A Mind of Its Own Read online

  When it comes to babies, an illusion of control is probably the best one can hope for.

  The conceit that we show in our thinking about the future goes further still than self-aggrandising calculations about our own power and prospects. We are overly confident, too, that our favoured political parties or sports teams will be victorious. Ask a group of people who they think will win a forthcoming election, and then divide them up according to who they hope will win (the Conservative and Labour parties, say) and you see something rather curious. Labour supporters will be significantly more hopeful about the chances of the Labour party than Conservatives, and vice versa. And the more fervently you want your party to win, the higher you rate their chance of success.29

  From where does this eternal hope spring? The sleazy lawyer may play a part, hiding or distorting unwelcome information. Yet even promises of cash prizes for accurate predictions – which should surely serve to counteract our predisposition to be unrealistic – can’t rid us of our sanguine expectations. It is the same, too, in the sporting stadium. Even in the betting booth, where people put their hard-earned money where their mouth is, judgment is swayed by desire.30 Another possible explanation for our undue positivism is that we are tempted into complacency by the company we keep; if everyone you know is a Democrat, their chances may begin to seem more hopeful than they really are.31 Yet this cannot be the whole story. Even people with the most up-to-date polling information at their fingertips are susceptible to the ‘wishful thinking’ effect.32

  We think it will be so, simply because we would prefer it to be so, the research suggests. This was made starkly clear in a laboratory study of wishful thinking in which the researcher randomly assigned college students to two teams, and then pitted the teams against one another in a dart-throwing competition.33 As one person from each team stood ready, dart in hand, everyone else scribbled down a guess as to which of the two would throw closer to the bull’s eye – the teammate or the opponent. Then the next two competitors stepped up for a throw-off. Their chances were rated by everyone else, and so on, until everyone had thrown a dart.

  Although the teams were put together in an entirely haphazard fashion, the flame of fellow feeling was nonetheless sparked. When asked, the students confessed to a desire that their own team would triumph. And, in line with their desires, each team thought it more likely that their own team would prevail against the opposition. Not only that, but all but a few of the students were confident that their predictions about which team would win were unaffected by their hankering for their own team’s victory. Yet what else could have been biasing their judgments, other than the hope that they would be on the winning side? Indeed, when the researcher took a closer look at the data, he found that the stronger the yearning, the greater the confidence. Hope springs eternally from hope, it seems.

  As we draw towards the end of this chapter, there are two morals to be drawn. One, never trust a social psychologist. Two, never trust your brain. They both manipulate your perception of reality, thus tricking you into embarrassing vanities. (Of course, in the case of the social psychologist those vanities are then permanently recorded in order that other professionals may be entertained by them. So perhaps you should trust social psycho logists even less than you do your brain.) But don’t feel angry with your vain brain for shielding you from the truth. There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.34

  Psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues have identified a pessimistic ‘explanatory style’ that is common in depressed people.35 When pessimists fail they blame themselves, and think that the fault is in themselves (‘I’m stupid’, ‘I’m useless’), will last forever and will affect everything they do. This is a far cry from the sorts of explanations that happy, self-serving people give for failure.

  What is more, it is becoming clear that pessimism can seriously endanger your physical, as well as your mental, health. The deathclock asks only four questions in order to calculate how many years to shear off your expected time of death. Are you male? Do you smoke? Are you overweight? And are you a pessimist? You may be surprised to see your personal disposition up there as a risk factor along with gender, smoking and obesity, but the research does seem to bear out its right to be in the Big Four. In one remarkable study of the effect of mental outlook on longevity, researchers analysed brief autobiographies written more than seventy years ago by North American nuns about to take their final vows.36 The researchers scrutinised the passages, counting how often the nun expressed a positive emotion. This yielded, for each nun, what one might (bearing the joyful heroine of The Sound of Music somewhat wryly in mind) refer to as a ‘Maria measure’. The researchers then looked to see whether their emotional outlook was related to their lifespan. The statistics showed that the more cheerful a nun’s autobiographical account, the longer the nun had on this earthly plain before being gathered up to the celestial empire. In fact, on average the jovial nuns lived almost a decade longer than their more sombre sisters.37

  Indeed, a Maria-style outlook could be just the ticket when the dog bites or the bee stings. Thinking about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens in the face of adversity may help to subdue the damaging cardiovascular effects of sadness.38 And the cheery Pollyannaism of optimists is matched by a similar can-do attitude in their immune systems.39 Optimists make fewer doctor visits, are more likely to survive cancer, are less likely to suffer recurrent heart disease, and are less likely to meet with an untimely death.40 Gloom merchants may find it hard to cultivate a more cheerful perspective in the face of such data, but it’s certainly worth trying.

  But while both our emotional and physical well-being seem to benefit from a careful filtering of the harsh light of reality, is there not a price to pay for being blinkered in this way? (Aside, that is, from the small matter of our self-knowledge turning out to be little more than an agreeable fiction.) Certainly, blind optimism can sometimes lead us astray. Our self-serving tendency to blame anything and anyone but ourselves for mistakes in our past can doom us to repeat them. This was the dismal conclusion of a study that asked college students to predict when they would finish an assignment they had just been set.41 As we have all done ourselves on many occasions, the students seriously underestimated how long it would take. Even asking the students to reflect on their failures to finish similar assignments in the time they had allotted themselves on previous occasions had no effect in challenging this immoderate confidence. The students simply dismissed those botch-ups as irrelevant; past assignments were late due to freakish obstacles that would surely never arise again.

  This touching faith that we hold it in our gift to deliver on time, despite all evidence to the contrary, can leave nothing but chaos in its wake. The planning fallacy, as it is known, is familiar to us all: from the take-home work that lies untouched in our briefcase all weekend, to the years-long delays in completing local construction projects that have project managers reaching for their blood pressure pills.

  Not only is time money, but we may also be forking out directly for the vain brain’s sleight of hand. As they rake in their profits, bookkeepers and casinos should offer up fulsome thanks to the wishful thinking phenomenon. And if your salary happens to depend on your ability to predict the future, an illusion of control can become an extremely expensive psychological luxury. Researchers asked a hundred traders from investment banks to play a computerised ‘financial market’ version of the ‘press button/hope for light to come on’ task.42 (Instead of trying to get a light to come on, the traders had to try to increase an index value.) Afterwards, the traders filled in questionnaires about the game that revealed how readily they were seduced into the erroneous belief that they could control c
hanges in the value of the index. Interestingly, the statistics showed that the more arrogant the trader about his influence on the computer task, the less he earned on the trading floor. According to the researchers’ analyses, traders with a high score on the ‘illusion of control’ scale earned about £60,000 per annum less than traders with only average scores.43

  Inevitably, our unrealistic expectations, and our reluctance to admit to our weaknesses and limits, will sometimes trip us up. However, the brain does have a helpful strategy in place to minimise such mishaps. So long as our minds are yet to be made up, we actually view ourselves and life unusually realistically as we quietly contemplate our future. Volunteers asked to deliberate a decision they had yet to make (to go on holiday, for example, or end a relationship) were less grandiose about themselves, more pensive, more attuned to the risks of life, and less susceptible to the illusion of omnipotence than were other volunteers not induced to be in such a contemplative frame of mind.44 This ‘window of realism’ is presumably what keeps our aspirations from becoming too fanciful, our strivings too absurd.

  Once our decision is made, however, the window of realism is snapped shut more tightly than ever before. Volunteers told to reflect on a decision that they had already made were even more exaggeratedly buoyant about themselves and their prospects than normal. And there is good reason for the vain brain to slip up into top gear just as soon as we are ready to put our plans into action.45 The shamelessly immodest cry of the conceited brain – ‘Sure! I can do that! (And if I can’t it’s someone else’s fault …)’ – is like a psychic trampoline. It propels you upwards, but provides a soft landing should you rapidly descend. The tricks of the vain brain enable you to pursue your ambitions while keeping your ego safe from harm. Self-handicappers, who protect their self-esteem by providing themselves in advance with a non-threatening reason for poor performance (‘I didn’t try’, or ‘I didn’t study’), gain another benefit from this strategy. By buffering their delicate egos from potential failure in this way, self-handicappers can have a go at things, safe in the knowledge that they have an excuse on hand should things go badly. People who habitually protect their pride in this way were given the opportunity to self-handicap before playing a pinball machine.46 By allowing the volunteers to choose how long to practise beforehand, the researchers were able to see how self-handicapping (by practising less) gave the volunteers the psychological leeway they needed to enjoy and persist at playing pinball, even when they were told that they weren’t terribly good at it.

  Ego-friendly excuses for unrealised aspirations are also invaluable in the classroom. Schoolchildren doing badly in reading or maths, when encouraged to blame their difficulties on lack of effort rather than lack of ability, show remarkable gains in both persistence and accomplishment.47 And persuading yourself that the sun will come out tomorrow – that the setbacks you are experiencing are only temporary and nothing to do with any personal deficiencies – lends strength to persevere with your goals. First-year undergraduates worried about their poor grades were enticed by researchers into thinking that grades naturally improve after the first semester.48 In a spectacular demonstration of the self-fulfilling prophecy, these students went on to get better grades (both a week and a year later), and were less likely to drop out, compared with similarly concerned students who were not persuaded to be optimistic about the future in this way.

  We have many reasons, then, to be grateful to the brain for its careful stretching of the truth. Indeed, without our vain brains, would we even bother to get up in the morning? One final, glorious reason to thank your brain for its little white lies is that they make life itself endurable. According to the sensationally named Terror Management Theory, developed by a psychologist rejoicing in the surname Pyszczynski,49 a healthily vain brain is ‘a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, destined only to die and decay’. I’m sure you will agree that if a few positive illusions can keep at bay the disturbing thought that in truth you are of no more significance in the universe than, as Pyszczynski cruelly puts it, ‘any individual potato, pineapple, or porcupine’, then we all owe a large debt of gratitude to our vain brains.

  But let’s end on a more comforting note. Although in the grand scheme of things you may not be of more significance than a porcupine, you are almost certainly a better driver.

  Notes

  1 J.M. Nuttin (1985), ‘Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: the name-letter effect’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 15: 353–61.

  2 For example, N. Epley and D. Dunning (2000), ‘Feeling “holier than thou”: Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 861–75; C. Heath (1999), ‘On the social psychology of agency relation ships: lay theories of motivation overemphasize extrinsic incentives’, Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, 78: 25–62; O. Svenson (1981), ‘Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?’, Acta Psychologica, 47: 143–8.

  3 D. Dunning, J.A. Meyerowitz and A.D. Holzberg (2002), ‘Ambiguity and self-evaluation: the role of idiosyncratic trait definition in self-serving assessments of ability’, in T. Gilovich et al. (eds), Heuristics and biases: the psychology of intuitive judgment, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press (pp. 324–33).

  4 For example, when considering what makes an intelligent or creative person, or a good leader, people regard the attributes that they themselves possess as the most important. D. Dunning, M. Perie and A.L. Story (1991), ‘Self-serving prototypes of social categories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16: 957–68.

  5 J.D. Campbell (1986), ‘Similarity and uniqueness: the effects of attribute type, relevance, and individual differences in self-esteem and depression’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50: 281–94.

  6 For example, J.R. Larson (1977), ‘Evidence for a self-serving bias in the attribution of causality’, Journal of Personality, 45: 430–41.

  7 W.K. Campbell and C. Sedikides (1999), ‘Self-threat magnifies the self-serving bias: A meta-analytic integration’, Review of General Psychology, 3: 23–43.

  8 E. Pronin D.Y. Lin and L. Ross (2002), ‘The bias blind spot: perceptions of bias in self versus others’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28: 369–81.

  9 L. J. Sanna and E.C. Chang (2003), ‘The past is not what it used to be: optimists’ use of retroactive pessimism to diminish the sting of failure’, Journal of Research in Personality, 37: 388–404.

  10 T.W. Smith, C.R. Snyder and M.M. Handelsman (1982), ‘On the self-serving function of an academic wooden leg: test anxiety as a self-handicapping strategy’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42: 314–21.

  11 J.M. Burger and R.M. Huntzinger (1985), ‘Temporal effects on attributions for one’s own behavior: the role of task outcome’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21: 247–61.

  12 C. Sedikides and J.D. Green (2000), ‘On the self-protective nature of inconsistency-negativity management: using the person memory paradigm to examine self-referent memory’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 906–22.

  13 H. Markus and E. Wurf (1987), ‘The dynamic self-concept: A social psychological perspective’, Annual Review of Psychology, 38: 299–337.

  14 Z. Kunda and R. Sanitioso (1989), ‘Motivated changes in the self-concept’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25: 272–85.

  15 R. Sanitioso, Z. Kunda and G.T. Fong (1990), ‘Motivated recruitment of autobiographical memories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59: 229–41.

  16 R. Sanitioso and R. Wlordarski (2004), ‘In search of information that confirms a desired self-perception: motivated processing of social feedback and choice of social interactions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30: 412–22.

  17 The ‘
intuitive lawyer’ versus the ‘intuitive scientist’ styles of information processing are contrasted by R.F. Baumeister and L.S. Newman (1994), ‘Self-regulation of cognitive inference and decision processes’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20: 3–19.

  18 Z. Kunda (1987), ‘Motivated inference: self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 636–47.

  19 R.S. Wyer and D. Frey (1983), ‘The effects of feedback about self and others on the recall and judgments of feedback-relevant information’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19: 540–59.

  20 For summary, see Z. Kunda (1990), ‘The case for motivated reasoning’, Psychological Bulletin, 108: 480–98.

  21 R. Sanitioso and R. Wlordarski (2004), ‘In search of information that confirms a desired self-perception: motivated processing of social feedback and choice of social interactions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30: 412–22.

  22 Z. Kunda (1987), ‘Motivated inference: self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 636–47.

  23 P.H. Ditto and D.F. Lopez (1992), ‘Motivated skepticism: use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63: 568–84.

  24 G.A. Quattrone and A. Tversky (1984), ‘Causal versus diagnostic contingencies: on self-deception and on the voter’s illusion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46: 237–48.

  25 C.R. Snyder (1978), ‘The “illusion” of uniqueness’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18: 33–41.

  26 Z. Kunda (1987), ‘Motivated inference: self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 636–47.