Chat Ed : Dr Erdos joins us tonight for a live webchat to talk about his experiment in which five households of nightmare neighbours move in next door to each other in an isolated, purpose-built village to see if psychological techniques can be used to turn bad neighbours into good ones.
Dr George Erdos : Welcome to the webchat, please make comments and ask questions as you have the opportunity…
jimbo : hi george
xx steph xx : did the dr find his experiment a success?
Snoopy : evening George :)
Dr George Erdos : Yes, it was a success because to some extent every single participant became aware of the impact of their behaviour on other people.
bc : what was the measure of the success?
Dr George Erdos : Their own admission that they learned something and the six month follow-up where one could see some evidence that they had changed their behaviour.
Raptor : The families were fantastic and very entertaining ! >(:O)
Simon : did you pick the people who took part yourself?
Dr George Erdos : To some extent yes, the selection process was done jointly between the production company and myself following a national advertising campaign and a careful selection of a lot of applicants.
Jos : Dr George, that’s a very interesting accent, where are you from originally?
Dr George Erdos : I was born in Hungary and spent 18 years there and for the last 32 years I have been living in Britain. In between those times I lived in four different countries and studied at five different universities.
gogglehead : How many families did you have to choose from for the show?
Dr George Erdos : I can’t honestly remember. At the first stage there were hundreds and at the second stage there were about a dozen serious candidates of whom we eliminated seven and so we had five remaining.
emily : you were my lecturer at Newcastle this year and I first would like to say well done! if you could go back and change something about the experiment, what would you change and why?
Dr George Erdos : The experiment itself had a number of constraints due to ethical considerations and environmental restrictions. If I did it again I would probably have about seven households and have more challenging tasks for them to do during the four-week period.
thesiblings : oh dr erdo dr erdos we love you, who lives next door 2 u?
Dr George Erdos : I live in a detached house and my next-door neighbours opposite me are a university professor and his wife and to our right a probation office and his two, well-behaved children. (I live in a corner house so there are no neighbours on the other side.)
dipset : Which family did you feel caused the most problems within the community Dr. Erdos?
Dr George Erdos : That is a difficult question to answer. In their own way each were quite problematic to the other participants at certain times, but overall I would guess that it was the students who were the most problematic. One of the reasons for that was that they had no responsibility for dependant others such as children or dogs.
Snipper : Dr. George, you may have had some success on a small scale, but do you think this could work in a bigger environment?
bc : do you foresee any practical implications of this experiment, or was it just an exercise in perfect psychology?
Dr George Erdos : That depends entirely on whether or not the participants in the bigger environment are willing to behave in a community-minded manner. As was indicated in the programme, during the Second World War the whole of Britain pulled together and social positions were virtually completely forgotten. First of all it was not perfect psychology it was a case study rather than a proper experiment but it indicated to me a couple of things, including that behaviour modifications work and that people who are willing to engage in conflict resolution can manage to live alongside each other.
Avi : Dear Dr Erdos, do you not think formulating the last test more like prisoner’s dilemma - with each household casting an anonymous vote as to whether they excluded or not - would have been more likely to produce an accurate result as to whether there was genuine solidarity? I got the impression that the households called your bluff in the last experiment???
Dr George Erdos : It is distinctly possible but life produces all sorts of problems including situations that, at least on the surface, communities need to appear to be unanimous on. One classic example of that is when neighbours come together to object to an unpopular decision by their local council.
iceman : Do you keep in touch with any of the families since the filming?
bexy : do you keep in touch with any of the families now? would you like to?
Dr George Erdos : No, in the experiment I had very little personal contact with the participants. My contact was as it appeared in programme, I went in with an announcement and walked out. I had no discussion or any arguments with them, they simply had to follow my instructions.
dangerous : Do you feel the edited programme was a true reflection of what happened during the experiment, or did the requirement to make an entertaining show skew the truth
Dr George Erdos : The edited programme was a reasonable reflection of the overall outcome and feel of the experiment. To edit such a programme is an extremely difficult task since for every hour in the programme approximately 100 hours have been filmed.
Stuart79 : Did you not feel that the community only pulled together when faced by yourself as a foe?
Dr George Erdos : Yes but that was deliberate on my part. I quite clearly stated that I was setting myself up as the external threat in order to bring them together, and to some extent, it worked.
Ken : Are you implying by this exercise that we have got it too easy these days and that if life were a little harder then the community would benefit?
Dr George Erdos : I am not implying that because that is a very expensive way of bringing people together, just look at what happened recently in London and how Londoners have responded. There must be easier ways to achieve the same goal as long as people show a reasonable amount of tolerance and understanding.
fancy_1_of_the_stude : who do you think gained the most from the experiment? i think it was the busy body, he seemed really amazed that other people actually warmed to him as a person!
peskykids : Do you have plans for more of these experiments?
Alannah : who do you feel benefited most from the experience?
Zack : Out of all of the participants who was your personal favourite and who do you think benefited the most from the show?
Dr George Erdos : I agree
Dr George Erdos chuckles
Dr George Erdos : I would love to do another one but the actual decision is very much in the hands of C4 who have to finance such an adventure.
lord_lazlow : Hello Dr Erdos - Fantastic programme - Did you intentionally choose participants from different social backgrounds for the experiment?
Dr George Erdos : I did not have any personal favourite. I found all the participants fascinating in their own ways. Thank you for the compliment. We chose families to represent the most common problems and since certain problems do tend to go with socio-economic status the consequence was that there was a good mix across the social strata.
LBabydoll : i have nightmares next door, what should i do?
rainbowsue : How would you use this method in a real life problem community, how could these lessons be applied?
Dr George Erdos : I'm sorry to hear that you have troublesome neighbours. The first piece of advice would be to reflect why you find them troublesome, then reflect on what motivates them to be troublesome and once you have done that try to approach it in a communicative manner following Churchill’s dictum that jaw-jaw is better than war-war and see whether you can apply some technique of conflict resolution. If you cannot do this on your own perhaps you can ask somebody to arbitrate.
oohBetty : Fascinating programme! Ifound your ideas to be very effective!
Sheila : Did the families put on an act just for the show or are they really like that?
Dr George Erdos : Since I could only observe the families somewhat indirectly through the eyes of the cameras I cannot say for certain, but I am pretty convinced myself that they behaved naturally and as it is in some of these fly-on-the-wall type programmes people eventually become oblivious to the presence of the cameras and they go about their business more or less like they normally do.
Joe : Who would you prefer as your neighbour and also perhaps unfair to ask but who would you prefer least?
Dr George Erdos : I think I would agree with a lot of viewers that Simon would be overall the least troublesome neighbour and I would personally find the unreformed Wendy difficult because, as a psychologist, I would be tempted to give her advice or to talk to her children which she might resent.
IanM : Dr Erdos, do you think you would get better or worse results running a similar experiment in other countries? Which country would you prefer?
Dr George Erdos : It is difficult to say because I only have stereotyped knowledge of certain countries but my guess would be that Mediterranean countries who are more likely to wear their emotions on their sleeves and fight it out with each other would make more interesting viewings that restrained countries, such as Holland.
Phill : Great series George - hope to see you on TV again!
angela : it was good but swearing was bad
Snoopy : night George x
Dr George Erdos : Thanks for writing in, it was very much appreciated.
Sophie : byyyyyeeeeeeee
Phoebe : and well done
Raptor : NN Dr !
lil-biggie : bye George
Colin : Byee George!
Colin : Byee George!
Baby Doll Stillet : Thanks for talking to us!
Donna Jones : byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Dr George Erdos leaves the room
