Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  If so, then it should be possible to reduce the durability bias by asking people to think about the many other events that will occur in the future. This is what we found in the study of college football fans. As mentioned earlier, we found the standard durability bias, whereby people predicted that the outcome of the game would influence their overall happiness for longer than it actually did. Another group first took part in what they thought was an unrelated study, in which they were asked to describe in detail what they would be doing on a randomly chosen day in the future, such as how much time they would spend going to class, socializing with friends, studying, and so on. Then these students took part in the study in which they predicted how happy they would be after a future football victory or loss.

  Reminding people that the football game would not occur in a vacuum, and that the subsequent days would be filled with many events that would compete for their attention, succeeded in reducing the durability bias. The people who first completed the prospective "diary" predicted that they would think less about the football game than did the other participants, and that the outcome of the game would have less of an impact on their overall happiness.

  Why people overestimate the duration of their emotional reactions to future events is now clear. First, they fail to take into account the extent to which external events will influence their thoughts and feelings (the focalism bias). Perhaps more importantly, they also fail to anticipate how quickly novel events will come to seem mundane through the psychological process of ordinization. This is especially difficult to do because at the time people make their predictions, the event is novel and powerful. When people imagine winning the lottery, a death in the family, or even the purchase of a new car or television, they are thinking about out-of-the-ordinary, emotion-producing events. Even if they know in the abstract that they will "normalize" these events over time, it is difficult to ignore how novel and attention-grabbing they seem now.

  The portrait I have drawn of self-knowledge has not been very encouraging. People have limited access to their own personalities, the reasons for their responses, their own feelings, and how they will feel in the future. Is there hope for improvement? What strategies work the best? Is it always wise to improve self-insight, or is a little self-delusion a good thing?

  Introspection and Self-Narratives

  Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

  -Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918)

  There is a lot about ourselves that is difficult to know, such as our nonconscious preferences, personality traits, goals, and feelings. How might people gain insight into the hidden corners of their minds? What better place to start than with introspection, which many of us assume opens an inner path that, if followed carefully, leads to important self-insights. Introspection can be quite useful, but not always in the way that most people think.

  "Introspection" is a very broad term, covering many different ways of examining the contents of one's own mind. It can involve brief, off-the-cuff attempts to figure out how we feel about something ("Do I really want the trout amandine or would I rather have a hamburger?") and decadeslong self-analyses recorded in lengthy journals. The object of the search varies widely; people can try to decipher their feelings, motives, traits, or values, not to mention what they want for dinner. Usually it is a solitary exercise, but it can be done with a guide such as a psychotherapist.

  It might seem pointless to lump together such radically different kinds of introspection. What do insight therapies have in common with idle thoughts about menu preferences? Actually, I believe that different forms of introspection have a lot in common, even when viewed through the lenses of such diverse approaches as psychoanalysis, postmodern conceptions of the self, and social psychological research on self-contemplation.

  Flashlights, Archaeological Digs, and Self-Narratives

  Introspection is often thought of as a flashlight that illuminates thoughts and feelings that were not previously the object of a person's conscious attention. The mind can be thought of as a cave, with consciousness constituting those objects that are currently in the beam of the flashlight. Anything in the cave can become conscious simply by pointing the light in the right direction. According to this view, there are no thoughts or feelings that are buried so deeply that they cannot be illuminated.

  This approach is similar to part of Freud's topographical model of the mind, namely the preconscious and conscious chambers. People have many ideas and feelings that are not repressed, but do not happen to be the current focus of attention. These are the contents of the preconscious, which according to Freud can "succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness." The conscious self need only point the flashlight in the right direction to bring a particular thought or feeling into consciousness, such as "the name of my hometown is " or "Oglethorp is a curious name."

  The flashlight metaphor also captures the case of unnoticed feelings. Sometimes people's feelings change before they are consciously aware that they have, such as William Carpenter's example of "the growing up of a powerful attachment between individuals of opposite sexes, without either being aware of the fact." Feelings may have popped up in the darkness like mushrooms. With a little introspection, however, the flashlight can find them.

  But the flashlight metaphor goes only so far, because not everything in the cave can be so easily illuminated. The case of unnoticed feelings, for example, may be the exception rather than the rule. Although feelings are the one output of the adaptive unconscious that is likely to reach consciousness, sometimes even feelings are unconscious. And other contents of the adaptive unconscious, such as personality traits and goals, are likely to remain beneath the surface, unavailable to conscious scrutiny (the beam of the flashlight).

  Freud, of course, recognized this limitation, which is why the unconscious was the biggest chamber in the topographical model. As a collector of antiquities, Freud was fond of the metaphor of psychoanalysis as an archaeological dig, whereby clues to the past are buried under many mental strata. With great difficulty the clues can be excavated one by one, and put together to reveal the nature of the person's unconscious drives and feelings.

  An important part of the archaeology metaphor is the idea that what is unconscious can be made conscious. It is much more difficult than simply pointing the beam of a flashlight, for two reasons. Unconscious thoughts and feelings are often quite old, dating back to early childhood, and thus considerable excavation is necessary. Second, there are active forces attempting to prevent the dig from taking place (i.e., repression and resistance), which is why it is very difficult to perform a self-analysis, unaided by a trained therapist. The chief differences between the archaeology and flashlight metaphors are thus the location of hidden thoughts (in the unconscious or preconscious) and the difficulty of uncovering them. These metaphors share, however, the idea that there are truths that can be uncovered through introspection. As the psychoanalyst Donald Spence put it,

  Freud had a fondness for thinking of himself as a kind of archeologist, believing that in the process of psychoanalysis he was always uncovering pieces of the past. If the patient is assumed, by virtue of his freeassociating stance, to have privileged access to the past, and if the story we hear is assumed to be the same as the story he is telling, then it is tempting to conclude that we are hearing a piece of history, an account of "the way things were:"

  What if introspection is an altogether different kind of activity from pointing a flashlight or going on an archaeological dig? The adaptive unconscious is a pervasive yet hidden engine humming beneath the surface of the mind, and there is no engine hatch that we can open to take a direct look at its operation. Just as we cannot observe the workings of our perceptual system-how binocular vision works, say-we cannot observe directly our nonconscious traits and motives. Although it may feel as though we are discovering important truths about ourselves when we introspect,
we are not gaining direct access to the adaptive unconscious. Introspection is more like literary criticism in which we are the text to be understood. Just as there is no single truth that lies within a literary text, but many truths, so are there many truths about a person that can be constructed.`

  The analogy I favor is introspection as a personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives, much as a biographer would. We weave what we can observe (our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories, our own behavior, the reactions of other people to us) into a story that, with luck, captures at least a part what we cannot observe (our nonconscious personality traits, goals, and feelings).'

  One version of the narrative viewpoint is perfectly compatible with the archaeology metaphor: people can excavate many things about themselves through introspection, which they then weave into a story. Any archaeological dig is incomplete; one can never uncover all there is to know about the past. There has to be some means of filling in the blanks and figuring out what all the artifacts mean, and that is where the narrative comes in. According to this view, introspection is a pipeline to people's true feelings and motives, but the "raw data" still must be combined into a coherent self-story, of which there might be several versions. This view is not incompatible with Freud's approach to psychotherapy, particularly as expressed in his later writings. The process of free association and interpretation is not just an uncovering of the client's true past, but a construction of a narrative that provides a healthy, coherent explanation of the client's life.5

  But we need to be more radical. Introspection itself involves the con struction of a story; many of the facts for the biography must be inferred, rather than directly observed. Construction occurs at all levels, from offthe-cuff introspections about one's motives to long-term psychotherapy. Introspection is best thought of not as illumination or archaeology but as writing a self-biography, with limited source information.

  The flashlight metaphor works well when it comes to illuminating the contents of consciousness; I may not be thinking of my dentist's name right now or how I feel about root canals, but with a little introspection I can bring these thoughts and feelings to mind. No amount of introspection, however, can illuminate the contents of the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard I try. Trying to access unconscious goals and motives results not in a direct pipeline to these states, but in a constructive process whereby the conscious self infers the nature of these states.6

  In a short story by Julian Barnes, for example, Anders Boden travels by steamboat every two weeks to inspect the seasoning sheds of his sawmill. By chance, the wife of the town pharmacist, Barbro, makes the same biweekly trip to visit her sister, and the two discover that they enjoy each other's company as they stand at the rail of the ship watching the forest go by.

  One might think that Anders would know exactly how he feels about Barbro through simple introspection whereby he attends closely to his feelings. The yearnings of the adaptive unconscious are not always so easy to discern, however, and Anders has to construct how he feels. Prior to their meetings he has never taken much note of Barbro, and at first he finds her a pleasant traveling companion who is attentive to his stories about the history of the sites they pass, but nothing more. It is only when Anders' wife accuses him of having an affair with Barbro (town gossip has reached her about the meetings on the steamboat) that Anders wonders if he feels something more deeply:

  Anders Boden lined up the insults he had received from his wife and stacked them as neatly as any woodpile. If this is what she is capable of believing, he thought, then this is what is capable of happening ... Of course, now I see: the fact is I have been in love with her since we first met on the steamboat. I would not have come to it so soon if Gertrud had not helped me there.'

  Anders' self-narrative takes a crucial turn because of his wife's suspicions, not because he succeeded, through introspection, in discerning a previously unnoticed set of feelings. He infers that he loves Barbro, and this inference becomes a central part of his narrative. Barbro, too, decides that she loves Anders, but their meetings end when Barbro's sister moves away and she no longer has a reason to take the steamboat trip. Their lives go on, and the two rarely see each other. The tragedy of the story is that as the years pass, the would-be lovers embellish and cherish their private narratives about their love for the other, only to see these narratives collapse when they finally try to act on them in a fateful meeting. It turns out that Anders and Barbro really did not know each other very well and that, like an anaerobic organism that has adapted to a lack of oxygen, their private narratives about their love for each other cannot withstand the fresh air of an actual meeting.

  Like Anders and Barbro, is it possible that people can introspect too much, to the point at which they construct a false picture of their feelings? Do some kinds of introspection result in better stories than others?

  Everyday Introspection

  A few years ago some friends of mine, both research psychologists, moved to a new city and began looking for a house. They took a rather unusual approach to their house hunt. First, they made a list of all the attributes of a house they cared about, such as the neighborhood, school district, number of rooms, layout of the kitchen, and so on. The list was quite exhaustive, taking up several pages. Then, when they visited houses with their real estate agent, they took out a copy of the list and rated each house on every attribute. They used the familiar tool of the social psychologist, the 7-point scale. Is the kitchen in this house a 5 or a 6 on the scale? What about the broom closet? After seeing several houses, my friends figured, they would have a good way of quantifying and remembering how they had felt about each one. They could simply compute the average rating of each house and know which one to buy.

  Contrast this to the way my real estate agent determines the kind of house her clients want. When she meets with her clients for the first time, she listens patiently as they describe their preferences, nodding her head sympathetically. Many people, like my psychologist friends, go into exhaustive detail. Then, my agent ignores everything the clients just said. She takes them to a wide variety of houses-some modern, some old; some with large yards, some with small; some in town, some in the country-even if the clients have just told her that they would never consider houses in some of these categories.

  On the initial visits, the agent pays close attention to her clients' emotional reactions as they walk through the houses, trying to deduce what they are really looking for. Often, she says, she determines that people like something quite different from what they have described. One couple said they had to have an older house with charm and would not even consider a newer house. My agent noticed, however, that the couple perked up and seemed happiest when she took them to modern houses. The couple eventually bought a house in a new development outside of town, rather than the older house in the city they said they had always wanted. My agent's wisdom is shared by other real estate professionals, so much so that there is a common saying in the business: "Buyers Lie."

  Buyers, of course, do not deliberately misrepresent what they want. Rather, they may not be fully aware of their preferences or have difficulty articulating them. One reason my real estate agent is so successful is that she is quite skilled at inferring what her clients want and often knows their preferences better than the clients themselves do.

  Is there a way that people can introspect more carefully about these nonconscious states in order to figure them out? A lot of time would be saved if people could articulate their preferences exactly. Real estate agents would not have to drive clients around to different kinds of houses and figure out what they really wanted.

  Perhaps my psychologist friends are onto something. If people approached their preferences more carefully and analytically, using 7-point scales to rate every attribute of a new house or car or potential mate, maybe they could determine better what they really liked. This strategy has been recommended by many very smart people, such as Benjamin Franklin, in
a letter to the scientist Joseph Priestley:

  My way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then, during three or four days of consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against each measure ... When each [reason] is thus considered, separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to make a rash step.8

  Other people have suggested that the analytic "pluses and minuses" approach is not very useful. Even worse, as the writer Mario Vargas Llosa discovered when he was a judge at the Berlin film festival, it might actually obscure how one really feels:

  I went to every screening with a fresh pack of notecards that I would dutifully cover with my impressions of each and every film. The result, of course, was that the movies ceased to be fun and turned into problems, a struggle against time, darkness and my own esthetic emotions, which these autopsies confused. I was so worried about evaluating every aspect of every film that my entire system of values went into shock, and I quickly realized that I could no longer easily tell what I liked or didn't or why.9

  A well-known social psychologist had a similar experience when trying to decide whether to accept a job offer from another university. It was a difficult decision, because there were many attractive features of both her current position and the new one-as well as some minuses. One of her colleagues, Irving Janis, had written a book advising people to complete detailed "balance sheets," listing the pros and cons of each alternative (much as Benjamin Franklin recommended), so she decided to give it a try. Here is her report of what happened: "I get half way through my Irv Janis balance sheet and say, `Oh hell, it's not coming out right! Have to find a way to get some pluses over on the other side."""