Strangers to Ourselves Read online

  There may be other times when it is more difficult to recognize the feelings generated by the adaptive unconscious, even when people introspect about their feelings. The conscious system is quite sensitive to personal and cultural prescriptions about how one is supposed to feel, such as "children love their pony, and their dog, and their parents, and picnics, and the ocean, and the lovely chocolate cake." People might assume that their feelings conform to these prescriptions and fail to notice instances in which they do not. These "feeling rules" can make it difficult to perceive how one's adaptive unconscious feels about the matter. Because everyone knows that "children love their pony," it is difficult for them to notice that Topper is a nasty brute-not because it would be especially anxiety-provoking to do so, but because it is diffi cult to see through the smokescreen of cultural and personal feeling rules. 12

  Remember my friend Susan from Chapter 1? She was convinced that she was in love with Stephen, because he fitted her definition of the kind of man she ought to love. He shared many of her interests, he was kind, and he clearly loved her. And yet it was obvious to those of us who knew Susan that she did not love him. Why was she the last one to figure this out? Her conscious "feeling rules" seemed to get in the way. The fact that he conformed to her image of the kind of man she ought to love made it difficult for her to realize that she did not.

  BEYOND ANECDOTES

  As compelling as these examples are, they are just anecdotes. Is there empirical evidence for the idea that people can possess one feeling while believing they have another? As it happens, there is a fair amount of support for this idea in the social psychological literature. One source of evidence comes from the literature on self-perception and attribution theories, in which people have been found to infer the existence of new attitudes and emotions by observing their behavior and the situation in which it occurs.

  According to these theories, when people are uncertain about how they feel, they use their behavior and bodily reactions as a guide. Many studies have found, for example, that people infer their emotions from the level of arousal they are experiencing and the nature of the social situation. We saw an example of this in Chapter 5 in the "love on the bridge" study. Men interpreted their arousal as a sign of attraction to the woman who approached them. They overestimated their attraction to the woman, failing to note that they were aroused, at least in part, because of the scary bridge.

  In another experiment, Stanley Schachter and Ladd Wheeler asked participants to take part in a study of the effects of a vitamin compound on vision. Participants received an injection and then watched a fifteenminute comedy film. Unbeknownst to the participants, the "vitamin" was actually epinephrine in one condition, a placebo in another, and chlorpromazine in a third. Epinephrine produces physiological arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rate and slight tremors in the arms and legs. Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that acts as a depressant of the sympathetic nervous system. The researchers reasoned that because the participants did not know that they had received a drug, they would infer that the film was causing their bodily reactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, people injected with the epinephrine seemed to find the film the funniest; they laughed and smiled the most while watching it. People injected with the chlorpromazine seemed to find the film the least funny; they laughed and smiled little while watching it."

  Richard Nisbett and I reviewed the dozens of studies like this and found that although there is ample evidence from people's behavior that they have changed their attitudes or emotions (e.g., the laughing during the film), people seldom report that they have these new attitudes or emotions. For example, Schachter and Wheeler asked participants to rate how funny the film was and how much they enjoyed it, and found no difference between the conditions. On average, people in the epinephrine condition (who had smiled and laughed a lot) did not rate the film as any funnier than people in the chlorpromazine condition did (who had smiled and laughed very little). This pattern of resultswhereby people act as if they have a certain emotion or evaluation, but do not report the existence of this emotion or evaluation-is quite common in studies like Schachter and Wheeler's.'a

  These results raise some intriguing questions: When people infer their feelings from their behavior, who is doing the inferring, and what happens to the feelings that are inferred? We saw the answer to the first question in Chapter 5: the attribution process, whereby people observe their behavior and make inferences about its causes, typically occurs in the adaptive unconscious. This process can occur consciously; the conscious self is an active analyzer and planner, and sometimes people mull over why they did what they did (e.g., "Why on earth didn't I begin the project sooner so that I didn't miss the deadline?"). The kinds of selfattributions studied by Schachter and Wheeler, however, are typically made quickly and nonconsciously. The participants in the epinephrine condition did not sit there scratching their heads thinking, "How funny is this film? Well, my heart is beating fast and my hands are shaking a little, so I guess it's hilarious." Instead, they made quick, nonconscious inferences that the film was funny, which caused them to laugh a lot. Similarly, the men in the "love on the bridge" study did not say to themselves, "Hm, I wonder why my heart is pounding? Let's see, I'd say I'm feeling 37 percent fear and 63 percent love-no, wait a minute, it's 34 percent fear and 66 percent love." Rather, they made a quick, nonconscious inference that their arousal was due, at least in part, to attraction to the woman.

  But what happens to the feelings that result from these nonconscious inferences? Why didn't Schachter and Wheeler's epinephrine participants rate the film as funnier than the other participants did? After all, these participants laughed and smiled the most during the film, as if they had inferred it was hilarious. Schachter and Wheeler suggested an answer: when rating the film, people based their responses more on their long-term preferences for the type of film they had watched (a slapstick film with the actor Jack Carson). As one of their participants put it, "I just couldn't understand why I was laughing during the movie. Usually, I hate Jack Carson and this kind of nonsense and that's the way I checked the scales [in the questionnaire].""

  In short, people's adaptive unconscious inferred that the film was funny, which caused them to laugh a lot. When asked how funny the film was, people based their response on their personal theories about their liking for this type of film. The adaptive unconscious felt one way, whereas people's conscious selves felt differently-just like Blake and Kate's attitudes toward Topper, and my friend Susan's feelings about Stephen.

  I have referred to the phenomenon in which people have two feelings toward the same topic, one more conscious than the other, as "dual attitudes." One of the most interesting cases is people's attitudes toward minority groups, where it is generally assumed that people know whether they are prejudiced. For example, Title VII of the United States Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, and religion, assumes that such discrimination is conscious, deliberate, and intentional. The law was written to prevent flagrant, conscious racism, with no acknowledgment that there might be such things as "unconscious prejudice" or "unintentional discrimination."

  It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that prejudice can exist at both an explicit level (people's conscious beliefs and feelings about other groups) and an implicit level (people's automatic evaluations of other groups of which they might not be aware). People can sincerely believe that they are not prejudiced and yet possess negative attitudes at an implicit level. To demonstrate this, social psychologists have developed some quite clever methods of measuring implicit prejudice, which I discuss in Chapter 9."

  An unresolved issue is whether these quick, implicit, negative reactions are unconscious. I believe that people often are not aware of these feelings, but can become so under the right circumstances. John, a white liberal, may sincerely believe that he is completely nonprejudiced, and that he treats blacks the same way
as he treats whites, unaware that he harbors negative feelings. There is evidence that such well-intentioned people can possess negative feelings and act more negatively toward blacks in ways that blacks notice but they do not." But even though people are often unaware of these negative feelings, they might recognize them if they looked carefully. If John were to take an honest look at his feelings and carefully monitor how he responded to blacks, he might come to recognize his negative implicit attitude.

  This example raises an important question about nonconscious feelings and attitudes. In previous chapters, we have portrayed the adaptive unconscious as a system of mental processes that are inaccessible, no matter how much people try to observe them. Whereas feelings and attitudes can reside out of sight, they appear to have a greater potential to reach awareness-if people can succeed in finding them through the smoke screen of their conscious theories about how they feel. This is often a matter of being a good observer of how one acts (e.g., how one responds in the presence of African Americans), rather than a matter of looking inward and introspecting about one's feelings.

  TOWARD A THEORY OF NONCONSCIOUS FEELINGS AND ATTITUDES

  At the beginning of the chapter I mentioned a standard view of the adaptive unconscious: it consists of a vast array of mental processes that can result in feelings, which emerge into consciousness. Imagine a compact disc player that can be programmed to search for and play various kinds of musical selections. The hardware and software that find and play the music operate out of view; but the end product-the sweet melody of an early Beatles song, say-is what we hear (what reaches awareness). Similarly, mental selection and interpretation can be nonconscious, but the feelings they produce are conscious.

  In contrast, I have argued that even the products of the adaptive unconscious-the melody itself-can fail to reach consciousness. Nonetheless, I think that feelings differ from the rest of the adaptive unconscious in their potential to reach awareness. The mental processes that produce them, such as the kinds of features of the adaptive unconscious detailed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, are inaccessible, like the hardware and software in the compact disc player. Under some circumstances, however, people are aware of the feelings they produce.

  It might even be the case that the default is for feelings to emerge into awareness, and that it takes special circumstances to prevent them from doing so. We have seen three such circumstances. The first is repression, whereby forces are brought into play to hide a threatening feeling (as in the case of homophobia). The second is inattention, or the failure to notice that a feeling has changed (as in Carpenter's example of falling in love). The third is the obscuring of feelings by the smoke screen of people's conscious theories and confabulations. People fail to recognize a feeling or evaluation if it conflicts with a cultural feeling rule ("people love their ponies," "my wedding day will be the happiest time of my life"), a personal standard ("I am not prejudiced at all toward African Americans"), or conscious theories and inferences about how one feels ("I must love him because he conforms to my idea of Mr. Right").

  Cases such as these, in which people fail to recognize a feeling produced by the adaptive unconscious, may not be very common. People typically recognize that they feel lust toward the person who sits in the third row of their American literature class, sad when their cat dies, and nauseous after riding the Big Thunder roller coaster for the third time. Nonetheless, the conditions under which people fail to recognize a feeling are probably not all that rare.

  Further, people differ in the frequency with which they recognize their own feelings; indeed, one definition of emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize our wants, needs, joys, and sorrows. Some people are good at seeing through the smoke screen of their personal and cultural theories, recognizing when their feelings are at odds with these theories and standards. Other people are less skilled at this kind of self-awareness."

  In extreme cases people are unable to recognize even their most basic and extreme emotions, a psychiatric condition called alexithymia (from the Greek words for "lacking words for emotions"). Although alex- ithymics do have emotions, they find it difficult to describe what these emotions are or where they came from. One woman reported that she often cried but did not know why; "It just makes my body feel better." Once, she said, she cried herself to sleep after watching a movie in which a mother of eight died of cancer. When her therapist pointed out that she might have been feeling sadness and grief about the fact that her own mother was dying of cancer, the woman looked bewildered and said she did not see the connection.21)

  Clearly, alexithymia is the most extreme case of unawareness. Few of us are that confused when trying to understand our own feelings. But all of us are alexithymic to a degree; there are times when our adaptive unconscious possesses feelings that we do not recognize. What about our knowledge of how we will feel in the future, and how long we will feel that way? It is often as important to know how we will feel about future events (e.g., "How happy will I be if Steve asks me to marry him?") as to know how we feel in the present. If people sometimes have difficulty knowing how they feel right now, however, they might also have difficulty predicting their feelings.

  Knowing How We Will Feel

  How often is it the case, that, when impossibilities have come to pass, and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm ... amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy to anticipate!

  -Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1846)

  The only thing standing in the way of lasting happiness, most of us think, is the inability to get what we want. People often say, "If only I had , I would be much happier." For one person it is "true love," for another "a million dollars," for a third "an appearance in Las Vegas as an Elvis impersonator." Whatever our dreams, we all tend to think that we would be significantly happier if they were to come true.

  To achieve lasting happiness, however, it is not enough for our wishes to come true. We also have to know what to wish for. Will an appearance as an Elvis impersonator or a trip to Disney World make us happier? Obviously, we have to know the answer to this question in order to know what to work toward. We have to make correct affective forecasts, predictions about our emotional reactions to future events.

  Affective forecasts are a crucial form of self-knowledge. Decisions big and small-whom to marry, what job to accept, whether to have children, whether to invest in the Elvis outfitare based on predictions about how gratifying and pleasurable these events would be. Just as our emotional reactions to current events have a special status and often reach consciousness, so may emotional reactions to future events be an important form of self-knowledge that people achieve much of the time. Most of us know that good health, a million dollars, and a happy marriage would make us happier than chronic pain, poverty, and a messy divorce. It would be difficult to survive in a world in which people had no clue as to what would make them feel good versus bad. Even rats can make accurate affective forecasts, learning to avoid pressing a bar that will have unpleasant results (electric shock) and learning to press the bar that will have pleasant results (yummy rat treats).

  Often, however, it is not enough to know what our initial reaction to an event will be. We also need to know how long that reaction will last. Life-altering decisions such as whom to marry and whether to have children are based on the assumption that they will cause enduring happiness and not just a moment's pleasure. But people's affective forecasts often involve a durability bias, a tendency to overestimate the duration of reactions to future emotional events. Research on this bias raises questions about the nature of happiness and why external events do not seem to influence it for as long as we think. It does not uncover the secret of how to attain everlasting happiness, but it does suggest a few hints.'

  The Fleetingness of Emotional Reactions

  Suppose that I asked you to imagine the best and worst things that could happen to you in the next week. Common answers to this que
stion are "winning the lottery jackpot" and "the death of a loved one" How long would your emotional reactions to these extreme events last? Most of us would respond by saying, "I would be thrilled for months or even years if I won the lottery" and "I would be devastated forever by the death of a loved one." For many of us, these affective forecasts would be wrong.

  MONEY CAN'T BUY ME LOVE-OR HAPPINESS

  Imagine that you are one of ten finalists in your state lottery. You and the other finalists are onstage waiting for the name of the winner to be drawn on live television. Beads of sweat form on your brow as the lottery official picks an envelope from a bin. He seems to take forever to open the envelope and unfold the piece of paper. But then he pauses, looks directly at you, and calls out your name. Yes, it has really happened: you have beaten the odds and are a million dollars richer.

  How happy do you think you would be at that moment? How happy would you be over the next few months? the next few years? Most of us would guess correctly that it would be thrilling to find out that we were the winner. When Paul McNabb's name was picked as the first milliondollar winner in the Maryland State Lottery, in July 1973, he fell to the floor and mumbled, "Oh my God," over and over. Governor Marvin Mandel had to bend over to hand McNabb the check for his first installment of $50,000. McNabb probably thought he was on easy street and that all his problems were over.

  Fast forward to 1993, after McNabb had received the last of his annual $50,000 lottery checks. When interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post, he was smoking generic-brand cigarettes and nursing a free soda at a bar in Las Vegas. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment and did not own a car. When the reporter asked him how he felt about winning the lottery, he laughed and said, "Would I do it all again? Hell, no."

  Soon after he appeared on television in 1973, McNabb was besieged by people demanding a share of the winnings. One person threatened his daughters; another broke into his house. "If you had gone through what I went through that first year, you wouldn't have trusted your own mother," he told the reporter. McNabb eventually moved to Nevada to escape the attention, but he did not find lasting happiness there either. "Do you realize I've lost 20 years of social life, of being human? I never got over the point that I always had to be on my guard. °'z