Subliminal

“Thank you,” says the black man. “So how do I get into heaven?”

“That’s easy,” says God. “All you have to do is spell one word!”

“What’s that?” the black man asks.

“Czechoslovakia,” answers the Lord.

The Lord’s method of discrimination is classic, and our brains employ it often: when information favorable to the way we’d like to see the world tries to enter the gateway of our mind we ask that it spell “God,” but when unfavorable information comes knocking, we make it spell “Czechoslovakia.”

For example, in one study volunteers were given a strip of paper to test whether they had a serious deficiency of an enzyme called TAA, which would make them susceptible to a variety of serious pancreas disorders.³¹ The researchers told them to dip the strip of paper in a bit of their saliva and wait ten to twenty seconds to see if the paper turned green. Half the subjects were told that if the strip turned green it meant they had no enzyme deficiency, while the other half were told that if it turned green it meant they had the dangerous deficiency. In reality, no such enzyme exists, and the strip was ordinary yellow construction paper, so none of the subjects were destined to see it change color. The researchers watched as their subjects performed the test. Those who were motivated to see no change dipped the paper, and when nothing happened, they quickly accepted the happy answer and decided the test was complete. But those motivated to see the paper turn green stared at the strip for an extra thirty seconds, on average, before accepting the verdict. What’s more, over half of these subjects engaged in some sort of retesting behavior. One subject redipped the paper twelve times, like a child nagging its parents. Can you turn green? Can you? Please? Please?

Those subjects may seem silly, but we all dip and redip in an effort to bolster our preferred views. People find reasons to continue supporting their preferred political candidates in the face of serious and credible accusations of wrongdoing or ignorance but take thirdhand hearsay about an illegal left turn as evidence that the candidate of the other party ought to be banned from politics for life. Similarly, when people want to believe in a scientific conclusion, they’ll accept a vague news report of an experiment somewhere as convincing evidence. And when people don’t want to accept something, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and a thousand unanimous scientific studies can all converge on a single conclusion, and people will still find a reason to disbelieve.

That’s exactly what happened in the case of the inconvenient and costly issue of global climate change. The organizations I named above, plus a thousand academic articles on the topic, were unanimous in concluding that human activity is responsible, yet in the United States more than half the people have managed to convince themselves that the science of global warming is not yet settled.³² Actually, it would be difficult to get all those organizations and scientists to agree on anything short of a declaration stating that Albert Einstein was a smart fellow, so their consensus reflects the fact that the science of global warming is very much settled. It’s just not good news. To a lot of people, the idea that we are descended from apes is also not good news. So they have found ways not to accept that fact, either.

When someone with a political bias or vested interest sees a situation differently than we do, we tend to think that person is deliberately misinterpreting the obvious to justify their politics or to bring about some personal gain. But through motivated reasoning each side finds ways to justify its favored conclusion and discredit the other, while maintaining a belief in its own objectivity. And so those on both sides of important issues may sincerely think that theirs is the only rational interpretation. Consider the following research on the death penalty. People who either supported or opposed capital punishment on the theory that it deterred crime (or didn’t) were shown two phony studies. Each study employed a different statistical method to prove its point. Let’s call them method A and method B. For half the subjects, the study that used method A concluded that capital punishment works as a deterrent, and the study that used method B concluded that it doesn’t. The other subjects saw studies in which the conclusions were reversed. If people were objective, those on both sides would agree that either method A or method B was the best approach regardless of whether it supported or undermined their prior belief (or they’d agree that it was a tie). But that’s not what happened. Subjects readily offered criticisms such as “There were too many variables,” “I don’t think they have complete enough collection of data,” and “The evidence given is relatively meaningless.” But both sides lauded whatever method supported their belief and trashed whatever method did not. Clearly, it was the reports’ conclusions, not their methods, that inspired these analyses.³³

Exposing people to well-reasoned arguments both pro– and anti–death penalty did not engender understanding for the other point of view. Rather, because we poke holes in evidence we dislike and plug holes in evidence we like, the net effect in these studies was to amplify the intensity of the disagreement. A similar study found that, after viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the 1982 massacre in Beirut, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated the programs, and the networks, as being biased against their side.³⁴ There are critical lessons in this research. First, we should keep in mind that those who disagree with us are not necessarily duplicitous or dishonest in their refusal to acknowledge the obvious errors in their thinking. More important, it would be enlightening for all of us to face the fact that our own reasoning is often not so perfectly objective, either.

ADJUSTING OUR STANDARDS for accepting evidence to favor our preferred conclusions is but one instrument in the subliminal mind’s motivated reasoning tool kit. Other ways we find support for our worldviews (including our view of ourselves) include adjusting the importance we assign to various pieces of evidence and, sometimes, ignoring unfavorable evidence altogether. For example, ever notice how, after a win, sports fans crow about their team’s great play, but after a loss they often ignore the quality of play and focus on Lady Luck or the referees?³⁵ Similarly, executives in public companies pat themselves on the back for good outcomes but suddenly recognize the importance of random environmental factors when performance is poor.³⁶ It can be hard to tell whether those attempts to put a spin on a bad outcome are sincere, and the result of unconscious motivated reasoning, or are conscious and self-serving.

One situation in which that ambiguity is not an issue is scheduling. There is no good reason to offer unrealistic promises with regard to deadlines, because in the end you’ll be required to back up those promises by delivering the goods. Yet contractors and businesses often miss their deadlines even when there are financial penalties for doing so, and studies show that motivated reasoning is a major cause of those miscalculations. It turns out that when we calculate a completion date, the method we think we follow in arriving at it is to break the project down into the necessary steps, estimate the time required for each step, and put it all together. But research shows that, instead, our minds often work backward. That is, the desired target date exerts a great and unconscious influence on our estimate of the time required to complete each of the intermediate steps. In fact, studies show that our estimates of how long it will take to finish a task depend directly on how invested we are in the project’s early completion.³⁷

If it’s important for a producer to get the new PlayStation game done in the next two months, her mind will find reasons to believe that the programming and quality-assurance testing will be more problem-free than ever before. Likewise, if we need to get three hundred popcorn balls made in time for Halloween, we manage to convince ourselves that having the kids help on our kitchen assembly line will go smoothly for the first time in the history of our family. It is because we make these decisions, and sincerely believe they are realistic, that all of us, whether we are throwing a dinner party for ten people or building a new jet fighter, regularly create overly optimistic estimates of when we can finish the project.³⁸ In fact, the U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that when the military purchased equipment involving new technology, it was delivered on schedule and within budget just 1 percent of the time.³⁹

In the last chapter I mentioned that research shows that employers often aren’t in touch with the real reasons they hire someone. An interviewer may like or dislike an applicant because of factors that have little to do with the applicant’s objective qualifications. They may both have attended the same school or both be bird- watchers. Or perhaps the applicant reminds the interviewer of a favorite uncle. For whatever reason, once the interviewer makes a gut-level decision, her unconscious often employs motivated reasoning to back that intuitive inclination. If she likes the applicant, without realizing her motivation she will tend to assign high importance to areas in which the applicant excels and take less seriously those in which the applicant falls short.

In one study, participants considered applications from a male and a female candidate for the job of police chief. That’s a stereotypically male position, so the researchers postulated that the participants would favor the