If you really want to be a scoundrel and use your psychological know-how to persuade a stranger to do something they wouldn't otherwise do, here's a little trick of the trade: convince them that you share the same birthday.
In his last post, PT blogger Stephen Diamond posted birthday salutations to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Yesterday, May 6, was also my birthday, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I must say that in the past I've probably been more sympathetic to Freudian claims by virtue of this coincidental tidbit. That was at least until I read that there was some question as to Freud's actual date of birth. Some say in fact that it's March 6, not May 6.
The story goes something like this: in 1968, a researcher was surprised to discover that records from Freiburg, Moravia, the town where Freud was born, indicated Freud's birth date as being March 6. It remains unclear as to whether this discrepancy between the date celebrated as his birthday and that which is noted in the town's register is a simple clerical error or, as at least one scholar suggests, belies a more scandalous affair. Freudian historiographer Marie Balmary has argued that, despite what even Freud himself thought to be true, March 6 is in fact Freud's real birthday. Balmary alleges that Freud's parents adopted the phoney May 6 date to hide the fact that Freud's mother, Amalie, was already pregnant when she married his father Jakob.
Perhaps we'll never know whether Freud's birthday was secretly marred by premarital lust, but ever since learning that Sigmund and I may have less in common than I thought, I've detected in myself a subtly less congenial reaction to Freudian-like arguments. We scientists pride ourselves on being objective; and if I'm being perfectly objective, I must note this delicate shift in my ability to judge Freud fairly. (I also tend to cut Robespierre, another May 6er, more slack than I ought to for his role in The Great Terror within France. I'm sure he was just misunderstood!)
Apparently, I'm only human. In a 2004 research study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, scientists from Santa Clara University led a group of female undergraduate students to believe that they shared the same birthday with a "confederate" participant in the same study (that is, this other participant was actually in on the experiment).
The procedure was pretty straightforward. Each participant was asked to complete a bogus questionnaire collecting random demographic information. The confederate was seated adjacent to the participant and was also allegedly completing this form, but in fact she took this opportunity to surreptitiously glance at the participant's birthday. The experimenter then collected the questionnaires and verbally asked the confederate her date of birth, first, and next did the same for the participant. Those participants randomly assigned to the control condition heard the confederate say a different birthday, whereas those assigned to the experimental condition were led to believe that the confederate shared their own birthday. What a coincidence!
As part of the cover story, participants were then asked to separately complete a brief personality test, the results of which weren't of any theoretical interest for the study. The real experimental manipulations occurred once the participants thought the study was over. While the participant was in the hallway leaving the laboratory and walking alongside the confederate, the confederate pulled out a stack of papers and said this:
"I wonder if you could read this eight-page essay for me and give me one page of written feedback on whether my arguments are persuasive and why?"
If that weren't presumptuous enough, the confederate added that she needed this by the next day. As you might have guessed, the researchers discovered that significantly more people from the shared birthday condition (62%) agreed to this outrageous request from a stranger than did those from the different birthday condition (34%). The authors concluded that "the participants reacted to the confederate [in the experimental] condition in a heuristic fashion and, instead of considering the costs and benefits of agreeing to the request, responded as if interacting with a friend."
It's OK, Sigmund, be you bastard conceived out of wedlock or not, you're still one of my moral heroes. Just not as much as before I found out you might be two months older than I once thought.
