Chapter 12: Interpersonal Processes & Social Interaction

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Okay, let's unpack this.

Let's do it.

We are diving deep today into something absolutely fundamental to the human experience, yet something that's often really hard to pin down scientifically, interpersonal processes.

Right.

And specifically, we're looking at attachments, how they form, how we can even measure them, what the dynamics are, and just how much influence they have on us.

And that word attachments, that's really the foundation of so much of psychology, isn't it?

It is.

I mean, whether you call them bonds, relationships, friendships, these are the things that matter most to almost everyone.

We build our lives around them.

Absolutely.

So you'd think, given how central they are, that psychology would have this complete map of the average person's social world.

You would.

But what's so fascinating, and what our source material points out, is this strange paradox.

Despite the topic's importance, there's a surprising lack of these huge,

general scientific studies on the whole landscape of human connection.

So where has the research been focused, then?

It tends to get very, very specific.

Really heavy research in these sort of niche areas.

Think of the classic work on infant mother attachments from people like Bulby or Maccoby and Masters.

Foundational stuff.

Totally.

Or, you know, big surveys on adult sexual contacts from Kinsey and his colleagues.

We even have specialized journals, like the Journal of Marriage and the Family, dedicated to just that one bond.

So we have these incredibly detailed pictures of very specific relationships, but the bigger picture is a bit blurry.

Exactly.

So our mission today is to walk through where psychology has managed to quantify and analyze these bonds to give us some real tools to understand our own social lives.

And to start, we really need to get our heads around the sheer reign of social connection that's out there.

It's not all neatly in the middle.

Not at all.

And Lowenthal's 1964 study of elderly psychiatric patients, people aged 60 and over, gives us a really stark picture of one extreme end of that spectrum, social isolation.

So what did he actually find in that study?

Well, he identified two big categories of isolation.

And together they made up about 20 % of the people he studied.

Almost 10 % were what he called pure isolates.

Pure isolates?

What does that even mean?

It meant that the person had had absolutely zero contact with any relative or friend for the last three years.

And crucially,

no one was even involved in the decision to hospitalize them.

Three years?

That's almost unbelievable.

It really makes the case for why we need these concrete definitions.

It really does.

And then another ten percent were semi isolates.

So only very infrequent or casual contacts.

And when Lowenthal dug into the histories of those pure isolates, he found this pattern he called the lifelong alienated.

And what did that profile look like?

It was pretty consistent.

They were mostly single men or men whose marriages had ended very early on.

They tended to have these rolling stone histories, moving jobs and homes constantly.

And maybe the most telling part, they often called themselves a lone wolf.

So for some people, this isn't just a phase, it's a stable lifelong identity.

It certainly suggests that.

And it really sets the stage for why we can't just use vague words like clothes or superficial.

If we're going to study this stuff scientifically,

we need objective, measurable criteria.

Which brings us to Grutz's review.

He laid out some really concrete criteria for what attachment and dependence actually look like in terms of behavior.

He did.

And even though they were often first studied in infants and mothers, they apply just as well to adult relationships.

So let's start with the most basic one.

Criterion one.

Approach responses.

Right.

And this is much broader than just, you know, walking up to someone.

It can be sexual contact, non -sexual physical touch, just being in the same room or even just talking and sharing information.

Even over the phone, I'd imagine.

Exactly.

Even remotely.

The key is that intentional movement towards the other person in whatever form it takes.

And that form changes as we get older, right?

Massively.

You can track a kid's growing independence by how much less time they spend physically near their parents.

But what's interesting is the source notes a similar pattern in some marriages.

The amount of leisure time a couple spends together might peak early and then actually decrease later on.

Which might free up time for other kinds of socializing with friends or hobbies.

Precisely.

The balance is always shifting.

So from just being near someone to actually touching them, what's criterion two?

Criterion two is body contact.

It's a measure of intimacy that for a long time was kind of ignored in human psychology, maybe because it's so sensitive.

But Girard's research in 1966 really started to map it out.

He had that visualization, the body for others.

Since we can't see it, can you paint a picture for us?

Of course.

Imagine a simple outline of a human body, all divided up into different sections.

Hands, forearms, chest, head, and so on.

Girard asked college students to report which parts of their body had been touched by four different people.

Their mother, their father, a same -sex friend, and an opposite -sex friend.

And he used shading to show how many people reported being touched in each area.

Exactly.

He had four levels.

The lightest shade meant only 0 to 25 % of people reported contact there.

The darkest, boldest pattern meant that a huge majority, 76 to 100%, reported contact.

So what was the big takeaway when you compared the four maps?

Well, some areas were high contact for everyone, like hands and arms.

But the really interesting differences were in the more core areas of the body.

The father map, for instance, often had the least shading overall.

But the key finding, in terms of total body area, touched.

Who scored highest?

It was the opposite -sex friendships.

They showed the most intimacy, if you define intimacy, just by that one criterion of total body area.

In fact, only the opposite -sex friend got that darkest shading in sensitive areas like the chest and upper legs.

Which really highlights the unique role of that potential sexual component, even in a friendship.

It does.

It gives us a concrete way to measure something we usually just feel.

Let's move to the flip side of attachment.

Criterion three, separation distress.

This one is maybe the most primal.

We see it so clearly in infants that protest and despair when they're separated from their mothers.

But for adults, it's just as powerful.

How we react to loss, or even just the idea of loss, is a huge part of how we define closeness.

The fear of loss can be just as strong as the loss itself.

Totally.

Think about how we talk.

Life hasn't been the same since I lost.

Or that deep anxiety in, I don't know what I'd do without.

If the thought of separation doesn't cause much distress,

the attachment is probably pretty superficial.

Okay, so beyond the physical and emotional, we get to the informational.

Criterion four is self -disclosure.

Right.

And this is a big one for adults.

It's about psychological intimacy.

Taylor and Altman did this work where they actually scaled different topics based on how intimate they were.

They found people are incredibly choosy about who they share vulnerable details with.

What were the most protected high -intimacy topics?

Things like the details of your sex life, your feelings about your own body and attractiveness,

deep -seated feelings about your family, especially conflicts, and your financial situation.

Sharing that stuff is a huge sign of trust.

And who do we tend to trust the most with that level of disclosure?

Well, Gerard and the Laskhouse study found a really clear winner.

For married people, it was their spouse.

By a long shot.

More than parents, more than friends.

And they also found that overall unmarried people just reported lower levels of this kind of intimate disclosure in general.

So the implication there is pretty significant.

It is.

It suggests that having a sexual bond is a really important condition for creating the opportunity for that deep social intimacy.

If you don't have a satisfactory sexual relationship, you might be missing one of the most favorable environments for developing that kind of closeness.

Now the next criterion, liking,

seems obviously connected to disclosure.

They're totally intertwined.

It's a feedback loop.

A study by Worthy and his colleagues showed two things.

First, and this isn't surprising, people were more likely to disclose to people they already liked.

Makes sense.

You trust people you like.

But here's the crucial part.

The subjects who made more intimate disclosures were then rated as more liked by the others afterwards.

So disclosure doesn't just come from liking.

It actually creates more liking.

It's a cycle.

Trust leads to disclosure, which leads to more liking, which leads to more trust.

Exactly.

Reciprocity is key.

Another study found that when disclosures were returned in kind, liking between colleagues went way up.

It's how relationships grow.

Okay, let's round out the list with criterion six, which sounds like it comes from the world of therapy.

Empathy, warmth, and genuineness.

It does.

This is from Trueaxe and Cartcuff's work on what makes a good psychotherapist.

But really, these are the conditions for any good friendship or mentoring relationship.

So break them down for us.

First, accurate empathy.

That's about being really sensitive to what the other person is feeling, both what they say and what they don't say, and then showing them that you understand.

It's more than just listening.

It's deep comprehension.

Then there's non -possessive warmth.

Which means accepting the person for who they are, right now, without conditions.

It's that unconditional positive regard.

You're not trying to change them or own them.

And finally, genuineness.

This one's about being real, not hiding behind a professional mask or a social role.

You have to be sincere and authentic in the moment.

And this wasn't just, you know, a philosophical wish list.

They could actually measure these things.

Absolutely.

They trained people to reliably rate these conditions just from listening to audio recordings of therapy sessions.

And the data backed it up.

Higher levels of empathy, warmth, and genuineness led to more positive change in patients, their real functional building blocks of connection.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

We've got these six criteria.

Approach, body contact, distress, disclosure, liking, and empathy.

What's the big caution we need to keep in mind?

The crucial thing is that they do not always go together.

We should never assume a relationship that's high on one is high on all of them.

A lot of relationships are close in only very specific and sometimes lopsided ways.

Give us some examples of that.

Relationships that are high on some criteria, but really low on others.

Well, the psychotherapist -patient relationship is a perfect one.

It's designed to have incredibly high disclosure from the patient, but very low disclosure from the therapist.

It's asymmetrical by design.

Okay.

What about a more personal one?

Think about some very long marriages.

They might be high on proximity.

They live together.

They're always around each other, but could be very low on sexual intimacy,

physical touch, or even just liking each other anymore.

A bond held together by habit, not affection.

Precisely.

Or take the extreme example of a relationship with a prostitute.

That's high on a very specific kind of sexual contact, but it's intentionally low on pretty much everything else.

Disclosure, liking, separation, distress.

It's a specialized functional relationship.

That's a really important distinction.

Closeness isn't one thing.

It's multidimensional.

And that leads us right into how we communicate that closeness or lack of it.

And that's all about nonverbal cues.

Right, because so much of that early therapy research was just based on audio tapes.

They were missing all the body language.

They were missing a huge part of the picture.

Posture, gestures, tone of voice.

These things signal affiliation or hostility.

And it turns out they're often more important than the words themselves.

There was that Shapiro study that was just mind -blowing.

It was.

They found that trained raiders could get a pretty good sense of a therapist's empathy and warmth.

Just by looking at still photographs of them.

Without hearing a single word.

Just from a picture.

Yeah.

It just goes to show how much is conveyed by our posture, our facial expression.

It supports this broader idea that our words carry the information, the what, but our nonverbals carry the emotion and define the relationship, the how.

And Argyle's experiments tested this directly, didn't they?

They put the verbal and nonverbal channels in conflict.

They did.

They would have someone say dominant, assertive words, but in a very timid, mousy tone of voice, or vice versa, they created these deliberately mixed messages.

And when people had to judge the overall message, what did they pay attention to?

Overwhelmingly, the nonverbal cues, the tone of voice and facial expression carried way more weight than the actual words being said.

It's the ultimate proof that how you say it is often more important than what you say.

Which brings us directly to the idea of the double bind.

Exactly.

The double bind theory, which came from observing families with a schizophrenic member, is all about receiving those contradictory messages in a really intense relationship.

Like someone saying, I love you, while physically pulling away or flinching.

That's the classic example.

The verbal channel is positive, the nonverbal is negative.

And the original theory was that if you're trapped in a situation like that, where you can't comment on the contradiction, it could be incredibly damaging psychologically.

Has that direct link to schizophrenia held up over time?

The source notes, the evidence for that specific link is weak now.

But the concept of the double bind is still really powerful.

It's a perfect description of what happens in relationships that are stuck in ambiguity or disagreement.

It's a symptom of a communication breakdown.

And speaking of breakdown, let's look at interpersonal conflict.

How did researchers even begin to measure that?

Ferrera and Winter did these studies where they'd bring families into a lab and give them a simple task, like deciding on a movie to watch together, and just observed.

They were looking for the behavioral signs of a problem -family interaction.

And what were those signs?

What could you actually measure?

They found four things.

First, it just took them a really long time to make a decision.

Second, people's individual choices rarely made it into the final group decision, so satisfaction was low.

Okay, so inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

Right.

Third, there was a lot of silence,

just gaps in the conversation.

And fourth, they didn't exchange much actual information.

So people weren't clearly stating their preferences or their reasons.

That sounds like a recipe for resentment.

It really is.

And they proposed this was a self -perpetuating cycle.

Bad communication makes it harder to make decisions, which creates more frustration and even worse communication.

And the source points out this isn't just families.

You see the same patterns and conflicts between staff in a hospital or even in international diplomacy.

So no matter the scale, the dynamics of conflict and communication breakdown look remarkably similar.

They do.

Which brings us to the next big question.

How much of this is about the individual and how much is about the interaction?

Let's start with the individual.

This is the idea of monadic concepts, right?

The idea that you can describe a person by their own attributes separate from any relationship.

Exactly.

It's focusing on the single person, the monad.

A classic example is something like assertive training.

The assumption is that you can teach a person a skill like how to complain effectively, and they can then apply that skill anywhere, with anyone.

The skill is inside them.

It's an internal attribute.

Right.

And a more complex monadic view is to try and map out where people fall on the major dimensions of social behavior.

And the evidence is pretty strong that our social behavior can be boiled down to two main independent dimensions.

The first one, on the horizontal axis, is affection.

This runs from warm, pleasant, and cooperative on one end, all the way to cold, hostile, and uncooperative on the other.

And the second dimension.

That's control on the vertical axis.

It goes from assertive, dominant, and controlling at the top, down to submissive, shy, and dependent at the bottom.

And because they're independent, you can be anywhere on that map, dominant and warm, or submissive and hostile.

Precisely.

And this two -dimensional structure pops up everywhere.

In studies of mothers and children, managers, students, it seems to be a fundamental way we organize social behavior.

The most famous visualization of this is Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle from 1957.

Yes.

The circumplex.

It's a brilliant model.

It takes those two axes of control and affection and then fills in all the points around the circle with specific labels for behavior, like managerial, autocratic, or docile dependent.

And what's the key property of that circle?

How do the different points relate to each other?

The most important rule is that a behavior is most negatively associated with the behavior directly across the circle from it.

They are psychological opposites.

So rebellious distrustful would be the polar opposite of what?

Of responsible hypernormal.

And Leary used this to reframe personality disorders not as a disease, but as someone being rigidly stuck in one section of the circle, unable to be flexible.

And he showed how this monadic view can fall apart in the real world with that study of a management group.

Yes.

That figure is so revealing.

It shows a map of the managers.

The point on the circle is their reputation, how others see them.

And the arrow points to their self -perception, how they see themselves.

And what did it show about their self -awareness?

It showed a massive disconnect.

The managers had very clear reputations.

The production manager was seen as a tyrant.

The personnel manager was seen as a softie.

But every single one of them saw themselves as being in the responsible and hypernormal quadrant, the ideal manager.

So the sales manager, who everyone else saw as bitter and suspicious, thought he was coming across as friendly and tolerant.

Exactly.

It's a profound lack of insight.

And it perfectly explains why there's so much miscommunication and frustration in that kind of environment.

Everyone thinks they're the reasonable one.

This monadic idea also connects to older concepts like marital aptitude.

Right.

The idea from Terman back in the 30s that some people just have marriage -wrecking traits like irritability or moodiness that make them incapable of being happy in any marriage.

It's all about what the individual brings to the table.

But there's a huge limitation to all these monadic concepts, isn't there?

A massive one.

They often fail to account for the power of the social role.

The situation you're in can completely override your personality.

A manager has to be managerial.

A teacher has to teach.

The role dictates the behavior.

There were a couple of great studies demonstrating this.

There were.

First, Borgata's role -playing study.

He took people who he knew were either assertive or submissive by nature and then randomly assigned them to play the role of an assertive or submissive person.

And the assigned role had a much bigger impact on their behavior than their actual personality.

They played the part.

They did.

And even more powerful was Caudil's study in his psychiatric hospital.

He just observed staff meetings.

And while personality mattered a bit, the hospital hierarchy mattered a lot more.

Senior doctors spoke the most, junior nurses spoke the least.

The most assertive nurse still spoke less than the most quiet and retiring doctor.

The role completely determined their level of participation.

Completely, which is the perfect bridge to our next section.

It's not just about the person or the role.

It's about the dynamic two -way street of interaction.

So what does this all mean?

It means we have to start thinking in terms of dyadic conceptions.

We have to think about feedback loops.

It's not just me acting on you.

It's a constant dance where your reaction to my action influences my next action.

This is where implicit personality theory or IPT comes in.

That's the internal map we have of other people.

It is.

It's the collection of beliefs and assumptions you hold about categories of people.

All librarians are quiet or all politicians are dishonest.

These are often unconscious, but they powerfully shape how we first see and react to someone.

And they create some serious biases.

Huge biases.

The source gives great examples.

Mistakes made by low -status kids are seen for what they are.

But the same mistakes by high -status kids are often overlooked.

Or people assume a roughly dressed blood donor must have been forced to do it, while a smartly dressed one is seen as a volunteer.

And the classic one about glasses making people look smarter.

A perfect example of IPT at work.

But one study showed that effect completely vanished if you just let the person talk for five minutes.

As soon as you get real information, the prejudice or the stereotype starts to fade.

OK, so how does our view of ourselves fit into this?

How does self -esteem change how we react to what other people think of us?

This is one of the most interesting findings.

People with high self -esteem react in a very straightforward way.

They like people who praise them and they dislike people who criticize them.

Simple.

But people with low self -esteem.

They barely differentiate.

They don't show that strong preference for the person who praises them.

And Secord and Backman's two -factor theory explains why.

What are the two factors?

Factor one is that everyone, on some level, likes being praised.

It just feels good.

Factor two is that everyone prefers things to be consistent with how they already see themselves.

So how do those two factors play out differently?

For a high self -esteem person, they work together.

Praise feels good and it's consistent with their positive self -view.

So they have a really strong preference for it.

For a low self -esteem person, the factors are in conflict.

The praise might feel good, but it's inconsistent with their negative self -view.

So the two factors kind of cancel each other out, leading to that weak or non -existent preference for praise.

Wow.

That's the real tragedy of low self -esteem.

It literally stops you from being able to accept compliments because they don't fit your story.

And it gets worse.

That need for consistency can actually lead people to sabotage their own success.

Aaronson and Carl Smith did this incredible experiment.

Walk us through it.

Okay, so they had people do a task that was basically a 50 -50 chance of getting it right.

But they gave them fake feedback to make them believe they were either really good at it, high expectancy, or really bad at it, low expectancy.

So they've manipulated people's self -concept for this one task.

Exactly.

Then they did a fifth round where the result was either consistent with that belief or totally inconsistent.

The real test was what people did when they were asked to repeat that fifth round.

How many answers did they change?

Okay, so let's look at the group that was led to believe they were good at it.

When they got an inconsistent bad score, what did they do?

They changed a lot of their answers, about 11 of them, which had perfect sense.

They thought that bad score was a fluke, I'm good at this, so they tried to fix it.

And the most important finding,

the maladaptive one.

That came from the low expectancy group.

When they got a surprisingly good score,

which was inconsistent with their belief that they were losers, they changed almost as many answers, about 10 of them.

Wait, so they changed their correct answers to get a worse score?

Yes.

They actively changed their successful responses on the repeat round, essentially engineering a failure just to restore the consistency of their poor self -view.

They chose to fail because succeeding felt wrong.

That's astonishing.

It's a perfect demonstration of self -sabotage.

The need for a consistent self -story, even a negative one, can be more powerful than the desire for success.

Let's pivot slightly to mate choice.

It seems like these same kinds of rules would apply.

They do.

While you hear these theories about complementarity, you know, a dominant person marrying a submissive one, the research overwhelmingly points to two much simpler things.

Propinquity, which is just being near someone, and similarity.

So we fall for people who are available and who are like us.

Pretty much.

Similarity in social class, education values, interests.

That's what the data supports.

Birds of a feather really do flock together.

Let's get back to Leary's circumplex.

But this time, not as a map, but as a predictive tool, the eliciting function of behavior.

Right.

Leary's big idea was that a certain behavior doesn't just happen in a vacuum.

It actively pulls a specific response from other people.

He had rules for it based on the axes of the circle.

So what's the rule for the vertical axis, the control axis?

The rule there is that you pull the opposite behavior.

Dominance elicits submissiveness.

And submissiveness tends to elicit a leading or advising response from others.

And the horizontal axis, affection.

That pulls a similar behavior.

Hostility breeds hostility.

Friendliness breeds friendliness.

And the research generally backs this up pretty well.

But there are exceptions, right?

It's not a perfect system.

It's not.

The context matters hugely.

One study by Shannon and Gurney found that in a group of female equals, competitive behavior didn't elicit submission, as Leary might predict.

It just elicited more competition.

So the rules change depending on the power dynamic of the group.

They do.

Which leads to this idea of maintaining a balance in our interactions.

We're constantly trying to find an equilibrium.

This is the idea of compensation effects, right?

Especially with things like eye contact and personal space.

Exactly.

We all have a sort of preferred level of intimacy in an interaction.

Argyle and Dean showed that if you mess with one channel, people will automatically adjust another one to get back to that comfort level.

How do they show that?

They had a confederate stare at the subject, which increases intimacy.

Then they move the subject further away, which decreases intimacy.

And they found that the further away the person was, the more eye contact they would make to compensate for the distance.

So they're trying to restore the balance.

Precisely.

The visual from that study just shows a clear line.

As distance goes up, eye contact goes up.

It's an automatic subconscious regulatory system.

Okay, so now we have to talk about how we process all of this.

Interperson perception.

How do our internal maps actually work?

Well, our implicit personality theories are full of these powerful general rules.

We see it in extremes, like paranoid people seeing threats everywhere.

But it's in all of us.

Hyperaggressive boys, for example, were found to interpret neutral actions from others as hostile.

And competitive people tend to assume everyone else is competitive.

They do.

It seems we project our own style onto the world.

There's also a general optimism, pessimism factor.

People with a positive view of themselves tend to have a positive view of others.

Delinquent boys, on the other hand, held negative views about themselves, their families, their teachers,

everything.

This brings up projection, the classic defense mechanism.

It does, though it's more complicated than the old idea of just projecting your own bad traits.

It seems to be really influenced by the situation.

If you're scared, you're more likely to see fear and hostility in others.

And what about other forms of self -deception?

A study by Frenkel Brunswick was really insightful.

She found two main mechanisms.

One was simple histerner.

Omission people just wouldn't mention the negative traits that their colleagues all saw in them.

And the other?

That was distortion into the opposite.

People would describe themselves as the polar opposite of their reputation.

And this was most common in people who already had a bad reputation.

It's like they're trying to will it into being true.

In a way.

And weirdly, she also found that people who really valued an ideal, like sincerity, were often seen by others as being less sincere.

It's a strange disconnect.

So beyond the content of our judgments, what about the structure, this idea of cognitive complexity?

Right.

This is about how organized your mental map is.

Someone with a simple structure tends to see the world in black and white.

People are either good or bad.

Their judgments are all tied to that one dimension.

And a complex thinker.

They have lots of different independent ways of judging people.

They can see someone is intelligent and mean or kind and a bit foolish.

They can hold contradictory ideas at the same time.

So complex thinkers are better at integrating new contradictory information.

Exactly.

If you show them two different sides of a character, they can build a rounded, nuanced opinion.

A simple thinker is more likely to just flip their opinion completely from good to bad, unable to reconcile the two.

Let's talk about attributing responsibility.

When do we decide an action really reflects someone's character?

Jones and Davis argued, we do it when the person had the ability, knowledge, and intention to cause the outcome.

When those are in place, we make what's called a correspondent inference.

We decide the outcome corresponds to their personality.

And we're most confident about that when the behavior is unexpected or out of role.

Totally.

If a job applicant says they're qualified, that's just real behavior.

But if they admit they lack a skill, that's out of role.

And we're much more likely to believe they're being honest.

We learn more from the unexpected.

And this all gets ramped up in a conflict situation because of personal relevance.

Oh, massively.

When you're personally affected,

you make much more extreme and negative judgements about the other person's character.

And we are masters of self -justification.

The aggressive person sees their action not as aggression, but as justified self -defense.

This is the punctuation problem, isn't it?

Where each person sees the other as having started it.

That's exactly.

Wes Lowick described it perfectly.

You see the sequence as,

they provoked me, so I reacted, which they then reacted to.

But they see it as you provoked me, so I reacted.

You're both punctuating the same sequence of events differently and both feel completely justified.

Which makes resolving the conflict almost impossible.

Right.

And all this complexity has led researchers to try and measure things like sensitivity or accuracy and perception.

But they ran into a huge problem.

The artifact problem.

Yes.

The problems of what looks like sensitivity is often just stereotype accuracy.

A happy wife describes her husband as loving and assertive, which is the cultural stereotype for a good husband.

He describes himself the same way.

She looks incredibly perceptive.

But she's just accurately describing the stereotype, not necessarily him as an individual.

Exactly.

And the Shuffling demonstration proved this.

They found that happily married wives were just as accurate at describing other happily married women's husbands as they were their own.

Wow.

That is a gut punch to the romantic idea that happy couples have this unique special insight into each other.

It really challenges it.

It suggests that a lot of what we call sensitivity is really just about having a positive, optimistic social outlook and applying the right positive stereotypes.

That's fascinating.

OK, let's move to our final segment.

How do we actually influence each other, the psychology of power and learning?

We can start with social power.

The basic idea is that if A depends on B for something, B has power over A.

It's clear in relationships like employer, employee, or teacher, student.

And there are different kinds of power, right?

French and Raven laid out five types.

Reward power, coercive power, referent power, which is based on being liked,

expert power, and legitimate power.

And when that power is unequal, the person with more power can use rewards and punishments very effectively.

This is operant conditioning in a social setting.

It is.

And it's been used everywhere from nursery schools to correctional institutions.

The crying boy example is a perfect illustration of how it works.

Right, so walk us through that graph.

What was happening at first?

At first, during the baseline period, the boy's crying was being accidentally rewarded.

Every time he cried, the teachers would rush over and give him attention.

So the crying got more and more frequent.

The attention was the reward.

So what was the intervention?

The extinction phase.

The teachers were instructed to completely ignore the crying, but to give him lots of positive attention whenever he was playing nicely or talking.

And the graph shows the crying just plummets to almost zero.

And they proved it was the attention by reversing it.

They did.

They went back to the old way for a few days, giving attention for crying, and the behavior immediately came back.

It's a stunningly clear demonstration of how contingent rewards shape behavior.

So what happens when power is more equal, like in a marriage?

Then you get bargaining.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's unwritten, but when a relationship is in trouble, sometimes that has to be made really explicit.

That contingency contract for Betty and Bill is a great example.

What were the terms of their deal?

It was very specific.

If Bill slipped up and nagged Betty, she got to buy a dress.

If Betty broke her work routine, which Bill wanted her to stick to, it cost her $5 from her own account.

It's taking these vague resentments and turning them into a formal transactional agreement.

Beyond direct power, a huge amount of our behavior comes from modeling, just watching other people.

A massive amount.

It's how we learn most of our social rules.

It can facilitate behavior.

We eat more when others are eating.

It can cause disinhibition.

We're more likely to litter if we see someone else do it.

Or it can cause inhibition.

We stop doing something if we see a model get punished for it.

And it even works for emotions and beliefs.

Absolutely.

Fears can be contagious.

And in the extreme, you get things like folia due, where a delusion is shared between two people in a close relationship.

We even model things as subtle as how often someone pauses when they speak.

And Bandura broke down the whole process of observational learning into four steps.

He did.

First is attentional processes.

You have to actually notice the model and pay attention.

If you're not looking, you can't learn.

Okay, step one is paying attention.

What's step two?

Retention processes.

You have to remember what you saw.

This means coding it into memory, maybe as an image or a set of rules.

So attend, then retain.

What's third?

Motor reproduction processes.

You have to actually be physically capable of doing the action.

And you need to be able to practice it and get feedback to get it right.

And finally, the most important one, motivation.

Right, motivational processes.

You won't perform the action if you don't have a reason to.

That reason could be an external reward, seeing the model get rewarded, or just the internal satisfaction of doing it right.

That model explains why we're so influenced by people we like or who have high status, but also why just being exposed to someone for a long time is so powerful.

That's why parents are such effective models.

The sheer amount of exposure kids have to them is huge.

And we see it with siblings too.

One study found second born boys were kinder if they had an older sister, and second born girls were more aggressive if they had an older brother.

We model what we see.

And it reinforces that idea that similarity drives connection.

It does.

We hang out with people who are already like us, and then through all this modeling and social influence, we become even more similar over time.

It's a continuous cycle that shapes our entire interpersonal world.

So we've taken this incredible journey through the psychology of our connections.

We started with the challenge of even defining an attachment with concrete criteria like self -disclosure.

Then we looked at individual styles versus the dyadic feedback loop.

We explored all the biases and how we see each other.

And finally, the powerful ways we influence one another through power, conditioning, and modeling.

It's been a real deep dive.

And it shows that our relationships are these living dynamic systems.

They're not static.

And I keep coming back to that finding about low self -esteem, that idea from the Aronson and Carl Smith experiment,

that people will literally engineer their own defeats just to stay consistent with a poor self -view.

It's such a powerful and sad finding.

It is.

And if you connect that to the bigger picture, given that our expectations so heavily shape how we perceive others, and given that people with low self -esteem might not just fail to see the positive, but might be actively working to create the negative, it raises a really important question.

How much of the reality in our relationships is something we are actively constructing from our own deepest beliefs about ourselves, rather than just reacting to what's out there?

It makes you wonder what deeply held negative belief about yourself might be unconsciously limiting the good things you see in your own relationships, maybe even pushing you to sabotage them.

A profound thought to end on.

The ultimate challenge of figuring out what's real and what's a story we're telling ourselves.

Thank you for sharing your source material for this deep dive into interpersonal processes.

We hope this is giving you a really thorough step -by -step tour of the key ideas in this chapter.

It's always a pleasure to unpack the science behind the most important parts of our lives.

And on behalf of the last minute lecture team, thanks for listening.

We'll catch you on the next deep dive.