Strangers to Ourselves Read online

  Surely, however, we do not want our conscious conceptions to get too out of whack. There are many times when we would be better off recog nizing our limitations, abilities, and prospects. When choosing a career, for example, it would be to people's advantage to know whether their nonconscious personalities were better suited for a life as a lawyer, salesperson, or circus performer.

  There is very little research on the consequences of having disparate conscious and nonconscious "selves" that are out of synch. An exception is the work of Joachim Brunstein and Oliver Schultheiss. In several studies, they measured people's nonconscious agentic motives (needs for achievement and power) and communal motives (needs for affiliation and intimacy), using the TAT test. They also included self-report measures of these same motives. As in previous studies, they found little correspondence, on average, between people's nonconscious and conscious motives.

  Some individuals, however, did have nonconscious and conscious motives that corresponded, and these people showed greater emotional well-being than people whose goals were out of synch. In one study, students' nonconscious and conscious goals were assessed at the beginning of the semester and their emotional well-being tracked for the next several weeks. The students whose conscious goals matched their nonconscious goals showed an increase in emotional well-being as the semester progressed. The students whose conscious goals did not match their nonconscious goals showed a decrease in emotional well-being over the same period. It appears to be to people's advantage to develop conscious theories that correspond at least somewhat with the personality of their adaptive unconscious. 30

  Before seeing how this might be done, we need to take a look at other aspects of the adaptive unconscious that people typically overlook, besides the nature of their personalities. For example, how good are people at recognizing the causes of their feelings, judgments, and behavior?

  Knowing Why

  -Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act I, scene 1 (1596)

  You are allowed to think that adult life consists of a constant exercise of personal will; but it wasn't really like that, Jean thought. You do things, and only later do you see why you did them, if ever you do.

  -Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun (1986)

  How well do people know the causes of their judgments, feelings, and actions? There are cases in the psychological literature of people who are so ignorant of why they respond the way they do that they have to invent explanations. Consider Mr. Thompson, a patient of the neurologist Oliver Sacks who suffered from Korsakoff's syndrome, a form of organic amnesia whereby people lose their ability to form memories of new experiences. Tragically, Mr. Thompson remembered nothing from one moment to the next. If you were to introduce yourself to him and left the room, he would have no conscious memory of ever having seen you before when you came back a few minutes later.

  What would it be like to be Mr. Thompson? Imagine that your consciousness is like a film in which scenes from hundreds of movies are spliced together. Every few seconds a scene from a new movie appears that has no connection to what went before or what comes next. Because Mr. Thompson had no memory for prior scenes, each one appeared to be brand-new, with new characters, new settings, new dialogue.

  What a terrible, Faustian nightmare, to lose the thread of memory that weaves together our life stories. Except for one thing: Mr. Thompson had little awareness of his plight. Because he had no memory of the prior "scenes," he had no sense of discontinuity. His consciousness was firmly rooted in the present, with no idea of what he had lost. Further, he had great success in imposing meaning on each scene of his everrenewing world. He invented a plot to explain each of his "new" experiences.

  If you walked into the room he might decide that you were a customer entering the delicatessen he used to own and would ask whether you wanted a pastrami or ham sandwich. But then "click," change of scene. He might notice that you were wearing a white coat and would invent a new story-you are the butcher from down the street. "Click," new scene. The butcher always had bloodstains on his coat; so you must be a doctor. Mr. Thompson would see no inconsistencies in his changing stories. He came up with perfectly good explanations for his current circumstances, with no idea that these explanations changed from moment to moment. Sacks describes it this way: "[Mr. Thompson] continually improvised a world around him-an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations-continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations. For Mr. Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fancies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable and factual world. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter."'

  Mr. Thompson's dilemma bears a remarkable similarity to the behavior of people acting on posthypnotic suggestions. A small percentage of the population can be easily hypnotized, and, when given posthypnotic suggestions, they end up doing things with no conscious awareness of why. G. H. Estabrooks notes that when this happens, the person "finds excuses for his actions and, strange to say, while these excuses may be utterly false, the subject tends to believe them." He relates the following example:

  The operator hypnotizes a subject and tells him that when the cuckoo clock strikes he will walk up to Mr. White, put a lamp shade on his head, kneel on the floor in front of him and "cuckoo" three times. Mr. White was not the type on whom one played practical jokes, in fact, he was a morose, nonhumorous sort of individual who would fit very badly in such a picture. Yet, when the cuckoo clock struck, the subject carried out the suggestion to the letter.

  "What in the world are you doing?" he was asked.

  "Well, I'll tell you. It sounds queer but it's just a little experiment in psychology. I've been reading on the psychology of humor and I thought I'd see how you folks reacted to a joke that was in very bad taste. Please pardon me, Mr. White, no offense intended whatsoever," and the subject sat down without the slightest realization of having acted under posthypnotic compulsion.2

  A final example of confabulation can be found in some of the "split brain" patients studied by Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux. The nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain (the corpus callosum) were cut in these patients, to reduce severe seizures that did not respond to other treatments. Much of what we know about the differences in left- and right-brain processing comes from studies of such split-brain patients. Psychologists have conducted clever experiments in which they flash pictures and words to the hemispheres separately, to see if the hemispheres process information the same way. This is done by asking the patients to fix their eyes on the center of a screen and then flashing pictures to the left or right of that point. Because of the way the visual system is structured, pictures flashed to the left of the point go exclusively to the right hemisphere, whereas pictures flashed to the right of the point go exclusively to the left hemisphere.

  One memorable study was conducted with a fifteen-year-old splitbrain patient named P. S. The researchers flashed pictures to one of his hemispheres and then asked him to choose a card, with his right or left hand, that was most related to the picture. For example, they flashed a picture of a snow scene to his right hemisphere, and then he was shown cards of a shovel, screwdriver, can opener, and saw. He could easily pick the shovel with his left hand, because this hand was controlled by his right hemisphere, which saw the snow scene. When asked to pick a card with his right hand he did no better than chance, because this hand, controlled by the left hemisphere, had not observed the snow scene.

  Things got especially interesting when the researchers flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres at the same time. For example, on one trial they flashed the snow scene to P. S. 's right hemisphere and a picture of a chicken claw to his left hemisphere. He picked the card with a shovel with his left hand (because that was most related to the snow scene seen by his right hemisphere) and a card with a chicken with his right hand (because that was most related to the chicken claw seen by his left hemisphere).

  The researchers th
en asked P. S. why he had picked the cards he did. Like most people's, P. S. 's speech center was in his left hemisphere, which knew why he had picked the chicken with his right hand (because it had seen the chicken claw) but had no idea why he had picked the shovel with his left hand (because the snow scene was viewed only by the right hemisphere). No problem; the left hemisphere quickly made up an answer: "I saw a claw and picked a chicken, and you have to clean out the chicken shed with a shovel." Perhaps the most striking thing about P. S.'s response is that he seemed perfectly comfortable with his answer and had no idea that it was a confabulation. In Gazzaniga and LeDoux's words, "The left [hemisphere] did not offer its suggestion in a guessing vein but rather as a statement of fact as to why that card had been picked."'

  There is an intriguing similarity between split-brain patients, people suffering from organic amnesia, and people acting out posthypnotic suggestions. In each case, people easily generate stories to explain their behavior and circumstances, with no realization that their explanations are works of fiction, even for such bizarre acts as garbing dour Mr. White in a lamp shade.

  What do these examples say about the rest of us? Fortunately, most of us are not like P. S., Mr. Thompson, or the subject in Estabrooks' hypnosis study. As far as I know, I have an intact corpus callosum that allows a transfer of information between my right and left hemispheres. Although my memory certainly isn't perfect, it is far superior to Mr. Thompson's. And, as far as I know, I have not been hypnotized and given posthypnotic suggestions to do bizarre things.

  Because P. S., Mr. Thompson, and hypnotized people are so different from us, it is tempting to dismiss their confabulations as just a few more candidates for inclusion in the annals of bizarre psychological case histories. But Gazzaniga and LeDoux have made the startling suggestion that we all share the tendency to confabulate explanations, arguing that the conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense.

  It may seem a substantial leap to conclude, on the basis of a few patients with brain damage or surgical sections, that all humans are blind to the causes of their actions and therefore have a "confabulator" that invents reasons. Yet there are times when the abilities and deficits of brain-damaged people provide a window into what it is like to he human, in addition to showing that some abilities are lost when the brain is damaged. Gazzaniga and LeDoux had the insight that severing the connection between the hemispheres might not have caused the kinds of confabulations they observed in P. S.; rather, it made it easier to see a common human tendency to confabulate.'

  Knowing Why in Everyday Life

  People's behavior is often determined by their implicit motives and nonconscious construals of the world. Because we do not have conscious access to these aspects of our personalities, we are blind to the ways in which they influence our behavior. If we ask someone why he or she feels a certain way about a new acquaintance, the person is unlikely to say, "I found him to be a tad aggressive because aggressiveness is a chronically accessible trait for me" or "I was bothered by his lack of attention to me because I have an anxious/ambivalent attachment relationship with my parents." We are not privy to the personality of our adaptive unconscious.

  Personality, however, is not the sole source of behavior. People's feelings, judgments, and behaviors are as often influenced by the nature of the immediate social situation as by their personalities. The distinction between personality and the social environment is artificial, of course, because people's personality often determines how they construe their environment. When a supervisor skips a weekly project meeting, Joe might interpret it as a sign that the supervisor does not value his work, whereas Sarah might interpret it a sign that the supervisor has great confidence in her abilities and does not feel the need to look over her shoulder.

  Nonetheless, social situations can be so powerful that virtually everyone construes them in the same way, such that they "overpower" personality differences. Sometimes this is obvious, as when a burglar points a gun at us and says, "Give me all your money." Virtually all of us would comply, regardless of how stingy we happen to be or the nature of our attachment relationship to our parents. Sometimes the power of social influence is less obvious, as in Stanley Milgram's demonstrations of how easy it is to prod people into delivering near-fatal electric shocks to their fellow humans.'

  The point is that personality is not the only cause of behavior and people might be better at knowing how factors in their immediate social environments influence their feelings, judgment, and behaviors. It might be difficult to discern how the deep-seated facets of our personality have shaped our behavior, but easier to tell that we are angry at John for forgetting our dinner date, sad because we just heard that our grandmother is ill, or nauseous because we just ate an entire bowl of clam dip. Clearly, it is to our advantage to detect how our immediate environment influences us; otherwise, we wouldn't know to go easy on the clam dip at the next party.

  Yet we are sometimes tongue-tied when it comes to understanding the roots of our feelings and beliefs. As Shakespeare noted in the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice, we have much ado to know ourselves. There is increasing evidence that Gazzaniga and LeDoux were correct in their hunch that our conscious selves often do not know the causes of our responses and thus have to confabulate reasons.

  THE BABY NAMING GAME

  Let's begin with an everyday example, why parents find a particular name pleasing and thus choose it for their baby. We all know that names for babies come in and out of fashion. The first names of many our grandparents are not in vogue today; my grandmothers, for example, were named Ruth and Marion, names that are rarely seen in today's birth announcements. Depending on your age, your name might already have gone out of fashion or will before long.

  The faddishness of names is curious, because when naming their babies, parents often strive for originality and uniqueness-no one wants to imitate what everyone else is doing. People want originalsounding names like Briana and Madison for girls and Tyler and Ryan for boys; yet the same "original" names end up becoming very popular. (All four of the names above are among the top dozen baby names for the year 2000 in the United States.) Why is it that many people end up giving their babies the same name, thinking that it is original and unique?

  One reason, I suspect, is that people often do not know why they thought of a name like Madison or Tyler. A name might come to mind for several reasons, such as the fact that people heard it on a television show or precisely because other people are giving babies that name. If parents-to-be recognize that they thought of a name because it is becoming faddish, they are likely to dismiss it ("Oh, honey, everyone is naming their baby Jessica these days") If people do not recognize that they thought of the name because it is becoming popular, they are likely to find it pleasing and original.

  A few years ago, for example, my wife noticed that the name Ashley Nicole was appearing with surprising frequency in the birth announcements of our local newspaper. Every week there were at least one or two baby girls who had that combination of names. One day, while chatting with the staff in my departmental office, I mentioned the increasing popularity of "Ashley Nicole." One of the secretaries, who happened to be pregnant, looked stricken: "Oh no," she said. "That's the name I had thought of for my baby!" She and her husband eventually named their child something else.

  Psychologists are certainly not free from these failures to recognize why they thought of a certain name. My wife and I named our first child Christopher, and although we certainly recognized that this is a fairly common boy's name, it seemed like a pleasing but not-too-faddish choice. Surely, we figured, it was not as popular as Michael or Joseph. We later learned that the most frequent name for male babies born that year was-you guessed it-Christopher. (That's okay; we still like the name!)

  Here's a final example from the world of baby-naming: In the late 1980s and early 1990s the name Hilary (or Hillary) was very popular, but suddenly, fo
r babies born in 1992 and after, it became quite rare. In 1992 Bill Clinton was first elected president of the United States, and Hillary is, of course, Mrs. (now Senator) Clinton's first name. Now, you might interpret the sudden drop in the frequency of "Hilary" to the unpopularity of Mrs. Clinton; who wants to name their baby after someone they dislike? The name became infrequent, however, even among supporters and admirers of Mrs. Clinton. I believe that there is another explanation: now that Mrs. Clinton was in the national spotlight, people no longer had the sense that Hilary was a name that they had thought of themselves. People were more likely to recognize that the name was familiar because of Mrs. Clinton, and thus choose to give their baby a more "original" name-like Briana or Madison.

  LOVE ON THE BRIDGE

  Such lack of insight is by no means limited to how we thought of a name. Imagine that you are single and meet someone you find attractive. You really want to get to know this person better and hope that he or she feels the same way. Suppose I were to ask you exactly why you felt the way you did about this person. How accurate would your answer be?

  Surely you could answer this question with some accuracy, referring to the person's beauty, charisma, or winning smile. But social psychologists have done studies showing that people can be mixed up about why they are attracted to someone. One study was conducted in a park in British Columbia. An attractive female assistant approached males in the park and asked if they would fill out a questionnaire, as part of a class project on the effects of scenic attractions on people's creativity. When people completed the questionnaire the woman thanked them and said she would be happy to explain the study in more detail when she had time. She tore off a corner of the questionnaire, wrote down her phone number, and said to give her a call if they wanted to talk with her some more. As a sign of how attracted the men were to the woman, the researchers kept track of how many of them telephoned her later and asked her out on a date.