The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  —A particularly subtle technique, in selling political positions, is for the speaker to present both sides of the argument, particularly when likely to be heard by people opposed to his or her own view. A presenter who does not seem to be obviously trying to persuade listeners to change their attitude is often, paradoxically, more effective than one clearly seeking to do so.69

  —An experiment conducted by Leon Festinger and Elaine Walster many years ago showed that overheard discussions are more likely to change a hearer’s mind than those in which the hearer knows the speakers are aware of his or her presence. Unconsciously, we are more swayed by a communication not intended to persuade us than by one intended to do so. A commercial for a well-known brokerage firm used to show all the people in a room falling silent and straining to overhear a person privately giving his companion a piece of that firm’s advice. The same principle underlies the many “candid camera” commercials in which a person, unaware of being filmed, testifies to the virtues of some product.70

  —A team of social psychologists conducted an experiment to find out the effect of distraction on the person listening to a persuasive message. They discovered that listeners who were distracted during a reasoned argument were more convinced by it than those who were not distracted; the effect was strongest when the argument was weak. The researchers’ explanation: Distraction interferes with the viewer’s or listener’s ability to evaluate or mentally argue against the message. Pratkanis and Aronson say that TV advertisers have made use of that finding:

  Advertisers can, for example, “compress” a thirty-six-second commercial into a thirty-second time by running the ad at 120 percent of its normal speed. Psychologically, time-compressed ads are harder to argue against. Metaphorically, the advertiser is persuading at 100 miles an hour while you maintain the speed limit and try to defend yourself at 55 miles an hour. You are bound to lose.71

  TV viewers may wonder why so many recent commercials are a pell-mell series of brief flashes of images plus a rat-a-tat-tat of words; that’s why.

  —A particularly immoral method of covert persuasion is the use of symbols based on repressed hatreds or fears. A notorious example is the series of commercials conceived of by the late Lee Atwater, architect of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, charging that Michael Dukakis was responsible for the weekend furlough of the convicted murderer Willie Horton, who, while out of prison, tortured a man and raped his fiancée. But the real intent of the commercial was the impact created by the picture of Horton, an ugly, fierce-looking, dark-skinned black man.

  —In a brand-new ploy, demonstrated in two experiments at Simon Fraser University, participants who had to solve an anagram (GANECY) before seeing the name of a brand of product were more likely to say they had seen the brand before than participants who were not asked to solve the anagram, and when shown a list of brand names in the same category, preferred the one they thought they had seen before. Why did they? The researcher, Antonia Kronlund, says the “Aha!” experience of solving the puzzle (AGENCY) generates a good feeling that is then misattributed to the first brand name seen. Says Ms. Kronlund, “Such techniques can be used by marketers in magazine layouts, in store displays—the possibilities are endless.”72

  —Finally, the ethos of covert persuasive techniques is candidly, almost proudly, displayed in the online ad of John Wiley publishers for its 2006 book Covert Persuasion: Psychological Tactics and Tricks to Win the Game by Kevin Hogan and James Speakman:

  A guide to all the tricks salespeople need to turn “no” into “yes”!

  Covert Persuasion synthesizes the latest research in the field of influence with the extensive experience of psychologist and public speaker Kevin Hogan to produce an unbeatable guide to the psychological tricks that win sales battles. Based on cutting-edge science, Hogan and James Speakman reveal dozens of previously unknown verbal and nonverbal tricks and tactics that will have customers saying “yes” before they even realize it. A salesperson fully aware of all the nonverbal and verbal cues and hints that lead a customer to a particular response will always have the upper hand. Covert Persuasion reveals more than ten keys to subtly elicit agreement from even the most stubborn customer.

  This is but a sampling of the use of unconscious persuasive factors in advertising and propaganda. We have seen others in our journey through psychological history, among them the foot-in-the-door technique of fund raising (asking for a small favor, then returning for a larger one), and Kahneman and Tversky’s experiments in skewed decision making (an alternative couched in terms of the chance of winning was chosen by many more people than a statistically identical alternative couched in terms of the chance of losing). Thousands of studies have investigated all sorts of other factors affecting persuasion, and many of the findings have been and are being used by advertisers, politicians, religious leaders, activists of all sorts, and others in the persuasion business. To the extent that these findings are used to manipulate Americans into making consequential decisions on the basis of unconscious motivations and fears, they are misuses of psychology—not as serious as the misuse of physics in nuclear bombs or of biology in germ warfare, but neither trifling nor innocuous.

  But let us end this discussion on a happier note. One of the most alarming forms of covert persuasion turned out to be nothing to fear. In 1957 James Vicary, a market researcher, announced that he had had the messages drink coca-cola and hungry? eat popcorn flashed on the screen in a Fort Lee, New Jersey, movie theater for 1/3000 of a second every five seconds during showings of the movie Picnic. No viewer, he said, had been aware of the messages, but in the course of a six-week trial Coca-Cola sales had gone up by 18.1 percent and popcorn sales by 57.7 percent.73

  The story was a sensation. The public was horrified, social critics issued alarms, subliminal advertising on radio and TV became big business during the 1970s, department stores played background music tapes containing undetectable warnings against shoplifting, and the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the use of subliminal messages could result in the loss of a broadcast license.

  All utter nonsense. In The Age of Propaganda Pratkanis and Aronson reported on their examination of more than two hundred academic papers on subliminal messages. Most found no evidence that such messages influence behavior, and those that did were “either fatally flawed on methodological grounds or cannot be reproduced.”74

  For good measure, Pratkanis and Aronson cited a droll experiment in which the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation subliminally flashed the message phone now 352 times during a popular Sunday night show, after telling viewers that a subliminal message would be sent and asking them to say what it was. The message had no effect on the volume of phone calls placed during the experiment, and not one of the nearly five hundred viewers who wrote in to say what they thought they perceived had the right answer. Many, however, apparently aware of the Vicary story, said they became hungry or thirsty during the show.75

  But all who believed the Vicary story had been gulled. An article in Advertising Age in 1984 said that Vicary admitted his original experiment was a fake, intended to increase customers for his failing marketing business.76

  Psychology in the Courtroom

  The formidable Hugo Münsterberg was the first to recommend that psychology be applied to the justice system, the very foundation of the structure of governance. In his 1908 book On the Witness Stand, he summarized existing psychological knowledge of the factors influencing testimony and said that applied psychology would be helpful to judges, lawyers, and juries—all of whom he took to task for “thinking that their legal instinct and their common sense supply them with all that is needed, and somewhat more.”77 But the book had little effect; during the next half century psychologists rarely served as expert witnesses, they tested candidates for only a handful of big-city police departments, and the studies they conducted on the psychology of the justice system had no direct effect.

  Since the 1960s, however, there has been an
explosive growth of interest in and application of psychology within the justice system. Although legal professionals and psychologists continue to have a strained relationship, applied psychology now pervades the courts, judicial chambers, and probation hearing rooms. The 2005 edition of the Handbook of Forensic Psychology, edited by the psychologists Irving B. Weiner and Allen K. Hess, runs to 912 pages and contains chapters on over a score of areas of application, each involving many specific activities , in both civil and criminal actions. To name but a few of these, psychologists now:

  —act as consultants to the court in custody disputes where there is a question about parental competency, and render opinions based on clinical methods of assessment.

  —testify in compensation cases where an employee claims that a physical or psychological disability is the result of injuries in the workplace. Such claims, running to many billions of dollars per year, often involve malingering or fakery; the psychologist’s job is to interview and test the plaintiff, and report his or her clinical impressions. —testify on the fairness of a lineup procedure that was used to identify a criminal suspect. The psychologist draws upon a body of research findings on fair and unfair lineups. An unfair lineup may make identification obvious by such means as using “foils”—stand-ins—very different from the suspect in appearance, or in the cases of photo lineups, by using a scowling or frowning photo of the suspect and neutral or smiling ones of the foils.

  —act as observer and adviser to a judge and attorneys when they interview a child to determine his or her competence as a witness.

  —obtain evidence in sexual abuse cases from children too young to testify in court. Using methods borrowed from child therapy, psychologists watch children play with dolls and look for the enactment of activities similar to those of the alleged crime.

  —interview and test a criminal suspect pleading the insanity defense. That defense is successfully used far less often than the public supposes. Surveys have found that the public thinks about 40 percent of criminals use the insanity plea and that a third of them succeed, but in 1991 a major eight-state study commissioned by the National Institute of Mental Health found that less than 1 percent of county court cases involved the insanity defense, and that of those, only around one in four was successful.78

  Certain other applications of psychology to justice processes are of more doubtful value, since they are not well accepted by court professionals or have uncertain outcomes. Cases in point:

  Predictions of dangerousness: Probation boards often ask psychologists to predict how likely it is that a prisoner convicted of a violent crime will commit additional violent crimes if released. Willie Horton gave a bad name to the psychological evaluation of future violence, as have other killers who, freed, have killed again.

  A much-cited review of five studies of predictions of violence found that the clinicians were correct in their predictions only a third of the time.79 (Many of their errors, however, were innocuous “false positives”—predictions of violence by an individual who, after being released, did not commit further acts of violence.) The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the capital conviction of one Thomas Barefoot, whose lawyer claimed that testimony predicting Barefoot’s future violence should not have been considered in deciding his sentence. In 1983 the Supreme Court disagreed, holding that such testimony is not necessarily unreliable.80 But even the American Psychiatric Association argued in an amicus curiae brief that predictions of dangerousness are wrong too often to be used where a death penalty is involved, and throughout the 1980 and 1990s, most mental health professionals maintained that dangerous behavior could not be predicted. Some recent studies, however, suggest that if certain basic rules were followed, clinicians could indeed predict dangerousness in certain situations—a not thoroughly reassuring conclusion.81

  Lie detector tests: The usefulness and validity of lie detector tests have been debated for many years by psychologists, legislators, lawyers, judges, and the press. As we have seen, anxiety about lying, particularly when the subject is asked questions containing key words or phrases related to the crime, will produce accelerated heart rate, accelerated breathing, and increased skin conductance, all of which the polygraph clearly shows. But the large research literature on the subject provides a great deal of evidence against, as well as for, the theory. An analysis of ten careful studies of the use of lie detection equipment showed that polygraphs do 64 percent better than pure chance—a lot better, but still far too inaccurate to warrant their use as evidence.82 That 1985 conclusion has been reaffirmed repeatedly. In 2002 an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences found no scientific evidence to warrant the use of polygraphs on a regular basis, pointing out that while thousands of employees of the FBI, CIA, and other governmental agencies have been given lie-detector tests, not one has ever been found to be a spy—not even Aldrich Ames, who passed the test but was later convicted of selling secrets to the Russians.83

  Leonard Saxe, formerly at Boston University and now at Brandeis, has offered a convincing explanation of the weakness of polygraph evidence. The polygraph, he says, is not a lie detector but a fear detector. If people are afraid the machine will expose their lying, they develop a fear reaction that the machine reports—but if they do not believe the machine can do so, they lie without being afraid, and the machine reports that they have told the truth.84

  Because of the unreliability and doubtful validity of polygraph testing, most courts do not usually admit the results as evidence and psychologists rarely do polygraph testing. (It is generally done by technicians who call themselves “polygraphers.”) But polygraph results are not entirely barred from the courtroom; the Supreme Court has left it to the courts of each jurisdiction to determine how and when to allow them, or to exclude them altogether (United States v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303 [1998]). A number of jurisdictions that otherwise exclude polygraph evidence nonetheless allow the parties to stipulate to the admissibility of the evidence before the test is administered. These courts typically set requirements on matters such as the qualifications of the polygraph examiners and the conditions under which the tests are to be given.85

  Plaintiffs and defendants sometimes take a polygraph test before the trial and, if the results favor them, release the news to the press. The results do not become evidence, but the public and, unfortunately, some jurors in the case may form an opinion on the basis of the so-called evidence.

  Scientific jury selection: The courtroom application of psychology in jury selection is of very questionable social value. Its proponents claim that it makes jury trials fairer, but its aim is to select jurors predictably biased in favor of the psychologist’s client.

  Scientific jury selection, which has existed for over three decades, is a specialized service that can cost a plaintiff or defendant anywhere from fifty thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars; accordingly, it is used chiefly in major damage suits and key civil rights cases, although some low-cost services have recently become available for smaller, low-budget cases.86 The service is provided mostly by market research and management consultant firms that have on their staffs, or hire for the purpose, sociologists and psychologists whose research furnishes the client’s lawyers with information about what kinds of jurors to avoid and what kinds to select.

  Lawyers, of course, have a number of their own rules of thumb as to what kinds of jurors are desirable or undesirable in different cases, and they try in the voir dire (the questioning of potential jurors) to select those they think are not biased against—or, even better, are biased in favor of—their client. The system is reasonably fair only because both sides question each candidate in order to select or reject him or her. Scientific jury selection adds to this process covertly gathered significant information about the personality traits and background characteristics of potential jurors from which the expert predicts, with considerably greater accuracy than the lawyer, how they will react to the two sides in the case.

  An early, but still arc
hetypal, example of the genre is the scientific jury selection conducted in 1975 by the defense in the murder trial of Joan Little, a black prisoner who had allegedly been raped by a prison guard and then killed him with an icepick. A team of sociologists and psychologists working for the defense began with demographics. They ascertained that Beaufort County, North Carolina, where the crime occurred, was 30 percent black but that the jury pool was only 13.5 percent black, and so advised the defense lawyers. For that reason and others the judge granted the defense motion for a change of venue.

  In the new venue the research team conducted a community survey of attitudes toward defendants in criminal trials. Using social-psychological methodology, they analyzed the data and produced profiles of “good” and “bad” jurors. Black women and young Democrats with at least a college education, for instance, would be likely to have social values predisposing them to be sympathetic toward Little.

  The next phase was purely psychological. An expert on body language observed prospective jurors during the voir dire, judging their truthfulness and anxiety level from their posture, movements, eye contact, vocal intonation, and hesitancy in speech. (Some jury researchers also take such characteristics to indicate whether a juror makes decisions on an emotional or a rational basis.) The body-language expert passed his evaluations on to the lawyers, who used them, along with the attitude profiles from the community survey, as the basis for selecting or rejecting jurors. Despite the opposing efforts of the prosecution, the jury selected was thoroughly pro-Little and after a five-week trial found her not guilty on all counts.87