by Robin Hanson
“Oh, doctor, I didn’t want to move my arm because I have arthritis in my shoulder and it hurts.” Or this is from another patient: “Oh, the medical students have been prodding me all day and I don’t really feel like moving my arm just now.”
When asked to raise both hands, one man raised his right hand high into the air and said, when he detected my gaze locked onto his motionless left hand, “Um, as you can see, I’m steadying myself with my left hand in order to raise my right.”8
Apart from their bizarre denials, these patients are otherwise mentally healthy and intelligent human beings. But no amount of cross-examination can persuade them of what’s plainly true—that their left arms are paralyzed. They will confabulate and rationalize and forge counterfeit reasons until they’re blue in the face.
Meanwhile, the rest of us—healthy, whole-brained people—are confronted every day with questions that ask us to explain our behavior. Why did you storm out of the meeting? Why did you break up with your boyfriend? Why haven’t you done the dishes? Why did you vote for Barack Obama? Why are you a Christian? Each of these questions demands a reason, and in most cases we dutifully oblige. But how many of our explanations are legitimate, and how many are counterfeit? Just how pervasive is our tendency to rationalize?
INTRODUCING THE PRESS SECRETARY
We need to be careful about drawing abrupt conclusions from research on brain-damaged subjects. The fact that stroke victims and split-brain patients confabulate doesn’t necessarily imply that healthy, whole-brained humans do the same. The brain is an intricate organ, and it’s no surprise that destroying some of its parts, whether by stroke or by surgery, can cause it to behave strangely—to do things it was never designed to do.
So what is the brain designed to do?
Well, what Gazzaniga concludes from his years of research, including later work on healthy patients, is that all human brains contain a system he calls the “interpreter module.”9 The job of this module is to interpret or make sense of our experiences by constructing explanations: stories that integrate information about the past and present, and about oneself and the outside world. This interpreter works to the best of its abilities given the information available to it. So in whole-brained patients, when information is flowing freely between the two hemispheres, the explanations produced by the interpreter typically make a lot of sense. But when the information flow breaks down, whether because of brain damage or any other reason, the interpreter is forced to weave more tenuous, inventive explanations, or even whole-cloth fabrications.
The key question regarding the interpreter is this: For whom does it interpret? Is it for an internal audience, that is, the rest of the brain, or for an external audience, that is, other people? The answer is both, but the outward-facing function is surprisingly important and often underemphasized. This has led many thinkers, including Dan Dennett, Jonathan Haidt, and Robert Kurzban, to give the interpreter module a more memorable name: the Press Secretary (see Box 6).
Box 6: “Press Secretary”
When we capitalize “Press Secretary,” we’re referring to the brain module responsible for explaining our actions, typically to third parties. The lowercase version of “press secretary” refers to the job held by someone in relation to a president or prime minister.
The idea here is that there’s a structural similarity between what the interpreter module does for the brain and what a traditional press secretary does for a president or prime minister. Here’s Haidt from The Righteous Mind:
If you want to see post hoc reasoning [i.e., rationalization] in action, just watch the press secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Reporters then challenge assertions and bring up contradictory quotes from the politician, or even quotes straight from the press secretary on previous days. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: “Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.”
Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re simply told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.10
Press secretaries—along with their corporate cousins, public relations teams—fill an interesting niche at the boundary between organizations and the outside world. They’re close enough to the actual decision-makers to be privy to some important details, but not close enough to get the full scoop. In fact, many press secretaries excel at their jobs with remarkably little contact with the president.11 Crucially, however, when talking to the press, they don’t differentiate between answers based on privileged information and answers that are mere educated guesses. They don’t say, “I think this is what the administration is doing.” They speak authoritatively—like the left hemisphere of the split-brain patient who declared, “I wanted to go get a Coke.” In fact, press secretaries actively exploit this ambiguity, hoping their educated guesses will be taken for matters of fact. Their job is to give explanations that are sometimes genuine and sometimes counterfeit, and to make it all but impossible for their audiences to tell the difference.
Press secretaries also provide a buffer between the president and reporters probing for sensitive, potentially damaging information. Remember how knowledge can sometimes be dangerous? Press secretaries can use strategic ignorance to their advantage in ways that a president, who must typically remain informed, can’t. In particular, what press secretaries don’t know, they can’t accidentally betray to the press. “I do my best work,” says William Bailey, the fictional press secretary on TV’s The West Wing, “when I’m the least-informed person in the room.”
This is what makes the role of press secretary so hazardous—epistemically if not also morally. It’s structured to deliver counterfeit explanations, but also to make those explanations hard to detect, which is as close as you can get without actually lying.
Press secretaries and public relations teams exist in the world because they’re incredibly useful to the organizations that employ them. They’re a natural response to the mixed-motive incentives that organizations face within their broader ecosystems. And the argument that Kurzban, Dennett, and others have made is that our brains respond to the same incentives by developing a module analogous to a president’s press secretary.
Above all, it’s the job of our brain’s Press Secretary to avoid acknowledging our darker motives—to tiptoe around the elephant in the brain. Just as a president’s press secretary should never acknowledge that the president is pursuing a policy in order to get reelected or to appease his financial backers, our brain’s Press Secretary will be reluctant to admit that we’re doing things for purely personal gain, especially when that gain may come at the expense of others. To the extent that we have such motives, the Press Secretary would be wise to remain strategically ignorant of them.
What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds. In other words, the parts of the mind that we identify with, the parts we think of as our conscious selves (“I,” “myself,” “my conscious ego”), are the ones responsible for strategically spinning the truth for an external audience.
This realization flies in the face of common sense. In everyday life, there’s a strong bias toward treating the self as the mind’s ultimate decision-maker—the iron-fisted monarch, or what Dennett calls the mind’s Boss or Central Executive.12 As Harry Truman said about his presidency, “The buck stops here”—and we often imagine the same is true of the self. But the conclusion from the past 40 years of social psychology is that the self acts less like an autocrat and more like a press secretary. In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them. “You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, �
�A most judicious choice, sire.’ “
In other words, even we don’t have particularly privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re pretty good at introspection, but that’s largely an illusion. In a way we’re almost like outsiders within our own minds.
Perhaps no one understands this conclusion better than Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist who’s made a long career studying the perils of introspection. Starting with an influential paper published in 197713 and culminating in his book Strangers to Ourselves, published in 2002, Wilson has meticulously documented how shockingly little we understand about our own minds.
Wilson writes about the “adaptive unconscious,” the parts of the mind which lie outside the scope of conscious awareness, but which nevertheless give rise to many of our judgments, emotions, thoughts, and even behaviors. “To the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconscious,” writes Wilson, “they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them.” He goes on:
Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture.14
This, then, is the key sleight-of-hand at the heart of our psychosocial problems: We pretend we’re in charge, both to others and even to ourselves, but we’re less in charge than we think. We pose as privileged insiders, when in fact we’re often making the same kind of educated guesses that any informed outsider could make. We claim to know our own minds, when, as Wilson says, we’re more like “strangers to ourselves.”
The upshot is that every time we give a reason, there’s a risk we’re just making things up. Every “because” clause, every answer to a “Why?” question, every justification or explanation of a motive—every one of these is suspect. Not all will turn out to be rationalizations, but any of them could be, and a great many are.
SNEAKING PAST THE GATEKEEPER
For those of us who want to understand what’s really going on in our minds, the Press Secretary module poses a problem. It acts as a gatekeeper, an information broker, helping the rest of the brain (the “administration”) conceal its secrets by presenting the most positive, defensible face to the outside world. We’d like to peer inside the mind—to understand what the administration is up to—but the Press Secretary controls so much of the information flow, and it’s a notorious spin doctor.
Our challenge in this chapter, then, as well the rest of the book, is to sneak past the gatekeeper,15 to catch a glimpse of what’s really going on in the mind, behind the Press Secretary’s smoke screen. We’ve already seen one fruitful approach: studying split-brain patients and stroke victims. In such patients, the Press Secretary is partially incapacitated, cut off from vital sources of information that would normally be available to it. But there’s another time-honored approach to sneaking past the gatekeeper—misdirecting it.
One of the striking facts about social psychology is how many experiments rely on an element of misdirection. It’s almost as if the entire field is based on the art of distracting the Press Secretary in order to expose its rationalizations.
In one classic study, researchers sent subjects home with boxes of three “different” laundry detergents, and asked them to evaluate which worked best on delicate clothes.16 All three detergents were identical, though the subjects had no idea. Crucially, however, the three boxes were different. One was a plain yellow, another blue, and the third was blue with “splashes of yellow.”
In their evaluations, subjects expressed concerns about the first two detergents and showed a distinct preference for the third. They said that the detergent in the yellow box was “too strong” and that it ruined their clothes. The detergent in the blue box, meanwhile, left their clothes looking dirty. The detergent in the third box (blue with yellow splashes), however, had a “fine” and “wonderful” effect on their delicate clothes.
Here again, as in the split-brain experiments, we (third parties with privileged information) know what’s really going on. The subjects simply preferred the blue-and-yellow box. But because they were asked to evaluate the detergents, and because they thought the detergents were actually different, their Press Secretaries were tricked into making up counterfeit explanations.
Analogous studies involving other products, like wine and pantyhose, have found similar results.17 The experimental deception in all these studies is the same: An identical product is presented as many “different” products in order to measure how suggestible people are to packaging, presentation, brand, and other framing effects. In each case, the Press Secretary makes up reasons it thinks are legitimate: “Oh, this wine is a lot sweeter,” or “These pantyhose are so smooth.” But since the products are identical, we know the reasons must be rationalizations.18
In an even more deceptive experiment, researchers showed male subjects pairs of photos of female faces. For each pair, the subjects were asked to point to the face they found more attractive. What the subjects didn’t realize is that, after they pointed to their chosen photograph, the researcher used sleight of hand to slip them the other photograph, the one they didn’t choose. The subjects were then asked to explain their “choice.” Not only did a clear majority of participants fail to notice the switch, but after being given the wrong photograph, they often proceeded to give concrete and specific reasons for their “choice.” “She looks like an aunt of mine I think, and she seems nicer than the other one.” Or “She’s radiant. I would rather have approached her at a bar than the other one. I like earrings!” (The other woman, the subject’s actual choice, was not wearing earrings.) Even under the best conditions—unlimited time to make the choice, pairs of women with different hair colors or styles—the subjects realized they had been deceived only about a third of the time. In most trials, the subject’s Press Secretary was perfectly happy to rationalize a decision the subject didn’t actually make.19
Another technique involves detecting counterfeit reasons statistically. Here the idea is to split people into two groups, vary a parameter or two between the groups, then notice how the groups give conflicting reasons for their behavior. Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson gave a great demonstration of this technique in the 1977 study we mentioned earlier (“Telling More Than We Can Know”). Subjects were split into two groups. Each group watched a short video of a teacher with a foreign accent, then rated the teacher’s overall likability as well as his appearance, mannerisms, and accent. The only difference between the two groups was the way the teacher related to his students. In one group, he was warm and friendly; in the other group, cold and hostile. Otherwise his appearance, mannerisms, and accent were the same.
Subjects in the warm condition obviously liked the teacher more—and, because of the halo effect, they also rated his other attributes higher. But when subjects were asked whether the teacher’s overall likability had influenced their judgments about his other attributes, they strongly denied it. In fact, many of them said it was the other way around—that it was the teacher’s appearance, mannerisms, and accent that determined whether they liked him. In other words, subjects couldn’t “see” that it was actually the teacher’s behavior that had influenced their judgments, and so instead many of them made up bogus explanations for how they had formed their opinions.20
RATIONALIZATION IN REAL LIFE
We’ve seen how to catch rationalizations in the lab. Now our task is to spot this kind of behavior in the wild.
Let’s start with a simple case involving Kevin’s nephew Landon. Here’s the scene: It’s 8 p.m. and time for Landon to go to bed. He’s three years old and in the midst of potty training. His mom asks if he needs to use the toilet before tucking him in for the night. Landon says no, so she gives him a kiss, turns out the light, and shuts the door. Five minutes later he calls out, “Mommy, I need to go potty!” She takes him to the bathroom and then back to bed. But five minutes later he’s calli
ng again, “Mommy, I need to go potty!”
At this point, we can roll our eyes. Clearly Landon doesn’t need to use the bathroom. And he’s far from alone in this behavior. On parenting forums, some moms even describe perfectly potty-trained children who, after being denied their third or fourth consecutive bathroom request, will wet themselves (just a bit) to prove how serious they are. But they aren’t fooling anyone; no one with a healthy bladder needs to pee that frequently. Instead these toddlers simply don’t want to go to sleep—that’s their true motive—and they’re using “potty” as a bedtime stalling tactic. It’s an excuse, a pretext, a counterfeit reason.
Adults, of course, are more cunning about their counterfeit reasons, and it’s commensurately harder to catch them in the act. Adult Press Secretaries are highly trained professionals, their skills honed through years of hard experience; above all, they know how to give rationalizations that are plausible. And thus when we (outsiders) are faced with a suspicious reason, it’s almost impossible to prove that it’s counterfeit. Remember people are often convinced they’re telling the truth, and they’ll sometimes go to great lengths to prove it—not unlike a toddler wetting herself to “prove” that her bathroom need was legitimate.
We, your two coauthors, can also give examples from our own lives. Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress.