Subliminal

male applicant and then unwittingly narrow the criteria by which they judged the applicants to those that would support that decision. Here is how the study worked: There were two types of resumes. The experimenters designed one to portray a streetwise individual who was poorly educated and lacking in administrative skills. They designed the other to reflect a well-educated and politically connected sophisticate who had little street smarts. Some participants were given a pair of resumes in which the male applicant had the streetwise resume and the female was the sophisticate. Others were given a pair of resumes in which the man’s and the woman’s strong points were reversed. The participants were asked not just to make a choice but to explain it.

The results showed that when the male applicant had the streetwise resume, the participants decided street smarts were important for the job and selected him, but when the male applicant had the sophisticate’s resume, they decided that street smarts were overrated and also chose the male. They were clearly making their decisions on the basis of gender, and not on the streetwise-versus-sophisticated distinction, but they were just as clearly unaware of doing so. In fact, when asked, none of the subjects mentioned gender as having influenced them.⁴⁰

Our culture likes to portray situations in black and white. Antagonists are dishonest, insincere, greedy, evil. They are opposed by heroes who are the opposite in terms of those qualities. But the truth is, from criminals to greedy executives to the “nasty” guy down the street, people who act in ways we abhor are usually convinced that they are right.

The power of vested interest in determining how we weigh the evidence in social situations was nicely illustrated in a series of experiments in which researchers randomly assigned volunteers to the role of plaintiff or defendant in a mock lawsuit based on a real trial that occurred in Texas.⁴¹ In one of those experiments, the researchers gave both sides documents regarding the case, which involved an injured motorcyclist who was suing the driver of an automobile that had collided with him. The subjects were told that in the actual case, the judge awarded the plaintiff an amount between $0 and $100,000. They were then assigned to represent one side or the other in mock negotiations in which they were given a half hour to fashion their own version of a settlement. The researchers told the subjects they’d be paid based on their success in those negotiations. But the most interesting part of the study came next: the subjects were also told they could earn a cash bonus if they could guess—within $5,000—what the judge actually awarded the plaintiff.

In making their guesses, it was obviously in the subjects’ interest to ignore whether they were playing the role of plaintiff’s or defendant’s advocate. They’d have the greatest chance at winning the cash bonus if they assessed the payout that would be fair, based solely on the law and the evidence. The question was whether they could maintain their objectivity.

On average, the volunteers assigned to represent the plaintiff’s side estimated that the judge would dictate a settlement of nearly $40,000, while the volunteers assigned to represent the defendant put that number at only around $20,000. Think of it: $40,000 versus $20,000. If, despite the financial reward offered for accurately guessing the size of a fair and proper settlement, subjects artificially assigned to different sides of a dispute disagree by 100 percent, imagine the magnitude of sincere disagreement between actual attorneys representing different sides of a case, or opposing negotiators in a bargaining session. The fact that we assess information in a biased manner and are unaware we are doing so can be a real stumbling block in negotiations, even if both sides sincerely seek a fair settlement.

Another version of the experiment, created around the scenario of that same lawsuit, investigated the reasoning mechanism the subjects employed to reach their conflicting conclusions. In that study, at the end of the bargaining session, the researchers asked the volunteers to explicitly comment on each side’s arguments, to make concrete judgments on issues like Does ordering an onion pizza via cell phone affect one’s driving? Does a single beer an hour or two before getting on a motorcycle impair safety? As in the police chief resume example, subjects on both sides tended to assign more importance to the factors that favored their desired conclusion than to the factors favoring their opponent. These experiments suggest that, as they were reading the facts of the case, the subjects’ knowledge that they would be taking one side or the other affected their judgment in a subtle and unconscious manner that trumped any motivation to analyze the situation fairly.

To further probe that idea, in another variant on the experiment, researchers asked volunteers to assess the accident information before being told which side they would be representing. Then the subjects were assigned their roles and asked to evaluate the appropriate award, again with the promise of a cash bonus if they came close. The subjects had thus weighed the evidence while still unbiased, but made their guess about the award after the cause for bias had been established. In this situation, the discrepancy in the assessments fell from around $20,000 to just $7,000, a reduction of nearly two-thirds. Moreover, the results showed that due to the subjects’ having analyzed the data before taking sides in the dispute, the proportion of times the plaintiff’s and defendant’s advocates failed to come to an agreement within the allotted half hour fell from 28 percent to just 6 percent. It’s a cliche, but the experience of walking in the other side’s shoes does seem to be the best way to understand their point of view.

As these studies suggest, the subtlety of our reasoning mechanisms allows us to maintain our illusions of objectivity even while viewing the world through a biased lens. Our decision-making processes bend but don’t break our usual rules, and we perceive ourselves as forming judgments in a bottom-up fashion, using data to draw a conclusion, while we are in reality deciding top-down, using our preferred conclusion to shape our analysis of the data. When we apply motivated reasoning to assessments about ourselves, we produce that positive picture of a world in which we are all above average. If we’re better at grammar than arithmetic, we give linguistic knowledge more weight in our view of what is important, whereas if we are good at adding but bad at grammar, we think language skills just aren’t that crucial.⁴² If we are ambitious, determined, and persistent, we believe that goal-oriented people make the most effective leaders; if we see ourselves as approachable, friendly, and extroverted, we feel that the best leaders are people-oriented.⁴³

We even recruit our memories to brighten our picture of ourselves. Take grades, for example. A group of researchers asked ninety-nine college freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English.⁴⁴ The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars’ records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students’ memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You’d think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students’ grade recall, but they didn’t. The intervening years didn’t seem to affect the students’ memories very much at all—they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B’s, 51 percent for C’s, and 29 percent for D’s. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it’ll improve.

MY SON NICOLAI, now in tenth grade, received a letter the other day. The letter was from a person who used to live in my household but no longer exists. That is, the letter was written by Nicolai himself, but four years earlier. Though the letter had traveled very little in space, it had traveled very far in time, at least in the time of a young child’s life. He had written the letter in sixth grade as a class assignment. It was a message from an eleven- year-old Nicolai asked to speak to the fifteen-year-old Nicolai of the future. The class’s letters had been collected and held those four years by his wonderful English teacher, who eventually mailed them to the adolescents her sixth-grade children had become.

What was striking about Nicolai’s letter was that it said, “Dear Nicolai … you want to be in the NBA. I look forward to playing basketball on the middle school seventh and eighth grade team, and then in high school, where you are now in your second year.” But Nicolai did not make the team in seventh grade; nor did he make it in eighth grade. Then, as his luck would have it, the coach who passed him over for those teams also turned up as the freshman coach in high school, and again declined to pick Nicolai for the team. That year, only a handful of the boys who tried out were turned away, making the rejection particularly bitter for Nicolai. What’s remarkable here is not that Nicolai wasn’t smart enough to know when to give up but that through all those years he maintained his dream of playing basketball, to the extent that he put in five hours a day one summer practicing alone on an empty court. If you know kids, you understand that if a boy continues to insist that someday he will be in the NBA but year after