Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [109]
A series of related studies investigated the same effect from the point of view of the workers themselves.18 Everyone knows that bosses with the right social and academic credentials and a nice title and salary have at times put a higher value on their own ideas than on those of their underlings. Researchers wondered, will people who earn more money purely by chance behave the same way? Does even unearned “success” instill a feeling of superiority? To find out, pairs of volunteers were asked to cooperate on various pointless tasks. In one task, for instance, a black-and-white image was briefly displayed and the subjects had to decide whether the top or the bottom of the image contained a greater proportion of white. Before each task began, one of the subjects was randomly chosen to receive considerably more pay for participating than the other. When that information was not made available, the subjects cooperated pretty harmoniously. But when they knew how much they each were getting paid, the higher-paid subjects exhibited more resistance to input from their partners than the lower-paid ones. Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence. It’s an element of personal and office dynamics that cannot be ignored.
But it is the other side of the question that was closer to the original motivation for Lerner’s work. With a colleague, Lerner asked whether people are inclined to feel that those who are not successful or who suffer deserve their fate.19 In that study small groups of female college students gathered in a waiting room. After a few minutes one was selected and led out. That student, whom I will call the victim, was not really a test subject but had been planted in the room by the experimenters. The remaining subjects were told that they would observe the victim working at a learning task and that each time she made an incorrect response, she would receive an electric shock. The experimenter adjusted some knobs said to control the shock levels, and then a video monitor was turned on. The subjects watched as the victim entered an adjoining room, was strapped to a “shock apparatus,” and then attempted to learn pairs of nonsense syllables.
During the task the victim received several apparently painful electric shocks for her incorrect responses. She reacted with exclamations of pain and suffering. In reality the victim was acting, and what played on the monitor was a prerecorded tape. At first, as expected, most of the observers reported being extremely upset by their peer’s unjust suffering. But as the experiment continued, their sympathy for the victim began to erode. Eventually the observers, powerless to help, instead began to denigrate the victim. The more the victim suffered, the lower their opinion of her became. As Lerner had predicted, the observers had a need to understand the situation in terms of cause and effect. To be certain that some other dynamic wasn’t really at work, the experiment was repeated with other groups of subjects, who were told that the victim would be well compensated for her pain. In other words, these subjects believed that the victim was being “fairly” treated but were otherwise exposed to the same scenario. Those observers did not develop a tendency to think poorly of the victim. We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom.
We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We