Transcription
If you spend enough time around dope fiends, you're going to end up a dope fiend, too. That's the idea that anyone who has ever gone through or been around people who use, drink, or trying to kick the habit know. And if you've never spent time around drug addicts or alcoholics who are trying to shake that monkey out their back, you know that birds of a feather flock together. And if you spend enough time around that flock, one of two things will happen. You'll either learn how to fly or you'll get left on the ground because they don't want you around.
The same idea works for any behavior, but people seem to think they're immune to this basic facet of human nature. But the truth is the truth. And that truth is this. No matter how much of a freethinker you think you are, you are heavily influenced by the people you spend time around. Even if you aren't aware of this influence, humans don't exist in a vacuum. Unless you live off the grid, in which case you wouldn't even be watching this video. This applies to you, especially if you don't think it does.
Social influence is a powerful invisible force that shapes our behaviors, decisions, and perceptions in countless ways. Even though we think that we can think for ourselves, and we absolutely can. However, that takes more energy and courage than the average person is capable of or is interested in expending. And this isn't necessarily even a bad thing, especially if you have good influences in your life. In everything from fitness to finance, from good habits to bad habits, as the old saying goes, you become the average of the five people you spend the most time around. Each member of your community or social circle influences all the others. It doesn't matter whether you're surrounded by drug addicts or preachers. You're going to take on the traits and habits of the people you spend the most time around. And this has some rather interesting counterintuitive outcomes for fixing or ruining your life.
People often see susceptibility to group influence in a negative light and is something to avoid. A lot of us can remember our parents saying something to us like, "If your friends jump off a bridge, are you going to do it, too?" But it's not always so bad. Influence by itself is immoral. Negative influences get all the hype, but people often become better when surrounded by people pursuing constructive goals and living a positive lifestyle.
In the moving to opportunity experiment conducted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, in the 1990s, researchers randomly assigned low-income families living in public housing projects in five US cities to one of three groups. One was the experimental group. They received housing vouchers that could be used to move to any low poverty, low crime neighborhood. Then there was the section 8 group, group two. They received traditional housing vouchers with no geographic restrictions. For the ghetto uninitiated, section 8 housing is effectively the same thing as public housing, aka the projects. There are slight differences, but those are beyond the point of this video. I just wanted to throw that in there so no one tries to revoke my street cred. And then there's group three, the control group. They didn't get anything. The researchers followed the families to assess the impact of moving to a better neighborhood on various outcomes, including probably most importantly, children's educational attainment. The results showed that when children moved to low poverty and low crime neighborhoods before the age of 13, they had significant improvements in their academic performance and long-term outcomes compared to those who remained in high poverty, high crime neighborhoods. Specifically, they were more likely to attend college and to attend better colleges at that. They had higher earnings and lower rates of single parenthood in adulthood. and they were less likely to experience poverty or receive public assistance as adults. If you put children in a better environment, they tend to do better.
Now, I experienced something similar when I attended a high school on the other side of town, far away from the crime and poverty infested public housing project where I grew up. I talk about that experience and how it shaped me and improved my life in my new book, Hard Lessons from the Her Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. I linked to it in the pin comment for you to check out.
Now, on the flip side of this same idea, a former inmate once told me that prison is like a finishing school for crim criminals. He said exactly this to me. He said, "American prisons are a punishment system, not a reforming one. You come out worse, less prepared with a wrap sheet, the wrong type of connections, and a distaste for the system. A criminal is a better criminal."
Now, now in both these cases, the influence feels obvious and is indisputable. No one doubts that the younger you are when your environment changes, the more significant those effects will be for the rest of your life. Also, most people are aware that prisons are primarily punitive. Almost no reformation occurs mainly because the behaviors needed to survive in prison, but also because if you put criminals around other criminals and treat them like criminals, you'll just end up with more criminals.
However, law-abiding adults are subject to the power of influence in this way and often aren't even aware of it. That's because you're like everyone else, especially when you believe you are different. In the introduction of Jonah Berger's book, Invisible Influence, he tells a story of a research study he and his colleague conducted on over 100 parked BMW owners in Palo Alto, California. The survey asked BMW owners about the practical and social factors that influenced their car purchase decision, such as price, gas mileage, friends opinion, and whether they associated the car with high status individuals. Notably, respondents completed the survey twice. Once for their car purchase decision and once for a friend or acquaintance who also owned a BMW. When the results came in, there was a clear asymmetry. BMW's owners readily acknowledge that social factors such as friends opinion and cars association with high status influence other people's decision to purchase a BMW. However, regarding their own purchase decision, they believe they were unaffected by social influence. So, not only do we believe our environment influences or do we not believe that our environment influences our decisions, but we also think that everyone else is influenced by their surroundings. Of course, we think we're the exceptions to the rule.
This was for something as harmless as what influenced a person's decision to buy a car, but we'll get to how dangerous this self-serving bias can be when it comes to how we treat other people. Self-serving bias, the tendency to see ourselves as immune to the same influences and attitudes of our peers, occurs when someone distorts or misrepresents or misinterprets reality to preserve their image. While this reality distortion is not always negative, as it can help people fake it till they make it and push through initial challenges when taking on new tasks, it can lead to problematic, destructive, and dehumanizing behavior. Leaders, for example, may find self-serving bias helpful in projecting confidence during difficult times. Still, the same bias can blind individuals to the insidious influences that shape their actions without their awareness.
Everyone thinks they're a good person. At the very least, few people will admit to harboring dark and twisted thoughts. Most of the same people who believe they are good people also think that everyone else is a bad person. Or at the very least, they think their capacity for evil is greater than their own. Several studies, surveys, and experiments have demonstrated that this perception though is an error and that this lack of self-awareness can be disastrous.
Let me draw your attention to a study that illustrated just how dangerous these serving bias generated blind spots can be in the wrong situation. In this study, researchers asked participants about their likelihood of conforming to authority or obeying unethical orders compared to others. Most of the participants believed they were less likely than the average person to comply with such horrible directives. However, when an authority figure instructed these same participants to perform unethical actions, and in this case, it was a type of sensory deprivation, they conformed and obeyed. The study is appropriately titled to defy or not to defy, an experimental study of the dynamics of obedience and whistleblowing. When surveyed before the experiment, only 4% of the participants believed they would comply with an unethical request that would cause harm. Shout out I guess to the 4% who knew that they were con not good. However, when the researchers made the unethical request, 77% of the participants obeyed. Of the remaining 23% who did not, 14% outright refused and only 9% chose to report anonymously. These rates were strikingly similar to those observed in the more notorious Mgrim obedience experiments. In the Mgrim obedience experiments, a high proportion of people were willing to administer what they thought were dangerous electric shocks to another person in order to do so by someone in a position of authority.
Both studies demonstrate how self-serving bias can lead individuals to overestimate their moral fortitude and underestimate their susceptibility to negative social influence. When people believe they are inherently good and resistant to external pressures, they become less vigilant in guarding against negative influences. A lower guard leads them to fail to recognize when others subtly influence or manipulate them into engaging in questionable behavior. Furthermore, self-serving bias may cause people to be less discerning about the social environments and influences they expose themselves to. Suppose you believe you are immune to the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of those around you. You'll be less cautious about the media you consume, the people you associate with, or the situations you place yourself in. However, social psychology research consistently shows that we are all highly susceptible to catching the outlooks and actions of our social surroundings, often without even realizing it. Perhaps our parents may have actually been on to something with the bridge question.
Self-serving bias can also lead individuals to more readily conform to unethical practices in group or organizational context. As they consider themselves good and moral, they assume it is acceptable if they go along with something. As the old saying goes, more harm is done in the name of righteousness than in any other way. Instead of questioning the ethicality of their actions, they mistakenly trust their moral compass, failing to realize that their circumstances have been miscalibrated. This misplaced trust is then supported and amplified by the actions of those around them who are doing the same thing. And this is exacerbated by another shortcut we tend to take, which will eventually turn us into the things we spend the most time around. And that is group think.
Group think occurs when a group's desire for harmony and conformity leads to dysfunctional decision-making processes. In group think situations, individuals may suppress dissenting and opinions and prioritize group consensus over critical thinking. In the aptly named conformity experiments, Solomon Ash investigated how social pressure from a majority can influence individuals to conform. Researchers asked participants to match the length of a given line with one of three other lines. In the control group, participants chose the correct answer 99% of the time. I imagine that 1% just had bad eyesight as this is just an objective test. And that should be scary to you because when placed in a group who were instructed to give the wrong answer, 75% of the participants conform to the group's incorrect answer at least once. Let that sink in for a minute. That is an objective. Is this the same size as this? And group think and social pressure got people to go, "No, it is not." They literally stopped believing what they were seeing. Conformity to prevailing opinion often leads to poor decisions and a failure to consider alternative perspectives. Group think is related to the ash conformity experiments in the same way which demonstrate how individuals can be swayed by majority opinion even when that opinion is incorrect.
So far we've discussed experiments that shows people's willingness to commit atrocities. But how does that actually look in real life? Well, we can look at the most popular example of this, the most well-known example. In Nazi Germany, group think led many people to conform to the dominant ideology and social norms, even if they did not fully support the Nazi party. Nazi activists used intimidation to enforce social and cultural norms infecting many people with mob mentality. While it is comforting believe that you would to believe that you would never go along with something like that, the reality is that in an environment of such extreme fear, propaganda, deprivation, and polarization, the vast majority of people did exactly that. They went along with it.
Self-serving bias causes us to dramatically overestimate our immunity to social influence. We imagine ourselves as rational, self-directed heroes, but we fail to appreciate how malleable we really are. The bystanders and desk murderers of the Holocaust were ordinary people, not monsters. We are doomed to repeat past mistakes if we don't acknowledge our human susceptibility to group dynamics.
We see this happening today with the virulent politically driven polarization occurring in the United States and worldwide. Everyone believes they are rational and open-minded and that other people are the extremist. I used to think this was just lip service to avoid the truth, but based on everything I've discussed here, I now genuinely believe that everyone thinks everyone else is the bad guy. If you're not part of one side, you're automatically the enemy of another and you are wrong. Even if you didn't initially believe the other side was that bad, you eventually take their position to avoid being labeled as the enemy or you start to support the other side just to make a point, even if you don't agree with them. And once you see the other side as the enemy and your self-s serving bias makes you feel morally superior, you're capable of the worst behavior towards them. This was on full display recently with the way people were treated during COVID. Dehumanization leads to degradation and a fight ensues in which both sides believe they are right but not logically or morally.
Throughout this video, I've talked about how each side thinks they're better than the other and why that happens and how easy it is for you to become influenced by your surroundings. But there is one group of people who are immune to the influencees around them and it's only because they've seen the game and had it run on them too many times. That trauma led them to become street smart. If you want to understand the truth of being street smart and why despite how it can protect you, it may not be worth it, watch this video here. I'll see you in the next video.