Steven Fein: The Art and Science of Social Psychology

Steven Fein, a professor of psychology at Williams College, recently sat down with Garth Neufeld of PsychSessions to discuss his career, research, and teaching. He highlights his 32-year tenure at the elite liberal arts college, noting its small class sizes and focus on undergraduate education. Steve also discusses his work with co-authors Saul Kassin and Hazel Rose Markus on the widely-used textbook, "Social Psychology," now in its 12th edition. His research has focused on stereotyping, prejudice, and social norms, with notable studies examining the influence of audience reactions on presidential debates. In one study, he found that audience applause can significantly alter viewers' perceptions of a candidate's performance. He reflects on his educational and career paths, emphasizing the importance of storytelling and making psychology relevant for students.

Transcript

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 0:01

Hi folks. This is Garth, and I am so excited to be here today with Steven Fein. Steven Fein is a professor of psychology at Williams College, and that is in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Steve, welcome to psych sessions.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 0:18

Thanks so much. It's really an honor to be here. I saw that two of your most recent podcasts are with Carol tavris and Elliot Aronson, and I'm like, why am I here part of a Make A Wish kind of thing, but I appreciate love it. Well,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 0:35

thank you. And you're here because, because we really wanted to have you on this podcast. And from what I know about you and your work, you have some I mean, I love storytelling, Steve, and I think that you probably have some pretty cool stories based on the research that you have done. And so first of all, for people who don't know what Williams College is or where it is, where are you in Massachusetts?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:02

Yeah, we're in the extreme northwest corner the Berkshires, which is beautiful right just under Vermont and just to to the east of New York State. So it's gorgeous here. It's very rural, but it's like as far away as you can be from Boston and still be in Massachusetts. So it's the other side of the state, and it's a really elite liberal arts college. Since I've been there, it's been like, rated number one in us new school report among liberal colleges like every year, which I take full credit for, of course. And so I'm really blessed to have just fantastic students. I don't have to work as hard as some of my colleagues do at other schools to get them excited about learning and interested in it. So it's just a really great place to teach and and it's an undergraduate liberal arts college, so I don't have graduate students, which, when I was coming out of grad school. I never envisioned myself going in this direction. We can talk about that at some point, but it's just great because they're good enough and motivated enough and disciplined enough to work with me to do really good research. So, and I wouldn't have caught me on. I certainly wouldn't have stayed here all these years, if not for that.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 2:20

How many years have you been there?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 2:21

I've been in here for about 32 years, which is a number you do not like to share.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 2:28

Really interesting. Okay, and so how big is the institution? How many students?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 2:32

About 2200 students, something like that.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 2:37

That's all right, that's a really nice size. Your classrooms must be reasonable.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 2:42

Yeah, you know, we, my seminars, We sort of cap it like 16 or 19. Sometimes we'll have eight, and Williams has a lot of tutorials, so it's just meetings with two students and yourself in your office. But social psych is really, really popular here. And so I let my lecture, my introductory social psych class, get large, because so many students want to take it. And that could be up to, you know, 150 180 students sometime, which, for here, is huge. I know, for, you know, University of Michigan, where I went to grad school, that would be a tiny section, but it feels, kind of electric when the room is filled up with a lot of students.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 3:22

Well, when, and we should tell people too, that you write a social psychology textbook. So you're giving some love to Elliot Aronson, of course, who who also writes a social psychology textbook, but you are in a 12th edition of your book right now, so I don't have to ask which book you use for your students, but can you just quickly tell me, like, how did you get into and probably there's a story behind it I imagine?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 3:23

It's funny, when I when I arrived at Williams, you know, I came right out of grad school. Was in the days where you didn't need a postdoc yet, necessarily, and I went right from undergrad to grad school, and right from grad school to here, so it's a ridiculously direct path. And when I came to Williams, I had two senior colleagues in social psychology. One was Al Goethals, who's and one was and the other one was Saul cat Saul Catherine, and they're both great social psychologists. Do great work and are great people, and each of them had their own social psych textbook. So casting had one with Sharon Brown and Al Golf was had one with Joel Cooper and some other people, and that was the book I actually used as an undergrad. Because, you know, so I anyway, I get to Williams, and I'm like, which senior faculty member do I piss off by not using their book to assign? And so I was going to just go with a neutral third party. So I actually looked at David Myers book because we had used that in grad school and but I read. I read the book that Al golls had co author, and the one that saw it had co authored. And I just fell in love with the with Sauls. It just, it just read beautifully. You talk about storytelling, it tells story. They're both. He's a great writer, and I could not use it, even though I knew, by choosing him. I'm not choosing and, you know, Al didn't care. He was perfectly nice guy. So sure, it didn't really, you know, I got tenure eventually despite this. But anyway, I love the book and and so song and I got, you know, got close. We did some research together along with Al. And then he was looking for, or they were looking for a someone to write, like their instructors, manual and test bank and study guide, and he knew that he had a sense that I'd be good at that, because, you know, he saw me teach, he saw me write, and he felt like we were very we had a consistent voice. So that's how I first joined that team is doing the ancillaries, and then Sharon was at retirement age, and so they were looking to replace her with somebody else, and they both asked me to come on as an author, as opposed to just doing the ancillaries. And it's really amazing, like Sharon's voice a little bit different than Saul's in mine, but Saul and I have very similar voices to the point where I was just doing this with the new 12th edition. My daughters were home visiting, and the book had just come out and just came out of a box. So I had them read like the introductory pages of a bunch of chapters, and have them guess whether I wrote it or not, and they were not great at figuring that out. Sometimes they all that's definitely you dad, but other times it was, it was a hard call. So I feel like there's a real smooth consistency to us across the chapters that we take the lead on. But you know, again, it was just the thing about our textbook that I think that I take a lot of pride in, and then I saw, when I first was just a reader of it was great in terms of current events, lots of news and politics and sports to make it apply to things that students and people are interested in, as well as very current scholarship. And just really well written. The photographs are chosen in a really, you know, a very careful way that they're not just conceptually relevant, but they're esthetically pleasing. So that's something that Saul and I both really, really value. And, you know, we're on our 12th edition now, and at some point along the way, Hazel Marcus joined in. And so she is the person who brings in her expertise on culture, which is, she's one of the founders of that sort of area, and a giant in that so that added a whole other element, where every single chapter, because some social psych textbooks have a chapter that has culture as a feature, culture and something, maybe culture and genes, or whatever, ours has culture in every single chapter, because we have Hazel Marcus and so we and we think it's relevant to every single topic there is in the field. So that's another thing about our book that we take a lot of pride in.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 8:21

Let me ask you a question, because I'm quite familiar with like intro psych authors and the way that they talk about approaching their books. A lot of times they do it in partnership. Because do you teach intro or general Psych? Okay, so it's

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 8:35

when we teach intro. Sorry to interrupt, but yeah, you do in a very different, unusual way. I don't know if any of that school that does this, we break it up into we have five instructors teaching, splitting up the course. So a neuroscientist teaches a neuroscience couple weeks, and a cognitive psychologist teaches about cognitive and so forth. So I just teach the social part of of the course that's interesting,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 8:58

that that sort of layers on to kind of APA recommendations for pillars of the different areas of psychology. I don't know if you've seen these, but basically what you describe was like a biological pillar, you know, a social pillar, a social personality pillar, a cognitive pillar, oh, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna get them all health pillar, do you have a health person

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 9:18

doing one? We, we we don't. We have a health we just recently hired a health psychologist who, who, that's a big feature of what she talks about. But it's not specifically about the the she also covers

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 9:30

other areas as well. Well, that's fascinating. I mean, yeah, as soon as you started talking about I thought, Oh, well, that. That was the recommendation for choosing content for intro psych, yeah.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 9:39

I mean, I remember, you know, in when I was in grad school at Michigan, we had, there was a great, extremely popular intro psych teacher who the students loved. He was like a cult figure around campus, who was it? Drew Weston, okay, and, you know, but. And he was a clinician, primarily, students would come out of that class, you know, with a very strong passion about clinical psychology, but they'd have a much more impoverished, you know, understanding or excitement about some of the other areas, and through no fault of Drew, it's just what he was most passionate about, and that just came through, right? And what he sort of emphasized more. And he was a great instructor. And I know of other instructors who are not as great and as talented, who, again, it's their area gets, you know, for better or worse, the you know, the most passion, the most expertise, and students come away with so, you know, like, if I had to teach the neuro section, you know, of an intro psych class, and I do my best, I'd read up on it, and I'd be okay, I think, yeah, but my neuroscience science colleague down the hall could do a much better job at that, and similarly, I could do a much better job at social than he or she Could. So that was our thinking about doing it this way. And, you know, there's some downsides to having five instructors rather than just one, but, but we really value having each area represented by someone who knows that area really, really well and is most passionate about it. So they get five people who all think their area is the best, you know. So that's a great perspective, I think,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 11:23

yeah, I mean, the reason why I asked about it was exactly for what you're saying, which is, we are not experts in all of these areas of psychology. So intro becomes one of the very difficult courses to teach, if not maybe the most difficult course to teach, because you might be sort of expert in one or two areas, right? Is social at all like that? Because I know you said, like, Hazel brings this cultural component. You bring, if I'm correct, I think it's like your expertise is in stereotypes and prejudice. And I'm sure we'll get into the rest of it. And then Saul. I don't know what kind of background stall comes from. But is it like

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 12:02

that in the book, you mean, or the way we teach? Yeah, just if

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 12:06

I was teaching a social psych class, which I don't teach, are there things that, if I'm a social psychologist, that are out outside of my expertise right there, where it's kind of harder to navigate?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 12:19

I think, you know, it's an interesting question. I feel like it's, it's an area that the different areas within social often intersect so much that if you're, you know, a reasonable scholar of the field, and you do a lot of reading, you're going to be familiar with most of the areas that we want to cover. So, you know, in a semester, you're always making choices about I can only emphasize so much, right? And I think some instructors are hurt when they try to be extremely broad and they can't get in depth about anything, because it's just they're trying to cover everything there might be, and that could be sort of like going through an art museum on a motorcycle. Oh yeah, there's Renoir, so you want to give certain things time to breathe and to get into the depth of it. So I'm sure there might be some topics that I don't cover, that someone else might who's really that's what their research is about. But I feel pretty comfortable covering all the, you know, all the areas of social psych that that I think are most appropriate, and certainly by doing a textbook where, yeah, maybe the area I know the best is one particular chapter, the stereotyping and prejudice chapter, for example. But I, you know, make it my mission to become expert at all the different, you know, areas that I'm primarily responsible for. So I feel like I become an even better student of the field, which then translates into better teaching. Because I really dive into, like, I've never done real work on, like altruism, for example, in my own research, but I know that field really well. That's a field because, you know, I write about that, and I try and I get really excited about it when I do, you know, dive into the research on that and tell the stories I want to tell about them.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 14:03

You know, anybody who's anybody who's listening to you right now, who loves teaching? I can, I've already picked it up a couple times that you really enjoy teaching. That's not always the case, right? When you're a researcher, right? Yeah.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 14:17

No, totally, yeah. I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, I

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 14:21

mean, and I think we'll get there. I'd like to learn about where that came from, and when you realize that you like teaching. But give me a moment to just, just ask you a couple more questions about about social psych for a second. So is your is your home organization like or are you involved? SPSP, Is that who you? Is that the organization call home, okay? And, and so I guess most social psychologists come out of grad school, and that's kind of, that's where they, they place themselves, right? Yeah, yeah. And what's, what is, what is that community, like a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, are probably part. More part of, like, the Society for the teaching of psychology, and so folks like me don't know what SPSP is like. Can you describe that a little

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 15:08

bit? Yeah, it's, it's definitely much more focused, almost exclusively, not completely, but almost on the research side. We rarely have much discussion about teaching. You know, formally, at least, there's often a, there might be a symposium at a conference about it, but it's, you know, it's, it's a very small piece of it's really all about what people are working on in terms of their research. And, you know, I was actually on the executive committee of that, of that of SPSP, when it was first starting. And at the time, we just felt like we needed a smaller group for serious personality and social psychologists in terms of research that is less broad than like APA, or, you know, things like that, where social just one little sliver of the whole pie. And it's good to have those conferences too, but we wanted one where we can really get into the weeds. So it's very research focused, and there's a lot of networking, you know, one that so there was a smaller society called Society of experimental social psychologists that I belong to CESP. But that one you you actually had to be nominated to get in and approve, then you could only do it. I think, remember how many years post PhD it is, maybe five years or something. So there were no grad students there, and it was, it was very high level and exciting because it was small. You know, you can have intimate symposia and really get to know, you know, the giants of the field are in a small room with you, which is really cool, but it was, it was elitist. It was exclusive. You couldn't, you know, there weren't grad students, there weren't new assistant professors. So we wanted to have SPS be formed where we can have similar kind of smaller, intensive conference about research, but not as elitist and exclusive, so grad students could be there, and you didn't have to be nominated and approved and things like that. And it just took off. We originally, I remember being on the trying to make decisions with the powers that be, but how should we have a conference every year or every two years? And I was like, oh, every year is too much. We're not going to be able to feel and it was every two years. And by the second year it was, like, it was enormously successful. And so I was totally wrong in my conservatism with that.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 17:33

How has it grown? How has it grown since then, and like, and how have they managed? Kind of the interest,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 17:40

yeah, yeah. I mean, the interest is, is, is there? Because it's the best opportunity for anybody in the field to to be in the same room with, you know, the giants of the field and to and, you know, get to talk to them and say, Look, I've been, I've been doing this research based on your work. And do you have all these opportunities to engage in that. Plus, obviously, here everyone's cutting edge research. But you know, it has gotten so popular that it can be overwhelming and it lose. It definitely has lost some of that intimacy that we had early on, and some people, and sometimes some years I don't go because, like, it's just too much people. Too bad. It's just everything is so crowded you have to wait in line for your lunch box, you know, your box of lunch for too long. And I don't know how to manage that. I'm no longer involved in the administration of that society. It's been years since I was yeah, so. But the reason people keep going is because it's, it's a just a good opportunity to see what's really current and to to reunite with people you you know you've met over the years and don't otherwise, get to see

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 18:53

that. That's helpful, and it's interesting. Would you consider yourself like mid career, late career? At this point?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 19:01

I just had a birthday that makes me think late. I feel mid. I feel young, yeah, but, you know, time is what it is. And I'd like to be optimistic and say mid, but, you know,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 19:16

I don't know. Okay, well, well, and I only asked because I think that from my observations, the way that people serve over time changes, right? So sure, you know, I wonder, like, it sounds like you've kind of gone back to your teaching and research and writing and maybe, maybe less, kind of out there, social, kind of building your career out there. And more, I don't even know if we'd call it introvert, but, but, you know, kind of back back to home base, sort of, it seems like

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 19:45

absolutely, that's definitely true. It's a good way to describe it. And it even sort of predated just age. With me, it was just a little bit, it's, it's, it can be, you know, I. I, like one of my best friends in grad school, we would, you know, we would see each other at conferences after we both got our jobs at different schools. And he was so natural at being able to go up to anybody and make a conversation with every member of them the next year. It's, oh, didn't you do this? And I would be like, I wish I had some more of that than he that he does. He's just so good at. And for me, it was just it was kind of a burden to try to do all that all the time, and beyond, I'd be excited about what everyone's doing, but to be able to sort of approach certain people. And it just got exhausting. And I felt like I just it just wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do every every single year, and I'd rather just be doing my own thing, doing my writing, doing my teaching. And as you said, as you suggested, you know, SPSP certainly teaching is not something that's that's promoted or talked about very much compared to, like a teaching of psychology conference. So I and it's something I love so much that, you know, it just wasn't serving all of my needs as much as I might have.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 21:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really, it's, it's interesting to think about as these, because, you know, some of these institutions just grow and grow and they change over time, right? And so, yeah, the play, the players definitely change, which is a good thing, I think. Yeah, one of the things you want to do is get get new people plugged into these, these existing institutions. All right, so I have a final question just about your book, because I've heard and you mentioned Dave Myers earlier in my conversations with Dave. You know, early on, Dave hired himself a writing coach, and he really wanted to work on voice. Now, I'm not a textbook author. I get voice, I guess, to some extent. But you mentioned voice, you mentioned that Saul and you have the kind of a very similar voice. When did you realize that that was going to be important? And do you, do you consciously? Do you work on it?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 22:00

I don't consciously work on it, other than I do a lot of it, and I do a lot of self editing. I do a lot of like, I work on like, I can work on a single paragraph, like, endlessly, until I feel I have my right so in that sense. But it's not like something where I like read about how to do better writing or ever taken a course in it. It's just something that always came pretty naturally to me, even starting in high school, I just love writing. I loved English. When I got to college, I thought it'd be an English sort of literature major, so I read a lot. And I think just reading great writing is the best way to to to improve your own writing. And I still am a voracious reader. You know, outside of the field, and I had, I think, a couple of good role several good role models when I was in school who, I think, just through osmosis, I absorbed some of their some of their tendencies, but mostly I think it came through just reading great literature and books of all sorts and and then I think what makes me as successful as I can be in teaching and writing, you know, writing a textbook is I just, I think again, it comes somewhat natural to me. It's something, but I do think about it all the time is, I just try to be to take the perspective of my audience all the time, like, what do they assume? What would they be confused by I've, you know, and then going to conferences, or seeing people come in and give talks at my school, great, great researchers who sometimes start like their talk on, what I would say is page 12, like they haven't set up the context well enough, because they're like, at this high level about the research, and they don't understand. You got to bring people up to it. They might consciously, if you ask them, but when they actually do it, they fall right into there. This is my perspective, and hopefully you'll, you'll figure it out with me. So I've just been I think I have a lot of empathy. And so when I'm in front of the room lecturing or in a seminar, I'm constantly looking for nonverbal cues to like, what are they getting? What are they confused by? And I've been doing this for over 30 years now, and I'm still very attuned to that kind of thing, like my canvas thing, because it worked last five years when I taught it this way, that it's going to continue. So I'm constantly reading the room, and when I'm writing, where you can't read the room, but you could project and say what, you know, what's going to work saying it this way. Can I say a little bit simpler? You know? How can I put in inject some humor without being cutesy, yeah, that kind of thing. It's just something I think about naturally and and, you know, and work on in terms of writing drafts and drafts until I feel like I've got that right.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 24:54

Yeah, it's so important. It's such a it's such a neat skill set for people who can understand the research and. Also communicate it. I was talking to a friend in business about in psychology, how we have these amazing researchers. You can go, like, see amazing researchers, and then see them give a talk, and it's not a great talk, which is nuts, right? And then you have these people who are journalists or communicators, even somebody like an Alan Alda or somebody like that, who is just very skilled at their thing, which is communication and and then they can dabble. You know, when you cross over, there are some researchers who can cross over, like you have done, into the communication and do it effectively. And there are some communicators who can cross over into the science and do it effectively. I just think it's a really neat space, also a very difficult one to do. Well, seems to me, yeah, I

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 25:45

mean, it's what drew me to social psychology in the first place. Was, to me, it was always about the marriage of art and science. So like I said, I when I was coming out of high school, I was, you know, all into English literature. That's what I was going to major in. And I took my first psychology classes, and Joel Cooper was the person who was teaching my first social psych class, and he's a giant in the field, one of the great founders of of social psychology, and did early work on dissonance and and was very dynamic, personable teacher, but, but hearing the stories about these really clever experiments, which required, like, it was almost like creating a play. You know, yeah, you had to create a script, and you had to have direction, and you had to make a believable, have the audience suspend this belief, but within the constraints of science. So it's got to be done in a precise way where there's not confounds and demand characteristics. You know, the first and I remember we had to do, like, a little term paper on whatever we wanted. You know about some sub area, some some research area in the field, and for whatever reason, I chose the bystander intervention research, you know, Darley and Latin a and John Darley was down the hall. You know, he was another professor at Princeton where he was an undergrad. And I didn't know him yet, but I think I I just sort of, I must have felt like his presence somehow in the bricks and and in the walls, like hazel Marcus has talked about how culture could sometimes be like in the in the in the brick and mortar building. I like that. Yeah, so, and I remember, so this was back in the day when, you know, before you can read journals electronically, and there's a little psychology library in the psych building. So I'd go into this little library and I pull out this big journal from, you know, 1968 and open it up, and the page are all kind of great, a little bit, and they smell a little musty, because it's been sitting in there for years. And read this stuff about how someone is pretending to have an epileptic seizure, and how the or someone's fallen off of a ladder and screaming help. And what do the subjects do? And I just fell in love with that. Like, again, you had to create this, this drama, but make it believable and real, but within scientific methodology and that combination of art and science just, you know, just blew me away. Like, this is cool, and you could actually and I remember in that first Psych class, we had to design our own little experiment. And, and my TA for that class was Pete Ditto. He was a grad student at Princeton, and now he's a very well known social psychologist in his own right. And, and we were like brainstorming about how to design some study. And I said I had an idea. And he said, bingo. And I was like, Yes, I felt so like alive that, you know, that this, this grad student who seemed so old, and he was probably like, you know, 23 you know, thought my idea was good, and so it just went from there. And I took more and more psych classes, and I just fell in love with it. And, you know, I grew up without any role models. You know, I was a first generation college student my I didn't know anybody in my family whose career was something they did because they enjoyed it. It's just, this is what, yeah, they can get paid. Where did you grow up? I grew up in a place called bayo New Jersey, so it's right near New York City. It's pretty lower working class, and that's how, you know, I that's what I grew up in. And my father worked in the Postal Service, and, you know, was fairly miserable, but, you know, at the job, but it was secure. And, you know, it brought enough, brought home, enough to for us to live on. So I didn't, I just expected, at some point I'll find a job like that that will just, you know, be what I have to

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 29:49

do. Nobody was going to college, around to nobody was going to college.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 29:55

And and then I stumbled into this, and I. Um, shockingly, you know, I've been doing it ever since, and I've, like, every day I think about it's like, I'm so lucky to be doing something I absolutely love.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 30:09

So from when, when you were a kid, is there any kind of foreshadowing of kind of the arts in what you said you like to read and write? So that was probably something,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 30:22

yeah, I mean, I, I'm sure there was, and I'm not thinking of but you know, what really clicked for me was just some good teachers. You know, it's as simple as that. You know, I had, like, a an English teacher in like, seventh and eighth grade who was like one of the meanest women you'll ever she was like a caricature, you know, she'll watch these old movies and like, they're gonna beat you with the ruler. They didn't do that, but it was that kind of thing, yeah. But she just instilled, like, you know, a sense of, you know, how to write properly. She would make a diagram census, so we know all the grammar right. And I still remember those lessons all these years later. I hated her, but I have enormous respect for how effective she was as a teacher. And then in high school, I just had a few teachers who just, I, you know, were really inspiring. And in particular my honors English class teacher that I had for my two or three years, and he was, he stood out in the school. He was weird. He was, I think he was a non conformist. In a school there was a lot of conformity. I'm sure he didn't get along with any of the other teachers administration, because he was, you know, I think he lived in New York City and commuted in. He would go to plays and encourage us to do this stuff and and it just, I just fell in love with, with with what he was, what he was dishing out, and they would occasionally go to plays with small groups in this city and and it just, it just, it just created this love of writing and literature and drama that stayed with me.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 31:52

It's interesting to hear you, first of all talk about theaters, because I wonder if that's some of the overlap, right, but, but when I talked to Elliot aaronson recently, and he told he discussed, just like you did, kind of designing the script and and making sure it works and it's believable. It is like going to the theater or something like that, where you you need to make sure that it is authentic, right, right? And, and, so, yeah, I just, I Okay, so if I had to do it all over again, there's a couple careers that, and kind of, if I could do it all over again, probably social psychology would be in there. For me. My background is, is, is counseling psych, but, or, marketing. Strangely, I really like, I really like that world. But I think that, you know, there are so many, and I was actually talking to wood Good, good friend about this, that that there are so many people, there are so many teachers that I have met who have some sort of background in the arts, which is interesting to me, yeah. And I wonder, you know what that is about, kind of our love for theatrics, for being able to communicate something in a way that is memorable. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's certainly

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 33:13

go ahead. It has to make for better teaching that kind of love and exposure, you know, to just again, make your students excited about what you're what you're teaching them, and it because there is a performance element to it, and not everyone cares about that, or or is particularly good at it, but, and it's not fake, it's real, but you still need to be performing it in a way that that keeps everyone you know excited and engaged on a cold February morning, you know. And you know, and it's so like, I've the last year I've been teaching a psych stats class, and, you know, and so this is a required course for the major. The large majority of students do not want to be taking this course if they could get away with not doing it, because that's not what they signed up for psychology for, right? And I make it. I love the challenge of teaching it for that reason. And the very first thing I tell my students is my goal for this course is, at the end of the semester, you're gonna say that didn't suck, yeah, and, and then, you know, in the end, they're like, Yeah, you're right. And actually, I kind of enjoy coming to class, and the only way to do that is by by bringing your own passion and making it clear why this is relevant. First of all, teaching in a clear way and all that. But yeah, so that's obviously important and necessary, but you need to do more than that, and you need to bring your own enthusiasm and energy to it. And then they it's contagious. And then they they see all this could be fun and interesting and and they could see why it's relevant to all kinds of things, other than just, how do I do this analysis?

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 34:50

So do you do you lean on your social psychology research and expertise for teaching that stats class? Is that what you pull from? Yeah, yeah, of course. Because it's inherently interesting, right? Yeah.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 35:02

And, you know, a lot of Social Psychology Today is not that interesting, you know. I mean, it's interesting in what they're the points, you know, the theoretical points that are being made. But the research itself can be pretty dry. It's very, I mean, stats, the complexity of stats today has just gone up. You know, it's been a revolution in this, which is important, and there's a lot of good to that, but the old studies of creating a drama and creating and even how live subjects is now a lot of it's done online, and you never see the person they're not in the same room with you, and we need that for sample size and statistical power and things like that. But you lose a little bit of that excitement that some of the classics, you know, would give and, you know, and I feel like I'm very old school. I still do that. I do a lot of research online, because I have to. But my favorite studies, I've been involved, and I try to bring some of that even in the online world. Sure, thank you for a compelling story or whatever, but it's not the same like the first studies. I really felt I took ownership over in grad school, you know, I was basically like a film director. I had a script, I had confederates, I had to rehearse them. And, you know, this one study where we had this woman being interviewed for a job, and it had to make her good enough, but not too good, so that there was room for participants to like her or not. So there's, you know, based on the stereotypes that we played with, and it just was, I was having the best time just being like a director of this, of this little movie we were creating.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 36:34

Are the questions different now for social psychologists, or maybe a different way to say that is, can we study the same questions with the New World, with the new technology, with the new way that things are being done, with the new statistics, or whatever I

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 36:52

think they can be, I think a lot of more. I think there's certainly, you know, there's always new things to to that become more in vogue or not, but you know, it's just a different approach, and you can't necessarily answer the same questions at a more micro level, but in terms of general, theoretical, conceptual issues that we're trying to tackle, whether it's prejudice or whether it's altruism or whether it's aggression or group dynamics, we're still Looking at those kind of things, yeah,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 37:21

yeah. Okay, so at what point do you decide to go to college when you were in high school? Yeah, right,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 37:31

I just, I was on like an honors track in high school. I was just academically very successful, and it just that seemed like, well, then that's what you do when you're getting good grades. Because our high school was it was very like, there's like a tech program, there was like a business program, and there was like a Honors Program, and it's based on, you know, how you did your first years. You sort of get tracked into those. So my high school was very split in terms of that. And most of the students did the sort of tech or business, and then there were some that went to the sort of honors, where the expectation was, then you go to college with this, right? And so I just seemed like, okay, that's what you have to do. I knew nothing about the different schools out there. I had, again, I didn't know anybody. I mean, some of the students who graduated right before me went to some different colleges, so I knew a little bit through them, but I was pretty clueless about it. But again, I had this honors English teacher who just took me under his wing, and so you got to go to one of these kind of schools. So you have the you have the potential. And I was like, Okay, I'll fly. And it just sort of, you know, just kind of worked out.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 38:41

How many schools did you apply to? You remember,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 38:44

I think something like eight or nine, okay, and it's a really funny story, actually, about how I wound up in Princeton. So, you know, I got into some great schools, including Princeton and Yale. I remember I was choosing, I really like both of them when I visited, but the financial aid packages they were both offering was just not good enough for what my family felt they could afford. It would just be too much of a sacrifice. So most of the students who went to college from my high school went to the State University of New York, of New Jersey, which is Rutgers. So I was like, Okay, I'll just go there and it'd be basically free. I got scholarships. It'll be free. So that's, that's, you know, you know, an easy decision, but in my senior year, my guidance counselor gave me a bunch of, as I did everybody, a bunch of like, forms to fill out for potential fellowships or scholarships, rather. And one of them, which I didn't pay any attention to when I filled it out, was the golden nugget scholarship. Golden Nugget was a casino in Las Vegas and New Jersey. And, you know, I figured, okay, maybe they have, like, $100 gift for people in those states. So I get this call that they I've reached the. The finalist round, and I have to write this essay to to be evaluated. And this is, like, late my senior year, I was like, I don't want to do this. What the golden nugget? What the hell is this? I'm going to be going to Rutgers. I don't need this. And it's the only time in my life where my my father pushed me academically. Like, no, you got to do this. Never did that before. But somehow he's like, No, you gotta, you gotta, at least give this a shot. So I almost passively aggressively wrote a really weird, I thought stream of consciousness essay, and and then, you know, I don't know, a couple weeks later get a call that I've, I've won a scholarship, and I have to go to Atlantic City to meet this guy named Steve Wynn, who I'd never heard of, and I couldn't Google his name yet. That didn't exist. So I get my father and I drive down to Atlantic City, and, you know, I go to the front desk and I'm supposed to meet somebody named Steve Wynn. And like, Oh, you're gonna go to the penthouse. So turns out it seems like your face, you recognize the name. He was the owner of the golden nugget, and was one of the richest men in the world and and it's become a huge mogul since then. And, you know, and anyway, so we go to his office, and he says how my essay just spoke to him. It reminded him of himself when he was, you know, high school kid, and he gave me, like, this enormous scholarship, 1000s and 1000s of dollars to go to any school in New Jersey or Nevada. And so I was like, I guess I could go to Princeton. And then he changed it, like, an hour late. I actually go to high school you want? I don't care. But by then, I was like, Alright, I decided on Princeton, so that's how I wound up there, as opposed to anywhere else. And he personally, so basically the mafia, I think, helped supply, help fund my

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 41:50

but he personally, your your essay. He personally read those essays. Mm, hmm. Remember what it was about? Remember what you talked about?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 42:00

I remember the title was a multiple singularity, and it was just about how you have multiple selves. That was an early psychology kind of thing, I guess, yeah, and beyond that, I couldn't tell you, it's just something about like I have this part of me. I have this part, you know, and he just liked it for whatever reason,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 42:18

and that was at the end of your communication with him.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 42:21

No, every year while I was in college, he'd have a dinner that he invited me and some, some of the other scholarship winners over the years. And I, you know, there are people like Kenny Rogers or the governor of New Jersey would be there and, you know, shake our hands and and then, you know, we kept a little bit of a correspondence over the years. And when he was once, I was, I was at a conference at SPSP in Las Vegas, number of years later, and I stayed at The Mirage, which was one of his hotels at the time, so I got to say a quick hello and thank him for him starting me off on, you know what turned into my career, and gave him a copy of my textbook. Actually, that's wild. But then we lost touch after after that, he's become a controversial figure, yeah.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 43:04

So, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, undergraduate experience at Princeton. How was that?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 43:15

I loved it academically. You know, there were, it was a great, great psychology program. And I got involved in a lot of research. You every student has to do a senior thesis and a junior basically thesis. And my advisor, my main advisor, was someone named Charlie Lord, sweet guy. He did some really interesting research that. And you know. So we designed this project on cap attitudes about capital punishment, and we wanted to see if people who are very pro death penalty, even even promoting mandatory sentences for certain kind of crime, like if you commit mass murder and you're found guilty, you're put to death. No, there's no judge discretion or jury discretion. That's the that's the sentence. If you gave them information about the person that the defendant, that humanized them didn't make them likable, but just made them like beacon, like they have a dog named Boomer, you know, and some other little facts that could be true of anybody that people were willing to say, Nah, they shouldn't be put to death, you know. So if they fit basically their prototype for what a mass murder probably is like, yes, they should be convicted, they should be sentenced to death, but if they were surprisingly different from what the the each participant expected of a mass murder, what their personality would be like, then they wouldn't. So I had to create this again, this sort of creativity, where, for each subject that we had, we had asked them a bunch of questions about, what do you think a mass murderer is like in these different ways, these different traits and relationships and stuff. And I had to craft a story about. A defendant that either did or didn't fit that prototype for each person is a little bit different, and so, so that's what we did for my senior thesis. And and Ned Jones, who is one of my heroes, he's one of the fathers of attribution theory, was sort of a secondary advisor for me, so I wound up just hanging out in the psych department all the time. They even gave me an office there, which was kind of crazy, and I just absorbed it. I loved it. So I loved it. Academically, I didn't love this. My social life there at Princeton. I didn't feel like I fit in, which is probably my own fault than anybody else's.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 45:37

But what was it like? Because I think probably there are a lot of students who felt that way, or, yeah,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 45:42

I'm sure it was one of those things where you think you're the only one who's like an imposter. Here plenty of others, right? We know that, but it just seemed to me like everyone else knew the drill. I kind of didn't. And I remember my one of my roommates, his father, took us out to dinner, and I remember we're driving. And he said, So where did you prepare and I had no idea what that meant like to me, for dinner, I just put on a fresh shirt. And he meant, like, what prep school did I go to? And I hadn't, I didn't know about prep schools, so it's that kind of thing and that interesting. Certainly, the majority of students probably weren't like that, but enough were, and I just didn't feel, you know, comfortable immediately. I probably just became a cell phone prophecy after a little while, or a little distant from maybe the mainstream there. I mean, I had a group of friends and had some fun and stuff, but it just it. I just didn't love the culture so much, you know, socially. But I loved, I love the academics, and not just in Psychology, English, philosophy, astronomy, even just a whole I just, there was great teaching there, which, yeah, it

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 46:51

reminds me of a, in fact, I think an early episode I the only one of the only times I ever interviewed a non psychologist for this podcast is, was I interviewed my friend. His name is, his name is Muhammad hamoudi, and he's a lawyer, and he's a public defender. He was a public defender in Seattle, and his job was to take these people who have done horrendous things and to go in front of the judge and basically to humanize them in front of, you know, a lot of context, but I mean, what your research, what you were describing just then was exactly, I feel like, what he's doing in a real life. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and it works to some extent, right? I mean, you know it, you've, you've studied it, you've seen the results, right? Yeah, you know, yeah. Your work is, I think, just the work of social psychologists, but your work in particular, human beings can relate to it, right? We see it. Can you? Can you just talk a little bit about maybe some of the work, because after this, you go to Michigan State, right to mission. You're yep, yep. Sorry. I just offended, like a lot of people, yeah, you did. We'll edit that out. Yeah. Okay, so University of Michigan, and, oh, by the way, where was, was makichi retired already. By the time you went to

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 48:14

the University, he was still around. He was still around. Was he? I didn't know him, but I knew of him. Yeah, yeah,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 48:19

interesting, just like a giant in teaching, right? Yes, psychology. Okay, so, how did you make the decision to go to the University of Michigan? All right?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 48:31

Mostly, you know, I again, I had great social psychologists at Princeton in my department who I got to know, so people like Ned Jones and Joel Cooper, eventually, John Darley, my my advisor, Charlie Lord, and they were all telling me, okay, these are the best schools right now in social psych. So University of Michigan was considered for what I was interested in, like, that's the place you should go. So I was choosing between. The end it came down to Michigan, like, and I got into, like, Harvard and Ned Jones. I remember saying, well, Harvard is a name, so you might want to consider, it's not that great right now. It's the time was in a low point became, you know what it would be again, but, uh, time was not, maybe the ideal place, um, and uh, but you should, you know, universe, Michigan's where a lot of the actions right now. And NYU is the other school. So I was choosing between John barge, young John barge, who whose research was like a perfect fit for what I was interested in, really like motivated social cognition. That's what excited me. And then at Michigan, it was more like how many great people there were. And all my advisors were telling me what a great program I was so and I grown up right outside New York City. I went to school in New Jersey, you know, for undergrad, and I just thought it'd be good for me to go somewhere else and not be back in, you know, although living in the Greenwich Village was always my dream, you know, because I love that. It's my favorite area of the city. But I just like, I feel like I should, I should. Venture a little away. So that was the sort of deciding factor, and I went to Michigan. But again, why Michigan? I suppose other schools. It was just because that's what my advisors were all saying, is the best place for what I was interested in, all right? And was very young, yeah, a guy who was the Princeton. He just recently got his PhD at Princeton. So he we actually even overlapped, I think, by a year when he was a grad student I was an undergrad. So he's very young assistant professor at Michigan and and very hungry, you know, trying to get tenure and stuff. And he and we just really work well together initially. And he was a great so he's another, so he's a very good teacher. And I think I talked over you. Who was that? James Hilton, is this? Okay? Yeah. And he was, again, he was someone who who I think was much more passionate about his teaching than his research, and he was a great teacher. And again, I just absorbed some of his lessons. And how do you teach a social psych class? And that was really, I think, influential for me,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 51:06

yeah. So is that where you taught your first classes?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 51:12

Well, the TAs would would lead a discussion section, yeah. So I got a lot of practice with that. I did it every semester and and I did actually get to co teach an entire course, which is very unusual at the time for an undergrad. I co taught it with Dick Nisbet, who's a really big deal and and in the field. And he was teaching our research method class. And Nisbet, as you know, he is a superstar in the field, but he was very nervous about his teaching. He didn't feel like, did it? Well, I don't know if that changed over the years, but at the time, he was like, and he just wanted somebody else who had a good reputation as a teacher, from from the grad from a for grad students. And I guess he heard I was so he invited me to co teach the course. So I actually gave half the lecture in this class, which is a great experience. And so that was my first time. I was, like, half responsible for a course, a whole

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 52:07

course, yeah. And you were doing research at the same time, yeah, right, all the time, yeah, yeah. And, and, but you came out of that experience with a PhD, and at that point you were applying, what did you think you're gonna primarily do research, or were you hoping to teach? Or how did that work its way out?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 52:27

I mean, I definitely I want to do both. I wouldn't happily accept an offer where I couldn't do both, and both would be valued. Now, if no offers were out there, then I take what I had to. But I was really hoping that will work out. And I expected to be at a place like the University of Michigan, you know, in our one university, but where, like my advisor, if you could still teach and, you know, and so I was actually, in the end, choosing between two schools that could not be more different on almost every dimension. It was UCLA or Williams College. And the only reason I even knew about Williams College and applied was because I met Al goffles. He'd come to Michigan for a talk, and he was a senior social person here at Williams. And I loved him. He talked up Williams and where you can really where both around valued and expected research and teaching. He said, You really should just apply and check it out, come visit. And I did, and I and that's where I met Saul Catherine, and I just fell in love with the people and, you know, and shocked myself by by choosing Williams. And you know, I never lived somewhere so rural and but I just absolutely love the students and love my colleagues, and here I am, only here later, 32

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 53:51

years later. Yeah, wow. Okay, so you've done some pretty interesting research. Can you talk about what is the research that you asked you're asked to talk about most. That's what I want to share with our audience here. Okay, I've read a little bit about it, so maybe you could just share a couple of them.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 54:09

Yeah, there's, there's two, I guess that come up the most one, it's just in my mind, because every four years I get all of a sudden, people start journalists and stuff, start contacting me when the presidential debates are about to happen. Yes, so I just have gotten a slew of these, which is kind of fun. I haven't done the research in a long time, but so I often forget, oh yeah, I used to do this, but I still keep, keeping on top of the research that other people do on it, but about presidential debates and a lot of my research, I have two basic primary strands of research. One is on sort of like, called like motivate, motivated social cognition, and how, for example, the way we, you know, express stereotyping or prejudice, is often influenced without our knowledge by how we want to see the world. So motivation. So that's one line. I've done a lot of work on the other one is about social norms, how our perceptions of how other people like us, what they think influences us. So the debate stuff came from that second category about social norms. I remember watching presidential debates and hearing the audience reaction, and so people are really applauding or one candidate more than the other. Could that be influencing people at home, who you know, ultimate voters? And from what we know about social it certainly might, right? So we wanted to put that to the test. So I did in a few different ways, during a debate, during a presidential debate, I had people watching one of three different rooms in groups of like, 2025 and we sprinkled in a handful of Confederates to really make a lot of noise for promoting one candidate over the other during the debate. Like really, like applauding what this one candidate would say a lot more, and kind of snicker at the other candidate. And it just obviously randomly assigned people to one condition, they promoted one person, another one was the other one, and a third condition, who was no Confederates that vocalas at all. And we've got enormous differences. I've never seen such huge differences in perceptions of all the other, you know, the naive participants, in terms of who they thought won the debate who they would probably vote for. And then we did a study in the same line, where, instead we took an old debate, we took the sort of famous debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. This is the second of the debates, the first debate Reagan had done terribly. He was a wildly popular incumbent president at this point, he was going to wipe the floor up with Mondale, but his first debate, he was already at the time, it's kind of interesting. I was coming back into the current discussion. He was already the oldest president ever, and there was worries about his age and whether he was actually starting to lose it cognitively, right? And he seemed like he'd lost his his train of thought multiple times during the first debate, people were like, really, this? Actually, he might lose. So all of a sudden, the polls started closing, and Mondo had a chance in the second debate, Reagan was ready and his team for a question about his age. And I think it was the very first or maybe second question in the debate. THE MODERATOR asked him about, Well, are you maybe too old for this? I remember when President Kennedy had to stay up all night during the Cuban Missile the Cuban Missile Crisis, blah, blah, blah, and Reagan said, No, I don't think age should be an issue in the campaign. And also, you know, I'm not going to exploit, I'm not camera exact word I'm not going to exploit for political purposes. My candidate, my opponent's using an experience. So he took the question and flipped it, and the audience laughed, and the moderator laughed. Mondel laughed. And then he, you know, he milked it. He took some water while they're all laughing. The milk it louder because he's an actor. He says, I don't know if it was Seneca or Cicero who said something like, if not for the elders of the society, there would be no civilization, you know, so hilarious little joke on age, and then this brilliant little pithy now, of course, it was all pre rehearsed, of course, and his team knew whether it was Seneca or Cicero, but he acted as if he's going back to his college days to remember this line. So he to show how his memory was intact. So anyway, it Mondale himself said later, I knew the election was over at that moment because he hit it out. And even the moderator said, you hit that one out of the park. And I remember thinking, did that? How much did that moment matter in the debate? So it's a 90 minute long debate, and how much did the reaction of everyone matter in and above the content of what was said. So we had participants, William students, years after this, watched the debate, you know, 90 minutes debate, and we either left it in intact, or we took out that whole question and answer. So 87 minutes were the same, but not those three. Or we left it in, but we took out all the reaction. There was no laughter, no applause, and just went to the next question, and we found in the control condition where we didn't edit anything, everyone thought Reagan easily won the debate, right? If we took out the whole exchange, it became more like 5050, and it was a huge victory for Reagan or or basically a toss up, but to me, in the condition where they left it in, we left it in, but took out the reaction, a huge win for mondel. So it more than the what Reagan said, it was how was validated by the audience. So if there was no reaction, people can say he didn't answer the question, right? He skirted it. That's that's not right, you know? So it's about the social validation, not about what he actually said that actually made a real big difference.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 59:53

I haven't I have an observation, and a question for my observation is it reminds me of a comic who's bombing, who. Who put something out there and then it's not received. It gets very awkward, very quickly. I wonder, yes, I wonder, what's going on there, right? My question was, did two of the did the experimental condition? Which of the experimental conditions occurred to you first, and did you add one afterwards? Or did you always know it was going to be three? Or is that too far back for you to go?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:00:21

Well, probably too far back for me to be accurate in what I'm about to say. It's possible I'm not remembering this correctly. But I felt like I think it was both all three all the time, because I want to know both the answer to both questions, how much did this sound bite matter? Yeah. And so take it out or leave it in, was clearly that had to be two conditions, yep. And then how much did the reaction matter? And then, so therefore, there had to be that third condition. So that was always part of what I wanted. Both of those questions answered. Nick, I would have been happy if it was just, you know, one or the other, but the fact that both of them worked in different, you know, to different degrees was, was really kind of, I

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:01:02

do kind of think about the classic like social psychology studies, or not even the classic ones, the really interesting ones, like what you've done, and wonder, like, what would have happened if they would have just gone a little further to test some other condition that they didn't? Would we have found out something really interesting? Yeah, that's kind of the fun of it, right? Think back. It's also what drives the research forward. So, so that was the big one, or that was one of them. Can you tell us about the other one as well? Yeah, the

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:01:26

other one, which is, is certainly more, I think, important in the field. It's the thing I get cited for the most, and stuff. The president's debate was just as fun, because every four years it becomes interesting again, to people, but the This is work. I started grad school with a another grad student, actually Steve Spencer, who was a year or two behind me in grad school, and he was a student of Claude Steele, and who's one of my giant heroes. I love him, but two of us. I remember when I first heard Claude Steele give it what turned out to be his job talk at Michigan. He was at University of Washington at the time, came to Michigan, gave a talk, and it's the first time I heard about self affirmation theory. And I remember thinking so the way self affirmation is basically, when you make people think about values and aspects of themselves that they feel really good about and feel safe when they think about it, and it's affirms their sense of self. And sort of what Claude was doing with it initially was as an alternative to cognitive dissonance, like if you in a situation where we normally experience cognitive dissonance and then change your attitudes to be consistent with your behavior, if you actually make people feel good about themselves, and something completely unrelated, that little threat from dissonant doesn't matter so much to you anymore, because, you know, you're a good person. So if you did this thing because this thing, so what? And you don't change your attitude. And I thought that was, you know, that was pretty interesting, but I so the way they did affirmation is I basically handed people like a values checklist and and got them to think about and something that's really important to them, like, Well, how do people affirm in the wild? Like naturally? Or do they and I was thinking because I was really interested in stereotyping and prejudice, that sometimes people might use negative stereotypes and prejudice to make someone else seem worse than yourself, and that makes you feel better in comparison, right, downward, social comparison. And I wonder if that was kind of affirming, you know, kind of a self affirmation. So I talked about this with my friend who is a cloud student. Well, do you think this might work? So we decided to investigate this in a few different ways. And so I wanted to look at a group that there was a strong negative stereotype about, but that people don't feel so bad about using. You know, it wasn't as politically incorrect to use it. So this is, again, where the sort of art of it is, like, how do you what's the right way to execute this idea that, basically, if you make people feel better or worse about themselves, will that affect how much, how likely they are to engage in prejudice towards someone based on their group membership. So what group, and at the time, this is the University of Michigan, there was a pretty strong negative stereotype about Jewish American princesses. They called them so Jewish women who came from, often from New York, like Long Island in particular, who were seen as entitled and spoiled and privileged. And there'd be all these Jap jokes, Jewish American princess jokes at the time. There's even a TV show about, like the nanny was about like the Jewish American princess. And so people didn't feel so bad about telling Jap jokes, because they were seen as a privileged group, they could take it and deserve it. So anyway, I thought that would be an interesting group to utilize. So we had, it's also a group where you can have someone seem to be a member of that group or not. So we found a woman, an undergrad, who looked like she. Could be Jewish or maybe not, depending on how we made her up and stuff and what she was wearing. And, you know, I asked undergrads what whether Jewish American princess looked like, and what they wore, and they had very specific things, like a certain kind of hair clip, for example, and a certain color sweatshirt. So we got all that information. And we had, I had this woman who took a picture of her with the hair clip, or not with a Star of David or a cross. So the same woman looking like she's probably Jewish or she probably isn't, and we created a fake resume about her that was identical for all irrelevant stuff, except her name was either Julie Goldberg or something else, her sorority. All the sororities in Michigan at the time were incredibly segregated. You had some sororities that one or two that were almost all Jews, Jewish women and and others that had no Jewish women in them. So she was a member of one of the other sorority. And I think there was one other little feature, oh, she was wearing the cross for the star David. But all the details were relevant were the same. And then we had them watch a video of her being interviewed. That's where I was talking about my directing debut was having. So wanted to have her be pretty good, but not great. And so we had participants read the resume, watch her job interview, and rate her on how good they think she'd be for the job, how intelligent, how likable, etc. Before that, they were in what was ostensibly an unrelated study where they took an intelligence test that we created and we gave them fake feedback to make them either feel really good or really bad. You know, they were in the 98th percentile or the 47th percentile. And of course, at the end of the study, we showed them it was all random and all that. So when they were feeling good about themselves, there was the subjects who thought they were evaluating a Jewish woman rated her just as well as the subjects who rated who thought she wasn't Jewish. No bias at all. But if they were feeling bad about themselves, they derogated the hell out of her, if they thought she was Jewish and most interesting, the more they did that, the more they derogated her when she was Jewish, the better they felt about themselves after the study, after that evaluation. So by derogating her, they sort of felt, you know, oh, superior to her. Now I'm sure for 90% of the subjects, it was completely not unconscious. If they knew they did that, they'd feel bad. They wouldn't feel better about themselves. They feel worse if they were unfair and biased. But they had no idea, and what the stereotype allowed them to do is to basically create a lens through which they could see her negatively, like they could say, oh yeah, she's seen whiny. She seemed stuck up, you know. But it wasn't in the video or the resume. It's just they had, oh, she's Jewish, and it from this group and the sorority. She must be. So it justified, whereas they didn't do that for the other woman, like they could have, you know, they were feeling bad about themselves. They evaluate just a woman from a neutral group. They could have derogated her too at fossa period, but they didn't have an excuse for it. They didn't have an easy tool to justify their derogation of her, the Jewish woman, part of it gave them that, and that's why they derogated her so much and felt better to the extent that

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:08:20

they did that. So you observe this difference, and it's pretty self evident what the difference was. Did you theorize what mechanisms are going on that caused somebody to do this? Yeah, I

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:08:33

think partly it's, it's a downward social for the stereotype allowed for an easy opportunity to engage in downward social comparison. It made them It gave them an opportunity to make her seem worse than she was, and therefore, in comparison, yeah, I messed up on this test. But I'm not this terrible person, you know. And it affirmed them. It's like, oh yeah, I'm actually, I'm not like that. I actually am a good person. I'm not wanting, I'm not materialistic, I'm not etc, etc. So yeah, I screwed up on this test. But so what? It's just a temporary thing. So I think that it gave them like a filter that would justify their downward social comparison against this other person.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:09:14

Where do you see your research? Kind of in our world today? I know it's a long time ago, and so you've probably moved on in the things that you're thinking about, but or when you're cited, what are people studying when they're Yeah,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:09:26

I mean, there's still people doing that kind of work, and I'm doing it to some extent. I think the more general picture is that how I get our motivation, in this case, we're motivated to to see ourselves as better than other people or some other person to because we're feeling this threat about ourselves. And you know, there are other ways of dealing with that threat that could be good or bad, but this idea that you have this, this motive to fix your your threat and self image, and you're looking for the easiest path to do that. And that manifests itself in all kinds of interesting ways. So people are doing that kind of thing, and I'm doing that kind of thing, like politically, if you're, like, really motivated to see your side as the right one, how you'll take information and completely distort it so that, see, I was right and you were wrong, and you get this political polarization because you get more and more fuel for why I'm even more right and you're even more wrong. And it's it satisfies when you're feeling insecure, when you're feeling threatened, which we all are these days, often, and the social media and the media just, you know, will will fuel all that the way it's curated, that's a feeling of existential threat. So how do you deal with that? So you find scapegoats to sort of put it on, whether it's the migrants or whether it's the Maga, whatever it is. So I think that's really relevant. You know, today, if not more than ever. Yeah, I

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:10:57

just, whenever I talk to you social psychologists, I always think about, okay, what am I participating in right now that I am, that I'm unconscious of, and I think we all need to ask ourselves that question, because it's kind of out of control, right? The masses are not thinking about it. They're not aware of it, and it's created. It's got really, really bad outcomes associated with it. It's kind of troubling to see. It must be interesting for you to kind of know some of what's going on in those situations. It's interesting,

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:11:26

but it's also terrifying, because you know that it's going to happen and there's nothing people are going to do about it. You know, hopefully with better education, they sort of be aware of it and but it's in all you see, it manifested in some like I just did this series of studies this past year as part of my stats class, where we were looking at attitudes about Taylor Swift and the NFL. And so we did one experiment where we had people, and this is done online with hundreds of people from around the country. Where we had them, we showed them images from different sports and asked them, Is this from the NFL or not? So everyone who agreed to be in a study had it has some familiarity with with football and interest in it. So we showed them pictures from basketball or from college or from the NFL and asked them, so is this from the NFL or not, or are these pictures from that and after a little while, in one condition, in the midst of several NFL action photos, there were some of Taylor Swift at game, at cheese games like celebrating, right or not? You know, with other fans celebrating, but not Taylor Swift. And then after they they went through this exercise, we asked them to rate, how much do you like the NFL? And we found that conservatives, if they were exposed to just three images of Taylor Swift or games, compared to like 15 other NFL things, rated the NFL significantly less positively if they saw those Taylor Swift images, and I didn't. Now they had no idea they were doing this, you know, but it just was another example, like she threatens certain people and her presence as woman, liberal woman, invading my space of the NFL, which is our territory, and it may, it sort of created this sort of negative feeling about the entire, you know, league that they're, they love, and, you know, and again, it's all part of the same, I think psychology about like she creates a certain little bit of a threat annoyance, like she doesn't belong within this group, and it just pisses me off, and that it leaks over into the whole NFL isn't what it used to be. Oh,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:13:49

wow. Well, that is some real world research. I love that.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:13:53

The whole reason I did it was because I wanted my students to learn how to do the analyzes necessary for the stats, but do it on something fun and that they'd be really meaningful to them, to them, and it

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:14:03

got so much coverage. But, like, why not? As a psychologist, ask a scientific question about it and show students how to think through it. I love it, Steve, I have taken a bunch of your time. But before we before we go, is there anything else I always want to give people a chance to promote or to just, like, tell our audience anything that you're working on, or else that you're writing about, or whatever. Is there anything else that you want to share with folks?

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:14:30

Well, great. Thanks. You know, I guess again, we didn't talk as much as maybe I might have about the textbook, because I just it's something I have just great pride in. I just want people to just look at it read like, if you read just the intro, like two pages per chapter, and you'll get a sense of how it's written. And I just would hope that people who otherwise haven't checked it out, if they, if they teach those like social side class, just to check it out, it's the authors are casting fine and Marcus in terms of research that are. I'm doing right now. One of the lines of research I'm excited about is looking at, again, with this is actually, this brings up norms and prejudice together. I've been looking at attitudes about things like conservative American conservatives, attitudes about like same sex marriage and gay couples adopting and how they're very, you know, overall, very negative toward toward those, you know, to gay rights compared to liberals. So what I wanted to do was to see if, again, norms might actually change some of those otherwise intractable attitudes. Because you could reconstrue What a classic conservative attitude might be about something like same sex marriage, like saying conservatives don't think the government should be involved in our everyday lives. You know what happens behind closed doors? Government should keep out. So who cares? Who's you know, as long I don't want to see it necessarily, because I don't like that. But if you know, if they're behind closed doors, married, I don't care. Consumers shouldn't care about that, the government should get involved. That's obviously not the attitude most conservatives have, but it could be in a counterfactual world. So did a study, or series of studies, where, and we're still ongoing, where we had liberals and conservatives. We asked them, there's about stuff like that, but we had before they expressed their attitudes, we had them see other alleged subjects, answers to the questions about this and and they were either, you know, a mixed group of liberals and reserves, or only a fellow conservatives who said very standard conservative things about other things, like, you know, the very pro gun, anti regulation of guns, but in terms of something like same sex marriage. I said this stuff. I was just talking about how, you know, 10 years ago, I would have been totally opposed to this, but I realized now the government should keep out of it, so as long as I don't have to see it as long enough to see it on my TV commercials and stuff. So again, it's clear they don't like, you know, gay stuff, but I don't care government, we should keep out of it. They want to get married, they want to adopt. That's up to them to see if that would actually change conservatives attitudes. And it did. It had a significant effect. And we're also just a senior thesis student this past year where we're doing similar things with gun control kind of issues and and getting some movement on that based on those kind of things, interesting, that's it's the most recent work I'm doing at the moment. Yeah, I always feel like politicians should be reaching out to psychologists to ask them how to proceed with kind of moving the needle on some of these issues. Yeah, I remember, sorry, take more time. I remember the height of the pandemic, when the director of National Institute of Health, I think it was, was sort of bemoaning that they wish that they had given more funding to social psych research to better address why there's so much resistance to the education they were trying to give about the pandemic and about vaccines and stuff, and all the work was going to the science about how to how to get the best vaccines and stuff, which is and how to get treatments, which, of course, has to be done. But there should have been also more attention if we knew the social psychology better of how you get people to understand be receptive to these messages and and he kind of wish that there had been more of that. So I do think there's a lot potential contribution to be made with listening to social science research more than they do not just social psych, but all social science work. I'd say, Yeah,

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:18:42

well, let's hope that they do listen a little bit. Hey, Steve. It was really nice to meet you folks. The book is social psychology, 12th edition. Steve's still doing some research. You can find his articles wherever great articles are sold. If you want to go to check out Steve's book on sage Publishing's website, you can do it at collegepublishing.sagepub.com and learn more there. Steve, thanks for taking the time today. I want to wish you all the best, and maybe I'll maybe I'll see you at a teaching conference someday.

Steven Fein, Sage Author and Professor of Psychology at Williams College: 1:19:17

That'd be great. Thanks so much for having me, it was a real pleasure.

Garth Neufeld, PsychSessions: 1:19:20

folks, if you want to check out Steve's Social Psychology textbook, the 12th edition, just visit collegepublishing.sagepub.com, and you can search for the book there. Thanks.