:L&k~-`t/r1]4Q^0Professor Paul Bloom: This is going to begin a two-lecture sequence on social psychology on how we think about ourselves, how we think about other people, how we think about other groups of people. We've talked a lot about the capacities of the human mind and some of these capacities involve adapting and dealing with the material world. So, we have to choose foods, we have to navigate around the world, we have to recognize objects, we have to be able to understand physical interactions. But probably the most interesting aspect of our evolved minds is our capacity to understand and deal with other people.
(e rG)f9W i0We are intensely interested in how other people work. The story that was a dominant news story in 2005 was this. And some of you--this--for those of you who aren't seeing the screen, is the separation of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. I remember where I was when I first heard about this. [laughter] And it's an interesting sight. Just remember--stepping back. As psychologists we have to question the natural. We have to take things that are commonsense and explore them. And one thing which just happens is, we're fascinated by this stuff. We're fascinated by the lives of celebrities. We're fascinated by the social lives of other people. And it's an interesting question to ask why. And this is one of the questions which I'm going to deal with in the next couple of lectures but before I get to the theory of social psychology I want to talk about an individual difference.心理学空间%y&kjK$m
`b,TU.\/m0So, we devoted a lecture early on--of a couple of weeks ago, to individual differences across people in intelligence and personality. I want to talk a little bit about an individual difference in our social natures and then I want people to do a test that will explore where you stand on a continuum. That test is the piece of paper you have in front of you. Anybody who doesn't have it please raise your hand and one of the teaching fellows will bring it to you. You don't know what to do yet with it so don't worry. The test was developed actually by Malcolm Gladwell who is a science writer--in his wonderful bookThe Tipping Point.And as he introduces the test, Gladwell recounts another experiment done by Stanley Milgram, of course famous for his obedience work but he did a lot of interesting things.
And one classic study he did was he gave a package to 160 people randomly chosen in Omaha, Nebraska and he asked these people to get the package somehow – and this was many years ago before the internet, before e-mail – to get the package to a stockbroker who worked in Boston but lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. What he found was that most people were able to do it. Nobody, of course, knew this man but they knew people who might know people who would know this man. So, most people succeeded. Most people were able to get the packages to this man and it took at maximum six degrees of separation, which is where the famous phrase comes about that we're all separated from another person by six degrees of separation. This is not true in general. This was a very--a single experiment done within the United States, but the idea is appealing, that people are connected to one another via chains of people.心理学空间x7a,u(i[Mg9`)g
!{?M"`Ay"v"ml1C j0But what Milgram found that was particularly interesting was that in about half of the cases these packages went through two people. That is, if you plot the relationships between people--We can take each person in this room, find everybody you know and who knows you and draw a line, but if we were to do this you wouldn't find an even mesh of wires. Rather, you'd find that some people are clusters. Some people are what Gladwell calls "connectors." It's like air traffic. Air traffic used to be everything flew to places local to it but now there's a system of hubs, Chicago O'Hare for instance or Newark where planes fly through. Some people are hubs. Some people are the sort of people who know a lot of people. Some people in this room might be hubs, and it is not impossible to find out.