At the last supper the apostle Peter said to Jesus, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” Jesus told him, “I tell you the truth. This very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” Peter protested, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And the rest is history – Peter did deny the Lord three times before sunrise.
I love that story because it reveals Peter’s humanity and ultimately the forgiveness of Jesus. I also believe it tells us something about each of us as individuals – we never really know how we will act until a situation is upon us.
I believe Peter meant what he said with all of his heart. To his credit he was ready to die for the Lord when he drew his sword and cut off the Roman slave’s ear. However, he wasn’t ready when the situation changed slightly. In the early morning in the courtyard outside the temple when he was under no physical threat he denied knowing Jesus when asked directly three times.
Quite often we “think” we know what we’d do in a situation. We would never participate in the holocaust; we would have done something about Jerry Sandusky had we been at Penn State; we would not have participated in segregation in the South even if we had grown up there. Then social psychology comes along and bursts our bubble with experiments that show us otherwise. For example:
We believe we could resist the pressure to conform (consensus) if we knew we were right. That’s what people assumed going into the Asch conformity experiments in the 1950s. And yet, an amazing number gave into the crowd and went along with them even though their senses told them they were correct, not the crowd.
Most of you reading this believe you’d never harm another person just because an “authority” insists that you do so. The participants in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment in 1961 probably thought the same thing going into the experiment. However, two-thirds eventually gave a series of 30 shocks with the last being 450 volts!
The college students in the 1971 Stanford prison experiment probably thought they’d never behave sadistically when acting as prison guards just because of the environment. After all, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were known for young people railing against the establishment, not conforming to it. In reality the students were so sadistic the two-week experiment was halted after just six days!
When it comes to how we’ll react in stressful situations we often overestimate our goodness and underestimate the impact of people in positions of authority, the environment we’re in, and the pressure we feel from others to conform.
Not everyone gave in during those experiments and maybe, just maybe, you’d be one of those who would have resisted. However, most people did give in so we’d be a little arrogant to just assume we’re so different than those ordinary people that we’d always do the right thing.
So what’s a person to do? Peter tried relying on his willpower and we know how that turned out. Heck, he was even told explicitly what he’d do and that wasn’t enough for him to catch himself and make a different choice.
Wouldn’t it be better to understand how people typically think and behave? If you have that understanding it can create the self-awareness you might need to make a better choice should you find yourself in a situation where you know the right thing to do but feel paralyzed by fear. That fear can be rejection from the crowd, retribution from the authority or the feeling of powerlessness in the situation.
This is where social psychology comes in handy because quite often our hunches about human behavior are incorrect. Dan Ariely wrote two books about this very subject; Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. I encourage you to keep checking in with Influence PEOPLE each week. An investment of five minutes might be all it takes for you to catch yourself and make a better choice than Peter did and most people in the experiments I mentioned.
** To vote for Robert Cialdini, President of Influence At Work, for the Top Management Thinker of 2013