The four most powerful words in the English language? Image credit: UNE Photos, Creative Commons.

“Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But you are ready all the same to take on all of these unknowns, the uncertainties, the ambiguities. You are ready to succumb to the world of the story.

The formulation is as near to universal as they come. While I can only vouch for a handful of languages through my own experience—in the Russian, the phrase translates loosely to in some kingdom, in some land; in the Romance languages, to some variation of there was once—if I’m to believe this elaborate list, few if any cultures stray from the general contours of the phrase.

A nineteenth century copy of Aesop's Fables. Image credit: Wikimedia commons.

And its appeal, too, is of the most enduring kind. It’s worth noting that one of the earliest known books to have been printed on the original Gutenberg press, in 1476, was Aesop’s Fables. The German printing was soon followed by the first English translation, by William Caxton, in 1484. To put this timing in perspective, consider that the Gutenberg Bible—the first surviving book produced on the new printing press—dates roughly to 1450. The central text of Europe’s central religion, followed closely by the tales and fairy spinnings of a Greek storyteller. (And in between, a 1461 printing of Der Edelstein, a work of German fables.)

Why such lasting and ubiquitous appeal? What is it that the words promise, exactly? Beyond the lure of fantasy and the make-believe, magic kingdoms and talking animals, why that phrase, that turn, that wording?

First, there is that semblance of distance. We are not in the now, but rather in some place in the removed past. Upon a time. And second, there is the vagueness, the deliberate lack of specificity. We are not speaking of a defined time, a time you can point to, but rather of a once, an indeterminate moment. Not a land or a place you can locate, but some kingdom, some land, some place that cannot be tied to a map or a ready-made travel plan. And it is to these two elements, distance and vagueness, that I propose we look in trying to describe, if not altogether explain, the power that once upon a time holds over its audience.

"Little Red Riding Hood": one of the most iconic fairytales of all time. Image credit: The New Ruffian, Creative Commons.

Distance is a psychologically powerful tool. It can allow us to process things that we would otherwise be unable to deal with—and I mean this in both a literal and a more metaphorical, emotional sense—and it frees up our mind in a way that immediacy does not.

If we take a step back—in time, in space, in the hypothetical mind (here, I am borrowing from the definition of psychological distance offered by NYU psychologist Yaacov Trope)—we can discern elements that are invisible from up close. In that movement, we change our construal, our representation of the world. Things that were concrete and specific become abstract and broad. Patterns emerge from pieces. Other perspectives vie with our own. We are able to see a reality that is broader and deeper than the one we can perceive up close.

At a distance, the world is less threatening. It is easier to take in. It is easier to parse. It is easier to handle. You can say and think things from far away that you can’t say and think up close. For a child, this means the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself. For an adult, it means much the same thing—a freedom of fantasy and reflection that we rarely give ourselves as we grow older.

In emotionally charged moments, we tend to do reflexively what the fairytale does for us: we put distance between ourselves and what we are experiencing in order to see it and deal with it better than we otherwise could. Sigmund Freud referred to projection, sublimation, reaction formation, displacement—all tools of self-distancing from problems that touch the ego too profoundly. And while many of Freud’s teaching have lost favor, few are the psychologists or psychiatrists who would deny the nature of the basic defense mechanism.

And in a less psychoanalytic fashion, who hasn’t at one point or another asked for advice “for a friend”? How many detective stories have used the trope of the client who acts ostensibly on someone else’s behalf—all the while being interested in himself alone? And who hasn’t experienced the realization that it seems far easier to play therapist and see the trends in someone else’s problems than to understand and deal with one’s own?

Distance makes possible what immediacy cannot accomplish. And distance is one of the hallmarks, the defining characteristics, of the fairytale—the tale that might be true but, safely, is not.

As for vagueness: that which scares us in real life—the lack of definitions, rules, clearly defined borders and boundaries—is not only unscary but entirely welcomed in the fairytale. The children’s story frees us up to generalize: this could be anyone (even me), and it could be anywhere (even here). But it does so from a safe place. It’s not actually me or here, and so, I can let everything play out as it may and see what happens. I am safely removed, and my mind can operate in peace. I can try out scenarios I otherwise wouldn’t. I can meet and understand people I never would in my everyday life. I can indulge in abstraction and play, engage my curiosity and foster my creativity, and remain the whole time protected by that vague veneer of once. (And not only can I do it, but I am healthier if I do it than not. Literal-mindedness is a hallmark of many a neurodegenerative disease and cognitive disability. Conversely, adults who are taught to imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations—and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity than their non-generalizing counterparts.) The safety valve of fantasy can be switched on and off at will.

Once upon a time opens up doors that need to be opened, for children and adults both. And these are doors that are difficult, if not entirely impossible—at least, not without traumatic effects, all the more so in the case of children—to open in its absence. Though all fiction works to similar purpose, it is in this simple formula that the mechanism is called out and distilled to its essence.

***

Today seems an especially fitting moment to reflect on the universal draw of the fairy tale, the fable, the children’s story that lets us all for a moment engage in the safe make-believe of fantasyland. I woke up to news of the death of Maurice Sendak, one of the greats of children’s literature—and someone who pushed always to redefine what the limits and possibilities of that literature could be.

Maurice Sendak. Image credit: John Dugdale/HarperCollins Children's Books. From NPR interview.

Sendak understood the nature of the fairytale as few others have done. He wasn’t afraid of the medium’s power, and he wasn’t about to coddle or speak down to his audience. He knew that within that frame of once upon a time, he not only could but had to deal with themes that would remain otherwise unapproachable. He did so against the opinion of the so-called experts: as a New York Times obituary points out, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once asserted—without reading the book, naturally—that Where the Wild Things Are was too traumatic for children. Bettelheim argued that, “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion.” But was the story actually traumatic? Or did it allow a child to confront his anxieties—and then, to move on? Was it, in a way, more adaptive than having the realities never spoken of or denied altogether?

Sendak certainly believed it was. In a 2003 conversation with NPR’s Terry Gross, he reasserted the view that you don’t keep things from children: “Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve convinced myself — I hope I’m right — that children despair of you if you don’t tell them the truth.” His words were inspired by his own childhood silence—or rather, the silence of his parents—surrounding the deaths of numerous family members in the Holocaust. Would a once upon a time have helped? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But at the very least, it would have offered an alternative to outright denial.

Cover of "Where the Wild Things Are," HarperCollins, 1963

And in a broader sense, I would argue that modern psychology has borne Sendak’s view of openness out repeatedly, in the development of cognitive behavioral therapies and the recognition that fantasy, play, the realm of the imaginary are just the right place to deal with “basic anxiety.” That in writing things down, talking them through, constructing distancing scenarios, we become better able to handle our fears and our anxieties, to deal with the problems of our everyday existence. For, Sendak didn’t just offer the darkness. He showed how Max and all his other creations could see past it and overcome the anxieties that were unavoidable in life. “His narrative is almost always about a child in danger whose best defense is imagination,” notes Cynthia Zarin notes in her 2006 New Yorker profile.

The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.

And if the story is strong enough—well, it’s enough to inspire a bit of the fairytale thinking in real life. Not just among children. Zarin describes Sendak’s brush with death over forty years ago:

In 1967, Sendak, then thirty-nine, suffered a near-fatal heart attack, the result of a childhood fever that had weakened his heart. On hearing of his illness, Else Holmelund Minarik sat down and wrote “A Kiss for Little Bear.” Michael di Capua recalls that she thought that if she wrote another Little Bear book Sendak would live. In the story, the picture that Little Bear paints to give to his grandmother is of a Wild Thing.

A belief that an action, a story can restore life, or keep someone from death.

With his many once upon a times, Sendak showed us what the power and promise of those words, at their best, can be. Not only can they show us where the wild things are, but they can teach them what we can do to tame them.

In memory of Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012.

Bluma Zeigarnik, 1921. Image credit: A.V. Zeigarnik, http://psyhistorik.livejournal.com/16254.html.

In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory.

Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact.

Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised.

The Zeigarnik Effect that has been demonstrated many times, in many contexts – but each time I see it or read about it, I can’t help but think of an admonition that came centuries before Ms. Zeigarnik sat down to her Viennese coffee: Socrates’ reproach in The Phaedrus that the written word is the enemy of memory. In the dialogue, Socrates recounts the story of the god Theuth, or Ammon, who offers the king Thamus the gift of letters:

This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Could this be the Zeigarnik effect in action, long before the psychological concept was discovered or explored in any great detail? When we no longer have the impetus to remember, when we are certain that what we know has been put into action—be it in the form of a completed order or a book that we know we’ll be able to reference at any future point—why take up precious mental real estate that can be put to use on other tasks that we can’t be so sure of completing or knowing how to complete should that need arise?

Does writing things down impede our ability to remember? Image credit: Denise Krebs, Creative Commons.

Authors long after Socrates have noted that very thing. I’ve always remembered Ernest Hemingway telling George Plimpton in his 1958 Paris Review interview that, “though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.” Hemingway continues:

I cannot believe Twain ever “tested out” Huckleberry Finn on listeners. If he did they probably had him cut out good things and put in the bad parts. Wilde was said by people who knew him to have been a better talker than a writer. Steffens talked better than he wrote. Both his writing and his talking were sometimes hard to believe, and I heard many stories change as he grew older. If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers. The man I know who talks best about his own trade and has the pleasantest and most wicked tongue is Juan Belmonte, the matador.

In this view, talking something through—completing it, so to speak, off the page—impedes the ability to actually create it to its fullest potential. Somehow, that act of closure, of having talked through a piece of work, takes away the motivation to finish. It’s like the order has already been delivered to the waiting customer. Once done, it escapes from the mind to make way for the next client. And the best of both worlds may or may not exist.

Hemingway in 1923. Image credit: Public domain, Wikimedia commons.

Hemingway’s words came from experience. When his wife lost a suitcase that contained all existing copies of his short stories, the work was, to his mind, gone for good. He had written himself out the first time around. He couldn’t recapture it–whatever it was–again. He even fictionalized the process in the short story, “The Strange Country”: the writer whose stories have been lost finds it impossible to remember. “It’s useless,” he tells his sympathetic landlady. “Writing [the stories] I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me. Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young, I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag.”

(Or, take the more modern story of the blind woman who didn’t realize her pen had run out of ink and who wrote the opening of her novel only to have her son tell her it was blank. Or the advice offered by the author Justin Taylor: “Don’t take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me. You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to look at later then that’s what your first draft was—a shorthand, cryptic, half-baked fragment.” It’s an oft-repeated tale.)

Hemingway seems to be, in many ways, on the same page as Socrates—and the same page as Zeigarnik and her foundational studies of our memories’ curious quirks. What’s more, the more we know about memory, the more true it seems to be that we somehow let go of the information that we no longer feel we absolutely must hold on to. Last year, a study by Betsy Sparrow and colleagues, published in Science, suggested that people are far less able to recall information that they expect to be able to have access to in the future. Instead, they remember where and how to find that information.

It’s Socrates’ “trust to the external written characters” brought to life. And to me, at least, there is something a bit disconcerting in the knowledge that my brain may choose to forget things just because it knows it doesn’t absolutely need to remember them. (It bears note that one of Sparrow’s paradigms involved priming subjects with the thought of computers. A reminder outside conscious awareness that we have the technology to do our remembering for us is enough to make us remember just a little less well.)

I would never give up the ability to record, to access, to research endless topics at the click of a button. But, with Hemingway and Socrates never far from mind, I may be slightly more cautious about how I use that ability.

The Zeigarnik effect is a powerful motivating force. And a motivated mind is a mind that is much more capable of thought and accomplishment – even if it does sometimes need to use a cheat sheet to remember just what it wanted to include, be it in a story or an order. I, for one, know that I will always prefer a waiter who writes my order down to one that remembers it—however urgently—all in his head.

Kruglanski, A., & Webster, D. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.” Psychological Review, 103 (2), 263-283 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X.103.2.263

Sparrow B, Liu J, & Wegner DM (2011). Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333 (6043), 776-8 PMID: 21764755

Image credit: Cover of first edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Stories are all around us. But what is it about the story that holds such a powerful grip on the human imagination? That’s the question that Jonathan Gottschall tackles in his new book, The Storytelling Animal. Stories can change our behavior. They can influence our perceptions. They may even have the potential to, quite literally, change the flow of history—or at least some parts of it.

In the following conversation, Gottschall explores the nature of human affinity for narrative and reflects on the future of story in the age of the Internet, video games, films, and ever-evolving media that may threaten to undermine—or at least, to change in unpredictable ways—the traditional bounds of our storytelling past.

MK: What was your inspiration for the book? Why did you choose psychology (as opposed to say, philosophy) as your main approach path?

JG: My work seeks to bridge the gap between the two cultures of the humanities and sciences. How can we use science to better understand fiction?  And what can scientists learn from fiction and the other arts?

But the idea for this specific book came to me not from research but from a song. I was driving down the highway and happened to hear the country music artist Chuck Wicks singing “Stealing Cinderella”—a song about a little girl growing up to leave her father behind. Before I knew it, I was blind from tears, and I had to veer off on the road to get control of myself and to mourn the time—still more than a decade off—when my own little girls would fly the nest.  I sat there on the side of the road feeling sheepish and wondering, “What just happened?”

Who hasn’t had a similar experience?  When we submit to fiction–whether in novels, songs, or films—we allow ourselves to be invaded by storytellers who seize control of us cognitively and emotionally. I wrote the book to try to understand how stories—the fake struggles of fake people—could have such power over us.

MK: Why hasn’t this book been written before? In other words, why is it so easy for us to be taken in by story—and yet much more difficult to ask the question that you posed, why exactly it is that we are taken in?

JG: Well, I do draw on a lot of excellent research by people working in a similar vein.  But I agree with the spirit of your question: If story is such a big deal in human life, why doesn’t it get more attention?  I think it’s because, in general, we just aren’t fully aware of it.  In the same way that plankton isn’t aware that it’s tumbling through salt water, we humans aren’t aware that we are constantly moving through story—from novels, to films, to religious myths, to dreams and fantasies, to jokes, pro wrestling, and children’s make believe.

From a young age, we are fascinated by stories. Image Credit: Kodomut, Creative Commons.

Then there’s the problem of academic boundaries.  In universities, we chop story to pieces and spread it across departments.  Psychologists get dreams.  Musicologists get song.  Literary scholars get novels. Anthropologists and folklorists get traditional tales. And so on.  This keeps us from seeing stories–from opera librettos to nightmares–as aspects of a unified mental process involving the construction of imaginative scenarios.  And it keeps us from seeing how story infiltrates every aspect of how we live and think.

MK: Mind wandering, according to research by psychologist Daniel Gilbert, makes us unhappy. And yet it seems to be our brain’s default state. Do you see a balance between daydreaming—which, as you point out, we engage in all the time—and being “in the moment,” so to speak?

JG: It would be nice if we could strike that balance, but I’m skeptical.  Our daydreams, like our night dreams, usually just happen.  Typically, we don’t will them into being, and it is very hard to suppress them (as anyone who has tried to quiet a racing mind at 4 AM knows).  To me, this is so cool: our brains are constantly generating these little inner films, and “we” don’t really have a say in it.

MK: You talk about the fine line between creativity and insanity. How do we keep our storytelling in check, so that it is a productive and not a destructive force in our lives?

JG: The human mind is addicted to stories. We make them up all time, and we can easily be taken in by them.  Once we latch on to a story (be it a religious narrative or a conspiracy theory) it’s hard to give it up.  So we need to be wary of the power of story.  But, on the other hand, a little fiction can be a good thing. Take our own life stories.  We all have a story that we tell about ourselves—about who we are, what our formative experiences were, and what our lives mean.  But psychologists have shown that these stories aren’t very trustworthy. They are based on distorted memories and wildly optimistic assessments of our own qualities.  Yet, crafting these stories—and believing them—seems to be preserve our mental health. People who don’t overrate their own personal qualities tend to get depressed.  So the little fictions we make up about ourselves are healthy, so long as they don’t cross over into narcissistic travesty.

MK: You raise some powerful examples of the ability of story to, quite literally, change the course of history, including that of Adolf Hitler. In describing Wagner’s effect on Hitler, you write, “But even historians who are skeptical of the Rienzi story do not deny that Wagner’s sprawling hero saga—with their Germain gods and knights, their Valkyries and giants, their stark portrayals of good and evil—helped shape Hitler’s character.” What makes a story so powerful? Could Hitler, for instance, have appropriated some other content—and used it to tell the same story of his destiny? In other words, was there a story that he wanted to tell, that he then superimposed on to Wagner’s sagas, or was the Wagner the real inspiration or cause behind Hitler’s changing identity?

Did Wagner's "Rienzi" change the flow of history? Image credit: Creative Commons.

JG: We’ll never know for sure.  This is one of those counter-factual questions that historians love to speculate about—to tell historical stories about.  Egomaniacal Hitler may have been primed to fasten on to a narrative like Wagner’s Rienzi—one that flattered his sense of vast personal promise. But when Hitler first saw Rienzi he was just sixteen; at that time he dreamed of conquering the world with art, not armies.  He wanted to be a great painter.  It seems possible that a different story could have moved Hitler—and thus history—in a different direction.

I use Hitler’s relationship to Wagner—and other less controversial instances of story changing history (like Uncle Tom’s Cabin)—as an entry point into psychological research. Studies show that we overestimate our immunities to story.  Fiction shapes our attitudes, actions, and values more than we know. I think story is one of the most powerful shaping forces in human life.

MK: You recount an anecdote about your daughter, Abby, learning for the first time about Christopher Columbus. As you point out, “what Abigail was taught is mostly fiction, not history. It is a story that is simply wrong in most details and misleading in the rest.” You go on to note that, “Throughout most of our history, we’ve taught myths.” Is this tendency to mythologize the past a bad thing, or does it help us remember better by storifying events, so to speak? Is there a balance between story and factual accuracy?

JG: The standard story of Columbus’s discovery of the new world is much closer to myth than history.  The dark side of Columbus’s journey is left out, and the heroic side (and there is a heroic side of it) is embellished.  But myths have a purpose, and being factually “true”  isn’t one of them.  Myths modify and regulate behavior. They bond people together around a common identity.  But myths have a dark side as well. Take the supernatural myths of religion. In 1869 the German evolutionist Gustav Jager prefigured modern theorists like David Sloan Wilson when he suggested that religion is “a weapon in the [Darwinian] struggle for survival.” As Jager’s language suggests, this doesn’t make religion a good thing.  There are good things about religion, including the way its stories bind people into more harmonious collectives. But there is an obvious dark side to religion too: the way it is so readily weaponized. Religion draws co-religionists together and drives those of different faiths apart.

MK: You describe your daughters as spending a good part of their early years in Neverland—as, indeed, do most children. Why do we lose that childlike effortlessness of make believe? Would it be beneficial to nurture it and maintain it? What positive value is there in the types of adult game communities, such as LARP (live action role playing), that you describe?

JG: I admire LARPers. Most of us stop making believe sometime in middle childhood.  But LARPers decide, as adults, that they want to re-enter Neverland, and so they do. The LARP community is small, but there’s now a huge number of grownups playing online versions of LARP like The World of Warcraft.  These video games offer make-believe role-play inside a digital Neverland.  For me, this all supports the Peter Pan principle: Humans are the species that just won’t grow up.  We may stop acting out our stories, but we never actually leave Neverland, never stop pretending.  We just gradually change how we do it.  Instead of making up our stories and acting them out—as children do—we spend more and more time inside the fantasies created by others: novels, TV shows, plays, video games, and so on.

MK: You point out that people are reading less fiction because they are finding their stories elsewhere—TV, music, video games. Studies have shown that readers of fiction are more empathetic, have better social skills, and are generally more understanding than their non-fiction reading counterparts. (And you make the point in your book that stories are, essentially, moral.) Do you think we can get this same benefit from stories that aren’t fiction in the traditional sense—that is, stories told through non-literary means?

JG: Yes, I do.  I think you find story’s primordial patterns in television, film, and video game narratives.  I argue in the book, that fiction is both endlessly variable, and shockingly uniform.  As you cross cultures and move around in history,  you find the same basic concerns and the same basic story structure.  The technology of story changes—from oral tales, to clay tablets, to medieval codices, to printed books, to movie screens, iPads, and Kindles. But the stories themselves don’t ever change. They have the same old obsessions.  And that won’t change until human nature changes.

MK: You write, “The real threat isn’t that story will fade out of human life in the future; it’s that story will take it over completely.” That point of view contrasts, I think, with the approach of someone like Jane McGonigal, who argues in Reality is Broken that games could be the answer to all of our problems and that play is really our ideal state. Do you see your views as opposed or as complementary? What do you think of her argument?

JG: Reality is Broken is an interesting book, and I see our arguments as mainly complementary.  I think we agree that the booming popularity of story-centric video games owes to the way that virtual worlds are becoming, in many ways, more appealing than real life (and these are still the early days; imagine what these games will be like a few decades from now).  I guess I’m more pessimistic about the implications than McGonigal.  I see storytelling moving in the direction of Star Trek’s holodeck.  On the holodeck, Star Trek’s characters enter into holonovels, where they get to actually be the heroine of a romance novel or the hero of a detective story.  The holodeck is a computerized walk-in closet that allows the user to simulate anything in absolutely realistic detail.  But I think Star Trek’s creators underplay the holodeck’s destructive potential.  If you had a technology that allowed you to live any story you wanted, why would you ever come out? Why would you ever want to stop being god?

Jonathan Gottschall is the author of “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He is an English professor at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania.

Promotional poster for Curly Sue. Image credit: Wikipedia.

When I was seven years old, my mom took me to see Curly Sue. Though I don’t remember much of the movie, two scenes made quite the impression: the first, when James Belushi asks Alisan Porter to hit him on the head with a baseball bat, and the second, when Bill, Sue, and Grey sit in the 3-D movie theater.

At first glance, that second one doesn’t seem to pack quite the same punch–insert pun grimace here–as a little girl swinging a huge bat at a man’s forehead. But I found it irresistible. A wide shot of the entire movie theater, and all of the faces—in 3-D glasses, of course—moving and reacting in perfect unison. Heads swerve left. Heads swerve right. Gasps. Ducks. Frowns. All in a beautifully choreographed synchronicity.

What made the scene so memorable to me? I’m not entirely sure, but I can only imagine that it was awe at the realization that, at certain moments, we can all be made to experience the same emotions in similar fashion. I don’t think I ever understood before that when I watched a movie, it wasn’t just me watching and reacting. Everyone else was watching and reacting along with me. And chances are, they were doing it in much the same way.

Twenty years later, researchers are finally beginning to understand what it is that makes the present-day film experience so binding on a profound level—and why it’s often difficult for older movies to keep up. It seems that filmmakers have over the years perfected the way to best capture—and keep—viewers’ attention. Through trial, error, and instinct, Hollywood has figured out how best to cater to the natural dynamic of our attention and how to capitalize on our naïve assumptions about the continuity of space, time, and action.

A film's audience will often react to the same scene in the same way. Image credit: Shutterstock.

You’ve certainly noticed the yawn-contagion effect: if someone’s yawn happens to catch your eye, it is difficult indeed to resist the urge to yawn too. But what’s less well known is a phenomenon called blink synchronicity: if we see someone blink, we’ll likely blink right along with him. Film editor Walter Murch noticed that very thing when he was editing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. When Gene Hackman blinked, there went Murch’s eyes—and that’s precisely where he wanted to place the film cut. Cut at the blinks, and more likely than not, the viewers will perceive the action as continuous. The cut itself will go unnoticed.

In 2009, a team of researchers from Japan confirmed the phenomenon experimentally. What’s more, they found that when we’re engrossed in a movie, we tend to blink at fairly predictable moments even absent someone else’s eye movement. People who view the same film tend to synchronize their blinks – and that synchronization reflects the editing of the story.

But it’s not all about blinking. It seems that blinking is itself part of a larger phenomenon: attentional synchrony. When people watch a movie, their eyes tend to follow similar patterns. Even if a scene has no actors, it remains likely that gaze focus will follow the same trajectory between different viewers. And it’s not just the gaze: each viewer’s brain may actually be reacting in similar fashion as well.

Gene Hackman: the initial inspiration for blink synchronicity. Image credit: Chris Little, Creative Commons.

In one study, individuals watched the first 30 minutes of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly while their brains were scanned by fMRI. Researchers found that 45% of neocortical activity—including areas implicated in vision, hearing, emotion, language, and multisensory integration—was quite similar for each viewer. That’s almost half the activity of that part of our brain that coordinates our higher cognitive functions. Impressive indeed.

What’s more, if we’re asked to break a film down into important events or segments, we’ll likely do so in a predictable fashion—and not only will we choose the same breaking points as others do, but our neural activity will reflect our choices. When people viewed The Red Balloon in a scanner and then divided the film into events, cuts that coincided with significant changes in action predictably activated dorsal frontal and medial temporal areas of the brain—associated with attentional control and motion processing, respectively—in a similar fashion for each viewer.

But that’s not all. In 2001, psychologist David Gilden discovered that our minds spontaneously generate a very specific pattern of attention: something known as 1/f noise. The specifics of the 1/f ratio are less important than one characteristic in particular: it just so happens that, starting in about 1960, the shot length of various films has approached that very pattern. In other words, the patterns of shot duration in movies have become more and more like the patterns that we generate naturally in our minds.

John Hughes may not have had a day of neuroscience training, but he figured out the exact same formula when he created Curly Sue – and when he depicted on screen the precise effect that his own movie was likely having on its viewers at that very moment.

Films have tapped into something incredibly basic in the way our brains work. And there’s something remarkable about that. A tribute of sorts to the innate, deep-rooted nature of our predisposition for narrative, for a world of stories that we can all experience, share, and pass on.

Walter Murch was recently interviewed by artist Josh Melnick. Their conversation, on blinking, editing, and psychology, can be found here. Much of the research is also available in Murch’s 1994 book, “In the Blink of an Eye.”

Smith, T.J., Levin, D. and Cutting, J. E. (2012). A Window on Reality : Perceiving Edited Moving Images Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21 (2), 107-113 DOI: 10.1177/0963721412437407

Gilden, D. (2001). Cognitive emissions of 1/f noise. Psychological Review, 108 (1), 33-56 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X.108.1.33

Nakano, T., Yamamoto, Y., Kitajo, K., Takahashi, T., & Kitazawa, S. (2009). Synchronization of spontaneous eyeblinks while viewing video stories Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276 (1673), 3635-3644 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0828

Hasson U, Nir Y, Levy I, Fuhrmann G, & Malach R (2004). Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science (New York, N.Y.), 303 (5664), 1634-40 PMID: 15016991

Zacks JM, Speer NK, Swallow KM, & Maley CJ (2010). The Brain’s Cutting-Room Floor: Segmentation of Narrative Cinema. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 4 PMID: 20953234

The logo's rainbow represents color bars on a screen. Image credit: Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons.

Perhaps it’s Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge, the apple a symbol of new discovery, with subtle undertones of lust for ever-growing innovation. Or maybe, Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree when the apocryphal falling fruit prompted his theory of gravity. Or maybe, it’s another story entirely: that of Alan Turing, the shy British mathematician who is embraced as the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence both.

Two years after Turing was tried for indecency for a romantic liaison with a 19-year-old male—the exact same charge, incidentally, that was levied against his compatriot Oscar Wilde in 1895, over half a century earlier—and then forced to undergo hormonal therapy to temper his “indecent urges” (the effective equivalent of male castration), he committed suicide—by biting a cyanide-laced apple. Body and apple both were found the next day. Turing was just two weeks shy of his 42^nd birthday.

Turing was a brilliant man. He was instrumental to breaking the Nazi’s Enigma Code during World War II, an advance which shortened the war by any number of years. He put forth the vision of the “universal computing machine”—then nothing more than an abstract concept—that served as the inspiration and blueprint for the development of the computer. He was the eponymous creator of the Turing Test, which marked the dawn of Artificial Intelligence. And all this, in just four decades of life. What better person to choose as the inspiration for a company based on visionary innovation, a force that forges ahead in its own idiosyncratic fashion regardless of public opinion? And the imagery of the rainbow stripes inside the original logo—could it be any more perfect?

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t hold up. None of them do. The symbol was a creation of the mind of one art director, Rob Janoff. The tale of Turing as inspiration was never and had never been true. (In fact, Janoff had never even heard of Turing when he began work on the design.)

But that’s not the interesting part. What’s more striking to me is that Steve Jobs never denied the  story of Turing-as-muse, even when asked about it head on. Instead, he just looked enigmatic.*

Did Turing inspire Jobs's logo? Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Why did Jobs choose to keep silent, when it would have been so easy to respond? Why did he let the rumors keep circulating, the questions keep coming?

Jobs, it seems, understood intuitively an important facet of our minds: we like to know where things come from. We like stories. We like nice tales. We need our myths, our origins, our creations. It would be disappointing to know that the apple was nothing more than an apple—and the bite, a last-minute addition to clarify scale, so that it was clear that we were seeing an apple and not a cherry. And that rainbow? A representation of a screen’s color bars, since the Apple II was the first home computer that could reproduce color images on its monitor.

How boring. How much of a letdown. Far better to have a story—and the better the story, the better for us.

So uncomfortable is it for us if something doesn’t have a cause that we strive to determine one, one way or the other, even absent the necessary evidence. In other words, no one even needs to suggest that Turing may have inspired the Apple logo for us to come up with that explanation—or another one, for that matter, should our brain decide something else works best at the moment—spontaneously. As philosopher David Hume observed in 1740, “Causality is the cement of the universe.”

Psychologist Tania Lombrozo argues that such impromptu causal explanations are critical to our everyday cognition. They contribute to improvements in learning. They can foster further exploration and idea generation. They can help us form coherent beliefs and generalize about phenomena—and then use those beliefs to understand, predict, and control future occurrences and, in turn, form new beliefs. Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider put it this way: “If I find sand on my desk, I shall want to find out the underlying reason for this circumstance. I make this inquiry not because of idle curiosity, but because only if I refer this relatively insignificant offshoot event to an underlying core event will I attain a stable environment and have the possibility of controlling it.”

Explanations can even enhance our own comprehension: when we explain something to someone, we understand it better ourselves. It’s called the self-explanation effect and has been demonstrated numerous times in the real world. For instance, students who explain textbook material perform better on tests of that material than those who study it twice. Students who are trained in self-explanation perform better on math problem-solving tests—and are better able to learn new mathematical concepts. And how’s this for a story: when Nobel-Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman passed away in 1988, after a struggle with cancer, these words graced his blackboard: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” His final injunction to his students and the world.

Richard Feynman's final blackboard. Image copyright: Caltech.

But explanations may need no further explanation, so to speak, than themselves:  they are just inherently so very satisfying. In fact, development psychologist Alison Gopnik has proposed that coming up with explanations may be so fulfilling in its own right that it motivates us to engage in more substantial reasoning. She compares the effect to that of an orgasm, writing “From our phenomenological point of view, it may seem to us that we construct and use theories in order to achieve explanations or have sex in order to achieve orgasm. From an evolutionary point of view, however, the relationship is reversed: we experience orgasms and explanations to ensure that we make babies and theories.”

Explanation is natural, just as it is spontaneous. Children as old as eight give explanations for all matters of phenomena as a matter of course. Lombrozo calls them promiscuously teleological: explaining things by the purpose they serve instead of digging deeper for meaning (i.e., they are more likely to say that a mountain exists to be climbed and not because of some geological forces that happened to shape the earth a certain way). And we never really outgrow this childhood tendency—in fact, we revert to it if we suffer cognitive decline, with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and even if we are simply feeling stressed or distracted. When in doubt, our brain takes the easiest route to determining causality, and it does so quickly and authoritatively.

Children are 'promiscuously teleological.' Image credit: Mike L. Baird, Creative Commons.

Some types of explanations are more satisfying to our minds than others. Simpler ones, as a rule, win out over more complicated: We will take the more direct of two equally good explanations—and may even overturn a slightly better but more complex one for a slightly worse but more straightforward one. And the more coherent, the more story-like and narrative-driven, the better – especially if it also explains a number of factors at once. To go back to the Apple logo, the Alan Turing story is the most intuitively appealing because it has more of a narrative arc and can account for elements that are missing from both the Adam and Eve and the Newton explanations: the rainbow, in both cases, and the bite in the latter.

***

Steve Jobs’s silence was truly perceptive. Sometimes, it’s just better to let natural human tendencies take over and start weaving tales, true or not, that will help people understand and relate to you better than anything you say ever could.

Consider the ending of this 2007 piece on Turing at The Guardian:

But my favourite tribute to Alan Turing may well be staring you in the face. Although never officially acknowledged, the Apple computer logo is often presumed to be not a reference to Adam and Eve, or even Sir Isaac Newton, but to the sad death of – and great debt owed to – Alan Turing.

Now doesn’t that make for a far more satisfying ending than the far more prosaic truth?

2012 marks the centennial of Alan Turing’s birth. A number of events commemorate the occasion, including the Turing Centennial Celebration at Princeton, where he earned his PhD.

*Reader Ian Watson has pointed out that in December 2011, Stephen Fry said, in an episode of the BBC’s QI XL, that Jobs did tell him that the story wasn’t true. Still, Jobs never went on record saying that; all we have is this reference to a private conversation. In public, as far as I know Jobs never debunked the myth.

Lombrozo, T. (2011). The Instrumental Value of Explanations Philosophy Compass, 6 (8), 539-551 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00413.x

Lombrozo, T. (2006). The structure and function of explanations Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 (10), 464-470 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.08.004

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]]> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/04/07/hunters-of-myths-why-our-brains-love-origins/feed/ 8 http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=a6db523379709055294c3ea7947f6fff http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/04/03/intelligence-and-other-stereotypes-the-power-of-mindset/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/04/03/intelligence-and-other-stereotypes-the-power-of-mindset/#respond Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:05:45 +0000 Maria Konnikova http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/?p=1824 Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English. It was 1940 and the Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn; they’d been one of the few Jewish families lucky enough to escape Vienna in [...]


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Walter Mischel, no longer nine years old. Image credit: Dieter Hoppe (www.berlin-fotografie.de)

Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English. It was 1940 and the Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn; they’d been one of the few Jewish families lucky enough to escape Vienna in the wake of the Nazi take-over in the spring of 1938. The reason had as much to do with luck as with foresight: they had discovered a certificate of U.S. citizenship from a long-since-dead maternal grandfather. Apparently, he had obtained it while working in New York City around 1900, before returning once more to Europe.

But ask Dr. Mischel to recall his earliest memories, and chances are that the first thing he will speak of is not of how the Hitler Youths stepped on his new shoes on the sidewalks of Vienna. Nor will it be of how his father and other Jewish men were dragged from their apartments and forced to march in the streets in their pajamas while holding branches in their hands, in a makeshift “parade” staged by the Nazis in parody of the Jewish tradition of welcoming spring. (His father had polio. He couldn’t walk without his cane. And so the young Mischel had to watch as he jerked from side to side in the procession). Nor will it be of the trip from Vienna, the time spent in London in an uncle’s spare room, the journey to the United States at the outbreak of war.

Instead, it will be of the earliest days in that kindergarten classroom, when little Walter, speaking hardly a word of English, was given an IQ test. It should hardly come as a surprise that he did not fare well. He was in an alien culture and taking a test in an alien language. And yet—his teacher was surprised. Or so she told him. She also told him how disappointed she was. Weren’t foreigners supposed to be smart? She’d expected more from him.

Image credit: Dimitris Kalogeropoylos, Creative Commons.

Carol Dweck was on the opposite side of the story. When she was in sixth grade—also, incidentally, in Brooklyn—she, too, was given an intelligence test, along with the rest of her class. The teacher then proceeded to do something that would today raise many an eyebrow but back then, was hardly uncommon: she arranged the students in order of score. The “smart” students were seated closest to the teacher. And the less fortunate, further and further away. The order was immutable—and those students who had fared less than well weren’t even allowed to perform such basic classroom duties as washing the blackboard or carrying the flag to the school assembly. They were to be reminded constantly that their IQ was simply not up to par.

Dweck herself was one of the lucky ones. Her seat: number one. She had scored highest of all her classmates. And yet, something wasn’t quite right. She knew that all it would take was another test to make her less smart. And could it be that it was as simple as all that—a score, and then your intelligence was marked for good?

Years later, Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck both found themselves on the faculty of Columbia University. (As of this writing, Mischel is still there and Dweck has moved to Stanford.) Both had become key players in social and personality psychology research (though Mischel the 16-years-senior one)—and both credit that early test to their subsequent career trajectories, their desire to conduct research into such supposedly fixed things as personality traits and intelligence, things that could be measured with a simple test—and in that measurement, determine your future.

It was easy enough to see how Dweck had gotten to that pinnacle of academic achievement. She was, after all, the smartest. But what of Mischel? How could someone whose IQ would have placed him squarely in the back of Dweck’s classroom have gone on to become one of the leading figures in psychology of the twentieth century, he of the famous marshmallow studies of self-control and of an entirely new approach to looking at personality and its measurement? Something wasn’t quite right – and the fault certainly wasn’t with Mischel’s intelligence or his stratospheric career trajectory.

Plaque on the site of the world's first IQ test, at the Haslingden Health Centre. Credit: Robert Wade, Creative Commons.

For many years, Carol Dweck has been researching exactly what that “not quite right” thing may be. Her research has been guided by two main assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way to measure intelligence, and there might be more to that very concept of intelligence than meets the eye.

I’ve written before about Dweck’s theories of intelligence, but let me briefly reiterate the concept here. According to Dweck, you can believe that intelligence is either incremental or that it is a fixed entity. If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid and can be changed. In other words, you think that Walter Mischel’s original IQ score is not only something that should not be a cause for disappointment, but that it has little bearing on his actual ability and later performance. Not only is he starting from a much higher base than what was captured by a test he could not have possibly been expected to understand, but his performance on other intelligence-related measures can improve with work, with application, with motivated dedication. Or, to put it in terms of that classroom, being put in the last seat doesn’t mean much except that you didn’t do so hot on a single test. As for the future, it can be far brighter—and far closer to the proverbial front of the room.

If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence cannot be changed, that it is given at birth and remains constant throughout life. This was the position of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. It means that once in the back, you’re stuck in the back. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of the draw.

In the course of her research, Dweck has repeatedly found that a person’s performance depends in large part on which of the two beliefs he espouses. If you believe yourself to be capable of improvement, believe that your mind can learn, can become better, can overcome setbacks, you are setting yourself—and your brain—up for exactly that path. And if you don’t? You may find yourself living in a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, where you prove those elementary school teachers right simply by believing that what they say is the way things are—instead of, like Mischel and Dweck, challenging the very assumption at its core.

But here’s the thing: mindset isn’t predetermined, just as intelligence isn’t a monolithic Thing that is preset from birth. We can learn, we can improve, and we can change our habitual approach to the world. Take the example of stereotype threat, an instance where others’ perception of us—or what we think that perception is—influences how we in turn act, and does so on the same subconscious level as all primes. Being a token member of a group—for example, a single woman among men—can increase self-consciousness and negatively impact performance. Having to write down your ethnicity or gender before taking a test has a negative impact on math scores for females and overall scores for minorities. On the GREs, having race made salient lowers black students’ performance. Asian women perform better on math tests when their Asian identity is made salient—and worse when their female identity is. White men perform worse on athletic tasks when they think performance is based on natural ability—and black men, when they are told it is based on athletic intelligence. In other words, how we think others see us influences how we subsequently perform.

Stereotypes impact us more than we might think. Image credit: istolethetv, Creative Commons.

But that performance isn’t the end of the story. Just as our mindset can hold us back, it can move us forward. Our mindset can change, and with it, our self-perception and our subsequent ability to take on various tasks. Women who are given examples of females successful in scientific and technical fields don’t experience the negative performance effects on math tests. College students exposed to Dweck’s theories of intelligence—specifically, the incremental theory—have higher grades and identify more with the academic process at the end of the semester. In one study, minority students who wrote about the personal significance of a self-defining value (such as family relationships or musical interests) three to five times during the school year had a GPA that was 0.24 grade points higher over the course of two years than those who wrote about neutral topics—and low-achieving African Americans showed improvements of 0.41 points, on average. Moreover, the rate of remediation dropped from 18% to 5%.

Intelligence, or IQ, is just one piece of the puzzle – and Dweck’s incremental-entity divide just one instance of a far broader phenomenon: mindset may begin in the head, but its repercussions are far wider. And as we change our thinking, so too are we changing our performance and, in a very real way, our abilities.

Our brains never stop learning, never stop changing, never stop growing new connections and pruning unused ones. And they never stop growing stronger in those areas where we reinforce them, like a muscle that keeps strengthening with use (but atrophies with disuse), that can be trained to perform feats of strength we’d never before thought possible—indeed, that we’d never even thought to imagine.

Take the case of the artist Ofey. When Ofey first started to paint, he was a middle-aged physicist who hadn’t drawn a day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever learn how. But learn he did, going on to have his own one-man show and to sell his art to collectors all over the world.

Physicist Richard Feynman didn't begin to draw until middle age. Image Credit: Copyrighted by the Nobel Foundation in 1965.

Ofey, of course, is not your typical case. He wasn’t just any physicist. He happens to have been the Nobel-Prize winning Richard Feynman, a man of uncommon genius in nearly all of his pursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as a pseudonym to ensure that his art was valued on its own terms and not on those of his laurels elsewhere. (The name itself is a play on words, from the French au fait, which usually means ‘by the way’ or ‘informed’ but was used by Feynman in the sense, ‘it is done.’) And yet there are multiple other cases. While Feynman may be unique in his contributions to physics, he certainly is not in representing the brain’s ability to change—and to change in profound ways—late in life.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses—better known as Grandma Moses—did not begin to paint until she was 75. She went on to be compared to Peter Bruegel in her artistic talent. In 2006, her painting Sugaring Off sold for $1.2 million. Vaclav Havel was a playwright and writer—until he became the center of the Czech opposition movement and then, the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia, at the age of 53. Harlan David Sanders—better known as Colonel Sanders—didn’t start his Kentucky Fried Chicken company until the age of 65—but went on to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation. The Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn competed in his first Olympic games in 1908, when he was sixty years old. He won two gold and one bronze medals—and when he turned 72, became not only the oldest Olympian ever, but the oldest medalist in history after his bronze-winning performance at the 1920 games.

And just think of the countless examples in literature. Richard Adams did not publish Watership Down until he was 52. He’d never even thought of himself as a writer. The book that was to sell over 50 million copies (and counting) was born out of a story that he told to his daughters. Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t published until he was 50. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, his first novel, just before he turned 60. Karen von Blixen-Finecke, better known by her pen name of Isak Dinesen, didn’t write her first book until she was 49. Raymond Chandler—one of my all-time favorites—didn’t write his first story until he was 45 – and it wasn’t until six years later that The Big Sleep introduced Philip Marlowe to the world. The list is long, the examples varied, the accomplishments all over the map. (Take a look at the New York Times from April 1, 2012, detailing the story of Kathy Martin.)

And yes, there are those to whom talent seems to come effortlessly. But though the talent is real, the effortlessness is an illusion. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work for it. And how can we work at something if we don’t believe it can happen in the first place? It all begins with a deceptively simple thing. A mindset.

Not only is intelligence not fixed, but neither are any number of abilities that we may think we either have or don’t have, be they as straightforward-seeming as math skills or as complex as musicality. Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck may have been labeled when young, but at the end, it was their attitude towards those labels and not the labels themselves that ended up determining the course of their lives.

It is a remarkable thing, the human brain.

This post is adapted from a draft of my forthcoming book on Sherlock Holmes, to be published by Viking in 2013.

Dweck, C. (2008). Can Personality Be Changed? The Role of Beliefs in Personality and Change Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (6), 391-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00612.x

Steele, C. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52 (6), 613-629 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.52.6.613

“Once upon a time, there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was barely larger than he, and who needed a friend.”* That’s how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would have liked to begin his story of the Little Prince. To those who understand life, he says, that sort of a beginning would have rung far more true than any other.

Original cover of "Le Petit Prince."

But he doesn’t begin that way. He can’t. For, you see, adults wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t understand at all. For them, for the little prince to be real there must be proof positive. Numerical, preferably. Asteroid B 612. That’s more like it. Now we get a sense of the man. His age? Weight? Height? Even better. But the sound of his voice? His preferred games? Whether he once collected butterflies? Irrelevant and unimportant considerations that could do little to shed light on the party in question.

That, at least, is the dichotomy presented in Saint-Exupéry’s classic, Le Petit Prince. On the one hand, we have the children, those like the narrator’s young self, inspired by a zoology text to draw a boa constrictor who has swallowed an elephant, or like the Little Prince of the title, who would very much like a picture of a sheep to take back to his planet. A sheep, preferably, who eats baobabs but not roses. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the adults, those who think the boa constrictor resembles an old floppy hat—and not a very well executed one, at that—and who urge the young narrator to pursue a Real Career and advise the Little Prince on the importance of counting every star, following routine, obeying orders, lighting a gas lamp at the proper time of day, even if it happens to be once a minute.

The Little Prince meets the fox.

In Saint-Exupéry’s world, the adults seem the absurd ones, going nowhere quickly and persisting stubbornly in mindless pursuits – even when they no longer have any idea of why they pursue them. And it’s from the petit gentilhomme, as the narrator terms him, and from his guileless friends, the fox and the rose, that we get any sense of wisdom, of what is and is not important, of the questions that are worth asking—and the ones that aren’t.

The juxtaposition is necessarily exaggerated (we are in the realm of fable, after all). But Saint-Exupéry’s larger point about creativity and thought is difficult to overstate: as we age, how we see the world changes. It is the rare person who is able to hold on to the sense of wonderment, of presence, of sheer enjoyment of life and its possibilities that is so apparent in our younger selves. As we age, we gain experience. We become better able to exercise self-control. We become more in command of our faculties, our thoughts, our desires. But somehow, we lose sight of the effortless ability to take in the world in full. The very experience that helps us become successful threatens to limit our imagination and our sense of the possible. When did experience ever limit the fantasy of a child?

The open and closed boa constrictor.

But it’s not that we aren’t capable of seeing a boa constrictor in place of a hat; it’s just that we don’t choose to do it. Think back to your childhood. Chances are, if I asked you to tell me about the street where you grew up, you’d be able to recall any number of details. The colors of the houses. The quirks of the neighbors. The smells of the seasons. How different the street was at different times of day. Where you played. Where you walked. Where you were afraid of walking. I bet you could go on for hours.

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we’ll never again come close to achieving. New sights, new sounds, new smells, new people, new emotions, new experiences: we are learning about our world and its possibilities. Everything is new, everything is exciting, everything engenders curiosity. And because of the inherent newness of our surroundings, we are exquisitely alert; we are absorbed; we take it all in. Who knows when it might come in handy?

But as we grow older, the blasé factor increases exponentially. Been there, done that, don’t need to pay attention to this, and when in the world will I ever need to know or use that. Before we know it, we have shed that innate attentiveness, engagement, and curiosity for a host of passive, mindless habits. And even when we want to engage, we no longer have that childhood luxury. Gone are the days where our main job was to learn, to absorb, to interact; we now have other, more pressing (or so we think) responsibilities to attend to and demands on our minds to address. And as the demands on our attention increase—an all too real concern as the pressures of multitasking grow in the increasingly 24/7 digital age—so, too, does our actual attention decrease. As it does so, we become less and less able to know or notice our own thought habits, and more and more allow our minds to dictate our judgments and decisions, instead of the other way around.

Tribute to the Little Prince, in Dniepropetrovsk. Image credit: Creative Commons.

In 2010, a group of psychologists decided to test experimentally the intuitive notion that, as we leave our childhood selves behind, we leave also some of that creative inspiration that is the basis of original ideas, innovative thought, and prescient discovery. They asked a group of college students to write a short essay: Imagine school is cancelled for today. What would you do, think, and feel?

All students answered the same question. But for one group, a single sentence was added to the instruction: You are seven years old.

After approximately five minutes of writing, each participant was asked to complete a version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (specifically, the abbreviated version for adults). The average performance was about as expected—with one major exception. Those participants who were in the seven-year-old condition exhibited significantly higher levels of originality in thought. Both their verbal and figural responses left their more adult-minded counterparts in the dust.

Imagining yourself a child, it seems, can quite literally make your mind more flexible, more original, more open to creative input and more capable of generating creative output—a nice complement to past findings that laughter and positive mood have much the same effect.

And is it so surprising? After all, J. M. Barrie did write: “What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.” (True, he did create the quintessential ever-child, Peter Pan—but not so Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mals is anything but a children’s book, and who echoed Barrie closely when he wrote, “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” Baudelaire’s assessment, in fact, may be closer to the truth of the matter: the ability to capture the childlike openness and curiosity, but to combine it also with the experience and depth a child could not possibly possess.)

***

In the French version of the book, Saint-Exupéry never actually uses the term “adult” to describe his uncomprehending elders. He terms them les grandes personnes. Big people. Not once does he call them anything else.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a crucial distinction. What matters, in the end, is the attitude, not the age. You can have children who are grandes personnes, just as you can have adults who aren’t. The question is one of mindset, of a way of looking at the world. It has little to do with age as such—only insofar as age tends to bring out a more staid attitude in many of us.

In the earlier study, the researchers found one more thing: it wasn’t just the seven-year-old thinkers who performed better. So did those individuals who scored higher on a measure of openness to experience. The effects were additive: someone who was more open-minded still derived benefit from the childhood thought manipulation, but could perform creatively—albeit not quite to the same extent—even absent that instruction.

Mindset is flexible. We don’t have to be grandes personnes forever, even if we’re well down that path already. And, like the Saint-Exupéry of the story, we can be as grande as ever when fixing our airplane—as serious a pursuit as there can be in the middle of a desert, thousands of miles from inhabited land—and as much of a budding illustrator of threatening baobabs and sheep in boxes when we so wish. That’s the beauty of a mindset. We have the power to change it at will, if only we so choose.

***

How old is the Little Prince? We never do find out. We know he has hair of gold. That his laugh is like the sparkle of the stars. That he loves a rose. That he tamed a wise fox and made him his friend. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all that really matters?

Parts of this piece were adapted from my forthcoming book on Sherlock Holmes, to be published by Viking in 2013.

All Little Prince illustrations from original version of “Le Petit Prince”: copyright 1943 by Harcourt Brace & Company, renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry.

Zabelina, D., & Robinson, M. (2010). Child’s play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4 (1), 57-65 DOI: 10.1037/a0015644

Nobel Prize winning neuropsychologist Roger Sperry. Image Credit: Wikipedia.

W.J. was a veteran of World War II. He was gregarious, charming, and witty. He also happed to suffer from a debilitating form of epilepsy—so incapacitating that, in 1960, he elected to have a drastic form of brain surgery: his corpus collosum—the connecting fabric between the left and right hemispheres of the brain that allows the two halves to communicate—would be severed. In the past, this form of treatment had been shown to have a dramatic effect on the incidence of seizures. Patients who had been unable to function could all of a sudden lead seizure-free lives. But did such a dramatic change to the brain’s natural connectivity come at a cost?

At the time of W.J.’s surgery, no one really knew the answer. But Roger Sperry, a neuroscientist at Caltech who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on hemispheric connectictivity, suspected that it might. In animals, at least, a severing of the corpus collosum meant that the hemispheres became unable to communicate. What happened in one hemisphere was now a complete mystery to the other. Could this effective isolation occur in humans as well?

No one had ever checked, but the pervasive wisdom was a resounding no. Our human brains were not animal brains. They were far more complicated, far too smart, far too evolved, really. And what better proof than all of the high-functioning patients who had undergone the surgery. This was no frontal lobotomy. These patients emerged with IQ intact and reasoning abilities aplenty. Their memory seemed unaffected. Their language abilities were normal.

The resounding wisdom seemed intuitive and accurate. Except, of course, it was resoundingly wrong. And it was proven so by a young neuroscientist who had just started working in Sperry’s lab, Michael Gazzaniga. When a new patient was brought in to Sperry’s lab for preoperative testing—he was to have his corposum collosum severed to treat his epilepsy—the task fell to Gazzaniga. Could he find a way to show what had never been done, that a pre- and post-operative brain were not one and the same, that the severing of this densely packed network of fibers could actually affect brain functioning?

Photo Credit: Mike Licht, Creative Commons.

W.J. came into the Sperry lab from his home in Southern California to find Gazzaniga waiting with a tachistoscope, a device that could present visual stimuli for specific periods of time—and, crucially, could present a stimulus to the right side or the left side of each eye separately. The patient had no problems identifying objects in either hemisphere and could easily name items that he held in either hand when his hands were out of view. Gazzaniga was satisfied. W.J. went in for surgery, where both the corpus collosum and the anterior commissure (a thin tract of white matter that connects the olfactory areas of each hemisphere) were severed. One month later, he came back to the lab.

The results were striking. The same man who had sailed through his tests weeks earlier could no longer describe a single object that was presented to his left visual field. When Gazzaniga flashed an image of a spoon to the right field, W.J. named it easily, but when the same picture was presented to the left, the patient seemed to have, in essence, gone blind. His eyes were fully functional, but he could neither verbalize nor recall having seen a single thing.

But he could do something else: when Gazzaniga asked W.J. to point to the stimulus instead of speaking, he became able to complete the task. In other words, his hand knew what his head and mouth did not. His brain had effectively been split into two independently functioning halves. It was as if W.J. had become two individuals, one that was the sum of his left brain, and one, the sum of his right.

W.J. was Gazzaniga’s patient zero, the first in a long line of initials who all pointed in one direction: the two halves of our brain are not created equal. And here’s where things get really tricky. If you show a picture of, say, a chicken claw to just the left side of the eye (which means the picture will only be processed by the right hemisphere of the brain), and one of a snowy driveway to just the right side of the eye (which means it will only be processed by the left hemisphere), and then ask the individual to point at an image most closely related to what he’s seen, the two hands don’t agree: the right hand (tied to the left input) will point to a shovel, while the left hand (tied to the right input) will point to a chicken. Ask the person why he’s pointing to two objects, and instead of being confused, he’ll at once create an entirely plausible explanation: you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop. His mind has created an entire story, a narrative that will make plausible sense of his hands’ discrepancy, when, in reality, it all goes back to those silent images.

Gazzaniga calls the left hemisphere our left-brain interpreter, driven to seek causes and explanations—even for things that may not have them, or at least not readily available to our minds—in a natural and instinctive fashion. The interpreter is responsible for deciding that a shovel is needed to clean out a chicken coop, that you’re laughing because the machine in front of you is funny (the explanation given by a female patient when a pinup girl was flashed to her right hemisphere, causing her to snicker even though she swore she saw nothing), that you’re thirsty because the air is dry and not because your right hemisphere has just been presented with a glass of water (another study in confabulation run by Gazzaniga and colleagues). But while the interpreter makes perfect sense, he is more often than not flat out wrong.

The left and right brain aren't created equal. Image credit: Bernard Goldbach, Creative Commons.

Split-brain patients provide some of the best evidence of our extreme proficiency at narrative self-deception, at creating explanations that make sense but are in reality far from the truth. But we don’t even need to have our corpus collosum severed to act that way. We do it all the time, as a matter of course.

Consider a famous problem-solving experiment, originally designed by Norman Maier in 1931: A participant was placed in a room where two strings were hanging from the ceiling. The participant’s job was to tie the two strings together. However, it was impossible to reach one string while holding the other. Several items were also available in the room, such as a pole, an extension cord, and a pair of pliers. What would you have done?

Most participants struggled with the pole, with an extension cord, trying their best to reach the end while holding on to the other string. It was tricky business.

The most elegant solution? Tie the pliers to the bottom of one string, then use it as a pendulum and catch it as it floats toward you while you hold the other string. Simple, insightful, quick.

But very few people could visualize the change in object use (here, imagining the pliers as something other than pliers, a weight that could be tied to a string) – unless, that is, the experimenter seemingly by accident brushed one of the strings to induce a swinging motion. Then, participants appeared to spontaneously think of the pliers solution. I say spontaneously because they did not actually remember the stimulus that prompted them to do so. It was a so-called unconscious cue. When subjects were then asked where their insight came from, they cited many causes. “It was the only thing left.” “I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it.” “I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees.”

All plausible enough. None correct. No one mentioned the experimenter’s ploy—and even when told about it in a debrief session, over two-thirds continued to insist that they had not noted it and that it had had no impact at all on their own solutions – even though they had reached those solutions, on average, within 45 seconds of the hint. What’s more, even the third that admitted the possibility of influence proved susceptible to false explanation: when a decoy cue (twirling the weight on a cord) was presented, which had no impact on the solution—that is, no one solved the problem with its help; they were only able to do so after the real, swinging cue—they cited that cue, and not the actual one that helped them, as having prompted their behavior. Explanation is often a post-hoc process.

Our minds form cohesive narratives out of disparate elements all the time: one of the things we are best at is telling ourselves just so stories about our own behavior and that of others. If we’re not sure, we make it up – or rather, our brain does, without so much as thinking about asking our permission to do so.

***

In 1916, Sigmund Freud delivered the eighteenth of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. There, he spoke about the three great blows that “the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to … at the hands of science.” The first: the Copernican Revolution. The second: Darwinism. And the third: Freud himself. He said:

Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must be content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.

The excerpt opens the recently published The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis and is meant to illustrate Freud’s ability to create a myth around his name and his work, to lay claim to a greatness—the Darwin of psychology—that others had tried, unsuccessfully, to claim before him. And while I agree with Freud’s prowess, I think the point is a much greater one (and one that suggests that the book’s ultimate conclusion, that psychoanalysis never really existed as anything more than a story, is either entirely inaccurate—or a truism that can be applied to almost any movement or school in history): all our minds have are the stories we tell ourselves.

When Freud claimed that the ego is not master in its own house, that it must be content with only scanty information about what is actually going on in the mind, he didn’t have access to any of the neuroscience or cognitive psychology research that would follow his words. He couldn’t know what W.J. would come to teach us about the mind, what researchers like Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson (along with, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Wegner, Tania Lombrozo, and many others) would tell us about our inability to access even something as seemingly simple as the cue that prompted us to solve a problem. He didn’t know that we really were masters of story telling – and of telling stories that, more often than not, had little to do with the truth. He didn’t know any of it, but in a way, he had guessed what would happen over thirty years after he delivered his lecture, when Gazzaniga first met his historic patient.

In a way, we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, W.J.

This post has been modified and expanded from a draft of my forthcoming book on Sherlock Holmes, to be published by Viking in 2013.

Gazzaniga, M. (2011). Interview with Michael Gazzaniga Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1224 (1), 1-8 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.05998.x

LeDoux, J.E., Wilson, D.H., & Gazzaniga, M.S. (1977). A divided mind: observations on the conscious properties of the separated hemispheres. Annals of neurology, 2 (5), 417-21 PMID: 103484

Nisbett, R., & Wilson, T. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84 (3), 231-259 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X.84.3.231

We're not always willing to take the risks that come with innovation. Image Credit: Creative Commons license.

As a general rule, we dislike uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain world is a much friendlier place. And so, we work hard to reduce whatever uncertainty we can, often by making habitual, practical choices, choices that protect the status quo. You know the saying, better the devil you know? That about sums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires novelty. Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exit, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. In other words, it is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even if we aren’t aware of just how much it frightens us personally. It is also potentially embarrassing (after all, there’s never a guarantee of success).

Consider a common paradox: organizations, institutions, and individual decision makers often reject creative ideas even as they state openly that creativity is, to them, an important and sometimes even central goal. Or another one: teachers have repeatedly been found to dislike students who show curiosity and creative thought, even though creativity is held as an important goal of education.

As Matthew Pearl reminds us in his new historical thriller, The Technologists (out this week), this general distrust of innovation is nothing new. The story, set in the Boston of 1868, follows students from M.I.T.’s first graduating class as they try to unravel a series of disasters that threaten the city (compasses going berserk in Boston Harbor, glass melting from the windows of the Financial District).

William Barton Rogers, the founder and first president of MIT. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

And while the disasters themselves are products of Pearl’s imagination, the extreme distrust of the fledgling technological college—Tech, as its students call it—is not. The school’s incorporation was resisted by the Massachusetts Board of Education. Funding was perpetually hard to come by (the more established Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard received the majority of donations from scientifically-minded patrons). And the Institute faced a steady stream of threats to its existence, from the possibility of being incorporated into Harvard to dissolution from lack of money and leadership.

Luckily, we know how this particular story ends. M.I.T. remains one of the most respected institutes of higher education in the world. But not everything works out so smoothly. If you’re a student whose teacher constantly thwarts you when you try to do something your own way, you may not have the stamina of M.I.T.’s founders—especially if you come across such resistance at an early age. Instead, you may find yourself trained to stop your creative thoughts before they are fully formed, lest you get in trouble for voicing something that is “wrong.” And before long, you may form a bias against creativity in all its forms—even though you will likely remain unaware of your negative views (after all, don’t we live in a society that values creative thought?).

While that chain of events is hypothetical, the final step is not. New research suggests that we may hold an unconscious bias against creative ideas much like we do in cases of racism or phobias.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a tool that was created to look for discrepancies between consciously held beliefs (i.e., a belief in racial equality) and unconscious biases (i.e., a faster reaction time when pairing white with positive concepts and black with negative ones than vice versa). The measure can test for implicit bias toward any number of groups (though the most common one tests racial biases) by looking at reaction times for associations between positive and negative attributes and pictures of group representatives. Sometimes, the stereotypical positives are represented by the same key; sometimes, by different ones. Ditto the negatives. And your speed of categorization in each of these circumstances determines your implicit bias. To take the racial example, if you are faster to categorize when “European American” and “good” share a key and “African American” and “bad” share a key, it is taken as evidence of an implicit race bias.

Over the years, the IAT has shown a prevalence of unconscious biases in areas such as race, gender, sexual orientation, age, mental disease, and disability. Now, it has been expanded to something that had never appeared in need of testing: creativity.

In a series of studies, participants had to complete the same good-bad category pairing as in the standard IAT, only this time, with two words that expressed an attitude that was either practical (such as functional, constructive, or useful) or creative (novel, inventive, original, etc.). The result: even those people who had explicitly ranked creativity as high on their list of positive attributes showed an implicit bias against it relative to practicality under conditions of uncertainty.

Innovation has never been altogether welcomed by society. Image credit: Portrait of Galileo Galilei, Justus Sustermans, 1636. Wikimedia Commons.

And what’s more, they also rated an idea that had been pre-tested as creative (a running shoe that uses nanotechnology to adjust fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters) as less creative than their more certain counterparts. So, not only were they implicitly biased, but they then exhibited a failure to see creativity for what it was when directly faced with it.

True, that effect was only seen in uncertain conditions—but doesn’t that describe most decision environments? I’m finding it hard to think of a time when we have to make actual judgments or choices or form real opinions that doesn’t involve some degree of the unknown.

I still find myself surprised at Mueller’s findings. Not surprised, necessarily, so much as disappointed. And yet, if you consider the evidence, they do make perfect sense. As Albert Einstein put it, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”  I guess I’d just hoped that society as a whole had left such bias behind it sometime circa 1868.

Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, By Lafayette Photo, London, Wikimedia commons.

What’s more, our beliefs and construals can actually alter our reality. What we believe can, quite literally, be what becomes true. As an example, take intelligence, something that many people believe to be a genetically predetermined entity. While intelligence may indeed have a large genetic component, that is far from all it is.

For many years, Carol Dweck has been researching two theories of intelligence: incremental and entity. If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid. If you work harder, learn more, apply yourself better, you will become smarter. If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence is fixed. Try as you might, you will remain as smart (or not) as you were before. It’s just your original luck. Dweck has repeatedly found that how someone performs, especially in reacting to failure, largely depends on which of the two beliefs he espouses. An incremental theorist sees failure as a learning opportunity; an entity theorist, as a frustrating personal shortcoming that cannot be remedied. As a result, while the former may take something away from the experience to apply to future situations, the latter is more likely to write it off entirely.

In a recent study, a group of psychologists decided to see if this differential reaction is simply behavioral, or if it actually goes deeper, to the level of brain performance. The researchers measured response-locked event-related potentials (ERPs)—basically, electric neural signals that result from either an internal or external event—in the brains of college students as they took part in a simple flanker task. The student were shown a string of five letters and asked to quickly identify the middle letter. The letters could be congruent—for instance, MMMMM—or, they might be incongruent—for example, MMNMM.

While performance accuracy was generally high, around 91%, the specific task parameters were hard enough that everyone made some mistakes. But where individuals differed was in how both they—and, crucially, their brains—responded to the mistakes. First, those who had an incremental mindset (i.e., believed that intelligence was fluid) performed better following error trials that those who had an entity mindset (i.e., believed intelligence was fixed). Moreover, as that incremental mindset increased—in other words, the more they believed in an incremental theory of intelligence—positivity ERPs on error trials as opposed to correct trials increased as well. And, the larger the error positivity amplitude on error trials, the more accurate the post-error performance.

So what exactly does that mean? From the data, it seems that a growth mindset, whereby you believe that intelligence can improve, lends itself to a more adaptive response to mistakes – not just behaviorally, but also neurally: the more someone believes in improvement, the larger the amplitude of a brain signal that reflects a conscious allocation of attention to mistakes. And the larger that neural signal, the better subsequent performance. That mediation suggests that individuals with an incremental theory of intelligence may actually have better self-monitoring and control systems on a very basic neural level: their brains are better at monitoring their own, self-generated errors and at adjusting their behavior accordingly. It’s a story of improved on-line error awareness—of noticing mistakes as they happen, and correcting for them immediately.

The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will. From broad theories to specific mechanisms, we have an uncanny ability to influence how our minds work—and how we perform, act, and interact as a result.

At the end, I keep coming back to Hamlet, perhaps one of our most famous examples of frequent, near-obsessive introspection and self-contemplation, someone who was intimately aware of the connection between mindset and subsequent reality. In an exchange with Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, he famously remarks, “Why then ’tis none for you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

To Hamlet, Denmark is a prison; to his companions, it is no more so than the world at large. How they see it affects how it is—not inherently good or bad, but good or bad as perceived through their own frame of mind. It is, in essence, the exact same principle: our world is what we perceive it to be, and our place in it, how we imagine it. If we think of ourselves as able to learn, learn we will—and if we think we are doomed to fail, we doom ourselves to do precisely that, not just behaviorally, but at the most fundamental level of the neuron.

This post is modified from an earlier version that I wrote for my Artful Choice blog on Big Think.

In an unfamiliar dessert landscape, you are likely to panic or revert to inappropriate habits unless trained otherwise. Photo credit: Vernon Swanepoel, Creative Commons.

Near the middle of the narrative, Paul Atreides and his mother, Jessica, find themselves alone on Arrakis, with no hope of returning to their old home. Arrakis isn’t exactly the most inviting place—it’s a desolate desert, with killer worms and treacherous storms to boot—and the pair has no experience in the environment. And yet, despite the seeming precariousness of the situation, Paul makes the most of their circumstances. Instead of panicking at their isolation, he remarks, “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.” This, just before a journey that might well kill them both. His mother doesn’t quite buy it, but she does think to herself, “How the mind gears itself for its environment. The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

Decades of psychological research have proven her to be quite correct. The story begins in 1949, with Donald Hebb. (Actually, it begins much earlier, but you need to start somewhere.) Hebb—a student of Wilder Penfield (who found that stimulating different areas of the temporal lobe during open-brain surgery could elicit different memories and sensations) and Karl Lashley (who quested for the engram, or the location for a specific memory, in the brains of rats)—believed that memories are stored by virtue of repeat association: an action causes activity in a cell, which in turn excites a neighboring cell. With each repetition, the connection between these two cells is strengthened, and over time, the cells become associated with one another, so that the activation of one predictably causes the activation of the other (as Carla Shatz memorably described it in 1992, “cells that fire together wire together”). These strengthening connections are now known as Hebbian plasticity, and Hebb’s idea, Hebb’s postulate.

But Hebb goes a step further than actual sensory experience. As he famously wrote, “You need not have an elephant present to think of elephants.” The thought itself can be enough to trigger the type of association that comes with learning. In other words, Paul Atreides need never have been in this specific desert environment in order to react as he does. It is enough for him to have trained his mind for that particular reaction, toward the positive and away from the negative, for the reaction to take place in reality.

Hebb’s work has since been expanded on, refined, and modified, but the general principle remains the same: training matters when it comes to how we learn and what we remember. Habit is king. Hebb’s postulate explains much of the logic behind such phenomena as Pavlovian conditioning (bell plus food equals salivation; fast forward to bell alone equals salivation), Skinnerian conditioning (pull lever, get pellet, learn to pull lever for pellet), fear conditioning and desensitization (think James Watson and poor Little Albert, or James Ledoux and scary snakes), and visual learning (Hubel and Wiesel and monocular deprivation in cats—no visual stimulus during the critical period makes for blind felines). Of course, it’s far more complicated than a single postulate, but the basic process is all about how our brains are trained, by our external and internal environment both, to respond to various situations in a predictable fashion.

Absent proper training, it's remarkably easy to crack under pressure. Photo credit: Bernard Goldbach, Creative Commons.

Jessica, however, doesn’t just talk about training. She also brings in stress. Here, too, she is correct: where you will see the effect of the synaptic bonds most openly is under highly emotional conditions. There, habit memory—the same type of procedural memory that you use when you do something that you’re skilled at, like drive a car or perform an integral function of your job—will take over, and declarative memory—or that memory that functions when you memorize something or when you’re still learning a new skill—will recede into the background. Nothing like stress to distinguish real habit from what you wish were habit.

In one study, participants who experienced a stress condition—the cold pressor task, where one hand is submerged in freezing (0-2 degrees Celsius) water for three minutes—reverted to habit when performing a forced choice task – whereas those who were not stressed were able to perform admirably on new contingencies. Specifically, habit was chosen at the expense of goal-directed performance when choosing what food to eat: a food that had previously been devalued or one that had not. Stressed individuals chose to eat the same food they had been eating to the point of over-satiation, while non-stressed individuals chose to diversify their food choices.

So, not only does stress inhibit new learning, but it pushes the brain to fall back on those habits of mind that are second nature. Of course, the process can vary from person to person—and it’s important to remember that stress follows an inverted-U function; that is, performance under stressful conditions actually improves up to an optimal point, and then drops off dramatically as more stress is added—but in general, stressful conditions are not the best for trying to assimilate new information. Indeed, chronic stress can reduce the volume of the hippocampus (an area of the brain intimately involved in memory formation and consolidation) and can aversely impact the dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain, so that we overvalue rewarding outcomes and are impaired in our ability to learn about negative outcomes. In other words, were we to land unprepared in the arid desert of Arrakis, we’d be in bad shape, indeed.

Humans are remarkably adaptable. Paul learns quickly to appreciate the positive aspects of his new surroundings, to enjoy the quiet and value the beauty of the new landscape. But he could have just as easily shut down, spiraling into a negative feedback loop and losing his cool entirely. In fact, had he not had prior mental training to dealing with just such stressful contingencies, he would have likely done so; certainly, he would not have been in a position to learn a new positive coping mechanism in the heat of the moment.

I take Jessica’s words as a timely reminder of the need to train yourself mentally for emotionally charged moments. It’s easy to forget how quickly our minds grasp onto familiar pathways when given little time to think or when otherwise pressured. But it’s up to us to determine what those pathways will be.

Atticus and Tom Robinson, screenshot from 1962 film. Moni3, Public domain, Wikimedia commons.

But what I remember has little to do with race or civil rights or the themes that dominated Gregory Peck’s portrayal. What I remember is a story of simple human kindness. Different kinds, different approaches, coming at times from the most surprising of places. And not just Atticus and Tom Robinson. Scout trying her best to be kind to the Cunninghams. Jem reading to Mrs. Dubose (and Atticus forgiving—or if not quite forgiving, then at least not judging that same Mrs. Dubose for—a lifetime of racism and hatred for a single last act of bravery). Boo Radley’s gestures of anonymous—and then, not so anonymous—kindness to Jem and Scout. Calpurnia’s love for the Finch children. And yes, there was meanness and close-mindedness and injustice and hate. But there was also human kindness, plain and simple, which didn’t ask for acknowledgment or repayment, which did not need to be loud or public, which existed just because it did. There didn’t need to be a reason.

I don’t mean to suggest that, because I remember those instances in the book where people acted as they should, sometimes in spite of themselves, everything is rosy and everyone, kind and good. But I do want to say something that is often forgotten or willfully ignored, more often than not in the world of psychology, something that Harper Lee made the eight-year-old me see quite clearly: there is no such thing as people, broadly speaking. People are different. Even people you think are the same. True, plenty of people will—and unfortunately, do—do horrible things, especially when pressed. And who hasn’t at one time or another invoked Stanley Milgram’s famed study of obedience, where person after person administered lethal electrical shocks (or so they were told) to a man with a heart condition—even after he had screamed in agony and then, gone silent altogether. Or Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment, where a group of Stanford students quickly assumed the roles of cruel guards and suffering prisoners and saw the veneers of university life fall away in a matter of days. Or the real-life case of Kitty Genovese, when a woman was murdered as onlookers listened from their windows—and no one called the police or interfered to help.

A shock generator, used in Milgram's obedience experiments. By www.psichi.org, Wikimedia Commons.

But as tempting as it is to cite those cases—and don’t get me wrong, they are important and instructive cases to cite—in so doing we are also tempted to forget the thing that Harper Lee would have us remember. When it comes to morality, people hold shades of grey. And while I won’t go so far as to say that for every one person that doesn’t help a Kitty Genovese, there is one who does, I will say that the ones who do exist.

In Milgram’s experiments of obedience, there were the few who refused to follow orders. Flat-out refused. They would not shock. They would not punish. They would not participate. They looked Milgram in the face, and said, not for me (and things that were not quite as nice as well). In Zimbardo’s prison study, not every guard became a sadistic torturer. In fact, there were three different types of guards: those who followed the rules, those who broke the rules to give the prisoners small breaks and favors and never punished them—and then, the brutal, hostile ones that tend to get all of the press.

In Kitty Genovese’s case, true, no one called the police. But one thing that is not often mentioned when discussing the bystander effect is that a single dissenting individual can be all it takes to tip a group to an entirely different reaction. One strong person is enough to break group conformity. It can happen on the smallest of levels, as with Solomon Asch’s famous study of social conformity, where a participant would go against his own eyes to conform with a group’s judgment of the length of a line—unless there existed a single other individual who would back him up, in which case, the conformity effect evaporated.

A sample stimulus from the Asch studies. What would you do if everyone in a room said Line B was the one that matched the image on the left?

And it happens all the time on the most real levels, where people put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of perfect strangers. In fact, if you were to talk to Philip Zimbardo these days, you would hear that he is studying just that: the hero effect. Far from toppling his faith in humanity, the Stanford prison study made him understand that people are capable of being tipped toward good just as they are of heading in the opposite direction—and that the right training (here, I think of Atticus’s many words of advice to Scout) can play an important part in tipping that balance.

I haven’t reread To Kill a Mockingbird since my childhood. My memories are just that. The impressions that I carried away with me from that tattered book. But whether accurate or not, they are impressions that lasted and that have colored how I view the nuances of human behavior. Whether or not you are a fan of Harper Lee (and I, for one, am), you have to acknowledge that she saw the possibility of grey when it comes to human morality—and that is a possibility that many of us are quick to dismiss. It is so much simpler to bundle people into masses and to make sweeping generalizations. And for psychologists, it’s also much more powerful and publication-worthy and somehow important-seeming. Who wants to talk about individual differences (and still get tenure, that is)? Who wants to mention all those participants who went against a reported effect or didn’t fit into the overall theme of a paper?

Harper Lee forces you to stop before you judge. To always remember the exceptions: those who did not obey, those who did not turn into animals, those who stepped in and helped and did the right thing. For, exceptions there will be. And you can be sure, there will be more of them than might appear at first glance.

We're not meant to keep secrets. Photo Credit: Linda (jinterwas Flickr photostream), Creative Commons

People are horrible at keeping secrets. As in, really, really bad at it (no matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary). And you know what? We’re right to be. Just like the two Rhesus Macaques in the picture above, we have an urge to spill the beans when we know we shouldn’t—and that urge is a remarkably healthy one. Resist it, and you may find yourself in worse shape than you’d bargained for. And the secreter the secret, the worse the backlash on your psyche will likely be.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne. I first dreaded him when my older sister came home with a miserable face and a 100-pound version of The House of the Seven Gables. I felt my anxiety mount when she declared the same hefty tome unreadable and said she would rather fail the test than finish the slog. And I had a near panic attack when I, now in high school myself, was handed my own first copy of the dreaded Mr. H.

Now, I’ve never been one to judge books by size. I read War and Peace cover to cover long before Hawthorne crossed my path and finished A Tale of Two Cities (in that same high school classroom) in no time flat. But it was something about him that just didn’t sit right. With trepidation bordering on the kind of dread I’d only ever felt when staring down a snake that I had mistaken for a tree branch, I flipped open the cover.

Luckily for me, what I found sitting on my desk in tenth grade was not my sister’s old nemesis but The Scarlet Letter. And you know what? I survived. It’s not that the book became a favorite. It didn’t. And it’s not that I began to judge Hawthorne less harshly. After trying my hand at Seven Gables—I just couldn’t stay away, could I; I think it was forcibly foisted on all Massachusetts school children, since the house in question was only a short field trip away—I couldn’t. And it’s not that I changed my mind about the writing—actually, having reread parts now to write this column, I’m surprised that I managed to finish at all (sincere apologies to all Hawthorne fans). I didn’t.

But despite everything, The Scarlet Letter gets one thing so incredibly right that it almost—almost—makes up for everything it gets wrong: it’s not healthy to keep a secret.

Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. The Scarlet Letter, painting by T. H. Matteson, via Wikimedia Commons

I remember how struck I was when I finally understood the story behind the letter – and how shocked at the incredibly physical toll that keeping it secret took on the fair Reverend Dimmesdale. It seemed somehow almost too much. A secret couldn’t actually do that to someone, could it?

It all depends on the secret. And in this case, it actually probably could. Over several decades, Daniel Wegner, of white bear fame, has been exploring the cognitive consequences of secrecy; and what he has found is not good news for would-be secret keepers. In a series of studies in the 1990s, Wegner and colleagues found that secret thoughts not only functioned in a way that was similar to suppressed thoughts, suggesting the same cognitive mechanism underlying the two, but that they were more accessible—in other words, people more easily recalled memories that they had been asked to keep secret than memories that they had told the truth or lied about—and came to mind much more often (and more often unintentionally) than any other thoughts (so, we tend to think more often of things that we’ve kept secret, such as telling a lie, masturbating, or having a crush on someone, than we do of things we haven’t, such as losing keys or getting bitten by a dog).

Put simply, our secrets preoccupy us. The more we try to keep them at bay, the more they rise up in our minds. The more we try to fight back, the more likely we are to slip up—in another study, Wegner found that people were much more likely to give an experimenter unintentional hints about something they were supposed to keep secret than they were to say something about a word, phrase, or image that they thought the experiment knew as well; and then, they were more likely to over-compensate and give themselves away even further—and the more taxing the effort will be on our minds. In fact, Wegner does Freud (as firm an adherent of the secret-as-enemy school of thought as ever there was) one better, showing that not only do personal secrets result in outward signs of distress or trauma, but that secrecy can itself create further unwanted thoughts, further exacerbating the cycle. And personal secrets, like a stigma that can be hidden? The effects get worse quickly, getting so bad as to be termed a private hell for the secret-keeper: the more personal and personally revealing a topic, the harder the effects of keeping it hidden will strike.

Arthur Dimmesdale is certainly not alone in seeing the pernicious effects of his secret eating away at him over many years. The mechanism’s effects play out far beyond the laboratory. Numerous researchers have demonstrated that keeping family secrets, such as abuse or parentage, often results in dysfunctional households—and that keeping personal secrets related to traumatic experiences is a frequent cause of psychological and physical health problems. In fact, Holocaust victims who talked about memories that they had long kept to themselves showed a marked improvement in health 14 months after the interview—and the more they disclosed, the more they improved.

To keep a secret, we have to constantly resist the urge to tell. Photo Credit: Luz Adriana Villa A., Creative Commons.

It’s remarkably taxing to keep something private. Keeping a secret means keeping up an act—and the bigger the secret and larger the audience, the greater the effort that must go into that act. And that effort isn’t just behavioral; we must also refresh it over and over in our minds. Wegner calls it the preoccupation model of secrecy: we suppress a thought; that suppression in turn causes the thought to rebound (for more on this process, you can read about his thought suppression experiments here); the rebound causes increased efforts at suppression; and the cycle continues ad infinitum.

Indeed, a secret that seemed small and inconsequential when you decided to keep it can take on a life of its own if you let it fester unattended. How many times have you not told someone something because it didn’t seem like the right time, only to find it harder and harder to say it—and to find yourself obsessing over why you didn’t, whether you should, what it all means, and on and on? Break the cycle, and you’re well on your way to freeing your mind. Only the cycle can be a tough one to break.

There’s certainly a time and a place for secrets. But before you agree to keep one for someone else—or before you decide to do something that would require you to keep one of your own—think twice. The act may be long since done, but the consequences of secrecy will remain. Just consider the fates of the two principal actors in The Scarlet Letter: at the end, it was the one who had never experienced public stigma who suffered the most. The truth often hurts, no question about it. But so does not telling it.

Think it's easy not to think about this bear? Think again. Image credit: longhorndave, Creative Commons

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a psychological goldmine. If you can think it, chances are he wrote about it. But as far as I know, only once has his writing directly inspired psychological research—and it was his non-fiction at that. Specifically, his reminiscences of travels to the European continent, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. One chapter in particular, “An Essay Concerning the Bourgeois,” has sparked some of the most prominent social psychology research of the last twenty years: Daniel Wegner’s studies of thought suppression.

In his essay, Dostoyevsky poses a challenge to his readers: rather than doing what writers normally ask you to do—that is, think—try not to think. And what’s more, try not to think of something quite specific – and see how far you can get. Dostoyevsky is not at all optimistic about the result. He writes, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

When Wegner read this, he was intrigued. So intrigued, in fact, that he decided to test it directly: would people be successful in keeping thoughts of a polar bear at bay when directed to do so? The point of the research was to look at conscious thought suppression, those moments when we deliberately try to keep from thinking about something, as opposed to unconscious thought suppression, an area made famous by Sigmund Freud in his writing on repression and apparent amnesia.

So, Wegner and his colleagues asked a group of students to do just what Dostoyevsky had suggested: not to think of a white bear. For a period of five minutes, the students were asked to report their thoughts verbally. Each time they either thought of or said the words “white bear,” they were asked to ring a bell. Then, for five additional minutes, they were instructed to think of a white bear all they wanted, and to continue ringing the bell whenever they did so. Another group received the opposite instructions: to first think of a white bear all they wanted, and then, to not think of the bear at all.

What happened next has since become one of the most widely replicated phenomena in psychology: those participants who had been instructed to avoid all thoughts of a white bear couldn’t do it. On average, they either said the words or reported thinking about the bear over once a minute. Moreover, when they were later told to think of the bear, they experienced a significant rebound effect, mentioning it much more often than any other group.

In a follow-up study, the researchers tried to help out by telling participants to think instead of a red Volkswagen each time they had the urge to think of a white bear. While the additional instructions had little influence in the suppression phase—people still couldn’t help but think of the white bear, even though they were now also thinking of the red car—they did help mitigate the subsequent rebound effect.

Since then, the ironic effects of thought suppression have been illustrated under countless circumstances and with far more candidates than white bears—pink elephants, ex-boyfriends, you name it. And the effects tend to last far longer than a five-minute laboratory sessions. Often, people will report rebounds of unwanted thoughts over periods of days and even weeks.

The phenomenon shouldn’t be at all surprising to people who have tried, for example, not to think of food when dieting (what else do you think of?) or who’ve done their very best to avoid a sensitive topic in a conversation—only to find themselves saying just the thing they had wanted to avoid. It seems that our natural tendency, whenever a topic bothers us or is in some way unwanted, is to do precisely the thing that makes us worst off: try not to think of it. And the more we try, the harder it can be, and the stronger the rebound we are likely to experience when the thought inevitably makes its way back.

Why would that be the case? The more effort we expend on keeping something from our mind, the more likely we are to be reminded of it—because at some level, we have to keep reminding ourselves not to think about it. As long as not thinking is in the back of our minds, we will be prompted to think of precisely the thing we shouldn’t be thinking about. Wegner calls this an ironic monitoring process: each time we think about a distracter topic to put off the topic we’d like to avoid (something we do consciously), our minds unconsciously search for the unwanted thought so that they can pounce on it if it makes so much as a peep. And if we are tired or stressed or distracted—or even if our mind goes silent for a moment—the unwanted thought will take the opportunity to assert itself.

We often blurt out just what we want to avoid saying. Image credit: Donata Ramonaite, Creative Commons.

It’s especially bad in social situations, when we try to avoid making mistakes that would carry some sort of social cost, such as trying not to swear or make sexual references or touch on an otherwise sensitive area of conversation. People who are asked to keep something private are more likely to mention it or allude to it in some way in a conversation. People who are asked not to think of anything sexual are more likely to slip up—and even show greater levels of physical arousal. People with eating disorders are more likely to mention food. People who have some sort of social prejudice—racism, sexism, homophobia—are more likely to say something biased when they are trying to be on their best behavior—especially if they are stressed or otherwise mentally engaged at the time.

The effects can even be physical. If we try to stop a pendulum from swinging in a specific direction, we may find it swinging in just the way we tried our best to avoid—especially if we are told to count backward from 1000 in threes. Athletes who concentrate too hard on avoiding a certain error may find themselves making just that error at the most inopportune of times (in golf, the effect even has a name: the yips). And if you are worried about not being able to fall asleep? Good luck trying to get to sleep. Dostoyevsky’s polar bear, it seems, just won’t let us go.

But, as it turns out, the news does get better. We may not always be at the mercy of the white bear. 25 years after Wegner’s original studies, further research has found ways we can keep—or at least, help—unwanted thoughts from resurfacing precisely when they shouldn’t. If we devote time and mental resources to avoiding a topic—and especially if we become absorbed in something else—we can successfully keep it at bay. If we practice focused self-distraction, or try to think intently about one specific topic that isn’t the topic we want to avoid, we will also be much more successful than if we let our minds wander without a focused purpose. If we avoid stress and other mental load, we are more likely to be in control of our thoughts. We can also practice techniques of mindfulness, meditation, focused breathing, and attention training (i.e., repeated practice of directing our attention toward specific targets and away from others), all of which allow us to be in better control of our minds more generally. And most interesting of all, if we deliberately try to think of what we want to avoid, we may find ourselves better able to avoid it down the line—a tactic that is known as exposure or habituation in anxiety and phobia research.

Dostoyevsky was right. If we pose as our task the act of not thinking about a polar bear, the cursed thing will indeed jump out at us from around every corner. The worst thing we can possibly do if we don’t want something to bother us is to try to avoid it. But if we take a different tack, acknowledging it, embracing it, confronting it, or if we learn to focus our minds on other, more productive lines of thought—through a positive process of actively trying to think of something rather than trying to avoid something else—we are much more likely to learn than the bear is not as powerful as once thought. It may be big and scary, but our minds have the potential to be even bigger and scarier if only we recognize the proper approach.

What determines the value of a gift? Photo from JD Thomas, Creative Commons.

A few weeks ago psychologist Dan Ariely, inspired by the holiday frenzy, pondered the hows and whys of gift-giving. Reading his piece—an endorsement of a behavioral economics view that challenges the rational economic contention that gift-giving is a largely irrational dilemma—at once brought to mind the story that has to me (and, I suspect, to many others) always epitomized the spirit of gifts and generosity: O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”

Only a few pages long, the story may be O. Henry’s most famous, its title almost a byword for a certain type of present. Say it, and chances are people will at once realize just what kind of gift you mean. A gift that is the real embodiment of quality over quantity, the value of thought over any amount of expenditure. A gift that puts the mere mention of a Holiday Wish List to shame. As O. Henry writes, “Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer….Two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.”

Recent work suggests that O. Henry may have been more right than he knew. The gifts that Della and Jim gave to one another may have actually been the wisest even from the most rational—at least in the evolutionary sense—of views, despite the fact that for a homo economicus, their value would have been worse than nothing, as bad an economic exchange as could be expected: humans may be wired to be overly generous, and that proclivity can actually confer a large survival advantage.

A group of psychologists from UC-Santa Barbara set out to test the long-standing conundrum that even in anonymous, one-shot games—in other words, in situations where you know that (1) you will never again encounter your partner and (2) no one has any idea what decision you’ve made—people more often than not choose to incur costs themselves in order to allocate benefits to others; an irrational behavior by traditional economic standards if ever there was one. In their model, the team managed to isolate an asymmetry that had previous been ignored: in an uncertain world, it is far more costly to incorrectly identify a situation as one-shot when it is in fact repeated than it is to mistake an actual one-shot encounter for a repeated one. Put differently, it is better to always assume that we will in fact encounter the same partners over and over. So costly is it to make a mistake in the opposite direction that, even absent any reputational or other mechanisms, it makes sense for us to behave generously to anyone we encounter. As the study authors conclude, “Generosity evolves because, at the ultimate level, it is a high-return cooperative strategy…even in the absence of any apparent potential for gain. Human generosity, far from being a thin veneer of cultural conditioning atop a Machiavellian core, may turn out to be a bedrock feature of human nature.”

So, it makes perfect sense for us to be as generous as we can. In fact, we may even like giving gifts more than we like receiving them—Jim’s joy at seeing Della’s happiness at her present was likely greater than his enjoyment of his own gift, and the opposite holds true for Della. In one study, subjects were given the choice to receive a very tangible material benefit to themselves—up to $128—or to donate money to a range of charities. Each charitable donation would decrease their own monetary endowment, while each choice that focused on their monetary interest would maintain their earnings.

Brain activation for monetary reward and donations. Figure and caption taken directly from Moll et al (2006).

Not only did the researchers find that all participants consistently chose to engage in costly donations, anonymously giving up an average of 40% of their endowment (around $51) for charity, but they also discovered surprising differences in neural activity for decisions that involved donating money versus receiving money. Specifically, while monetary rewards activated the mesolimibic reward system, including the dorsal and ventral striatum and the ventral tegmental area—as would be expected of something that gives us positive reward—when people donated money to a charity, the same network showed even greater activity—and the activity spread to the subgenual area (implicated in social attachment), which had remained inactive in the pure monetary reward choices. While we may not always agree, our brains seem to suggest that the joy of being a gift’s giver may eclipse that of being its recipient.

But “The Gift of the Magi”—and Ariely’s point—goes beyond simple generosity, to the thought that lies behind the gift itself. The act of giving is itself part of the gift, to be sure, but giving thoughtlessly is not enough. The actual value of a gift—which, in the story, ends up being negative in the immediate term to both Jim and Della—stems from the calculation which went into its choice: what will it actually mean to the recipient?

Ariely singles out this type of gift as one that makes the mental leap from your own vantage point to that of someone else. It’s a leap that is incredibly difficult to take—exhibiting empathy, let alone perfect empathy to the point of complete confluence with the mind of another person, is a tough feat even in the most conducive of circumstances—but that may be worth taking all the same. For, even if you fail to make it as accurately as you may have wanted, the effort will be noted. The actual accuracy is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that you try to make the shift from your own mindset to someone else’s, that you make the effort to think about what present would be best suited to another person. It’s a generosity that presupposes generosity of time, not just of material expenditure: you may not have thought it out quite correctly, but at least you’ve taken the time to think.

True, a time investment may seem not worth the hassle. After all, isn’t it easier to just ask what someone wants, or go online to check what they want, and leave it at that? Won’t everyone be better off? Not necessarily. Generosity of time and thought may actually pay off in more ways than we think. Not only is the gift recipient likely to be appreciative, but we ourselves may benefit. Generosity—which in this definition actually includes generosity of time and generosity that is both unexpected and spontaneous (in stark contrast to the list-variety of present)—is one of the top three predictors of a successful marriage, a surprising addition to the expected culprits, sexual intimacy and commitment. It can make us feel better about ourselves. It can help us actually be happier and see the world as an overall better place. In short, it might be an initial investment that is worth making.

And, at the end of the day, it may well go further than any “ideal” present that was purchased off of an Amazon Wish List but required no actual thought of your own ever could. If Jim and Della had both officially requested their gift, they may have avoided the result of their overly generous impulses, but the effect would have been taken away entirely. The sheer fact of verbalizing the desire would have taken the resulting gifts out of the Magi realm altogether. As Ariely puts it, “Instead of picking a book from your sister’s Amazon wish list, or giving her what you think she should read, go to a bookstore and try to think like her. It’s a serious social investment.”

Giving—and thoughtful, generous giving at that—may be more rewarding than receiving on numerous levels, from the neural, to the personal, to the social. And would a more generous, so to speak, gift be even more rewarding than a less generous one? While that remains to be tested directly, I’d be willing to bet that Jim and Della’s ventral tegmental area and striatum went all sorts of crazy when they picked out one another’s presents. And isn’t it just the type of gift you’d most want to receive yourself?

Pooh and Piglet, adapted from Iwona Erskine-Kellie (original illustration from Ernest Shepard), Creative Commons.

This past week, Winnie-the-Pooh just wouldn’t let me go. Please write about me, he kept whining. And when I told him I’d already written about him last week, he just looked confused. So what? Write about me again. He insisted that one time was not nearly enough, that he had far, far more to share with the world—and that, after all, the world would be quite happy to hear far, far more about him. And why is that, I wondered? Here, Christopher Robin stepped in, right out of the first chapter of Winnie the Pooh. “Because he’s that sort of Bear.”

Indeed. Solid logic if ever there was. As Christopher Robin informs us in that same chapter, Winnie loves to hear stories…as long as they are about him. And, not only does his preferred material focus on his own self, but he assumes that that focus will be the preferred one for everyone else as well. Sound a bit, well, egocentric? If it does, Pooh is not necessarily to blame. As a matter of fact, he may just be showing us something about ourselves that we’d rather not see, if we had a choice: we are all that sort of Bear. Egocentricity pervades almost all of our thoughts and decisions—and while Winnie’s insistence might be taking it up a notch, it is merely highlighting a tendency that is all too common and all too commonly ignored.

In everything he does, Winnie-the-Pooh begins with the same—entirely logical, might I add—starting point: himself. Not only are stories about him the most interesting ones, but his views, his tastes, his thoughts, his everything are the natural point of departure for considerations of anything and everything else. It’s not that Pooh doesn’t understand that others may not see the world in quite the same way; it’s that his understanding is too colored by his own perception to be of much practical value.

So, when he plots to eat honey from the bees’ nest, he realizes that bees don’t much like bears, and so masquerades as a black rain cloud. A disguise? Certainly. One that is likely to fool bees? Perhaps not. But when the bees fail to be taken in, becoming “suspicious” of the little rain cloud hovering by their nest, Pooh’s immediate reaction is not that his choice of costume was a bad one, but rather that he is dealing with “the wrong sort of bees.” It’s not me; it’s you.

But Pooh is not the only culprit. On their quest to catch a Heffalump , Piglet and Pooh fail to agree on the best bait for the Very Big Pit that will serve as the Cunning Trap for the mysterious beast.

Would you really want to catch this Heffalump, even in the deepest of deep pits? Elephant photograph from sarahemcc, Creative Commons.

While Piglet is quite certain that the proper thing to use would be acorns—his very favorite food—Pooh begs to differ, arguing that “Honey was a much more trappy thing than Haycorns.” Naturally, Piglet assumes that the unknown animal will like what he likes; and equally naturally, Pooh assumes the same thing. And when the trap is baited with honey, after much heated discussion? It may come as no surprise that what ends up being caught is not a Heffalump but rather, a Pooh bear.

We, too, make the same mistake over and over again, baiting our traps with honey or acorns, whatever our preference may be, and expecting that we’ll catch a Heffalump. Like Pooh and Piglet, we often forget—despite our best intentions—that Heffalumps may prefer another food altogether. Try as we may, it is incredibly difficult to get over that egocentric hump.

When we make a decision, we overestimate how many others would make the same decision as we would—the consensus bias (if we’re Pooh, we’ll overestimate how many others would choose to eat honey). And yet, we underestimate how clever they will be when compared with our own abilities—the false uniqueness and illusory superiority effects (so, while Pooh and Piglet think that they would be too smart to fall into the Cunning Trap, they assume a Heffalump will be more naïve; they are cunning, he, not so much).

And we don’t stop there. We also overweigh the importance of our own experiences and underweight those of others—the spotlight effect (Pooh and Piglet assume that the habits of the Heffalump are much like their own; of course he’ll come to the place where they hope to catch him, how could he not?). In fact, even when we actively try to adjust to another person’s point of view—after all, both Piglet and Pooh honestly wanted to find something that Heffalumps would most like to eat—we may find that our adjustment remains heavily colored by our own starting perspective, something known as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. And that, perhaps, is the most disturbing part of the story: we may all truly want to understand the Heffalump’s preferences, but try as we might, our understanding will begin and end with ourselves.

In a series of studies on perspective-taking, a team of psychologists led by Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich proposed to test directly the theory of egocentric adjustment, whereby we begin with our own perspective and only then adjust it to fit another person’s. In the first study, they asked participants to listen to ambiguous answering machine messages, that could be interpreted as either sincere or sarcastic. Each participant also received background information that resolved the ambiguity, making the intention of each message clear. Next, participants were split into one of two conditions: they were asked to either indicate the speaker’s intended meaning (intention condition) or anticipate how a third person, who did not have the clarifying information, would interpret the message (interpretation condition).

The researchers found that background information colored people’s thoughts in both instances: even though participants knew that the individual who would hear the message would lack any additional information, they still took that information (i.e., their own new perception of the ambiguous message) into account, rating the message as sounding objectively more sarcastic or more sincere depending on the background they’d received. They did their best to adjust—the rankings were not as extreme in the interpretation condition as they were in the intention condition—but they just couldn’t seem to shake their own unique knowledge, try as they might.

When cognitive resources were limited, the effects were even more severe. In a second study, all participants were placed in the interpretation condition, but some had to make their judgment under time pressure. These pressured participants ended up making more egocentric judgments than those who could take their time—and they made these judgments quicker the closer they were to their own perspective.

In a final study, where the participants were asked to give ranges of responses instead of exact responses (so, out of 100 other people, what percentage range would perceive the messages as sarcastic or sincere), the researchers showed that a concept known as satisficing may account for our usual less-than-accurate adjustments: as soon as we hit a plausible solution (i.e., a perspective that seems to make sense—back to the Heffalump, a food that may possibly appeal to him), we stop our search. So, we end up at the closest possible point to our own perspective that may plausibly be seen as adjusted to another point of view.

Since then, the effects have been shown in a variety of contexts and under a variety of conditions, providing themselves to be remarkably robust: we live, it seems, in a truly egocentric universe, even when we do our best to think of others.

Even our brains use our own experience as a natural starting point. In a recent functional neuroimaging study, a group of psychologists from Harvard University asked participants to judge the preferences of both themselves and another person (in either order) on a set of items. What the researchers found was that the brain, too, begins the process of thinking about the mental state of another person by looking first at one’s own mental state: activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), an area that has been linked to both self-referential processing and inferring the mental states of others, increased as preference judgments moved further away from a participant’s own preferences. In other words, the greater the self-other discrepancy, as measured by looking at the difference in assigned preference scores, the greater the MPFC activity. Even on a neural level, our first instinct is always to bait the trap with honey—and the further we travel toward considering other possible foods to use, the harder our MPFC has to work.

So, are we fated to keep looking for a Heffalump and catching ourselves instead? Not necessarily. Another study in the ambiguous message series suggested, for instance, that motivation may matter: if we are more motivated to be accurate about someone else’s perspective, we may actually become more accurate. It’s not so difficult to imagine that at the end of the day, Pooh and Piglet may not have wanted to catch the Heffalump all that much. Who knows how frightening he may have been even from the bottom of a Very Deep Pit, especially to a Very Small Animal.

Though it will always remain incredibly difficult to take someone else’s perspective without being encumbered by our own, we need not remain at the level of always suggesting honey (or acorns). For, unlike Pooh and Piglet, we can at least have the self-awareness to realize that we’ve likely adjusted our point of view less than we think we have. And maybe, just maybe, we can also be honest with ourselves about when we do want to catch the Heffalump—and when we’d rather not.

How many Winnie-the-Poohs is too many? Pooh is an excellent guide to the perils of multitasking. Credit: Crabchick, Creative Commons.

With those lines, Alan Alexander Milne—or A. A. Milne, as he’s more widely known—paid tribute to his most enduring creation, a certain fuzzy brown bear called Winnie-the-Pooh. And what a creation it was. It’s little wonder that the books have eclipsed the rest of Milne’s (quite considerable) pen-and-inking. For me, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh—that baby blue hardcover, with the ever-magnificent Ernest Shepard drawings gracing the dust jacket and jumping out from every page to say hi—is much like The Godfather is to the Tom Hanks character in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail: something that has the answer to everything. In all seriousness, it has to be among the greatest books of all time. And I don’t mean children’s books.

I’m hardly alone or even particularly original in considering Pooh to be oh so much more than a children’s book character. Benjamin Hoff, for one, even used Pooh and his friends to explore the principles of Taoism, in The Tao of Pooh and its companion, The Te of Piglet. But just as Pooh and Piglet prove themselves worthy of Eastern philosophy, they are no slackers when it comes to Western psychology. In fact, I would argue that Milne’s understanding of the human mind, as evidenced by the adventures, musings, and antics of a group of animals who happen to all live in the same corner of a not-too-large forest, is a profound one. Children may miss some of the insights, but the adults that belong to them would do well to pay attention. And if you’re an adult who hasn’t read the Pooh stories since childhood? Run. Grab the nearest copy. Read. Discuss. You’d be surprised at what you find.

You don’t even have to go much further than the lines I quoted at the beginning of the article to see why. In writing the Pooh books and poems, Milne wrote on whatever came in sight: on those things that surrounded and inspired him at any given moment. And that is never a bad idea when it comes to psychological research—look no further than Jean Piaget (inspired by his own children), Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (by the way their own minds worked and the mistakes they themselves made), Sigmund Freud (by his own complicated relationship with his father), David Eagleman (by his own near-death experience falling from a roof). The list can go on indefinitely.

In the very first paragraph of the very first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne uses Edward Bear—newly dubbed Winnie-the-Pooh—to illustrate a concept that is no less (and perhaps far more) relevant now than it was back in the days of Christopher Robin’s childhood: we can’t think straight when our head is busy doing something else. Milne writes:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

Oh, the perils of multitasking for proper thought. Pooh would like to think of a better way to travel down stairs—but he can’t, not as long as his thought process keeps being interrupted by the next stair. And what are those bump-bump-bumps but the exact kind of taxing interruption that we place on our own minds, of our own choice? We don’t need Christopher Robin to drag us down a set of stairs. We are very capable of doing it to ourselves, thank you very much.

Think of each step as one more thing that keeps getting in the way of what you’d originally meant to be thinking—in Pooh’s world, how to get down stairs; in yours, anything that you were trying to accomplish. Each new input—an email, a phone call, a chat message that pops up on your screen, a beep from your phone that reminds you of something you were supposed to do—serves as a bump that, quite literally, interrupts the thought process in a physical way. And when you resume it? You have to try to recreate your brain’s path, retrace your steps, take a moment to gather your mental resources – all at an incredible cost to both quality and speed.

Just like Pooh’s mind isn’t meant to think when it is bouncing down steps, ours aren’t meant to multitask. We are horrible at it. Good multitaskers? They don’t exist. Even the self-proclaimed best of the best perform far worse at just about anything when they are multitasking than when they focus on one thing at a time. In one study, those people who defined themselves as successful heavy media multitaskers, consuming multiple content streams at once with ease, were actually more susceptible to both irrelevant environmental stimuli and irrelevant representations in memory. As a result, they were far more likely to get distracted and became worse instead of better at task-switching. And isn’t task-switching just where you’d expect good multitaskers to excel?

And it goes further. A chronic tendency to sacrifice depth for breadth may, according to the findings, actually alter our brain’s underlying information processing and its cognitive control mechanisms, so that we become unable to weed out the irrelevant inputs that come both from the outside (media streams, etc.) and the inside (our own memories), and as a result, can’t focus our attention when multiple distractions are present. It really is an incredibly physical process, just as Pooh’s journey would have you believe.

And neural changes are evident even in something as seemingly easy—at least compared to the myriad inputs that we’ve become used to juggling every day—as driving and talking at the same time. Participants who listened to spoken sentences that they had to judge to be true or false saw a marked decline in driving accuracy in a simulated driving task. And what’s more, activation in the parietal lobe (associated with spatial processing) declined by 37% as compared to its activity during the uninterrupted driving task. All this without even having to manage a phone—just from having to process someone’s speech.

With age, the prognosis gets even worse. Older adults are more affected by interruptions than are younger adults, performing worse on tasks of working memory (incidentally, everyone is affected; it’s just a question of extent) and losing potentially valuable information in the process.

Still, you might find yourself arguing that, just as Pooh only knows one way of coming down the stairs, bump after bump, so, too, do we have to multitask to get along; no two ways about it. But is that really so? If you could improve quality and focus, you may end up getting more done by effective task planning than you would by simultaneously trying to do everything at once. Maybe, Pooh really could come upon that elusive other way to get down the stairs, once he stops bumping for a bit.

And what’s more, he might be happier as a result. Not that Pooh has any shortage of that—but then again, as instructive as he is, he is a bear of very little brain, and far less memory to begin with than are we. He may find it easy to forget that bumping along one step at a time wasn’t the most pleasant method of transportation. We may not be as lucky. In fact, multitasking may be making us more unhappy than we realize—at least Harvard psychologist. Dan Gilbert would argue that it does. Gilbert found that people are less happy, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant an activity might be, when their mind wanders (and yes, mind-wandering is the cause, not the result, of unhappiness, as time-lag analyses illustrated). And that happens on average 46.9% of the time. While mind-wandering and multitasking may not be the exact same thing, I would argue that really, mind-wandering is just one specific subset of multitasking: a multitasking of the mind, so to speak—and one that likely precedes (and certainly accompanies) physical multitasking.

Pooh has one thing on us. No bear is likely to be as in the moment as he. When his mind wanders, its new activity is whatever it has wandered to—and as such, you can say it’s not wandering at all. So, he manages to stay happy, if not necessarily as efficient as he might be if someone were to just stop bumping his head. And that, perhaps, is what we should learn from him. We may be able to improve our performance if we would only take a moment to pause in between all of those steps. But even if we can’t, the least we can do is be present in whatever multiple tasks we attempt.

A wall of photographs at the Sigmund Freud house. Credit: Shadowgate, Creative Commons

It was quite a challenge to think of a suitable topic for the first real, post-introduction Literally Psyched column. So many works to choose from (Shakespeare? Each play can be a multi-year series. Dostoyevsky? Hard to come up with a more psychologically-minded writer. Something more modern? Something less literary? Something more fun, à la Sherlock Holmes?). So many directions to go. And a kind of weight that can come only with a fresh slate. What will my selection say? What tone will it set? Does it imply any future commitments?

At the end, the choice seems almost inevitable. Who else but the writer who has had the most profound influence on my own thoughts from the earliest age, W. H. Auden?

I first discovered Auden—and by discovered, I mean really discovered, beyond “Funeral Blues” and “Lullaby” and the handful of poems that have been anthologized so many times they seem familiar even to those who’ve never read a line on their own—my junior year in high school, when I decided (who knows what compelled me) to write about his love poetry for my final English paper. It seemed straightforward enough, and I had no idea just how much I’d bitten off. Far, far more than I could chew.

But I chipped away, piece by piece. I made diligent trips to the Boston Public Library (oh, the pre-Google days) and must have done more research for that single paper than I’ve done before or since. Little did I know that among all of the declarations, explanations, and expositions of love that I sifted through was one that I originally cast aside—it didn’t seem to fit the theme; or so I thought—but that I would later find myself returning to again and again, as perhaps the single best encapsulation of the legacy of one of the most important figures in the history of psychology: “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.”

Sigmund Freud is more than just a historical giant, intimately familiar to any student of the mind almost from the moment he first decides to study it (and sometimes, even before that). What’s surprising isn’t his fame or his ubiquity—indeed, Freud is one of those near-mythical figures that makes most any person think he knows something about his work no matter his background or actual knowledge—but how poorly known he is considering both his prominence and his contributions to the field. And by poorly, I mean incorrectly: we may think we know Freud, but that knowledge is often colored by misrepresentations and incomplete facts.

Sigmund Freud, holding his signature cigar. Credit: Aly Letteri, Creative Commons.

In one classic account, Freud is pitted against his behaviorist counterparts, most often B. F. Skinner. The one, the father of psychoanalysis. The other, one of the founders and most influential figures of behaviorism, a school of thought that looks at learning and behavior as a series of stimulus-response contingencies. The one, focused on our inner life and unvoiced thoughts. The other, on our measurable behavior and overt actions.

This juxtaposition—one often seen in introductory textbooks and heard in introductory lectures—has the behaviorists rising up in angry reaction to the unscientific nature of Freud’s observations. In the telling, Freud is often cast in the role of near-demagogue and enemy of real science (whatever that may be), whose methods were flawed through and through: from a lack of validity and reliability, to overreliance on self-report, without external data to back it up, to experimenter bias and demand characteristics, to an overall lack of proof of any therapeutic effectiveness whatsoever of his psychoanalytic techniques. Skinner, on the other hand, takes on the role of savior, who rescues psychology from pseudoscience and brings it back to the realm of the measurable, the objective, the knowable. In short, Skinner tends to come out well ahead.

But while not entirely incorrect—after all, Freud did rely a bit too heavily on self-report, and did lack what would be considered adequate measurable data, to cite just a few instances—this version is far from the complete truth. So steeped has Freud’s reputation become in attributions, misattributions, interpretations, reinterpretations, and misinterpretations that it is difficult to get at the actual picture. Where to turn? Away from psychology textbooks, for one—and back to that poem I had so thoughtlessly cast aside. For when I revisited it, many years later, I found that the words that had meant little to me on our first encounter now presented a nuanced, perceptive, and above all, well-rounded and complete understanding of the essence of Freud’s contribution to psychology and the world at large, going beyond even those more evenhanded accounts that I had read in the psychology literature.

A portrait of W. H. Auden. Credit: Chris Weige, Creative Commons.

Unlike those accounts that jump immediately to judge, to compare, to sum up, Auden first takes a step back to remember a point so basic that it also becomes easiest to forget or ignore altogether: that we are living in a world that had been very different before Freud stepped on the stage. That the psychologist’s thinking didn’t just open a new field; it created a new way of being.  “They are still alive,” Auden writes of the people Freud had studied and wanted to understand, “but in a world he changed simply by looking back with no false regrets.” And there, in one sentence is that simple truth that Freud’s critics would like to forget: that a post-Freud world and a pre-Freud world are altogether different beasts.

Freud’s legacy has been subsumed so entirely in the current landscape that it is difficult to imagine a world without it. We can’t envision any alternative. But just try to think of a psychology without an understanding of desires, thoughts, and memories that aren’t accessible to the conscious mind. Or a psychology without the conception of internal and external needs that don’t coincide. Or one where we don’t understand that our past, our experiences, our perceptions can influence us in ways that we don’t understand. It wouldn’t really be psychology as we conceive it—but it was, for the most part, psychology before Freud.

And that, in essence, is the contribution that changed the world so much that its prior incarnation—a return to a pre-Freudian society—has become impossible to imagine: Freud radically altered our self-conception and our relationship to ourselves, by forcing us to acknowledge how much our internal life affects our external one, how great a contribution comes from elements that we don’t understand or know. Auden sums it up:

He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

The precepts of psychoanalysis, in three quatrains. And what’s more, written in a matter-of-fact way that underscores how entirely we now take them for granted. Of course the present is influenced by the past. Of course it is difficult to move on unless you understand what is holding you back. Of course we like to generate internal excuses that gloss over our weakest elements, hiding them even from ourselves.

No. Not of course. Or at least, of course now—not of course then. Why is it so easy to forget that, no matter what Freud did wrong, he did something so very right?

And lo and behold, even the behaviorists, those stimulus-response robots who (theoretically, at least) dismiss the black box of the mind as unknowable and therefore not worthy of study, agree with Auden—a point that tends to be forgotten in the rush to set up conflict and highlight a tale of starkly opposing schools of thought. John B. Watson—the first behaviorist, not to be confused with the John H. Watson I’ve written about in my Lessons from Sherlock Holmes series—wrote in 1916, in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, “I have been for some years an earnest student of Freud … [and] I am convinced of the truth of Freud’s work.” And Skinner himself was much more open to psychoanalysis than legend would have it. He even wanted to be analyzed, but was rejected because of too many hopefuls. Apparently, he didn’t quite make the cut – although he did test himself on Rorschach ink blots on several occasions. The rejection, however, didn’t make him less open to its ideas. In a 1954 critique of psychoanalysis—which, to be fair, also included a number of less than flattering points—Skinner wrote,

Freud demonstrated that many features of behavior hitherto unexplained—and often dismissed as hopelessly complex or obscure—could be shown to be the product of circumstances in the history of the individual. Many of the causal relationships he so convincingly demonstrated had been wholly unsuspected—unsuspected, in particular, by the very individuals whose behavior they controlled. Freud greatly reduced the sphere of accident and caprice in our considerations of human conduct.

Convincing. Visionary in his explanations; indeed, demonstrating things that had been wholly unsuspected before him. Someone who reduced the influence of accident and caprice in the study of the mind. It sounds like a recommendation more than a condemnation, something much more in line with Auden’s memoriam than present-day accounts.

Indeed, it is easy to forget that where Skinner showed how measurable behavior could be a path toward a deeper understanding of the mind, he owed a large debt to Freud, who had asserted far earlier that it was possible to study the mental in a rigorous, scientific manner formerly reserved for the laboratory sciences. And, Freud was first to attempt to trace behavior to the unknowable, the subconscious mind—a precursor of Skinner’s assertion that environmental contingencies shaped behavior outside our knowledge, another, more readily visible form of subconscious influence.

Still, don’t imagine for a moment that things are all rosy. That would be taking it too far in the opposite direction. But they are certainly more complicated than a classic account would have you believe—something that Auden, in all his homage, understood all too clearly. Don’t think that the poet glorifies or idolizes the psychologist. Quite the contrary. He doesn’t create some imaginary perfect scientist. Instead, he gives us Freud’s full legacy, in all its wisdom and all its absurdity:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:
Like weather he can only hinder or help,
the proud can still be proud but find it
a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn’t care for him much:
he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth …

Freud erred—sometimes to the point of the absurd. The Interpretation of Dreams? With precious little evidence to support its claims. The omnipresent power of sexuality? Something that has been taken to a nonsensical extreme. Freud may have started with what he considered an empirical approach—and accomplished more with that approach that most thought possible—but he did take his conclusions to lengths that were far outside the realm of the provable. (As, incidentally, did Skinner, that most objective of behaviorists, with Verbal Behavior, his treatise on language that Noam Chomsky later tore apart in his seminal work.)

But does going one—or several—steps too far and erring, however glaringly, in some areas negate Freud’s accomplishments? Absolutely not. As Auden says, Freud is “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.” And that climate should never obscure what the person has brought to light.

And that, perhaps, is Auden’s most far-reaching conclusion. Through his memorial to Freud, he teaches us how to approach psychology and science more broadly, beyond the subject of his poem. The most important element in evaluating any contribution, any person, any era is to take all research—and every researcher—on its own terms, not those of another area, another time, another approach, another mentality. It’s all too easy to let that subsequent climate of opinion cloud the essence of what came before—but it’s fair neither to the person nor to the work that is being evaluated.

It’s a lesson as applicable to evaluating contemporary research as it is to determining contributions from another time. Take the case of fMRI, a technique that looks at blood flow in the brain to detect areas of neural activity, to name but one prominent modern issue. Debates abound as to its usefulness and its proper function: what can we infer from imaging data? What can we conclude? How helpful is it in answering questions about cognitive processes?

The proponents and critics go back and forth in joust after joust. Is fMRI a panacea? Or, something that can tell us nothing and so to be abandoned? Neither. It should be taken on its own terms: as a methodology that is still in its early stages, that can tell us some things but not others. We should not ask questions of a method that it is not ready to answer, nor should we impute capabilities to it that aren’t there—just like we can’t ask Freud to account for developments that occurred long after his time or to justify directions where his work may have veered off course. Just because fMRI can’t tell you what love is or give you a definitive answer on the existence of free will—just like Freud wasn’t the be all and end all of the subconscious—doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Psychologist John Caccioppo put it best: “Just because you’re imaging the brain doesn’t mean you can stop using your head.”

And that’s one thing that Auden understood. You can never stop using your head, no matter how controversial or galvanizing the figure (or technique, or whatever) you examine may be. No matter what opinions may or may not have been given after the fact. Never do you have an excuse to stop thinking for yourself. And never are you allowed to judge Freud if you haven’t actually read his work or understood his contributions for what they are—secondhand accounts don’t count (just as I would never in my right mind listen to someone expounding for or against fMRI who hasn’t properly understood the technique itself; again, secondhand accounts just don’t cut it).

If Auden does anything, it is to remind us—and by us, I mean writers, readers, scientists, and thinkers alike—of the necessity to never stop thinking: to make sure we stop and reflect, ask the right questions and frame the right story, before we jump to judgment, be it of Freud, of brain imaging, or of whatever else.

Acknowledgments: I owe many of the Freud and Skinner quotes in this article to Geir Overskeid’s overview of Skinner and Freud, “Looking for Skinner and Finding Freud.”

A glimpse of a bookshelf of classics. Credit: Helder de la Rocha, Creative Commons.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Parker, had short, curly white hair and a low, smooth voice. Every day, right after lunch, she would take the large glasses that she always wore on a gold chain around her neck and place them on her nose. She’d pull the chair that usually sat behind her desk onto the faded blue rug that took up the far left corner of the classroom. Then, she would take one of the books from the low wooden shelves along the far wall, sit, and look over at us from above her blue frames. We didn’t need to be told twice. Soon, we would all come tumbling from wherever it was we’d been, to sit on the rug and look up in wide-mouthed expectation (really, our mouths were all wide open; I even have pictures to prove it). It was story time.

Story time was my favorite time of the school day. And I wasn’t the only one. I think Mrs. Parker managed to turn even the rowdiest rabble-rousers among us into sweet, docile model children. No Ritalin required. When she read, you couldn’t hear a peep. Just her steady voice, making its way through the most varied of adventures. I still hear it in my head whenever I think of the books of my early childhood.

My first grade class has long since graduated from high school, college, graduate school, even. But story time has remained my favorite time of the day. Every evening before bed, I read. Fiction, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction—the list is varied and long, but one thing that it never includes, change as it may, is anything scientific or academic. Papers, articles, academic books all have to take a pass. It doesn’t matter how busy I am or how much I need to get through or how high the (albeit virtual) stack of journals to read may be; it’s a rule I’ve never broken.

And that, I think, has served me well. It has provided much-needed inspiration when my brain has otherwise gone dry. It has given me research ideas when I’ve needed them most. It has helped me integrate disparate experimental findings and approaches, explain otherwise elusive connections, see the big picture where none is forthcoming from the researchers themselves, understand experimental pluses and shortcomings that I didn’t necessarily see before. In short, it has helped me maintain the kind of perspective that I feel is essential in any field and any endeavor, psychology not least of all—and the kind of perspective that all too often goes missing when psychologists focus too much on their chosen slice of research and forget the broader questions of human nature that inspired them to study the mind to begin with.

I’m not alone. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and one of psychology’s all-time greats, understood well the power of literature to inspire the most profound psychological insight. He wrote:

But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science.

Creative writers aren’t constrained by the need to formulate a tight research agenda and ask the exact, researchable question that can best be answered at any given point in time. They aren’t constrained by technology or funding. They aren’t constrained by what’s hot, what’s edgy, what will get you the best publication or set you up on the surest track to that coveted tenure position. The only thing that constrains them is their imagination. And for the best of them, that imagination is boundless.

Freud called their creations sources that haven’t yet opened up for science. I would add to that, sources that will likely never be opened up for science, at least not in their entirety—but sources of tremendous inspiration, that can help put existing psychological research into a broader, more widely applicable context and help set the stage for future exploration and discovery.

And that, in essence, is the theme of Literally Psyched. Here, I propose to use literature and creative inspiration to explore concepts in the psychology of the mind and human thought. To create a place that will blend the world of fiction and non-fiction, that of the literary and the psychological, of artistic inspiration and scientific exploration. To use whatever inspires me—a book, a character, a line, a moment—as a window of insight into the human mind. For who are creative writers but individuals who have dedicated their life and art to observing and chronicling humans as a whole: their interactions, their dreams, their hopes, their disappointments, the full complexity of their internal life? (As a side note: I even found Freud’s quote in a non-psychology context, when reading Richard Panek’s excellent book on Einstein and Freud, The Invisible Century.)

I hope you’ll join me on this journey of interdisciplinary exploration. I hope, too, that you will share your own inspirations with me along the way, both as suggestions of future columns—while I was writing the Lessons from Sherlock Holmes series (a kind of Literally Psyched in miniature, or better yet, a pilot version), I received a number of emails from readers who suggested authors, characters, and works that they thought provided equal insight into the mind; I would love to see more—and as part of a broader conversation on the borders and intersections of the psychological and the artistic.

I’m literally psyched to be starting out on this new endeavor. I hope you will be as well.

Not to worry. Holmes is not gone for good. He will be making the occasional appearance in a new series that I will be starting next week; but more on that later. For now, let’s turn one more time to the master detective to see what light his latest exclamation can shed on the inner workings of our minds.

In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” a young woman consults Holmes on the advisability of taking a strange–albeit remarkably well-paying–position as a governess in the country. Though Holmes tells her that, “it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for,” she proceeds to take the job. Holmes then predicts that he and Watson will hear from her shortly–trouble is certainly ahead, else why would this young woman be given a high salary for such light duties, along with being asked to comply with such extraordinary demands as changing the length of her hair and wearing a particular color of dress? But in the meantime, he can’t seem to get the case out of his mind. As Watson notes,

I observed that he sat frequently for half and hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. “Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” And yet he would always wind up by muttering again that no sister of his should ever have accepted such a situation.

Holmes’s exclamation is perhaps one of the most famous lines he has ever spoken, and with good reason. For, it points to a tendency that we all too often indulge and that is all too easy to indulge in: the tendency to do the impossible, to make bricks without their proper material. To create something, in this case, a theory, in the absence of anything on which to base it. To speculate absent any hard facts.

The ease of speculation…

Just think how easy it is to do. I say “governess,” and doubtless, images of governesses, acquired from reading, movies, and wherever else, rise up in your head. Maybe you see Miss Hunter as Jane Eyre and right away, start to imagine something sinister hiding in the shadows. Or maybe you see her like Mary Poppins and start smiling at the adventures that may lie in store–certainly a far less dark picture than the first. Or maybe you see her as something else entirely; but whatever you do, you see her in some fashion, a fashion that is in large part determined by your own experiences and associations.

It is easy to forget that these are no more than general images that have no concrete facts to back them up. We know next to nothing of the situation into which Violet Hunter is entering. It may be like Jane Eyre’s or Mary Poppins’s, or it may be entirely different. In any case, we have no basis for conclusions prior to learning more.

But how easy it is to speculate even without any further information. How many intricate scenarios can be drawn from a few strange facts. Miss Hunter herself engages in just such scenario-generating, positing that while her employer himself is a kind and good-natured man, his wife is a lunatic–perhaps Violet really has read too much Charlotte Brontë–and so he indulges her every whim to prevent an outbreak. But Holmes, after telling Violet Hunter that she might be in danger, says only, “it would cease to be a danger if we could define it.” He recognizes that the three facts that they do have are not nearly enough to go on and so refuses to speculate further. He may suspect that something doesn’t fit, but he will wait for more clay before he starts making the bricks of conclusions.

…And the necessity of resisting it

When Holmes calls for data, for his “clay,” he is, in essence, warning Watson of the dangers of jumping to conclusions when what we should be doing is gathering some facts to base those conclusions on. Of course, there is room for some speculation–clearly, Holmes knows something is off and knits his brows at the problem–but any theory that may arise must, as the detective has said repeatedly, cover all of the known facts. And what are the facts here, exactly? Only what we know from the girl before she has ever set foot on the property. She has not seen the wife. She has not seen her employer outside of a few minutes in the employment office. She has no notion whatsoever of the particulars of her new situation, save that it is in the country and will require some changes in her appearance. There are too many possible theories to cover what we do know to be of any use–the lunatic wife is but one of any number of possibilities–and not a single actual fact from the situation itself. Theories help explain facts; they do not and cannot replace them.

When we encounter something that captures our attention–in this particular case, it’s the incongruity of job compensation and demands and the presence of strange stipulations, such as length of hair and color of dress–it stands to reason that we would take note. Something does not add up. Why not give it some thought? But when we take note, we tend to go a step further, jumping ahead of ourselves and creating possible explanations and scenarios that might fit. Even Holmes seems to indulge in something of the sort, when Watson notices his concentrated thinking–though he refuses to take his speculations beyond his own mind and into the world at large by sharing them with Watson and thus giving them more definitive shape.

But most of us aren’t as disciplined. We latch on, and we run with it. Instead of stopping to reflect, we push to conclude. Holmes has warned us many times, in different guises, not to get ahead of ourselves in reasoning before we have sufficient data. Why the need for such repeated, empathic reminders? Because jumping to conclusions is all too easy. What is difficult is not jumping to them.

We jump to conclusions for any number of reasons. We may think we have the data when we don’t and thus end up forming an impression before we’ve even seen the necessary elements on which to base it. We may read more into the little that is known than we should, using our version of the facts and not the facts themselves. We may fail to take the necessary step back to see beyond mere detail, which may end up being meaningless on its own. And in each case, we take mental shortcuts, falling back on the same heuristics and biases that I’ve explored previously in this series. We think in terms of what we know and what we’ve experienced. We simplify and judge when we should be simply observing. Does Violet Hunter really know her employer is kind? She has never interacted with him beyond their initial encounter and has simply equated a large some of money with kindness. The two may coincide, but they certainly don’t have to. Does she know his wife is eccentric? Here, she has even less to go on–not a single fact, as it turns out. And yet that doesn’t stop her from drawing her own inferences.

Such speculation abounds in all walks of life–in politics, in science, in everyday decisions and experiences.  It’s easy to jump to conclusions from a few glaring elements or words (an electric blue dress, a preposterous salary) without stopping to gather the full story–or even realizing that what we have is but a fraction, and a not very meaningful fraction on its own, at that, of the whole. It’s easy to just glimpse a piece of the puzzle and conclude that we know what the whole thing resembles. And it’s hard to remember that the same piece can fit in any number of ways into any number of puzzles; until we find those corner pieces and start to fill in the center, we cannot possibly think we’ve found the single possible image that will emerge once the jigsaw is complete.

We can’t actually make bricks without clay. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try, substituting just about anything else for the pleasure of building itself, material be damned. After all, it is much more fun to build and to create than it is to gather up the raw materials–it provides much more of a sense of accomplishment. But if we just stop for a second to consider the fact that it would be far easier–and more reliable–to just wait to build until the proper clay can be found, we may find ourselves spared many a grievous intellectual (or other) error and living in a far stronger house, one that is build of actual bricks, not makeshift brick substitutes that will likely collapse under any real pressure.

Photo credit: Holmes and Watson meet with Violet Hunter, in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” By Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908) (Strand Magazine) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Previously in this series:

Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of Knowledge Is Essential
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Judge a Man by His Face
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: From Perspective-Taking to Empathy
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Why Most of Us Wouldn’t Be Able to Tell That Watson Fought in Afghanistan
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Preconceptions and the Blunting of Imagination

In “Silver Blaze,” one of the paragons of logical reasoning, Holmes admits to a rare lapse in judgment. In the story, a prize horse goes missing. As Holmes and Watson head to Dartmoor to help with the investigation, Holmes mentions that on Tuesday evening, both the horse’s owner and Inspector Gregory had telegraphed for his assistance on the case. The flummoxed Watson responds, “Tuesday evening! And this is Thursday morning. Why didn’t you go down yesterday?” To which Holmes answers,  “Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson–which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. The fact is that I could not believe it possible that the most remarkable horse in England could long remain concealed, especially in so sparsely inhabited a place as the north of Dartmoor.”

And there you have it.  The great Holmes has made a blunder.

A failure of imagination

So, what exactly is it that has gone wrong? Holmes often touts the benefits of imagination, that quality of mind that enables one to go beyond the hard facts and envision hypothetical worlds and alternative possibilities–in fact, he demonstrates the power of imaginative thought in “Silver Blaze” itself, to great effect. But even the best imagination is a servant of its owner’s mind, and that mind is necessarily subject to his unique experience and world perception. While a mind such as Holmes’s is, as a rule, able to imagine even the most remote of possibilities, to see beyond the present and bring to bear a wealth of knowledge to chart out most any eventuality, there are times when it, too, becomes limited by preconceived notions.

The concept is a simple one: preconceptions blunt imagination by narrowing the sphere of considered options. We are limited by what we see. Holmes sees a horse of exceptional appearance missing in a rural area. He can imagine many alternatives, but among them, he would never include something that dealt with a remarkable horse in a heavily populated area, or with a horse that wasn’t so remarkable in a sparsely populated area. After all, neither of those options corresponds with the facts–or at the very least, the facts as he sees them. For here, Holmes commits the mistake that is usually the failure of the Lestrades of the world, in taking a preconception and making it into a fact. His imagination does not extend to the possibility that either of his premises may be wrong.

True, the geography of the area is not subject to doubt. Dartmoor is, objectively, a sparsely populated locale. But a horse of remarkable appearance: is that set in stone? Holmes thinks it is–hence, the preconception–and consequently limits his imagination to a consideration of only those alternatives where that remains the case. His logic is as follows: if the horse is the most remarkable such animal in the whole of England, then how could it go under the radar in a remote area where hiding places are limited? Surely, someone would notice the beast, dead or alive, and make a report. But, it is Thursday, the horse has been missing since Tuesday, and the report has failed to come. What is it, then, that Holmes failed to take into account?

A horse couldn’t remain concealed if it could still be recognized as that horse. The possibility of disguising the animal doesn’t cross the great detective’s mind; if it had, surely he wouldn’t have discounted the likelihood of the animal’s remaining hidden.  The question then becomes, why didn’t he consider it? Why did the man who thinks of everything not think of this?

We are limited by our experience and our habits of thought

First, there is the question of experience. Our imaginations tend to be rooted in our own knowledge. What we see isn’t just what there is; what we see is also what we know. Were we to witness something that in no way fit with past schemas, had no counterpart in our memory, we would likely not know how to interpret it – or, we may even fail to see it altogether, and instead, see what we were expecting all along. Think of it as a complex version of any one of the famous Gestalt demonstrations of visual perception, whereby we are easily able to see one thing in multiple ways, depending on the context of presentation. For instance, in this example, do you see the middle figure as a B or a 13? The stimulus remains the same, but what we see is all a matter of expectation and context. A disguised animal? Not in Holmes’s repertoire, however vast it might be, and so, he does not even consider the possibility.

That oversight is directly related to the second element of imaginative failure: everyone has blind spots. In our distinctive way of looking at the world, we will inevitably make the same characteristic mistake over and over. The mistake may not be a common one–and it certainly doe not have to be common to everyone–but it will be typical of us, of our thinking, of our perception. Call it a personal habit of the mind. And in “Silver Blaze,” we come across one of those habits in Holmes: a failure to imagine the possibility of disguise.

Though the detective himself is a master of concealment, he seems to discredit the extent to which others may follow suit. “The Man with The twisted Lip” comes to mind almost immediately. Does it not strike you as odd that Holmes would not consider the possibility of disguise earlier on in the story? It seems an uncharacteristic oversight on his part. Or, take “The Yellow Face.” Here, too, disguise–or a lack of consideration for its possibilities–bears directly on Holmes’s failure to reach the proper solution to the mystery. The point here is not to laud the benefits of disguise, but rather to illustrate the notion that every mind has characteristic areas of shortcoming–even the greatest.

Had Holmes had the same benefit of rereading his own exploits as we do, he may have learned that he was prone to this type of error. Had he seen the whole picture, each story nicely placed back to back, he may have discerned a common problem. But give him disparate events, over many years, and the feat of analysis becomes a difficult one. In fact, it is not inconceivable that he’d fail to make the connection even if he had the whole picture, presented to him just as it is to us. Self-analysis is notoriously challenging. We don’t often like to look at our own shortcomings – indeed, we may not see them even if we stare them in the face. And while normally, the failure is an adaptive one–it keeps us from getting depressed, for one–it does cause errors in thinking that we could avoid if we chose to undergo more extensive self-analysis.

The moral of the story? We are all subject to our past experiences, our preconceptions, our habitual ways of thinking. Even Holmes. But, unlike Holmes, who is doomed by his creator to relive his errors over and over, we still have the possibility of change. We don’t have to keep falling for the same mistake. Some honest self-probing may set us on our way to remedying those areas where our minds are most likely to falter. And at the end of the day, that is the goal of each of these lessons, to get us one step closer to Holmes at his best and to use opportunities when he stumbles to learn how to surpass him at his own game–or at the very least, to learn what exactly the game entails.

Photo credit: The famous duck-rabbit Gestalt illusion. What do you see, a rabbit or a duck? It may depend on the animal you are more familiar with and which of the two you are expecting to see. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Originally published in Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind’s eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312.

Previously in this series:

Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of Knowledge Is Essential
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Judge a Man by His Face
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: From Perspective-Taking to Empathy
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Why Most of Us Wouldn’t Be Able to Tell That Watson Fought in Afghanistan

How, indeed? Again and again, Sherlock Holmes delights in displaying his prowess in identifying someone’s past and present to the ever-appreciative Watson; and Watson, in turn, can never seem to quite master the art himself, only seeing the logical link once it has been explained. But Watson is not alone. Holmes’s technique is so elusive not only because it relies on observational mastery that most of us do not possess but in that it also manages to both cast off and exploit one of the most common reasoning fallacies that we are prone to committing: the conjunction fallacy, whereby we give a conjunction a higher probability of occurring than we do either of its constituent parts, allowing one element to color our perception of the rest.

How do we form judgments?

When we form a judgment, we often compare something–in this particular case, a person–in the real world to a mental model of that thing in our heads. How closely that person corresponds with the model is called their representativeness. For instance, Holmes is likely close to exemplifying the model for “detective” in our heads–he is, after all, one of its original prototypes. Watson, on the other hand, may not always fit in with the mental model for “doctor” that one typically holds–few doctors (or so we’d hope) tag along on illicit criminal-catching adventures and leave their practice at a moment’s notice to accompany a friend on a new quest.

In forming the original mental model–say, of a detective or a doctor–we normally focus on several salient factors. The more common and typical something is, the more representative it seems. If it were, for instance, brought to our attention that Watson always carries a stethoscope and has a certain type of bowler hat that we associate with our picture of the typical doctor, based on the frequency with which we’ve seen such elements tied to a doctor in the past, we may increase our confidence in his being representative of the profession, despite the original incongruities. If, however, we are given even more discordant information that we originally had–for instance, that he enjoys gambling and chasing women–we are even less likely to see him as fitting the mold. But it is in that process of assessing typicality that we often go wrong.

Typical and easy to recall does not mean likely or right

The fact that something comes to mind easily does not necessarily make it diagnostic or even particularly representative, even if we think it so. And when it comes to judging people, the distinction is an essential one. Consider the following classic example of Bill and Linda, taken verbatim from a 1983 paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Each description is followed by a list of occupations and avocations, and the task is to rank the items in the list by the degree that Bill or Linda resembles the typical member of the class:

Bill is 34 years old. He is intelligent, but unimaginative, compulsive, and generally lifeless. In school he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.

Bill is a physician who plays poker for a hobby.
Bill is an architect.
Bill is an accountant.
Bill plays jazz for a hobby.
Bill is a reporter.
Bill is an accountant who plays jazz for a hobby.
Bill climbs mountains for a hobby.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Linda is a teacher in an elementary school.
Linda works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes.
Linda is active in the feminist movement.
Linda is a psychiatric social worker.
Linda is a member of the League of Woman voters.
Linda is a bank teller.
Linda is an insurance salesperson.
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

When the researchers’ subjects were presented with these lists, they repeatedly made the same judgment: that it was more likely that Bill was an accountant who plays jazz for a hobby than it was that he plays jazz for a hobby, and that it was more likely that Linda was a feminist bank teller than that she was a bank teller at all. Logically, neither idea makes sense: a conjunction cannot be more likely than either of its parts. If you didn’t think it likely that Bill played jazz or that Linda was a bank teller to begin with, you should not have altered that judgment just because you did think it probable that Bill was an accountant and Linda, a feminist. An unlikely element, even when combined with a likely one, does not somehow magically become any more likely. And yet, 87% and 85% of participants, respectively, made that exact judgment. This, in essence, is the conjunction fallacy–and it is as difficult to get rid of as it is prevalent in our typical determinations of people. We allow one salient feature to override other determinations, and in so doing, we lose sight of logic.

Indeed, in a follow-up, where only the two relevant options (Linda is a bank teller or Linda is a feminist bank teller) were included, fully 85% of participants still ranked the conjunction as more likely than the single instance. And even when they were given the logic behind the statements, they sided with the incorrect resemblance logic (Linda seems more like a feminist, so I will say it’s more likely that she’s a feminist bank teller) over the correct extensional logic (feminist bank tellers are only a specific subset of bank tellers, so Linda must be a bank teller with a higher likelihood than she would be a feminist one in particular) in 65% of cases. We can all be presented with the same set of facts and features, but the conclusions we draw from them need not match accordingly.

The logic behind the conjunction fallacy

Why do we make this mistake? One of the reasons has to do with the number of details presented: the more details there are, the more confident we are–especially if one of those details makes sense. A longer list somehow seems more reasonable, even if we were to judge individual items on that list as less than probable given the information at hand. So, when we see one element in a conjunction that seems to fit, we are likely to accept the full conjunction, even if it makes little sense to do so.

Moreover, the easier we can bring something to mind, the more we believe in it. If a mental image arises quickly and fits a description, we tend to think it is correct, even when it may be an exception in all cases. In fact, it’s often easier to remember exceptions than rules–they stand out more, while rules are, generally, much more mundane and boring. In another Kahneman and Tversky example, for instance, Hollywood actresses who had been divorced more than four times were judged to be more representative than ones who voted Democratic – in keeping with a media-coverage stereotype, no doubt, that had little bearing on how actually representative any given piece of information would be. Is it newsworthy to report that most actresses are Democrats? Or that many have stable marriages and have not been divorced a single time–or perhaps never married at all?

The last example brings me to what is perhaps the most pervasive reason behind the conjunction fallacy: we tend to ignore base rates. To go back to the earlier judgment of either Holmes or Watson as representative or typical of his profession, it is essential to ask one additional question: How relatively frequent are detectives and doctors, respectively, in this particular society? Even were we to hear a precise description of Mr. Holmes–without, of course, knowing him to be Sherlock Holmes–we should not jump to the conclusion that such a man is likely to be a detective, as the prevalence of detectives in the general population is remarkably low (and of consulting detectives in particular, equal to precisely one individual). But we never think of that. We just grasp at a mental match and call it a day.

What Holmes does differently: sticking to logic, regardless of impressions

Holmes, however, manages to both cast off and exploit this tendency toward the conjunction fallacy in forming a judgment of a specific individual. He casts it off in the sense that he himself neither ignores base rates nor conflates ease of image or amount of information with actual representativeness and confidence. Consider his guesses of professions: rarely do they jump–unless with good reason–into the esoteric, sticking instead to more common elements – and ones that are firmly grounded in observation and fact, not based on overheard information (as in the media world) or conjecture. When he lists the elements that allowed him to pinpoint Watson’s sojourn in Afghanistan, he points, to name one example of many, to a tan in London–something that is clearly not representative of that climate and so must have been acquired elsewhere; Holmes, we must remember, demonstrated his logic before the advent of the ubiquitous tanning salon and easy weekend travel–as illustrating his having arrived from a tropical location. One element, one conclusion. Step by logical step. The category “doctor,” you will see if you read Holmes’s explanation, precedes “military doctor”–category before subcategory, never the other way around. Never would Holmes call Linda a feminist bank teller, unless he was first certain that she was a bank teller at all.

And Holmes exploits the tendency in others in the sense that he realizes that most people do make these mistakes, jumping around from point to point, letting irrelevant elements affect their judgment, allowing themselves to be influenced by easy representations and commonly reported facts. Hence his ability to impress, to stay a step ahead of not only Watson, but Scotland Yard – and, notably, to don such an array of successful disguises: he knows, for instance, how someone usually judges an old woman and so is safe in that getup many a time. (A side note: someone else who exploits these tendencies to the fullest is the typical fortuneteller.)

So how to avoid the conjunction fallacy and judge someone more accurately than you otherwise might? Kahneman and Tversky found it remarkably difficult–nearly impossible–to guide people in the right direction. No matter how they pried, Linda the feminist bank teller prevailed. My advice–apart from rereading Holmes’s logical chains methodically and taking their structure and premise, if not their precise content, to heart–is to understand how the fallacy arises to begin with. Don’t let highly salient and seemingly representative elements influence a judgment from the get-go. You would likely never judge Linda a likely bank teller from her description – though you very well might judge her a likely feminist. Don’t let that latter judgment color what follows; instead, proceed with the same logic that you did before, evaluating each element separately and objectively as part of a consistent whole. A likely bank teller? Absolutely not. And so, a feminist one? Even less probable.

Or, to focus on another aspect, don’t let the ease of thinking about Hollywood divorces lead you to believe that divorce is the norm, or even particularly representative of that group as opposed to any other group. Don’t forget that even though a given political affiliation is not as sexy when it comes to news, it may be much more typical. And finally: don’t forget that Hollywood actresses constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population – and even of the population of Hollywood. How likely is someone to belong to such a small group? It’s from there that your conclusions should follow.

Photo credit: Sherlock Holmes sees Dr. Watson for the first time in A Study in Scarlet. By Richard Gutschmidt (1861-1926) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

======

Previously in this series:

Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of Knowledge Is Essential
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Judge a Man by His Face
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: From Perspective-Taking to Empathy
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Why Most of Us Wouldn’t Be Able to Tell That Watson Fought in Afghanistan

Empathy, a concept originally introduced as Einfühlung by Theodore Lipps, is a state that allows us to share in the experiences and mental states of others. It lets us understand–or at least begin to approximate–their feelings, their internal conditions, their possible thoughts and motivations, and as such, is one of the central elements of social behavior. And surprisingly, if you take his almost pathological detachment from others seriously–or obviously, if you consider both his remarkable ability to take on others’ points of views and his emotional attachment, however veiled, to the select few–it is an ability that Sherlock Holmes demonstrates to great effect on multiple occasions, sometimes going as far as to side with the criminal over the law when he identifies enough with the circumstances of the crime. In one such instance, we find him at the end of “The Adventure of Abbey Grange” urging Watson to stop a moment before rendering justice on Captain Jack Croker.

When Holmes makes his way to Scotland Yard to share crucial information with Inspector Hopkins on the murder under investigation, he changes his mind: he departs before entering the station and goes back to Baker Street having told nothing to the police. Why does he do that? As he tells Watson,

“No, I couldn’t do it, Watson. Once that warrant was made out, nothing on earth would save him. Once or twice in my career I feel that I have dome more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by this crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.”

When later that evening, Inspector Hopkins visits Baker Street with no more idea of the proper way to proceed than he’d had earlier on, Holmes dismisses him without much further explanation. He then addresses Watson:

“I dare say you thought I acted rather badly to Stanley Hopkins just now?”

“I trust your judgment.”

“A very sensible reply, Watson. You must look at it this way: what I know is unofficial; what he knows is official. I have the right to private judgment, but he has none. He must disclose all, or he is a traitor to his service. In a doubtful case I would not put him in so painful a position, and so I reserve my information until my own mind is clear upon the matter.”

And when his own mind does clear up, after he and Watson listen to Croker’s account of events, he proceeds to take upon himself the role of judge and pronounce the man acquitted.

Of course, in this instance we are witnessing far more than empathy at work: we are seeing a detective ascertain the details of a case, and then decide that the crime was worth committing. But why? From where did that judgment arise?

Here, we can see Mr. Holmes empathizing with two individuals: Mary Fraser and Jack Croker. Because of Mary’s ill treatment at the hands of her husband, she was a victim and worthy of drastic interference; and because of the captain’s love for Mary, he, too, was a victim (of his passion) and an upholder of the chivalric code of honor (protecting his lady) that Sir Conan Doyle himself held so dear.

Holmes makes his judgments long before hearing the details of the case from Croker’s lips. From the moment he hesitates on the steps of Scotland Yard, he has placed himself on the side of the perpetrators, progressing from their mindsets, their motivations, their goals–not his own–in making his decision. In short, he demonstrates the very hallmarks of empathetic thinking. It’s a step beyond simple perspective-taking. True, Holmes must first take the perspective of those in question; but then, he emotionally identifies with them in a way that the more purely cognitive first step does not necessitate.

The origins of empathy

Where does such empathy come from? When we observe someone acting a certain way or exhibiting a certain emotion, we automatically mirror the action in our own minds. So, if we see someone smile, we enact that smile in our heads–and often, on our own faces. When we see them lift an apple, we imagine that action ourselves. And as we do so, we begin to grasp not just the hows but the whys of the action. Why is he smiling? Why is he taking an apple? He’s happy. He’s hungry. I begin to see where he’s coming from. It’s not yet empathy, but it’s a step in its direction.

Indeed, so basic is the process of mental imitation that even in a macaque monkey, observing another’s action activates identical neural firings as does performing that action. This accidental discovery, made in the 1980s by a team of Italian researchers led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, has since formed the basis for much of the research into models of empathy and empathetic behavior, though the exact relationship remains unclear. It seems that much of empathetic feeling comes from our minds mirroring back the actions of the world via the so-called mirror neurons (in reality, just specialized motor neurons that fire in response to others’ actions). We don’t need to actually smile to model the smile in our minds–though we may do so anyway–and whether or not we physically perform an action, we are able to approximate its performance as if we had done so.

In a recent imaging study that attempted to untangle the mechanisms of imitation, individuals were shown images of different types of facial expressions (happy, sad, disgusted, surprised, angry, and afraid) while in a scanner. They either simply observed those expressions, or imitated them in addition to observing. The researchers found several interesting occurrences. First, the tasks engaged a largely overlapping neural network: even when individuals were just observing an emotion, the motor areas of the brain associated with performing the emotional action were activated, suggesting that internal imitation–a repetition of someone else’s action in your mind–was an essential component of experiencing empathy, even without physical mirroring. In order to emphasize with someone else, we must first mentally represent the actions that would be associated with the emotion that we see.

However, certain areas, namely the inferior frontal cortex (an area that codes action goals), superior temporal cortex (an area that codes early visual descriptions of actions and sends those descriptions to a specific subset of mirror neurons), and insula and amygdala (two areas heavily implicated in emotional processing), were in fact more active during the imitation trials than the observation trials. So, while we largely simulate similar reactions when we merely observe, actively imitating others’ emotional states and engaging with them more completely may help explain that causal step from simple cognitive understanding (I know he smiled and I know what smiling feels like) to emotional understanding and engagement (I begin to sense why he’s smiling and I’m engaging myself with that emotion).

In fact, we are remarkably good at inferring an action’s goals as opposed to just observing the action itself, making the latter course of active engagement (where we imitate the smile and don’t just observe it) more attainable. We may even do so much more naturally. In one study, children were easily able to imitate the hand movements of an experimenter who was sitting across the table under normal circumstances, but began to make mistakes when two large red dots were placed on either side of the table. Now, whenever the experimenter moved a hand, it would cover a red dot, and the children began to imitate the goal of covering the dot as opposed to the motor action they had been instructed to follow; the former came much more instinctively. So, not only do we imitate quite naturally, but we begin to make inferences, assign states, make generalizations almost automatically as well. Even if we’re told not to think about goals and to focus on mechanics alone, the natural reaction is to do exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing anyway.

Developing empathy further

Perhaps, then, we can exploit such natural tendencies to develop our empathetic ability to the point where we are able to imagine ourselves letting a murderer go–simply because we understand where he’s coming from (of course, in real life this is a much more problematic proposition than in Holmes’s world, which tends to be far more clear-cut, but the principle of broader and deeper other-understanding itself is a worthy and valid one).

There is, for example, evidence that some people mimic behavior much more frequently than others; they then tend to identify more with the feelings of those others and, in turn, experience more compassion toward them. In other words, by being better imitators they become more empathetic individuals. We could use their example in trying to actively imitate others when we need to understand them and identify with them emotionally (perhaps part of what Holmes was accomplishing when, back in The Valley of Fear, he chose to return to the scene of the crime?).

There is also some indication that we tend to empathize more with close others than we do with more distant others, feeling their pain, to take one instance, more acutely. Another approach, then, may be to frame more people as closer to ourselves, members of our immediate in-group, and fewer as constituting out-group, further others.

And a final approach? It brings us right back to where we started: perspective-taking. Learning to simulate others’ thoughts and actions from their own viewpoint and not ours, just as Holmes did with The Valley of Fear and as he does again in “The Adventure of Abbey Grange.” In the latter instance, Holmes goes a step beyond what most people are capable of achieving, becoming the empathetic individual par excellence. In his understanding of Croker’s motives and actions, he exhibits empathy even without having ever seen the individual in question–a mirroring at a distance. He has mentally been able to put himself in someone else’s place, to embrace his perspective to such an extent that he can motivate a murder in the wake of its influence.

And that, in a sense, is the goal of empathy: to take “mirroring” to its extreme, and instead of relying on those automatic, easy moments of imitation when something is staring us in the face, learning to use our powers of mental simulation on a deeper, broader, and more active level, empathizing at a distance and acting in accordance with that more open and accepting mental state.

Photo credit: Holmes and Watson welcome Captain  Jack Croker in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” By Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908) (Strand Magazine) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Previously in this series:

Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of Knowledge Is Essential
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Judge a Man by His Face
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Importance of Perspective-Taking

In this case, I’m exploiting the close contextual nature of memory: our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving. In other words, we recall information better in the same environment as we stored it–or, in my case, the same environment that triggered the connection–to begin with. Context, in all its forms–visual, aural, olfactory, tactile–works as an essential memory cue.

But can the connection go the other way around? Can a specific environment help trigger thoughts and associations that weren’t already there to begin with? That, in essence, is the suggestion that Holmes makes to Watson in The Valley of Fear, when he proposes to return to the scene of the crime under investigation in the evening.

“An evening alone!” Watson exclaims. Surely, that would be more morbid than anything else? Nonsense, Holmes counters. It could actually be quite illustrative. “I propose to go up there presently. I have arranged it with the estimable Ames, who is by no means whole-hearted about Barker. I shall sit in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I’m a believer in the genius loci. You smile, Friend Watson. Well, we shall see.” And with that, Holmes is off to the study.

And does he find inspiration? Indeed he does. And the next morning, he is ready with his solution to the mystery.

How a change in location can signal a change in perspective

But did Holmes really think that he could recreate events by being in the room where they took place, without the prior knowledge necessary to trigger such contextual memories? Hardly. Instead, he was doing something which is absolutely essential in the proper exercise of deduction and thought: taking the perspective of those involved in the crime instead of proceeding purely from his own vantage point. And in that sense, location is indeed a powerful ally.

Perspective-taking is an essential part of interacting with the world: we need to be able to see things from others’ perspectives in order to understand them and interact with them. Indeed, the ability to take another’s point of view is a crucial early developmental step in the formation of Theory of Mind, one of the areas where individuals who suffer from autism are most lacking. But perspective-taking goes beyond the fundamental ability to realize that others don’t always see the same thing we ourselves see–even though unfortunately, for many people, it stops at precisely that point. We are not often trained to look at the world from another’s point of view in a more basic, broad fashion that transcends simple interaction. How might someone else interpret a situation differently from us? How might he act given a specific set of circumstances? What might he think given certain inputs? These are not questions we often find ourselves asking.

Indeed, so poorly trained are we at actually taking someone else’s point of view that when we are explicitly requested to do so, we still proceed from an egocentric place. In one series of studies, researchers found that people adopt the perspective of others by simply adjusting from their own. It’s a question of degree rather than type: we tend to begin with our own view as an anchoring point, and then adjust slightly in one direction, instead of altering the view altogether. Moreover, once we reach a satisfactory-sounding estimate, we stop thinking and consider the problem resolved. We’ve successfully captured the required point of view. That tendency is known as satisficing: a response bias that errs on the egocentric side of plausible answers to a given question. It’s especially strong when a plausible answer is presented early on in the search process–we then tend to consider our task complete, even if it’s far from being so.

And, the busier we are and the more pressured, the less accurate–and what is a police investigation but a time-sensitive pressure-cooker, with the weight of expected quick results on the shoulders of the investigators and a variety of plausible-sounding options that are all too tempting to grasp at awaiting analysis? And that, in essence, is what Holmes’s genius loci technique is aimed at avoiding. Holmes realizes both the necessity of getting into the mindset of the actors involved in the drama and the immediate difficulty of doing so, with all of the elements that could at any point go wrong. And what better way to push all distracting information to the side and focus on the most basic particulars, in a way that is most likely to recall that of the original actors, then to request a solitary evening in the room of the crime? Of course, Holmes still needs all of his observational and imaginative skills once he is there – but he now has access to the tableau and elements that presented themselves to whoever was present at the original scene of the crime. And from there, he can proceed on a much more sure footing.

Indeed, it is in that room that he first notices a single dumbbell, surmising at once that the missing member of the pair must have somehow been involved in the unfolding events, and from that room that he deduces the most likely location of the dumbbell’s pair: out the only window from which it could reasonably have been dropped. And when he emerges from the study, he has changed his mind from his original conjectures as to the proper course of events: while there, he was better able to get into the mindset of the actors in question, and in so doing, clarify the elements that had previously been hazy.

And in that sense, Sherlock Holmes actually does invoke the same contextual memory principle as I explored earlier in the piece, except instead of using context to cue memory, he uses it to cue perspective-taking and imagination. Given this specific room, at this specific time of day, what would someone who was committing or had just committed the crime in question be most likely to do or think?

Perspective-taking is a tremendously difficult endeavor. It is far simpler to use yourself as the prototypical actor, often without realizing you’re doing so, instead of separating yourself entirely from the exercise. But it is nevertheless an essential skill. And so, we must use every possible tool at our disposal to improve our ability to see the world from a vantage point that isn’t our own; and as Holmes demonstrates, one such tool is as simple as a change of location–and if that location is the same as that of your target perspective, so much the better.

Photo credit: Groombridge Place in Tunbridge Wells in the county of Kent, the original setting for The Valley of Fear. Copyright Francois Thomas and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.

In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Dr. Watson demonstrates an approach that we are all too likely to follow naturally: judging too quickly from our initial impressions and failing to correct for the specific circumstances involved. After Holmes enumerates the difficulties of the case and stresses the importance of moving quickly, Watson remarks, “Surely the man’s appearance would go far with any jury?” Not so fast, says Holmes. “That is a dangerous argument, my dear Watson. You remember that terrible murderer, Bert Stevens, who wanted us to get him off in ’87? Was there ever a more mild-mannered, Sunday school young man?” Watson has to agree that it is, in fact, so. Many times, people are not what they may initially be judged to be.

When person perception breaks down

The process of person perception is a deceptively straightforward one. First, we categorize. What is the individual doing? How is he acting? How does he appear? Then, we characterize. Ok, now that I know what he’s doing or how he seems, what does that imply? Are there some underlying traits or characteristics that are likely to have given rise to my initial impression or observation? Finally, we correct: is there something that may have caused the action other than my initial assessment (in the characterization phase)? Do I need to adjust my initial impressions in either direction, augmenting some elements or discounting others?

So far, so good. Except, there’s one major problem: while the first two parts of the process are nearly automatic, the last is far less so–and often never happens at all.

According to psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we can be passive or active perceivers. As passive perceivers, we merely observe, but as active perceivers–the state we are in in most social situations–we are always multitasking, trying to navigate the complexities of social interaction at the same time as we make attributional judgments. In a series of classic studies, Gilbert set out to demonstrate that active perceivers categorize and characterize on a near subconscious level, automatically and without much thought, but then fail to implement the final step of correction–even when they have all of the information to do so–and so end up with an impression of someone that did not take into account all of the variables of the interaction. Like Watson, they remember only that a jury would like a man’s appearance; unlike Holmes, they fail to take into account those factors that might make that appearance a deceptive one – or those circumstances under which a jury would dismiss any appearance, no matter how trustworthy, as false.

In the first study, Gilbert and colleagues tested whether individuals who were cognitively “busy,” or multitasking in the way that we often do when we juggle numerous elements of a situation, would be able to correct initial impressions by making the necessary adjustment. A group of participants was asked to watch a series of seven video clips, where a woman was having a conversation with a stranger. The clips did not have sound, ostensibly to protect the privacy of those speaking, but did include subtitles at the bottom of each clip that told participants the topic of conversation. In five of the seven videos, the woman behaved in an anxious fashion, while in the other two, she remained calm.

While everyone watched the exact same videos, two elements differed: the subtitles and the task that the participants were expected to perform. In one condition, the five anxious clips were paired with anxiety-provoking topics, such as sex life, while in the other, they were paired with neutral topics like world travel. And within each of these conditions, half of the participants were told that they would be rating the woman in the video on some personality dimensions, while the other half was expected to both rate personality and be able to recall the seven topics of conversation in order.

What the researchers found came as no shock to them, but did shake up the way that person perception had always been seen. While those individuals who had only to focus on the woman adjusted for the situation–rating her as dispositionally more anxious in the neutral topic condition and as less anxious in the anxiety-inducing topic condition–those who had to recall the conversation topics completely failed to take those topics into account in their judgment of the woman’s anxiety. They had all of the information they needed to make the judgment–but they never thought to use it. So, even though they knew that the situation would make anyone anxious in theory, in practice they simply decided that the woman was a generally anxious person. What’s more, they predicted that she would continue to be anxious in future scenarios, regardless of how anxiety-provoking those scenarios were. And the better they recalled the topics of conversation, the more extremely their predictions were off. In other words, the busier their brains were, the less they adjusted after forming an initial impression.

In the second study, Gilbert addressed two remaining concerns: would the effect hold for observing verbal behavior, which is less automatic than physical, and would it hold in a more real-world applicable scenario, such as arises when we’re talking with someone and getting ready to say something ourselves in response? Here, participants listened to a man give a speech that he had been randomly assigned to write. The speech was either pro- or anti-abortion. The task: to guess at the real views of the person reading the speech, even though they may be opposed to the words themselves.  Half of the participants could just listen; the other half was told that they themselves would be asked to write and read a speech later in the study session.

What happened was analogous to the prior results: those individuals who knew they would give a speech later on were more likely to attribute the views of the speech at hand to the participant himself, believing that what he said corresponded to his actual thoughts despite knowing that the assignment had been random. They knew, and at the same time, they didn’t know. They understood in theory, but at the same time, they did not make the translation from theory to practice. It was too much cognitive work. And they had enough to think about as it was.

What this implies for our daily interactions

The news here is both good and bad. First, the obviously bad: in most situations, under most circumstances, we are active observers, and as such, more likely than not to make the error of unconsciously, automatically categorizing and characterizing, and then failing to correct that initial impression. And so, we go by appearances; we forget to be subtle; we forget how a person can easily be influenced at any given point by myriad forces, internal and external. Incidentally, this works whether or not you tend, as most westerners do, to infer stable traits over passing states, or, as many eastern cultures do, to infer states over traits: whatever direction you err in, you will fail to adjust.

But there’s good news. Sometimes, it’s good to be cognitively busy and not have time to make adjustments. It’s important to remember that there is a hierarchy of automaticity. We observe actions first and words second, and only then do we adjust. And if we are hyper-busy? We may only do the first, which is a major pitfall unless that first is the only reliable piece of data. Take the example of a liar: often, the words and the actions don’t correspond. If you’re too busy to focus on the words but do code the actions as somehow duplicitous, you will end up with a more accurate picture than the more attentive observer. And more broadly, the automaticity of the process is often a good thing. Many times, the person who is acting in an anxious fashion really is anxious and the man who looks reliable to a jury is in fact so. Having these cognitive shortcuts allows us to take information in more quickly and efficiently. It allows us to continue to function instead of getting stuck.

But what about the errors? Here is where a Sherlock Holmes comes in. For him, each of the three parts of person perception has been automatic. He corrects as quickly as he categorizes and characterizes. And that does not have to be a literary ideal. Studies have shown that it is in fact possible to train yourself to correct more naturally, to be less error-prone as a matter of course. It takes practice, vigilance, and a knowledge of the types of errors you yourself tend to make. But all the same, it’s possible. There’s reason to hope.

So the next time you jump to a conclusion about a person, or say with certainty that they are so-and-so or such-and-such, think: why am I saying it? Is there something I’ve forgotten? Something I haven’t applied? Something I may not even have noticed? Then, you may still want to say the exact same thing, but at least you will have stopped for a moment to give it some thought. And maybe, you will have decided to hedge your bets a bit instead of barreling on with full confidence in your own perception.

Photo credit: Holmes and Watson see their clinet for the first time, in “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.” By Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908) (Strand Magazine) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Previously in this series:

Don’t Just See, Observe: What Sherlock Holmes Can Teach Us About Mindful Decisions
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Paying Attention to What Isn’t There
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Cultivate What You Know to Optimize How You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Imagination
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Confidence Is good; Overconfidence, Not So Much
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Situation Is in the Mindset of the Observer
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Public Opinion
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Tangle Two Lines of Thought
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Breadth of Knowledge Is Essential
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Don’t Decide Before You Decide
Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them