Well, now we know where we are.
>> Boy, boy there's always one.
>> [LAUGH] Now what did we see in this clip?
What we saw is that at the beginning of these deliberations,
some people knew exactly what they wanted.
They put their hands up very quickly,
indicating that they thought the person was guilty.
But what we also saw were some people who were clearly uncertain.
They were looking around, trying to see what other people were doing, and
they weren't exactly sure whether they should raise their hands.
This is a good example of social influence in action.
You have some people who are uncertain, they are turning to other people and
allowing those people to resolve their uncertainty and
influence them in a way which makes it less likely that they're going to surface
their unique information to help the group make its decision.
Turns out, there are two examples of how this social influence occurs.
One example of this comes from the study of why people don't
help in emergency situations.
And there was a group of studies that was done by some researchers in the 60s.
This research for those of you with a historical bent was actually started
because of a murder in New York City which was witnessed by 50 people,
none of whom rendered assistance to the person who was being murdered.
And the researchers wanted to understand why this happens.
So the picture I'm showing you here is a room,
and what you're seeing in this room is a table,
that's the big red circle, and a couple of chairs, those are the small red circles.
Up in the upper right hand corner, that's a closet, and down at the bottom,
that's a door in and out of the room.
So let's imagine you are going to complete a survey for me.
So I bring you into this room, and I seat you at one of the chairs at the table, and
I tell you it's going to take you about 15 minutes to complete this survey.
If you have any questions, let me know.
At that point, I leave the room closing the door behind me,
you are alone in the room to fill out the survey.
After about five minutes or so you are filling out the survey,
suddenly some little wisps of smoke start to appear out from under the closet door.
And the longer you stay in the room, the more smoke
will pour into the room until eventually the room will actually fill up with smoke.
Now, what do people do when this happens to them alone?
Well most people investigate.
They get up.
They go over they see is the door hot?
No the door is not hot.
Is the closet door locked?
Yes it is locked.
At that point they exit the room to find me and say listen there's something going
on in the room, there's smoke pouring out of the closet.
but what happens if you're doing this with someone else.
And in particular what if you're doing this with someone else who I have told
not to react to the smoke.
So once again, you're brought into the room, there's now two of you.
You're given the survey to fill out.
You sit down to start filling out the survey.
I tell you okay it's going to take you about 15 minutes to fill out the survey.
Remember no talking you have to do this alone.
At that point I leave the room closing the door behind me you start in on the survey.
After about five minutes once again the smoke
starts coming in from under the closet door.
What happens in this circumstance?
Well, if you are filling this out,
the first thing you're going to do when you see that smoke is you're going to turn
your head to see what the other person is doing.
And of course,
I've told that other person not to do anything, not to react to the smoke.
What a lot of people do in this circumstance is they use the other
person's inaction to understand what they should be doing in the situation, and
so what we find is a lot of times people do not react to the smoke.
They go back to the filling out the questionnaire, they see more smoke,
they look at the other person, still not reacting,
back to the survey, more smoke, other persons still not reacting.
Some people stay in the so long that they actually have to wave the smoke away to
continue filling out the questionnaire.
This is an example of influence in action, but the key to this kind of influence
is that no one really knows what the right answer is.
And because we're uncertain we look to that other person to try and
resolve that uncertainty.
But this may cause us to actually censor our own information.
We may not say I'm worried about the smoke.
We may not say I'm unsure about what's going on.
This is an example of process loss that comes from uncertainty about how to react.
Now it turns out there's another example of this problem.
