Would you shake Trump’s hand in the time of Corona?
No, of course not; I would have been the one to give the President the elbow. I would have been the one to clean off the mic with a Clorox wipe right after Wal-Mart’s CEO and just before Target’s CEO took the podium at last Friday’s press conference. I would have done better.
Right.
So we all like to think. And yet, the research (and my own personal experience) tells a very different story, a story of falling in line with authority and groupthink.
I couldn’t even say no to a stranger
Last Thursday (March 12 — only five days ago but feels like five months ago), two friends and I visited six venues for the alternative health and wellness symposium we had been planning for May. At five venues, we did the awkward wave from afar, Namaste bow, we’re not going to touch each other and we’re all in agreement about that hello (#coronavirus). But at venue number six, when the man reached out to shake our hands, we all did. It happened so fast. He went in for handshake number one, then turned to me for handshake number two, and to my final friend for handshake number three.
I did not want to shake his hand. But I did. Because he went for it. Because my friend did. Because in that moment, I didn’t want to disrupt or make waves.
If I can’t react quickly enough to say no to a handshake from a perfect stranger, it’s no surprise that only one of the top executives — of Wal-Mart, Target, Becton Dickenson, etc. — reacted to the president extending his hand for a handshake with an elbow at Friday’s press conference. It’s the freaking president. He is in a position of power. And we are trained to conform.
Why no one told the emperor he was naked (and everyone shook Trump’s hand)
We all think we are above conformity — that we would have been like the kid in that famous children’s book, The Emperor’s New Clothes, who shouted out the truth — that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes at all. But there are dozens of experiments that show that we do conform, especially in the face of authority. These experiments show why no one told the emperor he was naked, and why almost everyone shook Trump’s hand regardless of the fact that the CDC and WHO and every other health organization in the world right now is telling us to avoid hand-shaking.
Experiment #1: We do what people in power tell us to do
Stanley Milgram, a researcher at Yale University, wanted to understand how something as horrifying as the Holocaust could have happened. The central question he looked to answer was: were the Nazis simply following orders from authority figures and would Americans react the same way to authority? So, he created an experiment to test “how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.”
He recruited 40 men of various professions. Each participant came into the lab and drew straws to determine his role — learner or teacher — with the straws rigged so that the participant would always be the teacher. The learner (who was part of the experiment) was strapped into a chair with electrodes (out of view of the teacher). The learner had to learn a list of word pairs, which were tested by the teacher. Every time the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher would have to administer an electrical shock. Because he was part of the experiment, the learner gave mostly wrong answers and the teacher (the research study participant) had to give a series of increasingly higher voltage electrical shocks.
When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter (actor in a lab coat) gave a series of orders for the teacher to continue: “please continue;” “the experiment requires you to continue;” “it is absolutely essential that you continue;” “you have no other choice to continue.”
The shocking (no pun intended) result was that 65% of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to shock learners up to the highest level of 450 volts and all the participants continued to 300 volts. This video of the experiment is disturbing to watch and shows one research participant teacher continuing to shock a learner until he is unresponsive. Of course, no actual harm was done to the learner, but the teacher believed he had essentially shocked the learner unconscious, and yet kept going anyway when the researcher (actor) prompted him to.
The experiment was reproduced 18 times with different factors — changing the garb of the experimenter from lab coat to regular clothes (obedience decreased to 20%) and the location from Yale to a set of rundown offices (obedience decreased to 47.5%), for example — showing that status affects obedience.
The core conclusion? We follow orders from people in positions of authority. Perhaps extending this to the hand-shaking is a bit of a stretch, but when the President of the United States — arguably one of highest authority positions in the world — sticks his hand out to shake yours, you shake his hand. I would bet that each one of these same executives had opted out of shaking someone’s hand earlier that same day, but changed their behavior when it was the president.
Experiment #2: We do what the group does
We change our behavior in the face of authority. We also fold under group pressure.
Dr. Solomon Asch, a social psychologist in the 1950s ran an experiment to test group conformity. He recruited participants for a visual acuity study. He then placed one experiment participant in a room with several other people who were in cahoots with the study, then repeatedly asked each person in the group which line on the right matched/was the same as the line on the right. It’s pretty obvious, right?
At first, everyone answered correctly, but over time the people who were part of the experiment started giving incorrect answers. Initially, the participant continued to give the correct answer, but over time, 75% of the participants agreed with the incorrect answers at least once. 25% agreed with incorrect answers half the time. Watch the actual video of the experiment here.
A 5-year old could say which line on the right is the same as the line on the left. But somehow, when a group gets involved, our answer changes. When participants were asked why they chose the wrong line afterward, some doubted their own eyes and others wanted to reduce possible conflict with the group. As one researcher comments: “We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen as rocking the boat, we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we’ll still go along.”
There are many other experiments that show the power of the group, and all are as shocking and mind-boggling as this first one:
- In an elevator — typically in elevators, everyone faces the same way, toward the doors. Except if three people get in and face the wall opposite the doors… everyone who enters the elevator subsequently starts facing the opposite wall too.
- In a waiting room, when at the sound of a beep, everyone in the waiting room (actors) stands up and then sits back down. It only takes two rounds for the unknowing participant to start standing and sitting too… and she even continues when she is left alone in the room.
- In a room filling with smoke — several people (all actors, but the participant) sit and pretend not to notice the smoke billowing into the room. The participant keeps looking around, but says nothing, does nothing, and continues to sit along with the rest of the people.
Bringing this back to handshakes in the time of Corona, let’s say executive number 3 had told himself “I will fist bump the president instead of shake his hand,” but now sees the two execs before him shake the President’s hand. All of a sudden, he is going against the norms of that specific day and that specific group and his mind makes the in-the-moment decision to do what the group does. Peer pressure is real, y’all.
Experiment #3: One person speaks up, we speak up
But peer pressure subsides dramatically if even one person does something differently than the group. In both experiments above, the experiment participant went against the group when one other person went against the group first.
In Milgram’s experiment, when two other teachers (who were actually part of the study) refused to continue shocking the learners when they made a mistake — one stopped at 150 volts and the second stopped at 210 volts — the participant teachers refused to shock the learners too. In fact, the level of obedience to authority by the participant teachers dropped to only 10% (from 65%) even with the same prompts from the experimenter (the actor in a lab coat)!
In Asch’s experiment, he ran a second version where he kept all other variables of the experiment the same — one unknowing participant and a room full of actors — but this time had one person from the group state a different answer from the group. As Ori and Rom Brafman write in their book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior: “The lone dissenting voice was enough to break the spell, as it gave permission to the real participant to break ranks with other members of the group. In almost all cases, when a dissenter spoke up, the participant flew in the face of the group and give the correct response. The really interesting thing though is that the dissenting actor didn’t even need to give the right answer… all it took to break the sway was for someone to give an answer that was different from the majority.”
Let’s just point that last part out one more time: the person didn’t even need to give the right answer for the participant to give their right answer! The sway of the group depends on unanimity.
To prove how powerful a dissenter can be, Psychologist Vernon Allen conducted an experiment to test this further. Like in Asch’s experiment, a participant was going to be placed in a group made up of actors and asked to answer simple questions. But before the study, the participant had to fill out a self-assessment. While filling out the self-assessment, a researcher brings in another study participant (an actor) wearing the thickest coke-bottle lens eyeglasses you can imagine (that gave the impression of severe limited seeing ability). Several things happen in the room in front of the actual participant:
- It is made clear that the actor-participant cannot see far: he states he cannot see long-distance and fails to read something easily legible on the opposite wall.
- The researcher says they need all 5 people and that the actor-participant can just answer any way he wants, randomly even, and says he won’t record the actor-participant’s answers.
Even though the actor-participant could not see and was told to guess at the answers, having that person go against the group helped the actual participant go against the group too. The data was startling: 97% of participants conformed to the group when there was no dissenter present, but when the visually impaired dissenter was present — even though he was not a reliable person and was giving wrong answers — the percentage of actual participants who conformed went down to 64%! Brafman and Brafman write: “The presence of a dissenter, any dissenter, no matter how incompetent, still made it possible for a large segment of participants to deviate from the majority and give the right answer.”
Think about all the times you wanted to state a different opinion, but only did when someone else before you had the courage to do so. We have all been there.
The power of you: stand up and dissent
So, how do we each step up to have the courage and consciousness to be the dissenter in a group? To be the one person in a room who stands up to the majority? To be Bruce Greenstein, who was the last person to step up to the mic at Friday’s press conference and who rejected the President’s handshake and met him with his elbow instead?
Personal power and practice.
Power: “ability to act or produce an effect.” We all have this ability. Power is not something that can be taken or given to us. We are power. And the more we know ourselves, the more we act and produce effects from an authentic place, the more we speak our truths, the more we stand up for what we believe.
Practice: “to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient.” It’s not easy to be the one to stand up for what we believe, but it does get easier with practice. So…
- Practice saying what you like and don’t like out loud.
- Practice being the dissenter in small groups of people who you love and get along with — disagree with two friends, or siblings, or co-workers.
- Practice telling your friends that you are social distancing when they want to have a birthday gathering.
- Practice amplifying the voices of those most hard-hit by this crisis.
And, once we’re on the other side of this virus:
- Practice speaking your mind with small things: ask a Lyft driver to turn up the AC, your neighbors to turn down the music, or the person passing you on the street to pick up the trash they just let fly. (
- Practice speaking up, asking questions, asking for clarification at the doctor’s office.
- Practice speaking up for a pregnant woman or disabled person on the subway or bus when no one is getting out of their seat.
Be the first person to say something
It can be debilitating to speak up against a group when you’ve never practiced speaking up at all. But the thing is, if every person reading this commits to dissenting even once — being the first person to do something differently in a group — then someone else will follow. That’s how the game works. You have the ability to act or produce an effect. You are power, so start practicing it.
Think back to Friday’s press conference: if Bruce Greenstein had been the first person up to the podium and given the president the elbow instead of a handshake, would the rest of the executives have followed suit? We can only guess, but if we go by what the research tells us, my guess is yes.
We are in a time of crisis. Let’s all aim to be that dissenter, to step into our power, to be the person who chooses social distancing before it’s mandated. The person who points out facts when the group is running high on emotion. The person who stops laughing mid joke and explains why it’s actually not funny because it’s racist, sexist, or making light of something (like this virus) that will not kill them, but that will definitely lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths because of so many who are making light of it. The person who sticks to their values. Are you in?
