Jim Jones is an altogether different figure than yesterday’s blog subject, Van Jones (no relation), but his story is just as compelling.  Last night I saw for the first time the 2006 documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple: a chilling tale complete with visuals and recordings of Jones’ sermons, which also provides a human touch to the story by interviewing the people who survived the suicides.  These conversations helped show that Jones’ victims were intoxicated by his influence, but were also normal human beings with families, friends, fears, desires and dreams.

One of the first times I heard the story of Jonestown was in an introduction to a social psychology textbook. Jonestown was used as a compelling example of how moral, intelligent, and passionate people can be lead astray not because they are crazy or weak-willed, but because a social context had been set up that combined strong amounts of peer and family pressures with a potent authority figure.

Social psychology is one of my favorite subjects because it shows us that human behavior being as prone to all sorts of influence from social and cultural contexts.  Human beings are innately information gatherers, and when we are put in unfamiliar or stressful situations, we use a variety of clues from our environment to inform the correct behavior, often at the cost of accuracy.  At Jonestown, the residents were not psychologically distrubed or bizzare, but simply felt everyday social dynamics that all humans encountered, and acted in a way they deemed correct, based on those social dynamics.  In this case, these dynamics were so powerful that they were unable to conclude an alternative solution and course of action.

A UX or psychology researcher can design an experiment perfectly yet yield inaccurate results when their participants fall victim to such social effects.  But wait Jon, we’re testing them in a controlled lab environment, not within a cult! Well, we need only look at two classic social psychological experiments to see this effect in play in a laboratory, and come up with ways to avoid them.

Strapping down Milgram's "shock victim"

Stanley Milgram surprised the nation by showing that even bright and talented Yale University students will administer a deadly amount of electric shock to an innocent person, if a research scientist (a trusted authority) instructs them to do so for an experiment.  A bias towards authority does not necessarily require a fanatical and drug-disturbed pastor in sunglasses: a calm, rational and intelligent man in a white lab coat and spectacles might be just as influential and just as dangerous.

How is one able to avoid authority-based biases? Here are some suggestions:

• Allow a research participant the freedom to express themselves.  Keep instructions to a minimum which will lessen your perception as an authority.  Especially in the field of usability research, every piece of input is valuable.  A “mistake” provides just as much insight into a design prototype as a successful participant, and probably more.
• Keep your experiment informal.  Don’t wear lab coats, be a person.  Don’t hide behind a glass wall or enter another room.

Sound good enough?  Well, we can’t get too chummy.  If you insert friends (or peers) around the participant, Solomon Asch has shown us that peer influence can also guide behavior and the subject is compelled to answer questions in a way that reflects the opinions of the rest of the group.  In many experimental settings, including those with “fellow subjects”, a research participant is under a stressful situation, guided by a desire to find “correct answers” and to appear competent.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6LH10-3H8k]

So we can’t be too authoritative and also not too peer-like. The key here is balance.  We have so much to learn from users, it is imperative they are free to express their input freely.  Both experiments show us how social cues from the environment can cause human beings to act radically different than they would normally.

Please feel free to leave comments on how you’ve struck the balance between structure and freedom in your user research studies.