Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

This is why we effortlessly and sometimes unknowingly reinterpret our behaviour to make it seem that we had deliberately made the choices all along. We are constantly telling stories to make sense of our selves. In one study, adults were shown pairs of female faces and asked to choose which was the more attractive of the two women. 5On some trials, immediately after making their choice, the card with the picture of the chosen woman was held up and the participants were asked to explain why they had chosen her over the other. Was it her hairstyle or colour of her eyes? The cunning aspect of the study was that, on some of the trials, the experimenter used sleight of hand to switch the cards deliberately so that participants were asked to justify a choice they hadn’t made – to support the choice of the woman who they had actually just rejected. Not only were most switches undetected, but participants went on to give perfectly lucid explanations for why the woman was so much more attractive than the one they rejected. They were unaware that their choice was not their choice. It works for taste tests as well. When shoppers were asked to sample different jams and teas at a Swedish supermarket, again the researchers switched the products after the shoppers had selected the flavours they preferred and were asked to describe why they chose one flavour over another. Whether it was a switch from spicy cinnamon apple to sour grape jam, or from sweet mango to pungent Pernod-flavoured tea, the shoppers detected less than a third of the switches. 6It would seem that, once we have made a preference, we are committed to justifying our decision.

This shows just how easy it is to fool our selves into thinking that our self is in control. As Steven Pinker 7put it, ‘The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander-in-chief.’ Having been presented with a decision, we then make sense of it as if it were our own. Otherwise, it would suggest that we don’t know what we are doing, which is not something that most of us would readily admit.

Sour Grapes

That we can so readily justify our choices is at the heart of one of the ancient world’s best-known stories about our necessity to spin a story. One day a hungry fox came across a bunch of grapes that hung high on a vine but, despite repeated leaping attempts to reach them, the fox was unable to dislodge the grapes. Defeated, he left saying that he did not want them anyway because they were sour. He had changed his mind. Whenever we talk disparagingly about something that we initially wanted but did not get, we are said to be displaying ‘sour grapes’. It’s very common. How often have we all done this when faced with the prospect of loss? Consider all those job interviews that you failed to get. Remember those dates that went disastrously wrong or the competition you entered and lost? We console our selves with the excuse that we did not want the job anyway, the other person was a jerk or that we were not really trying to win. We may even focus on the negative aspects of being offered the job, getting a kiss or winning the competition. But we are conning our selves. Why do we do this?

Who would have thought that a Greek slave born over 2,500 years ago would have produced some of the most enduring commentaries on the human condition through his storytelling, which pre-empted recent theories in cognitive science? Remarkably, Aesop’s fables about animals behaving like humans endure not only because they are immediately accessible metaphors for the vagaries of human behaviour, but they also speak to fundamental truths. In the case of the fox and the sour grapes, Aesop is describing cognitive dissonance – one of the major psychological mechanisms discovered and researched over the last fifty years that has generated an estimated 3,000 plus studies.

Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by Leon Festinger in 1957, is the process of self-justification whereby we defend our actions and thoughts when they turn out to be wrong or, as in the case of sour grapes, ineffectual. 8We interpret our failure to attain a goal as actually turning out to be a good thing because, with hindsight, we reinterpret the goal as not really desirable. Otherwise, we are faced with the prospect that we have wasted a lot of work and effort to no avail. This discrepancy creates the cognitive dissonance. It’s a dissonance because, on the one hand, we believe that we are generally pretty successful at attaining our goals. On the other hand, we were unsuccessful at achieving this particular goal. This is the dissonance aspect of our reasoning – the unpleasant mental discomfort we experience. To avoid the conflict this dissonance creates, we reinterpret our failure as a success. We tell our selves that the goal was actually not in our best interests. Job done – no worries.

Freud similarly talked about defence mechanisms that we use to protect the self illusion. However, the self illusion sometimes has to reconcile incongruent thoughts and behaviours. For example, I may consider myself to be a good person but then have bad thoughts about someone. That is inconsistent with my good self-story so I employ defence mechanisms. I may rationalize my thoughts by saying that the person is actually bad and I am justified in my negative attitude towards them. Perversely, I may do the opposite and go out of my way to think of them positively as a compensation for my unconscious negativity in what Freud called ‘reaction formation’. Or I may project my negative feelings about a person on to their pet dog, and blame the poor mutt for my reasons of dislike, when it is actually his owner I despise. All of these are examples of why we try to reframe the unpleasant feelings that we have towards someone in order to maintain our valued sense of self – a self that is not unduly or unfairly judgemental of others.

It is worth pointing out that not only can justification happen at the level of the self, it can also happen at the level of groups. Probably the best recent example is the justification for the Iraq War on the basis of the alleged threat from weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The British general public was told that Saddam Hussein had missiles that could reach the mainland within the infamous forty-five-minute warning. The nation was shocked. Despite repeated assurance by United Nations inspection teams that there was no evidence for such WMDs, we were told that they were there and that we had to invade. After the invasion and once it was clear that there were no WMDs, the instigators had to justify their actions. We were told that the invasion was necessary on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who needed to be removed from power, even though such regime change was in violation of international law. We were told that if he did not have WMDs before, then he was planning on making them. The invasion was justified. We had been saved. It would appear that modern politicians do not need a thick skin so much as a carefully crafted capacity for mass cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance protects the self from conflicting stories and is at the heart of why the self illusion is so important but it also reveals the dangers that a strong sense of self can create. We use it to justify faulty reasoning. Although we do not appreciate it, our decision-making is actually the constellation of many processes vying for attention and in constant conflict. We fail to consider just how much of our decision-making is actually out of our control.

The Monty Hall Problem

There are essentially two problems with decision-making: either we ignore external information and focus on our own perspective or we fail to realize the extent to which our own perspective is actually determined by external influences. In both cases we are fools to believe that our self is making decisions independent of the external context. This can lead to some wondrous distortions of human reason.