Yesterday I wrote about how the trainees enrolled in a leadership course in the Israeli military were affected by the Chameleon Effect. Today I want to talk about another fascinating experiment described in the book Sway that demonstrates the ‘Chameleon Effect’ in action. Just to review, the ‘Chameleon Effect’ takes place when a person, or people, get influenced and change their behaviour based on how another person, or people, label them.
This experiment consisted of two parts. During the first part, fifty-one women were supposed to have a brief conversation with a men randomly assigned to them. These men and women signed up for a study on communication. The time allotted to the conversation was not long enough to engage into anything much deeper than chit-chat about the weather, past education, current work, and maybe some interests. The women were just told to sit by the phone and wait for it to ring. Each man, on the other hand, was given a sheet of paper, several minutes before the call, with the brief biography and a picture of a woman he was about to talk to.
The biographies were accurate, but the pictures were bogus and were carefully chosen by the researchers before the experiment. Half the men were given pictures of very attractive women and the other half were given pictures of ordinary looking women. As you can guess, the men gave the bio snapshot a quick glance and paid a lot more attention to the attached picture.
After reviewing the profile of the women they were about to call, the men were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their expectations regarding women’s personalities. Regardless of what was written in the bio snapshot, the men who were given pictures of very attractive women expected to talk to “sociable, poised, humorous, and socially adept women.” The group of men who were shown pictures of ordinary looking women, thought they would be chatting with “unsociable, awkward, serious, and socially inept” women. Women, of course, had no idea that this was going on.
As you can imagine, once men formed their opinions about the women they were about to talk to, they brought that bias into the conversation. When the men started talking to their women, the other, even more interesting, part of the experiment started.
During the second part, the researchers recorded the conversations of all the pairs. They then isolated women’s voices and played them to a group of twelve ordinary people who knew nothing about the study and have not met any of the participants. These twelve people were asked to fill in the same questionnaire about women’s personalities. Remarkably, they attributed the same traits to the women based on their voices alone, as the men attributed earlier based on their fake pictures.
This is an incredible example of how expectations of one person are picked up on, and, in turn, acted out by the other person. While fascinating, it is somewhat disturbing to know that once you form the expectations, they are difficult to change. My hope is that being aware of this will help me avoid this trap in the future. Or at least, by expecting the best from people, I can hopefully bring that side of them out into the open more often.
Until Monday,
V