Resistance to Persuasion

Linda, the feminist bank teller, fits best with how she was described, even though we may have some lingering doubts about her career as a banker. This is one of the most widely used tests that help people experience the representativeness heuristic we encountered earlier when thinking about who the typical Florida resident is (remember: not the elderly). It shows how our intuitions can lead us astray. Recall that you were asked to rank, from most to least likely, statements about Linda. It cannot be that the category bank teller and active in the feminist movement is more likely than a category, bank teller, that subsumes it. A feminist bank teller automatically is also a bank teller--but not every bank teller, of course, is a feminist bank teller. While logic dictates that there must be more bank tellers than feminist bank tellers, when contemplating Linda that point is not intuitive. Linda looks more like a feminist than a bank teller and thus, when we add a representative piece about her--feminist--to an unrepresentative piece--banker--she becomes more alive. Linda's description as a feminist bank teller is psychologically more appealing, albeit less probable, than her being just a bank teller. Mind control and brainwashing are categorized under social influence. In the world, social influence happens each minute of the day. Someone, somewhere, is always trying to get a friend or acquaintance or stranger to do something. Every day, people use various methods to change other people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Some people use compliance to initiate change in an individual's behavior without considering the person's attitudes or beliefs. Persuasion is used to initiate a change in attitude. The education method is used to try to change beliefs, which is why it's called the propaganda method. Comparatively, brainwashing aims to change a person's beliefs, attitudes, and behavior; The brainwasher requires complete control over their victim, including how and what they eat, their sleeping patterns, and every other basic human need. The idea is to completely hijack the victim's identity to the point where they no longer have a sense of identity. Too many people, not given enough help, either go through years of unresolved grief or require psychiatric help later.

How can we help families whose relatives die quickly or violently with no time to go through the preparatory stages? They have to be given enough time to get out of the state of shock and denial and they will have to go through all the stages after death occurs. How can we help a patient who has recovered from a severe coronary overcome the fear of sudden death? Many patients who have had a massive coronary and recovered become overanxious and are always afraid of another heart attack and sudden death. Those patients need some counseling to alleviate their anxiety and help them exercise, perhaps use a bicycle, so that they can live as much of a normal functioning life as their physician allows. Many of these patients are so tense and anxious all the time that the possibility of another coronary is much higher than if they are able, often through the help of professional counseling, to exercise and to live as normal a life as possible. How can the family accept the sudden death of a child? Nothing is more difficult than having to accept the death of a child. If it is a sudden death, and the child's family has had no preparation, this family sometimes needs years of working through the grief. When economists Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University and Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago sent companies (fictitious) resumes, Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones received fewer callbacks than the otherwise identical Emily Walsh and Greg Baker. Names that sounded white got 50 percent more callbacks than the African-American sounding names; Across four occupational categories--sales, administrative support, clerical services, and customer services--Lakisha and Jamal were consistently perceived as the black salespersons or black assistants, while Emily and Greg were just salespersons or assistants. Just as Linda was a feminist first, for a clear majority of employers, when hearing Lakisha's and Jamal's names, the internal referent is a black person, first and foremost. Together with Max Bazerman and Alexandra van Geen, I set out to find an intervention that would debunk the internal referent. In retrospect, the idea seems quite simple. We introduced an explicit comparator. Put differently, we wanted to confront evaluators with two applications at the same time. This would help them, we hoped, to explicitly compare job applicants rather than to implicitly judge them based on the internal referent. This is how the experiment worked. Once this happens, the brainwasher introduces them to a different set of behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that align with the brainwasher's needs.

While many experts believe that it is possible to brainwash an individual under the right situation and condition, some consider it an improbable form of influence. They believe that brainwashing is not achievable without the presence of the fear or threat of physical violence. This means that for brainwashing to be achievable, there has to be coercion, whether physical or nonphysical. However, experts further believe that the effects of brainwashing are transient, regardless of the methods or techniques used. The process of brainwashing doesn't necessarily eradicate a person's identity; Once the brainwasher stops reinforcing the process, the hidden identity starts coming back. This explains why most of the captured American soldiers, despite the torture and reported brainwashing, chose to return to the country, and only a paltry twenty-one actually stayed back. To brainwash their victims, manipulators follow a series of steps: They assault your identity to break you. This means that you should not desert these families but be available to them for months and months after the death of a child, while the parents and siblings go through the stages of dying after the death of the child. What can we say and how can we be helpful in the event of sudden death several hours after an accident or a very unexpected death after a sudden severe illness? In the few hours immediately after such an unexpected death, we cannot do much for the family except to remain available to them and help with the mechanical things that have to be done following a death. Most of these family members will be in a state of shock and denial. They need someone who can think clearly and unemotionally to notify the next-of-kin and make the funeral arrangements. How do you handle the dying patient when the person she related to the most dies? Death of an important figure during the dying process of a patient is one of the most difficult things that we have to face. In a hospital, where we interviewed about eight hundred terminally ill patients, one death is perhaps outstanding and was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. This was the death of the most significant surgeon and physician who took care of many of my cancer patients. He died unexpectedly of a coronary one morning just prior to making rounds. Study participants had to hire a candidate for either a stereotypically male task, a math problem;

They were paid based on their chosen candidate's performance. In the control condition, evaluators were informed of one single candidate's past performance and his or her sex (plus a number of filler characteristics that were identical for all candidates; In the treatment condition, in addition to the sole candidate introduced in the control condition, we added information on one additional candidate. Control condition evaluators had to decide whether to go with the candidate presented to them or be assigned a candidate at random, pulled from the pool of candidates. In the treatment condition, evaluators had to decide whether to go with one of the two candidates presented to them or draw from the pool. They were informed of how well the candidates in the pool had done on average, thus they knew what to expect by going back to the pool. The experiment was designed to mimic real hiring and promotion decisions. According to one study, about half of real-world evaluators look at one candidate at a time. The other half pools a number of applicants and screens various candidates simultaneously. They incite feelings of guilt to make you feel bad about who you are. They encourage you to accept their view of who you are to enact self-betrayal. Once you are at your breaking point, they offer you a possibility of salvation. They start being lenient and offering to help you. They help you confess to everything they have accused you of. They channel your guilt to different things, so much so that you become confused about what your original crime is. This leaves you in a blank state, meaning the brainwasher can fill you in with whatever they want. They then help you to release your guilt. This is a tactic to get rid of your belief system. Once this is done, they can introduce you to a new set of beliefs. Many of his patients who trusted him implicitly and explicitly and who loved him dearly were in the stage of tremendous shock and extreme anguish.

Several of them preferred not to have any additional surgery since they regarded it as a sign that any further surgery would no longer be necessary. They go through a tremendous amount of grief over the loss of such a significant person. All of our patients required counseling in order to come to grips with the death of an important caring human being. The same thing holds true, naturally, if the husband of a terminally ill woman dies or a terminally ill patient loses a child during his or her hospitalization. They should be told the facts; Somebody has to take the time, share that news with them, and then remain available for helping them to work through this tremendous loss. How do you handle the family of a person who has died in an accident when they come to the emergency room after death has occurred? It is very important that the physician notify the family of the death of their relative and that this duty not be delegated to a nurse or member of another helping profession. It is not that the nurse cannot handle it, sometimes she can handle it more appropriately, but for the family it is important to know that the physician was present, that everything possible was tried to prevent the death. Another survey, this one of senior executives in large US companies, suggests that about 30 percent of promotion decisions involve one candidate only. In our experiments, when evaluators looked at candidate profiles individually, men were more likely to be hired for the math task and women for the verbal task, including those who had performed below par. Our intervention, where evaluators were exposed to more than one candidate, was able to overcome these stereotypical assessments. Comparative evaluation focused evaluators' attention on individual performance instead of group stereotypes. When candidates were evaluated comparatively, not only did the gender gap vanish completely, but basically all evaluators now chose the top performer. This makes comparative evaluation not just more fair, but also profit maximizing. The right thing turned out to be the smart thing, too. Without hesitation, I recommend comparative evaluation procedures to all organizations I work with. It is an immediately available design that promotes gender equality and an improved bottom line. At the Kennedy School, whenever possible, we bundle our junior faculty searches. Finally, the rebuilding of self--which is all about reconstructing your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.