Invisible Influence (27 page)

When it comes to hiring, raising money, or even conserving energy, people aren't rational robots. Where they stand in relation to others affects motivation.

Social facilitation can also help people reach their personal best. Whether training for a half marathon or just trying to lose a couple pounds, peers are a useful tool to help increase success.

At a basic level, peers provide a useful commitment device. Most people mean to exercise at least a few times a week, but it's easy for work, family, and life to get in the way. It's harder to skip a workout, though, when someone else is waiting for you. Planning to meet a friend at the gym at 6:30 p.m. increases the chance we follow through.

Peers can also motivate people to work harder. When we're by ourselves, it's easy to slack off. We often mean to do a few sets of certain exercises, but if the first couple were harder than expected, it's easy to convince ourselves that two is more than enough.

It's harder to give in when someone else is there. Just like the cockroaches running in the stadium, people often exert more effort when others are around. Particularly if we're competitive, working out with friends can push us to go further, faster, and harder than we would otherwise. Even if you're not competitive, simply having others around will encourage you to stick to what you planned.

If it's hard to find a workout partner, run, or go to the gym when others are around. Pick the treadmill next to another runner rather than one that is far away. Their mere presence should encourage us to give it 110 percent.
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I
. Research on social facilitation can be classified into two main areas: research that examines audience effects and research that examines coaction effects. The former examines how the presence of passive spectators influences performance. How running alone, versus with others watching, affects how quickly people run. The latter examines how others doing the
same
activity separately, but at the same time, influences performance. How running alone, versus next to someone else who is running, affects how quickly people run. In both cases, the presence of others can influence performance, and for similar reasons.

II
. The same holds for college basketball. Analyzing more than forty-five thousand games showed that being behind at halftime significantly increased NCAA teams' chance of winning. Slight underdogs are also more likely to win. Since the NCAA tournament expanded to sixty-four teams, ninth seeds have beaten eighth seeds 54 percent of the time. Not a huge margin, but surprising given that the eighth seeds should be the better teams.

III
. This experiment also rules out some of the things we couldn't control for in the basketball data. Maybe referees root for the underdog and give losing teams a break, calling fewer fouls and giving them a better chance to win. Or maybe coaches are better at motivating their players when their team is behind rather than ahead. Other tests we ran cast doubt on those possibilities, but even then, we can't rule them out in that data. But in the experiment we can. Even when there were no coaches, or referees, people worked harder when they thought they were slightly behind their opponent.

IV
. In all but the final set.

V
. It's worth noting that research on Opower doesn't find a demotivating effect of being far behind (Allcott, 2011). Households that are told that their neighbors use much less energy than they do don't seem to give up and decide they no longer care about energy use. If anything, the data shows that the biggest energy hogs are the ones who conserve the most. People who used much more energy than others show the biggest decrease once the program is introduced. It's not clear, however, whether this is a psychological effect or a more mechanical one. Just as it's easier to lose two pounds if you're 20 pounds overweight than if you're only 3 pounds overweight, households that use more energy simply have more slack to trim. They also may not have taken as many steps yet to reduce consumption, and as a result it may just be easier for them to cut back.

VI
. Winning can also be demotivating, but for a different reason. When someone is far ahead of their competition, being crowned the victor almost seems a certainty. Something drastic would have to happen for them to lose. Consequently, people take their foot off the gas pedal. Rather than continuing to work hard, they become complacent and coast. In Aesop's famous fable about the tortoise and the hare, for example, the hare dashes out in front of the tortoise and looks like it will easily win the race. But the hare is so confident of winning that he takes a nap. And by the time he has woken up, the tortoise has already won.

Note, however, that complacency should only kick in when the lead is decently sized. Being ahead by a little is unlikely to make people complacent.

VII
. Two caveats. First, avoid direct comparison with others who are of much higher ability. A professional runner can give great tips, but going running with them all the time might make people feel so far behind that they give up. Picking someone who is a little bit better or a little bit worse is a better idea. If they are a little better, that will motivate us to work harder. And if they are a little worse, at least it will make us feel good about ourselves.

Second, be careful involving others when just getting started. If someone has never shot a basketball before, other people can provide pointers, but they may also increase anxiety. Learning from someone we know well should reduce any potential negative impact.

America has always been seen as the land of opportunity. But the reality that immigrants encountered was often far from that lofty ideal. In the early 1900s, new arrivals to New York City often slept twelve to a room in teetering tenements. Street children huddled together over grates for warmth or roamed the alleyways as shoeshines and beggars. The slums were a chaotic mess of poverty and desolation, mixed with a dash of hope. Dilapidated wooden shacks, packed together, that could easily be mistaken for today's developing world.

Spurred on by these conditions, in the 1930s the United States began to develop public housing. As part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act directed the Public Works Administration to clear the slums and construct low-income dwellings. The first public housing project opened in Atlanta in 1936, and by the end of the decade, more than fifty additional projects had been built all across America.

Renowned architects were commissioned to design communities that fostered interaction. Buildings were constructed with central spaces for children to play and complexes included
libraries and kindergartens on-site. Some units even had their own bathtubs and electric ranges, luxuries at that time.

These developments were intended to eliminate the slums, but many soon became slums themselves. Physical deterioration and backlogged repairs led to mold and vandalism. Cockroaches ran rampant. Shoddy construction and mismanagement led to general dissatisfaction and high vacancy rates.

Originally built with high standards and catering to a wide range of applicants, public housing eventually became a last resort. It came to stand for concentrated poverty, crime, and racial segregation. Politicians resisted the creation of units in middle- and working-class neighborhoods, focusing construction around already poor areas of the city. White flight from the inner city to suburbia and income requirements further segregated the population. Soon the only individuals left in public housing were people who didn't have anywhere else to go.

Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government tried a different approach. Rather than focusing on supply, or the number of low-cost units being built, the Experimental Housing Allowance Program focused on the demand side as well. Instead of just providing “project-based” assistance that applied to the development of specific properties, individual households were given vouchers. This tenant-based support covered the gap between 25 percent of a household's income and fair market rent and could be used anywhere vouchers were accepted. No longer constrained to the projects, people were free to move wherever they pleased.

Vouchers were designed to encourage people to move to better areas. The idea was that low-income families now had a choice. Rather than being forced to concentrate in the projects, they could move to regions with less crime and poverty.

Unfortunately, however, many didn't. It turned out that the problem was about more than just flexibility. Households receiving rental assistance were confronted with an array of other barriers. Lack of information about other potential locations, discrimination, market conditions, and lack of transportation conspired to keep individuals localized in communities of intense poverty. Even when it seemed like they could go elsewhere, they couldn't.

In 1992, the U.S. government created a new program called Moving to Opportunity. Recognizing the difficulties with prior efforts, the program combined rental assistance vouchers with intensive housing search and counseling services. Giving people the ability to move, paired with the support to make it happen.

The initial effort was restricted to sizable cities situated in larger metropolitan areas. Of the twenty-one possible U.S. locations, a competitive process whittled the list down to five: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

In each city, the local public housing administration recruited participants through fliers, tenant associations, and a variety of other means. Participation was limited to low-income families with children. Families had to be living in either public housing or Section 8 project-based housing located in poor areas. Places where the poverty rate was at least 40 percent. Three-quarters of applicants were on welfare and less than half had graduated from high school.

Demand was high, so participation was determined by lottery. And, consistent with the program's name, Moving to Opportunity didn't just encourage people to move, it encouraged them to move to lower-poverty communities. Applicants received
counseling and assistance finding a private unit to lease, but the unit had to be somewhere with less than 10 percent of the population below the poverty line. These low-income families couldn't just move from one project to another, the program encouraged them to move from what tended to be some of America's most distressed urban neighborhoods to a completely different environment.

This aspect of Moving to Opportunity was particularly important. For decades, scientists and policy makers have debated the impact of what have been termed “neighborhood effects.” People who live in high-poverty areas tend to fare worse on a variety of dimensions.
¹
Children who grow up in poorer neighborhoods tend to have lower IQs, verbal ability, and reading scores. Adolescents are more likely to drop out of school, display aggression, and commit crimes. There are higher rates of depression, joblessness, alcohol abuse, and mental health issues. Across a wide range of economic, health, and educational outcomes, people from poorer neighborhoods are worse off.

The cause of this disparity, however, is less clear. People who grow up in poorer neighborhoods certainly face greater challenges. Crime is already high, schools are underfunded, and government services are lower quality. Racial segregation is high. There are fewer high-paying jobs and more hurdles to overcome to get them.

But family characteristics like income, race, and education also vary. The people who live in poorer neighborhoods are not exactly the same as the people who live in wealthier ones.

Consequently, it is hard to determine what's driving the disparity. Is it individual and family circumstances or the effect of the neighborhood itself? Do children who grow up in poor neighborhoods tend to do worse in school because the schools
are bad or because their parents are less educated? Do people who live in high-poverty areas tend to have more behavioral and mental health problems because of who they are or where they live?

It's a classic question of nature versus nurture. How much are life outcomes driven by genetics versus the environment? By who people are, versus what surrounds them?
²

The answer has important policy implications. Should the government pay for more tutoring programs or enable poor families to move to higher-income areas? Focus on individual health or on improving communities?

The Moving to Opportunity program provided a unique chance to investigate these questions. By randomly giving some families the opportunity to move to better neighborhoods, while others stayed put, scientists could examine how neighborhoods affect outcomes. Nurture, not nature.

Years later, when scientists analyzed the data, they found some impressive effects. Moving to lower-poverty areas greatly improved the health and well-being of both children and adults.
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Not only were kids 35 percent less likely to be victims of a crime, they were less likely to be injured or have asthma attacks. Girls were less likely to use marijuana and less likely to be arrested for property crime. Adults were less likely to be obese, experience psychological distress, or experience clinical depression. Moving had as big an effect in decreasing diabetes likelihood as taking diabetes medication.

The most striking effects, though, were on economic outcomes.
⁴
Children whose families moved to a lower-poverty neighborhood before they turned thirteen were more likely to
attend college and had higher-earning jobs later in life. As adults, these children ended up living in better neighborhoods themselves and were less likely to become single parents.

And the effects were sizable. When followed up with in their mid-twenties, compared to children who didn't move, those who did were earning almost 33 percent more a year than their peers.
^I

Effects were even larger for children who moved at a younger age. Children who moved at age eight were expected to earn more than $300,000 over the course of their careers.
⁵
This boost more than paid for the incremental cost of the subsidized voucher.