by Bruce Hood
These findings indicate that although the Big-Five factors of personality might be reliable within an individual in one role, it can completely change in another, just as the looking glass self predicts. In other words, people are not necessarily consistent in all aspects of their lives. This is why you can live with someone who is fastidious at work when it comes to detail but hopelessly disorganized when it comes to the domestic situation. This influence of context on the self has been shown over and over again. In one classic study, Princeton theology students were asked to present a sermon on the ‘Good Samaritan’ in a building across campus.25 If they were told that they were running late, only one in ten stopped to help a sickly man in a doorway on their way to the meeting compared to six out of ten who were not in a hurry. What were they thinking? Clearly nothing about the message of the sermon. How do they deal with such inconsistencies?
The answer is that we easily use our cognitive dissonance to reframe the events to justify our actions. Alicia Esteve Head may not have been a true victim of 9/11 but what Tania initially did was good for the survivors: Alicia could not have achieved this without becoming Tania. The theology students were aware of the poorly man but it was more important for their calling to deliver a sermon that would have greater impact on more people. It’s all too easy to reframe a story to protect the self-narrative from disentangling when presented with inconsistency.
Why do we create these distortions? Isn’t it better to be honest with oneself, otherwise, we will only end up fooling our selves? For one thing, positive illusions (that we are better than most others) may actually be beneficial to our mental well-being.26 These positive illusions ensure that our self esteem is protected by downgrading our failings (‘Everybody cheats on their tax returns’) to overegging our positive attributes as being special (‘Unlike most people, I have a really creative mind’). Armed with these positive illusions, we feel that we have more control over situations when in fact we have little or none. Remember how the illusion of control inoculates us from the stress of uncertainty?27 Positive illusions mean that we tend to see positive outcomes as a direct consequence of our actions whereas negative outcomes as someone else’s fault.28 This makes us unrealistically optimistic given the trials and tribulations that life can throw at us, positive illusions make us more resilient and willing to carry on.
Maybe this resilience gave us a selective advantage as we evolved. Somewhere back in the mists of time, this way of thinking may have been the difference between the hunter on the Serengeti who was willing to keep trying that bit harder and the hunter who gave up the chase too early and failed to make it back to camp to mate. It is speculation, of course, but believing you will succeed means that sometimes you will, whereas believing that you will fail means that you inevitably do.
Listen With Mother
When we describe our self to others we refer to our past experiences by way of an explanation of who we are and how we have arrived at this point in our life. This seems such an objective exercise that we never really question the truthfulness of our storytelling. However, culture plays an influential role in how we interpret the world around us. It turns out the individualism that is so characteristic of Western thinking and the collectivism of the East shape our autobiographical memories as well.
Qi Wang, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, has shown that childhood memories differ between Eastern and Western cultures with a greater focus on the individual in the West when it comes to recounting past experiences.29 The self-obsessed Western perspective (‘I remember the time I won the class test’) drives our thought processes to focus on an elaborate encoding of moment-to-moment personal events. This is why Western children recall more specific details compared to their Eastern counterparts.30 Those Eastern children who also had demonstrated greater detail for personal memories also scored higher on measures of individualism thus proving that it was not the culture or language that determined autobiographical memory but rather the way they viewed the world.31
The way children remember is partly aided by parents reminiscing with their children. As we learned earlier, we know that if parents talk over events with their young children then the amnesia barrier that is typically reported in two to three year-olds can be pushed back much earlier. This indicates that the framework of interpretation provided by the adults helps the child to make sense of their experiences and form better memories.32 However, studies have also shown that parents from the East and the West differ in the way they reminisce, with adults and show the typical individualistic or collective frameworks when talking to their children about their memories.33
What’s more surprising is that the full content of memories is not always lost either. If you prime individuals from either the East or the West to think more individualistically or collectively, then they recall more personal or group-oriented memories accordingly. This means that the memories are still available: it is just that they are not usually retrieved. The context in which we find our selves even defines how we retrieve memories to describe our inner self – memories that we know are selectively processed. As Sir Frederick Bartlett said, ‘Social organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the manner and the matter of recall.’34 Even the memories we recall to define our self-story are defined by the groups to which we belong.
A Flight From Reality
For some individuals, their self-story is unacceptable – it’s too much to cope with so they seek to create a new self or at least lose the one they had. Take the case of Gene Saunders who had been experiencing considerable difficulties in his home life and had a huge argument with his eighteen-year-old son who called him a failure. Gene simply packed his bags and ended up 200 miles away in another town where he became ‘Burt’ – a short-order cook who had no memory of his past existence. This kind of memory loss is known as a dissociative ‘fugue’ state, from the Latin for ‘flight’.
‘Fugue states’ typically emerge in early adulthood and not very often after fifty years of age. They usually occur rapidly but also end abruptly and are thought to be a reaction to stress where the individual ceases to acknowledge who he or she is.
For example, Jeffrey Alan Ingram turned up at a television news conference in Denver in 2006 looking for his identity. All he knew was, that his name was ‘Al’. He asked the viewing audience, ‘If anybody recognizes me, knows who I am, please let somebody know.’ It turns out that he had been on his way to visit a friend dying of cancer but on arrival in Denver had gone into a fugue state. Eventually, his fiancée’s brother, who had watched the news, recognized Jeffrey who lived over a thousand miles away in Olympia, Washington. His own mother explained that this was not the first time Jeffrey had entered a fugue state, as a similar disappearance occurred in 1995 on trip to the grocery. He turned up nine months later with no knowledge of who he was.
Fugue states are just one of a number of conditions known as dissociative identity disorders (DIDs), formerly called multiple personalities, in which alternative selves or ‘alter egos’ are present. The first popular fictionalized account of DID was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson but the idea that an individual can split into different personalities is a recurrent theme in modern culture. A notable recent example is Ed Norton’s alter ego, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999). Just like Jekyll and Hyde, we watch as the anarchic character of Tyler Durden increasingly drags Norton’s upstanding character into criminality only to discover at the end of the movie that Durden is in fact his own alter ego.
The notion that we all have a good and bad side has become accepted wisdom although few of us would regard the different characterizations as different individuals. And yet this is exactly the claim with DID to the extent that it has been used in criminal cases as a defence plea. The first such case was in 1978, when twenty-three-year-old Billy Milligan was arrested following an anonymous tip-off fo
r the rape of four college women on Ohio State campus the previous year. At first he seemed like the typical drifter: troubled childhood, abused by his stepfather, constantly in trouble. That changed after a psychological examination indicated he had at least ten different personalities, two of which were women. In fact, it was one of the women, Adelena, a nineteen-year-old lesbian, who claimed responsibility for the rapes. Another of Milligan’s personalities was the fearful and abused child, David, nine, who it was claimed made the telephone call turning in Billy. According to Time, investigators found the police telephone number on a pad next to Milligan’s phone.35 Milligan ended up being sentenced to ten years in secure psychiatric hospitals and was released in 1988.
Another famous case in which DID was used as defence was that of the Hillside Strangler, Ken Bianchi, who claimed that an alter ego, Steven Walker, had been responsible. However, this defence fell apart when a dubious psychiatrist suggested that most cases of DID had at least two alter egos. In the following hypnosis session, Bianchi conveniently manifested another alter ego, Billy. When police investigated further, they found out that Steven Walker had been a real psychology student whose identity Bianchi had tried to steal in order to commit fraud. Bianchi is currently serving a life sentence.
Although DIDs are recognized in the major psychiatric manuals, they are still considered highly controversial. The first cases, reported in the nineteenth century, are linked to the psychoanalytic movement. Not much was heard of DID again until 1957 with the release of a popular movie, The Three Faces of Eve, about a woman with DID, followed by a similar movie, Sybil, in 1976. Prior to the 1970s there had been very few cases of DID but suddenly the incidence exploded, which led many to question whether it was a real medical disorder or a fashionable fad. Also DID was primarily a North American problem with few cases reported in other countries. Those that were reported in North America also tended to come from the same specialists, which cast doubt on the source of the disorder.
Just like hypnosis and the actions of student prison guards, DID has been dismissed as an extremely elaborated example of role-playing in which a belief about dissociated states is promoted by society and supported by a few influential experts, namely the psychiatrists who are experts in the field. That is not to say that individuals with DID are deliberately faking their symptoms. Support for this comes from studies that reveal that different brain states can be manifest when the individual is in one of their alternative personalities. For example, brain-imaging studies have shown that patients with DID can manifest different patterns of brain activity when in different characters.36 In one patient the memory region seemed to shut down during the transition between one personality to another as if a different set of memories was being retrieved.
The evidence from brain-imaging studies is less convincing if one considers that we can alter our brain activity by simply thinking about different things. If I think about a time when I was upset or angry, my brain activity will change. However, one dramatic case in which the brain science backs up the claim of true separated selves comes from a recent German DID patient who after fifteen years of being diagnosed as blind gradually regained sight after undergoing psychotherapy.37 At first, only a few of the personalities regained vision, whereas others remained blind. Was the patient faking? Not according to the electrical measurements recorded from her visual cortex – one of the early sensory processing areas in the brain. When her personality was sighted, electrical activity was normal over this region but absent when the patient was experiencing a blind personality. Somehow, the parts of her brain that were generating the multiple personalities were also switching on and off the activity of the visual part of the brain. This finding is beyond belief – literally. To believe that you are blind is one thing, but to switch off parts of the lower level functioning sensory processing areas of your own brain is astounding. Somehow, the network of connections that operates further upstream in the brain to deal with complex concepts, such as the self and personality, can control earlier basic processing input relay stations downstream in the brain.
How the Mighty Have Fallen
If we are not brain-damaged or suffering from DID, to what extent can we experience a different self? In modern Westernized cultures, some people appear to lead complicated, multifaceted lives juggling private and public personas, whereas others lead a more simple existence such as subsistence farming in rural villages. The selves we present to the world must be a reflection of the different circles we inhabit. Sometimes those worlds can clash, which occurs when we discover a different side to individuals whom we thought we knew so well – the unfaithful spouse, the paedophile priest, the sadistic nurse or the corrupt politician. These are the contradictions in the self that we see so often in others. Public figures seem to constantly fall from grace by engaging in activities that seem so out of character. Is there anything that the science of the self illusion can do to cast some light on these transgressions?
The first question to ask is why do people put their public self image unnecessarily at risk? For example, why do upstanding members of society with supposedly impeccable moral standards often seem to get caught with their pants down? Why did Sir Allan Green, the former Director of Public Prosecutions in the United Kingdom, go cruising around London’s King’s Cross station – at the time, a notorious hangout for prostitutes – where he must have known there was a good chance he could be arrested. Likewise, few could understand why Hollywood heartthrob Hugh Grant would pay Divine Brown for sex in a car on Sunset Boulevard, a notorious nightspot where the vice squad regularly operated. He must have known how risky were his actions. But maybe that is the whole point. There might be something thrilling and exciting about taking risks and it is only a risk when you have something to lose. When called to account, many are at a loss to explain their actions and say they were not their usual self.
Another fascinating facet of this type of behaviour is sexual role-playing where people act out a very different sort of self from that they exhibit in their daily lives. For the most part, members of repressed societies have to maintain dignity and decorum, no more so than our leaders. For example, they have to be dominant and yet how often do we hear about captains of industry or politicians engaging in submissive sexual fantasies where they pay to be dominated and subjected to humiliation? In 2010, three Long Island lawyers teamed up with a New York dominatrix to run a $50 million mortgage scam. Their victims were the many willing and wealthy clients who attended the dominatrix’s private dungeon in Manhattan. Paying for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) appears to be fairly common in the corridors of power. But why?
For obvious reasons, getting people to talk about their sexual behaviour is very difficult. Luckily there are some who ask the sort of questions about sexual behaviours that the rest of us would shy away from. Katherine Morris, a psychologist from the United States, interviewed 460 heterosexual men who regularly engaged in BDSM. The majority of the men she interviewed were high-level professionals, including a fair number of corporate executives, including several chief executives of corporations. Her interviewees also included psychiatrists, attorneys, engineers, scientists, and other professionals who spend a great deal of time in high-pressure intellectual pursuits on a daily basis.38
Morris detected a pattern where their emotions during these private BDSM sessions were ones that they did not feel they could express as part of their daily public lives. It was as if something was missing in their lives that needed addressing for total satisfaction. These men felt forced to reintegrate the missing components in privacy as part of a sexual ritual. Morris described how many of the high-level corporate executives felt that they were frauds and that in her view, ‘humans seek balance’ between their public and private lives.
It is not only due to inadequate fulfilment that people seek out such role-playing. BDSM also allows the individual to lose their identity and adopt a role that they find sexually gratifying by being someone else.39 For the mos
t part, our sexual activities are private compared to our public behaviour. It is almost as if we are allowed to become a different person in the bedroom. The cliché is the shy and demure wallflower in public who transforms into a sexual demon behind closed doors. It’s as if the persona we portray in public is just a front for the real person in private. Certainly, we are all expected to control our sexual behaviours in public – something that we are taught from a very early age. Those who cannot are regarded as perverts or mentally ill. In some societies there are very strict codes of conduct, very often based on religion, but all societies have some rules about what sexual behaviours are permitted in public. Members of these societies must conform to these rules but, ultimately, one consequence is to suppress thoughts and behaviours that do not go away but may eventually need to be vented, like the Tourette’s patients who lack the ability to suppress screaming profanities. The more they try to stop themselves, the stronger the compulsion becomes. This is the ego-depletion effect again. The illusion is that we have the self-control to decide whether we give in to our urges or not. The problem is that abstinence may lead to pent-up frustration to do exactly the things we are trying to avoid. That’s when the mighty fall down in such a spectacular way.