value? Would you rate your opinion on this matter on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 means the results have no scientific value or importance and 10 means they have a great deal of value and importance.Would you have any desire to participate in another similar experiment? Would you rate your desire to participate in a similar experiment again on a scale from -5 to +5, where -5 means you would definitely dislike to participate, +5 means you would definitely like to participate, and 0 means you have no particular feeling.RESULTS OF THE EXPERIMENTQuestions in InterviewControlOne DollarTwenty DollarsHow enjoyable tasks were-0.451.35-0.05How much you learned3.082.803.15Scientific importance5.606.455.18Would participate in similar experiment-0.621.20-0.25The most relevant of all these data is the first row, how enjoyable the tasks were since we are looking at?cognitive dissonance. Since the tasks were purposefully crafted to be monotonous and boring, the control group averaged -0.45. On the other hand, the One Dollar group showed a significantly higher score with +1.35. The resulting dissonance in the subjects was somehow reduced by persuading themselves that the tasks were indeed interesting. Comparing this result to the results from the Twenty Dollar group, we see a significantly lower score in the Twenty Dollar group -0.05.CONCLUSIONS: Two conclusions were obtained from the results.1) if a person is induced to do or say something which is contrary to his private opinion, there will be a tendency for him to change his opinion so as to bring it into correspondence with what he has done or said.2) the larger the pressure used to change one’s private opinion, beyond the minimum needed to change it, the weaker will be the above-mentioned tendency. This is clearly evident in the results of the $20 group, the experimenters obtained a lower score since they used a large amount of pressure compared to $1. which can be considered as the minimum pressure needed to make the change of opinion.Bystander ExperimentBystander effect is one of the most famous psychology effect that explain why people sometimes, in some certain situation, can become so ‘rude’. This effect is a social phenomenon in which the presence of other people reduces our helping behavior.RESULTS OF THE BYSTANDER APATHY EXPERIMENT Only 31% of the subjects tried to seek for help. This means that most of the subjects didn’t bother to look for the experimenters to help the suffering participant. Most of them were obviously anxious but the reaction was not there.However, the significant finding of this experiment lies on the results of the first treatment condition. In a one-on-one conversation, 85% of the subjects actually asked for help. This means that if the subjects think that they are the only one who knows about the incident, there is a higher probability that they will ask for help. On the contrary, the bigger groups displayed fewer reactions to the incident.ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION : The significantly higher percentage of subjects who asked for help in the first treatment condition entails that people react more if there is less number of people around an emergency or an event. On the other hand, the significantly lower percentage of subjects who helped in the other treatment conditions entails that individuals are less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present.Two reasons were offered to explain the bystander apathy effect. First is diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when other people think that another person will intervene and as a result, they feel less responsible. The second explanation is pluralistic ignorance. This refers to the mentality that since everyone else is not reacting to the emergency; my personal help is not needed. Seeing the inaction of others will lead to the thought that the emergency is not that serious as compared to perception when he is alone. ................
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