Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

by Adam Alter

  PART TWO

  THE WORLD BETWEEN US

  4.

  THE MERE PRESENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE

  It’s in the Eyes

  For several years, the staff in the psychology department at Newcastle University, in northern England, took tea and coffee from the kitchen without contributing to the honesty box on the counter. A notice nearby asked drinkers to pay a small fee for their beverages—30 pence for tea, 50 pence for coffee, and 10 pence for milk—but the pile of coins inside the honesty box accumulated slowly, while tea, coffee, and milk supplies shrank rapidly. Something needed to be done, and three academics in the department decided to tackle the problem using the best tool at their disposal: a research intervention. As students of human behavior, they recognized that people are guided by weak moral compasses that function much more effectively under surveillance. Unfortunately, honesty box contributions were anonymous, and it would have been expensive and overzealous to install a camera. Instead of forcing everyone to comply under the gaze of constant surveillance, the researchers devised an intervention that merely made people feel as though they were being watched. During a ten-week period, they displayed ten different pictures above the price list for one week each, alternating between images of a pair of eyes and images of flowers. The researchers measured how much milk was consumed as an index of coffee and tea consumption, and counted how much money was in the honesty box at the end of each week. The intervention was a remarkable success. When the image featured a collection of flowers, drinkers paid an average of only 15 pence per liter of milk consumed, whereas they paid 42 pence per liter when the image displayed a pair of eyes. The mere suggestion that someone was watching compelled drinkers to contribute nearly three times more cash to the honesty box.

  Drinkers contributed almost three times as much to an anonymous honesty box when the price list featured a pair of eyes (dark gray bars) rather than flowers (light gray bars).

  Two hundred miles south of Newcastle, the West Midlands police department was justifiably curious about the research. The department was responsible for policing Birmingham, the second-largest city in the U.K., and the Newcastle University intervention appeared to be both inexpensive and effective. Within months, the police department launched Operation Momentum, putting up a string of posters featuring a pair of piercing eyes with the slogan “We’ve got our eyes on criminals.” Local officers described the campaign as a great triumph, claiming a 17 percent reduction in robberies, and swiftly launched its sequel: Operation Momentum 2.

  As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we’re being watched, we start to notice how we’re behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching. We’re far more forgiving of our own moral shortcomings—like failing to pay a small sum for tea and coffee—than we imagine other people might be, so the same acts that seem appropriate in isolation seem unacceptable when viewed from an observer’s perspective. Today few of us spend more than a few hours alone, so our thoughts and actions come to reflect the presence of the family, friends, and strangers who surround us. So much of the way we think and behave is molded by these interactions with others that it becomes very difficult to imagine the people we’d become during a week, a month, or even a year of social isolation. For small groups of people across time, that hypothetical has become a temporary or permanent reality, and the results have almost always been alarming.

  Damaged by Social Isolation

  As in Rudyard Kipling’s story of Mowgli, a boy who was raised by a pack of wolves in the jungle, some people are raised without any human contact at all. Stories of feral children are legend, though few of them are supported by strong evidence. Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja spent twelve years living with wolves in the mountains of southern Spain, until he emerged miraculously at age nineteen. Robert, a Ugandan boy, survived a massacre that killed his parents in the early 1980s, and lived for three years with a troop of vervet monkeys. Perhaps the most famous and disturbing case of the twentieth century was “Genie,” a girl whose parents forced her to spend the first thirteen years of her life strapped to a chair in a dark room in Los Angeles. When Genie was discovered in 1970, she was incapable of speaking, making eye contact, or engaging in basic social interactions. Instead of walking, she held her hands out in front of her body and shuffled erratically, and instead of speaking, she made animalistic sniffing and spitting sounds. Although Genie learned to speak in short sentences, she never overcame the initial period of isolation. As her psychologists noted, children acquire most of their social and linguistic skills during a critical window early in their lives. Children who grow up without human contact tend not to acquire those skills, and just as people struggle to learn new languages after childhood, they rarely learn to engage in basic social interactions.

  Because their social muscles wither without regular exercise, even people who are raised with plenty of social contact struggle during prolonged isolation. In the mid-1950s, social psychologist Stanley Schachter recruited five young men to participate in a small experiment on social isolation. Each man was confined to his own room, a comfortable “cell” furnished with a table, a chair, a bed, a lamp, and toilet facilities. The rooms contained no books or magazines or TV, and a researcher left food for the men at the door without making social contact. Schachter told the men that he would pay them for their time, that they were free to withdraw from the experiment at any time, and left them alone as time began to elapse.

  Just twenty minutes later, one of the men frantically rapped on his door and asked to be released. Even this brief period of social isolation was too much for him to bear, so Schachter paid him and allowed him to leave. Of the four remaining men, three lasted two days. One of those men claimed that his two days in isolation were among the most difficult days of his life, and he vowed never to repeat the experience. Another told Schachter that he felt increasingly uneasy and disoriented as time wore on. The third was unfazed but requested to be released after two days, while the final man remained happily isolated for eight full days.

  Not everyone responds to social isolation the same way, but for many if not most people, the experience is disorienting, unsettling, and no less acute than the hunger and thirst that come from a prolonged fast. As the space race intensified during the 1960s, a young French adventurer named Michel Siffre decided to contribute to the cause. Siffre offered to spend two months deep underground in a dark cave to simulate the isolation that astronauts might experience during solo missions. In the summer of 1962, Siffre descended to a depth of 375 feet inside a subterranean glacier in the French-Italian Maritime Alps. The cave was humid and cold, and though Siffre suffered from hypothermia, he emerged with his mental faculties largely intact. Apart from losing track of time and a brief spell of madness in which he sang wildly and danced the twist, his thinking remained clear and he was eager to conduct a more extensive experiment.

  Ten years and countless hours of planning later, Siffre spent six months in a cave near Del Rio, Texas. This second cave was warm and comparatively comfortable, and Siffre amused himself by reading magazines and books and conducting scientific tests. But then, on day seventy-nine, he succumbed to a prolonged bout of depression after his record player broke and mold and mildew began to destroy his magazines and scientific equipment. He pondered suicide, only to befriend a mouse that renewed his will to live. Sadly, when he tried to trap the mouse in a casserole dish, he accidentally crushed and killed it, and wrote in his journal that “desolation overwhelms me.” Even Siffre, who had volunteered to enter the cave, emerged disoriented, confused, and profoundly depressed, another victim of the ravages of social isolation.

  Cases like Siffre’s voluntary confinement are too rare to warrant sweeping conclusions, but thousands of prisoners have experienced similar disorientation and discomfort during periods of enforced solitary confinement. In the early 1980s, psychiatrist Stuart Grassian exami
ned a group of inmates who had spent between eleven days and ten months in solitary confinement at a prison in Massachusetts. The men experienced hallucinations, profound depression, confusion, perceptual distortion, memory loss, and paranoia. A decade later, psychologist Craig Haney studied a hundred inmates at the Pelican Bay supermax prison in California. Many of the prisoners spent years in isolation, emerging with a combination of “chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair.” Between 80 percent and 90 percent of them were “irrationally angry,” confused, and socially withdrawn—symptoms that affect only a few percent of the general population. Dozens of studies have drawn similar conclusions, and many of them have found that isolated prisoners struggle to distinguish between reality and fiction. Psychologists have compared the effects of social isolation to the process of deterioration that victims experience when they’re poisoned by slow-acting snake venom. At first, isolation breeds agitation—the sort of agitation that seasonal hunters in remote parts of the world refer to as “cabin fever.” Cabin fever isn’t pleasant, and sufferers will expose themselves to bitter blizzards rather than face another hour alone in a small space. After agitation come hallucination, acute anxiety, and even psychosis: a complete psychological break from reality. Chronic social deprivation is also one of the primary causes of premature death in people who are otherwise healthy.

  Why is prolonged social isolation so profoundly damaging? Apart from the depression that sets in when people are forcibly isolated, one reason is that we tend to lose our sense of reality when we’re unable to confirm our version of the world with that of other people. Does it make sense to slaughter, cook, and eat cows? What about domestic dogs? Are men considered stylish when they don long powdered wigs? Leather jackets? Three-piece suits? The answers to these questions are impossible to determine in the absence of social contact, because they’re entirely determined by social norms or standards that differ across time and cultures. People born in China and the United States have the same digestive systems, and people born in the 1700s and 2000s have the same sensory systems, yet their preferences diverge under the influence of very different social contexts. You can imagine how Anne Shapiro, an American woman who awoke from a twenty-nine-year coma in 1992, felt when she emerged into a completely different world from the one she left in 1963, on the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Similarly, a prisoner who began a twenty-nine-year prison term in 1963 would have rejoined a world now populated with computers, cordless phones, and color televisions. To those of us who have lived through these years in good social company, these changes are gradual and manageable, but to people who have lived in comparative isolation, they’re monumental shifts that demand new and improved conceptions of reality. In fact, much of what we consider to be real is a direct product of standards determined by the people around us.

  Deriving Reality by Comparing Yourself with Other People

  In some settings, your understanding of reality is independent of other people. For example, try to answer these questions:

  Question 1: Is your body comfortable, or would you be more comfortable with the help of heating or air-conditioning?

  Question 2: Is the room you’re in light enough, or would you be more comfortable under the glow of an extra lamp?

  Even if you live alone in a shack, thousands of miles from civilization, you can answer these questions quite easily. Humans and other animals know instinctively whether the ambient temperature is comfortable and whether the environment is bright enough to enable them to see.

  Now try this very different question:

  Question 3: Given the amount of electricity you use to power the heating, air-conditioning, and lighting in your home, are you being good to the environment?

  There’s an important difference between this third question and the first two questions. This one is much more difficult to answer in the absence of social standards. Even if you knew that your household used 5,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, how would you evaluate the environmental impact of that figure? Like so many questions that tap into behavioral norms, it’s very difficult to assess your behavior without the help of comparison standards. (The average U.S. household consumes 11,500 kilowatt-hours per year, so 5,000 is an impressively modest figure.)

  Historically, power bills have been restricted to an unhelpful summary of each household’s usage figures, so consumers have struggled to measure their consumption behavior against an informative yardstick. Part of the problem is that power companies face the same obstacle that hobbled the Newcastle University psychology department: in the absence of constant feedback, they’re unable to encourage people to consume less electricity. Like the psychologists who encouraged socially conscious behavior with a strategically placed pair of eyes, one power company encouraged people to scrutinize their actions both cheaply and effectively.

  Opower was founded in Virginia in 2007 by two longtime friends. The company promised to improve communication between power providers and consumers by harnessing the tools of behavioral science. As of 2012, Opower had contracts with more than fifty utility companies across twenty-two U.S. states. Each month, Opower sends a report to each household containing not just the standard consumption figures, but also a simple summary of the household’s electricity use compared with the rest of the population. The most important part of the report is the Last Month Neighbor Comparison, which features two pieces of information: how much energy you’re using relative to your efficient neighbors, and a description of your use as “more than average,” “good,” or “great.”

  Consumers who achieve “greatness” by using considerably less electricity than their neighbors are rewarded with two smiling faces, whereas those who are merely good are greeted with a single smiling face. Opower has been incredibly successful, reducing power consumption in catchment areas by an average of 2.5 percent per person—a long-term saving of almost a billion kilowatt-hours across the United States since the company’s inception. What’s made Opower so successful is its recognition of two critical factors: first, that people don’t know how to evaluate their power without knowing how much electricity other households are consuming; and second, that people respond to the virtual acclaim and criticism that comes from simple social cues like smiling faces. More recently, the company has released an iPhone app that allows users to compete with their friends for the title of “most energy efficient.” The real or even imagined presence of fellow energy consumers drives competition, and people respond by curbing their appetite for electricity.

  What Opower has done for environmental change, Turkish soap opera Noor has done for cultural change in the Arab world. Some writers have claimed that Noor (Arabic for “light” and the main character’s name) may someday be considered the origin of “the Islamic world’s accidental cultural revolution.” In 2006, Saudi Arabian TV channel MBC bought the rights to the soap opera about a young woman named Noor who marries into a wealthy family. The characters quickly became surrogate family members in households across Saudi Arabia, and later other parts of the Arab world. Some of them violated deeply held conservative norms by drinking wine with dinner and engaging in premarital sex, but the relationship between Noor and her handsome, progressive husband, Mohannad, showed viewers the marital benefits of gender equality. Mohannad was consistently loyal and attentive, supporting his wife’s career as a fashion designer and as an equal partner in their marriage. Dozens of other TV stations around the world bought the rights to the show, and it began to subtly reshape how people thought about their relationships. Mohannad and Noor became two of the most popular babies’ names in Saudi Arabia. Formerly submissive wives began to demand that their husbands treat them with the respect that Mohannad accorded Noor. Meanwhile, as the divorce rate rose by 10 percent in the United Arab Emirates, officials came to believe that the increase was partly due to the prominence of empowering soap operas like Noor. According to interviews, many of these divorces were initiat
ed by women who were unhappy in their marriages, but only realized that they had the power to escape after watching similar situations on TV. A soap opera in Brazil taught women to seek contraception, and fertility rates in areas that received the satellite signal fell dramatically, while they remained stable in nearby areas that were beyond the signal’s reach.

  Like the Saudi women who watched Noor, we’re all born into one reality, oblivious to the countless alternate realities that exist in other parts of the world. Without the presence of people who express the possibilities of a different set of norms, we continue to think, feel, and behave within the invisible boundaries that have shaped us since birth. The good news for social progress is that we’re instinctively programmed to mimic other people—to mirror their behavior and to learn how to tackle problems with fresh insight.

  Mimicry, Problem Solving, and Social Connection

  In the early 1930s, psychologist Norman Maier began to wonder how people solve problems that require creativity. Maier brought sixty-one students into his lab at the University of Michigan, and asked them to find as many solutions as they could to a simple physical problem. Two cords of identical length hung from the lab’s ceiling, and Maier asked the students to tie the cords together. The room also contained a number of other items, including pliers, extension cords, a table, chairs, and poles. When the students grabbed one of the cords and tried to walk across to the other cord, they realized that they couldn’t quite reach the second cord without using the props in the room. Some of the solutions were simple, so most of the students described them without much difficulty. For example, the second cord could be anchored to a chair midway between the two cords, allowing the students to bring the first one over to the second. One of them could also be lengthened with the extension cord or pulled closer with the pole.