No Man is an Island
Book Review:
Elliot Aronson, "The Social Animal", Tenth Edition, Worth Publishers, 2008.
This book has been on my to-read list for so long that I don't remember where I first became acquainted with it -- but it was probably Sparring Mind's list of "must-read psychology books" (where it takes the number one position). Anyway, I thought it would be nice to contrast Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 with something more "mundane", like a book about everyday social interactions.
The Social Animal is, for many intents and purposes, a textbook on social psychology. Despite being a more "mundane" topic than existential risk from AI or the end of liberal humanism, social psychology is by no means trivial -- it is connected to many of the facets of humanity that make us, well, human. Hence the title of the book, which also refers to a quote by Aristotle:
"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god."The topics of the book include conformity, persuasion, social cognition, self-justification, aggression, prejudice, and liking. Clearly, anyone who wants to understand human behavior needs to understand these topics. As the author of the book, Elliot Aronson, notes in the introductory section titled "Why I Wrote This Book", sociopsychological research is relevant to society's problems because it uses the experimental method to shine a light on complex social phenomena. In doing so, it may even play a role in making the world a better place. Eliezer Yudkowsky considers social psychology a field "which impinges upon rationality", along with evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, probability theory and decision theory.
The Social Animal is structured into nine chapters, of which the first and the last are about social psychology in general. The book was written for students (and Aronson admits this), so naturally it takes the opportunity to explain the scientific method. In Chapter 1 we learn that social psychology is about "the influences that people have upon the beliefs, feelings, and behavior of others" (p. 6), and that we are all in some ways amateur social psychologists. What sets scientific social psychology apart is its focus on rigorous, impartial experimentation which lets it overcome pitfalls like hindsight bias and reach more precise conclusions. In Chapter 9, Aronson explains how the scientific process moves from observation to hypothesizing "lawful relationships" to the experimental testing of hypotheses. The advantage of experiments is that they allow the researcher to control for extraneous variables and isolate the effect of an independent variable (e.g. the severeness of initiation to a group) on a dependent variable (e.g. the degree of liking the group). By randomly assigning participants to different experimental conditions, it becomes unlikely for hidden variables to systematically affect the results. This should all be familiar if you have ever taken a social science course at university or if you have read my earlier review of Psychology Applied to Modern Life by Weiten, Dunn and Hammer.
Social psychology does, however, face additional challenges. Unlike experiments on particles and lab rats, social psychology involves humans in social situations -- this means that control is limited, especially as it needs to be balanced with the need to have participants take the experiment seriously and become absorbed in it. Furthermore, experimental settings do not always reflect everyday "real world" experiences. Finally, researchers often need to use deception to conceal the true purposes of the study, and this raises questions of ethics. According to Aronson, there is an ever-present ethical dilemma of balancing a respect for human dignity with the value of free scientific inquiry. One way to approach the dilemma is to do a cost-benefit analysis for each experiment, and always to debrief participants.
With that being said, what have been the discoveries of social psychology?
Conformity
It should be no surprise that people frequently conform to the group. This is often in the face of group pressure (real or imagined), such as when people change their opinions to fit the unanimous agreement of their peers. A classic experiment conducted by Solomon Asch found that about three-quarters of participants conformed at least once to the "obviously" incorrect judgments given by the experimenter's confederates. The reason for this is probably that people desire to live up to the expectations of others -- social exclusion is painful. Privately, they may still believe in their initial judgments (unless the group's behavior provides valuable information). Publicly, people are most likely to conform when the majority opinion is unanimous (i.e. fellow dissenters decrease the pressure to conform), when the individual has low self-esteem, when the culture is collectivist, and when the group consists of experts or people with high social status. People are less likely to conform when they have made a commitment to their initial judgment and when they are held accountable for making accurate decisions.Elliot Aronson further distinguishes between three responses to social influence: compliance (acting in accordance with reward or punishment), identification (desiring to be like an admired influencer), and internalization (adopting a belief as one's own in order to be right). For example, you may follow traffic laws either because of the risk of being penalized by police (who have power), or because your dad (whom you like) always follows traffic laws, or because you believe that traffic laws are good (since you have credible information that they prevent accidents). A particular form of compliance is obedience, as illustrated by Stanley Milgram's Yale experiments wherein the majority of participants continued to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to an accomplice at the command of the experimenter. Again, there are factors that can reduce obedience: when there are others who defy the authority figure, or when the authority figure is illegitimate, or when the authority figure is physically absent from the room, the percentage of fully obedient participants drops. Nevertheless, Aronson cautions us:
"We harbor a myth of our personal invulnerability to obedience pressures. When participants were asked to predict their own performance in the Milgram study, their values and self-conceptions caused 100 percent of them to predict that they would discontinue the shocks at or below the moderate level. But we have seen how the forces of the actual situation can override those values and self-conceptions." (p. 47)Yet another example of conformity is the bystander effect: when people are in a large group, they are less likely as individuals to help a victim in distress. We take our cue on how to behave from others, and in our society people tend to suppress strong emotions in public. Luckily, a feeling of mutuality or connection with the victim can reduce the diffusion of responsibility. Even if the victim is a stranger, people are more likely to help if they can do so effectively and at relatively little cost to themselves.
The experiments of Asch and Milgram are also discussed in chapter seven of Psychology Applied to Modern Life, and the topics of obedience, conformity, and the bystander effect are discussed in Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality, another book that I've reviewed on this blog. Thus, these studies have had quite a large impact.
Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion
The Internet, television, radio, newspapers and magazines are forms of mass media that are full of attempts at persuasion by companies, politicians, educators and entertainers. Through repeated exposure and through stirring up strong emotions, they can have a powerful influence on our attitudes and opinions. The sociologist David Phillips is known for studying emotional contagion: news stories about teen suicides or contaminated painkillers can cause widespread panic or even copycat behavior. But this kind of influence is usually not intentional; an example of more direct persuasion is the TV commercials of candidates running for election. To what extent are these appeals effective? As Aronson notes:"... the results indicate that the more educated the person, the greater the skepticism, and further, people who are skeptical believe their skepticism makes them immune to persuasion. This might lead us to conclude that the mere fact of knowing that a communicator is biased serves to protect us from being influenced by the message. This is not true." (p. 68)In reality, people buy brands that are heavily advertised and therefore more familiar, and familiarity is often linked to sales. Political candidates who spend more on commercials tend to get more votes. So, how does persuasion work? Richard Petty and John Cacioppo argue that we are persuaded either through a central route (i.e. thinking deeply and systematically about the argument) or through a peripheral route (i.e. responding to simple cues without much thought). We are more likely to use the central route when the issue is relevant or important to us, while we are more likely to use the peripheral route when we are distracted or tired. Again, The Social Animal has a lot of overlap with Psychology Applied to Modern Life, especially with regards to the two routes to persuasion and the factors affecting persuasive success, namely (a) source factors; (b) message factors; and (c) audience factors.
The source of communication matters in terms of credibility and attractiveness. The nature of the communication can determine its effectiveness -- for instance, fear-arousing appeals combined with specific instructions can influence behavior. A single vivid personal example can be more effective than statistical data. If you are debating an opponent in front of an audience, you'll do better thanks to the primacy effect when you speak first, if your speeches are back-to-back and the audience must make up its mind only after a prolonged period. However, you'll do better thanks to the recency effect when you speak last, if there is a break between the two speeches and the audience must vote right after the second speech. People are more likely to change their opinions when there is a moderate (not small nor large) discrepancy between their initial views and the message... unless the communicator has high credibility, in which case a large discrepancy produces the greatest results. Finally, in terms of audience characteristics, people with low self-esteem are more easily persuaded, as are people who are happy, relaxed and well-fed prior to the persuasive attempt. Forewarning the audience that they are about to face a persuasive attempt decreases the effectiveness of the message.
One interesting approach to helping people resist persuasion is the inoculation effect. This refers to the tendency of people to become "immunized" against a strong argument after first being exposed to a milder version of it that is easy to refute. Inoculation can be effective against cultural truisms (e.g. "if people are willing to work hard they can succeed") or peer pressure (e.g. that it is "cool" to smoke). The effect probably occurs because people are motivated to defend their beliefs and gain practice doing so. For example, by challenging our belief in democracy, we are forced to examine why we hold the belief -- which can help us resist simplistic antidemocratic propaganda.
On the other hand, an inoculation effect can be mitigated by presenting the message in a way that masks the fact that attempted influence is taking place. Thus, broadcasters are able to "fly beneath the radar of our defenses" (p. 109). Aronson stresses the importance of being able to recognize and understand persuasion tactics and to question their abuse.
This chapter of The Social Animal does have some connections to Maria Konnikova's book The Confidence Game. For instance, Konnikova also discusses the mere exposure effect, source attractiveness, emotional appeals, and the primacy effect... but then in the context of con-artistry and duplicity. That book is worth reading as an illustration of the dark side of persuasion.
Social Cognition
How do people construe and misconstrue social events? Social cognition is about how we make sense of our social world. We try to explain others' behavior by making attributions based on impressions and information, such as the consistency of a person's action, consensus, and distinctiveness. However, we often lack access to accurate information or sufficient mental processing resources. Thus, we use cognitive shortcuts that reduce our cognitive load -- in other words, we are cognitive misers. This leads to bias, prejudice and stereotypes, which can fuel acts of cruelty.One of the factors that affects how we judge people (including ourselves) is the social context. Due to the contrast effect, an object or person is more likely to be judged as good, beautiful, tall etc. when juxtaposed with a relatively worse, uglier, shorter etc. reference point, and vice versa. Due to priming, a prominent feature of the situation can color our interpretations in a subtle way. Due to framing, we can reverse a decision in order to avoid a perceived loss, even when the outcome is in fact the same. Due to the primacy effect, it is true that first impressions matter. Finally, the dilution effect means that irrelevant, neutral or nondiagnostic information can weaken a judgment by diluting the impact of relevant information.
We also use numerous judgmental heuristics. Some examples of these are the representative heuristic (inferring that an object has a feature because a similar object has it), the availability heuristic (making a judgment based on the ease of bringing specific examples to mind), and the attitude heuristic (categorizing objects based on our attitudes). The attitude heuristic contributes to the halo effect, which is when our general impression of a person affects our future expectations about them. It also contributes to a false perception of consensus, since we tend to overestimate the percentage of people who agree with us or like what we like. These kinds of heuristics are most likely to be used when we are short on time, when we are overloaded by information, when the issue at stake is unimportant, and when we lack useful information. These conditions are often present in persuasive landscapes such as supermarkets.
How we categorize persons and events also has major consequences. For example, categorization guides our expectations in the form of stereotypes. It also creates illusory correlation, i.e. the perception of a relationship when there is none (for example, believing that lesbians are more likely to contract HIV). By categorizing the world into "us" versus "them", we fall prey to the homogeneity effect (viewing the members of outgroups as being all alike) and ingroup favoritism. Interestingly, ingroup favoritism happens even when strangers are divided into groups based on trivial, inconsequential and meaningless criteria, such as the label "W" or "X".
Could there be further errors in social cognition? Oh yes. We are bad at making predictions about how we will react to future events, and when we remember the past we "reconstruct" it in a biased way. Autobiographical memories are organized in terms of self-schemas; we distort our memories to fit the general picture we have of ourselves. Unfortunately, the fallibility of memory also means that it is possible for therapists to inadvertently guide clients into "recovering" false childhood memories (e.g. of abuse). Of course there are further cognitive biases too: there is the tendency to seek confirmation of our initial beliefs (confirmation bias), the hindsight bias, the tendency to attribute the cause of someone's behavior to a corresponding character trait (correspondent inference), the tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors relative to situational influences (the fundamental attribution error), the tendency to attribute one's own actions to situational factors while attributing the actions of others to personality dispositions (actor-observer bias), egocentric thought (including the illusion of control), and the tendency to make dispositional attributions for our successes and situational attributions for our failures (self-serving bias).
Many of these biases are related to cognitive conservatism. Aronson notes:
"The failure to update our conception of the world in the face of new and discrepant information can result in a mistaken picture of reality. The consequences are not just mental but can show their face in social problems that we call racism, sexism, prejudice, and just plain stupid thinking." (p. 159)Aronson gives four pieces of advice: (i) be wary when people try to define and label a person or event; (ii) try to see a person or event in a number of different ways; (iii) treat individuals as unique; and (iv) consider the possibility that your impression might be mistaken.
Self-Justification
We often end up with a distorted picture of the world due to our need to justify ourselves and our behavior. We want to see ourselves as good, sensible, reasonable, and logical people. One of the central theories related to self-justification is Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance: it predicts that whenever a person simultaneously holds two inconsistent ideas, attitudes, beliefs or opinions, that person will experience an unpleasant state of psychological tension and will be motivated to reduce it. For example, a smoker may experience dissonance between the two cognitions "I smoke cigarettes" and "cigarette smoking produces cancer". There are a number of different ways the smoker can reduce the dissonance:- Give up smoking
- Convince themselves that the evidence of the link is inconclusive
- Start believing that filter-tipped cigarettes trap carcinogenic materials
- Place more positive value on smoking, like emphasizing enjoyment and relaxation
- Use rationalizations like "there are many hazards in life and both smokers and nonsmokers get cancer"
- Minimize the extent of their habit by perceiving themselves as "moderates"
Cognitive dissonance can arise after making a major decision such as buying a new car. A cognition that your car has deficiencies and other cars have positive aspects is dissonant with the cognition that you chose that alternative. Thus, you are likely to seek out positive information about the car you bought and avoid negative information. But dissonance reduction can have even more dangerous consequences:
"American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were dying every week, and hundreds of billions of dollars were being drained from the U.S. treasury. How did President Bush and his staff reduce dissonance? By adding new cognitions to justify the war. Suddenly, we learned that the U.S. mission was to liberate the nation from a cruel dictator and give the Iraqi people the blessings of democratic institutions." (p. 199)To avoid the escalation of commitment, leaders should bring in skilled advisors from outside their inner circle, since these dissenters are presumably less caught up in the need to reduce dissonance.
Interestingly, self-justification can cause people who resist the temptation to commit an immoral act to become even more harshly opposed to the act, while indulging in the act can lead to more lenient attitudes. Therefore, the "most zealous opponents of a given position are not those who have always been distant from that position" and people "who almost decide to live in glass houses are frequently the ones who are most prone to throw stones" (p. 206). Aronson suggests that perhaps it is possible to get someone to soften their moral attitude towards a deed by tempting them into performing it.
Similarly, if people cannot find an external/situational justification for their own behavior, they will likely turn to internal justification by changing their attitudes to be more in line with their actions. Financial incentives, protecting others' feelings, and drunkenness are examples of external justifications for telling a lie. In the absence of such justification, we start to believe our own lies. This phenomenon is called "saying is believing", and it may explain why counter-attitudinal advocacy can help change attitudes. Likewise, giving extensive rewards to students may not be a great way to get them to enjoy mathematics -- by giving "inadequate" rewards, teachers and parents are more likely to foster long-term enjoyment and hence performance. Praise is beneficial in moderation, and is more effective if it focuses on effort rather than talent. To extend this concept even further, psychologists maintain that severe threats of punishment are less effective at deterring behavior than are mild threats.
The fascinating implications of dissonance theory do not end there. When we put in more effort towards a goal, we tend to find it more attractive (e.g. liking a fraternity after going through a severe initiation). When we harm other people, we maintain our positive self-image by maximizing the culpability of the victim (or by dehumanizing them in the case of war). When we live in an area highly vulnerable to earthquakes, we are less likely to take steps to prepare for one. Sometimes, we may even experience less hunger, thirst or pain as a result of dissonance reduction when we commit ourselves to situations in which we will be deprived of food or water or in which we will be electrically shocked. Therefore, dissonance theory can be quite powerful and has numerous applications, including helping people lose weight, use condoms, conserve water, etc.
Human Aggression
The chapter on aggression opens with a poignant anecdote about Aronson's son showing tears of grief upon learning what napalm is. Aronson's point here is that humans, especially adults, can grow accustomed to brutality. As he writes, "What kind of species are we if the most important events in the brief history of humankind are situations in which people kill one another en masse?" (p. 254). But is aggression part of human nature?Aggression can be defined as "intentional behavior aimed at causing either physical or psychological pain" (p. 254). It can be either hostile or instrumental. Experiments on animals show that aggressive behavior doesn't need to be learned (i.e. that it is instinctive), but also that early experience can inhibit these instincts. Even in humans, we can observe how aggressive behavior changes in accordance with social conditions; for example, in the southern U.S. a culture of honor makes men more prone to using violence to protect their property compared to northern males. We have evolved aggression perhaps because it can be useful -- it helps establish "who is boss". However, it is also true that nonaggressive and noncompetitive behavior can provide survival value, especially in today's world. Therefore, it is probably worth trying to become gentler and more tolerant.
Aronson proceeds to debunk the idea that releasing one's aggressive energy in an act of catharsis is a necessary component of therapy. In fact, the evidence shows that aggressive behavior (like hitting a punching bag) does not decrease anger but increases it. Furthermore, because our brains feel our own pain more than the pain of others, it is easy to retaliate disproportionately by engaging in overkill; this in turn leads to dissonance, which leads to further derogation of the other and an escalation of violence. Aronson thus concludes that violence itself is a major cause of violence.
But there are other causes of aggression too. Stimulation of the amygdala (an area in the brain) triggers the "fight or flight" response. The male sex hormone testosterone is linked to physical aggression (which is why men are more likely to commit violent crimes). Alcohol tends to lower people's inhibitions, including for violent retaliation. Pain and discomfort (including hot weather!) are known to cause aggression. Likewise, frustration (especially when a goal is close and gets unjustifiably blocked) can also prompt aggression. The relationship between thwarted expectations and aggression has interesting implications for class and/or racial tensions, as Aronson suggests:
"Revolutions usually are not started by people whose faces are in the mud. They are most frequently started by people who have recently lifted their faces out of the mud, looked around, and noticed that other people are doing better than they are and that the system is treating them unfairly." (p. 273)Social rejection, exclusion, taunting and humiliation contribute to aggression, and this is potentially a factor responsible for mass shootings at U.S. high schools. Another factor influencing aggression is deindividuation, i.e. a state of anonymity and lowered self-awareness produced by being part of a crowd or mob; this likely plays a role in riots, gang rapes, lynchings and vigilante justice. (Incidentally, Stuart Sutherland also links this to the conformity effects that crowds have.) The process of social learning can influence aggressive behavior through portrayals of violence in mass media like TV and video games -- and this can also explain the link between violent pornography and rape of women. Although controversial, Aronson claims that "the overwhelming thrust of the experimental evidence demonstrates that watching violence does indeed increase the frequency of aggressive behavior in children" (p. 280). This happens because media can weaken our learned inhibitions, facilitate imitation, prime aggressive responses to be more available, and desensitize us to the horrors of violence.
If we want to reduce violence, we need neither logical arguments nor severe punishments, but to help our children internalize a set of nonaggressive values, for instance through mild threats, reducing exposure to aggressive models, rewarding constructive behavior patterns, providing nonaggressive models, and teaching empathy toward others.
Prejudice
Elliot Aronson defines prejudice as "a hostile or negative attitude toward a distinguishable group on the basis of generalizations derived from faulty or incomplete information" (p. 303). In American society today there are still instances of prejudice against blacks, women, homosexuals, Jews, and Muslims. This includes not just overt discrimination, but also more indirect, subtle forms of prejudice. For example, when black and white college graduates are given identical resumes to apply for jobs, employers are more likely to call back the white applicants. Interviewers are more likely to act uncomfortably (e.g. sitting farther away, making speech errors, ending the interview sooner) when facing black applicants. Many men (and women) hold the belief that women need protection because they are warmer and weaker than men -- Peter Glick and Susan Fiske call this "benevolent sexism".We are more likely to express our prejudices when we are tired, stressed, distracted, drunk, or simply when unconscious biases leak out. It takes mental energy to suppress prejudiced impulses in order to maintain a positive image; yet this also means that we are more likely to express prejudices when we perceive a valid justification, for example in a selective reading of the Bible. The driving force behind prejudice is stereotyping, a tendency we evolved because our ancestors found it adaptive to quickly and automatically categorize people. Of course, stereotyping has the downside of neglecting individual differences (whether positive or negative). And when we act on these distorted perceptions, the results can be deadly (e.g. in cases of police fatally shooting innocent black men) or merely unfair (e.g. interpreting a shove as violent when done by a black man but playful when done by a white man). Prejudice can also cause us to make negative attributions, which in turn feed into negative feelings which reinforce the prejudice in a spiral. It can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby our expectations of others cause us to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
An example of a self-fulfilling prophecy is stereotype threat: this is when negative stereotypes about a group cause members of that group to feel anxiety and apprehension about confirming the stereotypes, thereby interfering with their performance. At the same time, members of the majority who are not targets of prejudice may find it hard to explain inequitable outcomes if they believe that the world is a just place; hence they are prone to blaming the victims for their treatment. Interestingly, it seems that victim blaming is related to the hindsight bias.
But where does prejudice come from? Aronson identifies five basic causes of prejudice: economic or political competition; displaced aggression (i.e. lashing out against a scapegoat); maintenance of status or self-image; dispositional prejudice (e.g. having an authoritarian personality); and conformity to social norms. Some of these involve dissonance, as Aronson notes:
"If we can convince ourselves that a group is unworthy, subhuman, stupid, or immoral, it helps us to keep from feeling immoral if we enslave members of that group, deprive them of a decent education, or aggress against them. We can then continue to go to church and to feel like good Christians because it isn't a decent fellow human we've hurt." (p. 332)Is there a way to reduce prejudice? Yes -- but it's not as simple as doing information campaigns. Making direct contact under conditions of equal status, for example mixing black and white families in a public housing project, can help. When people believe that contact with other groups is inevitable, they also show more favorable attitudes toward these groups (because it is a way of reducing dissonance). However, in the real world there is often economic conflict, which can feed further hostility. Another possible solution is to set up a situation wherein two groups are mutually interdependent, as Muzafer Sherif did in his famous experiment involving young boys at summer camp. Aronson and his colleagues came up with the "jigsaw technique", which is a way to teach cooperation in the classroom by making it necessary for students to listen to each other (and share their knowledge with each other) in order to gain enough knowledge to pass a test. This method improves race relations by building empathy.
Liking, Loving, and Interpersonal Sensitivity
In contrast to much of the preceding content of the book, Chapter 8 deals mainly with kind, helpful, thoughtful, and affectionate behavior. A natural question to ask is: how can I get people to like me? Right off the bat, Aronson cites Dale Carnegie's best-selling book (which I reviewed a while ago) and calls its title "chillingly manipulative". Nonetheless, Carnegie's tips -- namely to be pleasant, agreeable, and cooperative, to show a liking for others, and to praise them -- do indeed work (according to laboratory experiments), albeit in general terms and at the early stages. Lavish praise is not always effective, however. For example, constructive criticism can lead to rewarding results, meanwhile unwarranted praise may be seen as having ulterior motives. We like people who do us favors, but not when the favors come with strings attached. Interestingly, due to the justification of effort, you can even get someone to like you by getting them to do you a favor!When it comes to attractive personal characteristics, two important ones are competence and beauty. The relationship between competence and liking is not always straightforward; someone who is so brilliant that they make us look bad by comparison is not the most likable -- they would be more attractive if they showed evidence of human fallibility. This is known as the pratfall effect. (However, even "perfect" people may be preferred over mediocre people.) Physical attractiveness is a very strong predictor of liking, and physically attractive people are seen as having more desirable personality traits and are even blamed less for misbehavior. Good looks are correlated with higher salaries. Couples tend to be more successful when they match each other in terms of rated physical attractiveness.
Another factor influencing attraction is the similarity between two people. We tend to like those who share our attitudes and opinions. We also tend to like those who like us. In many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe that somebody likes us, we are likely to smile more and be warmer and more open when we encounter them, thereby causing the other to behave similarly. But because we also fear rejection, we are more likely to like someone who likes us (including unattractive people) if we have low self-esteem or feel insecure and "needy".
Aronson introduces his own theory of interpersonal attraction called the gain-loss theory, which predicts that a gain in positive evaluations from somebody will have more impact than constantly positive feedback, and likewise that a loss in rewarding behavior from another person will have greater impact than constant negative behavior. Through a clever experiment, he found that people indeed like others more when those others begin by disliking them and then gradually like them more, than if the others always liked them. For this effect to hold, there must be a genuine change of heart, and it must not be too abrupt (which would seem suspicious). Nevertheless, gain-loss theory has interesting implications for close relationships (e.g. intimate love). Similar to friendship, we tend to fall in love with people who are geographically nearby and similar to us in terms of looks, values and personalities. Sternberg's triangle of love (also mentioned in Weiten, Dunn and Hammer) says that love can have three components: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Relationships often begin with passionate love, then develop into romantic love, and finally companionate love. The blending of all three components is called "consummate love", but is rarely achieved because passion often fades over time. According to gain-loss theory, the long-term support of a partner may not be interpreted as a "gain", whereas there is a lot of potential for them to hurt us. As Aronson puts it:
"These results and speculations suggest a rather bleak picture of the human condition; we seem to be forever seeking favor in the eyes of strangers while, at the same time, we are being hurt by our most intimate friends and lovers." (p. 393)However, the good news is that when people fear the loss of a friend, they are more likely to act in ways that would preserve the relationship. Therefore, honesty and authenticity in a relationship (e.g. expressing one's annoyances) can help guard against reaching a dull yet fragile plateau. To improve marital satisfaction, couples can do well with direct methods of conflict resolution, and honest self-disclosure. Instead of trying to make a good impression, authentic communication entails an open discussion of feelings and concerns without accusing, blaming or ridiculing the other person -- Aronson calls this straight talk. It works because it lets us reveal our vulnerabilities to a loving friend while enabling them to listen nondefensively. But straight talk works best when we are also sensitive to our own feelings and the vulnerability of others.
Effective communication is not only open, but also tries to avoid hurting people. It is better to express emotions rather than judgments; for instance "I feel envious of Harry" instead of "Harry is a phony". This promotes mutual understanding in a way that ego-protecting disdain does not. Likewise, making situational attributions is preferable to dispositional attributions, because people resent being told what kind of person they are. If we follow this advice, Aronson hopes, we are a step closer to consummate love.
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After summarizing these chapters, it is worth returning to Chapter 1 to understand "Aronson's first law" in context: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. Before classifying someone as psychotic, we should try to understand the nature of the situation and the sociopsychological processes at play. It can be tempting to view ourselves as immune to intense social pressures, but as Zimbardo's "prison" experiment at Stanford showed, normal and stable people (in this case divided into the roles of prisoners and guards) can be moved to behave in frightening and pathological ways.
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So, is The Social Animal worth reading? In my opinion, yes. Gregory Ciotti (from Sparring Mind) is right when he writes that it is a great general and in-depth overview of social psychology; however, I wouldn't be in the position to say whether it is the "greatest". I gave The Social Animal a rating of 4/5 stars on Goodreads instead of a full score. There are a couple of reasons: firstly, the style of writing, whilst clear, is not always the most engaging -- by which I mean that it does not entice the reader to read further, especially in the middle of chapters where Aronson spends a lot of words on the details of particular experiments: for example what the hypotheses were, how the experiments were carried out, whether the findings were replicated, and what the limitations are. These details may very well be relevant for students of psychology, but for the lay public less so (except for perhaps the most famous experiments, like the ones of Milgram and Zimbardo). Generally, I am most impressed by books that are able to simultaneously cater to an academic and popular audience. Secondly, beyond the text itself, The Social Animal lacks supportive material such as figures or images, tables, and summary sections. This adds to the "dry" feeling. There are actually a number of Saul Steinberg drawings in the book, each one symbolizing the theme of the next chapter. Here is an example from right before Chapter 8:
- Conformity is decreased when people are oriented toward being as accurate as possible and have to explain their nonconformity to the group
- There are certain conditions (e.g. time intervals) that influence whether the primacy effect or recency effect will dominate
- Cognitive dissonance can cause us to misremember the past
- Severe threats can be less effective at deterrence than mild threats (this runs counter to the idea that more incentives = more results)
- People are more likely to be aggressive in hot weather
- We prefer it (in the sense that it is more rewarding) when others initially dislike us and then gradually come to like us, over when others have always liked us
Elliot Aronson has co-authored a book with one of his students, Carol Tavris, called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), which is also on my to-read list. One day I hope to summarize it here too.
Social psychology is highly relevant to the next book I'm reading, so stay tuned. (Hint: Our old friend Yuval N. Harari returns.)
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