Stop Annoying People
The only thing more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack is finding a needle in a needlestack. When an object is surrounded by similar objects it naturally blends in, and when it is surrounded by dissimilar objects it naturally stands out. Look at figure 16. If you had a stopwatch that counted milliseconds, you’d find that you can locate the letter O in the array on the top (where it is surrounded by numbers) a bit more quickly than you can locate it in the array on the bottom (where it is surrounded by other letters). And that makes sense, because it is harder to find a letter among letters than a letter among numbers. And yet, had I asked you to look for “zero” instead of “the letter O,” you would have been a bit faster to find it in the array at the bottom than in the array at the top.16 Now, most of us think that a basic sensory ability such as vision is pretty well explained by its wiring, and if you wanted to understand this ability, you would do well to learn about luminance, contrast, rods, cones, optic nerves, retinas, and the like. But once you knew everything there was to know about the physical properties of the arrays shown in figure 16 and everything there was to know about the anatomy of the human eye, you would still not be able to explain why a person can find the circle more quickly in one case than in the other unless you also knew what that person thought the circle meant.
Fig. 16.
Meanings matter for even the most basic psychological processes, and while this may seem perfectly obvious to reasonable folks like you and me, ignorance of this perfectly obvious fact sent psychologists on a wild-goose chase that lasted nearly thirty years and produced relatively few geese. For much of the last half of the twentieth century, experimental psychologists timed rats as they ran mazes and observed pigeons as they pecked keys because they believed that the best way to understand behavior was to map the relation between a stimulus and an organism’s response to that stimulus. By carefully measuring what an organism did when it was presented with a physical stimulus, such as a light, a sound, or a piece of food, psychologists hoped to develop a science that linked observable stimuli to observable behavior without using vague and squishy concepts such as meaning to connect them. Alas, this simpleminded project was doomed from the start, because while rats and pigeons may respond to stimuli as they are presented in the world, people respond to stimuli as they are represented in the mind. Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind, and it is these subjective stimuli to which people react. For instance, the middle letters in the two words in figure 17 are physically identical stimuli (I promise—I cut and pasted them myself), and yet, most English speakers respond to them differently—see them differently, pronounce them differently, remember them differently—because one represents the letter H and the other represents the letter A. Indeed, it would be more appropriate to say that one is the letter H and the other is the letter A because the identity of an inky squiggle has less to do with how it is objectively constructed and more to do with how we subjectively interpret it. Two vertical lines with a crossbar mean one thing when flanked by T and E and they mean another thing when flanked by C and T, and one of the many things that distinguishes us from rats and pigeons is that we respond to the meanings of such stimuli and not to the stimuli themselves. That’s why my father can get away with calling me “doodlebug” and you can’t.
Fig. 17. The middle shape has different meanings in different contexts.
Disambiguating Objects
Most stimuli are ambiguous—that is, they can mean more than one thing—and the interesting question is how we disambiguate them—that is, how we know which of a stimulus’s many meanings to infer on a particular occasion. Research shows that context, frequency, and recency are especially important in this regard.
• Consider context. The word bank has two meanings in English: “a place where money is kept” and “the land on either side of a river.” Yet we never misunderstand sentences such as “The boat ran into the bank” or “The robber ran into the bank” because the words boat and robber provide a context that tells us which of the two meanings of bank we should infer in each case.
• Consider frequency. Our past encounters with a stimulus provide information about which of its meanings we should embrace. For example, a loan officer is likely to interpret the sentence “Don’t run into the bank” as a warning about how to ambulate through his place of business and not as sound advice about the steering of boats because in the course of a typical day the loan officer hears the word bank used more frequently in its financial than in its maritime sense.
• Consider recency. Even a boater is likely to interpret the sentence “Don’t run into the bank” as a reference to a financial institution rather than a river’s edge if she recently saw an ad for safe-deposit boxes and thus has the financial meaning of bank still active in her mind. Indeed, because I’ve been talking about banks in this paragraph, I am willing to bet that the sentence “He put a check in the box” causes you to generate a mental image of someone placing a piece of paper in a receptacle and not a mental image of someone making a mark on a questionnaire. (I’m also willing to guess that your interpretation of the title of this section depends on whether you annoyed someone more or less recently than someone annoyed you.)
Unlike rats and pigeons, then, we respond to meanings—and context, frequency, and recency are three of the factors that determine which meaning we will infer when we encounter an ambiguous stimulus. But there is another factor of equal importance and greater interest. Like rats and pigeons, each of us has desires, wishes, and needs. We are not merely spectators of the world but investors in it, and we often prefer that an ambiguous stimulus mean one thing rather than another. Consider, for example, the drawing of a box in figure 18. This object (called the Necker cube after the Swiss crystallographer who discovered it in 1832) is inherently ambiguous, and you can prove this to yourself simply by staring at it for a few seconds. At first, the box appears to be sitting on its side and you have the sense that you’re looking out at a box that is across from you. The dot is inside the box, at the place where the back panel and the bottom panel meet. But if you stare long enough, the drawing suddenly shifts, the box appears to be standing on its end, and you have the sense that you’re looking down on a box that is below you. The dot is now perched on the upper right corner of the box. Because this drawing has two equally meaningful interpretations, your brain merrily switches back and forth between them, keeping you mildly entertained until you eventually get dizzy and fall down. But what if one of these meanings were better than the other? That is, what if you preferred one of the interpretations of this object? Experiments show that when subjects are rewarded for seeing the box across from them or below them, the orientation for which they were rewarded starts “popping out” more often and their brains “hold on” to that interpretation without switching.17 In other words, when your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency, and recency do.
Fig. 18. If you stare at a Necker cube, it will appear to shift its orientation.
This phenomenon is not limited to the interpretation of weird drawings. For example, why is it that you think of yourself as a talented person? (C’mon, give it up. You know you do.) To answer this question, researchers asked some volunteers (definers) to write down their definition of talented and then to estimate their talent using that definition as a guide.18 Next, some other volunteers (nondefiners) were given the definitions that the first group had written down and were asked to estimate their own talent using those definitions as a guide. Interestingly, the definers rated themselves as more talented than the nondefiners did. Because definers were given the liberty to define the word talented any way they wished, they defined it exactly the way they wished—namely, in terms of some activity at which they just so happened to excel (“I think talent u
sually refers to exceptional artistic achievement like, for example, this painting I just finished,” or “Talent means an ability you’re born with, such as being much stronger than other people. Shall I put you down now?”). Definers were able to set the standards for talent, and not coincidentally, they were more likely to meet the standards they set. One of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words are the lexical equivalents of a Necker cube, and the human mind naturally exploits each word’s ambiguity for its own gratification.
Disambiguating Experience
Of course, the richest sources of exploitable ambiguity are not words, sentences, or shapes but the intricate, variegated, multidimensional experiences of which every human life is a collage. If a Necker cube has two possible interpretations and talent has fourteen possible interpretations, then leaving home or falling ill or getting a job with the U.S. Postal Service has hundreds or thousands of possible interpretations. The things that happen to us—getting married, raising a child, finding a job, resigning from Congress, going to prison, becoming paralyzed—are much more complex than an inky squiggle or a colored cube, and that complexity creates loads of ambiguity that just begs to be exploited. It doesn’t have to beg hard. For example, volunteers in one study were told that they would be eating a delicious but unhealthy ice cream sundae (ice cream eaters), and others were told that they would be eating a bitter but healthful plate of fresh kale (kale eaters).19 Before actually eating these foods, the researchers asked the volunteers to rate the similarity of a number of foods, including ice cream sundaes, kale, and Spam (which everyone considered both unpalatable and unhealthful). The results showed that ice cream eaters thought that Spam was more like kale than it was like ice cream. Why? Because for some odd reason, ice cream eaters were thinking about food in terms of its taste—and unlike kale and Spam, ice cream tastes delicious. On the other hand, kale eaters thought that Spam was more like ice cream than it was like kale. Why? Because for some odd reason, kale eaters were thinking about food in terms of its healthfulness—and unlike kale, ice cream and Spam are unhealthful. The odd reason isn’t really so odd. Just as a Necker cube is both across from you and below you, ice cream is both fattening and tasty, and kale is both healthful and bitter. Your brain and my brain easily jump back and forth between these different ways of thinking about the foods because we are merely reading about them. But if we were preparing to eat one of them, our brains would automatically exploit the ambiguity of that food’s identity and allow us to think of it in a way that pleased us (delicious dessert or nutritious veggie) rather than a way that did not (fattening dessert or bitter veggie). As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.
Because experiences are inherently ambiguous, finding a “positive view” of an experience is often as simple as finding the “below-you view” of a Necker cube, and research shows that most people do this well and often. Consumers evaluate kitchen appliances more positively after they buy them,20 job seekers evaluate jobs more positively after they accept them,21 and high school students evaluate colleges more positively after they get into them.22 Racetrack gamblers evaluate their horses more positively when they are leaving the betting window than when they are approaching it,23 and voters evaluate their candidates more positively when they are exiting the voting booth than when they are entering it.24 A toaster, a firm, a university, a horse, and a senator are all just fine and dandy, but when they become our toaster, firm, university, horse, and senator they are instantly finer and dandier. Studies such as these suggest that people are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.
Cooking with Facts
In Voltaire’s classic novel Candide, Dr. Pangloss is a teacher of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology” who believes he lives in the best of all possible worlds.
“It is clear,” he said, “that things cannot be other than the way they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. For instance, noses were made to support spectacles, hence we wear spectacles. Legs, as anyone can see, were made for breeches, and so we wear breeches. Stones were made to be shaped into castles; thus My Lord has a fine castle because the greatest baron in the province ought to have the finest house. And because pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. So those who say that everything is well are speaking foolishly; they should say that everything is best.”25
The research I’ve described so far seems to suggest that human beings are hopelessly Panglossian; there are more ways to think about experience than there are experiences to think about, and human beings are unusually inventive when it comes to finding the best of all possible ways. And yet, if this is true, then why aren’t we all walking around with wide eyes and loopy grins, thanking God for the wonder of hemorrhoids and the miracle of in-laws? Because the mind may be gullible, but it ain’t no patsy. The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can’t spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers. We may see the world through rose-colored glasses, but rose-colored glasses are neither opaque nor clear. They can’t be opaque because we need to see the world clearly enough to participate in it—to pilot helicopters, harvest corn, diaper babies, and all the other stuff that smart mammals need to do in order to survive and thrive. But they can’t be clear because we need their rosy tint to motivate us to design the helicopters (“I’m sure this thing will fly”), plant the corn (“This year will be a banner crop”), and tolerate the babies (“What a bundle of joy!”). We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.26
Rather than thinking of people as hopelessly Panglossian, then, we might think of them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness.27 This metaphor is unusually appropriate. For example, the physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognize and destroy foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognize and respect the body’s own cells. If the physical immune system is hypoactive, it fails to defend the body against micropredators and we are stricken with infections; but if the physical immune system is hyperactive, it mistakenly defends the body against itself and we are stricken with autoimmune disease. A healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well—but not too well.
Analogously, when we face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, the psychological immune system must not defend us too well (“I’m perfect and everyone is against me”) and must not fail to defend us well enough (“I’m a loser and I ought to be dead”). A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it (“Yeah, that was a lousy performance and I feel crummy about it, but I’ve got enough confidence to give it a second shot”). We need to be defended—not defenseless or defensive—and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts. That’s why people seek opportunities to think about themselves in positive ways but routinely reject opportunities to think about themselves in unrealistically positive ways.28 For example, college students request new dorm assignments when their current roomm
ates do not think well of them, but they also request new dorm assignments when their current roommates think too well of them.29 No one likes to feel that they are being duped, even when the duping is a pleasure. In order to maintain the delicate balance between reality and illusion, we seek positive views of our experience, but we only allow ourselves to embrace those views when they seem credible. So what makes a view seem credible?
Finding Facts
Most of us put a lot of stock in what scientists tell us because we know that scientists reach their conclusions by gathering and analyzing facts. If someone asked you why you believe that smoking is bad and jogging is good, or that the earth is round and the galaxy is flat, or that cells are small and molecules are smaller, you would point to the facts. You might need to explain that you do not personally know the facts to which you are pointing, but that you do know that at some time in the past, a bunch of very earnest people in white lab coats went out and observed the world with stethoscopes, telescopes, and microscopes, wrote down what they observed, analyzed what they wrote down, and then told the rest of us what to believe about nutrition, cosmology, and biology. Scientists are credible because they draw conclusions from observations, and ever since the empiricists trumped the dogmatists and became the kings of ancient Greek medicine, westerners have had a special reverence for conclusions that are based on things they can see. It isn’t surprising, then, that we consider our own views credible when they are based on observable facts but not when they are based on wishes, wants, and fancies. We might like to believe that everyone loves us, that we will live forever, and that high-tech stocks are preparing to make a major comeback, and it would be awfully convenient if we could just push a little button at the base of our skulls and instantly believe as we wanted. But that’s not how believing works. Over the course of human evolution, the brain and the eye have developed a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees and not to believe what the eye denies. So if we are to believe something, then it must be supported by—or at least not blatantly contradicted by—the facts.
Stumbling on Happiness Page 17