What Have We Learned?

Such experiments illustrate two important lessons.

  1. There are powerful unseen social forces guiding our behavior. More than we might suspect, these invisible strings of persuasion and group influence constrain and pull us. As group-dwelling creatures whose ancestors' survival was boosted by forming attachments and cooperating in hunting, gathering, and defending, we care about what others think and about maintaining our place in groups. We are social animals.

  2. We need social psychological research. Simply asking people how they would act, or asking what explains their actions, sometimes gives us wrong answers.

Other researchers, too, have found that Benjamin Franklin may have been right: "There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one's self." Unless the causes of one's behavior are conspicuous, people often miss big influences and "see" factors that actually are innocuous. For example, when people are asked to estimate how well the day of the week, the weather, or their last night's sleep predicts their day-to-day mood, they often err badly, report Timothy Wilson and his colleagues. And self-predictions of one's own future behavior are often hardly more accurate than predictions based on the average person, report Sidney Shrauger and Timothy Osberg.

The best advice when predicting yourself, is to consider your past behavior in similar situations. And the best advice when predicting how people, in general, will behave in given situations is not to take a survey, but to experiment.