YANSS 279 - Pluralistic Ignorance (rebroadcast)

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Put another way on certain issues, the majority of people believe that the majority of the people in a group believe what in truth the minority of the members believe. Or put another way, it's the erroneous belief that the majority is acting in a way that matches its internal philosophies and that you are one of a small number of people who feel differently when in reality the majority agrees with you on the inside but is afraid to admit it outright or imply such through its behavior. Or look, put another way, it's when people are unhappy with a norm but aren't sure if they're long in that thinking. And when they don't know what the majority opinion truly is, they play it safe and adhere to the norms of the day. But since we can't read each other's minds, we assume that other people are following norms because they actually believe in them while we are following norms to play it safe. So everyone in the group at the same time gets a stuck following a norm that no one wants to follow. Everyone is carrying a shared false belief about everyone else's unshared true beliefs and that is pluralistic ignorance, which isn't just hard to explain, it's kind of hard to say. I've never been able to come up with something better to replace it with. Okay, so first of all, I'm very bad at pronouncing pluralistic ignorance. Me too, me too. I have to overdub myself every time. Don't worry about it. It's tremendous. Yeah, you should just overdub it with someone else saying pluralistic. And I teach on it too, and it just causes me impossible troubles. That is Stanford psychologist and sociologist Rob Willer. I also asked him for his definition, and he also couldn't help but explain it in about three different ways. Pluralistic ignorance is a term that was coined by Floyd Alport. And it describes a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm while assuming wrongly that most people accept it. So put differently, it's when a majority falsely believes that they're in the minority or plurality. So it's when a majority is essentially ignorantly thinking they're in a plurality, hence this term pluralistic ignorance. Crutch and Crutchfield, these earlier, early pluralistic ignorance researchers, described it as a situation where no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. A famous example is the situation when it's very often experienced among bystanders in emergency situations where each individual bystander thinks that they're the only ones who, the only person who is uncertain of what to do. They think that everybody else is acting out of confidence and certainty, whereas they themselves are feeling uncertain and unsure. That's why that misinterpretation, if you will, is the reason why bystanders are so unlikely to act in cases of emergencies. It's because they assume that other people are not acting, are not taking action because they know that it wouldn't be appropriate or wouldn't be needed or wouldn't be right to take action, whereas they themselves are uncertain and confused. So you're behaving the same way as another person, but you're feeling differently about it. One of my favorite examples, actually, when I always see pluralistic ignorance, is when I go to academic conferences and everybody at the academic conference is attending talks and looks very professional and looks very engaged. And secretly, they're all anxious about whether they, in fact, they feel that every being else is doing more than they are. Everybody else is more on top of it than they are. Everybody else has published more recently than they have. But everybody feels that way. So it's taking other people's show of confidence and certainty and command at face value without recognizing that you, too, are giving a show of confidence, certainty, and self-command that is belied by your own anxiety and uncertainties. Opposition to the Vietnam War on college campuses, according to at least one study I saw, undergraduates believed that undergraduates as a whole were more opposed to the Vietnam War than they really were. And I think a resonant example these days is, or it could be climate change attitudes, where I think Americans imagine that this is a very disputed issue and that maybe not a majority, but maybe about half of America doesn't believe in climate change. But research consistently shows that a super majority of Americans believe in climate change and are concerned about it. We have all had a run-in with pluralistic ignorance. It's sort of what social media does, isn't it? Where you see on Facebook these lives of people around us that don't actually match their internal attitudes. And so we might try to match ourselves to what we see on display and think that what we're feeling inside is not being shared when actually we're all sharing certain things. It's also what leads to imposter syndrome. I think most of us have also been in a classroom or a business meeting and had a question or been confused. And when the person running this show asked, "Does anyone here have any questions?" Or they say something like, "Does anyone not understand or is anyone confused?" We all look around and we see no one else raising their hands. And then we choose to pass on the opportunity to clear all on confusion. And you do this because you think you're the only person who has no idea what's going on and then you decide to keep your hand right where it is. And after a few seconds, the speaker moves on. In most of those cases, many people have questions. Many people are confused. Sometimes the majority of the people in the room. But everyone waits to see if others signal that same confusion. And if they don't, they don't either. A wave of insecure uncertainty passes through the collective with all persons wondering if they are alone in their confusion. And the result is a totally inaccurate view of reality in which everyone thinks that everyone knows that everyone else has no questions. Except yourself. And so the teacher moves on thinking that the classroom is following along and now everyone continues living a lie. If only someone had spoken up, if only you had spoken up, then the spell would have been broken. But instead, everyone remains silent and everyone suffers. And this scales up in ways that have affected the lives of millions. For instance, a study by the sociologist Hubert J. O'Gorman in 1975, which he later replicated with fellow sociologist Stephen Elgary, picked apart surveys of American whites during the final years of racial segregation in the United States. And they found that only a small number of white people at that time truly supported segregation. Most wanted it to end, but most believed that most other white people believed differently. O'Gorman and Gary found that the level of pluralistic ignorance varied from region to region. For instance, in the extreme Northeast, 93% of people favored ending segregation. But 20% of people believed they were alone in that attitude. In the deep south, 68% of people supported ending segregation, but 61% believed that the majority around them felt otherwise. Overall, the surveys showed that about half of all US citizens believe that the majority of the country was in favor of continuing segregation. But in reality, it was only around 25%. Now, that level of pluralistic ignorance led to situations in which people said things like, "I don't believe in it, but everybody around here does." Or, "It's not me, but it's my neighbor." Or, "I don't have a problem with you eating here, but you know how people are." It's this. It's this false belief that the majority supports something like segregation that slows down the process of indigate. And it sues policymakers, employers, advertisers, and the rest of society to act as though they live in a world that isn't really there. In their study, O'Gorman and Gary showed that whites who were undecided about the issue, but who also falsely believed that the majority supported the issue, they tended to go with the perceived majority. When people don't know the truth, people on the fence go with what they assume the majority wants. And in situations like this, people like that will continue to enforce norms that most people wish would go away. And that happens even today. Pluralistic ignorance keeps people on the fringe, the sort of people who will be phased out by change, clinging to their outdated beliefs for far longer than they should. And it keeps their opponents feeling less supported, and they truly are, while keeping people in the middle favoring the status quo. And in the end, a make-believe status quo changes the way everyone acts, and by doing so, how they think. As O'Gorman and Gary put it, people often unintentionally serve as cultural people. carriers of cognitive error. So one thing that I think is interesting to reflect on is that with a lot of these examples of pluralistic ignorance, it's not so hard to imagine how they came about in the first place. So think about alcohol drinking on college campuses, opposition to racial integration in the south in the late 50s and early 60s, opposition to the Vietnam War. Why would these positions or beliefs get overestimated? Well in all cases, they're more observable than their opposites are, right? The people that are out there drinking on college campuses are very visible, but sometimes obnoxiously visible and you're like, "Oh, everybody must be comfortable with binge drinking. There's dozens, maybe hundreds of students outside on Friday and Saturday night making lots of noise." But what you're overlooking is there are thousands of T-totally undergraduates who are watching videos in their dorm room or maybe already asleep and you can't see them to sample them correctly. Same goes for the opponents of racial integration. They're outside protesting on the front steps of schools. They're very visible. They're on the news and you're seeing them, you're over sampling them and same for opposition to the Vietnam War. People who oppose the Vietnam War in the 1960s made an effort to be as visible as possible. And in fact, you might even argue that creating pluralistic ignorance is an early stage goal of a social movement that starts out with a minority of support and is trying to reach critical mass to win over a larger population. Well you want to have an outsized influence on people's estimates of how calm beliefs are, right? You're so blown on why. I've thought about this for years and I've never even looked at it that way because you're thinking of it almost like artificial selection. There's a natural selection version of it and then consciousness raising or protesting especially or organizing and making people go, "Oh, wait, I see a lot of people care about this." There's a form of it that just happens and then there's a form of it where you actively go out there and then start the cascade happening. So that you can create the. I'm just blown my mind right now, the idea of more observable than its opposite. When I think another factor that can lead to. I mean, so if the germ of a lot of plurality. I did it again, okay? Of unpopular norms, if the germ is bad sampling at the beginning of the process, another key factor can be mass media effects. So the mass media will often elevate a minority viewpoint to get disproportionate attention either to seem balanced or because it's particularly interesting or because it's disrupting society. So that's why they might elevate a social movement to look more common than it maybe really is or why we might overestimate the rate of climate deniers in the general population, you know, because that's the other side of the issue. I've actually studied the last couple years in my introduction to social psychology class that I teach here at Stanford. I've fielded a survey to get a sense of how much support there is in the class for shutting down conservative speakers on campus and also how much support everybody thinks there is. And I find pretty consistently that people on average are opposed to shutting down conservative speakers on campus, even though the majority of the students report being liberal, but then they estimate that the majority of the people in the class are supportive of shutting down conservative speakers on campus. Now why would they get that impression? Well, they're reading lots of news articles that are suggesting that that's a very common protest tactic on college campuses and it is common in the sense that you can find many anecdotes that are examples of that and you can see them on campus too. It happens sometimes on campus. But the truth is that that's very much a minority viewpoint. I think my favorite example of pluralistic ignorance is from the work of psychologist James Kits. In 1995, he infiltrated a vegetarian student cooperative which people lived in aid together under the norm of a meatless lifestyle. And he found that most people explained that they would sometimes sneak a piece of beef for chicken went away from the other members, but they would never do such a thing in the shared housing at a fear of offending others or making them feel sick or you know, being ostracized. Kits surveyed the population of several of these collectives and he found that members estimated about 75% of their fellow vegetarians stuck to their diet and avoided beef, but the actual number was around 60%. And when it came to fish, when he asked about fish, the vegetarians estimated about 40% of their peers sometimes slipped a bite here and there, but the actual percentage of people sneaking out deep fish was closer to 60%. And that's a great example of how pluralistic ignorance can cause any sort of group to remain one way when its members would prefer the group to act in another. Most of the vegetarians wanted to eat meat occasionally, especially fish, but no one would say so out loud and so most people thought that they were members of a tiny cabal of cheaters. But if you ask a social scientist about pluralistic ignorance, they will usually bring up the work of Deborah Prentice, who in the 1990s, along with her colleague Dale Miller, investigated the impact of this phenomenon on drinking behavior, specifically at Princeton, which at the time held these class reunions, which held the record for the second highest level of alcohol consumption for any event in the United States, other than the Indianapolis 500. And undergraduate student of mine named Jennifer Lightdale. She was a student I think she graduated from Princeton in the early 90s. She was one of my undergraduate advisies and she was also for, I was a new faculty member at that time at Princeton and she was my informant about campus life. And Princeton has these private clubs. They're not actually owned by the university, but they're private clubs that serve meals. They're called the eating clubs. And she was the vice president of her eating club. And so it was a time when alcohol use was very, an area of big concern on campus. There had been a tragic accident that alcohol related on campus shortly before. And so there was a great deal of concern about how much student strength. And Jennifer sort of explained to me about the dynamics of drinking on campus and how everybody went to the street as it's called and drank excessively on Thursdays and Saturday nights, not on Friday nights by tradition. And that people did drink to success and people would actually get sick and it was worrisome. It was worrisome to her. It was worrisome to the students themselves. But everybody was into it. That everybody else really liked it. She had misgivings. I mean, she was worried. She didn't think it was very fun and she didn't enjoy herself at that part of street life. But everybody else really did. And that description captures polaristic ignorance. Right? It's this, you know, because she too went to the street, right? And she was vice president of her eating club. I mean, she participated in this life willingly and, you know, she, I don't think she would have had it any other way. While at the same time considering the, in particular, the excessive drinking to be too much, it worried her. But she thought her misgivings were hers alone. She didn't understand that they were shared. She didn't think of that as a reason why there should be some other way of being on the street. So that was just recognizable as a case of polaristic ignorance to me in the description. And so we started collecting data to find out if in fact she was right, if that, you know, the polaristic ignorance phenomenon truly did exist on campus. And that was the start of that line of research. We conducted surveys asking about how, how do you feel about excessive drinking on campus? How does the typical Princeton student feel? How does the average student feel? We asked about students of your gender. We asked of, you know, all sorts of, we asked about most students and would consistently get this finding, this discrepancy between what people felt themselves. They didn't feel nearly as comfortable as they thought. The typical student, you know, at the average student, most students, even students of their gender and even their best friends, even their close friends. But the difference was smaller there, but even their close friends they thought were more supportive of excessive drinking than they were. So then we did a number of studies in which we looked at some of the consequences of that phenomenon. We looked at the extent to which it in fact promotes excessive drinking as people conform. to these norms that in fact don't have private support, we found evidence for that. And we found evidence for the alienating effects of believing erroneously that you are out of step with your fears. (upbeat music) Every year, like at a lot of universities, new freshmen would arrive at Princeton and come into contact with the norm of excessive drinking. And then they would quickly identify that norm as the prevailing norm and quickly assimilate, adopting it around others to ingratiate themselves into this new culture. But when Prentice and Miller surveyed those students by asking them not only how they felt about excessive drinking, but how they fought their fellow students felt, they discovered that most students' private attitudes did not match their public behavior. Most new students didn't like the norm, but they also thought that everyone else felt differently. So they went along with it begrudgingly. And the truth was, if everyone's public behavior had matched their private attitudes, then excessive drinking would have just died off. One of the most interesting aspects of their research is that there's a push pull antagonism between internalization and alienation. And the students really felt this over time. Even though their attitudes ran counter to the norm in the beginning as freshmen, those attitudes quickly moved in the direction of their public behaviors over time as they behaved in opposition to the way they felt inside. That is to say, conformity changed the way they felt. And as they say in psychology, they internalized the norm. They observed themselves doing things that ran counter to their attitudes and so to avoid cognitive dissonance, they changed their attitudes to support their behaviors. But as the years went by, possibly because of vacations and breaks and bad experiences, many people boomeranged and they returned back to their original attitudes. The result was a strong sense of alienation deep into their life, they are on campus. There's also a noticeable gender gap in these effects. Men were more likely to internalize the norm over time while women were more likely to feel alienated over time. Now, there's a lot of speculation as to why this would be true and we don't really know why. But one of the big speculations is that in male dominated social groups, there is simply more social pressure to drink. But the truth is, we don't know for sure. We just know that men were more likely to conform in this specific study. And there's another part of this study that's really interesting because in 1991, during the research, the school instituted a ban on beer kegs. The president announced this ban, the media covered it, and the public was immediately divided because the people on the fringes, the ones who really, really, really loved those crazy reunions, they got very upset. It became very vocal when the keg ban was announced. When students heard that the alumni were protesting and that the alumni wanted the current students to join, most of them privately did not want to participate. This is what we found in the research. Because privately, they supported that ban. But since the protests were so public, not joining them incurred a social cost. So the result was that the farther along you were in that trajectory of being in school, starting out trying to conform and then slowly returning back to your original attitude, but modified with some wisdom. The more alienated you felt in this instance, the more deviant you felt. People found that these protests made them feel like they would probably never attend one of those reunions after graduation. And this is one of those amazing psychological ironies. Thanks to pluralistic ignorance, they felt estranged from their peers and felt less connection to their institution. When in reality, they were part of a community, a majority that shared their feelings. Everyone had these same feelings. And if they just knew that, if they could have met in some way, if they could have spoken up, if someone had just spoken out for everyone, they probably would have felt the exact opposite. So how do you deal with such a strange and mind-twisting phenomenon? Well, the solution is actually kind of simple. It just requires effort. You have to ask everyone what they really think and feel. You have to survey people, and then you must broadcast what you discover to everyone in that group in some way. You have to make the private public. You have to make it safe for people to say what's really on their minds. Or you have to reveal to them that it's actually already safe to do that. So what you need is to somehow publicly let people know what other people feel. And there are a variety of ways to do that. One would be to conduct a survey and publish the data. So that was one of the factors that contributed, for example, to the end of prohibition was that surveys came out showing that in fact that privately people did not support prohibition nearly as much as people thought people supported prohibition. That's one way. You can do it. I mean, I've done it in classroom settings, for example, in some of the work that I've done looking at pluralistic ignorance with respect to excessive drinking on campus. That actually is such a robust phenomenon. People are so convinced that other people are more excited by more into excessive drinking than they are that you can do it in a group. You can say raise your hand if you think that everybody else is more accepting of this behavior than you. And 95% of people will raise their hands. And then, of course, they'll look at each other and laugh. So it's something that gets people-- it's something that outs people's true attitudes. It's some way of getting what is private to be public. Because then it enters the public sphere. And then it lives at the same level, if you will, as the norms do. I love the idea of it lives at the same level. A lot of this feels so strangely as if these are spells that we've cast and chantments that we live under or that there are entities that are beyond us. It feels so strange that this is collective thinking and collective behavior. And that at some level, it's just brains being brains. But it feels like it's this emergent phenomenon. It feels so creepy. I mean, is that your sense? You've studied this for a long time. How do you reconcile that feeling? Just walking out in public or going to walking the street and feeling this or watching an election or whatever. How does it resonate with you? For a long time, psychologists have recognized and thought and talked and written about the distinction between public selves and private selves. And I think individual, ordinary people recognize that distinction. They recognize having good manners about behaving well in public regardless of how you feel. I think as kids grow up, they learn-- I mean, babies don't have this. Babies are out there with their feelings. A lot of what becoming socialized in our society, in most societies, involves, is developing this public self that you present to the outside world that is distinct from the private self, your private thoughts and feelings. And that's what gives rise to the phenomenon. Now, many scientists like to bring up the parable of the Emperor's new clothes when talking about this, because this story by Hans Christian Anderson shows someone busting pluralistic ignorance by speaking up the story, if you don't recall. It goes like this, a vain Emperor hires two tailors who tell him that they have made him a suit of clothes so fine that it appears invisible to people who are unfit for their job or who are very dumb. The trick, of course, is that they haven't made any clothes at all. And so the Emperor's lackeys and subjects act as if his clothes are beautiful and amazing at a fear of appearing stupid or unfit, until finally a child who has no skin in the game is not invested anyway who is free to tell the truth, points out that the Emperor is walking around naked. At that point, everyone's size and relief and feels safe to say what they were thinking all along. And stories with similar plots to this one go back all the way to antiquity. So this idea has been with us for a long time. And we know books can do this. Standup comedians can do this. In fact, that's one of the great things that stand up comedy gives us. They say what's already on everyone's mind, but people may be too afraid to say it. Hot takes on the internet can do this. Social media can do this. Group therapy, television shows, movies, there are many ways to bust pluralistic ignorance. In fact, when it comes to college drinking, apprentices later work, had students meet once in a while to share their inner thoughts on drinking and whether they disagreed with the norm and compared to a control that didn't meet and do this. Those students drink significantly less. And that's been the lesson from her work. Information campaigns that tell people the consequences of excessive drinking are far less effective than campaigns that simply tell people that their peers feel the same way they feel. And that same approach can work in many other situations where the majority is unaware that it is, in fact, the majority. But there is an exception. In fact, there are two. But there's one that is a dark, terrible exception. And that's the one that led 700 people to kill 300 of their children and then themselves. And after the break, we will learn what that exception is, how prevalent it is out here among our everyday lives and what we can do about it. All that after this. And now we return to our program. My name is David McRainey and this is the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. In this episode, we are exploring pluralistic ignorance. What happens when almost everyone in a group privately disagrees with a norm or decision or an idea or a practice or a plan, but everyone also thinks they are alone in that disagreement. So they go along with what they think is the consensus which leads a group of people to act in a way that no one actually wants to act. And that can have dire consequences. But the spell can be broken if, as in the Emperor's new clothes, someone speaks up and reveals what everyone is thinking. If someone is willing to risk being shamed by the group by speaking their mind. But in some cases, this does not work. And that's what I want to explore next by taking a look at what happened when someone spoke up during the Jonestown Mass Suicide. Here's the short version of how Jonestown was created. Jim Jones became a student pastor in the Methodist Church in the 1950s, but he wanted to integrate African Americans into the church and he faced opposition to that. He was also passionate about Marxism and Communism at a time when that was very much against the grain of popular opinion. So he formed his own integrated church where he spoke a lot about Communism. This was the 1950s and people looking for a spiritual life but who were politically active and liked his message who wanted to fight racial discrimination. They were drawn to his very not mainstream message. But as the years passed, the church became more organized and more isolated. And he claimed to be able to heal people with his hands and to see the future and so on. And that aspect became more prevalent during the sermons. And fearing the government would interfere with their growing community, they armed themselves. They rented airplanes to track down people who tried to leave, that became less focused on religion and moral politics and much more on Jonest as a supernatural savior of some kind with special powers. He became convinced of multiple conspiracy theories and after he claimed to have visions of a nuclear apocalypse, he moved his congregation from Indiana to California where they grew from hundreds to thousands and shifted into a full-fledged cult. Whereas they would say "Commune". Jonest continued to preach that America was becoming fascist, that capitalism was the anti-Christ and that the group itself was in grave danger because of these views. And again, the apocalypse was coming and he could see it with his visions. So in 1974, the group acquired land in Guyana and built the People's Temple Agricultural Project in the middle of the jungle with the hopes of starting a tropical paradise utopia. Their own country, maybe, one day. All throughout this, over the years, people defected. They left the group because of abuse, and isolation, and the sort of things that happen in cults that make people want to leave, and some of them were able to get the attention of U.S. Congressperson Leo Ryan of California. On November 17, 1978, he flew to Guyana with a delegation and an NBC camera crew who accompanied some family members searching for their relatives. Together, they all visited Jonestown, or the People's Temple Agricultural Project, and while there, some of the members asked Congressperson Ryan to help them get out. Jones, who was keeping tabs on all of this through his most loyal followers, became very paranoid about what was going to happen. So when the Congressperson's entourage left to board their planes, Jones sent some of the members of Jonestown to escort him and the crew and the family members. And at the airstrip, they opened fire on them. Young three journalists, one defector, and Congressperson Ryan. See, Jim Jones thought that the CIA, or some part of the U.S. government, was out to get him and his group. He had thought this for a long time, and he often told this to his followers. He told them that if they were to be captured and brought in, their children would be tortured and killed. So for months, he and his lieutenants had arranged what they called "white nights, drills, trial runs," in which people were given four choices. Either leave and go to the Soviet Union, or fight off the imaginary soldiers and assassins who would be parachuting in to take them out, or run into the jungle and hide, or commit a simulated mass suicide. On two occasions, people voted to die. And then they all pretended to drink poison. There's a sign of loyalty to Jones and camaraderie to their fellow members. It's a sign of loyalty to the group and its leader. Meanwhile, Jones had actually acquired cyanide. He used a jeweler's license, which allowed him to purchase several pounds of it, because it sometimes used a clean gold. He and his most trusted inner circle tested it out on pigs. They found that it worked, and then they concocted a plan that distributed in case the enemy that Jones had imagined would actually arrive one day. So when a U.S. Congressperson visited Jones, investigating allegations of abuse, Jones felt like all his fears were coming true. So he sent his goons to kill them. Then realizing there was no coming back from that, he called for the commune to gather around him, grabbed a microphone, and asked them to join him in his suicide. He asked them to kill their children and to kill themselves, and they did. I think it's worth noting here that it's a terrifying truth that cults are a side effect of natural human tendencies. People don't really join cults so much as they fall into them. They were all susceptible in the right conditions to that kind of fall. And cult leaders usually don't set out to form cults. They just sort of happen. The cult forms around them, and then they take advantage of their power day by day and step by step. In fact, the very word cult is a topic of debate in the social sciences because once we began to understand the sociological and psychological forces behind them, it became clear that they shared many features with social groups we wouldn't consider cults. The best we can do right now is say something like cults are social movements that form around socially deviant beliefs. The cults typically form when the leader claims the serve of a higher authority and that they're demand. or their mission is really, you know, the demands or the mission of that higher authority. And when a group is aware that these beliefs that they all share aren't mainstream and their leader makes it clear that the group itself has in danger from the outside world because of those beliefs, the higher ranking members begin to control the flow of information in and out of the group. Members become isolated, the world becomes black and white, us versus them, and a stray from the group becomes an act of strain from the ideas and values that the group embodies and to embrace the evil that the group is fighting against. Because of all this, at some point, the leader's word becomes unquestable and to speak against it will bring severe sanctions, social sanctions. In other words, people become aware on some level that speaking out or leaving will have negative consequences, sometimes very severe consequences. Now in any group, once people are entrenched in group loyalty, they can become willing to die for that group for their fellow humans, which makes sense, evolutionarily speaking. We often honor people who do this, who die in wars, who die for their families, who die in the line of duty as a police officer or a firefighter. But what makes Jones Town such a frightening example of these group psychological forces is that the primal drives that could compel people to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their group can go awry, they can malfunction, they can lead to everyone sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the group, even though there will be no group afterward to benefit from that sacrifice. So you may be asking yourself, in this particular instance, why didn't anyone speak up? Why didn't anyone refuse to drink the poison? Why didn't someone stand up and appeal to the others to revolt against Jones? Well, it may surprise you to learn that someone did. And what happened after that person spoke up became the focus of a line of research by sociologist Rob Willer, who we heard from earlier and who we will hear from again after you hear some audio from that moment when someone said, you know what? Maybe not. Maybe we should all think about what we're about to do here. When someone defied Jim Jones. What's going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of those people on that plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn't plan it, but I know it's been happened. They're going to shoot that pilot and down comes that plane into the jungle. And we had better not have any of our children left when it's over because they'll parachute in here on us. And turning just as plain as I know how to tell you, I've never lied to you. I never have lied to you. I know that's what's going to happen. That's what it intends to do. And he will do it. He'll do it. Fortunately being still bewildered with many, many pressures on my brain seeing all these people behave so treasonous. It was just too much for me to put together, but I now know what he was telling me. And it'll happen if the plane gets in the air even. So my opinion is that we be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the portion like they used to take an ancient Greece and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It's a revolutionary act. We can't go back. It's such a tragic story and the more detail you read about it, I mean the more horrific and shocking it is. Children died. People died terribly. It's just terrible as you can possibly imagine. And generations of scholars have asked why did they do this? Why did people do this? It's one of the great examples of abnormal mass psychology. Why would nine or people get together and do this? Why didn't people stand up against Jones? You had everything to lose. And in fact, the prospect of the cult being liberated by the US government or some other outside force for a lot of people should have been a relief because conditions had turned out to be so bad in Guiana. Well, it turns out that somebody did stand up and we know a fair amount about this story because we have audio tapes of the gathering that night and the things Jim Jones said and the people said back to Jim Jones. And on that audio tape of the final, final, fateful night at Jonestown, we learned that a woman, Christine Miller stood up and confronted Jones and suggested, tried to very carefully suggest that they didn't have to do it. That they didn't have to commit mass suicide. They didn't have to drink the flavorate. That there was some hope that maybe Russia would come save them that they could at least reach out. That there had to be some other option. And what we learn, and you're listening to it and you know what's going to happen. And nonetheless, it's just chilling and dramatic and and you're curious, how's this going to go? Even though you know, it feels like the whole situation is sitting on the knife edge and it all depends on how people react to Christine Miller because there's not enough guards to keep 900 people in line. If everybody sides with her, it's going to end. The spell is going to be broken. But what happens is as soon as Jim Jones contradicts her and says, "No, this is the only way the whole crowd sides with him." And they all shout her down and she doesn't win and then everybody lines up and they drink the flavorate. And it's a tragic end that could have gone differently. It feels like it could have. But that wasn't how it worked. Anyone that has any dissenting opinion, please speak. Yes, Christine. Is it too late for Russia? It's probably too late for Russia. They killed. I started to kill. That's why it makes it too late for Russia. Otherwise, I said, "Russia, you bet you're alive." But it's too late. I can't control these people. They're out there. They've gone with their guns. And it's too late. And once we kill anybody, at least that's way out. I've always put my lock with you. If one of my people do something, it's me. Now they say, "I don't have to take the blame for this. I cannot live that way. I live for all and I'll die for all." As you just heard, Christine at first asks, "Can we just go to Russia?" And John says, "No, they've just killed a congressman, you know, implicating them in his crime." Then he appeals to the crowd. and says, "We're all in this together." And they cheer. But Christine pushes back. "I said, "Let's make an out-out-out-left Russia." That's what I say. I don't think nothing is impossible. -How is it going to air? -How are you going to air-left Russia? Well, I thought they said, if we got it in emergency, they gave you a code to let them know. No, they gave us a code that they'd let us know of an issue, not an upgrade an issue for them. They said, "If they saw the country coming down, they'd create and give us the code." They gave us the code. You can check on there and see if it's on the code. Check with Russia to the state that they've taken us in immediately. Otherwise, we die. I don't want to, as she say, to these people. But to me, death is not a fearful thing. It's living this treacherous. Again, Jones counters and the crowd supports them. They cheer. And this goes on for a while, back and forth. And then Christine tries another approach. I think that there were two few left for 200 people to give them their lives for those people that left. You know how many left? -20 on. That's a small 20 on. -20 on. -How do we hear? -20 on. But what's going to happen when they don't leave? I hope that they could leave, but what's going to happen when they don't leave? -You mean the people here? -Yeah, what's going to happen to us when they don't leave when they get on the plane and the plane goes down? -I don't think they'll go down. -You don't think they'll go down? -I think they'll go down. -I. I. At this point, the crowd becomes more angry at Christine. They grow more incensed and they begin to speak up against her. Well, I don't see it like that. I mean, I feel like that as long as it's life is hope. That's my faith. Well, some of everybody dies. Some place that hope runs out because everybody dies. -What's going on? -I'm thinking nobody yet didn't die. And I like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I'm trying to be in tormented the hell. That's what I'm trying to do. -I'm trying to do it. The crowd tells Christine they're not on their side and they're not convinced by our arguments. And with Jones prodding, she loses them. -I said I'm afraid to die. -I don't think you are. -But. I look at our babies and I think they deserve the live. -I agree. -You know? But also they deserve much more than they deserve peace. We all came here for peace. -And we've had it? -No. -I tried to give it to you. I've laid down my life practically. I've practically died every day to give you peace. And you're still not had any peace. You look better than I've seen you in a long while. But you're still not. I want to kind of be that I want to give you. The person to food continues to say, "Let your winner win when you're losing." (audience cheering) - When you, when we destroy ourselves, we're defeated. - It's over, sister, it's over. We made that day, we made a beautiful day, and let's make it a beautiful day. That's how I. (audience cheering) - We win when we go down. Tim's don't have no money else to hate. He has nobody else to hate. Then he'll destroy himself. I'm speaking here not as the administrator, speaking as a prophet today. I wouldn't have stepped in this deep and talk so serious if I didn't know what I was talking about. There's any way to call back. The immense amount of damage is going to be done. But I cannot separate myself from the pain of my people. You can't either Christian, if you stop and think about it. You can't separate yourself. We've walked too long together. - I know that, but I still think there's an individual. I have a right to do, and I'm listening. - What I think, what I feel, and I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. - Right. - And I think I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs. - Mm-hmm. - And who's? - I'm not criticizing, I'm not turning. What's that? (indistinct chatter) - Your mom is the reason why this is saying that's why. - That's why I think that's why I think that's why 20 people set the day with their lives. - I think I still have a right to my own opinion. - I'm not taking it from you. I'm not taking it from you. - Christine, you're only standing here because he was here in the first place. So I don't know what you're talking about, having an individual's life. Your life has been extended to the day that you're standing there because of him. (audience cheering) - I'm not talking her. Will you let her, let me talk. - You're talking. - Will you make us sit down and let me talk while I'm on the floor or let her talk? - Properly tell the leader what to do. You really is. (audience cheering) - I'm not letting her take you, John. Can you let them take you, John? (audience cheering) - See John, John. - What's that? - You mean you want to see John, the little ones are keeping. - I want to see. (audience cheering) - I hate Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete. - Are you kidding? Would you think he's saying it's more than that other children here? - John, John. - Is that what you're saying? - Do you think I'd put John's life above others? If I put John's life above others, I wouldn't be standing with his jaw. I'd spend John out and he could go out on the driveway tonight. - Because he's young, they are young. - I know, but he's no different to me than any of these children here. He's just one of my children. I don't prefer one above another. I don't prefer him above you, Jarrah. I can't do that. I can't separate myself from your actions or his actions. If you don't stop thing wrong, I stand with you. They want to come and get you. They'd have to take me. - Ready, ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we're ready. I'm pretty sure all of us have to do the brothers and the with me. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - I should say that John's town is like a Rorschach test for behavioral scientists. Depending on what it is that you study, you're gonna see some of those dynamics in the John's town example. So if you study charismatic leadership, you're gonna say this is all about Jim Jones as a charismatic leader. Or if you study the bystander non-intervention problem, you're gonna say, well, sure, nobody really wanted to die, but no one person felt they could stick their neck out. Or without that, that Christy Miller was not enough to give people enough cover to move in and say, okay, I'm gonna stick my neck out out of these 900 people. Or if you are a rational choice theorist, you're gonna say, well, there were arm guards there. And there's a threat that if you ran off or protested, you could get shot. They'd just shot five people earlier that day. So I should say that in seeing a social pattern that I've studied in this dynamic, I have many fellow travelers. But the factor that we highlight as I think a critical factor in that final night, that final fateful night is a phenomenon that we call false enforcement, which is when people not only conform to, but also enforce norms that they privately disagree with. And so when we see dozens of people shouting down Christine Miller and say, no, no, don't speak out on behalf of us. Like we wanna drink the flavor aid and follow this guy. We see a phenomenon of people enforcing a norm that they may be privately queasy about or concerned about, the norm here to participate in the revolutionary suicide. But they are so concerned about the apparent sincerity of their conformity, that they're willing to sanction those people, sanction somebody like Christine Miller who's fallen out of line in order to credibly signal that they themselves are loyal and true followers. - Christine Miller really has an astonishing person. And what she did was amazing and heroic and its tragic because she did die. And it's worth just taking a second, I think, to, I don't know, just acknowledge what she did. So let's just do that for one second. So yeah, the story of Christine Miller, for Rob Willer, it presented something worth exploring, something worth adding to the literature of pluralistic ignorance and the persistence of false norms and popular norms. So they devised an experiment to explore exactly what happened after she spoke up. - So this, so we were very interested in a dynamic that we call false enforcement, which is a tendency to not only conform to, but also enforce a norm that you privately disagree with. And this is a very kind of quizzical behavior. Like why would you do this? Why would you, it makes sense maybe to fall in line, you're trying to avoid being judged by other people, but why would you also judge others? And we were thinking that there are certain situations where the strength of social pressure is great enough to where conformity is all well and good, but you're still anxious. In fact, you're concerned that other people will find out that your conformity is insincere. And so how can you convince people that your conformity is sincere? Well, you could sanction other people for not falling in line. So, I'm nervous, maybe about looking dumb in my philosophy class. So I not only pretend to understand the reading, the heightager or who's surreled reading that I did over the weekend that I don't understand at all, but I maybe even criticize other people for not seeing the value of the text. This is an example I take from my own undergraduate days. Where I think this happened to me. Of course, who knows? That's, I believe I've experienced that. I hope I've never done that. Yeah. Well, here's another one that's kind of close to home that I think a lot of men can relate to. Is your nervous in some sort of all-male setting about being seen as unmasculine? And so you not only act macho in front of your male friends, but you might also make fun of someone for being insufficiently macho. And I don't think there's probably a super majority of men in our society whose hands are dirty on that one. Like you have filthy. Yeah. Or you're worried about being the victim of criticism for being insufficiently egalitarian or sensitive in your use of language. And you not only enforce those language standards. You not only follow those language standards as a result, but you might also enforce them on other people by criticizing someone for being insensitive to others. So somebody's pretty close to home. So the examples. And I think the-- if you imagine a world where there's false enforcement, which I think is our world, then it's not-- unpopular norms are not so fragile, right? Because what happens when the child calls the emperor naked isn't that the spell is broken and everybody says, oh, great. Now we can say that the emperor's naked, which we've wanted to do this whole time, instead what happens is people rush in to criticize the child, like they criticized Christine Miller. And it doesn't destroy the norm. It actually strengthens it. Because people now see an example of what happens when you do stand up. This is the most essential thing that your work shows is that I'm very familiar with the idea that these norms are fragile. It just takes someone speaking up. It just takes someone striking at the status quo. And people will-- it just takes one stand-up comedian to say, hey, maybe I feel this way. What do you think? And then everybody's like, oh, and then it just sort of cascades across the population. Somebody speaks truth. But your work is. and especially the study is demonstrating this idea that sometimes no, because it can go one more level higher. If you could take us through the study, I'll have a couple of follow up questions about that. - Yeah, so what we did in our first study of this dynamic was we did the study back at Cornell University in the mid-2000s. We recruited groups of six undergraduates at a time to show up for a wine tasting study. And we put them at separate cubicles and then they believed that they were interacting with one another in the study, but in fact, we were simulating the behavior of the other people to create the situation we were interested in studying. And so people were given samples of wines and then they were supposed to taste them and submit their ratings on the computer. We used non-alcoholic wines because we were not allowed to use alcoholic wines. We fought that fight and we lost. And so people submitted their ratings on their computer and they also saw ratings from the other people in the room. But these were simulated. And the way we set it up, we had the four people who came before them, we had people go in order and they rated one of these two particular wines as substantially better than the other one. Now, in fact, these two wines were identical. They were poured from the same bottle. There was no difference between them, but they're facing four people who are like, "Mmm, you know, this one wine is far better." than the other wine. And what we find is on average, people would go along with that dynamic and they would conform. Not everybody did, but on average people did. And they would say, "Yeah, a wine A is indeed better than wine B. I too understand wines." And we picked wines on purpose because we thought there'd be some sort of social anxiety around wine tasting of, you know, I don't really know how to do this, but I know that, you know, very refined people do. Then we arranged to have the sixth person again, simulate person, say, I think these two wines are exactly the same quality. And so you might think of this person as the child and the emperor's story. Now, at this point in the study, the experiment branches and we have half of the participants now take part in the study privately and anonymously giving their subsequent ratings in private so that they don't think anyone will know. And the other ones believe that everything they do after this will be known by everyone else in the room. And what we say next is that it's very important in wine tasting rituals to not only taste the wines, but to also evaluate the other wine tasteers, which is, you know, all of a sudden a very, you know, potentially anxiety-provoking situation. And we say, you, this is always the participant, are gonna go first. So you go first and then everybody else in the group comes after and now you face a dilemma. You have to decide, you know that you didn't really taste much of a difference between these wines. You didn't actually taste any difference though you may have convinced yourself you did, which is an interesting issue. But now you got four people who said there was a difference and one person who spoke the truth, what are you gonna do? And what we find is that it depends a lot on whether your decision, your ratings of these people is in public or in private. So among those people who had conformed to the norm in the first round and said, "Wine A is better than wine B." If they were in public, they tended to consistent with this say that the deviant, the child, if you will, in the emperor's story, was the worst wine taster in the room and that the four people that came before were the best wine tasters in the room. But if they were in private, if they submitted their ratings in private, those people who had just said that, you know, wine A was better than wine B would show the opposite pattern. They said that the deviant was actually the best wine taster in the room. And so if no one was looking, the child would break the spell, right? And you would say, "Oh, you know what? The child that called the emperor naked actually is the person who's seen this situation most soberly." But if everybody's watching, then you don't do that. You might fall in line and you might even criticize that person. - And this is how unpopular norms start to enforce themselves outside of us. No, there's no institution, there's no, there's not sort of a established system. It's performing, psychological mechanisms are just unfolding and as a result, people's false feelings and behaviors are being affected perhaps like permanently. - Yeah, well, I think that this is where experiments are really helpful because in the experiment, we can set up a very spare setting that allows us to study this very carefully. You know, out in the world, if you're studying, say, pluralistic ignorance and the enforcement of it in Soviet countries, for example. You know, Soviet dictatorships where the regime is privately become very unpopular, people don't realize it, but it's actually quite unstable and we're ready for a cascade of revolutions that will undo dictatorial, you know, Soviet style communism in a period of like four or five years. It's all very unstable, it's waiting for people to move forward, but people aren't moving forward and it's not just because they fear peer enforcement, 'cause they very credibly fear being sent to jail. You know, they're gonna be sent to prison, they could face terrible consequences. And so it's very difficult in that setting to say, well, how much of this is people being scared of judgments from their peers, how much of that, those judgments are real judgments, or how much is everybody staying in line and, you know, enforcing obedience to the dominant regime on one another because of their credible fear of, you know, sanctions from a dictator and their government. And so when we, you know, the ability to set up a very controlled setting and laboratory to study this is a valuable capacity that we have. - Oh yeah, absolutely. - So you're out some of those factors. - What creates an environment in which such false enforcement would become prevalent in the real world and then the back end of that is knowing what we know about it, what options do we have if we wanted to prevent, mitigate or break something like that? - Yeah, these are fascinating questions. So, you know, a couple observations that I've made from just looking anecdotally at the examples of pluralistic ignorance in the literature are that, you know, it can come about, pluralistic ignorance can come about when one, when there's some sort of bad sampling dynamic that's happening, either as a result of one behavior being more observable than its opposite, like we've discussed before, or where the mass media is for some reason, you know, wittingly or unwittingly distorting impressions of the actual frequency of false enforcement there, like what makes that one particular thing come to the fore? - Well, I think that false enforcement is most common where there's really high levels of social anxiety about conformity, to where conformity is not enough. You have to also sanction other people for not conforming sufficiently. There's a great quote from Arthur Miller, when he was talking about the crucible, and he's talking about the dynamic in the Salem witch trials. You know, why was it that people rushed to accuse other people of being witches, and he said, naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others, whom you had seen in the devil's company. And so, as person after person gets accused of being a witch, to try to survive, they would not only confess, which they were required to do, but then name other people. And also witches in order to fully absolve themselves and just to survive. And so that's a rather lethal example of the kinds of social pressure that we're thinking about, but you can find more familiar examples in the red scare of the 1950s, or the enforcement of masculinity norms amongst young men, or binge drinking on college campuses. I don't know about you, but I wasn't in a hurry to say to my friends, maybe we shouldn't drink so much. Do we really want to do this? I would be risking some sort of reputation loss. I would look really uncool in front of my friends. And I think I really would have. I don't think it would have just broken the spell. Absolutely. So, do we know if anything that seems, if we wanted to break something like this up, or do anything about this, do we have any options? Yeah, I think that if we're trying to avoid pluralistic ignorance around popular norms, what have you, trying to get accurate information is helpful. Sticking to your guns, just saying what you really think is critical, and that can be your contribution to not playing into the dynamic. But I think what this research on false enforcement shows is that it's also a deeply social phenomenon. People are falling in line, in part because of their fear of other people's judgment. So can you somehow help remove that fear of judgment from other people? That would be another way that you could help. So you could encourage other people to share their own personal views, even if they are not the majority view, and don't criticize them. When someone takes a truly tough position, even if you disagree with them, and even if you voice your disagreement to them to support that they did speak out, these are some of the techniques that have been shown to help with group think is to try to encourage other people to descend from the majority. And to also surface devil's advocate style arguments, you can cloak your descent. Maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but I wonder if this might be the case, or I wonder what this kind of person would say in this situation. And now you've given yourself a little bit of cover to say what might be the truth that everyone's afraid to say. In situations like Stonewall, they're like, we'll just get arrested. We'll just get beat up. I mean, that's just what's going to happen. Or there's the other thing to do, which is happen all throughout social movements is to maybe we should meet in private. and develop a safe space, literally, where we cannot be suffer punishment for expressing what we actually think. And then that can be uploaded into a movement. Well, it's interesting 'cause that sort of dynamic of a small cadre of true believers coming together in a dense subnetwork, a tightly connected group, where they can reaffirm one another's views and create a strong minority. That's a force that can both destroy an unpopular norm, but also create one in the first place, because that's a recipe for creating social majorities. So when we studied this in a computational model that we conducted, we found a few things were critical to growing the pattern of unpopular norms. We found you needed to have a hardcore of true believers who conform to and enforce the norm. You need that when people face with enough social pressure, they'll not only conform, but they'll also enforce on others. And then the third thing was that the network needed to not be fully connected. It needed to instead have these dense clusters where the norm could catch fire, could convert everyone in a small local group before diffusing out to other dense subnetworks and flipping them as well. And that's that same recipe is the thing that can take down a norm or build one in the first place. And every time I think about our finding, I'm always reminded of this famous quote from Margaret Mead, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) If you would like to learn more about Christine Miller, her involvement in Jones Town, her life leading up to it, and just about Jones Town itself, the People's Temple, and all of the things surrounding that phenomenon that group, there's a great website at San Diego State University, San Diego State University, has put this together, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at SDSU. You can find it at Jones Town.sdsu.edu. And there you can find tapes and transcripts of things that they recorded and did there. And you can find the tape that I played in this episode on the internet, lots of different places. And I recommend you don't actually listen to it unless you are deeply fascinated because it is a really terrible incident and something very strange to put into your brain. But it is out there if you wanna find it. That is it for this episode of The Your Not So Smart Podcast. If you would like to find Rob Willer out there, you can find Rob Willer's stuff at robwiller.org. R-O-B-B-W-I-L-L-E-R.org. If you'd like to find more of Deborah Prentice's work, you can find her at the Department of Psychology at Princeton, psych.printstin.edu. She's got a website there. It's at psych.printstin.edu/person/debrach. For previous episodes of This Podcast, go to uornotsosmart.com. You also find show notes for this episode and all the other episodes, transcripts for the episodes, and links to all sorts of things that we talk about. In these shows, over at uornotsosmart.com, you can also find in previous episodes its iTunes, the Twitter account for uornotsosmart.com. It's @NotsMarkBlog. I am @DavidMacRaney. We're also over at Facebook/UornotsoSmart. And if you'd like to support the show, you can find us on Patreon/UornotsoSmart over at Patreon. Pitching in at any amount will get you the show at free, but the higher amounts, you get t-shirts, and signed books, and posters. The opening music is clashed by Karev M. Palace. The interstitial music in this episode was mostly magwai, a little bit of incompetent, some Drew Gareway, and the 8-bit music came from Snubish, which you can find on iTunes. That's SNA-B-I-S-C-H. All right, new shows on the way. Thank you very much. This was a hard one to do. Listening to that Jim Jones tape over and over. Oh, so I look forward to giving you more stuff, more stuff soon. Thank you. See you then. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]