You Know Who's Weird? People, That's Who.
You Know Who's Weird? People, That's Who.
A dive into human behavior.
Most people can't spend fifteen minutes by themselves. They'd prefer electric shocks. That's what a team of psychologists at the University of Virginia discovered when they asked adults to sit alone for fifteen minutes.
They couldn't do it.
Isn't that weird?
As the authors conclude, "we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending six to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think... many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts." In light of recent events, that makes a little too much sense.
It makes you wonder where their thoughts go.
Now get this:
You can teach someone to think bananas are evil.
It's called spontaneous trait transference. This happens when people transfer negative traits to anyone and anything they associate with bad news or threats, even if it's just someone trying to warn them about the threat. Their brains can't tell the difference between a threat and someone trying to warn them about the threat. If you describe someone else as dangerous or dishonest, they'll remember it as if you were talking about yourself.
That's weird. Guess what else?
The more good a person thinks they do for society, the more likely they are to "cheat" and do something awful. The bad things they do often negate the good and then some, but they don't notice because they're too busy thinking about what a good person they are. Also: Once someone establishes their reputation in society as a good person, it's almost impossible to dislodge that. It doesn't matter what awful things they do, everyone will defend them.
It's called moral licensing.
If you make someone sad or stress them out, their empathy and compassion plummet. Psychologists have found that college students won't donate to charities if they see pictures of kids frowning. They also won't stop to help someone having a heart attack if they're late for something important.
A psychologist at Johns Hopkins named John Calhoun made utopias for rats. They wound up killing each other. Humans do something similar. It's called personal space. If they don't get enough of it, they flip out. A psychologist at Harvard named Edward T. Hall developed Calhoun's ideas into a theory called proxemics. I wonder if proxemics extends into the internet. You think people are getting weird because they never get a break from each other, because their phones and computers constantly invite them to harass and taunt each other while fawning over celebrities who don't care about them at all and just want their money?
It might be a thing.
Here's something else:
Most people's brains can't tell the difference between their future self and a total stranger. If you hook them up to a machine and ask them questions about their future, and then ask them questions about someone they don't know, the same parts of their brain light up in scans. If you ask them questions about their current self, it activates different parts.
So most people treat their own future the same way they treat a stranger, and we know how most people treat strangers.
Don't we?
Another thing: If you present someone with overwhelming evidence on a topic, even if they admit you're right, they'll try even harder to believe the opposite. Psychologists learned all that when they debunked the divinity in Jesus in 1975 for a bunch of high school girls. The girls admitted the psychologists were right. Later, they said the whole experience deepened their faith. They wound up believing in Jesus even more than they had before.
So if you win an argument, it can actually just make someone even more determined to pretend you're wrong, even if they know you're right.
Isn't that weird?
Now:
If you want to get someone to believe something, anything at all, you just have to repeat it enough times. It's called epistemic weight. Your brain has a hard time telling the difference between something that's true and something it's just encountered a ton of times. One team of psychologists even convinced people that elephants were faster than cheetahs.
That's why advertising works.
Now get this:
True or not, most people don't even remember when or where they first encountered a piece of information. When someone tells you they heard about something on the radio or read it in a journal, they're usually just making that up. They actually have no idea. They might've heard it on CNN or Fox News, or they might've just picked it up from Reddit. If their neighbor tells them about an article they read, there's a good chance they'll think they actually read that article themselves.
That's called the illusory truth effect.
It's a doozy.
If you want to hear something even weirder, read the book Big Liars. As psychologists have figured out, it's easier to believe a big audacious lie than a little one. If you really want to sell a big lie, bury it in a bunch of hard truths.
The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe. A bunch of people will literally go nobody would make up a lie that brazen...
So it just has to be true.
It's so weird.
A Yale Law professor confirmed that most people actually don't care where this or that expert went to college. They don't care how many books they've published, how many awards they've won, or anything else. They only trust experts who already agree with them on the issues they consider the most important.
In the 1950s, a cult formed around the idea that space aliens were going to beam them up into a ship and save them from the end of the world. When the ship didn't arrive, they tried even harder to recruit new members. They spent even more time talking to the press. It took years for them to finally give up. The whole thing was so weird, a psychologist named Leon Festinger wrote a book about it. His book inspired decades of studies on cognitive dissonance.
Festinger also found out that the less you pay someone to do boring, tedious work... the more grateful they feel for the opportunity.
If you pay them more, they complain.
Weird, huh?
Next:
If things get bad fast, everyone notices and freaks out. If things get bad slowly over time, nobody cares. They get used to it. They adjust. They start calling it "normal."
That's shifting baseline syndrome.
This guy named Harold Staw started one of the first department stores in America. He made it rich. Instead of selling his business and retiring early, he started getting angry at Kmart for outcompeting him. He squandered his fortune trying to keep up with them. His son spent the rest of his life studying entrepreneurs, companies, and governments that didn't know when to quit.
Since then, psychologists have observed time and again that most people won't give up when they start to lose. They even know it's a bad idea to keep going, but they can't let go. It's called entrapment in escalating conflicts.
And finally:
Let's not forget those famous studies in the 1950s where college students deliberately disregarded their own eyes during a series of tests, just so they could conform to a group that was knowingly giving the wrong answers to easy questions. Yeah, I'm talking about the Asch conformity experiments.
Let's stop and review:
People would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes alone.
You can teach them that bananas are evil.
If you're having a heart attack, but they're running late for something, there's a good chance they won't stop to help you.
They can't tell the difference between a stranger and themselves a year from now.
If you try to warn them about something, they'll think you're telling them not to trust you and that you're dangerous.
Doing something nice makes someone more likely to do something horrible.
If they know something's wrong or false, they would rather keep believing in that than change their mind, no matter what.
Facts can make things worse.
You can convince them that elephants are faster than cheetahs if you say it enough times.
If they can't remember where they got a piece of information, they'll just make something up that sounds good.
They almost never give up, even when they know they should.
They care more about fitting in than anything.
When you piece together everything psychologists have learned about people over the last 50 years, it's no wonder we're here.
Here's the bad news:
Most people out there are easy to manipulate. Most of them think they're smart, independent free thinkers who would never, ever just bob along with the crowd, even if it goes against their own interest.
Here's the good news:
Theoretically, we know we're easy to manipulate. So if we try really, really hard, we can overcome all of these glitches in our brains. We can keep ourselves and each other honest. We can do better than we're doing.
We just have to want it.
Isn't that weird?
If you appreciate my work, you can buy me a cup of coffee or get my book. This publication is grateful for support from readers and organizations like Kanro for funding research and awareness of diseases and other crises.