You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  This behavior is more likely to show up when the task at hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder. You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out. Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast.

  Sports scientists over the years have informed coaches of this behavior, so now most major teams isolate each player when they’re trying to evaluate them, going so far as to film them individually with a different camera so the player won’t fall prey to social loafing. This phenomenon has been observed in every possible situation involving group effort. Communal farms always produce less than individually owned farms. Factories where people do repetitive tasks with no supervision are less productive than ones where each person has an individual quota to reach.

  Be aware, most organizations know all about social loafing these days; somewhere up the chain a psychologist has ratted you out. So it’s likely, especially if you work for a corporation, that your output is being monitored in some way and you are being told about it so you’ll work harder. They know when it comes to group effort, you are not so smart.

  36

  The Illusion of Transparency

  THE MISCONCEPTION: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.

  THE TRUTH: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.

  You stand in front of your public speaking class with your notes centered on the lectern, your stomach performing gymnastics. You sat through all the other speeches, tapping the floor, transferring nervous energy into the tiles through a restless foot, periodically wiping your sweaty hands off on your pants. Each time the speaker concluded and the class applauded, you clapped along with everyone else, and as it subsided you realized how loud your heart was thumping when a fresh silence settled. Finally, the instructor called your name, and your eyes cranked open. You felt as if you had eaten a spoonful of sawdust as you walked up to the blackboard, planting each foot carefully so as not to stumble. As you begin to speak the lines you’ve rehearsed, you search the faces of your classmates.

  “Why is he smiling? What is she scribbling? Is that a frown?”

  “Oh no,” you think, “they can see how nervous I am.

  “I must look like an idiot. I’m bombing, aren’t I? This is horrible. Please let a meteor hit this classroom before I have to say another word.”

  “I’m sorry,” you say to the audience. “Let me start over.”

  Now it’s even worse. What kind of moron apologizes in the middle of a speech? Your voice quavers. Flop sweat gathers behind your neck. You become certain your skin must be glowing red and everyone in the room is holding back laughter. Except, they aren’t. They are just bored. Your anxiety is peaking, and it feels like waves of emotional energy must be radiating from your head in some sort of despair halo, but there is nothing to see on the outside other than your facial expressions and flushed skin. To get information out of one head and into another, it has to be transmitted through some sort of communication. Faces, sounds, gestures, words like the ones you are reading now—we must depend on these clunky tools because no matter how strong an emotion or how powerful an idea, it never seems as intense or potent to the world outside your mind as it does to the one within. This is the illusion of transparency.

  You know what you are feeling and thinking, and you tend to believe those thoughts and emotions are leaking out of your pores, visible to the world, perceivable to the outside. You overestimate how obvious what you truly think must be and fail to recognize that other people are in their own little bubble, thinking the same thing about their inner worlds. When you try to imagine what other people are thinking, you have no choice but to start from inside your noggin. In there, among your inescapable self, you think your thoughts and feelings must be evident. Sure, when people are paying attention, they can read you to an extent, but you grossly overestimate how much so.

  You can test the illusion of transparency using a method created by Elizabeth Newton.

  Pick a song everyone knows, like your national anthem, and have someone else sit across from you. Now tap out the song with your fingertips. After a verse or two, ask the other person what you were tapping. In your mind, you can hear every note, every instrument. In their mind, they can hear your fingers tapping. Pause here and try it out. I’ll wait.

  OK. I’m going to assume you’ve been tapping. How did you do? Did they figure out what you were trying to play? Probably not. In Newton’s study, the tappers predicted the listeners would be able to guess the tune half of the time, but the listeners correctly guessed about 3 percent of the songs.

  The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably led to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and e-mails. If you are like me, you often have to back up and restate your case, or answer questions about your tone, or reword everything and try sending it again.

  On the Internet, people often include “/s” at the end of a statement to indicate sarcasm (it’s a programming joke, essentially meaning “conclude sarcasm”). It was so hard to communicate tone online we had to create a new punctuation mark. Getting an idea out of one head and into another is difficult, and much can be lost in the information transfer. An insight that slams into you like an avalanche won’t have the same impact coming out of your mouth or fingertips.

  In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky published their research on the illusion of transparency. They reasoned your subjective experience, or phenomenology, was so potent you would have a hard time seeing beyond it when you were in a heightened emotional state. Their hypothesis was based on the spotlight effect—the belief everyone is looking right at you, judging your actions and appearance, when in reality you disappear into the background most of the time. Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky figured the effect was so powerful it made you feel as if the imaginary spotlight could penetrate your gestures, words, and expressions and reveal your private world as well. They had Cornell students divide into groups. An audience would listen as individuals read questions from index cards and then answered them out loud. They either lied or told the truth based on what the card said to do on a label only they could see. Audience members were told they would get prizes based on how many liars they detected. Liars would say something like “I have met David Letterman.” They then had to guess how many people could tell they had lied, while the audience tried to figure out who out of the five were fibbing. The results? Half of the liars thought they had been caught, but only a quarter were—they strongly overestimated their transparency. In subsequent experiments the variables were shuffled around and the lies presented in other ways; the results were nearly identical.

  Studies in the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your own lies will be easy to detect. Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky moved on to another experiment. They sat students down in front of a video camera and a row of fifteen cups filled with red liquid. They asked to students to hide their expressions as they tasted the beverages, because five of the drinks were going to be rat nasty. They then had ten people watch the tape and asked the students who did the tasting to estimate how many of the observers would be able to tell when they had imbibed something gross. About a third of the observers could tell when people were disgusted, or at least they said they could and guessed well. The people doing the tasting predicted about half would be able to see through their attempts to hide revulsion. The illusion of transparency jacked up the powers of observation they imagined in their judges.

  Pushing ahead, the researchers tried another experiment based on the research of Miller and McF
arland on the bystander effect (the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one person will leap into action). Once again, their research showed when people were in a situation in which they felt concerned and alarmed, they assumed it was written all over their faces, when in reality it wasn’t. So no one acted. In turn, they thought if other people were freaking out, they would be able to see it. In 2003, Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich conducted a study to determine if they could short-circuit the illusion of transparency. They had people give public speeches on the spot and then rate how nervous they thought they looked to their audience. Sure enough, they said they looked like a wreck, but the onlookers didn’t notice it. Still, in this experiment some people got stuck in a feedback loop. They thought they appeared nervous, so they started to try and compensate, and then they thought the compensation was noticeable and tried to cover that up, which they then felt was more obvious, and so on, until they’d worked themselves up into a state where they were obviously freaking out. The researchers decided to run the experiment again, but this time they explained the illusion of transparency to some of the subjects, telling them they might feel like everyone could see them losing it, but they probably couldn’t. This time, the feedback loop was broken. Those told about the illusion felt less stressed, gave better speeches, and the audiences said they were more composed.

  When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail. Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.

  When you get near the person you have a crush on and feel the war drums in your gut, don’t freak out. You don’t look as nervous as you feel. When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can’t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile. When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she can’t hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.

  If you are trying to communicate something complex, if you have vast knowledge of a subject and someone else does not, realize it is going to be difficult to get it across the gulf between your brain and theirs. The explanation process may become thorny, but don’t take it out on the other person. Just because that person can’t see inside your mind doesn’t mean he or she is not so smart. You don’t suddenly become telepathic when you are angry, anxious, or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.

  37

  Learned Helplessness

  THE MISCONCEPTION: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it.

  THE TRUTH: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.

  In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.

  He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov—the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment. After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves. He figured if the dog rang the bell, it would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn’t. It just sat there and braced itself. They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it. When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before or had previously been allowed to escape and tried to zap it—it jumped the fence.

  You are just like these dogs.

  If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you convince yourself over time that there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act—you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

  Studies of the clinically depressed show that they often give in to defeat and stop trying. The average person will look for external forces to blame when he or she fails the midterm. People will say the professor is an asshole, or they didn’t get enough sleep. But depressed people will often blame themselves and assume they are stupid. Seligman called this your explanatory style. You see events affecting your life along three gradients: personal, permanent, and pervasive. If you blame yourself or blame forces beyond your control, it hurts more. If you believe the situation will never change, sadness is stronger than if you believe tomorrow things will be better. If you think your problems affect every element of your existence instead of just a specific element of your life, once again, you feel far worse. Pessimism sits on one side of the gradient and optimism on the other. The more pessimistic your explanatory style, the easier it is to slip into learned helplessness.

  Do you vote?

  If not, is it because you think it doesn’t matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn’t count? Yeah, that’s learned helplessness.

  When battered women, or hostages, or abused children, or longtime prisoners refuse to escape, they don’t because they have accepted the futility of trying. What does it matter? Those who do get out of bad situations often have a hard time committing to anything that may lead to failure. Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state.

  In another study by Seligman, he grafted cancer cells into rats so they would develop fatal tumors. The rats were then given routine electric shocks, but some had an opportunity to escape by pressing a lever. Another group received no shocks at all. One month later, 63 percent of the rats who could escape rejected their tumors. By comparison, 54 percent of the group who were not shocked rejected theirs. The survival rate of the group forced to bear the shocks was only 23 percent. Rats suffering from cancer will die faster if placed in an inescapable situation.

  A study in 1976 by Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity are encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and well-being of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active. This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts. In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment. When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.

  Psychologist Charisse Nixon at Penn State Erie shows her students how learned helplessness works by having them complete word unscrambling tests. She asks her students to rearrange the letters in words so they create new words. She asks her class to do this one word at a time: “whirl,” “slapstick,” “cinerama.” Try it yourself, but don’t move to the next word until you finish the first. If you were in Nixon’s classroom, as you were working on the first word she would ask for everyone who was already finished to raise their hands, and then you would look up and see half the class was ready to move on. Nixon then tells everyone to go to the next word, and once again everyone but you and a few others raises a hand. Again, she repeats this for the third word, and again half the class gets it quickly while the rest sits dumbfounded. The trick in her informal study is that half the class gets the words above, and the other half gets: “bat,” “lemon,” “cinerama.” “Bat” is easily turned into “tab,” and “lemon” becomes “melon” just as easily. So when the half with the easy words gets to “cinerama,” they find it simple to unscramble it into American. If you acted like most people, you would feel weird and in
adequate as the hands went in the air while you looked at “whirl” and turned it over in your head searching for another word to make from the letters. “If this is so easy, what is wrong with me?” Then comes “slapstick,” and now you feel even dumber, as half your peers seem to have no problem figuring it out. Now, with learned helplessness in full effect, you see “cinerama” differently from the now confident others with the easy word tasks. Even though it shouldn’t be too tough, learned helplessness tells you to give up. In Nixon’s classes, this is what usually happens. The half with the impossible words gives in by the third word.

  The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources. If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an automatic shutdown. At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die. If you stop, there is a chance the bad thing will go away.

  Every day you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate—your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customize your ring tone, you paint your room, you collect stamps. You choose.