A Mind of Its Own Read online

  Even when your brain does accept responsibility when things go wrong, research shows that just a few days later it may have conveniently cast off the more unflattering explanations for failure. In one experiment investigating this phenomenon, male university students were given a task that supposedly assessed their ‘manual dexterity and cognitive perception coordination’.11 (‘I’m handy and I’m coordinated.’) You can of course imagine a male ego immediately wanting a piece of that pie. The students were randomly told either that they were dexterous virtuosos of cognitive perception or that, frankly, the average china shop proprietor would more warmly welcome a bull into their shop. The men were then asked either immediately afterwards or a few days later to explain why they had done well or badly on the test. The students whose vain brains were given a few days to edit the memory of the experiment were much more self-enhancing in their explanations of why they had succeeded or failed, in comparison with the students who were asked for their explanations straight away.

  Memory is one of your ego’s greatest allies, of course. Good things about ourselves tend to secure a firm foothold in the brain cells, while bad stuff – oopsie – has a habit of losing grasp and slipping away. Imagine being given a personality test, and then a list of behaviours that – according to the test – you are likely to perform. Would you later remember more negative behaviours (such as ‘You would make fun of others because of their looks’ and ‘You would often lie to your parents’) or more positive behaviours (such as ‘You would help a handicapped neighbour paint his house’ or ‘You would keep secrets if asked to’)? Intuitively you might think that the rather surprising predictions that you are likely to be unkind and untrustworthy would so jar with your generally positive self-concept that they would be more memorable. However, when researchers gave people a bogus personality test of this sort, this is not what they found.12 Instead, it was the predictions of caring and honourable behaviours that stuck in people’s memories. The reason was that their brains simply refused to allocate as much processing time to nasty predictions as to the nice ones. It seems that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for negative feedback to enter the kingdom of memory.

  Not only does memory collude with the brain in the information that it lets in but, as you might begin to fear, it also controls the information it lets out. All brains contain an enormous database of personal memories that bear on that perennially fascinating question ‘Who am I?’, or the self-concept. But the self-concept, psychologists have discovered, is conveniently self-shifting.13 If the self-concept you are wearing no longer suits your motives, the brain simply slips into something more comfortable. The willing assistant in this process is memory. It has the knack of pulling out personal memories that better fit the new circumstances. Two Princeton researchers observed this metamorphosis directly, by tempting the vain brains of their volunteers with an attractive change of self-concept.14 They asked a group of students to read one of two (fabricated) scientific articles. The first article claimed that an extroverted personality helps people to achieve academic success. The second article, handed out to just as many students, claimed instead that introverts tend to be more academically successful. You can guess what’s going to happen. Imagine it. You’re a vain brain. You’re a vain brain at Princeton, for goodness’ sake. Someone’s offering you a shimmering, glittering, dazzling self-concept that says, ‘Hey, world. I am going to make it.’ A personality trait you’ve been told offers the crystal stairway to triumph might not be quite your size, but if you can make it fit with a bit of tweaking, you will. Whichever personality trait the students thought was the key to success, they rated themselves more highly as possessing.

  What happens is that the vain brain calls in memory to make sure that the most attractive self-concept fits. From the enormous wardrobe of rich and complicated autobiographical events from your life, your memory brings to the fore those memories that best match the self-concept you are trying to achieve. When people are told that extroverts, say, tend to be more successful than shy and retiring types, it is the memories that bear out their sociable and outgoing natures that rush quickly and easily to consciousness.15 And as we’ve already seen, memory keeps the gate at the front door as well. Give someone who’s been told that one type of personality leads to success a bit of personality feedback, and she will remember much more of the feedback that shows that she possesses the supposedly more favourable attribute.16

  The vain brain’s other powerful protectorate is reasoning. This might seem a little odd. Isn’t reasoning supposed to be the compass that guides us towards the truth, not saves us from it? It seems not, particularly when our ego is under attack. In fact, the best we can say of our gift for thinking in these circumstances is that we do at least recognise that conclusions cannot be drawn out of thin air; we need a bit of evidence to support our case. The problem is that we behave like a smart lawyer searching for evidence to bolster his client’s case, rather than a jury searching for the truth.17 As we’ve seen, memory is often the over-zealous secretary who assists in this process by hiding or destroying files that harbour unwanted information. Only when enough of the objectionable stuff has been shredded dare we take a look. Evidence that supports your case is quickly accepted, and the legal assistants are sent out to find more of the same. However, evidence that threatens reason’s most important client – you – is subjected to gruelling cross-examination. Accuracy, validity and plausibility all come under attack in the witness stand. The case is soon won. A victory for justice and truth, you think, conveniently ignoring the fact that yours was the only lawyer in the courtroom.

  Time now to watch your hot-shot lawyer in action. Imagine there’s a rumour afoot that certain things about you augur badly for how well you will do in your chosen profession. Your reputation is at risk, and your lawyer is engaged to defend you from this potential slander. This was the situation created in a study demonstrating that the client is always right. University students were asked to take part in an experiment to do with the reasons for success in law, medicine and business.18 They were given fictitious descriptions of people who supposedly did well or badly at professional school. The sorts of attributes they read about were things like being the youngest or oldest child, being Catholic or Protestant, and having had a mother employed outside the home or a stay-at-home mother.

  Now, say one of the students is the youngest child of a Catholic family whose mother stayed at home rearing her and her ten older siblings, and she longs to be a doctor. Then she reads about a successful doctor who is Catholic, the oldest child, and whose mother went out to work. Wouldn’t it be nice if she could convince herself that the things she has in common with the successful doctor are what make for success, but that the things they differ on aren’t important? This is just what happens. The student decides that a Catholic upbringing brings success, but that the other two factors are relatively unimportant. However, if the student had been told that the same person was unsuccessful, suddenly her Catholicism would seem far less relevant (what could religion possibly have to do with it?), but birth order and mother’s employment – the factors she differs on – would suddenly become crucial. Your hard-working lawyer constructs the most flattering and self-serving case it can from the available data.

  The next step is the evaluation of evidence. When that evidence poses a threat to your ego, a good lawyer can always find fault. In one such experiment, high-school students were given an intelligence test.19 Some of them were told that they had done well, others that they had done badly. All of them were also given a few pages to read containing arguments from scientists both for and against the validity of intelligence tests. Even though everyone was given the same information, the poor guinea pigs whose egos had been threatened by negative feedback decided that intelligence tests were a much cruder tool for measuring intellectual depths than did students who were told that they’d done brilliantly. Was this because memory had hidden the pro-intelligence test file
s? Actually, no. In fact, the ego-threatened students remembered more of the pro-intelligence test arguments than did the others. This seems a little odd, until you consider all the effort the vain brain’s lawyer must have put in to disparage those particular arguments. If you spend a great deal of effort cross-examining a witness you’ll have a good memory for what they said, even if you don’t believe a goddamn word of their lies.

  On the whole, it seems we are content to employ the sloppiest of reasoning … until some threat to our motives appears, at which point we suddenly acquire the strictest possible methodological standards.20 The smart lawyer inside us is also skilled at finding supporting witnesses to bolster our case. Remember the experiments in which people were told that being either outgoing or withdrawn by nature is more conducive to success? Well, your brain not only biases your memory to make you think that you’ve been blessed with the more favourable personality attribute. It also then encourages you to spend time in the company of people who think you’re really like that.21

  It’s rather unsettling to know that your ego is so very well protected from reality. And it’s not just your ego that’s kept so safely removed from the truth. Perhaps understandably, given the slings and arrows of fortune we must dodge every day, your vain brain calls upon many of the same strategies to keep your perception of your future health, happiness and fortune pleasantly unrealistic.

  Just as we all believe ourselves to be better people than average, so too we think ourselves relatively invulnerable to life’s trials. As with anything that threatens our egos, we push absurdly high our standards for evidence that might challenge our rosy beliefs. For example, brains prefer not to have to take too seriously any medical information that challenges our sense of physical invincibility. My father-in-law enjoys a lifestyle that, to put it bluntly, would leave the hardiest of cardiologists weeping into their public health information pamphlets. Statistically, he should probably have died shortly before he was born. Concerning all those pesky ‘smoking – disease – death connection’ studies, he is breathtakingly (excuse the pun) dismissive. Yet he is not immune to the charms of scientific discovery when it suits. For example, he never fails to encourage me to push aside my tumbler of water in favour of a nice healthy glass of red wine. In an experimental study of this ‘motivated scepticism’ phenomenon, people were given an article to read that set out the medical dangers for women (but not men) of drinking too much coffee.22 Men and women who drank little or no coffee found it convincing. Men who drank a lot of coffee found it convincing. There are no prizes for guessing which group thought the link between caffeine and disease unpersuasive.

  Vain brains are reluctant to accept hints of physical vulnerability even when it’s staring them in the face. In another demonstration of self-protective incredulity, some volunteers were told about a fictitious medical condition called thioamine acetylase (TAA) deficiency.23 TAA deficient individuals, they were reliably informed, were ‘relatively susceptible to a variety of pancreatic disorders’ later in life. Then one by one the volunteers were led into a private room (or was it?) to test themselves for the condition, by dipping a special piece of test paper (or was it?) into a sample of saliva. Some of the volunteers were told that if their TAA levels were normal, the strip would remain yellow. They were the lucky ones. The rest of the volunteers were told that if their TAA levels were normal the strip would turn dark green. They were the unlucky ones. The test strip, being made of ordinary yellow paper, wasn’t going to change colour no matter how much spit it encountered.

  These ‘TAA deficiency’ volunteers, the ones who ‘failed’ the saliva reaction test, were determinedly optimistic about the perils of TAA deficiency. They reckoned that both TAA deficiency and pancreatic disease were far less serious and far more common than did people who ‘passed’ the test. Those volunteers who failed also rated the saliva reaction test as less accurate. Even more defensive was their behaviour while they were taking the saliva test. The researchers were secretly spying on them, of course, while it took place. Everyone had been told that colour change in the test paper took from 10 to 60 seconds, but was generally complete within 20. Volunteers were asked to pop their strips into an envelope as soon as the test was done. The supposedly deficient volunteers were much slower to do this, giving their yellow paper a generous extra half a minute or so to change colour, compared with the ‘no deficiency’ volunteers. What’s more, the majority of the volunteers who failed engaged in some kind of illicit retesting to help their recalcitrant strips along. Some people used a fresh saliva sample. Others retested using a new strip. Some placed the strip directly onto their tongue. The strips were shaken, blown, wiped and saturated with enormous volumes of saliva. These unlucky volunteers didn’t like their diagnosis and they were seeking second, third and fourth opinions on the matter.

  Vain brains can even trick us into unconsciously manipulating the outcome of a medical diagnosis to make it more acceptable. To show this, a group of experimentees were asked to immerse their forearm in a vat of icy cold water (yes, painful) and to keep it there for as long as they could bear.24 They had to do this both before and after physical exercise. Some volunteers were told that if they could keep their arm in the ice-water for longer after exercise, that was a sign of long life expectancy. The other volunteers were told the reverse. Although they weren’t aware that they were doing so, the volunteers changed their tolerance for the cold water after exercise in whichever direction they’d been told predicted a long and healthy life. Of course, manipulating their tolerance in this way couldn’t possibly affect actual life expectancy, but that’s not really what’s important to a vain brain.

  The rose-tinted spectacles through which we scrutinise information about our health can also push back our inevitable demise to a more distant horizon. Despite being confronted with a precisely calculated actuarial estimate of time of departure, we blithely estimate that we will live about ten years longer than we are allotted by mere statistics.25 I recently came across a website that, on the basis of a few pertinent pieces of information, furnishes you with your likely date of death. (For those with a morbid interest, or the need to make very long-term plans, the website is www.deathclock.com.) From this helpful website I learnt that I would die on Sunday, 10 May 2054 at the age of 79. ‘That seems very young’, I thought, and instantly gave myself another – well – ten years, mostly on the grounds that I have long eschewed sausage meat, a product which must surely substantially impair longevity. Indeed, it seems that whenever we gaze into the future we take care only to peep through pink-hued lenses. Who, at the wedding altar is thinking, ‘Fifty-fifty chance of this working – let’s keep our fingers crossed’? Possibly most of the congregation, but probably not the bride or groom. Remember our Catholic student who made up theories to explain why she was likely to succeed at medical school? In the same study the researchers showed that people use the same sort of self-serving speculations to persuade themselves that their marriage will be happy.26

  Nor does the self-deceit stop with our dismissal of the possibility that there may be trouble ahead. We also have an inflated sense of control over what is to come. Take, for example, a task in which volunteers are asked to try to get a light to come on by pressing a button.27 Volunteers are told that the button might control the light; in fact, the light comes on and off randomly and its illumination is entirely unrelated to what the volunteer does with the button. Yet although the volunteers have absolutely no control over the light, their perception is very different. They experience an illusion of control, as it is known, and claim to have an influence over the light. As subjects of future vanity, people rate their personal control more highly if the light happens to come on more often. In other words, we are even more susceptible to the self-flattering impression that we are responsible for how things have turned out, when they turn out well.

  We also succumb more readily to a false sense of influence on occasions when a little omnipotence would be particularly helpful. Offer
a hamburger as a prize in a random draw from a deck of cards, and hungry volunteers will optimistically persuade themselves of greater clout on the task than will volunteers who have already eaten.28 And desperate times call for desperate delusions. In the painfully sleep-deprived months just after the birth of our second child I was convinced that I, and I alone, knew the best and quickest way to get the baby back to sleep. ‘No, no!’ I reprimanded my husband one afternoon, walking in on his attempt to settle the baby for a nap. ‘You have to sit him on your lap with his back curved to the left and hum “Humpty Dumpty” while you stroke his forehead with your thumb. Really, it’s the only thing that works.’

  ‘Well, no wonder it takes you so long to get him to sleep’, my husband replied with pitying scorn, ‘because what he actually finds most soothing is to be walked up and down between the crib and the window with a gentle vertical rocking motion. Would you mind adjusting the blind on your way out? It needs to be raised to exactly two-and-a-half inches above the sill.’