Let's go back in time to March 21st, 1983 in the village of Arrabah, West Bank. A seventeen year old girl sitting in class suddenly started experiencing an irritating cough and shortness of breath. Shortly after, seven of her classmates started experiencing similar symptoms. In a span of a week, the "illness" had spread to a total of 943 Palestine girls and some few Israeli soldiers. These events in an already tense situation resulted in the Palestinians blaming the Israelis of usage of chemical weapons. At the same time, the Israelis were blaming the Palestinians of using poison to trigger mass demonstrations. After careful investigation, it was concluded that the symptoms were psychosomatic and it exploded into a case of "mass hysteria". When mass hysteria occurs, and individual's symptoms trigger panic among others, who unconsciously adopt the symptoms, and a domino effect is activated. These mass hysteria cases have usually been recorded during or shortly after very stressful situations such as armed conflict. In this post, my goal is to try to explain the role of stress in how we perceive our environment and how we receive news or information.
I bet everyone has experienced how a person who is stressed is more likely to react, get upset, or bite back. But why is this? On her book, "The Influential Mind", Tali Sharot talks about an experiment she ran along some colleagues that gives us some insight to question. The goal of the experiment was simple, how exactly stress changes the way people are influenced by information? In their experiment, they exposed people to threat, record their physiological reactions, and observed how the participants' thinking changed.
The experiment divided participants into two groups, one control group (C), and the other group (O). Let's say you belonged to group O. You came in and they asked you to spit in a tube (this is to measure your cortisol levels, which are associated with stress levels). Then you filled out a questionnaire where you recorded your current anxiety levels. Then you were explained the experiment. Say: "The experiment consists in answering a thirty minute questionnaire on a computer. Afterwards you will be handed a piece of paper with a topic on it. You will have five minutes to present the topic in front of thirty people while also being recorded for other to view online." If you are like most people, after being explained the instructions, most likely your stress levels must have risen. To test so, a sample of your saliva was taken again and you were asked to record your current anxiety levels as well. In other words, they stressed you out. The control group on the other hand, would take the thirty minute questionnaire like you, but they would have to write a short essay instead of presenting. On top of that, they were reassured that the essay would not be rated or read by anyone.
After the whole presentation/essay ordeal is when the real experiment measurements happened. The experimenters would present the participants with bad scenarios, such as a robbery, a car accident, or a broken rib and ask them how likely were this to happen to them. Then, they would present the participants with the actual probabilities depending on their population. For example, in London your chances of being robbed are 30 percent. Afterwards, they would ask the participants to measure their likelihood of experiencing any of those scenarios again. The results showed that people under threat or stress are more inclined to take in negative information as well as learning the likelihood of negative outcomes. Furthermore, the more stressed they were, the greater their tendency to alter their views in response to unexpected bad news.
When we are under threat or stress we immediately absorb cues about danger. The evolutionary explanation for this is simple. Think about an antelope that spots a lion in the wild. The antelope will immediately release cortisol to be ready to react and save its life. When we experience stress, we might not be in life threatening situations. Nevertheless we still are more perceptive to cues of danger, or more generally, bad news. When these stressful situations are chronic or extreme such as life in the West Bank, it can even affect us in unconscious ways. That is why the news of someone having symptoms similar to those of chemical weapon usage can trigger a domino effect of mass hysteria. The highly stressful situation made the people so perceptive towards bad news that they believed them in a unconscious manner.
My hope in sharing this information is to land it on a more practical every day usage. When we are stressed, it is harder to analyze things clearly. Hopefully now that you know some of the effects of stress you will be able to see things a tiny bit clearer. On top of that, and the most useful case for this information is when you are around someone who is stressed. You might want to phrase your sentences in specific non-negative ways, or even avoid the sharing of specially bad news at least until his/her stress levels have dropped.
What do you think? I'd like to hear your opinions.
If you want to check out other thoughts that this awesome book has evoked, click on these past posts:
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #1: Disinformation That The Information Era Has Created
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #2: The Power Of Language And Ideas
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #3: On The Facebook Scandal, Data Usage, And The Spreading Of Emotions
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #4: On The Irrationality of Phobias
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #5: On Agency And The Hardship Of Financial Decisions
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #6: On How Agency Is Deeply Rooted In Us
- The Influential Mind Made Me Think #7: On The Pleasure And Pain Of Knowledge, And What We Choose To Learn
Best,