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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
THE DAZZLING FIRST BOOK FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY INSIGHT INVESTMENT SCIENCE BOOKS PRIZE 'A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book.' Helen Dunmore 'Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.' Mail on Sunday 'Fine is a cognitive neuroscientist with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality' The Times Perhaps your brain seems to stumble when faced with the 13 times table, or persistently fails to master parallel parking. But you're in control of it, right? Sorry. Think again. Dotted with popular explanations of social psychology research and fascinating real-life examples, A Mind of Its Own tours the less salubrious side of human psychology. Psychologist Cordelia Fine shows that the human brain is in fact stubborn, emotional and deceitful, and teaches you everything you always wanted to know about the brain – and plenty you probably didn't.
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Praise for the first edition of A Mind of Its Own
‘We are all vain bigots, thanks to the foibles of the human brain, so argues Fine in her witty survey of psychology experiments … An ideal gift for anyone interested in psychology’ Focus
‘Clear, accessible writing makes her a science writer to watch.’ Metro
‘Filled with quotable stories and interactive ways of how our brain has a buoyant ego of its own and is not the objective tool we might like to believe’ Bookseller
‘A light and amusing introduction to the brain and how it works on our perceptions and actions’ Publishing News
‘Consistently well-written and meticulously researched’ Alain de Botton, Sunday Times
‘In breezy demotic, Fine offers an entertaining tour of current thinking … [she] is especially fascinating on the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain’ Telegraph
‘Fine with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, slaps an Asbo on the hundred billion grey cells that – literally – have shifty, ruthless, self-serving minds of their own.’ The Times
‘Fine’s style is chirpy … [with] many affectionately amusing scenes’ Guardian
‘Engaging, intelligent’ Scotland on Sunday
‘Fine’s flair for the humorous and anecdotal makes this a delightful read.’ Irish Times
‘Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.’ Mail on Sunday
‘This is one of the most interesting and amusing accounts of how we think we think – I think.’ Alexander McCall Smith
‘A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book. By the end you’ll realise that your brain can (and does) run rings around you.’ Helen Dunmore
‘Witty and informative’ Philip Pullman
‘Excellent … Fine’s very engaging and chatty style … will delight many readers … Fine has got it just right. Although she is an academic, she writes like a human being … All in all this short and enjoyable book is a must for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what their brain gets up to when they aren’t watching it. First class.’ Brian Clegg, www.popularscience.co.uk
‘A fun introduction to some of the factors that can distort our reasoning. I’d recommend it to anyone who is just getting interested in the topic, or as a gift for anyone you know who still thinks that their personal point of view is unprejudiced and reliable.’ Psychologist
‘Fine is that rare academic who’s also an excellent writer. Highly recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.’ Library Journal
‘Remarkably entertaining’ Los Angeles Times
A Mind of Its Own
How your brain distorts and deceives
Cordelia Fine
Contents
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks go to Simon Flynn and his colleagues at Icon Books for their assistance, in so many ways, with this book. Their contribution is greatly appreciated. I am also most grateful to my agent Barbara Lowenstein and her colleagues, for their advice and support on so many matters. Thanks, too, go to my editors at W.W. Norton for all they did for the US version of the book. For my mother, who always said just the right thing when I needed encouragement, I have the deepest gratitude. And finally, without my husband’s very practical support, I would still be working on Chapter 1. Thank you.
Dr Cordelia Fine studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by an M.Phil in Criminology at Cambridge University and a Ph.D in Psychology at University College London. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University.
Introduction
Do you feel that you can trust your own brain? So maybe it falters for a moment, faced with the thirteen times table. It may occasionally send you into a room in search of something, only to abandon you entirely. And, if yours is anything like mine, it may stubbornly refuse to master the parallel park. Yet these are petty and ungrateful gripes when we consider all that our brains actually do for us. Never before have we been made so aware of the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of those one hundred billion brain cells that make up the engine of the mind. And barely a day goes by when these gathered neurons aren’t exalted in a newspaper article highlighting a newly discovered wonder of their teamwork.
From day to day, we take our brains somewhat for granted, but (particularly with this book in hand) it’s likely that you’re feeling a little quiet pride on behalf of your own. And, reading books on the subject of its own self aside, what else can’t the thing do? After all, it tells you who you are, and what to think, and what’s out there in the world around you. Its ruminations, sensations and conclusions are confided to you and you alone. For absolutely everything you know about anything, it is the part of yourself you have to thank. You might think that, if there’s one thing in this world you can trust, it’s your own brain. You are, after all, as intimate as it is possible to be.
But the truth of the matter – as revealed by the quite extraordinary and fascinating research described in this book – is that your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. Your brain is vainglorious. It’s emotional and immoral. It deludes you. It is pigheaded, secretive and weak-willed. Oh, and it’s also a bigot. This is more than a minor inconvenience. That fleshy walnut inside your skull is all you have in order to know yourself and to know the world. Yet, thanks to the masquerading of an untrustworthy brain with a mind of its own, much of what you think you know is not quite as it seems.
CHAPTER 1
The Vain Brain
For a softer, kinder reality
A week after Icon commissioned this book, I discovered that I was pregnant with my second child. The manuscript was due three days before the baby. My husband, a project manager both by temperament and employ, drew up a project plan for me. To my eye, it entirely failed to reflect the complexity, subtlety, and unpredictability of the process of writing a book. It was little more than a chart showing the number of words I had to write per week, and when I was going to write them. It also had me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby was born.
‘This plan has me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby is born’, I said.
‘Plus all the annual leave from your job’, my husband added.
I felt that he had missed the point. ‘But when do I rest?’
‘Rest?’ My husband pretended to examine the plan. ‘As I see it, you rest for two days after you finish the manuscript, shortly before going into labour, giving birth and having your life entirely taken over by the nutritional demands of a newborn.’
I had a brief image of myself in labour, telling the midwife between gasps of gas what a treat it was to have some time to myself.
‘What if I can’t do it?’ I asked.
My husband gave me a ‘this really isn’t difficult’ look. ‘This is how you do it’, he said, stabbing the plan. ‘You write this many words a week.’
He was right, I told myself. Of course I could do it. It was irrelevant that I was pregnant. After all, growing a baby is easy – no project plan required. My first trimester nausea and exhaustion would soon pass. The brains of other, weaker women might be taken hostage by pregnancy hormones, but not my brain. My bump would remain well enough contained to enable me to reach the computer keyboard. And absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, the baby would not come inconveniently early. Of course I could write the book.
I then did something very foolish. I began research on this chapter – the vain brain. The vain brain that embellishes, enhances and aggrandises you. The vain brain that excuses your faults and failures, or simply rewrites them out of history. The vain brain that sets you up on a pedestal above your peers. The vain brain that misguidedly thinks you invincible, invulnerable and omnipotent. The brain so very vain that it even considers the letters that appear in your name to be more attractive than those that don’t.1
I didn’t want to know any of this. But then it got worse. I went on to read just how essential these positive illusions are. They keep your head high and your heart out of your boots. They keep you from standing atop railway bridges gazing contemplatively at approaching trains. Without a little deluded optimism, your immune system begins to wonder whether it’s worth the effort of keeping you alive. And, most extraordinary, it seems that sometimes your vain brain manages to transform its grandiose beliefs into reality. Buoyed by a brain that loves you like a mother, you struggle and persevere – happily blind to your own inadequacies, arrogantly dismissive of likely obstacles – and actually achieve your goals.
I needed my vain brain back. Immediately.
Luckily, I managed to regain my optimism, and the manuscript was delivered a few days before the baby. About three months later, however, my agent contacted me with the news that the US publisher W.W. Norton was interested in the book. In fact, they liked it so much that they wanted another hundred pages of it. (My husband didn’t know which to open first – the champagne, or the spreadsheet.) This was a daunting prospect: just writing a shopping list can take all day when there is a small baby in the house. Thankfully, though, my positive illusions triumphed once again. Pushing aside all dispiriting thoughts of the difficulties ahead, I began to sharpen the pencils. And, as the existence of this new, longer version of the book proves, again, it worked for me. But now it’s time for me to attempt to spoil your chances of happiness, health and success by disillusioning you.
While it troubles philosophers, for the rest of us it is vastly more comfortable that we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting lens of our brains. Freud suggested that the ego ‘rejects the unbearable idea’, and since then experimental psychologists have been peeling back the protective layers encasing our self-esteem to reveal the multitude of strategies our brains use to keep our egos plump and self-satisfied. Let’s start with some basic facts. When asked, people will modestly and reluctantly confess that they are, for example, more ethical, more nobly motivated employees, and better drivers than the average person.2 In the latter case, this even includes people interviewed in hospital shortly after extraction from the mangled wrecks that were once their cars. No one considers themselves to fall in the bottom half of the heap, and statistically, that’s not possible. But in a sample of vain brains, it’s inevitable.
For one thing, if it’s at all possible then your brain will interpret the question in the way that suits you best. If I were asked how my driving compares with others, I would rate myself better than average without hesitation. My driving record at speeds above one mile per hour is flawless. Yet below this speed my paintwork, and any stationary object I am attempting to park near, are in constant peril. These expensive unions between the stationary and the near-stationary are so frequent that at one point I actually considered enveloping the vulnerable portions of my car in bubble-wrap. My mother, in contrast, can reverse with exquisite precision into a parking spot at whiplash speeds. On the other hand, she regularly rams into the back of cars that ‘should have gone’ at roundabouts. She, too, considers her driving to be superb. You begin to see how everyone is able to stake their claim to be in the superior half of the driving population. If the trait or skill that you’re being asked about is helpfully ambiguous, you interpret the question to suit your own idiosyncratic strengths.3
Even if you are unambiguously hopeless in an area of life, your brain gets round this by simply diminishing the importance of that skill. I, for example, cannot draw. I am the artistic equivalent of being tone deaf. However, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest because to my brain, drawing is an unnecessary extra. I can see that it would be useful if one were an artist, but in the same way that it’s useful for a contortionist to be able to wrap his legs behind his head. Essential for a small minority, but nothing more than a showy party trick for everyone else.4 And in a final clever enhancement of this self-enhancement, people believe that their weaknesses are so common that they should hardly even be considered weaknesses, yet their strengths are rare and special.5
What these strategies reveal is that a bit of ambiguity can be taken a very long way by a vain brain. The next technique in your brain’s arsenal of ego defence exploits ambiguity to the full. When we explain to ourselves and others why things have gone well or badly, we prefer explanations that cast us in the best possible light. Thus we are quick to assume that our successes are due to our own sterling qualities, while responsibility for failures can often be conveniently laid at the door of bad luck or damn fool others. This self-serving bias, as it is known, is all too easy to demonstrate in the psychology lab.6 People arbitrarily told that they did well on a task (for example, puzzle solving) will take the credit for it, whereas people arbitrarily told that they did badly will assign responsibility elsewhere, such as with their partner on the task. The brain is especially self-advancing when poor performance could deliver a substantial bruise to your ego.7 People told that puzzle solving is related to intelligence are much more likely to be self-serving than those told that puzzle solving is just something that people who don’t like reading books do on trains. The bigger the potential threat, the more self-protective the vain brain becomes. In a final irony, people think that others are more susceptible to the self-serving bias than they are themselves.8 (Allow yourself a moment to take that sentence fully on board, should you need to.)
Thus when life or psychology researchers are kind enough to leave the reasons for success or failure ambiguous, the self-serving bias is readily and easily engaged to protect and nurture the ego. However, our vain brains aren’t completely impervious to reality. No matter how partial my explanation of why I added up the restaurant bill incorrectly, I have no intention of applying for any professorships in mathematics. In a way, this is definitely good. When we lose all sight of our ugly face in reality’s mirror, this generally means that we have also lost grip on our sanity. But on the other hand, who wants to see the warts and all with pristine clarity? We’ve already seen how the vain brain casts our features at their most flattering angle. Now we’ll rummage deeper into its bag of tricks. For by calling on powerful biases in memory and reasoning, the brain can selectively edit and censor the truth, both about ourselves and the world, making for a softer, kinder and altogether more palatable reality.
Failure is perhaps the greatest enemy of the ego, and that’s why the vain brain does its best to barricade the door against this unwelcome guest. The self-serving bias we’ve already encountered provides a few extra services to this end. One approach is to tell yourself that, in retrospect, the odds were stacked against you and failure was all but inevitable. Researchers have found that optimists in particular use this strategy, which has been dubbed ‘retroactive pessimism’, and it makes failure easier to digest.9
‘Self-handicappers’, as they are called, exploit the self-serving bias in a different way. In self-handicapping, the brain makes sure that it has a non-threatening excuse for failure, should it occur. If you can blame your poor performance in an intelligence test on your lack of effort, for example, then your flattering self-image of your intelligence and competence can remain unchallenged. Self-handicapping also enhances the sweetness of success when it occurs, creating a win-win situation for your ego. Drug use, medical symptoms, anxiety … they can all be used to shield the ego from failure. Take, for example, a group of students who reported suffering severe anxiety during tests. According to a trio of refreshingly brusque researchers, the brains of these devious strategists exploit their test anxiety, whenever they can, to serve ignoble ends.10 The researchers gave their test-anxious students a difficult two-part test, purportedly a measure of general intelligence. In the interval between the two parts of the test, the students were asked to say how anxious they were feeling about the test, and how much effort they were putting into it. However, right before this survey, some of the students had their potential handicap snatched away from them. They were told that a remarkable feature of the test they were taking was that their score was impervious to anxiety and – no matter how nervous they were – their score would be an accurate measure of their intellectual ability.
This was cunning as well as mean. If a test-anxious student merely reports accurately how anxious she is feeling, with no self-serving motivations, it should make no difference to her whether she thinks that anxiety might reduce her score on the test – she should declare the same level of anxiety regardless. However, if test anxiety is used to protect self-esteem, then it will be important whether she thinks that anxiety offers a plausible excuse for poor performance on the test. If she thinks that scores are adversely affected by nerves, she will be tempted to protect herself against possible failure by claiming greater susceptibility to the jitters. This is exactly what the researchers found. Only students who thought that their anxiety offered its usual non-threatening excuse for low marks hoicked up their self-reports of anxiety. The other students, who knew that they wouldn’t be able to blame their nerves, didn’t bother. They did something else instead. In place of their handicap of choice, these students instead claimed to have made less effort on the test. It takes more than a few psychologists to stymie the cunning of a determinedly vain brain.
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 files? 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.’
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
