Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave
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Linguist Stephen Levinson visited the Guugu Yimithirr people in the 1980s and described a series of interactions that showed just how differently the Guugu Yimithirr think about physical space. In one case, a local poet advised him to beware of the big ant “just north” of his foot. In another, Levinson asked an elder to describe what he saw in a picture. The elder explained that he saw two girls, one whose nose pointed east and another whose nose pointed south. Of course, had the elder turned 180 degrees to face the opposite direction while holding the image, he would have explained that the girls’ noses now pointed west and north, respectively.
Not too far away, on the opposite side of Cape York in far north Queensland, the Pormpuraaw Aborigines take a similar linguistic approach to describing time. Instead of imagining that time flows from left to right, or right to left, the Pormpuraaw describe time as flowing like the sun: from east to west. When a Pormpuraawan faces north, time flows from right to left, but when she turns to face south, time flows from left to right. In one experiment, a group of Pormpuraawans were asked to arrange a set of cards showing a man at different ages, from youth to adulthood. As expected, the study’s participants arranged the cards in ascending age, ordered from east to west. Those who were facing north arranged the cards from right to left (as in the left-hand panel of the illustration below). Halfway through the experiment, a cameraman who was filming the task explained that he needed to take a different angle, so participants swiveled 90 degrees to face a different cardinal direction (as in the right-hand panel of the illustration). Instead of arranging the cards from left to right relative to their own position, as English-speakers do regardless of which direction they’re facing, the Pormpuraawans arranged the cards from east to west again—but this time the cards were oriented from bottom to top rather than right to left. The linguistic labels of the Yimithirr and Pormpuraawan languages determined how they perceived both physical space and time.
Bird’s-eye depiction of a Pormpuraawan completing the card-ordering task, facing north and facing west. Time passes from east to west according to the Pormpuraawan language.
Seeing What Isn’t Really There
Labels go undetected as they frame how we perceive time and space, but they play their most cunning tricks when they paint a scene that doesn’t actually exist. In the early 1970s, researcher Elizabeth Loftus began to study how labels distort eyewitness memories. She wondered, for example, whether people who witnessed a car accident recorded and recalled their memories faithfully, or whether their recollections changed depending on how the accident was described. In one classic experiment, people watched a series of car accidents from a Seattle Police Department driving safety video. After each video, the viewers estimated how fast the cars were traveling before the accident. Everyone saw exactly the same videos, but the questionnaire that they completed used one of five different terms to describe how the vehicles interacted. Some of the viewers were asked to estimate how fast the cars were going when they hit each other; others were asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed, collided, bumped, or contacted each other. Though everyone saw the same cars involved in the same accidents, their estimates differed widely.
When the accidents were sensationalized, the cars seemed to be traveling faster: in the minds of viewers, a “smashed” car must have been traveling faster than a merely “contacted” or “hit” car. A similar experiment revealed the even more disturbing truth that labels sometimes create memories that are entirely false. A group of college students watched a video of two cars colliding. Some of them were told that the cars smashed, and others that the cars hit one another. A week later they were asked to recall whether they had seen any broken glass following the accident. Almost all of the students who had been told that the cars hit each other correctly remembered that there was no glass following the accident, and only 14 percent mistakenly remembered seeing glass. But among those who had been told that the cars had smashed, almost one-third remembered seeing broken glass. For these students, the sensationalized “smashed” label had replaced reality with a false memory in which the cars spilled glass following the accident. More broadly, this disturbing result suggests that eyewitnesses to a crime or an accident are open to forming false or exaggerated memories depending on how others label the events. The moral of the story is that plaintiffs and defendants should never blithely adopt the descriptions offered by opposing counsel. An angry plaintiff’s “smash” is a persecuted defendant’s “nudge.”
While Loftus investigated how labels changed the way people remembered events in the past, social psychologists began to wonder whether they could also reshape interactions between two people in real time. One question that fascinated the field in the 1970s was why disabled people found social interactions so difficult. Most people aren’t cruel and disparaging, but many people with stigmatized disabilities seemed to believe their interactions with strangers were awkward and uncomfortable. On the one hand, a well-intentioned able-bodied person might spend so much mental effort trying to behave “normally” that she had no mental energy left to carry on an easy conversation. On the other hand, the disabled person might be acutely sensitive to every facial expression, turn of the head, or blink of the eyes that might confirm her worst fears: that she’s being judged for her disability. Teasing apart these explanations demands creativity. How do you know the root causes for why an interaction isn’t going well? Two social psychologists devised a very clever method to show why the label of disability and the stigma of a scar cause such awkward interactions.
The researchers ran their study at Dartmouth College in the late 1970s. Unsuspecting Dartmouth students who had signed up to take part in the study were led into a small room where an experimenter explained that they would be interacting with another person. Before the interaction began, some of the students were told that a makeup artist would paint a scar on their faces. The patient but anxious students stood immobile while a makeup artist applied a fake scar, and then showed them what the scar looked like in a mirror. The students stared briefly at this newly labeled version of themselves. They were essentially the same people, but it wasn’t easy to anticipate how the students they were about to meet would respond to meeting a person with a prominent facial scar. After the students looked in the mirror, the makeup artist applied some cream to make sure that the scar would remain in place, and the students walked to another room, where they met their interaction partner for the first time.
The students felt uncomfortable during their interactions, and they were convinced that their scars were attracting unwanted attention. In fact, they spent so much time worrying about the scar that they had no energy left to feign the sort of cool detachment expected of students when they meet one another for the first time. Other students who weren’t made up with scars were told that their interaction partner expected them to have an allergy, but allergies make for innocuous labels, and these students sailed through their interactions with ease.
But the experimenters had devised a clever twist: when the makeup artists said they were applying a cream to ensure the scar wouldn’t fade, they were actually removing the scar with makeup-removal cream. By the time the students began interacting with their partners, their faces were no more flawed than they had been when the experiment began. Still, the label had already done its work: the students were convinced that their partners couldn’t stop staring at their scars, and in response their own behavior jeopardized the success of the interaction. The students’ partners agreed: though they weren’t told whether the student believed he had been scarred or merely described as allergy-prone, they were able to tell almost immediately which students were led to believe they were scarred. Even in the absence of a real physical blemish—a scar, in this case—people become paralyzed by the prospect that others will judge them for the label, and this anxiety is enough to hamper the progress of a fledgling friendship.
Labeling afflicts physically stigmatized people
every day, but it has an even darker history in the realm of mental stigmatization, where psychiatric professionals sometimes perceive disorders that aren’t actually there. Sigmund Freud’s mentor, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, was one of the most prolific labelers of all time. Charcot’s pet diagnostic label was hysteria, which he used to describe a broad array of disorders in female patients. To get a sense of just how broadly the term was used, George Beard, a physician during the late nineteenth century, created a catalog of the symptoms ascribed to hysteria. Beard’s catalog ran for seventy-five pages, and with exasperation he ultimately acknowledged that the list was still incomplete. The list included symptoms from faintness and nervousness to fluid retention and abdominal bloating. Charcot held theatrical demonstrations for his colleagues and students, presenting a “neurotic” woman and describing her symptoms and a range of possible cures. The label lost favor when practitioners decided that its breadth undermined its usefulness, but not before it had done plenty of damage. The treatments included painful abdominal water massages, induced bleeding, and invasive genital stimulation. (Physicians complained so bitterly about having to administer this last form of treatment that the “portable vibrator” was designed to “automate” the process.) Meanwhile, women across the developed world were diagnosed with hysteria to such an extent that the label lost all value. Women under pain of hysteria became second-class patients, and physicians often ignored legitimate complaints that warranted treatment.
The case of hysteria is disturbing, but it feels so remote from contemporary medical mores that it’s tempting to feel that psychiatric labeling is no longer a concern. In fact the reverse is true. With each successive edition of the psychiatric bible—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM)—comes new labels. One dangerous label in vogue at the moment is borderline personality disorder (BPD), which encompasses almost as many symptoms as hysteria did a hundred years ago. BPD entails a subset of chronic anger, feelings of emptiness, impulsivity, unstable personal relationships, and a host of other behaviors. The problem is that these symptoms also explain dozens of other disorders, and psychiatrists have been accused of diagnosing patients with BPD too hastily. Worse still is the stigma that goes along with a BPD diagnosis. BPD is notoriously difficult to treat—in part because the label describes so many different constellations of symptoms—and clinicians respond by distancing themselves from patients who have been diagnosed with BPD. The same patient who would have escaped the stigma of a BPD label before the label became popular now has much more difficulty finding a willing psychiatrist.
BPD isn’t the only catchall label on the market. Since the 1970s, thousands of children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a disorder with a list of symptoms to rival BPD and hysteria. Psychiatrists tend to diagnose ADHD much more often in younger children within each school grade, which suggests that some cases of simple childhood immaturity might be mistaken for ADHD. The disorder has spawned a range of overprescribed drug treatments, like Ritalin and Adderall, which are notoriously popular among healthy but overworked college students and professionals. The mere existence of the labels hysteria, borderline personality disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is enough to encourage those diagnoses in the same way that people who adopt the label disabled are primed to believe that other people are treating them strangely or unfairly merely because they bear a visible scar.
Labels are immensely powerful, shaping not only what we see but also events that haven’t actually taken place. For all their power, though, approximately one-quarter of the world is still illiterate, incapable of reading written labels. The great global common denominator is graphic information in the form of pictures, symbols, and images, which make themselves understood as soon as they attract a casual glance. Arguably more powerful than labels, some symbols communicate with such force that they demand the same care as a loaded gun.
3.
SYMBOLS
Symbols Are Magnets for Meaning
The U.S. Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, sits on Silver Strand, between San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The base was commissioned in 1944 as World War II came to a close, and by the late 1960s it had begun to outgrow its original design. The navy responded by contracting local architect John Mock to design Complex 320-325, six new buildings that today house sailors from the Seabees division. At ground level, the buildings are nondescript monuments to 1960s barracks architecture. From the air, however, they form an alarming symbol.
Few symbols inspire stronger reactions than the swastika, and many San Diegans were up in arms when they discovered the building’s sinister bird’s-eye profile. The local Anti-Defamation League and local members of Congress implored the navy to “find a feasible solution.” Some creative stakeholders suggested adding strategic walkways to transform the swastika into a completed square, tall stands of trees to obscure the buildings’ shape from the air, and even special structures designed to camouflage the building entirely. Navy spokespeople resisted at first, but ultimately they were forced to earmark $600,000 to reshape the buildings. In a recent interview, architect John Mock distinguished the “four L-shaped buildings” from a swastika shape and claimed that the original builders and architects knew exactly how the buildings would look from the air. Whether or not the complex forms a true swastika, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t bear a striking resemblance to the tainted symbol.
How does a symbol like the swastika—a simple combination of six straight lines—inspire such strong reactions? Mock’s buildings are completely safe, and they don’t cause blindness or physical harm when viewed from the air. In fact, until the Nazi Party co-opted the symbol, it represented a range of innocuous mystical concepts. To Buddhists, the symbol represented eternity, to some Hindus the shape represented the god Ganesha, and to the Panamanian Kuna Yala people it represented the octopus that created the world. These positive connotations are reflected in its name, which comes from the Sanskrit word for “lucky” or “auspicious.” So what happened when the symbol became associated with the Nazi Party? Like names and labels, symbols lack meaning until they’re associated with existing meaningful concepts. They’re powerful because their inherent lack of meaning allows them to represent any concept from a menu of infinite possibilities. A decade after World War II ended, Gerald Holtom designed the now-famous peace symbol, but imagine how differently people would feel about the symbol if the Nazi Party had adopted it fifteen years earlier.
Gerald Holtom’s nuclear disarmament peace symbol, a combination of the semaphore (flag alphabet) signals for N and D.
Symbols and images are also powerful because we perceive them so effortlessly and so rapidly. A century before Mock designed Complex 320-325, Russian author Ivan Turgenev wrote, “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.” Now shortened to “a picture is worth a thousand words,” this aphorism suggests correctly that symbols and other meaningful images have the capacity to quickly inspire extreme reactions, ranging from anger and fear to joy and celebration. They’re especially powerful because we process symbolic images very quickly—more quickly than we process the meaning of words—and they correspondingly embed themselves more deeply in our memories.
Symbols, then, are magnets for meaning, and they have the power to shape our thoughts and behaviors just as words and labels do. They accomplish this feat by priming (or preparing) us for particular thoughts and behaviors. Since the swastika is now associated with aggression, anger, and general negativity, it should prime us to perceive aggression, anger, and negativity in events that might otherwise seem innocuous. To test this effect, my colleague Virginia Kwan and I asked a group of students to complete two seemingly unrelated tasks. We called the first one a geometric acuity task, a scientific-sounding name for a task in which the students counted the number of right angles in four shapes. Three of the shapes were identical for
the entire group of students, but we varied the design of the fourth shape. For half of the students, that fourth shape looked a lot like a swastika, so for those students the concepts of aggression, anger, and negativity should have been particularly accessible. For the other half, the fourth shape was just a series of squares and circles that had no particular meaning.
After the students finished the geometric acuity task, we distracted them with another task for a few minutes, and then asked them to read a supposedly unrelated passage about a man named Donald. The passage described a day in Donald’s life, and we purposely described his actions so they could be interpreted either as innocuous or as evidence that Donald was an aggressive, mean-spirited character. For example, the passage explained that a salesman knocked on Donald’s door, but Donald refused to let him enter. Most people refuse to let salespeople enter their homes from time to time (or perhaps most of the time), but if you’re viewing Donald’s behavior through a critical lens, his decision to keep the salesman at bay might constitute evidence that he’s generally mean-spirited. Later in the day, Donald was standing in line to buy tickets to a U2 concert. He started playing poker with some of his fellow U2 fans, and suggested that the winner could take the losers’ tickets. A policeman stumbled on the game, which unbeknownst to Donald happened to be illegal, and arrested him. The students who read the scenario were asked how severely Donald should be punished and whether he seemed moral and decent, or depraved and offensive.