Transcription
How can a normal person be talked into committing murder in less than an hour? What would it take to get somebody to completely deny every single instinct of survival and social behavior and cause the death of another person? What I'm about to show you is terrifying. It's the darkest side of psychology, and I'm going to show you what all of the experts completely missed.
So, before we launch into this scary stuff, let's discuss some extreme influence. I teach probably the most advanced persuasion and influence training in the world, but influence itself is just a tool. So, like a surgical scalpel, it can be used to save someone's life, it can be used to take it. So a coach, a leader, a therapist, or maybe a parent could use the same influence skills to change someone's life that a cult leader uses to ruin them. So when it comes to ethics, the tool is only a tool.
Let me introduce you to Dr. Stanley Milgram. In 1961, Dr. Milgram did something that would change the world of psychology forever. And this quote of his about this experiment has stuck in my mind since the day that I read it. And he said, "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman into the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes, he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point, he pushed his fist into his forehead and he muttered, 'Oh God, let's stop it.' And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and he obeyed until the end."
That hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it. Anybody that you ask is going to say that could never be talked into such things, but I think you'll be surprised. So what causes a human to go from zero to killer? And if some of us are willing to kill because a stranger in a lab coat tells us to, should we worry? So what if, just like we have visual blind spots, we have behavioral blind spots? Like maybe a small hole that allows a person to reach into our mind and start pulling some levers that they probably shouldn't have access to. None of us would really like to believe that we're vulnerable, or this vulnerable, to the world around us. And I think most of us tend to go through our lives just firmly believing that our minds are somewhat of a fortress, and the only things that really get in there are things that we're allowing to come in. This belief is called The Fortress Illusion, and not only is it incorrect, it's dangerous to believe.
So let's talk about a behavioral loophole really quick. I define a behavioral loophole as an inborn quality of the human brain that has its roots in protecting us from harm. So these automatic responses to specific types of stimuli create a loophole in our behavior where we can instantly shift from processing information and cognitive reasoning to reacting to information and impulse reaction. So since these loopholes are universal in human behavior, they can be pretty reliably exploited, allowing an operator to basically predict an outcome and use that loophole to obtain some kind of desired impulse response, such as focus, excitement, or a strong desire to feel a connection with the other person. So why and how can a person hijack a human's brain, their normal rational decision-making centers?
So let's go back to the Milgram experiment just for a minute. Imagine it's 1962. You respond to an ad in the newspaper that says, "We're going to pay you four bucks for an hour of your time." The ad says, "A study on memory is being conducted at Yale, and they're going to need all types of people, so they're even going to pay for your gas to come to the campus. They'll probably give you a free sandwich. All you've got to do is mail a detachable coupon to Dr. Milgram."
So when you arrive, this doctor greets you, and one other participant is in the lobby. And he explains the study. So he says, "We'll be conducting a study on memory and learning, and one of you will be the teacher, and one's going to be the learner. So the teacher is going to read off a pair of words. The person in the next room, if the learner responds incorrectly, you're going to administer some electric shocks." So you draw the straw, and it says "teacher" on it. The man in the lab coat shows you where the learner is going to be seated in the next room. And as he does, he lets you see the electrodes get placed onto this person's arm. He lets you feel the electricity, even that the learner is going to feel in the next room. So he sat in the learner's chair. You walk out of that room. Right beside it, there's another room. And this guy in the lab coat closes the door. And now you're shown to this little teacher's station at this desk right here. You're going to be seated, and there's a large electrical box there with different shock levers on it, ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts. And right after the 450-volt mark, there's some letters that say XXX, and then it says, "Danger, severe shock" on there. So next to the machine, there is a clipboard with groups of words on them. You've got to read them out to this person in the other room. And as you take a seat, every time they get it wrong, you have to shock them.
Dr. Milgram was average height, from all accounts. He was a serious dude. He grew up in the Bronx. Many of Dr. Milgram's extended family still bear Nazi concentration camp tattoos. So this left a huge mark on his personality. So at his own bar mitzvah, his speech was solely about the suffering of the European Jews and the stuff that they had to endure during World War II. And Milgram showed a special interest in this guy, Adolf Eichmann. He was an organizer of the Holocaust. The actions of Eichmann inspired the development of the Obedience Experiment, and Milgram simply wanted to know if it was true that, as Eichmann said while he was standing trial in Israel, that he was just following orders.
So inside the Milgram experiment, the learner is in one room, the teacher, which is you, or in the other room, shocking this person because the person in the lab coat's telling you. Next to with every incorrect answer, as the voltage increased, the teacher was told the microphone was just a one-way communication tool to the other room, but he could hear the protests. He could hear screaming and pleas for help from the other side of the wall. And these sounds of the learner in pain, they were coming from a record player, actually. In real life, with pre-recorded screams and all that kind of stuff. It even says he has a heart condition, he wants to stop the experiment, all kinds of stuff is going on. And the guy in the lab coat is continually telling them to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. So you can imagine participating in something like this could be pretty damn stressful. That's why we don't have experiments like this anymore. But they continued shocking the other person.
So initially, these scientists got together, they predicted that 99% of people would outright refuse. They argued the only people who would go all the way through with this were psychopaths or sadists, and they predicted only 0.1% of people would go all the way. But in fact, 65% of people, about, went all the way to maximum voltage. 250 volts can kill you. How many people do you think went all the way up to 250 volts? Surprisingly, and sadly, it was 100%. So of course, if somebody interviewed you and asked, "Would you go all the way up to 450 volts?" you'd bet anything that you own, you would never do anything like that, and you'd be able to resist the experimenter. I would walk out of the room. The experiment has been replicated dozens, if not hundreds of times, with about the same results. Most people go all the way. Everybody obeys to some extent, all the time. So why then do people obey? The experimenter didn't issue orders. He didn't shout, he didn't scream, he didn't make demands. He didn't have some secret persuasion technique. There was no hypnosis being used. They just listened.
So let's look at a few more experiments here. I want you to investigate these with me. Another experiment that, in my opinion, is even scarier. A person volunteered to take a survey. They show up in a room. There are several other people who are already sitting down, taking the same survey, and they're not knowing these people. These other people in the room are all actors. Smoke starts billowing from a nearby door. They see the smoke. They look around at the other volunteers, which are the actors in this one, and they seem not to care at all. So the actors have been told, "Simply do nothing." So now smoke is starting to fill the room. Smoke detectors are going off and beeping like crazy. It's starting to look even more like there's a genuine emergency here. So the actors see the smoke, then they casually go back to filling out the survey. In this experiment, 100% of people sat in the room long enough to die of asphyxiation. And if the fire had been real, 100% would have died.
So could this happen in real life, though? It actually did. In May of 1979, a cab driver reports a fire coming from a Woolworths department store in Manchester. They found some bodies. They found most of the bodies in the restaurant, and it turns out people hadn't left because they wanted to pay their bill. They're operating on this social script that's just written in their mind. Nobody wanted to deviate from the group, and nobody wanted to be the first to really stand out from the rest of the crowd.
So let's perform one more investigation into an experiment that shows how powerful this is. I want to introduce you to this guy here. His name is Dr. Solomon Ash. So the experimenter shows them with two pieces of paper, holds them up, and puts them on the table there. And one of them had a line drawn down the middle on it. Other sheet had three lines on it, just A, B, and C. And the students were simply just asked to determine which of the three lines was equal in length to the line on the other page, which only had one line on it. So nine out of ten of the students at the table were actors in the experiment, and only one person in the room was the actual participant. The actor students obviously would deliberately choose the incorrect line on the right. And Dr. Ash was just curious if the student would conform to the answers given by all the other people. So guess what? They sure did. They denied the evidence right there in front of their own eyes and went along with the group behavior. So Ash, Dr. Ash, concluded that students mostly conformed for two basic reasons. They either wanted to fit in with the group, or they trusted the opinion of the group more than their own. Changing your behavior to fit in is called normative influence, and trusting a majority opinion over your own is called informational influence. No matter where you look for the rest of your life, you're going to start seeing this behavior. Social media has made it even more powerful, just increasing the size of a group that can influence a person, and then they're only going to expose you to the news and the opinions that they want you to see, exactly what they want you to see. So your behavior is conforming in ways that we're not even fully aware of.
So people are going to tell you these experiments are about obedience to authority. I mean, Dr. Milgram wrote a book called "Obedience to Authority." So authority essentially has five components when we're talking about obedience to authority. According to me, in my training, there are five components to authority that I teach: those are confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment, or a sense of enjoyment. So these are very precise, and we're going to dig into these in a video next week. So if you're subscribed, you'll get a notification when that one comes out. But there's something missing. It's not just authority. This video is about what the hell these experiments missed. So let me show you right now.
So I want you to imagine you're a volunteer in the Milgram experiment that we just talked about. You see the ad in the paper. You drive to a building that you've never been to before. You walk upstairs. You never walk down into a hallway you've never been to to meet people that you've never met before. You see a machine on the desk you've never seen before that's supposed to shock a human being, which you've never done before. There's a brand new room you've never been in. There's new smells, there's new sounds, there's a new test, there's a brand new experience, new words that are unusual from the experimenter. This is what they missed, and it's called novelty. And I want to show you how powerful this is. And my goal here is to persuade you to completely change whatever you thought was going on with these experiments.
So when something unexpected happens or something new is occurring, our brains ramp up our level of focus, which makes us more suggestible. Focus kept our ancestors alive, therefore they passed down this instantaneous focus switch to us to do the same. And when something is unexpected or new, we become focused on it instantaneously. This is not one of the things that we can just turn off. It's built into our brain stem. So from award-winning speeches to TV shows, we can't stop watching the injection of novelty is the fastest entry point into the human mind. And I'd like you just to imagine the Milgram experiment again without any of the novelty. The guy in the lab coat is the volunteer's roommate, and the experiment is taking place in a familiar place, like maybe the volunteer's apartment. So it's in his own house. The person in the lab coat is the roommate. Boom. Authority goes to zero. Even if you replace the person in a lab coat with the professor, authority goes to zero. The novelty is not high enough to produce a tremendous amount of focus. So in order to leverage any authority, focus has to be present first. And the fastest pathway to focus is novelty. Something new is happening. So no matter how confident you are, no matter how much authority you have, if focus isn't there, you're getting nothing in return.
We've inherited a lot from our ancestors. It's all built in there to help us survive. But sometimes these inherited traits make loopholes in us that can be hacked by somebody with training or skill. And in other situations, it can be leveraged to help a person to maybe stop somebody from a negative behavior or change somebody's life entirely. The ethics live in you, not the technique. This is only part one of the series, and in the next video, we're going to investigate the five characteristics of true authority and how to get them. And I'm going to show you exactly how to seriously level up your life when it comes to influence and persuasion. Use these wisely. We rise by lifting others. This is something you can do. You have more training in this now than 99% of the world. Thank you for spending time with me today. I can't wait to see you again in the next one. Love ya.
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