Invisible Influence (23 page)

V
. In other situations, color may be identity relevant, while other dimensions provide differentiation. Goths and punks often wear all black, but one goth might wear a black trench coat while another wears a black T-shirt. Similarly, if the color peach is in vogue, people who want to seem fashionable may all wear peach but buy the color from different brands. The particular attributes that people conform and differentiate on will depend on which attributes communicate identity and which ones don't.

VI
. Such visual cues not only make novel technology feel more familiar, they also shape the reference category used to evaluate the device. Apple's Newton was an early predecessor to today's smartphone. It was designed and viewed as a computer, and ultimately evaluated as an underperforming one. The PalmPilot was introduced only a few years later, but because it fit in a pocket and resembled a daily agenda book, that, instead of a computer, became the standard of comparison. And seen as an improvement over the standard agenda book, the PalmPilot became quite successful.

Kara sat quietly in the dark waiting for the race to begin. It would be a sprint. Nothing complicated, just a straight track. No curves to stumble around, no turns to navigate. Just one long stretch lay out in front of her. It was a distance she had run many times.

Sometimes she ran against others, but today she was running alone. Just her and the clock, slowly ticking off the seconds that made up her time.

She could hear the steady pounding of the fans in the grandstands. Her peers milling around, ready for the start. They had already seen five racers go by, and Kara would be the sixth. All this buildup for less than a minute of action.

When the light went off, Kara jumped out of the gate. She started slow but picked up speed. Sprinting down the track, trying to focus on the end and ignore the eyes fixed on her. She felt scared, frightened even, but she kept churning, one foot in front of the other. Finally, after a tense forty-two seconds, she reached the finish line, gasping for air. It was her best time so far.

As the black door shut behind her, Kara retreated to a corner. She stretched each of her six legs and groomed her antennae.

Kara was a cockroach.

In the late 1800s researcher Norman Triplett published a study that marked the birth of a field we now know as social psychology.
¹
For his master's thesis at Indiana University, Triplett examined race data from over two thousand cyclists. Cyclists raced one of three ways. Sometimes they raced alone, simply trying to score the best time. Sometimes they raced head-to-head in direct competition with other cyclists. And sometimes they raced against the clock, but with another cyclist racing with them to set the pace.

When he compared the times turned in by different racers, Triplett noticed that cyclists raced faster when they biked at the same time. Whether competing or not, people who biked with others cycled twenty to thirty seconds faster per mile. Racing together seemed to improve performance.
²

To probe this idea further, Triplett designed an experiment. He took a group of children and had them play a game that involved turning a fishing reel as quickly as possible. A flag was attached to the fishing line, and Triplett timed how quickly it took the kids to wind the reel, either working alone, or working side by side with another child who was playing the same game.

The results were similar to what he'd observed among cyclists: kids reeled faster when another child was reeling next to them.

Many subsequent studies have found the same pattern. The mere presence of others changes performance. People tend to do better when others are around.

In one experiment,
³
college students were shown a word and
given a minute to write down as many related words as they could think of. In another, students were given a passage to read and asked to write as many arguments as possible disproving the line of thinking in the reading. In both cases, people who did the tasks in groups (working individually, but in the presence of others) performed better. They generated more word associations and more arguments against the passage.

This phenomenon has been described as social facilitation, where the presence of others leads people to perform faster and better than they would otherwise. Even if people aren't collaborating, or competing, the mere fact that others are present changes behavior.

And it's not just people that show social facilitation. Animals behave the same way.
⁴
Rats drink faster and explore more when other rats are around. Monkeys work harder on a simple task when other monkeys are present, and dogs run faster in pairs than alone. Ants dig three times as much sand when working alongside other ants, even if they aren't cooperating. Social facilitation even impacts how much animals eat. The presence of a peer eating leads chickens to keep eating, even if they are already full.

Across a host of situations, people (and animals) seem to perform better when others are present.
^I

Interestingly though, other studies have found the opposite. That people do
worse
when others are present.
⁵

In one study, college students were given the difficult task of remembering a list of nonsense syllables. Those who learned the list in front of an audience took longer to learn and made more errors. In another, people were asked to trace a maze while blindfolded. Participants took longer when spectators were present. And people taking their driving test were less likely to pass if others, besides the instructor, were present in the car.

The presence of others has also been found to decrease performance in animals.
⁶
When paired together, greenfinches had more difficulty discriminating between palatable and unpalatable food sources. Parakeets took longer to learn a maze, and made more errors, when trained in pairs.

So which is it? Does having others around facilitate performance or inhibit it?

This question vexed Stanford professor Bob Zajonc. Zajonc's path to academia was far from usual.
⁷
An only child born in Poland in the 1920s, Zajonc's family fled to Warsaw in 1939 to avoid the Nazis. Two weeks after they arrived, however, the relative's apartment they were staying in was hit in an air raid, and Zajonc's parents were killed.

Zajonc barely survived with broken legs, and the sixteen-year-old's hospital stay was cut short when the Nazis arrested him and sent him to a German labor camp. Zajonc managed to escape with two other prisoners by walking over 200 miles into France. After crossing the border, the Germans captured them and sent them to a French jail. Eventually, Zajonc escaped again, staging a breakout and joining the French Resistance. He and a fellow
prisoner walked for almost 550 miles, stealing food and clothes along the way, before a generous fisherman found them and brought them to Ireland.

From there, Zajonc made his way to England. Having learned English, French, and German through his journeys, he became a translator for the U.S. Army. When the war ended, he worked briefly for the United Nations before emigrating to the United States. Zajonc applied to be an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and was eventually accepted on a probationary basis. He worked through a bachelor's and a master's, and in 1955 he received his PhD from Michigan in social psychology.

As a scientist, Zajonc had a knack for dusting off important questions that had been overlooked for decades and cleverly reinventing them with strokes of insight. He had a keen sense of human behavior and was always looking for simple relationships underlying complex patterns. It was with this perspective that he studied social facilitation.

The findings seemed to contradict each other. On the one hand, numerous studies had shown that the mere presence of others improved performance. That an audience, or others doing the same task, made people perform faster or do more, even in the absence of competition. On the other hand, a similarly compelling set of results showed the opposite. That the presence of others could impair learning and performance.

Zajonc had a theory about what explained the differing outcomes. It was as elegant as it was simple.

He just needed a way to test it. And that's where Kara came in.

Picture in your mind an Olympic 400-meter track race. A large, burgundy-red track surrounded by stands. A stadium,
filled to the brim with screaming fans, each cheering on their countrymen to victory. And competitors, lined up, awaiting the starting gun.

Now imagine that same picture, but replace all the people with . . . cockroaches. Instead of muscular sprinters cloaked in spandex, the competitors are . . . cockroaches. And instead of camera-toting, flag-waving, vuvuzela-blaring supporters, the fans are . . . well, cockroaches.

Ugh.

People tend to react to cockroaches with disgust. Scuttling pests that feed on rotting food and thrive in the darkness.

But cockroaches are actually some of the cleanest and hardiest insects. They can survive without air for forty-five minutes and recover from being submerged in water for a half hour. They can endure decapitation, at least temporarily, and a cockroach's severed head can subsist for several hours, or even longer when refrigerated and given food (though it's not clear why anyone would want to do that.)

Zajonc thought cockroaches would be the perfect subjects to test social facilitation.

So he built a cockroach stadium. A large Plexiglas cube where he could time how quickly cockroaches ran through a set course. On one side of the cube was a small, dark starting box where the cockroach waited for the race to start, separated from the track by a thin metal door. On another side of the cube was the finish line, another small, dark box separated from the track by a similar metal door.

Cockroaches hate light. So, rather than using a starting gun to drive them to action, Zajonc used a floodlight. He would open the doors covering the entrance and exit to the track and flick on a bright light in the starting box. The cockroach would scuttle
onto the track, looking for a dark place to hide. Light filled the entire track, so the only escape was the finishing box. When the roach finally scampered in, Zajonc would shut the door and return the roach to darkness.

Zajonc timed how long it took the roach to run from one box to another. From when he opened the door on one end to when he closed it on the other.

To test how the presence of others influenced performance, Zajonc also built cockroach stands. Little audience boxes filled with other cockroaches situated next to the track. To make it easy to see the fans, but keep them out of the action, a clear wall separated them from the racetrack. By removing the audience boxes for some of the races, and keeping them in for others, Zajonc could test whether the mere presence of others, other cockroaches in this case, changed how quickly the racers ran.

All this was extremely clever. Genius, even. But there was one more key detail.

Zajonc thought he knew why others' presence was having opposing effects. Why others sometimes increased performance and sometimes decreased it.

In his mind, it depended on the complexity of the task, or the thing on which people (or animals) were being measured. If the task was easy, or something participants had done many times before, spectators would facilitate performance. But if the task was difficult, or involved learning something new, spectators would inhibit performance.

To test this idea, he created two versions of the track. One was a straightaway. The starting box on one end and the finishing box on the other. Nothing could be simpler. The cockroach only had one way to run and its dominant response should be to run away from the light and toward the end.

The other track was much more complex. Halfway down the straight track, a second track ran perpendicular to the first like a cross. Rather than only one way to run, the cockroach now had three. But only one led to safety.