How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Influential rationalists like Smith and Hume made a point of emphasising the vast capacity humans show for empathy and altruism. Why then, if all these philosophers were so attuned to our admirable qualities, were their institutions (democracy, trade and industry) so often premised on pessimism? Why did they continue to cultivate a negative view of human nature?
We can trace the answer in one of David Hume’s books, in which the Scottish philosopher articulates precisely this contradiction in Enlightenment thought:
‘It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave: though at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact.’
In other words, Hume believed that we should act as though people have a selfish nature. Even though we know they don’t. When I realised this, a single word flashed through my mind: nocebo. Could this be the thing that the Enlightenment–and, by extension, our modern society–gets wrong? That we continually operate on a mistaken model of human nature?
In Chapter 1 we saw that some things can become true merely because we believe in them–that pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When modern economists assumed that people are innately selfish, they advocated policies that fostered self-serving behaviour. When politicians convinced themselves that politics is a cynical game, that’s exactly what it became.
So now we have to ask: could things be different?
Can we use our heads and harness rationality to design new institutions? Institutions that operate on a wholly different view of human nature? What if schools and businesses, cities and nations expect the best of people instead of presuming the worst?
These questions are the focus of the rest of this book.
Part Four
A NEW REALISM
‘So we have to be idealists in a way, because then we wind up as the true, the real realists.’
Viktor Frankl (1905–97)
1
I was nineteen when I attended my first lecture in philosophy. That morning, sitting under the bright fluorescent lights of an auditorium at Utrecht University, I made the acquaintance of British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). There and then, he became my new hero.
Besides being a brilliant logician and the founder of a revolutionary school, Russell was an early advocate for homosexuals, a freethinker who foresaw the Russian Revolution ending in misery, an anti-war activist who would be thrown behind bars for civil disobedience at the age of eighty-nine, author of more than sixty books and two thousand articles, and the survivor an aircraft crash. He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What I personally admired most about Russell was his intellectual integrity, his fidelity to truth. Russell understood the all-too-human proclivity to believe what suits us, and he resisted it his whole life. Time and again, he swam against the tide, knowing it would cost him dearly. One statement of his particularly stands out for me. In 1959, the BBC asked Russell what advice he would give future generations. He answered:
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts.
These words had a big impact on me. They came at a time when I’d begun to question my own faith in God. As a preacher’s son and member of a Christian student society, my instinct was to cast my doubts to the wind. I knew what I wanted: I wanted there to be life after death, for all the world’s wrongs to be made right in the hereafter and for us not to be on our own on this rock in the universe.
But from then on I would be haunted by Russell’s warning: ‘Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe.’
I’ve done my best, while writing this book.
Did I succeed in following Russell’s advice? I hope so. At the same time, I have my doubts. I know I needed a lot of help from critical readers to keep me on track. But then, to quote Russell himself, ‘None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.’ So if we aim to get as close as possible to the truth, we have to eschew certainty and question ourselves every step of the way. ‘The Will to Doubt’, Russell called this approach.
It wasn’t until years after learning about this British thinker that I discovered his maxim contained a reference. Russell coined the phrase ‘The Will to Doubt’ to place himself in opposition to another philosopher, an American named William James (1842–1910).
And this is who I want to tell you about now. William James was the mentor of Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many other leading lights of American history. He was a beloved figure. According to Russell, who’d met him, James was ‘full of the warmth of human kindness’.
Yet Russell was less enamoured of James’s ideas. In 1896, he had delivered a talk not about the will to doubt, but ‘The Will to Believe’. James professed that some things just have to be taken on faith, even if we can’t prove they’re true.
Take friendship. If you go around for ever doubting other people, you’ll behave in ways guaranteed to make you disliked. Things like friendship, love, trust and loyalty become true precisely because we believe in them. While James allowed that one’s belief could be proved wrong, he argued that ‘dupery through hope’ was preferable to ‘dupery through fear’.
Bertrand Russell didn’t go in for this kind of mental gymnastics. Much as he liked the man himself, he disliked James’s philosophy. The truth, he said, doesn’t deal in wishful thinking. For many years that was my motto, too–until I began to doubt doubt itself.
2
The year is 1963, four years after Russell’s interview with the BBC.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the young psychologist Bob Rosenthal decides to try a little experiment at his Harvard University lab. Beside two rat cages, he posts different signs identifying the rodents in one as specially trained intelligent specimens and in the other as dull and dim-witted.
Later that day, Rosenthal instructs his students to put the rats in a maze and record how long it takes each one to find its way out. What he doesn’t tell the students is that in fact none of the animals is special in any way–they’re all just ordinary lab rats.
But then something peculiar happens. The rats that the students believe to be brighter and faster really do perform better. It’s like magic. The ‘bright’ rats, though no different from their ‘dull’ counterparts, perform twice as well.
At first, no one believed Rosenthal. ‘I was having trouble publishing any of this,’ he recalled decades later.1 Even he had trouble initially accepting that there were no mysterious forces at play and that there’s a perfectly rational explanation. What Rosenthal came to realise is that his students handled the ‘bright’ rats–the ones of which they had higher expectations–more warmly and gently. This treatment changed the rats’ behaviour and enhanced their performance.
In the wake of his experiment, a radical idea took root in Rosenthal’s mind; a conviction that he had discovered an invisible yet fundamental force. ‘If rats became brighter when expected to,’ Rosenthal speculated in the magazine American Scientist, ‘then it should not be farfetched to think that children could become brighter when expected to by their teachers.’
A few weeks later, a letter arrived for the psychologist. It was from the principal of Spruce Elementary School in San Francisco, who had read Rosenthal’s article and extended an irresistible offer. ‘Please let me know whether I can be of assistance,’ she wrote.2 Rosenthal didn’t need to think twice. He immediately set to work designing a new exp
eriment. This time his subjects weren’t lab rats, but children.
When the new school year started, teachers at Spruce Elementary learned that an acclaimed scientist by the name of Dr Rosenthal would be administering a test to their pupils. This ‘Test of Inflected Acquisition’ indicated who would make the greatest strides at school that year.
In truth it was a common or garden IQ test, and, once the scores had been tallied, Rosenthal and his team cast them all aside. They tossed a coin to decide which kids they would tell teachers were ‘high-potentials’. The kids, meanwhile, were told nothing at all.
Sure enough, the power of expectation swiftly began to work its magic. Teachers gave the group of ‘smart’ pupils more attention, more encouragement and more praise, thus changing how the children saw themselves, too. The effect was clearest among the youngest kids, whose IQ scores increased by an average of twenty-seven points in a single year. The largest gains were among boys who looked Latino, a group typically subject to the lowest expectations in California.3
Rosenthal dubbed his discovery the Pygmalion Effect, after the mythological sculptor who fell so hard for one of his own creations that the gods decided to bring his statue to life. Beliefs we’re devoted to–whether they’re true or imagined–can likewise come to life, effecting very real change in the world. The Pygmalion Effect resembles the placebo effect (which I discussed in Chapter 1), except, instead of benefiting oneself, these are expectations that benefit others.
At first I thought a study this old would surely have been debunked by now, like all those other mediagenic experiments from the 1960s.
Not at all. Fifty years on, the Pygmalion Effect remains an important finding in psychological research. It’s been tested by hundreds of studies in the army, at universities, in courtrooms, in families, in nursing homes and within organisations.4 True, the effect isn’t always as strong as Rosenthal initially thought, especially when it comes to how children perform on IQ tests. Nonetheless, a critical review study in 2005 concluded that ‘the abundant naturalistic and experimental evidence shows that teacher expectations clearly do influence students–at least sometimes’.5 High expectations can be a powerful tool. When wielded by managers, employees perform better. When wielded by officers, soldiers fight harder. When wielded by nurses, patients recover faster.
Despite this, Rosenthal’s discovery didn’t spark the revolution he and his team had hoped for. ‘The Pygmalion Effect is great science that is underapplied,’ an Israeli psychologist has lamented. ‘It hasn’t made the difference it should have in the world, and that’s very disappointing.’6
I’ve got more bad news: just as positive expectations have very real effects, nightmares can come true, too. The flip side of the Pygmalion Effect is what’s known as the Golem Effect, named after the Jewish legend in which a creature meant to protect the citizens of Prague instead turns into a monster. Like the Pygmalion Effect, the Golem Effect is ubiquitous. When we have negative expectations about someone, we don’t look at them as often. We distance ourselves from them. We don’t smile at them as much. Basically, we do exactly what Rosenthal’s students did when they released the ‘stupid’ rats into the maze.
Research on the Golem Effect is scant, which is not surprising, given the ethical objections to subjecting people to negative expectations. But what we do know is shocking. Take the study done by psychologist Wendell Johnson in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939. He split twenty orphans up into two groups, telling one that they were good, articulate speakers and the other that they were destined to become stutterers. Now infamously known as ‘The Monster Study’, this experiment left multiple individuals with lifelong speech impediments.7
The Golem Effect is a kind of nocebo: a nocebo that causes poor pupils to fall further behind, the homeless to lose hope and isolated teenagers to radicalise. It’s also one of the insidious mechanisms behind racism, because when you’re subjected to low expectations, you won’t perform at your best, which further diminishes others’ expectations and thus further undermines your performance. There’s also evidence to suggest that the Golem Effect and its vicious cycle of mounting negative expectations can run entire organisations into the ground.8
3
The Pygmalion and Golem Effects are woven into the fabric of our world. Every day, we make each other smarter or stupider, stronger or weaker, faster or slower. We can’t help leaking expectations, through our gazes, our body language and our voices. My expectations about you define my attitude towards you, and the way I behave towards you in turn influences your expectations and therefore your behaviour towards me.
If you think about it, this gets to the very crux of the human condition. Homo puppy is like an antenna, constantly attuned to other people. Somebody else’s finger gets trapped in the door and you flinch. A tightrope walker balances on a thin cord and you feel your own stomach lurch. Someone yawns and it’s almost impossible for you not to yawn as well. We’re hardwired to mirror one another.
Most of the time, this mirroring works well. It fosters connections and good vibes, as when everybody’s grooving together on the dance floor. Our natural instinct to mirror others tends to be seen in a positive light for precisely this reason, but the instinct works two ways. We also mirror negative emotions such as hatred, envy and greed.9 And when we adopt one another’s bad ideas–thinking them to be ideas everybody around us holds–the results can be downright disastrous.
Take economic bubbles. Back in 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes concluded that there was a striking parallel between financial markets and beauty pageants. Imagine you’re presented with a hundred contestants, but, rather than picking your own favourite, you have to indicate which one others will prefer.10 In this kind of situation, our inclination is to guess what other people will think. Likewise, if everybody thinks everybody else thinks that the value of a share will go up, then the share value goes up. This can go on for a long time, but eventually the bubble bursts. That happened, for example, when tulip mania hit Holland in January 1637, and a single tulip bulb briefly sold for more than ten times the annual wage of a skilled craftsman, only to become all but worthless days later.
Bubbles of this kind are not isolated to the financial world. They’re everywhere. Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, once gave a brilliant demonstration during a college lecture. To explain his field of behavioural economics, he provided the class with what sounded like an extremely technical definition. Unbeknown to the students, however, all the terms he used had been generated by a computer, cobbled together in a series of random words and sentences to produce gibberish about ‘dialectic enigmatic theory’ and ‘neodeconstructive rationalism’.
Ariely’s students–at one of the world’s top universities–listened with rapt attention to this linguistic mash-up. Minutes ticked by. No one laughed. No one raised their hand. No one gave any sign they didn’t understand.
‘And this brings us to the big question…’ Ariely finally concluded. ‘Why has no one asked me what the #$?@! I’m talking about?’11
In psychology circles, what happened in that classroom is known as pluralistic ignorance–and, no, this isn’t a term generated by a machine. Individually, Ariely’s students found his narrative impossible to follow, but because they saw their classmates listening attentively, they assumed the problem was them. (This phenomenon is no doubt familiar to readers who have attended conferences on topics like ‘disruptive co-creation in the network society’.)
Though harmless in this instance, research shows that the effects of pluralistic ignorance can be disastrous–even fatal. Consider binge drinking. Survey college students on their own, and most will say drinking themselves into oblivion isn’t their favourite pastime. But because they assume other students are big fans of drinking, they try to keep up and everyone winds up puking in the gutter.
Researchers have compiled reams of data demonstrating that this kind of negative spiral can also factor into deeper societal evils like racism, gang rape,
honour killings, support for terrorists and dictatorial regimes, even genocide.12 While condemning these acts in their own minds, perpetrators fear they’re alone and therefore decide to go with the flow. After all, if there’s one thing Homo puppy struggles with, it’s standing up to the group. We prefer a pound of the worst kind of misery over a few ounces of shame or social discomfort.
This led me to wonder: what if our negative ideas about human nature are actually a form of pluralistic ignorance? Could our fear that most people are out to maximise their own gain be born of the assumption that that’s what others think? And then we adopt a cynical view when, deep down, most of us are yearning for a life of more kindness and solidarity?
I’m reminded sometimes of how ants can get trapped crawling in circles. Ants are programmed to follow each other’s pheromone trails. This usually results in neat trails of ants, but occasionally a group will get sidetracked and wind up ‘travelling’ in a continuous circle. Tens of thousands of ants can get trapped rotating in circles hundreds of feet wide. Blindly they carry on, until they succumb to exhaustion and lack of food and die.
Every now and then families, organisations, even entire countries seem to get caught in these kinds of spirals. We keep going around in circles, assuming the worst about each other. Few of us move to resist and so we march to our own downfall.
It’s been fifty years since Bob Rosenthal’s career began, and to this day he still wants to figure out how we can use the power of expectation to our advantage. Because he knows that, like hatred, trust can also be contagious.
Humankind Page 22