by Adam Alter
The last remaining solution was much trickier, though, and only 39 percent of the students arrived at the solution without help: one of the cords could be converted into a pendulum if affixed to one of the smaller, heavy objects in the room. The students could then swing the pendulum, grabbing the attached cord as it approached the second cord. When most of the students couldn’t solve the problem unaided, Maier gave them a subtle hint at the solution that became one of the first demonstrations of social learning. As time passed, he began pacing the room, occasionally grazing one of the ropes with his shoulder and setting it in motion. The rope swung gently, but Maier refrained from discussing the hint, and the students continued to ponder the problem. Less than a minute after witnessing Maier’s subtle hint, two-thirds of the students who hadn’t yet solved the problem jumped up and excitedly described the pendulum solution. Almost all of them denied having seen that the experimenter jostled the cord, and even if he had brushed against it, they were sure that it hadn’t prompted the solution. Instead, they were convinced that the solution came to them unaided, a product of mental effort rather than gentle prompting. Although Maier was more interested in problem solving than in social mimicry, he also concluded that people learn from subtle cues without recognizing that they’re mimicking the behavior of others.
Consciously mimicking or aping another person is taboo in social settings, but unconscious mimicry is rife. Former England soccer manager Steve McClaren departed England to coach Dutch side FC Twente in 2008. Several months later, McClaren was interviewed before a game, and instead of responding with his normally fluid British accent, he spoke in a halting form of English that made him sound Dutch. His grammar was strangely off-kilter, and he skipped words that native English-speakers would normally use. British fans responded by plastering a YouTube video of the interview with dozens of derisive comments. A group of computer scientists also found that when two people talk on the phone while walking, they tend to synchronize their footsteps even without the help of visual feedback, relying instead on the rising and falling tones of their partners’ voices. Even infants as young as nine months of age begin mimicking other people, leading psychologists to argue that mimicry is an innate, evolved form of social glue that binds people together.
Psychologists call this the chameleon effect. Chameleons primarily change color to signal their intent to mate or fight, and mimicry in humans appears to serve a similarly social purpose. In one classic series of experiments, two students visited a research lab to complete a simple task that required them to interact for a few minutes. Unbeknownst to one of the students, the other student was actually a member of the experimenter’s team who was instructed to adopt a specific string of mannerisms. With some of the students she smiled, with others she refrained from smiling, and with some she rubbed her face several times, while with others she shook her foot incessantly. The students didn’t notice these subtle behaviors (as they told the experimenter later), but a videotape of the interaction showed plenty of mimicry. When the trained actor smiled, the students smiled three times as often; when the actor rubbed her face, the students rubbed their faces twice as often; and when she shook her foot, they shook their feet twice as often. In another, similar experiment, an actor either mirrored the students’ behavior or adopted neutral mannerisms that bore no resemblance to those of the students. When the students later reflected on these interactions, they felt the interactions went more smoothly when they had been mimicked. Not only do people naturally mimic one another, but those actions go on to create social bonds between strangers that form the foundation of future friendships.
Humans are suckers for mimicry, because unconscious imitation is one of the few clear signals that other people admire you enough to emulate your gestures. Watching someone as they mimic you is also a rare opportunity to evaluate your behaviors through the lens of an outsider, which Sartre described as at once exhilarating and frightening. For some people, some of the time, there’s nothing more exciting than performing before a large audience, but much of the time there’s nothing more mortifying than standing in the spotlight of another person’s gaze. According to one story, that statement is literally true; thousands of Americans who were polled claimed that public speaking was their biggest fear, with death a long way back in second place.
Performing Before a Crowd: The Highs of Social Exhilaration and the Lows of Social Anxiety
Of the 100 billion people who have ever lived, Usain Bolt may be the fastest. On a Saturday evening during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the Jamaican sprinter demolished the hundred-meter world record—the pinnacle of athletic achievement. Bolt’s performance was devastating. In a postrace interview, American eighth-place finisher Darvis Patton drew a line between Bolt and the rest of the field. “It’s not even close,” Patton said. “It’s everybody catching up with Usain Bolt. He’s a legend in his own right. The guy’s a phenomenal athlete. He’s a freak of nature.” Underscoring his dominance, Bolt slowed to celebrate his victory twenty meters from the finish line, and discovered that one of his shoelaces happened to be untied. A team of Norwegian astrophysicists, lamenting Bolt’s decision to decelerate before the end of the race, calculated that his time of 9.69 seconds might have been lowered to 9.51 seconds had he continued running apace. This revised time challenges the belief held by several prominent scientists that humans will one day run a theoretical minimum time of 9.48 seconds—but probably not before the year 2500.
Some athletes inhabit a Zen-like state before they run, but Bolt lives to run in front of “audiences who love” him. While his competitors gaze myopically at the finish line, Bolt dances playfully before each big race. Bolt’s tendency to warm to crowds may be one reason why he runs so fast at big events.
Perhaps the first experiment ever conducted in the field of social psychology suggests that humans are often faster and stronger when they test their speed and strength in the company of other people, rather than alone.
That study, conducted at Indiana University in the late 1890s, was the brainchild of Norman Triplett, a cycling enthusiast and a sports aficionado. In dozens of experiments he pushed cyclists to ride as fast as they could on stationary bikes, occasionally leaving them alone in the lab room and free from distraction, at other times pacing them against a motor-driven cycle, and sometimes asking them to ride in the presence of other cyclists. Across his observations, Triplett noticed that the cyclists tended to ride faster when other cyclists rode nearby. One cyclist rode a mile in 2 minutes 49 seconds when alone, but managed to ride the same mile in 2 minutes 37 seconds in the company of four pacing cyclists; similarly, he rode ten miles in 33 minutes 17 seconds while riding alone, but rode the same distance two minutes faster when riding with several pacers. Triplett acknowledged that his observations were far from rigorous, so he conducted an experiment to show that the effect persisted in a tightly controlled lab study.
Triplett recruited forty children, ages eight to thirteen, to complete his study in 1897. He measured how quickly the students could wind a fishing reel so that a small flag attached to the line traveled a distance of sixteen meters. The task was simple but novel, and none of the children had played with fishing rods before the experiment. They performed the task both alone and in the presence of other children, and Triplett noticed that they wound the reels faster in the presence of others. He concluded that an audience enables people to “liberate latent energy” not normally available when they perform alone. Peering 110 years into the future, Triplett might have attributed Usain Bolt’s remarkable performance to a combination of natural talent and—a critical special ingredient—the presence of a supportive, energy-liberating crowd.
Science doesn’t always tell simple stories, and other researchers challenged Triplett’s groundbreaking results well into the twentieth century. While some researchers replicated Triplett’s effect—now known as the social facilitation effect—others found the opposite effect, known as social inhibition. J
oseph Pessin and Richard Husband asked participants in their study to learn a simple maze either blindfolded alone or blindfolded in the presence of other people. The blindfolded participants traced their fingers along the maze, and reversed each time they encountered one of ten dead ends. Instead of performing better in front of an audience, Pessin and Husband’s participants completed the maze more quickly when they were alone.
Inconsistencies like these persisted for years, until social psychologist Bob Zajonc (pronounced like science with a leading z) proposed a solution: it all depends on the nature of the task. Audiences accentuate our instinctive responses and make it more difficult to override those responses in favor of more carefully considered alternatives. For Usain Bolt, there’s nothing more natural than running, and the children in Triplett’s experiment devoted little thought and attention to frantically winding the experimental fishing reel. In contrast, learning a maze is difficult, and it requires concentration. Pessin and Husband’s maze learners were probably distracted by the knowledge that they were being watched, and feared making a mistake in front of an audience.
Zajonc avoided experimenting with humans at first, choosing to observe the behavior of seventy-two cockroaches instead. With a small team of researchers, he devised two small athletic tasks that required the cockroaches to scuttle from a brightly lit area in a small box to a more appealing darker compartment. Some of the cockroaches completed a simpler task, in which they ran along a straight runway from the glare of the box to the darkened goal compartment. The remaining cockroaches completed a more difficult task, traversing a more complex maze before they could escape the light. Some of the cockroaches completed these tasks alone, but the researchers also built a small audience box to force some of the athletic cockroaches to compete in front of an audience of roach spectators. Just as the researchers predicted, the cockroaches were much quicker to cover the straight runway when watched by an audience, reaching the darkened goal compartment an average of twenty-three seconds more quickly when they were performing before a crowd. But the cockroach athletes responded very differently to an audience when they were faced with the complex maze, reaching the goal seventy-six seconds more quickly when they were alone. The same audience that pushed the cockroaches to perform the simpler task more quickly also delayed them when the task was more complex.
In the early 1980s, social psychologists found evidence for Zajonc’s theory in humans when they watched the behavior of competent and novice pool players. Strong players, who sank 70 percent of their shots while playing alone, made 80 percent of their shots in the presence of four onlookers. Meanwhile, weaker players who made only 36 percent of their shots alone, sank a lowly 25 percent when observed. The stronger players were energized by the presence of onlookers, but the same audience distracted the already overloaded weaker players. As writers and school students will similarly testify, there’s nothing more disconcerting than having a reader or a teacher gazing over your shoulder as you try to simplify a clunky sentence or complete a tricky math problem.
More Competitors Breed Less Competition
All audiences aren’t created equal, and Zajonc and Triplett were almost always interested in passive audiences—those made up of observers who had no real stake in the performers’ success or failure. The cockroaches in Zajonc’s maze and the cyclists who trained together were never competing directly with the performer, never willing his loss at the expense of their win. But many observers are also competitors, observing precisely because they’re taking part in the same competition. When Usain Bolt crouches before a race, he’s also observed by seven other athletes who occupy the lanes to his left and right. Does it matter whether Bolt pays attention to all seven competitors, or perhaps just his strongest rival? Would he perform differently in a head-to-head two-man race, as star athletes Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey did when Bailey beat Johnson for the title of “world’s fastest man” in 1997? Should football coaches motivate their players by reminding them of the entire league of teams, or should they focus instead on one team at a time? Are students better off completing standardized tests in a small hall, with only a handful of other students, or will they perform better surrounded by hundreds of fellow test-takers? These are important questions for all sorts of people, from athletes to students.
We don’t have answers to all of these questions yet, but psychologists have examined the relationship between SAT scores and the number of test-takers in each venue. For each U.S. state, they calculated the number of students who were taking the SAT in 2005, and divided that figure by the number of test-taking venues in the state. The outcome of that simple equation represented the average number of test-takers in each venue. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the students in states with more test-takers per venue tended to perform more poorly. In other words, the students scored better on the SAT when they were surrounded by fewer competitors. Of course, states differ in lots of ways, so it’s possible that the higher-density states were poorer and had fewer venues, or that the students were merely more distracted while taking the test. To address these concerns, the psychologists ran other studies where students completed tests alone, but believed they were competing against a large pool or a small pool of fellow students. In one experiment, students completed a quiz in twenty-eight seconds when they believed they were competing against ten other students, but completed the same quiz in thirty-three seconds when they believed they were competing against a larger pool of a hundred students.
This result might seem surprising. Shouldn’t people respond to more competition by putting in more effort? That simple relationship seems compelling, but when people are overwhelmed, their motivation wanes and sometimes they disengage completely. It’s easy to focus your energy on the opponent across the tennis net or the team on the opposite end of the field, but it’s much more difficult to focus on the entire population of competitors in the tournament or league all at once. We derive a lot of our competitive spirit from these sorts of mental comparisons, weighing our own performance against the performance of others, and we’re more likely to commit to the task when those social comparisons are vivid, rich, and motivating. Indeed, a similar process explains why people donate more money to charity when they focus on just one child in need, rather than the overwhelming need of millions of starving children: it’s much easier and more rewarding to commit mental and emotional energy to an easily imagined limited cause than it is to commit energy to a cause that’s so vast that your efforts are unlikely to put a dent in the edifice of need.
It’s tempting to think of people as lazy, expedient, and exploitative when they appear to slacken in the presence of competitors and team members. In truth, though, people are seldom aware of these effects, many of which only begin to make sense when you examine them through the nuanced lens of human psychology. One of the most puzzling behavioral patterns is the tendency for a crowd of people to ignore an emergency that, as isolated individuals, they would address with urgency. Journalists lament the decline of humanity each time this happens, but a small group of insightful psychologists have offered another, more compelling interpretation.
Too Many Cooks Ignore the Broth
The tragedy unfolded in 2011, just before sunrise on a mid-April morning in Queens, New York. A man and woman who apparently knew each other fought with increasing venom, and a homeless Guatemalan man named Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax intervened to help the struggling woman. Her male companion turned on Tale-Yax and stabbed him several times in the torso. For ninety minutes, Tale-Yax lay in a growing pool of his own blood as dozens of passersby ignored him, took photos, or stared briefly before continuing on their way. By the time firefighters arrived to help, the sun had risen and Tale-Yax had died.
Tale-Yax’s death inspires a predictable stream of responses, beginning with contempt for human nature and ending with questions about how and when humans lost their humanity. Were we better citizens fifty years ago? Or ten years ago? Do
es New York attract particularly callous residents, or are good people turned vile after spending too long in the city?
Some of the answers are disturbingly clear. Bystander nonintervention is not merely a product of postmillennial depravity, and similar incidents have been reported as far back as the 1960s. One incident that attracted widespread media attention (and the attention of a couple of talented social psychologists) was the stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese, also a Queens resident, in 1964. The details of the attack remain contentious, but the basic facts are distressing. As Genovese arrived home from work at 3:15 a.m., an assailant stabbed her in full view of at least a dozen apartment residents. None of the residents called the police during the attack, which lasted half an hour, and Genovese ultimately died in the ambulance on her way to the emergency room. The passersby who ignored Tale-Yax behaved just as their counterparts had a half century ago.
The effect may not be new, but that doesn’t explain why our moral compasses seem to be broken. There are at least two explanations for bystander apathy: either there’s something wrong with our moral wiring, or our moral wiring is fine and there’s something special about these situations that causes us not to respond. Both of those explanations appeal to experts. According to psychologist Michael Bradley, interviewed in an ABC news story, there is indeed something wrong with our moral wiring: “We have this kind of 24/7 pounding of violence. We now know that that pounding of violence actually causes brain changes where people start to not distinguish between real violence and cyberviolence. We’re actually rewiring our brains to not react to violence and pain the way we should.” Simply put, it takes a lot for us to respond to violence, because what used to warrant a response no longer registers on our violence-detecting radar. Violent video games, films, and TV shows have dampened our sensitivity to real-life violence, so public stabbings don’t register as strongly as they used to.