Imagine the busy streets of New York City, an enormous place with millions of people. Every day, the streets are crowded with people going about their daily lives. Now imagine a small robot in the middle of all of those people. Most people would not even notice the ten-inch smiling robot, called a Tweenbot, rolling along the busy sidewalk. This strange machine may interest some people, while others would ignore it completely. A researcher interested in studying how helpful people really are uses such robots in her experiments.

The Tweenbots experiment is the idea and creation of Kacie Kinzer, which was to make a robot that could navigate the city and reach its destination only if it was aided by pedestrians. Tweenbots rely on the kindness of warm-hearted strangers. Made simply of cardboard, wheels, and a device to turn the wheels, the Tweenbots face many dangers on the city streets. They could be run over by cars or smashed by careless kids. Each of Kinzer's robots is fitted with a flag that displays instructions for the robot's destination. The only way these robots will reach their final point is if someone lends them a hand. Tweenbots are essentially a social experiment aimed at providing people a chance to show how caring they are.

On a daily basis, people in New York City are often in a hurry to get around. However, the Tweenbots, through their inability to look after themselves, took people out of their normal routines. The people who noticed the helpless little robots were actually interested in helping the Tweenbots find their way home. Tweenbots move at a constant speed and can only go in a straight line. If one was to get stuck, or was going in the wrong direction, it would be up to strangers to free it or turn it in the right direction. Surprisingly, no Tweenbot was lost or damaged, and each one arrived at its target in good condition. In fact, most people treated the robot in a gentle manner, and some even treated it as though it were a small living being.

Applied Ethics

Although ethics classes are common around the world, scientists are unsure if their lessons can actually change behavior; evidence either way is weak, relying on contrived laboratory tests or sometimes unreliable self-reports. But a new study published in Cognition found that, in at least one real-world situation, a single ethics lesson may have had lasting effects.

The researchers investigated one class session's impact on eating meat. According to study co-author Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside: students' attitudes on the topic are variable and unstable, behavior is easily measurable, and ethics literature largely agrees that eating less meat is good because it reduces environmental harm and animal suffering. Half of the students in four large philosophy classes read an article on the ethics of factory-farmed meat, optionally watched an 11-minute video on the topic and joined a 50-minute discussion. The other half focused on charitable giving instead. Then, unbeknownst to the students, the researchers studied their anonymized meal-card purchases for that semester — nearly 14,000 receipts for almost 500 students. "It's an awesome data set," says Nina Strohminger, a psychologist who teaches business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and was not involved in the study.

Schwitzgebel predicted the intervention would have no effect; he had previously found that ethics professors do not differ from other professors on a range of behaviors, including voting rates, blood donation and returning library books. But among student subjects who discussed meat ethics, meal purchases containing meat decreased from 52 to 45 percent — and this effect held steady for the study's duration of several weeks. Purchases from the other group remained at 52 percent.

"That's actually a pretty large effect for a pretty small intervention." Schwitzgebel says. Strohminger agrees: "The thing that still blows my mind is that the only thing that's different between these two cases is just that one day in class." She says she wants the effect to be real but cannot rule out some unknown confounding variable. And if real. Strohminger notes, it might be reversible by another nudge: "Easy come, easy go."

Schwitzgebel suspects the greatest impact came from social influence — classmates or teaching assistants leading the discussions may have shared their own vegetarianism, showing it as achievable or more common. Second, the video may have had an emotional impact. Least rousing, he thinks, was rational argument, although his co-authors say reason might play a bigger role. Now the researchers are probing the specific effects of teaching style, teaching assistants' eating habits and students' video exposure. Meanwhile Schwitzgebel who had predicted no effect — will be eating his words.

Years ago, I interviewed James Patterson, an advertising manager, about the latest campaign. But all he wanted to talk about was fiction-writing. "I hope to be a writer. It is always in my head," he said.

I remember thinking: Sure, you and everybody else. 

A decade or so later, however, I was surprised to see James on TV, holding up his new book. 

Mr. Patterson's ability to see himself as a writer illustrates a concept known as "possible selves." The term, coined in 1986 by the social psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, grew out of research on self-concept. While self-concepts – "I am a kind person" or "I am a good parent"- are rooted in the present, the researchers found people are also informed by ideas about what they might become and how they might change.

These possible selves, both positive and negative, are closely related to motivation. A violin student who envisions life as a professional musician might be motivated to practice. A person whose feared possible self is an alcoholic may become a non-drinker. In a small study, when young adults were encouraged to envision themselves as either regular exercisers (hoped-for selves) or inactive(feared selves), both groups exercised more in the weeks afterward. 

A possible self can take you beyond daydreams, which are often not necessarily grounded in reality. It can come to fruition if you build a bridge from your "now" self to the possible self. "If you're regularly dreaming of a different career, enroll in a course, shadow someone, take up a hobby or a side job. Making the transition requires you to say now, today, this week, these are the steps I can actually take to attain the goal," said Daphna Oyserman, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California.

But don't quit your job just yet. An analysis of career-transition research concluded that successful reinventions require adjustments and re-evaluations as you go. Mr. Patterson, for example, wrote almost a dozen books while still at his ad agency; he found his style only after many tries.