by Sam Sommers
How, exactly, do we get acquainted with this core self? A trip to the local bookstore suggests that the answer has something to do with chicken soup. That, plus we’re supposed to ask ourselves questions like these suggested by Dr. Phil:3 “What are the 10 most defining moments of your life?” “What are the 7 most critical choices you have made to put you on your current path?” “Who are the 5 most pivotal people in your world and how have they shaped you?”
Dr. Phil’s questions share a common link. And I don’t just mean the use of arbitrary digits that I can only assume were once his fortune cookie lucky numbers. Their more important shared characteristic is the assumption that introspection produces reliable self-insight. These questions imply that looking inward provides some sort of direct channel to your internal preferences, deepest thoughts, and true motivations.
It’s a nice idea, that you have an authentic self lurking within, waiting to be unveiled. But your answers to Dr. Phil’s questions—like your responses to the Twenty Statements Test—change across time and location. So which are the authentic ones?
In trying to name my 5 most pivotal people, my biggest challenge is whom to rank higher: Jennifer Aniston or Eva Longoria. Yet, somehow, when my wife’s in the room, they both drop off the list entirely. But even when you strive for honesty, looking inward only gets you so far in the effort to learn about the self. While Dr. Phil’s assumption seems reasonable enough—the idea that we can accurately articulate the influences on our own behavior or how happy we are with various aspects of our life—it just isn’t how self-perception really works. Introspection turns out to be far more difficult and limited than we give it credit for.
FOR STARTERS, take the presumption that we can reliably explain why we make the decisions we do, one that underlies Dr. Phil’s questions about “choices that put you on your current path” or “how others have shaped you.” This is the same assumption that drives political pollsters trying to forecast voting behavior or marketing departments conducting focus groups. However, research demonstrates that we’re not nearly as good at explaining the factors that shape our preferences and actions as we think we are.
Consider a series of experiments conducted at the University of Michigan by Dick Nisbett and Tim Wilson.4 In one, they investigated consumer behavior, with hundreds of male and female respondents asked to evaluate various household items. One set of participants examined four pairs of nylon stockings in an effort to determine which was the best product. In addition to visual inspection, they were allowed to handle each sample to assess its feel, durability, disguise potential for convenience-store robbery, and whatever other characteristics one looks for in evaluating this product. Their ultimate preferences increased in a clear left-to-right progression: the far right pair of stockings was, on average, rated the highest, followed by the pair to its immediate left, and so on. In fact, the right-most stockings were selected almost four times as often as those on the far left of the nylon stocking array.
Fascinating data for those hosiery aficionados out there, sure, but what do the rest of us learn from the study? First, on a personal note, I learned that when using your visible-from-the-hallway work computer, it’s probably best to close your office door before Googling “nylon stockings.”
Second, this study captures the limitations of introspection in action. Because it just so happens that all four pairs of stockings used in the array were identical. Same brand, same style, same color. One would have predicted, therefore, that ratings for pairs A, B, C, and D would have been comparable. That they weren’t—that they varied systematically as a function of position in the array—suggests that consumers often hold off on selecting a product until they’ve been able to “shop around” and view multiple possibilities (since respondents typically inspected the stockings in left-to-right fashion).
But the researchers never would have realized this had they relied on participants’ introspective explanations. When asked to account for their choice, not a single person cited stocking order. Instead, they talked about knit and sheen and weave and other product characteristics that transcend the imagination of a mere nylon neophyte such as myself. These individuals had no idea what had actually shaped their behavior, but they had little trouble generating explanations. And confident ones at that. When the researchers asked respondents—point-blank—about how the order of the stocking array might have impacted their evaluation, “virtually all subjects denied it, usually with a worried glance at the interviewer suggesting that they felt either that they had misunderstood the question or were dealing with a madman.”5
Just as we sometimes fail to note the true influences on our behavior, in other instances we show the opposite tendency: thinking that factors have influenced us when they actually haven’t. In another study, Nisbett and Wilson asked a different set of participants to watch a documentary about urban poverty. One group viewed the film under normal conditions. Another watched the movie while suffering through construction-related noise from a power saw in the hallway outside.
When asked how they liked the film, no meaningful differences emerged between the responses of the two groups. If anything, the film ratings of those viewers subjected to the construction noises were trivially more positive. But when the person supervising the screening apologized to audience members in the loud room and asked whether their ratings of the film had been adversely affected by all the noise, more than half—55 percent—said yes. Once again, these people were confidently answering questions regarding what shaped their judgments, but they were flat-out wrong.
Voters claim to ignore negative political ads, jurors tell you they’re not swayed by inadmissible evidence, and my younger daughter simply can’t eat another bite of dinner because there’s no room left in her tummy. But the data are in: negative campaigning works,6 inadmissible evidence isn’t disregarded,7 and, miraculously, just minutes later, there’s enough space in that belly for a whole ice cream cone plus some of my dessert.
So think twice the next time you’re tempted to make major changes to your physical appearance, wardrobe, or first-date strategy based on some magazine’s “What Men/Women Really Want” poll—the respondents may be answering confidently but still misleadingly. It’s easy to think of potential reasons for our decisions or influences on our preferences. Being accurate about it all is the hard part.
THESE CONCLUSIONS aren’t limited to trivialities like stocking preferences and film ratings. Consider a recent study in the Journal of Arthroplasty , in which researchers interviewed 101 adults preparing for hip replacement.8 Patients were given a checklist of twenty-five possible reasons why they might be planning to undergo the procedure; one year later, they were given the same checklist and asked to offer retrospective explanations for why they had opted for surgery. For the majority of patients, these pre- and post-surgery responses differed. That is, the explanations they gave before the procedure were markedly different from those they gave afterward, particularly among patients who felt that the surgery didn’t live up to their expectations.
For example, before the procedure, 36 percent of patients had said that difficulty putting on their shoes (and taking them off) was an important basis for having the surgery. One year later, only half of this 36 percent identified such problems as one of their original concerns. Before the surgery, 29 percent said that difficulty navigating stairs was a major factor; a year later, fewer than one-third of this 29 percent cited issues with stairs as having been an important consideration in their decision.
These patients aren’t alone—we can all think of examples when our own explanations for a decision changed over time. How did you decide on your profession? Why did you choose your college major? What made you realize you wanted to marry this person? These are tough questions, and depending on what stage of life you’re in, your mood, and who asks you, introspection produces different insights. When your answers to personal questions evolve in this manner—whether over time, context, or company—it becomes diffi
cult to put much stock in the ability of introspection to provide direct access to authentic attitudes and an indisputably true self.
Over the years I’ve given many different answers to the question of how I chose a college. At the time, I would have said that coming from a small high school, I wanted a small college with a similar feel. After graduating and beginning work toward my Ph.D. elsewhere, I would have emphasized the research opportunities available at a liberal arts college. Today I look back at my seventeen-year-old self with the jaded perspective of presumed wisdom and insight. I’d tell you that my parents took me on a seven-day, eight-school college visit marathon, in which one campus walking tour started to look a lot like another campus walking tour, until I became no different than the average nylon stocking shopper and decided that the last school I visited was the best one.
You might propose that introspection should be more reliable when it comes to other forms of self-insight beyond explaining past decisions. Even if it is more difficult than expected to articulate why we’ve made the choices we have, surely we’re able to give an accurate reading of highly personal ideas such as our likes and dislikes, or what we need to be happy in life. Right?
But behavioral researchers have consistently found that even the assessment of our own life satisfaction is, in a word, malleable.9 How happy are you with your life? It depends. More so right after your favorite sports team has won or when you’re seated in a pleasantly decorated, comfortable room. You’re more satisfied with the entirety of your life when it’s sunny outside. Hell, all it takes to boost overall life satisfaction is the pleasant surprise of finding a dime before you’re interviewed.
As Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert explains throughout Stumbling on Happiness, we’re not so good at anticipating what will make us happy in the future.10 It’s no wonder—we have trouble making up our minds about how happy we are in the here and now!
So it goes for a wide range of personal beliefs. Including politics: Americans’ evaluations of Republicans become markedly more positive when they’re first asked about a particularly popular member of the party (think mid-1990s Colin Powell).11 Perceptions of physical attractiveness, too: Men asked to rate photos of unfamiliar women see the strangers as less attractive after watching the provocatively clad detectives on display in Charlie’s Angels. 12 Which are the “true” perceptions about Republicans? Or the “authentic” assessments of attraction? There’s no way to know.
Sure, there’s something to be learned when we look inward to explore our attitudes, preferences, and decisions. But much of the information that introspection generates is fleeting, on-the-fly construction at a particular point in time: how we think we feel; why we guess we’ve made the choices we have. By looking inward, we don’t gain access to a stable set of impressions regarding an unwavering, authentic self. We produce a temporary status report.
In other words, the gurus of self-help got it wrong. Our sense of who we are is no less context-dependent than the behaviors of everyone else around us. Book sales, Nielsen ratings, and Oprah appearances notwithstanding, introspection just isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
COMPARED TO WHAT?
If introspection isn’t enough, how else do we come to learn about ourselves? For that matter, how can we account for the surprising context dependence of our sense of self? To answer these questions, I refer you to one of the great unheralded commentators on the mysteries of human nature. I speak, of course, of none other than my wife’s late grandfather, Grandpa Syd.
Grandpa had no formal training in disciplines such as psychology or sociology. He was not well versed in the intricacies of the scientific method. Grandpa Syd was a pants salesman from Cleveland, not a behavioral researcher from the Ivy League. Yet he was, in his own inimitable way, a very keen observer of human behavior.
He was also hilarious. Throughout years of interactions, my favorite Grandpa Syd line was, by far, one that he enjoyed unveiling at dinner—and the more formal the occasion, the better. He’d pick up an item under the guise of passing it down the table, then announce in a loud, clear voice, “Sam, you want this butter up your end?”
Unfortunately, this joke has no relevance whatsoever to understanding self-perception.
But my second-favorite Grandpa Syd line is germane to the present analysis. Whenever we’d call to talk to him, inevitably the first question we’d ask was, “How are you doing?” Occasionally, his response would be “H and D,” shorthand, naturally, for “Hot and Dull,” his description of retirement life in Sun City, Arizona. But more frequently, it was simply, “Compared to what?” As in:
Q: “Grandpa, how are you and Grandma doing?”
A: “Compared to what?”
Now, a few of you might quibble with my attribution of this quotation, asking, hey, isn’t that a Henny Youngman line? To which I’d reply, hey, isn’t everything? As far as I’m concerned, this was and always will be Grandpa Syd’s joke. And with these three simple yet astute words, my wife’s grandfather managed to capture an important essence of how we think about the self.
The Colin Powell and Charlie’s Angels examples on the previous pages illustrate that much of how we see the world relies on comparisons: the Republican brand looks better with Powell in the mix; women you’ve never seen before look less attractive compared to Farrah Faw-cett (or, for you cineasts out there, Cameron Diaz). As Grandpa Syd’s canned response implies, how we feel, what our preferences are, and, indeed, how we see ourselves also depend on the specific basis for comparison.
You compare your present self to your self of the past. You compare reality to the way you wish your life was. But not all of the comparisons guiding your self-perception are strictly internal—many are made with other people. In fact, quite often we have great difficulty answering questions about ourselves unless we’re able to draw upon comparisons with others.13
Think about the last time you were handed back a paper or exam in class, whether it was days or decades ago. If you’re like most of the students I teach (or, for that matter, like me when I was a student), your first reaction was to wonder what the average was, to ask your friend how she did, or to sneak a peek at the score of the guy down the row. Even absent a rigid grading curve, students need some context to figure out how best to translate the number they see into an assessment of personal competence. Outside the classroom we also rely on social comparisons like these to gauge our own abilities and situate our opinions, accomplishments, and personal characteristics.
Simply put, one critical source of information about ourselves is other people.
Our need for such social comparison is more pressing in some contexts than others. For instance, the presence of objective indicators can render such comparisons unnecessary. Wishing to know how much I weigh, how fast I swim, or how high I jump, all I need is a scale, a stopwatch, or, in my case, a very small ruler. But often, there are no objective criteria for the self-evaluations we care about most: Am I a good parent? How attractive am I? Has my life been a success?
Questions like these beg for the Grandpa Syd response—compared to what? To answer them, we rely on comparisons to similar others in our immediate environment. What this means is that our choice of company colors how we see the self. Who we’re with has a profound impact on who we believe ourselves to be.
As a middle school student in a tiny class of six at a Jewish day school, I fancied myself a basketball prodigy. A regular LeChaim James, if you will. Upon moving to a secular high school with double-digit class sizes, I discovered that it was a tad more difficult defending a point guard who didn’t hold his yarmulke on with his left hand while dribbling with his right. One crossover move later, I had readjusted downward my odds of a future athletic scholarship. And so it goes for even more important judgments about the self, including those alluded to earlier: parenting prowess, physical attractiveness, personal success. There’s no self-evaluation too intimate to be guided by those around us.
BEAR IN MIND, I’m not
arguing simply that other people inform our sense of self. That would be an obvious, unremarkable conclusion. Most of us readily acknowledge that we’ve been shaped by a variety of role models—particularly parents. And even if we don’t, those parents would eagerly remind us at the next family get-together.
The more surprising conclusion, though, is that it’s not just our friends, teachers, and loved ones who mold our sense of self. So does the stranger on the bus, the woman pictured in the magazine, and that guy down the row in chemistry class. Without their knowing it, we often look to these people to evaluate our own abilities and attitudes. The company we keep shapes our identity, our self-esteem, and even our emotional state.
That’s right, even the way you read your own emotions can be dictated by the strangers in your midst. We learned this from an experiment by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer at Columbia University that bisected the fields of psychology and physiology. 14 In the study, 184 men were injected with a small amount of either adrenaline or saline solution. Even a small dose of adrenaline—or epinephrine—has clear physiological impact: increases in heart rate, respiration rate, and blood flow to the muscles. A similar amount of saline solution—or salt water—does not. So the study’s major comparison was between two groups of men, one feeling the arousing effects of adrenaline, and one experiencing no such arousal.