Following Nature
Anyone who works with natural materials knows that they have tendencies within them such as a grain or orientation. It is useful to know the direction of the grain to work with such materials, such as wood or stone. If you are cutting or otherwise shaping them, it helps to know the material’s natural orientation in order to save yourself a lot of time and energy. If you have an axe, for instance, knowing the grain of a piece of wood is helpful in working it, whether you want to cut it to length and thus work across the grain, or split it over its length by working with the grain.
Soft sciences like social psychology are about discovering and validating natural tendencies in people, whether individually or at the group level. It is worth understanding the natural tendencies in ourselves and others in greater detail if we want to work with the human material rather than against it.
At times the subject itself seems too obvious to merit much study. The research findings don’t seem much better than what we intuitively believe anyway. Yet closer research can yield some surprisingly innovative ways of either confirming or disproving things we think we know about how our minds work. Since the research involves general tendencies rather than fast and hard laws of the natural sciences, creative researchers have to find sneaky ways of discovering how much people tend towards certain behaviors when confronted with specific situations that can be reproduced on different test subjects.
Thus, the value of books of social psychology like Robert Cialdini’s Influence or Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s The Power of Bad: to describe the subtle and often hidden grain of human nature.
The research studies themselves can have design flaws. On occasion, it is because the researchers have succumbed to their inner biases or the pressure to succeed in academia, requiring research with positive results even when exaggerated. Research that investigates a potential phenomenon and determines it doesn’t exist unfortunately goes unrewarded, even though dispelling misconceptions should have an intrinsic value. The urge to find tendencies that are just out of plain view is strong—at times too strong for the ambitious academic to resist. The incentives to find errors or intentional frauds are not always that great. The effort of disproving established conclusions itself can give rise to enmities within narrow fields of specialization that are ruinous to careers.
Cialdini reports several innovative research experiments designed to find out whether tendencies exist and how strong the tendencies are. Most of them involve researchers pretending to question the study subjects about one thing while in reality examining tendencies the researchers keep hidden from the subjects.
For instance, to determine how strong the pull of commitment and internal consistency is, researchers set up two different surveys using interviewers stationed at the entrance to a grocery store. In both situations, there were two displays for bananas in the fresh produce section. One was marked only with the price, while the other bore the additional label “organic”. In the one set of interviews, shoppers entering the store were asked to describe what they liked about organic foods. In the other interview, shoppers were merely asked about their general grocery shopping habits. When shoppers told interviewers why they like organic foods, they entered the store more likely to buy the organic bananas by a wide margin. This was one demonstration of how we talk ourselves into ideas, and how we put those ideas into action as we acquiesce to outside influence, using the force of our own words.
The tribal tendencies have been tested in research, too. The contrasting experiments involved having research subjects do warm-up exercises before completing tasks. In one, participants were made to do individual pen-and-paper type work by themselves before completing subsequent tasks that called for collaboration. In the contrasting group, participants were asked to sing a song together, recite poetry in unison, or read selections of literature aloud in sequence. The participants who had collaborated on tasks beforehand worked together much better. The shared group activities primed them to feel like members of a tribe, of sorts, even if that uniting experience was relatively short.
All of which is to say that even when the tendencies appear superficially intuitive, it is useful to explore how strong they are. This has its purpose for gaining better understanding of ourselves in its own right, but comes in handy for commerce and enterprise, too, where such knowledge is pursued with a particular attention to detail. It informs the design of marketing and advertising as well as how retail stores are laid out. It shapes the modern world we live in, whether we admit to liking it or not. Enough of our peers do to make the expense worthwhile.
Day Two survived. Very wet. No dryer miracle was achieved, so D and E will take our camp clothes to be dried at the laundromat after I get them washed. I have music to work on this evening.
An open question:
We often touch upon topics of some import in these spaces. Are not we, those of us who engage in a certain form of humor, the true pundits? -- Asking for all my friends here.