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Scientist at Work: Ellen J. Langer, Scholar of the Absent Mind

By PHILIP J. HILTS [NY Times]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Ellen J. Langer's specialty may

seem a little odd for a psychologist: she studies mindlessness.

Everyone exhibits it, of course. People misplace their

keys. They enter a room only to realize they don't know

why. They talk to mannequins before realizing that a

reply isn't likely.

One of Dr. Langer's favorite examples of mindlessness

concerns the time she used a brand new credit card in a

department store. The clerk noticed she had not yet

signed it, and handed it to her to sign the back. After

passing the credit card through the machine, the clerk

handed her the credit card receipt to sign.

"Then she held up the receipt I signed next to the card

I had just signed, and she compared the signatures!" Dr.

Langer said. "Amazing!"

Dr. Langer's studies have always centered on the degree

to which humans are in control of their actions, or

rather, the degree to which they maintain the illusion

of control. Beginning in the late 1970s, her studies

showed that mindless behavior was far more widespread

than people liked to believe.

Based on that and other work, she became the first woman

to be named a tenured professor in psychology at

Harvard. In her recent work she has followed up her

studies of mindlessness by working on antidotes -- the

"mindful" attitude and how to cultivate it. She has

written two popular books published by Addison-Wesley,

"Mindfulness" (1989) and "The Power of Mindful Learning" (1997).

Her latest book argues that traditional methods of

learning can produce mindless behavior because they tend

to get people to "overlearn" a fact or a task and

suggest that there is only one way to do it. She argues

that is important to teach skills and facts

conditionally, setting the stage for doubt and an

awareness that different situations may call for

different approaches or answers.

Dr. Langer, 50, was born in the Bronx, grew up in

Yonkers, and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at

New York University and a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale

University. Colleagues say she is about the least

mindless person they know. She is, as one colleague put

it, "aggressively thoughtful" and full of creative energy.

Dr. Langer, said Dr. Robert Abelson, professor of

psychology at Yale, "enjoys being outrageous, and

challenging conventional wisdom," adding, "Dr. Langer

even as a student noticed that while psychologists were

always talking about thinking and behavior, it seemed to

her that people were behaving thoughtlessly just as often."

Psychologists have been aware for at least a century

that some complicated behavior is performed

automatically, that is, without conscious deliberation.

As Dr. Langer wrote, citing people who say hello to a

mannequin or write a check in January with the last

year's date, "when in this mode we take in and use

limited signals from the world around us (the female

form, the familiar face of the check) without letting

other signals (the motionless pose, a calendar)

penetrate as well."

People have in their repertoires thousands of "scripts"

for talk or behavior that they act out when they are

cued by something familiar. The array of behavior people

can carry out without thinking is enormous.

When she first started the work it came as something of

a challenge to mainstream psychology. When her career in

the shortfalls of thinking began in the 1970s,

psychology as a whole seemed to be moving in the

opposite direction, turning to cognitive psychology in a

big way. A rush of studies had begun on the details of

human thinking and the importance of reasoning in human behavior.

"In the midst of that," said Dr. Daniel Wegner, a

research psychologist at the University of Virginia,

"Ellen Langer started saying, 'Maybe, but we really are

pretty mindless.' In the history of psychology there had

been some work on mindlessness, or automaticity, but she

revived it and extended it much farther."

Wegner said that Dr. Langer's work is important and "has

really broadened our perspective in psychology," adding:

"She showed that mindless behavior is fairly widespread

and general. She showed us that we have to take into

account not only things that make sense, but the things

that don't make sense.

"She was one of those pioneers who discovered early on

that people are much less thoughtful in their everyday

behavior than they wish they were. She has helped make

us rethink the role of thought in behavior."

In the 1970s and 1980s she carried out a series of

landmark studies to make the point scientifically, the

most famous of them referred to as "The Copy Machine."

In that study, she stationed someone at a copy machine

in a busy graduate school office. When someone stepped

up and began copying, Dr. Langer's plant would come up

to the person and interrupt, asking to butt in and make copies.

The interruption was allowed fairly often, about 60

percent of the time. But the permission was granted

almost 95 percent of the time if the person stepping up

to interrupt not only asked, "May I use the copy

machine?" but added a reason, "because I'm in a rush."

That seems to make sense. People heard the reason and

decided they were willing to step aside for a moment.

What was odd, Dr. Langer found, was that if the

interrupter asked, "Can I use the machine?" and added a

meaningless phrase, "because I have to make copies," the

people at the machine also stepped aside nearly 95

percent of the time.

The idea, she said, is that the listener at the copy

machine heard a two-part statement: a request and

something like a reason. That was all their mental

script for such a situation required. They never did

reflect on the fact that the interrupter's "reason" was

not meaningful.

The people at the copy machine only began to listen more

carefully to the request and judge the reason for it

when those interrupting had a large number of pages to

copy. They were asking for a big favor, and in this

case, adding "because I have to make copies" had no

effect. Only when people added that they had to hurry

would people step aside.

Her most influential studies were some of the earliest

to establish the notion of "learned helplessness" in

nursing homes. She and a co-author, Dr. Judith Rodin,

now president of the University of Pennsylvania, found

that giving the elderly residents some control in their

lives -- such as when to watch movies, where to visit

with relatives, whether and how to raise plants -- they

fared better.

They felt better, and were more able to handle visitors

and tasks in the home. In follow-up studies over the

next two years they found those in the group given some

control continued to be more active, and in fact,

ultimately lived longer.

All this apparently stemmed, she said, from an

intervention by experimenters that lasted only a few

weeks. "That so weak a manipulation had any effect

suggests how important increased control is for these

people, for whom decision-making has been virtually

nonexistent," she wrote in a paper.

In one of the simplest experiments, she asked elderly

patients to put together jigsaw puzzles, and measured

their success. One group was simply asked to do it,

another given "encouragement only" and a third was

actively helped by the nursing staff to assemble the puzzles.

She found that those who were helped performed most

poorly and considered the task difficult, while those

who did the work themselves performed better and found

the task easier.

"When you provide people with opportunities to make

choices, they live longer, they are happier," she said

in an interview. "Sometimes the situation in nursing

homes goes to the opposite extreme, and people entering

a nursing home essentially give up their personhood. The

staff ends up talking to visiting relatives about care

of the elderly and ignoring the elderly themselves."

After spending the first part of her career

demonstrating that people often behave mindlessly, Dr.

Langer is now showing how people can overcome that

tendency. She says she also vaguely recalls switching

from the negative to the positive after someone

suggested that in psychology people studied their own worries.

"I didn't want to be thought of as mindless," she jokes,

"so I changed the name of what I was studying from

mindlessness to mindfulness."

Dr. Langer, an avid tennis player, uses an example from

that sport: "At tennis camp I was taught exactly how to

hold my racket and toss the ball when serving. We were

all taught the same way. When I later watched the U.S.

Open, I noticed that none of the top players served the

way I was taught, and, more important, each of them

served slightly differently."

Because each person has different attributes -- hand

size, height, muscle development -- one way of serving

cannot be right.

Thus it is important to teach everything conditionally.

"For example," she said, "you can teach 'here is one way

of serving,' or, 'if an incoming ball has backspin, here

is one way that you can use to return it.' "

This method accounts for the fact that each instance is

different, and a person's responses must be changed

moment to moment, day to day.

In her studies of learning, she found that just changing

the way instructions are worded, from "this is the

answer" to "this is one answer" can have a significant

effect on how facts or tasks are learned.

In one study, high school students were taught lessons

in physics by videotape. But with half the students, the

video was preceded by verbal instructions that the tape

was only one way of looking at the physics problems, and

that students should consider other ideas and methods.

When tested, both groups were equally able to repeat the

facts given in the videotape, but only the group with

the extra instructions tended to use other methods and

information from their previous experience.

In another study, she divided students who were starting

piano lessons into two groups, those who would learn the

scales in the traditional rote manner and those who

would learn them "mindfully." The chief difference was

that the "mindful" group was instructed to be creative

and to vary their playing as much as possible.

When independent evaluators later listened to tapes of

the students, without knowing which were assigned to

each group, they rated the "mindful learners" as more

competent over all and more creative, Dr. Langer wrote.

Other studies show that memory is improved by "mindful"

learning, even down to the simplest task of trying to

remember a series of pictures.

Rote learning can be destructive not because repetition

is unnecessary -- tennis players may hit thousands of

similar forehand shots before attaining some competence

-- but because it teaches a person to use one mindless response.

"Teaching skills and facts in a conditional way sets the

stage for doubt and an awareness of how different

situations may call for subtle differences in what we

bring to them," Dr. Langer wrote.

She has done studies showing that when people learn by

rote, the small steps that make up the skill come

together in larger and larger units. The smaller

components may thus be "lost," so people are then unable

to vary them. Yet it is by adjusting and varying these

pieces that people can improve their performances.

It is vital to include the possibility of different

answers at the time of learning, because once a rigid

pattern of response is set, "it is hellishly difficult

to change," Dr. Langer said, adding, "But if you learn

some flexibility from the beginning, it's much easier to

vary your response."

-----------------------

September 23, 1997

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

Related Article

---------

Fuhgedaboudit!           By JACQUES STEINBERG

A Harvard psychologist argues that remembering is not

always the way to learn

To anyone who has ever found learning, inside the

classroom or out, to be an onerous process yielding little

long-term benefit, Ellen J. Langer offers a path to relief:

Studying for a test, she argues, need not involve rote

memorization. Forgetting can sometimes be constructive. And,

perhaps most heartening of all, there is not always a right or

wrong answer.

In ''The Power of Mindful Learning,'' Ms. Langer, a

professor of psychology at Harvard University, seeks to

deflate seven myths of learning that, she contends, have

undermined American education.

Does practice make perfect? Not according to Ms. Langer,

who says that by merely drilling ourselves, whether in

baseball or medicine, we are only learning to perform

mindlessly, with little prospect of flexibility or

enjoyment. Instead, she argues for a more ''mindful''

approach, involving ''an openness to novelty'' and

''awareness of multiple perspectives.'' By illustration,

she points to her own study of two groups of beginning

piano students. Both groups were introduced to a simple

C major scale. One was told to respond to thoughts and

feelings; the control group was taught to practice in a

more traditional, ''memorization through repetition''

style. When two graduate students in music evaluated

videotapes of the groups, they found the playing of the

first to be more competent and creative.

Ms. Langer is hardly the first educator to seek to knock

down accepted truisms of the field. Indeed, many

elementary school reading teachers long ago threw away

the fill-in-the-blank workbooks that were a staple of

phonics and use instead a more free-flowing ''whole

language'' strategy, in which students use contextual

clues to gain meaning.

But the debate over which way is best to teach reading

-- and a host of other subjects -- rages on. And it is

in this context that Ms. Langer provides a fresh,

thoughtful plea -- and one that is notably free of

''edubabble'' -- for exploring strategies of teaching

and learning that are more engaging to students.

She has also steered clear of writing a pat self-help

guide. Rather, she weaves together disparate swatches:

snippets of fairy tales, digestible summaries of

scholarship and descriptions of her research.

One chapter opens with an excerpt from ''Hansel and

Gretel,'' after which Ms. Langer concludes that by

dropping crumbs on the forest floor as a means to get

home, ''Hansel and Gretel lost sight of the bigger

picture,'' adding, ''Had they actively drawn

distinctions and noticed finer points in their

surroundings . . . they might have had an easier time.''

She then describes an experiment. A class of 10th-grade

history students was assigned a chapter about the

passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To make the subject

meaningful, one group was asked to read the passage from

multiple perspectives: its own, as well as that of the

participants, wondering what they must have felt at the

time. The control group was told ''simply to learn the passage.''

At the end of the period, and a week later, a test was

given. Students in the ''mindful'' group, Ms. Langer

reports, again outperformed the control group in the

information they retained, the content of the essays

they wrote and their improvement from the first test to the second.

Still, Ms. Langer's hard line against any concerted

memorization seems to go a bit far, particularly when

applied to medical students. I was even less persuaded

by the contention that by forgetting some information

and relearning it later, we might learn it better.

Others will have an equally strong reaction, I suspect,

to her argument that there is no such thing as ''basic

skills.'' But Ms. Langer is quick to encourage the

reader to be skeptical of her ideas, because, to

puncture one myth, there is often more than one right

answer, and ''out of the questions of students come some

of the most creative ideas and discoveries."

---------------

Jacques Steinberg is an education reporter for The New York Times.       May 18, 1997

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

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book:

Ellen J. Langer  The Power of Mindful Learning  [Amazon.com:] 'Professor Langer seeks to prove that real learning takes place in a "mindful" environment that provides a context for the subject we are studying and allows us to bring something of ourselves into the process. As an example, she points to a study of two groups of piano students, one of which was taught through repetition and memorization of scales, while the other was encouraged to respond to their own thoughts and emotions. The second group became more competent and more creative.'

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