If views are acceptable only when they are credible, and if they are credible only when they are based on facts, then how do we achieve positive views of ourselves and our experience? How do we manage to think of ourselves as great drivers, talented lovers, and brilliant chefs when the facts of our lives include a pathetic parade of dented cars, disappointed partners, and deflated soufflés? The answer is simple: We cook the facts. There are many different techniques for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing facts, and different techniques often lead to different conclusions, which is why scientists disagree about the dangers of global warming, the benefits of supply-side economics, and the wisdom of low-carbohydrate diets. Good scientists deal with this complication by choosing the techniques they consider most appropriate and then accepting the conclusions that these techniques produce, regardless of what those conclusions might be. But bad scientists take advantage of this complication by choosing techniques that are especially likely to produce the conclusions they favor, thus allowing them to reach favored conclusions by way of supportive facts. Decades of research suggests that when it comes to collecting and analyzing facts about ourselves and our experiences, most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in Really Bad Science.
Consider, for instance, the problem of sampling. Because scientists cannot observe every bacterium, comet, pigeon, or person, they study small samples that are drawn from these populations. A fundamental rule of good science and common sense is that this sample must be drawn from all parts of the population if it is to tell us about that population. There’s really no point in conducting an opinion poll if you’re only going to call registered Republicans from Orange County or the executive membership of Anarchists Against Organizations Including This One. And yet, that’s pretty much what we do when seeking facts that bear on our favored conclusions.30 For example, when volunteers in one study were told that they’d scored poorly on an intelligence test and were then given an opportunity to peruse newspaper articles about IQ tests, they spent more time reading articles that questioned the validity of such tests than articles that sanctioned them.31 When volunteers in another study were given a glowing evaluation by a supervisor, they were more interested in reading background information that praised the supervisor’s competence and acumen than background information that impeached it.32 By controlling the sample of information to which they were exposed, these people indirectly controlled the conclusions they would draw.
You’ve probably done this yourself. For instance, if you’ve ever purchased a new automobile, you may have noticed that soon after you made the decision to buy the Honda instead of the Toyota, you began lingering over the Honda advertisements in the weekly newsmagazine and skimming quickly past ads for the competition.33 If a friend had noticed this and asked you about it, you would probably have explained that you were simply more interested in learning about the car you’d chosen than about the car you didn’t. But learning is an odd choice of words here because that word usually refers to the balanced acquisition of knowledge, and the kind of learning one does by reading only Honda ads is more than a little lopsided. Ads contain facts about the advantages of the products they describe and not about the disadvantages, and thus your quest for new knowledge would have the interesting side benefit of ensuring that you would be marinated in those facts—and only those facts—that confirmed the wisdom of your decision.
Not only do we select favorable facts from magazines, we also select them from memory. For example, in one study, some volunteers were shown evidence indicating that extraverts receive higher salaries and more promotions than introverts do (successful-extravert group) and other volunteers were shown evidence indicating the opposite (successful-introvert group).34 When the volunteers were asked to recall specific behaviors from their pasts that would help determine whether they were extraverted or introverted, volunteers in the successful-extravert group tended to recall the time when they’d brazenly walked up to a complete stranger and introduced themselves, whereas volunteers in the successful-introvert group tended to recall the time when they saw someone they liked but had been too shy to say hello.
Of course, other people—and not memories or magazine ads—are the richest sources of information about the wisdom of our decisions, the extent of our abilities, and the irresistible effervescence of our bubbly personalities. Our tendency to expose ourselves to information that supports our favored conclusions is especially powerful when it comes to choosing the company we keep. You’ve probably noticed that with the exception of Wilt Chamberlain, nobody picks friends and lovers by random sampling. On the contrary, we spend countless hours and countless dollars carefully arranging our lives to ensure that we are surrounded by people who like us, and people who are like us. It isn’t surprising, then, that when we turn to the folks we know for advice and opinions, they tend to confirm our favored conclusions—either because they share them or because they don’t want to hurt our feelings by telling us otherwise.35 Should the people in our lives occasionally fail to tell us what we want to hear, we have some clever ways of helping them.
For example, studies reveal that people have a penchant for asking questions that are subtly engineered to manipulate the answers they receive.36 A question such as “Am I the best lover you’ve ever had?” is dangerous because it has only one answer that can make us truly happy, but a question such as “What do you like best about my lovemaking?” is brilliant because it has only one answer that can make us truly miserable (or two if you count “It reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain”). Studies show that people intuitively lean toward asking the questions that are most likely to elicit the answers they want to hear. And when they hear those answers, they tend to believe what they’ve nudged others to say, which is why “Tell me you love me” remains such a popular request.37 In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.
And it gets worse—because most of us have ways of making other people confirm our favored conclusions without ever engaging them in conversation. Consider this: To be a great driver, lover, or chef, we don’t need to be able to parallel park while blindfolded, make ten thousand maidens swoon with a single pucker, or create a pâte feuilletée so intoxicating that the entire population of France instantly abandons its national cuisine and swears allegiance to our kitchen. Rather, we simply need to park, kiss, and bake better than most other folks do. How do we know how well most other folks do? Why, we look around, of course—but in order to make sure that we see what we want to see, we look around selectively.38 For example, volunteers in one study took a test that ostensibly measured their social sensitivity and were then told that they had flubbed the majority of the questions.39 When these volunteers were then given an opportunity to look over the test results of other people who had performed better or worse than they had, they ignored the tests of the people who had done better and instead spent their time looking over the tests of the people who had done worse. Getting a C– isn’t so bad if one compares oneself exclusively to those who got a D.
This tendency to seek information about those who have done more poorly than we have is especially pronounced when the stakes are high. People with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer are particularly likely to compare themselves with those who are in worse shape,40 which explains why 96 percent of the cancer patients in one study claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient.41 And if we can’t find people who are doing more poorly than we are, we may go out and create them. Volunteers in one study took a test and were then given the opportunity to provide hints that would either help or hinder a friend’s performance on the same test.42 Although volunteers helped their friends when the test was described as a game, they actively hindered their friends when the test was described as an important measure of intellectual ability. Apparently, when our friends do not have the good taste to come in last so th
at we can enjoy the good taste of coming in first, we give them a friendly push in the appropriate direction. Once we’ve successfully sabotaged their performances and ensured their failure, they become the perfect standard for comparison. The bottom line is this: The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
Challenging Facts
Whether by choosing information or informants, our ability to cook the facts that we encounter helps us establish views that are both positive and credible. Of course, if you’ve ever discussed a football game, a political debate, or the six o’clock newscast with someone from the other side of the aisle, you’ve already discovered that even when people do encounter facts that disconfirm their favored conclusions, they have a knack for ignoring them, forgetting them, or seeing them differently than the rest of us do. When Dartmouth and Princeton students see the same football game, both sets of students claim that the facts clearly show that the other school’s team was responsible for the unsportsmanlike conduct.43 When Democrats and Republicans see the same presidential debate on television, both sets of viewers claim that the facts clearly show that their candidate was the winner.44 When pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers see identical samples of Middle East news coverage, both proponents claim that the facts clearly show that the press was biased against their side.45 Alas, the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.
Inevitably, however, there will be times when the unkind facts are just too obvious to set aside. When our team’s defensive tackle is caught wearing brass knuckles, or when our candidate confesses to embezzlement on national television, we find it difficult to overlook or forget such facts. How do we manage to maintain a favored conclusion when the brute facts just won’t cooperate? Although the word fact seems to suggest a sort of unquestionable irrefutability, facts are actually nothing more than conjectures that have met a certain standard of proof. If we set that standard high enough, then nothing can ever be proved, including the “fact” of our own existence. If we set the standard low enough, then all things are true and equally so. Because nihilism and postmodernism are both such unsatisfying philosophies, we tend to set our standard of proof somewhere in the middle. No one can say precisely where that standard should be set, but one thing we do know is that wherever we set it, we must keep it in the same place when we evaluate the facts we favor and the facts we don’t. It would be unfair for teachers to give the students they like easier exams than those they dislike, for federal regulators to require that foreign products pass stricter safety tests than domestic products, or for judges to insist that the defense attorney make better arguments than the prosecutor.
And yet, this is just the sort of uneven treatment most of us give to facts that confirm and disconfirm our favored conclusions. In one study, volunteers were asked to evaluate two pieces of scientific research on the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent.46 They were shown one research study that used the “between-states technique” (which involved comparing the crime rates of states that had capital punishment with the crime rates of states that did not) and one research study that used the “within-states technique” (which involved comparing the crime rates of a single state before and after it instituted or outlawed capital punishment). For half the volunteers, the between-states study concluded that capital punishment was effective and the within-states study concluded it was not. For the other half of the volunteers, these conclusions were reversed. The results showed that volunteers favored whichever technique produced the conclusion that verified their own personal political ideologies. When the within-states technique produced an unfavorable conclusion, volunteers immediately recognized that within-states comparisons are worthless because factors such as employment and income vary over time, and thus crime rates in one decade (the 1980s) can’t be compared with crime rates in another decade (the 1990s). But when the between-states technique produced an unfavorable conclusion, volunteers immediately recognized that between-states comparisons are worthless because factors such as employment and income vary with geography, and thus crime rates in one place (Alabama) can’t be compared with crime rates in another place (Massachusetts).47 Clearly, volunteers set the methodological bar higher for studies that disconfirmed their favored conclusions. This same technique allows us to achieve and maintain a positive and credible view of ourselves and our experiences. For example, volunteers in one study were told that they had performed very well or very poorly on a social-sensitivity test and were then asked to assess two scientific reports—one that suggested the test was valid and one that suggested it was not.48 Volunteers who had performed well on the test believed that the studies in the validating report used sounder scientific methods than did the studies in the invalidating report, but volunteers who performed poorly on the test believed precisely the opposite.
When facts challenge our favored conclusion, we scrutinize them more carefully and subject them to more rigorous analysis. We also require a lot more of them. For example, how much information would you require before you were willing to conclude that someone was intelligent? Would their high school transcripts be enough? Would an IQ test suffice? Would you need to know what their teachers and employers thought of them? Volunteers in one study were asked to evaluate the intelligence of another person, and they required considerable evidence before they were willing to conclude that the person was truly smart. But interestingly, they required much more evidence when the person was an unbearable pain in the ass than when the person was funny, kind, and friendly.49 When we want to believe that someone is smart, then a single letter of recommendation may suffice; but when we don’t want to believe that person is smart, we may demand a thick manila folder full of transcripts, tests, and testimony.
Precisely the same thing happens when we want or don’t want to believe something about ourselves. For instance, volunteers in one study were invited to take a medical test that would supposedly tell them whether they did or did not have a dangerous enzyme deficiency that would predispose them to pancreatic disorders.50 The volunteers placed a drop of their saliva on a strip of ordinary paper that the researchers falsely claimed was a medical test strip. Some volunteers (positive-testers) were told that if the strip turned green in ten to sixty seconds, then they had the enzyme deficiency. Other volunteers (negative-testers) were told that if the strip turned green in ten to sixty seconds, then they didn’t have the enzyme deficiency. Although the strip was an ordinary piece of paper and hence never turned green, the negative-testers waited much longer than the positive-testers before deciding that the test was complete. In other words, the volunteers gave the test strip plenty of time to prove that they were well but much less time to prove that they were ill. Apparently it doesn’t take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, but it takes a whole lotta facts to convince us of the opposite. We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions.51 Not surprisingly, disfavored conclusions have a much tougher time meeting this more rigorous standard of proof.52
Onward
In July 2004, the City Council of Monza, Italy, took the unusual step of banning goldfish bowls. They reasoned that goldfish should be kept in rectangular aquariums and not in round bowls because “a fish kept in a bowl has a distorted view of reality and suffers because of this.”53 No mention was made of the bland diet, the noisy pump, or the silly plastic castles. No, the problem was that round bowls deform the visual experience of their inhabitants, and goldfish have the fundamental right to see the world as it really is. The good counselors of Monza did not suggest that human beings should enjoy the same right, perhaps because they knew that our distorted views of reality are not so easily dispelled, or perhaps because they understood that we suffer less with them than we would without them. Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact
that experiences are ambiguous—that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion. So what does all of this have to do with forecasting our emotional futures? As we are about to see, we may live at the fulcrum of reality and illusion, but most of us don’t know our own address.
Stumbling on Happiness Page 18