Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

  For Penzler, the story captures the genius of Elmore Leonard. Although he worked in a genre defined by its mechanistic plots, Leonard still found ways to inject mystery into his characters. Leonard filled his noir worlds with unpredictable people that he invented but refused to control. Sometimes this meant his hero died in the middle of the book, a victim of tragic circumstance. But these writerly headaches were worth it: Leonard’s rounded cast of loan sharks, bank robbers, cynical cops, and trigger-happy marshals is what helps set his fiction apart.

  And this returns us to the mental benefits of literature, which seem to depend on its rounded characters. These fictional beings don’t just change the way we read—they change the way we think and feel. In a recent paper, the scientists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano apply the flat-versus-round distinction of Forster to explain why the best literature boosts our care for others by reminding us of their inherent mystery.20 Flat characters, the scientists say, can be understood in terms of “category-based perception.” The character is a type, not an individual; there is no need to enter his mind because we already know what he’ll do next. These are the obvious kinds of people in a pulp fiction, or a summer action movie: we know what they’ll do before they do it. This helps explain why reading genre fiction (which is often less focused on the internal states of characters) doesn’t lead to improvements in theory-of-mind performance.

  Round characters, however, cannot be reduced to a category—they exceed every caricature. It doesn’t matter if it’s Hamlet or an Elmore Leonard detective: readers must pay attention to the character’s subtle emotional cues, inferring a theory of mind from the words on the page. Because these characters resist our mental shortcuts, we have to go through the long process of imagining their thoughts and feelings. It’s the opacity that gets us inside their head.

  The result is that stories with round characters allow us to practice the act of mind reading. Cecilia Heyes, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, compares mind reading to print reading, noting that both are part of our cultural inheritance and not hardwired into the infant cortex.21 Print reading takes years of “scaffolding and explicit instruction”—we have to be taught the alphabet and phonics. Mind reading almost certainly requires the same sort of training. As Heyes notes, human babies are no better at mentalizing than chimp babies. The difference is that we grow up in environments rich with stories that take us inside the minds of others. The rounded fictional character, in this sense, is an essential human technology, augmenting our natural abilities.

  But practice alone is not enough. According to Rorty, literature doesn’t just let us simulate the act of empathy—it also helps us overcome our natural weaknesses, many of which are rooted in the failure to accept the mystery of other people. Consider a common mistake known as the fundamental attribution error. The error itself is straightforward. When we assess the behavior of others, we tend to ascribe all their actions to their inner character. If he’s speeding, it’s because he’s a reckless driver. If she slips, it’s because she’s clumsy. If he’s slow to reply to that text, it’s because he’s a rude person. Rather than accept their inherent roundness, we treat them like flat characters, reducing them to a short list of predictable qualities. They’re easier to blame that way.

  However, when we assess our own behavior, we’re much more forgiving. It’s not that we wanted to do the wrong thing—we were just in a tight spot. If we’re speeding, it’s because we’re late for an important meeting. If we slip on a wet path, it’s because the rocks were slippery. If we’re slow to reply to a text, it’s because we had a busy day at work. We understand that much of our own behavior is driven by context, that we are moody creatures, with a mercurial edge.

  The psychologist Walter Mischel spent decades studying how circumstance shapes behavior. His breakthrough began with a failure. In the early 1960s, Mischel was hired to help the Peace Corps develop a personality assessment to screen prospective volunteers.22 (Many of the young Americans struggled with the rigors of living in developing countries.) Mischel based his assessment on the latest science, hiring experts to score the volunteers on various personality traits. He then followed up to see how these volunteers performed as teachers in Nigeria. To his surprise, the “costly personality inferences… did not even reach statistical significance.”23 People were not nearly as predictable as scientists had assumed. Our personalities remained a mystery.

  One of Mischel’s most influential studies, conducted with Yuichi Shoda, followed children at a summer camp in New Hampshire.24 At the time, it was widely assumed that aggression was a stable trait—if you were aggressive at home, you would also be aggressive at school, and so forth. But Mischel and Shoda found that how children behaved was highly context-dependent and very sensitive to the specifics of the situation. (To measure behavior, the scientists enlisted the help of seventy-seven camp counselors, who recorded the behavior of campers everywhere except the bathroom.) The same child might fight with other campers but obey the warnings of counselors. Another might react badly to criticism from adults but calmly handle provocations from peers. And it wasn’t just aggression: the same nuanced model also applied to traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, and whining.

  As Mischel notes, this theory of human personality contradicts thousands of years of scientific thinking. Ever since the ancient Greeks developed a theory of the four humors, we’ve described other people in terms of stable and static qualities. Human beings are supposed to be like flat characters, defined by their levels of yellow bile, extroversion, and agreeableness. (The adjectives change, but Myers-Briggs shares a conceptual foundation with the humorism of Hippocrates.) This is who they are; this is how they will act.

  However, the work of Mischel and others has shown that human beings are much more mysterious than that. As the psychologist Todd Rose writes, “If you want to understand a person, descriptions of their average tendencies or ‘essential nature’ are sure to lead you astray.… If you are conscientious and neurotic while driving today, it’s a pretty safe bet you will be conscientious and neurotic while driving tomorrow. At the same time, what makes you uniquely you is that you may not be conscientious and neurotic when you are playing Beatles cover songs with your band in the context of your local pub.”25

  Literature is one of the best antidotes to the fundamental attribution error. A good novel doesn’t describe its characters in terms of general traits—it reveals them as a function of their context, showing us who they are in different situations. In many respects, the narrative is a series of if-then patterns, full of surprising scenes and encounters. After all, if the characters were predictable—if they always acted the same way—then they’d quickly become tedious. Why keep reading about someone we already understand?

  And this returns us to Rorty’s sentimental education. His point is that the qualities that make literature interesting are also what make it edifying. By showing us round people acting in mysterious ways, it trains us to see them everywhere. We realize that human beings are complicated and that circumstance can bend us in surprising ways.

  Once we do that, Rorty says, we discover that we’re not so different after all. Instead of blaming people’s fixed character, we offer them the kind of forgiveness that we usually save for ourselves. “This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like,” Rorty writes. “That is why the novel, the movie and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicle of moral change and progress.”26 The ironic power of fiction is that it features pretend people who teach us how to deal with real ones.

  The Mystery of Talent

  The Philadelphia Eagles football team was established in 1933, a replacement for the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets, named for one of the city’s working-class neighborhoods. The team was led by Bert Bell, a former colle
ge quarterback and part-time football coach who had pitched in $1,250 for the team rights. Bell came from old money—his father had been the state attorney general, and the family had significant real estate holdings—but Burt had no interest in the family business. “All I ever wanted to be was a football man,” Bell said.27

  The Eagles got off to a rough start. Their first game was against the Giants at the Polo Grounds—they lost 56–0. In their next game, against the Portsmouth Spartans at home, they were routed 25–0. The team was so bad that, according to John Eisenberg, Bell had to offer a free car wash to anyone who bought an Eagles ticket.28 The stadium was still mostly empty.

  The 1934 season was no better, with the team losing five of their first six games. Bell was despondent, but he didn’t know how to fix the situation. He tried recruiting top prospects—he routinely outbid the other teams—but players didn’t want to sign with the lowly Eagles. “The league is no stronger than its weakest link, and I’ve been a weak link for so long that I should know,” Bell concluded. “Every year the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

  Bell’s solution to this problem would transform professional sports. In May 1935, Bell proposed the creation of a football draft. It was a simple idea, at least in theory. All the top college prospects would be placed in a pool. The worst team in the league, which in this case was the Eagles, would get to choose a player first, followed by the second-worst team, and so on. The goal was to create parity, or at least to shrink the gap between the dominant New York Giants and the dismal Eagles. (Think of it as a reverse meritocracy, with the worst getting rewarded.) Even the Giants’ owner, Tim Mara, grasped the need for Bell’s proposal. While Mara knew the draft would make it harder for his team to win, that “was a hazard we had to accept for the benefit of the league, of professional football, and of everyone in it,” Mara said. “People come to see competition.”29II

  Bell’s draft helped create the modern NFL, a sports league with annual revenues in excess of $15 billion.30 Although the 1936 draft was an informal affair—the team owners gathered in a hotel suite, choosing players based on a scattering of newspaper stories and hearsay—the draft would soon become one of the most important events on the football calendar. For losing teams, the stakes are massive: the difference between years of success and failure often comes down to a single draft pick. Choose the right player—say, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, or Lamar Jackson—and you’ve got a chance at the title. Choose the wrong player, and you’re likely to keep losing for several more years.III You’ve squandered the consolation prize.

  Given the impact of the draft, NFL teams have come to invest heavily in draft intelligence. They hire legions of scouts, who watch the college players in person, and employ data analysts to pore over the statistics. During the draft combine, the teams administer a battery of personality and intelligence tests, desperate to identify the factors that predict success in the pros.

  But here’s the shocking finding: these investments are mostly a waste of money. Although NFL teams have been drafting college players for more than eighty years, they still haven’t found a way to choose the best ones, at least not reliably. A recent analysis of the football draft by Cade Massey and Richard Thaler found that picking athletes is basically a crapshoot, no more scientific than betting on dice in Las Vegas.31 For instance, Massey and Thaler looked at the likelihood that a given player performs better in the NFL than the next player chosen in the draft at his position. This is the practical question that teams face in the draft, as they debate the advantages of trading up to acquire a specific athlete.

  Unfortunately, there is little to no evidence that teams know what they’re doing: only 52 percent of picks outperform those players chosen below them. “Across all rounds, all positions, all years, the chance that a player proves to be better than the next-best alternative is only slightly better than a coin flip,” write the economists. Or consider this statistic, which should strike fear into the heart of every NFL general manager: over their first five years in the league, draft picks from the first round have more seasons with zero starts (15.3 percent) than seasons that end with a selection to the Pro Bowl (12.8 percent).

  If teams admitted their ignorance, they could adjust their strategy accordingly. They could discount their scouting intelligence and remember that college performance is only weakly correlated with NFL output. Alas, teams routinely act as if they can identify the best players, which is what leads them to trade up for more valuable picks. The main culprit is what Massey and Thaler refer to as “overconfidence exacerbated by information.” Teams assume their judgments about prospective players are more accurate than they are, especially when they amass large amounts of data and analytics. What they fail to realize is that much of this information isn’t predictive, and that it’s almost certainly framed by the same biases and blind spots that limit our assessments of other people in everyday life. As Massey and Thaler write, “The problem is not that future performance is difficult to predict, but that decision makers do not appreciate how difficult it is.”

  There is something sobering about the limits of draft intelligence in professional sports. (Researchers have found that other professional sports leagues, such as the NBA and Major League Baseball, also struggle to identify the most talented young players.)32 These are athletes, after all, whose performance has been measured by a dizzying array of advanced statistics; they have been scouted for years and run through a gauntlet of scientific assessments. (As the economists write, “Football teams almost certainly are in a better position to predict performance than most employers choosing workers.”) However, even in this rarefied domain, the mystery of human beings still dominates.

  But there is hope. The secret is to remember our fundamental ignorance when it comes to other people. To borrow the literary framework of E. M. Forster, we should treat these college players like round characters in a good novel, always keeping in mind their ability to surprise and confound.

  Knowing what we don’t know appears to be one of the essential talents of the best football executives. Take Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots. If Belichick has a signature move in the NFL draft, it’s trading down, swapping a high pick for multiple, less valuable ones. If teams could reliably assess talent, this strategy would make little sense, since it would mean giving up on superstars. However, given the impossibility of predicting player performance—Tom Brady was selected with the 199th pick in the 2000 draft—gaining more picks is an astute move. Belichick realizes that the draft is mostly a random gamble; the only way to win is to place as many bets as possible. His crucial edge doesn’t come from solving the mystery of football players. It’s realizing that the mystery exists.

  The Mystery of Desire

  In 1912, Sigmund Freud wrote an obscure paper about sexual impotence. He wrote about impotence because it was an extremely common affliction: “apart from anxiety in all its many forms,” it was the condition that he was most frequently asked to treat.33 For these patients, the sex organs refused to perform under certain conditions, even though there was nothing wrong with their physical function. The failure was in the mind.

  Freud referred to this as “psychical impotence.” While entire sections of his paper now feel outdated and obsolete—Freud spends a lot of time worrying about the incestuous fixations of the unconscious—the medical issue he identified is still extremely prevalent.34 According to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, 52 percent of men between the ages of 40 and 70 suffer from episodes of impotence.35 Even young men are not immune: according to a study of more than 9,000 Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 25, 30 percent have experienced at least one episode of impotence.36

  What accounts for this epidemic of impotence? Freud’s greatest insight occurred as he considered less severe cases, those patients still capable of performing the physical act but incapable of enjoying it. According to Freud, their lack of pleasure wasn’t due to a lack of love; these people were often deeply attached to their
partners. They just didn’t want to have sex with them. “Where they love they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love,” he wrote.

  For Freud, psychical impotence revealed the tragic conflict at the center of adult relationships. We crave the adventure of romance, the kind of intense desire that accompanies flirting and courtship. It’s a desire rooted in mystery—we are still learning about our partner, discovering her pleasures, mapping his moods. All those secrets make for good sex.

  If we are lucky, however, this initial uncertainty will eventually give way to the security of attachment. We’ll come to rely on the relationship, finding safety in the predictable comforts of flannel pajamas and Netflix on the couch. Such are the unintended consequences of intimacy—it often leads to unromantic habits, fixed routines that remove the risk from a relationship. Before long, we stop closing the bathroom door.

  Freud believed that the conflict between love and desire was an inescapable fact of life.IV Lasting passion was impossible. Marriage meant a renouncement of romance. Our best hope was to avoid neuroses and divorce.

  In recent years, however, many psychoanalysts and psychologists have come to believe that Freud was too pessimistic. They’ve discovered that many couples experience lasting sexual attraction, even though they’ve had sex thousands of times.37 In a sense, these relationships violate the law of habituation, which holds that repetition ruins pleasure, and that our nerves get bored by the familiar.