Subliminal

Thompson had been a grocer, Thompson remembered him as the butcher from down the street. Moments later he forgot that “realization” and altered his story, remembering Sacks as a particular customer. Thompson’s understanding of his world, his situation, his self, was in a constant state of change, but he believed in each of the rapidly changing explanations he evolved in order to make sense of what he was seeing. As Sacks put it, Thompson “must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness.”

The term “confabulation” often signifies the replacement of a gap in one’s memory by a falsification that one believes to be true. But we also confabulate to fill in gaps in our knowledge about our feelings. We all have those tendencies. We ask ourselves or our friends questions like “Why do you drive that car?” or “Why do you like that guy?” or “Why did you laugh at that joke?” Research suggests that we think we know the answers to such questions, but really we often don’t. When asked to explain ourselves, we engage in a search for truth that may feel like a kind of introspection. But though we think we know what we are feeling, we often know neither the content nor the unconscious origins of that content. And so we come up with plausible explanations that are untrue or only partly accurate, and we believe them.²⁵ Scientists who study such errors have noticed that they are not haphazard.²⁶ They are regular and systematic. And they have their basis in a repository of social, emotional, and cultural information we all share.

IMAGINE YOU’RE BEING driven home from a cocktail party that was in the penthouse of a posh hotel. You remark that you had a lovely time, and your designated driver asks you what you liked about it. “The people,” you say. But did your joy really stem from the fascinating repartee with that woman who wrote the best seller about the virtues of a vegan diet? Or was it something far subtler, like the quality of the harp music? Or the scent of roses that filled the room? Or the expensive champagne you quaffed all night? If your response was not the result of true and accurate introspection, on what basis did you make it?

When you come up with an explanation for your feelings and behavior, your brain performs an action that would probably surprise you: it searches your mental database of cultural norms and picks something plausible. For example, in this case it might have looked up the entry “Why People Enjoy Parties” and chosen “the people” as the most likely hypothesis. That might sound like the lazy way, but studies suggest we take it: when asked how we felt, or will feel, we tend to reply with descriptions or predictions that conform to a set of standard reasons, expectations, and cultural and societal explanations for a given feeling.

If the picture I just painted is correct, there is an obvious consequence that can be tested by experiment. Accurate introspection makes use of our private knowledge of ourselves. Identifying a generic, social-and-cultural- norms explanation as the source of our feelings doesn’t. As a result, if we are truly in touch with our feelings, we should be able to make predictions about ourselves that are more accurate than predictions that others make about us; but if we merely rely on social norms to explain our feelings, outside observers should be just as accurate in predicting our feelings as we are, and ought to make precisely the same mistakes.

One context scientists used to examine this question is familiar to anyone involved in hiring.²⁷ Hiring is difficult because it is an important decision, and it is hard to know someone from the limited exposure afforded by an interview and a resume. If you’ve ever had to hire people, you might have asked yourself why you thought a particular individual was the right pick. No doubt you could always find justification, but in hindsight, are you sure you chose that person for the reasons you thought you did? Perhaps your reasoning went the other way— you got a feeling about someone, formed a preference, and then, retroactively, your unconscious employed social norms to explain your feelings about that person.

One doctor friend told me that he was certain he had gotten into the top-rated medical school he’d attended for only one reason: he had clicked with one of the professors who’d interviewed him; the man’s parents, like his, had immigrated from a certain town in Greece. After matriculating at the school he got to know that professor, who maintained that my friend’s scores, grades, and character—the criteria demanded by social norms—were the reasons their interview had gone so well. But my friend’s scores and grades were below that school’s average, and he still believes it was their shared family origin that really influenced the professor.

To explore why some people get the job and others don’t, and whether those doing the hiring are aware of what drove their choices, researchers recruited 128 volunteers. Each subject—all of them female—was asked to study and assess an in-depth portfolio describing a woman applying for a job as a counselor in a crisis intervention center. The documents included a letter of recommendation and a detailed report of an interview the applicant had had with the center’s director. After studying the portfolio, subjects were asked several questions regarding the applicant’s qualifications, including How intelligent do you think she is? How flexible? How sympathetic would she be toward clients’ problems? How much do you like her?

The key to the study is that the information given to different subjects differed in a number of details. For example, some subjects read portfolios showing that the applicant had finished second in her class in high school and was now an honor student in college, while others read that she had not yet decided whether to go to college; some saw a mention of the fact that the applicant was quite attractive, others learned nothing about her appearance; some read in the center director’s report that the applicant had spilled a cup of coffee on the director’s desk, while others saw no mention of such an incident; and some portfolios indicated that the applicant had been in a serious automobile accident, while others didn’t. Some subjects were told they’d later meet the applicant, while others were not. These variable elements were shuffled in all possible combinations to create dozens of distinct scenarios. By studying the correlation of the facts the subjects were exposed to, and the judgments they made, researchers could compute mathematically the influence of each piece of information on the subjects’ assessments. Their goal was to compare the actual influence of each factor to the subjects’ perception of each factor’s influence, and also to the predictions of outside observers who didn’t know the subjects.

In order to understand what the subjects thought influenced them, after assessing the applicant, the subjects were polled with regard to each question: Did you judge the applicant’s intelligence by her academic credentials? Were you swayed in your assessment of her likability by her physical attractiveness? Did the fact that she spilled a cup of coffee over the interviewer’s desk affect your assessment of how sympathetic she’d be? And so on. Also, in order to find out what an outside observer would guess the influence of each factor would be, another group of volunteers (“outsiders”) were recruited; they were not shown the portfolios but were simply asked to rate how much they thought each factor would influence a person’s judgment.

The facts that were revealed about the applicant had been cleverly chosen. Some, such as the applicant’s high grades, were factors that social norms dictate ought to exert a positive influence on those assessing the job application. The researchers expected both the subjects and the outsiders to name these factors as an influence. Other factors, such as the coffee-spilling incident and the anticipation of later meeting the applicant, were factors that social norms say nothing about in this regard. The researchers therefore expected the outsiders not to recognize their influence. However the researchers had chosen those factors because studies show that, contrary to the expectations dictated by the norms, they do have an effect on our judgment of people: an isolated pratfall such as the coffee-spilling incident tends to increase the likability of a generally competent-seeming person, and the anticipation of meeting an individual tends to improve your assessment of that individual’s personality.²⁸ The crucial question was whether the subjects, upon self-reflection, would do better than the outsiders and recognize that they’d been swayed by those surprisingly influential factors.

When the researchers examined the subjects’ and the outsiders’ answers, they found that they showed impressive agreement, and that both were way off the mark. Both groups appeared to draw their conclusions about which factors were influential from the social-norms explanations, while ignoring the actual reasons. For example, both the subjects and the outsiders said the coffee-spilling incident would not affect their liking of the applicant, yet it had the greatest effect of all the factors. Both groups expected that the academic factor would have a significant effect on their liking the applicant, but its effect was nil. And both groups reported that the expectation of meeting the applicant would have no effect, but it did. In case after case, both groups were wrong about which factors would not affect them and which factors would. As psychological theory had predicted, the subjects had shown no greater insight into themselves than the outsiders had.

EVOLUTION DESIGNED THE human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive. We observe ourselves and the world and make enough sense of things to get along. Some of us, interested in knowing ourselves more deeply—perhaps to make better life decisions, perhaps to live a richer life, perhaps out of curiosity —seek to get past our intuitive ideas of us. We can. We can use our conscious minds to study, to identify, and to