Positive Self-Evaluation

The psychological literature is full of studies illustrating the benefits—both personal and social—of holding positive “illusions” about ourselves. Researchers find that when they induce a positive mood, by whatever means, people are more likely to interact with others and more likely to help others. Those feeling good about themselves are more cooperative in bargaining situations and more likely to find a constructive solution to their conflicts. They are also better problem solvers, more motivated to succeed, and more likely to persist in the face of a challenge. Motivated reasoning enables our minds to defend us against unhappiness, and in the process it gives us the strength to overcome the many obstacles in life that might otherwise overwhelm us. The more of it we do, the better off we tend to be, for it seems to inspire us to strive to become what we think we are. In fact, studies show that the people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem, or both. An overly positive self-evaluation, on the other hand, is normal and healthy.

Motivated Reasoning

As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker. We’ve seen in earlier chapters how the unconscious mind is a master at using limited data to construct a version of the world that appears realistic and complete to its partner, the conscious mind. Visual perception, memory, and even emotion are all constructs, made of a mix of raw, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting data. We use the same kind of creative process to generate our self-image. When we paint our picture of self, our attorney-like unconscious blends fact and illusion, exaggerating our strengths, minimizing our weaknesses, creating a virtually Picassoesque series of distortions in which some parts have been blown up to enormous size (the parts we like) and others shrunk to near invisibility. The rational scientists of our conscious minds then innocently admire the self-portrait, believing it to be a work of photographic accuracy.

Psychologists call the approach taken by our inner advocate “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning helps us to believe in our own goodness and competence, to feel in control, and to generally see ourselves in an overly positive light. It also shapes the way we understand and interpret our environment, especially our social environment, and it helps us justify our preferred beliefs. Still, it isn’t possible for 40 percent to squeeze into the top 5 percent, for 60 percent to squeeze into the top decile, or for 94 percent to be in the top half, so convincing ourselves of our great worth is not always an easy task. Fortunately, in accomplishing it, our minds have a great ally, an aspect of life whose importance we’ve encountered before: ambiguity. Ambiguity creates wiggle room in what may otherwise be inarguable truth, and our unconscious minds employ that wiggle room to build a narrative of ourselves, of others, and of our environment that makes the best of our fate, that fuels us in the good times, and gives us comfort in the bad.

Sorting People and Things

If you read someone a list of ten or twenty items that could be bought at a supermarket, that person will remember only a few. If you recite the list repeatedly, the person’s recall will improve. But what really helps is if the items are mentioned within the categories they fall into—for example, vegetables, fruits, and cereals. Research suggests that we have neurons in our prefrontal cortex that respond to categories, and the list exercise illustrates the reason: categorization is a strategy our brains use to more efficiently process information.

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Every object and person we encounter in the world is unique, but we wouldn’t function very well if we perceived them that way. We don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to observe and consider each detail of every item in our environment. Instead, we employ a few salient traits that we do observe to assign the object to a category, and then we base our assessment of the object on the category rather than the object itself. By maintaining a set of categories, we thus expedite our reactions. If we hadn’t evolved to operate that way, if our brains treated everything we encountered as an individual, we might be eaten by a bear while still deciding whether this particular furry creature is as dangerous as the one that ate Uncle Bob. Instead, once we see a couple bears eat our relatives the whole species gets a bad reputation. Then, thanks to categorical thinking, when we spot a huge, shaggy animal with large, sharp incisors, we don’t hang around gathering more data; we act on our automatic hunch that it is dangerous and move away from it.

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Thinking in terms of generic categories helps us to navigate our environment with great speed and efficiency; we understand an object’s gross significance first and worry about its individuality later. Categorization is one of the most important mental acts we perform, and we do it all the time.

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But the arrow of our reasoning can also point the other way. If we conclude that a certain set of objects belongs to one group and a second set of objects to another, we may then perceive those within the same group as more similar than they really are—and those in different groups as less similar than they really are. Merely placing objects in groups can affect our judgment of those objects. So while categorization is a natural and crucial shortcut, like our brain’s other survival-oriented tricks, it has its drawbacks.

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In another study, researchers found that if you ask people in a given city to estimate the difference in temperature between June 1 and June 30, they will tend to underestimate it; but if you ask them to estimate the difference in temperature between June 15 and July 15, they will overestimate it.4 The artificial grouping of days into months skews our perception: we see two days within a month as being more similar to each other than equally distant days that occur in two different months, even though the time interval between them is identical.

In all these examples, when we categorize, we polarize. Things that for one arbitrary reason or another are identified as belonging to the same category seem more similar to each other than they really are, while those in different categories seem more different than they really are. The unconscious mind transforms fuzzy differences and subtle nuances into clear-cut distinctions. Its goal is to erase irrelevant detail while maintaining information on what is important. When that’s done successfully, we simplify our environment and make it easier and faster to navigate. When it’s done inappropriately, we distort our perceptions, sometimes with results harmful to others, and even ourselves. That’s especially true when our tendency to categorize affects our view of other humans—when we view the doctors in a given practice, the attorneys in a given law firm, the fans of a certain sports team, or the people in a given race or ethnic group as more alike than they really are.

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Remember that the propensity to categorize, even to categorize people, is for the most part a blessing. It allows us to understand the difference between a bus driver and a bus passenger, a store clerk and a customer, a receptionist and a physician, a maître d’ and a waiter, and all the other strangers we interact with, without our having to pause and consciously puzzle out everyone’s role anew during each encounter. The challenge is not how to stop categorizing but how to become aware of when we do it in ways that prevent us from being able to see individual people for who they really are.

Margaret Thatcher

If voice makes such a huge impression, the key question becomes, To what extent can someone consciously alter their voice? Consider the case of Margaret Hilda Roberts, who in 1959 was elected as a Conservative member of British Parliament for North London. She had higher ambitions, but to those in her inner circle, her voice was an issue.16 “She had a schoolmarmish, very slightly bossy, slightly hectoring voice,” recalled Tim Bell, the mastermind of her party’s publicity campaigns. Her own publicity adviser, Gordon Reese, was more graphic. Her high notes, he said, were “dangerous to passing sparrows.” Proving that though her politics were fixed, her voice was pliable, Margaret Hilda Roberts took her confidants’ advice, lowered the pitch, and increased her social dominance. There is no way to measure exactly how much difference the change made, but she did pretty well for herself. After the Conservatives were defeated in 1974, Margaret Thatcher—she had married the wealthy businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951—became the party’s leader and, eventually, prime minister.

Nonverbal Communication

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, and those messages may reveal more than our carefully chosen words and sometimes be at odds with them. Since much, if not most, of the nonverbal signaling and reading of signals is automatic and performed outside our conscious awareness and control, through our nonverbal cues we unwittingly communicate a great deal of information about ourselves and our state of mind. The gestures we make, the position in which we hold our bodies, the expressions we wear on our faces, and the nonverbal qualities of our speech—all contribute to how others view us.

Being Social and the Theory of Mind

One advantage of belonging to a cohesive society in which people help one another is that the group is often better equipped than an unconnected set of individuals to deal with threats from the outside. People intuitively realize that there is strength in numbers and take comfort in the company of others, especially in times of anxiety or need. Or, as Patrick Henry famously said, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

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Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer. Many languages have expressions—such as “hurt feelings”—that compare the pain of social rejection to the pain of physical injury. Those may be more than just metaphors. Brain-imaging studies show that there are two components to physical pain: an unpleasant emotional feeling and a feeling of sensory distress. Those two components of pain are associated with different structures in the brain. Scientists have discovered that social pain is also associated with a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex—the same structure involved in the emotional component of physical pain.

It’s fascinating that the pain of a stubbed toe and the sting of a snubbed advance share a space in your brain. The fact that they are roommates gave some scientists a seemingly wild idea: Could painkillers that reduce the brain’s response to physical brain also subdue social pain?

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Social rejection doesn’t just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being. In fact, social relationships are so important to humans that a lack of social connection constitutes a major risk factor for health, rivaling even the effects of cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of physical activity. In one study, researchers surveyed 4,775 adults in Alameda County, near San Francisco. The subjects completed a questionnaire asking about social ties such as marriage, contacts with extended family and friends, and group affiliation. Each individual’s answers were translated into a number on a “social network index,” with a high number meaning the person had many regular and close social contacts and a low number representing relative social isolation. The researchers then tracked the health of their subjects over the next nine years. Since the subjects had varying backgrounds, the scientists employed mathematical techniques to isolate the effects of social connectivity from risk factors such as smoking and the others I mentioned above, and also from factors like socioeconomic status and reported levels of life satisfaction. They found a striking result. Over the nine-year period, those who’d placed low on the index were twice as likely to die as individuals who were similar with regard to other factors but had placed high on the social network index. Apparently, hermits are bad bets for life insurance underwriters.

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When we think of humans versus dogs and cats, or even monkeys, we usually assume that what distinguishes us is our IQ. But if human intelligence evolved for social purposes, then it is our social IQ that ought to be the principal quality that differentiates us from other animals. In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called “theory of mind,” or “ToM,” this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people’s past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold given their present or future circumstances. Though there is a conscious, reasoned component to ToM, much of our “theorizing” about what others think and feel occurs subliminally, accomplished through the quick and automatic processes of our unconscious mind. For example, if you see a woman racing toward a bus that pulls away before she can get on it, you know without giving it any thought that she was frustrated and possibly ticked off about not reaching the bus in time, and when you see a woman moving her fork toward and away from a piece of chocolate cake, you assume she’s concerned about her weight. Our tendency to automatically infer mental states is so powerful that we apply it not only to other people but to animals and even, as the six-month-olds did in the wooden disk study I described above, to inanimate geometrical shapes.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance to the human species of ToM. We take the operation of our societies for granted, but many of our activities in everyday life are possible only as a result of group efforts, of human cooperation on a large scale. Building a car, for example, requires the participation of thousands of people with diverse skills, in diverse lands, performing diverse tasks. Metals like iron must be extracted from the ground and processed; glass, rubber, and plastics must be created from numerous chemical precursors and molded; batteries, radiators, and countless other parts must be produced; electronic and mechanical systems must be designed; and it all must come together, coordinated from far and wide, in one factory so that the car can be assembled. Today, even the coffee and bagel you might consume while driving to work in the morning is the result of the activities of people all over the world—wheat farmers in one state, bakers most likely in another, dairy farmers yet elsewhere; coffee plantation workers in another country, and roasters hopefully closer to you; truckers and merchant marines to bring it all together; and all the people who make the roasters, tractors, trucks, ships, fertilizer, and whatever other devices and ingredients are involved. It is ToM that enables us to form the large and sophisticated social systems, from farming communities to large corporations, upon which our world is based.

Scientists are still debating whether nonhuman primates use ToM in their social activities, but if they do, it seems to be at only a very basic level.10 Humans are the only animal whose relationships and social organization make high demands on an individual’s ToM. Pure intelligence (and dexterity) aside, that’s why fish can’t build boats and monkeys don’t set up fruit stands. Pulling off such feats makes human beings unique among the animals. In our species, rudimentary ToM develops in the first year. By age four, nearly all human children have gained the ability to assess other people’s mental states. When ToM breaks down, as in autism, people can have difficulty functioning in society. In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, the clinical neurologist Oliver Sacks profiled Temple Grandin, a high-functioning autistic woman. She had told him about what it was like to go to the playground when she was a child, observing the other children’s responses to social signals she could not herself perceive. “Something was going on between the other kids,” he described her as thinking, “something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic.”

Memory

From the nature of these memory errors, and those documented in many other incidents he studied, Münsterberg fashioned a theory of memory. He believed that none of us can retain in memory the vast quantity of details we are confronted with at any moment in our lives and that our memory mistakes have a common origin: they are all artifacts of the techniques our minds employ to fill in the inevitable gaps. Those techniques include relying on our expectations and, more generally, on our belief systems and our prior knowledge. As a result, when our expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge are at odds with the actual events, our brains can be fooled.

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Münsterberg published his ideas about memory in a book that became a best seller, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime. In it, he elaborated on a number of key concepts that many researchers now believe correspond to the way memory really does work: first, people have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will believe the memories they make up.

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Between them, Freud and Münsterberg had come up with theories of mind and memory that were of great importance, but unfortunately the men had little impact on each other: Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss—but had no sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.

Every Human Mind is a Scientist

IN PHYSICS, SCIENTISTS invent models, or theories, to describe and predict the data we observe about the universe. Newton’s theory of gravity is one example; Einstein’s theory of gravity is another. Those theories, though they describe the same phenomenon, constitute very different versions of reality. Newton, for example, imagined that masses affect each other by exerting a force, while in Einstein’s theory the effects occur through a bending of space and time and there is no concept of gravity as a force. Either theory could be employed to describe, with great accuracy, the falling of an apple, but Newton’s would be much easier to use. On the other hand, for the calculations necessary for the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) that helps you navigate while driving, Newton’s theory would give the wrong answer, and so Einstein’s must be used. Today we know that actually both theories are wrong, in the sense that both are only approximations of what really happens in nature. But they are also both correct, in that they each provide a very accurate and useful description of nature in the realms in which they do apply.

As I said, in a way, every human mind is a scientist, creating a model of the world around us, the everyday world that our brains detect through our senses. Like our theories of gravity, our model of the sensory world is only approximate and is based on concepts invented by our minds. And like our theories of gravity, though our mental models of our surroundings are not perfect, they usually work quite well.

The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data. Nature helps us overcome gaps in information by supplying a brain that smooths over the imperfections, at an unconscious level, before we are even aware of any perception. Our brains do all of this without conscious effort, as we sit in a high chair enjoying a jar of strained peas or, later in life, on a couch, sipping a beer. We accept the visions concocted by our unconscious minds without question, and without realizing that they are only an interpretation, one constructed to maximize our overall chances of survival, but not one that is in all cases the most accurate picture possible.

The New Unconscious

Though psychological science has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father in order to marry his mom, or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ. We should certainly credit Freud with understanding the immense power of the unconscious—this was an important achievement—but we also have to recognize that science has cast serious doubt on the existence of many of the specific unconscious emotional and motivational factors he identified as molding the conscious mind. As the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote, the “supernatural flavor of Freud’s Unbewusst [unconscious] made the concept generally unpalatable.”

The unconscious envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and gentler than that and more reality bound.”12 In the new view, mental processes are thought to be unconscious because there are portions of the mind that are inaccessible to consciousness due to the architecture of the brain, rather than because they have been subject to motivational forces like repression. The inaccessibility of the new unconscious is not considered to be a defense mechanism, or unhealthy. It is considered normal.

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In modern times, as I mentioned, it was Freud who popularized the unconscious. But though his theories had great prominence in clinical applications and popular culture, Freud influenced books and films more than he influenced experimental research in psychology. Through most of the twentieth century, empirical psychologists simply neglected the unconscious mind. Odd as it may sound today, in the first half of that century, which was dominated by those in the behaviorist movement, psychologists even sought to do away with the concept of mind altogether. They not only likened the behavior of humans to that of animals, they considered both humans and animals to be merely complex machines that responded to stimuli in predictable ways.

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Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you.

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Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence. You might feel certain you took a job because it presented a challenge, but perhaps you were really more interested in the greater prestige. You might swear you like that fellow for his sense of humor, but you might really like him for his smile, which reminds you of your mother’s. You might think you trust your gastroenterologist because she is a great expert, but you might really trust her because she is a good listener. Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven astonishingly inaccurate.

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In truth, environmental factors have a powerful—and unconscious—influence not only on how much we choose to eat but also on how the food tastes. For example, suppose you don’t eat just in movie theaters but sometimes go to restaurants, sometimes even restaurants that provide more than just a menu board listing various types of hamburgers. These more elegant restaurants commonly offer menus peppered with terms like “crispy cucumbers,” “velvety mashed potatoes,” and “slow-roasted beets on a bed of arugula,” as if at other restaurants the cucumbers are limp, the mashed potatoes have the texture of wool, and the beets are flash-fried, then made to sit up in an uncomfortable chair. Would a crispy cucumber, by any other name, taste as crisp? Would a bacon cheeseburger, presented in Spanish, become Mexican food? Could poetic description convert macaroni and cheese from a limerick to a haiku? Studies show that flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical foods given only a generic listing. If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look; yet a dish’s description turns out to be an important factor in how it tastes. So the next time you have friends over for dinner, don’t serve them salad from the store down the street; go for the subliminal effect and serve them a mélange of local greens.

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... In that study participants were asked to read a recipe for creating a Japanese lunch dish, then to rate the amount of effort and skill they thought the recipe would require and how likely they were to prepare the dish at home. Subjects who were presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more difficult and said they were less likely to attempt to make the dish. The researchers repeated the experiment, showing other subjects a one-page description of an exercise routine instead of a recipe, and found similar results: subjects rated the exercise as harder and said they were less likely to try it when the instructions were printed in a font that was hard to read. Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information.

The science of the new unconscious is full of reports about phenomena such as these, quirks in our judgment and perception of people and events, artifacts that arise from the usually beneficial ways in which our brains automatically process information. The point is that we are not like computers that crunch data in a relatively straightforward manner and calculate results. Instead, our brains are made up of a collection of many modules that work in parallel, with complex interactions, most of which operate outside of our consciousness. As a consequence, the real reasons behind our judgments, feelings, and behavior can surprise us.

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In a recent experiment, he [Antonio Rangel] and his colleagues showed that people would pay 40 to 61 percent more for an item of junk food if, rather than choosing from a text or image display, they were presented with the actual item. The study also found that if the item is presented behind Plexiglas, rather than being available for you to simply grab, your willingness to pay sinks back down to the text and image levels. Sound weird? How about rating one detergent as being superior to another because it comes in a blue-and-yellow box? Or would you buy German wine rather than French because German beer hall music was playing in the background as you walked down the liquor aisle? Would you rate the quality of silk stockings as higher because you liked their scent?

In each of these studies, people were strongly influenced by the irrelevant factors—the ones that speak to our unconscious desires and motivations, which traditional economists ignore. Moreover, when quizzed about the reasons for their decisions, the subjects proved completely unaware that those factors had influenced them. For example, in the detergent study, subjects were given three different boxes of detergent and asked to try them all out for a few weeks, then report on which they liked best and why. One box was predominantly yellow, another blue, and the third was blue with splashes of yellow. In their reports, the subjects overwhelmingly favored the detergent in the box with mixed colors. Their comments included much about the relative merits of the detergents, but none mentioned the box. Why should they? A pretty box doesn’t make the detergent work better. But in reality it was just the box that differed—the detergents inside were all identical. We judge products by their boxes, books by their covers, and even corporations’ annual reports by their glossy finish. That’s why doctors instinctively “package” themselves in nice shirts and ties and it’s not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts.