Subliminal

least two of them had to be wrong, Rokeach wondered how they would process this idea. There were precedents. In a famous seventeenth-century case a fellow named Simon Morin was sent to a madhouse for making the same claim. There he met another Jesus and “was so struck with the folly of his companion that he acknowledged his own.” Unfortunately, he subsequently reverted to his original belief and, like Jesus, ended up being killed—in this case, burned at the stake for blasphemy. No one was burned in Ypsilanti. One patient, like Morin, relinquished his belief; the second saw the others as mentally ill, but not himself; and the third managed to dodge the issue completely. So in this case, two out of the three patients managed to hang on to a self-image at odds with reality. The disconnect may be less extreme, but the same could be said to be true even of many of us who don’t believe we can walk on water. If we probed—or, in many cases, simply bothered to pay attention—most of us would notice that our self-image and the more objective image that others have of us are not quite in sync.

By the time we were two, most of us had a sense of ourselves as social agents.¹⁶ Around the time we learned that diapers are not a desirable fashion statement, we began to actively engage with adults to construct visions of our own past experiences. By kindergarten, we were able to do that without adult help. But we had also learned that people’s behavior is motivated by their desires and beliefs. From that time onward, we’ve had to reconcile the person we would like to be with the person whose thoughts and actions we live with each moment of every day.

I’ve talked a lot about how research psychologists reject much of Freudian theory, but one idea Freudian therapists and experimental psychologists agree on today is that our ego fights fiercely to defend its honor. This agreement is a relatively recent development. For many decades, research psychologists thought of people as detached observers who assess events and then apply reason to discover truth and decipher the nature of the social world.¹⁷ We were said to gather data on ourselves and to build our self-images based on generally good and accurate inferences. In that traditional view, a well-adjusted person was thought to be like a scientist of the self, whereas an individual whose self-image was clouded by illusion was regarded as vulnerable to, if not already a victim of, mental illness. Today, we know that the opposite is closer to the truth. Normal and healthy individuals—students, professors, engineers, lieutenant colonels, doctors, business executives—tend to think of themselves as not just competent but proficient, even if they aren’t.

Doesn’t the business executive, noting that her department keeps missing its numbers, question her own abilities? Or the lieutenant colonel, noting that he can’t seem to shed that prefix, wonder whether he’s fit to be a colonel? How do we convince ourselves that we’ve got talent and that when the promotion goes to the other guy, it’s only because the boss was misguided?

As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. The human mind is designed to be both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe. Together these approaches vie to create our worldview.

Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn’t seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions. For example, if you’re at the races, it is rational to bet on the horse you believe is fastest, but it doesn’t make sense to believe a horse is fastest because you bet on it. Similarly, it makes sense to choose a job you believe is appealing, but it’s irrational to believe a job is appealing because you’ve accepted the offer. Still, even though in each case the latter approach doesn’t make rational sense, it is the irrational choice that would probably make you happier. And the mind generally seems to opt for happy. In both these instances, the research indicates, it is the latter choice that people are likely to make.¹⁸ The “causal arrow” in human thought processes consistently tends to point from belief to evidence, not vice versa.¹⁹

As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker. We’ve seen in earlier chapters how the unconscious mind is a master at using limited data to construct a version of the world that appears realistic and complete to its partner, the conscious mind. Visual perception, memory, and even emotion are all constructs, made of a mix of raw, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting data. We use the same kind of creative process to generate our self-image. When we paint our picture of self, our attorney-like unconscious blends fact and illusion, exaggerating our strengths, minimizing our weaknesses, creating a virtually Picassoesque series of distortions in which some parts have been blown up to enormous size (the parts we like) and others shrunk to near invisibility. The rational scientists of our conscious minds then innocently admire the self-portrait, believing it to be a work of photographic accuracy.

Psychologists call the approach taken by our inner advocate “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning helps us to believe in our own goodness and competence, to feel in control, and to generally see ourselves in an overly positive light. It also shapes the way we understand and interpret our environment, especially our social environment, and it helps us justify our preferred beliefs. Still, it isn’t possible for 40 percent to squeeze into the top 5 percent, for 60 percent to squeeze into the top decile, or for 94 percent to be in the top half, so convincing ourselves of our great worth is not always an easy task. Fortunately, in accomplishing it, our minds have a great ally, an aspect of life whose importance we’ve encountered before: ambiguity. Ambiguity creates wiggle room in what may otherwise be inarguable truth, and our unconscious minds employ that wiggle room to build a narrative of ourselves, of others, and of our environment that makes the best of our fate, that fuels us in the good times, and gives us comfort in the bad.

WHAT DO YOU see when you look at the figure below? On first glance, you will see it as either a horse or a seal, but if you keep looking, after a while you will see it as the other creature. And once you’ve seen it both ways, your perception tends to automatically alternate between the two animals. The truth is, the figure is both and it is neither. It is just a suggestive assemblage of lines, a sketch that, like your character, personality, and talents, can be interpreted in different ways.

^{Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 4, no. 3 (1968), p. 191, “Ambiguity of Form: Old and New,” by Gerald H. Fisher, Fig. 3.2, copyright © 1968 by the Psychonomics Society. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media B.V.}

Earlier I said that ambiguity opened the door to stereotyping, to misjudging people we don’t know very well. It also opens the door to misjudging ourselves. If our talents and expertise, our personality and character were all defined by scientific measurement and carved into inalterable stone tablets, it would be difficult to maintain a biased image of who we are. But our characteristics are more like the horse/seal image, open to differing interpretations.

How easy is it for us to tailor reality to fit our desires? David Dunning has spent years pondering questions like that. A social psychologist at Cornell University, he has devoted much of his professional career to studying how and when people’s perception of reality is shaped by their preferences. Consider the horse/seal image. Dunning and a colleague loaded it onto a computer, recruited dozens of subjects, and provided motivation for them to see it as either a horse or a seal.²⁰ Here is how it worked: The scientists told their subjects that they would be assigned to drink one of two liquids. One was a glass of tasty orange juice. The other was a “health smoothie” that looked and smelled so vile that a number of subjects dropped out rather than face the possibility of tasting it. The participants were told that the identity of the beverage they were to drink would be communicated to them via the computer, which would flash a figure—the image above—on the screen for one second. One second is generally not enough time for a person to see the image both ways, so each subject would see either just a horse or just a seal.²¹

That’s the key to the experiment, for half the subjects were told that if the figure was a “farm animal,” they were to drink the juice and if it was a “sea creature,” they were to drink the smoothie; the other half were told the reverse. Then, after the subjects had viewed the image, the researchers asked them to identify the animal they’d seen. If the students’ motivations biased their perceptions, the unconscious minds of the subjects who were told that farm animal equals orange juice would bias them toward seeing a horse. Similarly, the unconscious minds of those told that farm animal equals disgusting smoothie would bias them toward seeing the seal. And that’s just what happened: among those hoping to see a farm animal, 67 percent reported seeing a horse, while among those