Now at NYU, his Motivation Lab designs tools and strategies to translate a person’s desire into a strong goal commitment using primes: words, sounds, or objects that unconsciously convince people to accept new thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Early behaviorists like Hull and James spoke about primes in terms of the power of suggestion and the process of guiding a person’s goals through hypnosis. Later experiments at the University of Connecticut modified that a bit, suggesting instead that verbal and nonverbal cues influenced people using waking suggestion, or non-hypnotic suggestibility. This, says Gollwitzer, is how people unconsciously catch goals from one another. The process of making someone catch a goal involves, among the usual behavioral mimicry, subtly exposing people to specific primes, or cues. They plant good and bad ideas in our minds that quietly germinate and eventually motivate the body to engage in the pursuit of them.
Gollwitzer tells me he can fairly easily make people catch some goals and behaviors without their knowledge—things like assertiveness, flexibility, docility, aggression, and the motivation to be more successful. In the lab, his process involves subjecting people to a sophisticated series of words hidden in writing prompts, or furtively revealing specific images and sounds to people that might seem innocuous but in reality implant ideas or behaviors. If he wants to increase a person’s attention to detail, he uses a technique called embodied priming. By assigning a pre-task game of connect-the-dots, he slows down the subject’s processes. In another kind of lab manipulation, words like fast or accurate flash so rapidly between images on a screen that they are imperceptible to the eye, yet they prime a subject to work faster or more slowly.
He and his colleagues once set up an experiment that asked participants to read a short scenario about a man planning to go on vacation. In one slightly different version of the story, he included information about the man’s job on a farm, details that implied, but never explicitly mentioned, a goal of earning money. Next, every participant was asked to perform a short task. They learned that if they finished the task on time they would be invited to participate in another task in which it was possible to earn money. The participants in the goal condition—those who had information about the main character’s job—worked faster and exerted more effort to reach the last task than those in the control condition. In other words, perceiving another person’s goal-related behavior, in this case working on a farm to make money, led readers to catch and pursue a similar goal, even though it meant the participants pursued it in a different way from the farmer. Far more fascinating to Gollwitzer was that this effect was automatic. Encoding the goal required no specific instruction.
“I’m guessing these primes happen naturally outside of the lab, too.”
“That’s actually where things get interesting,” he says. “Beyond the lab, we catch other people’s goals through everyday cues. There are some people who say that 99 percent of our lives and actions are the result of unconscious goal pursuit through primes we’ve registered from others around us.”
That means, I muse, that, unbeknownst to me, my goals could really belong to a friend, a person on the periphery, or someone just beyond it. My motivation for ordering a latte from Starbucks instead of one from Dunkin’ Donuts this morning might have come from a brand of cup tossed into a trash can I scarily registered out of the corner of my eye. Or perhaps I caught the smell of a brand of coffee on the clothes of the woman at the bodega who sold me my morning paper. Better yet, one of these cues might have sparked the thought that I needed a cup of coffee, or that my body was tired from travel, or that I required sustenance at all. What if one such off-the-cuff cue primed me for something more substantial, like my desire to start a family?
I think about the theories Palo Alto has floated about reasons behind the suicide cluster. Gollwitzer would have me believe that primes in the environment are responsible for cuing social contagions like work ethic, ambition, and greed, and our fear-based responses as well. And yet, given everything I’ve learned about our strange contagion, I have to consider that the mind is strong enough to thwart ideas that are not its own, let alone those that propel it toward self-harm.
Still, the Motivation Lab continues to find evidence to the contrary. Many of our most personal goals are actually those we have inadvertently caught from primes in the community. Not only are goals contagious, but the mind has difficulty deciphering between an intrinsically motivated goal and one that a person has ostensibly picked up from someone else.
For instance, Gollwitzer says, women are more likely to get pregnant from thirteen to twenty-four months after a coworker has had a child. Men’s roles in the proliferation of this contagion appear to be negligible, although the pregnant sister of a nonpregnant colleague will transmit the desire to have a child to women in the office within eighteen months of her sister giving birth. In other words, it’s possible that a stranger’s pregnancy can unintentionally influence another person’s desire to have a baby. The mechanisms behind contagious goals go well beyond biological synchronicity, chemical signals that harmonize menstrual cycles, or biological cues from underarm-sweat compounds that provoke fear-based reactions. Gollwitzer is talking about something far more universal, the mundane and the everyday that hide in plain sight that possess the power to activate desires and goal commitments in each of us in both intentional and unintentional ways. “People have become very good at using hidden priming strategies to mold us,” he says. Our standard QWERTY keyboard configuration is a beautiful piece of ingenuity specifically created to slow down typists, preventing typewriter jams. The original logo for Jack in the Box included subliminal religious subtext as the O and X came together to create the symbol of the Jesus fish, encouraging an adherence to a certain value system. To convince people to buy a product, advertisers sell the customers on an environment or an experience, like the image of a modern kitchen instead of the features of a single appliance. During presidential campaign rallies, color, lighting, and room temperature affect a crowd’s energy and mood. Department stores pipe in fast-paced music, priming customers to move quickly from rack to rack, goading patrons to see more inventories and increasing the likelihood they’ll find something they will like.
With this new understanding of primes, the makeup of the strange contagion at home once again grows in complexity. My definition continues to evolve. I briefly take stock of what I’ve learned, about the delicate balance between treating social contagions and spreading them, about the way hysteria galvanizes the power of the mind, creating feedback loops of paranoia and fear. Adding to this classification the fact that objects cause us to catch thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, this psychological picture sharpens for me.
With his glasses still in his hand, Gollwitzer points behind me and says, “That’s where I lead team meetings.” I turn and look across the room toward the sofas. On the wall above the love seat hangs a grouping of black-and-white photos I noticed when I first arrived. I look at the pictures in their frames and recognize Battery Park, the Hudson River slogging by in the background. A dusting of snow clings to metal gate rails.
“So often our conversations get heated, so I asked a photographer to give me pictures that can cool us down.”
Before I can fully process this, he directs my attention to his work desk against a wall near the center of the office. My eyes fall on the poster above it, an image of mismatched rooftops. Some are made of brick, some of wood. Each pops with bright color. “That’s for me,” he says. “It primes me for creativity.”
I shake my head: he’s intentionally set these primes for himself, to unconsciously coax his moods, to guide his behaviors, to foster his strengths, to mitigate his weaknesses.
Just then I notice another poster on the wall, this one directly beside us. With a finger I gesture to the image of big glass skyscrapers, their mirrored windows reflecting distorted images in their glass. Graduate students discuss their research projects here at this table, he says. The image primes them to be open to different pers
pectives.
“The striking part is, most of the time we don’t know we’ve been primed,” he continues.
“This all seems . . .” I pause, searching for the right word. Thrilling. Crazy. Frightening. “. . . dangerous,” I conclude.
Contagious goal pursuit assumes that, through subtle priming, we register an idea and behave as though it has originated from within. Companies invest billions of dollars annually to identify what those cues are, all in an effort to better understand potential customers and engage them. We can use this information to sell widgets as well as influence far more profound social changes. Researchers at Brown University, curious about the evolving nature of racial bias, took data measuring self-reported associations with facial perceptions. Specifically, they were curious about the way white people view faces of black minorities. In 2007 the number of positive associations increased. The timing was during the run-up to the presidential general election, where so much of the imagery around Barack Obama included his face and words such as hope and change. The study concluded that this level of media exposure conditioned people to invert negative perceptions, successfully reversing pejorative stereotypes.
We are encoding images and objects we see in the world everywhere we go. Nothing is neutral. Each object triggers a judgment, a feeling, a response. It becomes a memory that later, although it may never surface in our conscious minds, informs our decisions. When we see it again, out of context, out of the corner of our eye, it re-invokes visceral memories. This is how marketers and advertisers identify images that can, with very low-level visual properties, speak to us quickly and directly. Once we understand that thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are passed from person to person on an unconscious level, there’s very little difference at all between a trend and a contagion.
Like Gollwitzer and his wall art, we often use these primes to cue ourselves, too. We wear a suit to an interview, instilling in ourselves and in potential employers a sense of professionalism on a bodily felt level. We engage in pregame rituals to focus our intent, to stoke our fortitude, to visualize a win.
And yet I can’t help but worry that someone wise to these processes might easily manipulate others to engage in pursuits against their better judgment, the way a hypnotist entrances a member of the audience to hand over the contents of his wallet.
“That could happen, except for one thing,” says Gollwitzer. The glasses turn in his fingers, and suddenly I’m paranoid that this small but distinct gesture is supposed to make me respond in some way, like a cat chasing string.
“The fail-safe,” he says.
“There’s a fail-safe?”
“There’s always a fail-safe.”
Chapter 15
Tripping the Fail-safe
“To contract a goal, the goal must already be part of our behavioral vocabulary,” Gollwitzer says. The mechanism for influencing thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in other people is dependent on certain internal stipulations. This fail-safe stops us from enacting cues to, say, walk off a cliff or act upon primes that might convince us to rob a store. It’s the very thing that saves people from catching a social contagion in the first place. Gollwitzer is talking about a kind of resistance to a social contagion. “If it’s not part of our natural vocabulary, we call that anti-normative and it won’t catch.”
Priming the shy to act with aggression only works so long as they have ever behaved assertively in their lives. For women to catch the desire to have a baby from the sister of a coworker, at some point they will have envisioned themselves as mothers. An unattractive trait like greediness is so universal that even the most benevolent person is capable of exhibiting it. Therefore, we’re all vulnerable to it.
Returning to the topic of Palo Alto, Gollwitzer says, “You’d think self-destruction is anti-normative for most of us. Well, if you were to do an experiment where there’s a task to be performed, and you can perform it in a way that is self-destructive, you can in fact. Because many of us are self-destructive once in a while.”
Like other qualities that commonly reside deep within our soul, each of us, in spite of our better judgment, possesses tendencies toward harmful behavior. Usually this stops at irreversible self-harm, but I fret now that this alone isn’t enough of a fail-safe to protect people back home.
“All we have to do is identify the problematic cues,” I say. If we do that, we can systematically go through and remove them. But even as I say this, I’m aware it’s coming off sounding more like a question than a statement of fact.
Gollwitzer sighs doubtfully. The trouble is there are potentially dozens, even hundreds, of cues in our community that could be contributing to the strange contagion event. The iconography of Silicon Valley alone—the self-driving cars, Stanford University, billboards promoting technical products, and career opportunities at the biggest companies—is a prime for achievement, drive, greed, and work ethic. “There are some behaviors that we cannot solve with one or even a series of cues,” he says, and I sink a bit.
What about finding primes to slow down the processes? Primes to halt impulsivity? Primes to instill hope in the hopeless? Primes to cue mood changes strong enough to stop mental illnesses? Primes to infuse a desire to think beyond one passing moment where the pain of living burns hotter than anything worth living for?
“In the lab, maybe,” he replies. His lab has primed people to be more methodical in their endeavors and more precise in their thinking. The problem is they haven’t been very successful in priming everything. Out in the world, he says, even if we slow one or two for some people, this is no match for a widespread cyclone of fear, hysteria, work ethic, greed, and God knows what else. As much as the Motivation Lab possesses the ability to unlock parts of the human experience, the human experience itself is, for better or worse, far more complicated and nuanced than any collaboration of bright minds huddled in a research facility might ever hope to fully decode.
These thoughts triangulate in my head as I walk east, away from the portico of NYU’s psychology department. I turn the corner onto Broadway and pause at the entrance to the Tisch School of the Arts. I have a little while before I need to catch my flight to California. So I tug on the entrance door and step inside.
The lobby is a cavernous space with polished brick floors and walls as pallid as teeth. An exhibit of photos features images of flat desert landscapes, roiling oceans, beaches of smoothed stone, and arching rock formations. Gollwitzer might say these pictures prime us for movement or freedom or access to endless and expansive possibility, activating any number of constructive character traits, exploiting all variety of vulnerabilities, and launching a cascade of behaviors.
These photographs cull within me a sense of dismal resignation and a ceaseless urgency to keep searching for the counterweight to the self-destructive impulses that speak to us and move us in our most desperate times.
The Tisch School reminds me of Gunn High student Sonya Raymakers, who accepted an offer to join this prestigious theater program. A couple of weeks before attending, she became the second student to die by suicide on the Caltrain tracks. I also think about home. Holding Gollwitzer’s theories up against this real-world tragedy, I feel at once satisfied and distressed. In Palo Alto, we can pool our resources, throw up safety nets, and engage in hard conversations, but without fully understanding what problematic primes exist, or knowing what primes we might use to stop people from taking their lives, what good are they? My investigation has just become enormously more byzantine now that it involves a search for primes that could literally be anywhere.
I wonder about the cues that set Raymakers and the other four students who died each on their paths and I get stuck on the impossibility of ever truly knowing what those were. Furthermore, if primes are everywhere, manifesting in the form of economics, leaders, even inanimate objects, how do we guard against them? The problem seems monumental, almost hopeless, even.
And yet, in this endeavor to satisfy the journey I’m on and bring it to a plausibl
e end, I can safely say, just as Gollwitzer explained, that the world around us has the capacity to motivate. To keep me moving forward. To provide me with the drive to reach this goal.
For now, however, all I want is to get back home; I want to hold my son again.
It’s getting late in the day, so I make one more pass through the gallery and then head outside. Returning to the noise and the crush of people on the sidewalk, I continue down the steps of the Eighth Street Station and move underground to take my place beneath the surface.
Part V
The Interrupters
“Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.”
―Jimmy Carter
Chapter 16
Finding the Man Who Launched a Rampant Revolution of Courage
I’m driving through a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes, each one set behind wrought iron gates, brick walls, or barriers of high bushes. The cars slow ahead, and two valets in matching purple jackets approach mine. One opens and holds my door for me. The other directs me to the house across the street, at the end of an outdoor walkway flanked on one side by a jaw-dropping waterfall spilling down two stories.
A couple of months after returning home from Philadelphia and New York, I received an e-mail from Adam Grant at Wharton. He hoped my fact-gathering trip had gone well and was writing to invite me to come with him to a party when he was in town next. The event was going to be held at the home of a high-powered tech industry executive. There were going to be dozens of big thinkers there who might have some perspective to share about the social contagions in the region.
Strange Contagion Page 9