Birds of a feather – any feather!

Tags

liking, psychology, similarity

[The importance of similarity in liking others]

Whenever I go into a store to buy something and I start chatting with the shop assistant, within seconds it emerges that we share at least 2-3 things in common. Now isn’t this strange?

Back in the 1990s, a young researcher by the name of Donn Byrne wanted to study how similarity affects how much we like others. He started by talking to students and finding out their attitudes and preferences on pretty much everything from religion, to politics, to films, to sports, to premarital sex. He analysed his data and distilled them down to 26 key attributes.

Next, he found some students and asked them to indicate how much they agreed with a number of statements. Some were about serious things like ‘I believe in God’, while others had to do with relatively trivial attitudes, such as ‘I dislike Westerns’. He collected the responses and then a few days later, he showed each person the responses of another individual on the same statements. (Naturally, he had made these up!) Then he asked students how much they liked these other people on the basis of their responses.

Byrne had divided his subjects into four categories. The first group got responses which were practically identical to their own. With the second group it was the other way round. What he discovered was that similarity of views / attitudes mattered enormously. On a scale of liking from 1 – 14, the first group said they loved these other guys (rating: 13 out of 14). The second group all but hated them (rating: 4.41 out of 14). This is a huge difference.

What happened with categories three and four is much more interesting however. Subjects in group three got responses which showed that the other person had similar attitudes in important matters (e.g. religion, politics) but different ones in less important ones (e.g. sports, films). With group four, it was the other way round. Now, you would expect that people in group three would really like these other people, while people in group four would dislike them, right?

Wrong! Incredibly, what Byrne found was that quantity trumps quality! In other words, it does not matter whether we share similar views on important matters, so long as we {“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“df5e4e5d-9285-435c-a4b2-7cae0b216280″],”srcRootClientId”:””}have many trivial things in common. Put another way, it does not matter if we disagree in politics, as long as we share the same name, zodiac sign and shoe-size! (Byrne 1997).

And this is the moral here: do you want your students / your colleagues / your boss / parents etc. to like you? The easiest way to achieve this is to discover as many things as you can that you share in common – however trivial (‘Yes! I too add pepper to my coffee!’). Take a leaf out of the shop assistants’ book.

The Moral: Find and stress similarities between yourself and others.

The Art of Being Selfish

Tags

happiness, Motivation, psychology

[The unexpected link between happiness and altruism]

Try this with your students: ask them to write down a list of things that would make them happier, then put their pens down. Professor Tali Sharot did that with her students, then she smiled and said: ‘I bet none of you listed ‘being kinder’ between ‘earning double what I do now’ and ‘more travelling’. Brilliant! – Read on… 😊

Imagine you are a university student in Vancouver, Canada. One day at the campus, a nice young guy approaches you and gives you an envelope. ‘Here’ he says ‘This is for you’. This actually happened to quite a few people on that particular day. Inside the envelope was some money (either a $ 20 bill or a $ 5 bill) along with a little note asking people to spend this money by buying something for themselves until the evening. Others got a different message; once again they got some money (either $ 20 or $ 5) but this time the note asked them to spend it on buying something for someone else. Later that day, these people were contacted by phone. Sure enough, they had spent the money as they had been asked. The big question was: how were they feeling? To find out, read on or – better still – watch this short clip:

OK – here is what they found: i) the people who had spent money on doing something for others, were much happier at the end of the day;  ii) significantly, it was the act of altruism that mattered – not how much money they had spent.

I remember watching this clip again and again and thinking to myself ‘Wow! This is amazing! Why can’t we use this in class? Students will be using the L2 and they should end up feeling quite a bit happier into the bargain! Here are two ideas:

i)      Get students in groups and ask them to brainstorm little things they could do to make someone happier (e.g. write a little ‘Thank you’ note to their mother [or to your teacher! 😊 ] or do the shopping for the old lady next door.

ii)    Ask students to choose one of the ideas, actually do it and then write a little paragraph about what it was and how the other person felt. You can put these up on the wall (or on a Padlet wall) and students can try to guess who it was that did what.

The possibilities are endless! And while you are at it, you might want to share the following Dalai Lama quote with your students ‘If you would like to be selfish, do it in a clever way […] work for the welfare of others’. Respect.

The Moral: Get students to do things for others – and talk about it in English.

OK – What Happens Next?

Tags

curiosity, investment, Motivation

[The power of investment]

Watching football at the pub with the lads is a favourite male pastime in the UK – but James Lang and his friends thought they’d make the whole thing somewhat more exciting. Every Thursday, they would pick three matches and try to predict who the winner was going to be. The guy with the best crystal ball won a beer from each of the others. Then Lang noticed something interesting: he could remember these games a lot better than the others (‘Small Teaching’ – p. 42).

Why does this happen? Lang gives us two answers:  i) increased attention and ii) emotional engagement. If this is the case, then this is something we could certainly use in class. But has it been tested? Well, consider the following study (‘Stumbling on Happiness’ – p. 116): researchers got two groups of children together. They told the first group that they would ask them some general knowledge questions (e.g.  ‘What is the longest river in the world?’) and then they would give them a reward for their participation – either a chocolate bar, or the answers to the questions. Guess which reward the kids went for… 😊

With the second group though, they did things differently: they asked them the  questions first and only then did they offer them the choice of reward. To everyone’s amazement, this time the children actually eschewed the chocolate in favour of the answers! This is completely counter-intuitive; before the study, the researchers had asked teachers and psychologists to predict what children would choose, and everyone had said they would choose the chocolate in both conditions.

The moral: Getting students to invest in an activity by getting them to guess/predict something is a sure way to motivate them. So how can we do this? We could get them…

… to guess the answers to the questions before giving them a text;

… to complete half-sentences before playing an audio/video track;

… to guess what certain numbers might refer to, etc. etc.

Or you could just get them to predict how a story continues. Take these three ads for instance. You ask students: ‘Why has this happened? What is going to happen next?

• A boy is standing in front of his mother’s mirror carefully applying lipstick on his lips….
• A mother is taking her little daughter to school when she is stopped for speeding. Her daughter writes something on a piece of cardboard and shows it to the policeman…
• A man is playing with his daughter in the garden. In the garden next to theirs, a wedding party are posing for photos. Suddenly, the girl runs up to them…

When the students have written a few lines about how each story unfolds, you play them the clip below. Enjoy!  😊

The Moral: To generate motivation, get students guessing!

What can Put-Pocketing Teach us?

Tags

Classroom Management, demonstration, Motivation

[How demonstrations trump explanations]

A crowded place is a pick-pocket’s paradise. How do you get people to take better care of their belongings? Well, the obvious thing to do is to put up a sign: ‘Beware: Pickpockets Operate in this Area’. What happens when you see this of course is that you automatically tap your pocket to make sure your wallet is still there – which sends just the right message to any pickpocket who may be around! 😊

What to do? The Ogilvy team came up with a brilliant idea: why not employ former thieves and magicians to actually put things inside people’s pockets? And what they put in was a leaflet with a message saying that they too could have their stuff stolen and directing them to a site where they could get more info about what they could do. The results: for every 100 leaflets dropped, 93 people visited the site. Amazing! (Groom & Vellacott ‘Ripple’ – p. 38) Watch this clip:

So what can we, as teachers, learn from this? Well, I have often noticed for instance that when I give my students tips on how to write essays, their eyes glaze over. Sure, they can repeat back the information (‘Yes, yes, we know all this’), but I can tell it has not actually registered. So what I sometimes do, is I get them to read an essay telling them how great it is, and of course they agree. Then I start taking it to pieces by pointing out all kinds of structural and linguistic mistakes which they have failed to notice…  Now the message really sinks in! 😊

But the worst offenders are of course colleagues. I often encounter this attitude at PD events. ‘We are qualified, we are experienced – we know all this stuff’. So what I do then is I challenge them. I give them a short story which describes a lesson and I get them to see whether they can spot all the little things the teacher did well as well as the moments when he slipped up. And I am going to do the same with you now.

This particular story was shared more than a thousand times when it was posted on the British Council Facebook wall. It contains 14 interesting moments – both good and bad. You read the story, you make your notes and you compare them to the commentary underneath. If you get more than 10, you are really good. Enjoy! 😊

The Moral: A good demo can really drive your message home.