One of the themes in this blog over the years is goal contagion, which is the idea that
we often adopt the goals of the people around us. See someone helping others, and you suddenly
want to be helpful. See someone being aggressive,
and it makes you more likely to engage aggressively with others.
What about apathy?
If you see people being indifferent about a task, is that
contagious as well?
That question was explored in a paper in the August, 2014
issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Pontus Leander, James Shah, and Stacey Sanders.
They suggested that when people are wavering in their
commitment to a goal, then being exposed to apathy decreases people’s
motivation to pursue a task.
In one study, participants performed twelve GRE analogy
problems. Prior to solving these
problems, participants did a task in which they responded to words presented in
the center of the screen. Prior to seeing
the words, pictures were flashed quickly on the screen. These pictures either showed students looking
bored or students looking engaged. A
control group saw no pictures. The
pictures were flashed quickly enough that they could be perceived subliminally. After solving the GRE problems, participants
were asked for their undergraduate grade-point average, which is a broad
measure of their commitment to academic work.
Participants with a high GPA were relatively unaffected by
the prime. Those with a low GPA solved
fewer analogy problems when they were primed by apathetic students than when
they were primed by energetic students or received no priming at all.
This result suggests that exposure to apathy can decrease
the motivation for people who are already unsure of their commitment to a
goal. Another study used primes for
apathy and primes for anger. Only primes
for apathy led people to perform more poorly on a later test. This finding suggests that apathy is not just
creating negative emotion that influences performance.
Another study used a more sensitive measure of commitment to
academic achievement. Once again,
participants were exposed to images of people being either apathetic or
not. For half the participants, the
images showed academic situations, and for half the participants, the images
were of nonacademic situations. All
participants then solved anagrams, which they were told were a measure of
verbal fluency. For example, they might
see the letter ECTAR and would have to form the word CRATE.
An interesting pattern of results was obtained. The prime that was not in an academic context
had very little influence on people’s behavior.
The pictures in an academic context had an interesting
influence on people’s behavior.
Participants who were not strongly committed to academic achievement
spent less time on the anagrams and solved fewer anagrams when they saw
pictures priming apathy than when they saw pictures unrelated to apathy. Participants who were strongly committed to
academic achievement actually spent more time on the anagrams and solved more
of them when they saw pictures related to apathy than when they saw pictures
unrelated to apathy.
This pattern suggests two conclusions. First, the influence of apathy is situation
specific. Second, the influence of
seeing apathy depends on a person’s commitment to the goal. People who are not committed to the goal
interpret apathy as a signal that they should also give up. People who are strongly committed to the goal
actually get even more committed by seeing apathy.
The researchers ran several other studies to rule out other
interpretations of the study. For
example, one study demonstrated that just thinking about the goal does not lead
to these effects. The influence of
apathy requires that people have either a low or high commitment to the goal.
What does all of this mean?
We interpret the actions of the people around us. When we see people acting indifferently to a
task, we know that they are expressing a lack of interest in that task. That lack of interest is then related to
people’s existing commitment to a goal.
When people are wavering in their commitment to a goal, then seeing
others who are apathetic nudges them in the direction of giving up. When people are highly committed to the goal,
then seeing others who are apathetic actually increases their commitment to the
goal.
