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PROFESSOR: We have the privilege today
of hearing from Professor Susan Silbey.
Professor Silbey taught this class
with Professor [? Dysart ?] and me in the last two years.
And she is a sociologist, political scientist,
anthropologist, head of the anthropology section.
And obviously brings a different perspective
to a number of these issues than I, a poor country economist do.
And as I said last time, I showed
you a little bit of the economics of energy demand,
and then suggested at the end of the lecture,
by talking about dollars on the sidewalk
and what picked up in energy efficiency on the one hand,
and people aggressively investing in energy
efficiency on the other hand.
Perhaps, the notion of tangible energy services
wasn't quite rich enough to explain energy demand.
And now, it will all be explained.
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, Hello, it's rather a tall order.
But we'll try.
On Monday, Dick talked to you about the economics
of energy demand.
He talked about how demand for energy
is derived from demand for products and services.
And so we talk about it as mediated
or derived demand, which requires some adjustments
in the basic economic models.
He also mentioned, I believe, that variations
in derived demand depend upon fixed capital investments, as
well as short and long run expectations.
And that, because of those short and long run expectations,
income and price elasticities are generally
limited, unlike in other products and services,
and thus, constraining the ability
to maximize with efficient responses.
And as Dick just mentioned again,
people do not always maximize or optimize, let me say,
their decisions.
There's lots of possible efficiencies
that are not pursued.
And he mentioned, I believe, on Monday, the leaving
those dollars on the sidewalk.
Because of, perhaps, imperfect information,
riskiness and uncertainty of future savings,
could be a lot of other reasons too.
And as he mentioned again, just now,
people might be over investing.
Now, let's think about what that means.
To over invest in efficiency means, by economic models,
you're not going to get a specific dollar return,
the Prius being example.
But there might be other reasons why people might do it.
That is go for more efficiency than is defined economically.
So why do we see economically non-optimal decisions?
That's the $64,000 question.
How do people act?
Why do people do what they do?
Why are they not, in the economic model,
perfectly rational actors?
Now, it is the mission of all of social science
to try to describe human behavior.
But the explanations that come from economics
are not necessarily the same that come
from the other social sciences.
How many of you have had a course in economics
before this one?
Oh, lots of you, because it's required for this course.
That's right.
But I didn't see every hand.
I was wondering how accurate this survey was going to be.
How many of you have had a political science class?
Let me see those hands.
I can't see, one, two, three, four, five, six.
How many-- oh did I miss some over here?
Seven, eight.
OK, how many have had a history class?
Wow, that's pretty good.
How many have had an anthropology class?
Zero, right?
Oh, one, two.
And we don't offer sociology here for undergraduates, only
really for graduate students.
So this-- why do people do what they do?
It turns out that each of the social sciences
has a slightly different answer.
And so by way of, well, for those of you who
have had a political science class, how is it
different from economics?
Nobody wants-- Yeah, Andrew?
AUDIENCE: No, equations and stuff like that.
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, that turns out not to be true.
It just isn't in the--
it's just not in the undergraduate class.
There are plenty of equations.
There are plenty of equations in sociology, too,
not in anthropology.
OK, so maybe I need to do this.
So if you think of the social sciences
as the study of human behavior, there is a division of labor.
Now, this division of labor can be simply explained,
but gets a little complicated when you go into detail.
So we might think of the most basic and simplest
social science as psychology, which we almost
don't have anymore, which is about
what goes on inside people's heads.
Psychology being the study of a person,
and explaining what this person does by looking inside.
And we have various terms for talking about what's inside
people's heads, their desires, we talk about the id, which
is the desires you have, and the ego, which is the control,
and the notion of a constraint on what you do.
But then we have--
and I would put psychology by itself as different
from the rest of the social sciences.
And then we have sociology, which
says that it is interested in what
goes on between two or more persons, never a person alone.
And the unit of analysis, or the subject, is the interaction.
Not what's in here, but what is exchanged
between the two of them.
Now, some people would say that sociology
is the queen, because everything follows
from these interactions.
Because the interactions can take various patterns.
So they can be interactions about production
and distribution.
And then we get economics.
If you can think about it as the interactions
where some people are making things
that other people are receiving.
And it happens through this thing called the market.
Which is sort of an invisible black box.
Then we might have interactions that have
to do with force, violence.
And when that's concentrated, we call
that the state who has a monopoly of force.
And that's what political science studies.
So here, we have four social sciences
leaving the study of the circulation of the signs.
This one's more complicated.
That's probably why only two of you
took the classes, because you don't understand what it is.
But it's the circulation of the signs and symbols among people.
And we call that culture.
And that's what anthropology studies,
the practices, and the production,
and circulation of signs.
So there you have the social sciences.
Now, that's a very simple, easy distinction.
But like most things in life, that's too simple.
And in any place--
oh, I forgot, you're not supposed to.
Oh, I forgot, I forgot, I forgot.
No human power here.
OK, so we have political science, which
studies force and the state.
But it overlaps with some sociology,
which looks at the patterns of interactions.
And there's something called political sociology.
And then some of sociology studies production
and distribution.
And we call that economic sociology.
And some of economics is now interested in how
people's desires and behaviors affect their decision making.
We call that behavioral economics.
And that overlaps with psychology and anthropology.
So you might just think about what
is actually studied as having normal distributions that
overlap.
And depending-- lots of people are
studying in these places, which we call interdisciplinary.
And that's how you get a class like this.
OK, so why do people, or how do people--
how do people deal with these questions about energy?
How do they make the decisions?
So what I'm going to try to do today, and this is my outline,
is to go through some basic models,
some very general models, about how people make decisions,
the variations and the motives, we might say,
or the vocabularies of motive.
I'm going to look at some results
from cognitive science and sociology of decision making,
going to look at a few experiments.
And then, maybe, we can end, if time permits,
with some discussion of what happens
when we focus on the individual and the ironies
of popular psychology.
I'm not sure we'll get there.
In future classes, I know you are
going to discuss decision making in firms
and organizations, which are aggregates, patterned
aggregates.
Not one, but the pattern by which people are
arranged in their activities.
Those are organizations and firms.
And we will look at states, or you will,
in which we make public policies.
So how do people make decisions?
How do we make decisions about right and wrong?
What kind of car to buy?
Why are people buying that Prius even though they'll never
recoup the savings?
Why do we think that skinny women are beautiful now?
And 100 years ago, we thought that heavy women
were beautiful?
Maybe none of you know that that was the case?
AUDIENCE: Advertising.
SUSAN SILBEY: OK, advertising.
Why might that-- but what about the advertising?
What did the advertising say?
And was it advertising 100 years ago?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: There's some predominately--
fashion advertising of the '50s and '60s
switched from more volumptuous sexual icon
to something really skinny.
There's one person in particular named
Twiggy who kind of became a very famous, very skinny fashion
model.
And everyhting from that kind of followed.
SUSAN SILBEY: Yeah, but it was in the 19th century,
before there was advertising.
Yes, David.
AUDIENCE: I'd say there's also a change in the signaling
about what you're buying.
If you go further back, there are
depictions of larger, heavier people as being wealthy,
which is something [INAUDIBLE].
Which was, you didn't have to work in fields.
You had enough to eat.
[INAUDIBLE]
SUSAN SILBEY: That's right.
And the signaling was, in the 19th century,
to have heft on you meant you were wealthy enough
to eat well.
Because most people did not.
So this is just a little exercise.
And this is about culture.
This is about the circulating signs, the signaling.
So you've all got it.
You got it.
The culture encourages us to want certain things
to think their beautiful.
Is there anything else?
None of you believe--
AUDIENCE: Education as well.
SUSAN SILBEY: You're all so socialized, it's fantastic.
AUDIENCE: If we put that slide we had up on Monday
that showed you that you're not going to make your money back
from buying Prius, I think that would deter people
from buying them.
And similarly with things like obesity in the US,
while being as skinny as Twiggy might not be healthy,
generally, more fit would be more healthy
due to the knowledge we have now we might not
have had 100 years ago.
SUSAN SILBEY: That's right, that's right.
You've got it.
But there's another set of reasons people often offer.
I'll go back.
Well, you know the other reasons?
None of you have any other reasons why we do what we do?
Yeah, is that Matthew?
AUDIENCE: They saw other people doing the same thing.
[INAUDIBLE]
SUSAN SILBEY: These are all sociological and
anthropological reasons.
And I just love it, as being head of that department.
But I usually get, not necessarily in this class,
I think you've all learned quite well,
many students tell me that they are programmed
to want and do certain things.
And I'm so surprised MIT students
not coming up with that.
Because when I teach sociology or anthropology class,
this is the one that comes up first.
None of you believe that, anymore?
It's not in your DNA.
Fantastic, I love it.
I love it.
I think it's great.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I mean, there's evolutionary psychologists
who would argue that we're attracted to certain things
based on reproductive purposes.
AUDIENCE: But not a Prius.
[INAUDIBLE] the hourglass shape.
Wider hips.
[INAUDIBLE]
SUSAN SILBEY: I should have worn something different.
OK, all right, so what I want to offer before we go further is.
Oh, did you have your hand up, David?
AUDIENCE: I was going to say, you posed the question why
did the appeal change from women that were rounder to women that
were skinnier?
SUSAN SILBEY: Except for their boobs.
AUDIENCE: So DNA kind doesn't account
for that, because your DNA didn't change over
the course of 50 years or 100 years.
But maybe it is hardcoded DNA is that [INAUDIBLE]
or able to support themselves, raise children, or whatever.
So maybe the ideal, what it is in the social,
this woman is fit.
So that means that she's more capable?
SUSAN SILBEY: So maybe it's fit versus
the specific definition of fit.
AUDIENCE: Exactly, yeah so part of it comes from the DNA
that you're seeking.
But the social kind of defines what exactly--
SUSAN SILBEY: That means.
Well, that's a very interesting observation.
Because there's lots of good social theory
which suggests that about lots of concepts.
That many-- all societies have some form
of marriage system and family system for raising children.
So you might say that there is a human system of reproduction
in the social relations, in addition to the biological.
But, so we say there is something called
the institution of the family.
But that varies from society to society.
And that's the same kind-- the specificity varies.
Though there could be something more general.
And that's a good introduction to what
I want to do for a few minutes.
Is I want to suggest to you that there are a few general models
of human action, which I sort of suggested in the differences
among the social sciences.
And we use different concepts and terminology
to describe what is observable in human behavior.
And these social science theories
are not always, as Andrew suggested at the outset,
quantified into equations.
That economics begins and ends with those equations.
The other social sciences haven't all
developed into equations for most of what they do.
But you will find it in some.
In all of them, there'll be some.
So I want to show you, for example,
the equation you had on Monday.
That's an economic one about derived demand.
Well, here's one you all you may or may not know.
This is one of my favorite ones.
Because it's the field that I'm specialist in.
And it says that formal social control is inversely related
to informal social control.
Social control is what we do to manage other people's behavior,
or to manage behavior.
And formal social control simply means government.
And informal means everything that's
not the government, that's not the legitimate use of force.
And the more you have of informal norms,
informal culture, the less you have of government.
That's what this theory says.
So one varies inversely.
And sociologists have been trying
to validate this theory for a long time.
OK, theories without equations are an organization
of words that are clearly defined,
that try to make explicit what is often
tacit, that is unspoken.
And in social science, our task is
to make explicit and describable through systematic
observations, through transparent methods, what
goes on in human behavior.
So Andrew's first answer to me was more methodological
than it was conceptual.
And what I offered in my distinctions
in the social science was more conceptual.
The methods we use turn out to be almost the same
across all the social sciences.
We observe, we ask, we count.
There are a variety of ways of doing that.
OK, so how do people make decisions?
Well, I tired to get from you two different notions, more
cultural and institutional versus biological.
But even if you look in the non-biological explanations,
there are sort of patterns that come up in the explanations
that people give.
So one pattern is the psychological one,
that people act on the basis of individual desires, wills.
That sometimes, this individual desire and will
is a product of their DNA, nature,
they made their biography, their parenthood.
This is what made them who there.
There are different kinds of persons.
So this is the biological, individualistic, personality,
psychology, evolutionary biology.
Man makes history.
We have an Obama as president because he's
a unique individual.
We had George Washington because he was a special person.
Oh, Gandhi was charismatic.
These are the explanations that say
there is something about the person that
produces the behavior and the achievements.
The alternative-- and so, OK, so they're
unique and independent individuals.
And society is merely the aggregate of these individuals.
The philosophers and writers who exemplify this point of view
include John Locke in the 17th century,
John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, Friedrich Hayek
and Milton Friedman in the 20th century.
OK, when you come across these names,
you can now put them in the box that
says we can explain what happens in the world, including
the production and distribution of energy
by looking at individual behavior.
And that's what we're going to do today.
But there's a second answer, or a second kind theory,
which many of you gave me to start with,
which is that the motives and the intentions of individuals
are located in a larger circulation,
whether it's advertising or education,
that people anticipate certain things to happen.
That they locate themselves in a sequence.
And so that it's not the individual,
but it's what the individual has learned
over time, and the experiences that they have had,
and what the philosopher John Dewey called situated action.
That an action doesn't mean the same
in one place as in another.
And so therefore, the action you make or do
isn't the same in one place or another.
And if you take account of that variation,
then it isn't the individual causation.
But it's also the situation.
And the authors who say these kinds of things
include Pierre Bourdieu.
And he calls this situation, or these culturally
learned behaviors, habits, or the habitus.
And Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
he wrote before he wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776,
do you all know The Wealth of Nations, 1776, OK,
and you all know about the invisible hand.
OK, yes, no?
Well, look it up on Wikipedia.
But what is important about that theory, which most people take
as obvious, because the foundation of the market
is that before he wrote The Wealth of Nations he,
wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
And in that book, what Adam Smith said
is that the person all people will try to be good.
They will be limited in their desires, which
is what gets translated into demand in the market
by the expectation of what their neighbors will think of them.
That doesn't hold very true in the modern world,
except if you go to what some of you
start at the beginning, advertising,
and signaling, and education.
So what we desire, Adam Smith said,
will be constrained by what we think
our neighbors will think of us.
And that's the framework in which our desires or demands
can shape a market.
So in this second bifurcated notion,
it's not that history makes the man.
It's that man makes history.
No, no, I said it backwards.
Erase that.
The second theory, history makes the man.
So Barack Obama can get elected in 2008.
He could not have gotten elected president in 1980, or 1990,
or 2000.
Conditions had to be such, is how the story would go.
Or that George Washington would have been a farmer,
and he would have spent his whole life as a farmer,
were it not for the American Revolution,
which he did not participate in until the war started.
He was not one of the signers of the Declaration
of Independence.
They needed someone to be a general.
Without that need, he wouldn't have been the president.
And so this second model is that personhood, identity, will,
the desires are produced and are contingent on the opportunities
that exist, and the constraints.
And the authors who write from this perspective
are Max Weber, Emile [? Durkheim ?] Karl
Polanyi, Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
So when you encounter those names,
you can put them as antithesis to Locke, Mill, Hayek,
and Friedman.
OK, now, I'll put in a little amendment
that's not in the notes.
That for the most part, Americans,
when you survey them and ask them
why things happen as they do, they give you the first answer.
Because people are special.
That's why what they have.
Or that's why things turn out the way they are.
We are, in the United States, a nation of individualists.
We rarely see the patterns of aggregation.
So now, one more, one more how do people make decisions.
There's one more model that I'd like
to present to you, that's not a binary model.
These have been binaries, right?
Two different views, individual, biological, collective
and culture.
The sociologist Max Weber offered us
a more complex notion.
He suggested that action is social
whenever we take account of somebody else,
just like Adam Smith's notion of the moral person.
We care what our neighbors think.
Now, Weber didn't say we care what our neighbors think.
He merely said that he will define action as social when
we take account of another, when there's more than one.
And we anticipate, or we care, or we
want to say something about or imagine an other
in relationship to ourselves.
That's what makes it social.
So whenever you hear the word "social,"
which is bandied about something terrible,
it always means an interaction of two or more.
And in his grand theory, which I'll try to do in five minutes,
this is 1,000 pages, OK, you're getting it in five minutes,
there are four ways in which we can
take account of other people.
The first one is what he called rational action.
And here, we have exactly the economic model.
That people act and make decisions
on the basis of reasoning, of means and ends reasoning.
That they take account of the objects in the external world,
the situations.
They mobilize logic.
And they try to figure out how to get from here to there.
They maximize their ends by figuring out appropriate means.
This is our economic rational actor model.
And he called that formal rational action.
But he said there was another kind of rationality,
in which we were oriented not to maximizing
means ends efficiencies, but because there was something
we thought was good, an absolute value.
This could be a conscious belief in a God, who tells us
what to do.
It could be some ethical value, such as do unto others as you
would have them do unto you.
It could be aesthetic to maximize beauty.
It could be to maximize equality,
as communism was originally imagined by Karl Marx.
So that behavior is organized to maximize or to fulfill
that absolute value.
It's not an efficiency or logical requirement
of means and ends.
And the third kind of behavior--
so this is virtue.
Could be you want to be environmentally sustainable,
whether it's efficient or not.
OK, that's an alternative to efficiency.
The third kind of behavior he described
was ones which come from our feelings, from our emotions.
We do things because it feels good.
Now, you all know what that's like you
do a lot of that we all do.
That's why people take drugs, drink alcohol,
have sex, because it feels good.
It's also the basis on which we sometimes
convey honor to people.
We say some people are better than others.
Being seen and celebrity, this whole TV and internet
world of being there, people are getting some sort
of emotional satisfaction.
And the fourth kind of social action
is simply tradition and habit.
We act because we have always done it this way.
And that, sometimes, is a little bit of mimicry, but mimicry
of the past, rather than necessarily something
co-present.
And there are lots of societies, lots of groups.
And this institution, MIT, is frequently
accused of being stuck in its ways.
So when we were accredited a few years ago, or re-accredited,
the re-accreditation committee said
that MIT had just about come into the 20th century in terms
of the information systems in which it managed.
We had hardly made it to the end of the 20th century,
because we don't change things too easily.
OK, habit, it's comfortable.
So now, like those overlapping disciplines, those overlapping
disciplines, all these concepts have fuzzy borders.
So it's rare that you'll ever find an empirically observable
action social action that's just one kind, that's just
rational action, or that's just affect without habit,
or something else.
And that brings us to exactly where Dick left off on Monday.
What else, besides rational action,
besides economic reasoning might be affecting demand for energy?
OK, so these are the basic models of--
and habit, or past, is what those
are historic investments are that we can't change very much.
That we have suburbs and automobiles.
That we have habituated preferences
in our political system and the individualism
that makes it very hard for us to change our energy production
and consumption systems.
So what I want-- this is the big picture,
and now, let's look at some specific research that wants
to do something with this.
But I would like you to take away from this the notion
that any human action involves usually
a combination of these forms of action.
These are the categories which we
mix and match to describe it.
So cognitive science and the sociology
of decisions, these days there's been a recent marriage.
And it may, in the end, end up being a marriage of our brain
structure and our behavior.
So what used to be psychology, asking people
why they do what they do, watching them in experiments,
treating them just like rats in experiments,
we now look inside their brains with PET scans, fMRIs.
The neuroscientists look at the brains, the architecture
of our brains, the arrangement of the pieces,
that's about all they can do, so far.
And look at the physical matter inside our skulls,
where the psychologist used to study, we might say, the mind.
Brain scientists or neuroscientists
study the brain.
And the cognitive scientists go, try to put the two together.
Is that fair?
Do we have any BCS majors here?
Not a one?
Not one brain and cognitive science major.
Interesting, I would have thought
you'd all want to become brain scientists.
That's the future, folks.
Well, do the brain and cognitive science of energy decisions.
There you go, there's a dissertation for you.
OK, so some of this marriage of mind and brain
has produced some interesting results.
So that what people used to think was hard wired,
the neuroscientists have showed us is quite malleable.
That in fact, oh, I think up until about the 1980s, doctors
and scientists would say oh, well, you
might be able to regenerate muscles if you've
had an accident or damaged it.
But the brain was what it was and it never changed.
Well, we know that's not true.
Used to think it was fixed and formed.
But now, we know that the neurons are always
in the making.
And those circuits are changing.
The neurons and networks, we have learned,
develop in response to experience to the inputs.
So that they shape the capacity to act.
So that it's not just how you're born.
But the experiences that you have had
transform your mental capacities.
Well, you all know that's true.
You wouldn't have gotten to MIT otherwise.
Unless you all think there was all these equations
were in there to start with and they just came out recently.
That you've learned.
You've learned how to defer gratification.
That's what most successful college students, to get here,
you learned.
And some people don't have the experiences which allow that.
What if you're a child who's never
had gratification of any bodily or emotional function?
Well then delaying it is not something
you could learn that will be rewarded.
You understand what I'm saying?
So if you've never had a full belly, then when food
is put in front of you, you're not necessarily
going to wait to eat it until you're told to eat it.
It's as simple as that.
And the same thing with cognitive activities.
So there's lots of work now going
on that is closing the gap between what
is observable between the inner states and the external aspects
of culture.
So in this work, in this scholarship,
scholars, researchers, have started
to distinguish a fundamental difference between what
they call automatic cognition and deliberate cognition.
Automatic cognition is rapid, effortless, unintentional
thoughts, things which are those habits, those things we
do without thinking.
And it allows quick processing of information
without extended thought or figuring out what to do.
Deliberate cognition is slow, considered, measured.
Where we can reject or accept alternatives.
We can consider various actions to take.
Where we might actively search for solutions,
for characteristics, for connections,
for seeing if we can find relationships.
And where we don't assume, but we solve, you might say.
So examples of automatic cognition
are as the example, male and female.
We look at somebody and we categorize them like that.
When we can't categorize them like that, we start to think.
And we frequently, then, refer to that person
as not usual or not normal.
Age, race, in the United States is
a fundamental automatic cognition.
Turns out not to be that in all cultures.
In many cultures, it's much more varied.
It's not a binary, like it is in the United States.
So our habits are examples of automatic cognition.
It's outside of our thinking process.
It's outside of consciousness.
And it happens more often when we're under stress.
The experiments put people in different conditions.
And how quickly they respond when they're under stress
is measurable.
In deliberate cognition, what has
been shown is that people deliberate and they think
about alternatives when there has been
a disruption of those habits, a disruption
of non-thinking-- of acting without thought.
OK, so I want to give you some empirical examples
of how this works.
The first example is by Carol Heimer
at Northwestern University, where
she did a study of neonatal care in several hospitals.
She noticed in these wards for preemie babies
that routines the hospital had established
were used to manage what was a very
uncertain medical situation, very
uncertain for the families, very stressful.
And that there was a very marked hierarchy among the staff.
The aides at the bottom, the doctors at the top,
the surgical nurses higher up, others lower down.
And along with this hierarchy of persons,
Heimer also identified a continuum of routines.
At one end of her spectrum, there
were tasks which were highly routinized.
That there was almost never any variation for how it was done.
And then there were other tasks which
varied a lot from patient to patient and family to family.
She noticed that when there was either very, very
routinized or very, very unroutinized,
that there was deliberate cognition.
There was a great deal of talk, examination, consideration
of alternatives.
But where there was moderate routinization,
that things were automatic.
According to Heimer the overroutinization
triggers deliberate cognition, because people
are so overwhelmed and overloaded with routines
that the things they have to do routinely become a burden.
They become noise, rather than a signal.
And they cease to focus attention on the child
or on the situation.
Then because there's so many things that need to be done,
and need to be done in a specified way,
they have to think about how to do it.
In underroutinized context, they have
to figure out what to do when there are no routines.
And they have to be inductive.
Is this like one we saw before?
Is this like the four other cases last week?
So that lots and lots of routine,
they have to think about how to manage.
No routine, they have to think.
But simple, not high volume of routines, and they
act without thought.
So that might be taking blood.
It might be putting in the injection.
But if they have to do 10 of those things at once,
then they will think about it.
So that's one example.
In a second study about residents in an Argentinean
shanty town, two scholars, Auyero and Swistun
studied the ways in which people handled uncertainty
in risk and especially the conditions under which--
the conditions which sustained uncertainty
and sometimes led to assessments of environmental pollutants.
So they saw that sometimes, people paid attention
to the pollutants around them.
And sometimes, they didn't.
And they wanted to identify those different situations.
And the evidence they collected suggested
that if the polluters pollute without disrupting
the habits of the community, the community paid no attention
to the pollution.
But if the pollution disrupted habits,
such as getting children to school,
or preparing meals, or being able to ride on the bus,
then the population mobilized.
The routines encouraged people to adopt
what we are calling automatic pilot, or automatic cognition,
to their surroundings.
But when routines are disrupted, people
began to explore and try to figure out
what it was in the environment that was disrupting it.
So in these cases, familiar routines
combined with automatic cognition
to restrict the attention to the pollution.
So that's a second example.
Third example, in a study of political commitments,
Martin and Desmond found that when citizens identify
themselves as having strong political commitments
along a continuum from liberal to conservative,
so if they were strong at one end or the other
of the political spectrum, they spent less time evaluating
the evidence about politics.
The ideological commitments organized the world for them.
And it made it effortless and efficient
to know how to interpret and how to make decisions.
In a study of social movements, the scholars
found that when movement leaders use everyday metaphors, that is
ordinary language, in particular ways,
they generate more or less support.
So for example, the right to life movement came up,
that is an anti-abortion movement,
came up with a simple phrase, right to life.
And that had more salience than did choice
for those who were pro-abortion.
And so the metaphors aligned with a whole set
of other metaphors.
So that people thought more or less
about the process of abortion.
OK, the same thing with faith-based labor movements.
In the 19th century, Mark Steinberg
has written about the ways in which the cotton
workers in England were able to mobilize and form
a union because, this is in the 1830s
to '50s, because they used the already existing language
of abolition against slavery.
And they identified their work in the cotton mills as slavery.
And by associating themselves with slavery,
people didn't pay as much attention to the differences
and were more likely to support and join the unions.
More recent research along this issue
of the metaphors, the signaling, this is about signaling,
the metaphors that affect deliberate or automatic
cognition, a study of the Serbo-Croatian conflict
in the 1990s showed that the associations
with the past that people used affected the level of conflict.
Particular words and metaphors generated associations
with the past.
So that people viewed the current conflict
as a continuation of hundreds of years of conflict,
rather than assess the current conflict
within current conditions.
So simple metaphors associations encourage
people to think deliberately or to act automatically.
So finally, the last example of these differences
between automatic and deliberate cognition
comes from work on narrative.
So we've gone, I just want you to see,
from routines, to disruptive habits,
to language organizing social movements and wars.
And now we have, from metaphors, we go to narratives.
So researchers have not only looked
at these routines, metaphors, analogies,
for triggering automatic rather than deliberate cognition,
but also at the structure, how the metaphors are
organized into a story at narrative and storytelling.
Some of the very best research on this
has been done in courtrooms.
So that if witnesses tell a story
and they leave out little links in the sequence of action,
the audience, the jurors, and the judges
are more likely to fill in those ellipses
with conventional action.
That is what usually is done in those circumstances.
And it is most often to the disadvantage of a defendant,
because the defendant is arguing that this was not routine.
But this was unusual.
So witnessing, in criminal courts,
makes a difference how complete your narrative is.
If it is not, then people automatically
fill in with routinized information.
In my own work, I have shown that when a story describes
or fails to describe-- let me put it
this way, when a story fails to describe how power is
organized, people are less likely to resist the power
of that organization or person.
But when a story reveals who holds power and why,
then people are more likely to resist authority.
So a little bit of, perhaps, what
was happening last spring in the Middle East.
As stories circulated on the internet about what
was happening in different places,
in villages and towns in Libya and in Egypt,
those stories spread.
And they told stories, they were stories,
about what the government was doing to whom.
And it helped to mobilize the people.
So that's what cognitive science is telling us
about how people make deliberate or automatic decisions.
We have some experimental data that
helps us to understand how decisions
can be made specifically about energy consumption.
So this was the articles you read, I think, the experiments?
Right, Goldstein, Cialdini, and Grisk--
I can't say that.
So what did they want to show?
What did they want to show?
Yeah, Veronica?
AUDIENCE: They wanted to change the wording
that they had to say your fellow guests are doing it.
Help your fellow guests.
SUSAN SILBEY: Why?
Why did they want to do that?
AUDIENCE: Because subliminally, that social pressure
would motivate them more to do it.
And there's examples given in the other article
about how when people gave money to the guy playing
guitar or whatever, other people behind the guy who gave--
SUSAN SILBEY: So those are two--
those are two different norms.
Yes, those are-- looking for norms are
observed patterns of action.
That's what a norm is.
They're looking to see if they can find
the pattern in human action.
AUDIENCE: Yes, Vivian.
So they did find a pattern.
And I think they just want to show that this tactic isn't
being used.
Whereas, because this is something
that we can use to help people started
making environmentally conscious decisions,
and it's not being used.
SUSAN SILBEY: I don't want to be personally critical.
But they don't want to show anything.
They want to discover something.
OK, let's talk about it in a way that is fair to them.
They have an aspiration to understand.
They want to understand the basis
upon which decisions about energy use can be affected.
OK, they want to understand the basis of decision making.
OK, and the assumption they start with,
the hypothesis is that people mimic.
They do what other people do.
And they care about whether they are a member
of one group or another.
That seems they have an identity.
So let's walk through it.
All right, they're trying to use, as I have on the screen,
social norms, that's patterns, to motivate conservation.
Is it possible?
So the question was, the first one,
would people not put their towels for laundry
but would reuse their towels?
And the standard message was, help save the environment.
But the message that they offered was slightly different.
They said, you should do this, because everybody else
is doing it.
Does that appeal to you?
Have you seen these signs?
You've never seen these signs in hotels?
AUDIENCE: I've definitely seen the signs, more in Europe
than over America.
But it's also not only that other people are doing it.
I think in this case, it speaks to anti-environmental movement
that says one towel hanging is not going to make a difference.
So a lot of people, their motivation
is brought down, because they're saying,
I'm going through all this trouble.
Nobody is around me.
I'm not making a difference.
Why am I going to keep the self-sacrifice?
So by telling them, it's not only the bandwagon idea.
But it's also the--
look we're actually doing it in Europe,
and it's actually going to go a long way.
SUSAN SILBEY: So trying to say that each effort aggregates
to a larger effort.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: And that other people are doing it, too.
So it's not just one person's effort, right?
OK, so they got 75% more reuse by simply
saying join your fellow guests.
So then they tried to specify, is it just all guests?
Or could they get an even greater result?
So in our Weberian concepts, this
is sort of a little bit of be like others.
Enjoy your group membership.
But it's hardly efficiency, right?
It's not a calculation of what would be rational action.
So then they first ask the people who they identify with.
Do you identify with the people who are male or female,
or are citizens of the state, or are you
an environmentally concerned person,
with other hotel guests, or with guests in this room?
I have to confess I find this an extraordinary result.
As you see, in the bottom set, those
with who identified with the standard environmental message
had less reuse than those where they said people in this room
didn't reuse their towels.
They did.
I'm sorry, did reuse their towels.
So you should be like people in this room.
I think it's bizarre.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Well, it's the proximity.
You don't want to be seen as that one guy who's not
doing his part to contribute.
SUSAN SILBEY: You think it's a smaller group.
And therefore, you'll be more outstanding.
AUDIENCE: The effect of you being
seen as a pariah is more immediate,
because the small room.
SUSAN SILBEY: But you don't know those people.
AUDIENCE: So there's no one in this room.
SUSAN SILBEY: He's alone.
He's alone.
It's a hotel room, not a dormitory.
AUDIENCE: I can't really articulate.
I still think proximity has to do something with it, the fact
that it was this room.
SUSAN SILBEY: Yeah, obviously has something,
but I find it unpersuasive.
Oh, sorry.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] identify themselves
with the select group of people who are
more likely to be in that room.
SUSAN SILBEY: I think that's right.
I think that this room--
and maybe that's what he was getting at.
That's a smaller group of people.
I'm more like a person who would be in this room
than I am like 350 million citizens or half of them, male
or female.
Or even the number of environmentally concerned
citizen.
So people in this room is a smaller group.
And I'm more like those who stay in this kind of hotel room.
Yes, Matthew.
AUDIENCE: Is it saying that the people who identify themselves
as environmentally concerned are least
likely to recycle the towels?
SUSAN SILBEY: Than when they offered the other identities
to choose.
AUDIENCE: I think that's the most surprising on there.
PROFESSOR: But the message was presumably
be environmentally responsible, recycle, as opposed
to recycle like people who stayed in the room.
AUDIENCE: So it's not what they identify with.
It's what they're given.
SUSAN SILBEY: It's the message.
Oh, it's the message, which message got a boost.
PROFESSOR: The standard environmental message
said help save the environment, use your towels.
SUSAN SILBEY: And this one, and for people who--
OK, but the other one was be like people
who were in this room.
AUDIENCE: I think you can attribute
the discrepancy between the standard environmental message
and the same room.
And the whole--
I think the one to the extreme right appeals to something
that's more common among humans, just the need or the desire
to appear more fit, or more civilized, or more respectable,
even when nobody's watching, as opposed to just
standard environmental message that only
a small subset of the public even, I guess, care about,
acknowledge.
SUSAN SILBEY: Charlotte?
AUDIENCE: Could also be like what
you were talking about earlier, with what you register
and what you just kind of see something
that's there all the time.
So standard environmental messages are everywhere.
So it's possible people just don't really register it.
But if you see a message that says something different
than you're used to seeing, you may just notice it more
and respond to it because of that.
SUSAN SILBEY: Possible, disrupted the routine.
Rachel?
AUDIENCE: The other thing, too, is the argument about people
that have been in that room doing the same thing, I think
Cialdini, in his book, or whatever,
he talks about people being more likely to do something
if someone's watching them.
And the fact that they're saying,
oh, people who've stayed in this room have been doing it,
implies the hotel is watching which guests are.
SUSAN SILBEY: Yes, that implies they know.
Very good, so maybe that suggested surveillance.
There was another hand up over here?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I was going metnion, all these were good points.
But also people like to be a part of a team.
That kind of makes you feel part of a group that's being
environmentally conscious.
SUSAN SILBEY: Yeah, I think that's what Ovema and Everson
was saying, too.
You're all on the same.
This business of possibly their surveillance is a new insight.
Yes, Andrew?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: And so why would you
get more reuse of the towels by saying this room?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: We don't have a lot of evidence about that
is the problem.
That's the individualist fallacy,
that there are always people who want to be different.
But then there's people who want to be different.
It's a group who wants to be different.
This search for the unique is the problem.
PROFESSOR: Back in the '60s, there were a lot of rebels
all together.
SUSAN SILBEY: All wanting to be different.
That's the problem.
It's social.
It's not individual.
That's the issue.
Yes, Scott?
AUDIENCE: Somebody pointed out earlier that someone might not
want to reuse a towel.
Because they think that I'm only one person,
what's this going to do?
But I think if you have the info that, oh, well, everyone
in this room is using a towel.
So that you think, oh, if I'm the one person who's
not doing it, then, I am making a difference,
but it's in a bad way.
So if you contribute to it, then you're
helping make a difference.
Whereas, it's not you're just thinking, oh, well,
one person what's that going to do?
SUSAN SILBEY: All right, so what other norms or incentives might
we use for energy efficient--
Oh, let me see.
Let's take the takeaway message and then consider
some alternative.
So what this cognitive science research
and the experimental research shows
is that people do follow the norms of others
with whom they feel associated, even if that association
doesn't seem, on the outside, terribly meaningful
as some group identity.
And in some circumstances, individuals
follow norms of a meaningless and unimportant identity
rather than a meaningful and important one if the connection
is based on an uncommon characteristic, which is maybe
helps Andrew's point a little bit,
that this is a smaller group, it's
an uncommon characteristic.
And it's the same as Jacob, and Ovema, and Everson.
So I can identify with this group.
Now, maybe if they had some other sign,
they could have done better.
Have you got any suggestions of what other norms
they might try to invoke?
How might you get people, if not only in towel reuse?
How can we get people?
Yes, Sid.
AUDIENCE: Give them a financial statistic,
nothing coming to me.
If I have like a number or something, telling me,
how much choice A, why choice is better than choice B.
SUSAN SILBEY: Tell them how much?
AUDIENCE: Well, I tell them how much they're saving.
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, now that's interesting.
Because there was a story in the news.
Remember the story about there was
a story about how the hotels were only
doing this to save money, that they weren't, in fact, saving
energy.
And that had a negative effect.
So it has to be--
AUDIENCE: I don't mean in this, hotel instance,
I mean when you're just talking about energy saving.
if you can find that discrepancy and you
can show that choice A is energy efficient and is saving you--
SUSAN SILBEY: So you're arguing that if you put it
into dollars, people will behave.
AUDIENCE: I mean, for me, a dollar amount says a lot more
than, perhaps, trying to I guess group
me into one group or the other.
SUSAN SILBEY: That sign?
It's not too clear.
But it's how many miles per gallon
you'll get is the car stickers.
So if you by one car, in city driving,
you'll get 18 miles per gallon.
But on the other car, you'll get 23 miles per gallon.
Will you buy the car with the 23 and the 30?
Is that kind of number helpful?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
AUDIENCE: To kind of bounce off waht he's saying,
it's a number, but it doesn't really
tell you dollars and cents.
Oh, bigger number is better.
SUSAN SILBEY: So you think that should
say you will save $500 this year on your gasoline,
on an average of 10,000 miles a year or something like that?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: And I think it's important that you
talking about their savings.
But that kind of sounds like the stuff
that you were saying before, how people act, they might have--
habitually or traditionally and perhaps
the willingness to change their habits
is not as great as the willingness to--
SUSAN SILBEY: And so why do people buy Priuses?
Yeah, Matt.
AUDIENCE: I think it's talks to the point about style
and a need for individuality.
That people have Priuses because they
think that they're environmentally friendly,
but they also want--
SUSAN SILBEY: Everybody else to think they are.
So it's not individuality.
Let's just get the terminology clear, because it's--
because we talk about individuals a lot.
People buy Priuses.
And what you're trying to say is because they
want to be seen to be environmentally?
No?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, but in a way that makes them look effortless
like they're doing it.
SUSAN SILBEY: Because it's just routine.
I've made a commitment.
I'm a good person.
Jessica, and then Charles.
AUDIENCE: It's got to be coupled with you go in,
and you see something that's got off the charts mileage, MPG
mileage, and the sales person there's
going to tell you this is the best
investment I'm going to make.
I think if they actually ran the numbers,
like you did in class, in front of them,
and they told them it's never going to break even, never
pay for itself.
I think they might not want to still be seen [INAUDIBLE]..
SUSAN SILBEY: I didn't think the argument was, about the Prius,
that it wouldn't be environmentally good.
They just never get the savings back.
But so you two are not disagreeing.
You're offering two different motivations.
AUDIENCE: I just think their own economical well-being
would overpower their want to be environmental.
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, that's a hypothesis.
That's a hypothesis which is challenged by all the Priuses.
Oh, you're saying they don't know.
They don't know.
PROFESSOR: There's also a question,
there are hybrids available in other cars that
aren't distinctly styled.
You could buy hybrids and various other vehicles,
as opposed to the Prius being a hybrid Corolla,
looks like a Corolla, it's distinctive.
You can buy hybrids in various Ford and Chevy models
that are indistinguishable from a distance.
SUSAN SILBEY: And that would not serve Max's reason,
because everybody has to know that you are--
PROFESSOR: Not many people do.
You don't buy it for Max's reason,
because nobody can tell you made the purchase.
And the sales are less.
SUSAN SILBEY: Jacob and then Charlotte.
AUDIENCE: I would say there's kind of a threshold.
Once so many Priuses were sold, they
became a thing in advertising.
When someone thought, I need to buy a hybrid.
They though of a Prius.
They didn't think of other hybrids.
SUSAN SILBEY: I'll confess.
I didn't know, for a long time, there were others.
I just saw the Priuses.
So I was one of those people who don't recognize the ones that
are not styled differently.
That's right.
AUDIENCE: I was just going to say
that I agree that I think that economical position comes
into a lot of part.
Because the way that Priuses are advertised, is their advertised
that gas is really expensive.
And this is also environmentally friendly.
But it's a lot of--
people think that they're going to save a lot of money.
And if you show them the numbers, they wouldn't.
But whenever I was getting a car,
I was considering buying a Prius, because it's
environmentally friendly, whatever.
But also because I live in Oklahoma.
So I drive a lot.
And I wanted to not have to pay a lot of money for gas.
And that was my reasoning.
And I would have never considered running the numbers.
SUSAN SILBEY: You just believe what they told.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, and then also, just
because when you think of hybrid,
you think of Prius, because of their advertising strategy.
It's not like I wasn't wanting to buy it
just because I thought it would make people think that I
was environmentally friendly.
It was because I thought, oh, maybe I wanted a hybrid car.
I should get a Prius, because that's the only one I know of.
SUSAN SILBEY: I want to get on Max's side for just a moment.
Because I think that people don't just
buy things because they're efficient,
or because they're a better economic deal.
You cannot explain the fashion industry.
You cannot explain celebrity.
It's not about economic efficiency.
I mean, you don't need to have the number of sweaters
and shoes.
They don't wear out.
You don't have to change the hems from long to short
for efficiency.
Why do people change their clothes,
change their hairstyles?
It's not because it's economically efficient.
There is something else.
PROFESSOR: Cadillac Escalades, they don't carry much,
their performance is lousy, terrible gas mileage.
SUSAN SILBEY: And why do people buy them?
Because
AUDIENCE: Ford F150 is still the best selling care in America.
And people like trucks, people like
to be seen in high, big vehicles to make them look wealthy.
And they go outdoors--
SUSAN SILBEY: It's called status and approval.
Sid, and then Andrew.
AUDIENCE: I think has to do with everyone's personal utility,
[INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: So where did that personal--
let's get to the basis of this lecture.
Where did that personal utility come from?
AUDIENCE: I mean, I'm sure like it has to do with group theory,
and which group you want to be associated with.
But there are different groups.
And different people might buy different things
for different reasons.
SUSAN SILBEY: And do we choose all the groups we belong to?
Come on.
I mean, no.
You can't say, just look around this room,
you can't say we all choose the places, the groups we're
identified with.
Come on.
We wouldn't have the wars we've been having if people all
chose their group identities.
Think about it.
Think what's driving the world.
And the price of oil.
Group identities, not rational decision making, folks.
It's group identities.
Habitual, historic, group identities
have raised the price of oil this week.
Not rational decision making.
The stock market went down yesterday,
and what did the analysts say?
Fear of oil reserves.
The oil reserves did not change yesterday.
I am sorry to push back at you.
Make the rest of the argument.
Part of it's right.
But those utilities come from someplace.
AUDIENCE: Yes, but what I was trying to say
is that I think everyone can reason
as to why they make a decision.
And it's like very--
yes, everyone's utility is affected
by the groups around them.
But all I'm trying to say is someone
will buy that Prius to make a fashion statement.
But the utility they get out of making that fashion statement
is worth more for them than calculating
the savings they're going to make and knowing that--
SUSAN SILBEY: So you want to do--
OK, you want to do a cost benefit analysis
and add to the benefit status rewards and emotional rewards.
Fine, we're total heated agreement.
OK, however, not everybody can think through.
There are-- you have to have the categories to think with.
That's where culture comes from.
We have cultures, and I don't want you to--
that do not have certain categories in them.
They just don't have them.
You're sitting in the institution that
makes categories to think with.
But not everybody has them.
So we have to deal with the fact that we live in an integrated
world, interconnected.
And we do not get to choose all the time.
So Andrew had his hand.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: Save the dollar.
Saving the dollar is a good idea.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: To care about that.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: To care about little bits of money.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, this has been observed
about American society.
If you want, I'll give you the source,
Thorstein Veblen was an observer at the beginning
of the 20th century and described
Americans preoccupation with these kinds of things.
OK,
PROFESSOR: [INAUDIBLE].
Dallas, Texas, you would not do that.
Houston, Texas, you would not do that.
SUSAN SILBEY: Well, see you on--
next week.
Thank you.