Deborah Prentice: faking fun, and free speech

Chris - You mentioned psychology because your particular forte was social psychology, wasn't it? Working out social norms and how we do and don't conform to them. What drew you into that?

Deborah - I was interested in science and maths broadly. Found my way into biology because I loved the systems thinking of biology. And then I discovered psychology by accident because I had had exposure to it in my coursework and realised that in fact you could apply the methods and the thinking of natural science, of biology, the experimental method, to understanding how people behaved in the social world. You could understand complex phenomena in social life through the same methods and thought processes that you use to understand complex processes in a cell or in an organism.

Chris - And was this at Yale? You began to think along those lines?

Deborah - Actually, it was still at Stanford. I mean, I was still an undergraduate and I took about five or six courses in psychology while I was still an undergraduate. And that's what got me into a PhD program in psychology at Yale. So I actually went to Yale claiming to know something about psychology when I'd had just a couple of courses and made up a lot along the side.

Chris - What did you do your PhD on?

Deborah - Really what I was interested in was how do we represent ourselves, and how is it like and unlike we represent other people. How we think of ourselves versus how we think of a close friend or how we think of a stranger. Trying to get at what is the essence of self.

Chris - And you finished that at Yale. Did you then take that with you to Princeton straight away?

Deborah - I brought it to Princeton with me, but very quickly discovered Princeton, which was a very different kind of place than Yale. It was a residential campus. It had a very strong social group ethos. There was nothing written down at Princeton. It was all informal social norms. If you didn't know, you didn't deserve to know, and none of the buildings had names on them because if you didn't already know what they were, then you didn't belong there anyway. It had that feel to it. And it was the first time in my life I had ever been in an environment that functioned like the social groups, like the face-to-face groups I had studied in my psychology classes on small groups. How they function and the norms of small groups, and the conformity pressures that exist and the ways in which people get their identity from the groups of which they're apart. And it was like this giant laboratory for the study of social groups all laid out before me and it was too good, right? It was just too good. And I started chatting with my students at Princeton. All undergraduate students work with academic staff on independent research. I had some fabulous students early in my career who came and were my informants about life at Princeton and about all of these social groups and that became then the core of my work at Princeton and really the core of my work in my career.

Chris - Where did the studies on alcohol come into it? Because that was something that you've become very well known for.

Deborah - One of my very first senior students, named Jenifer Lightdale, was the vice-president, I think, of her eating club. The eating clubs were the social clubs, the core of social life at Princeton at that time. And she came and explained to me about the drinking culture at Princeton, which involved heavy drinking, especially on Thursday and Saturday nights. Not Friday because there were sporting events on Saturday morning, so everybody had to abstain on Friday nights. But Thursday and Saturday nights were the big nights. And that in fact the drinking was worrisome to her. It wasn't like social drinking. It was very, very heavy drinking.

Chris - Men and women?

Deborah - Men and women. But she said she was the only one who felt that way, that she was the only one who was worried. Everybody else was having a great time, she was really concerned. And I said, 'how do you know they're not worried?' 'Well, they're having a good time.' I said, 'well, don't you look like you're having a good time?' 'Well, yes I do.' And that is a phenomenon. That disjunction between the behaviour that everybody's engaging in and assumes is authentic in everybody else, versus one's private thoughts and feelings about that behaviour, and perhaps misgivings. That I recognised as a psychological phenomenon called pluralistic ignorance. It happens very often when people conform publicly, if you will, to norms and conform willingly to norms that belie in some sense some of their private views. In the aggregate, what that creates is a social reality that diverges from private reality. So we started studying that in the context of alcohol use on campus. And in fact, we're part of a very early group of researchers recognising that heavy drinking, alcohol abuse among college students in particular, is very often not a medical or a clinical problem. It's actually a social problem. And that kind of social problem is not limited to alcohol use, although alcohol use typifies it.

Chris - Did you use that to inform policies after that?

Deborah - The existence of this phenomenon then lent itself to a particular approach to intervention, which involved dispelling the pluralistic ignorance. If their heavy drinking is driven by the sense that they have to do that in order to fit in socially. Then if you show them in fact, and that's how we do it, we show them with data, 'look, in fact, you think everybody else is more comfortable than you are with drinking, but see everybody thinks that, right?' You give them a chance to discuss with people in a group, why do we all think this? And in fact, it lessens the pressure people feel to drink in order to be a good member of the group. In order to fit in. And it reduces, it doesn't eliminate drinking but we were never about eliminating drinking. We were about enabling people to drink at the level that they felt comfortable. And that's in fact what we showed in our work.

Chris - There are many parallels with the world we find ourselves in now with social media. People saying something because they think it will get likes. They don't necessarily believe it. And you've been quite outspoken in interviews you've given before taking up this job about wanting to really push free speech and make sure it's safeguarded in universities plural, not just in Cambridge University. You must be seeing a sort of repetition, but in a slightly different way. The alcohol story playing out in a different way here.

Deborah - Social media cuts both ways. So although in social media, yes, people often expressed views that get a lot of likes and then that leads them to express an even more extreme view in order to get more likes. At the same time, social media has been the means through which people have found like-minded others who wouldn't have been able to find them in face-to-face social life, right? So there are plenty of communities around less frequent kinds of attributes or opinions that people in fact can find others online who feel the same way they do. Social media is just another lens through which the same kinds of self-censorship and self-expression phenomena around those. That's really what I'm interested in is how to get people to express themselves. When do they censor themselves? What licences them to say certain things? The social gauze through which people try to express themselves and get known by others. And all of those filters, if you will, on how we carry ourselves in the social world exist on social media as well as in face-to-face life.

Chris - What must we do though to make sure that we safeguard debate and free speech at universities? Because we have seen a pattern in a number of institutions where people have had a view on something and they have had the platform whipped out from under them and they haven't been able to share their views. And historically we would've had a debate about these sorts of things. People are rightly, I think, expressing alarm that this means we're not having a sensible debate and a discussion and reaching a consensus. We're just censoring people.

Deborah - Yes, that's right. And so this is one of the things that I've been working on.

Chris - It happened at this university.

Deborah - It's happened at all universities. I think the pandemic made it a lot worse, because in fact people no longer had ways that they could express themselves to each other and have an authentic kind of exchange with reactions that they could observe and respond to. It was getting bad already, with the polarisation that has arisen. There are many things that lead people to self-censor. And I think that the challenges around, not knowing who you're talking to, not knowing if it's going to get a positive reception lead people to hesitate to express themselves, to censor their own views, to look for cues about what kinds of opinions will be acceptable. It's just become very, very difficult, I think, to have the kinds of authentic sharing of views, perhaps half formed views, perhaps an exploratory conversation to try to get at the truth of something, that many of us remember from our college university days. I remember being able to talk much more freely than I see people able to talk now. So really one of my initial projects here at Cambridge is to look for ways to create spaces to give people experience listening to diverse views, expressing diverse views. It's not something that people come now to university with a lot of experience doing.