SCIENTIST AT WORK: Ellen J. Langer; A Scholar of the Absent Mind
By PHILIP J. HILTS
Published: September 23, 1997
ELLEN J. LANGER'S specialty may seem a little odd for a psychologist: she studies mindlessness.
Everyone exhibits it, of course. People misplace their keys. They enter a room only to realize they don't know why. They talk to mannequins before realizing that a reply isn't likely.
One of Dr. Langer's favorite examples of mindlessness concerns the time she used a brand new credit card in a department store. The clerk noticed she had not yet signed it, and handed it to her to sign the back. After passing the credit card through the machine, the clerk handed her the credit card receipt to sign.
''Then she held up the receipt I signed next to the card I had just signed, and she compared the signatures!'' Dr. Langer said. ''Amazing!''
Dr. Langer's studies have always centered on the degree to which humans are in control of their actions, or rather, the degree to which they maintain the illusion of control. Beginning in the late 1970's, her studies showed that mindless behavior was far more widespread than people liked to believe.
Based on that and other work, she became the first woman to be named a tenured professor in psychology at Harvard. In her recent work she has followed up her studies of mindlessness by working on antidotes -- the ''mindful'' attitude and how to cultivate it. She has written two popular books published by Addison-Wesley, ''Mindfulness'' (1989) and ''The Power of Mindful Learning'' (1997).
Her latest book argues that traditional methods of learning can produce mindless behavior because they tend to get people to ''overlearn'' a fact or a task and suggest that there is only one way to do it. She argues that is important to teach skills and facts conditionally, setting the stage for doubt and an awareness that different situations may call for different approaches or answers.
Dr. Langer, 50, was born in the Bronx, grew up in Yonkers, and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at New York University and a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University. Colleagues say she is about the least mindless person they know. She is, as one colleague put it, ''aggressively thoughtful'' and full of creative energy.
Dr. Langer, said Dr. Robert Abelson, professor of psychology at Yale, ''enjoys being outrageous, and challenging conventional wisdom,'' adding, ''Dr. Langer even as a student noticed that while psychologists were always talking about thinking and behavior, it seemed to her that people were behaving thoughtlessly just as often.''
Psychologists have been aware for at least a century that some complicated behavior is performed automatically, that is, without conscious deliberation.
As Dr. Langer wrote, citing people who say hello to a mannequin or write a check in January with the last year's date, ''when in this mode we take in and use limited signals from the world around us (the female form, the familiar face of the check) without letting other signals (the motionless pose, a calendar) penetrate as well.''
People have in their repertoires thousands of ''scripts'' for talk or behavior that they act out when they are cued by something familiar. The array of behavior people can carry out without thinking is enormous.
When she first started the work it came as something of a challenge to mainstream psychology. When her career in the shortfalls of thinking began in the 1970's, psychology as a whole seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, turning to cognitive psychology in a big way. A rush of studies had begun on the details of human thinking and the importance of reasoning in human behavior.
''In the midst of that,'' said Dr. Daniel Wegner, a research psychologist at the University of Virginia, ''Ellen Langer started saying, 'Maybe, but we really are pretty mindless.' In the history of psychology there had been some work on mindlessness, or automaticity, but she revived it and extended it much farther.''
Dr. Wegner said that Dr. Langer's work is important and ''has really broadened our perspective in psychology,'' adding: ''She showed that mindless behavior is fairly widespread and general. She showed us that we have to take into account not only things that make sense, but the things that don't make sense.
''She was one of those pioneers who discovered early on that people are much less thoughtful in their everyday behavior than they wish they were. She has helped make us rethink the role of thought in behavior.''
In the 1970's and 1980's she carried out a series of landmark studies to make the point scientifically, the most famous of them referred to as ''The Copy Machine.''
In that study, she stationed someone at a copy machine in a busy graduate school office. When someone stepped up and began copying, Dr. Langer's plant would come up to the person and interrupt, asking to butt in and make copies. The interruption was allowed fairly often, about 60 percent of the time. But the permission was granted almost 95 percent of the time if the person stepping up to interrupt not only asked, ''May I use the copy machine?'' but added a reason, ''because I'm in a rush.''
That seems to make sense. People heard the reason and decided they were willing to step aside for a moment. What was odd, Dr. Langer found, was that if the interrupter asked, ''Can I use the machine?'' and added a meaningless phrase, ''because I have to make copies,'' the people at the machine also stepped aside nearly 95 percent of the time.
The idea, she said, is that the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter's ''reason'' was not meaningful.