You move through life forming opinions and cobbling together a story about who you are and why you did the things you did — which, taken as a whole, seems real.
But the truth is, there is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science which says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. Not that you would admit it — instead you create narratives, little stories to explain away why you gave up on that diet, why you stayed angry at Beth, why you feel the way you do about your co-workers.
Every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought which lead them astray without them knowing it.
In his new book, “You Are Not So Smart” (Gotham Books), and on his blog YouAreNotSoSmart.com, journalist DAVID McRANEY examines some of the ways our own minds fool us. Here, an excerpt of three of these psychological insights.
Catharsis isn’t good for you
The Misconception: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family.
The Truth: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.
Let it out, they say.
Left inside you, anger will fester and spread, grow like a tumor, boil up until you punch holes in the wall or slam your car door so hard the windows shatter. Those dark thoughts shouldn’t be tamped down inside your heart where they can condense and strengthen, where they form a concentrated stockpile of negativity that could reach critical mass at any moment.
Get yourself one of those squishy balls and work it over with death grips. Use both hands and choke the imaginary life out of it. Head to the gym and assault a punching bag. Shoot people in a video game. Scream into a pillow.
Feel better? Sure you do. Venting feels great. The problem is, it accomplishes little else. Actually, it makes matters worse and primes your future behavior by fogging your mind.
In the 1990s, psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State decided to study whether or not venting actually worked. At the time, self-help books were all the rage, and the prevailing advice when it came to dealing with stress and anger was to punch inanimate objects and scream into pillows. Bushman, like many psychologists before him, felt like this might be bad advice.
In one of Bushman’s studies he gathered a group of students together and had them write essays for or against abortion, a subject on which they probably had strong feelings. He told them the essays would be graded by fellow students, but instead they got back their work with this scrawled across the first page: “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” The subjects were then told they were going to get to compete against the person who graded their essay.
The scientists divided the students into two groups. One group punched a bag, and the other group sat and waited for two minutes. After the punching and waiting, the competition began. The game was simple, press a button as fast as you can. If you lose, you get blasted with a horrible noise. When you win, your opponent gets blasted.
Participants could set the volume the other person had to endure, a setting between zero and 10, with 10 being 105 decibels. Can you predict what they discovered? On average, the punching-bag group set the volume as high as 8.5. The timeout group set it to 2.47. The people who got angry didn’t release their anger on the punching bag — their anger was sustained by it. The group that cooled off lost their desire for vengeance.
Bushman has been doing this research for a while, and it keeps turning up the same results. If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting. It’s drug-like, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it.
If you get into an argument, or someone cuts you off in traffic, venting will not dissipate the negative energy. It will, however, feel great. That’s the thing. The emotion that led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if it made you feel good, you’ll seek it out again in the future.
How many buddies you can really have
The Misconception: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known.
The Truth: You can only maintain relationships and keep up with around 150 people at once.
Think of a cup filled with water. You try to add one drop to this cup, and one drop spills out. You try to pour a cup of water into it, and a cup of water spills out. This is called a zero-sum system. To add anything to it you must remove an equal proportion.
The bank of names and faces and relationships in your mind, the one you use to keep up with who is a friend, who is a foe, and who is a potential mate — this bank is a zero-sum system too. The reason for this doesn’t really have to do with how much space you have to keep the information; it has to do with how much energy you have on tap to devote to worrying about your place in your social world.
In other primates, social relationships are maintained by grooming and picking bugs off of each other. You don’t go to a “Mad Men” party and dig around in your friend’s hair while watching the show. But getting together for any reason is still a grooming behavior. Giant cities full of other humans, Internet social networks with hundreds of people sharing status updates, corporations with branches around the world — your brain is incapable of handling the amount of grooming needed for the multitude of human contacts populating these examples. Out of this cluster of humans you can only reliably manage to keep up with around 150 to 230 people.
According to sociologist Robin Dunbar, the larger a group, the more time must be spent by each member to maintain social cohesion. Each person must do some grooming with each other person, and then also keep up with who is a friend with whom, who has a beef, and what their status is compared to yours and others’.
The complexity builds exponentially with each new member. If someone you know moves away, you start to groom him or her less and less until you start to touch base once a year, or maybe lose touch for years. It takes more effort to stay connected once a friend escapes your direct contact. That effort takes away from time you can spend with other friends.
Your brain was shaped in a world where this time also took away from other efforts — like hunting, gathering and building shelter. There is a maximum amount of time and effort you can spend — it’s a zero-sum system.
You most likely have a much smaller group of friends than 150 people, but when incentivized to connect to more people than you would naturally associate with — like at your job or in a school — 150 is the point where your neocortex cries uncle. With better tools — like telephones, Facebook, e-mail and so on, you become slightly more efficient at maintaining relationships, so the number can be larger, but not much larger. Dunbar’s most recent research suggests even power-users of Facebook with 1,000 or more friends still only communicate regularly with around 150 people, and of that 150 they strongly communicate with a group less than 20.
In the end, online social networks might not have much of an effect on the core social group you depend on for true friendship. Anyone who uses the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing is fooling himself. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret with only a handful of true friends.
Turning enemies into friends
The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.
The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.
Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters.
Born in 1706 as the eighth of 17 children to a Massachusetts soap and candlestick maker, the chances Benjamin would go on to become a gentleman, scholar, scientist, statesman, musician, author, publisher and all-around bad-ass were astronomically low, yet he did just that and more because he was a master of the game of personal politics.
By the 1730s, Franklin was a celebrity and an entrepreneur who printed both a newspaper and an almanac — so he had a few enemies by the time he ran for the position of clerk of Philadelphia’s General Assembly.
He won his first race, but the next election wasn’t going to be as easy. Franklin’s autobiography never mentions this guy’s name, but according to the book, when Franklin ran for his second term as clerk, one of his colleagues delivered a long speech to the legislature lambasting Franklin. Franklin still won his second term, but this guy truly pissed him off. In addition, this man was “a gentleman of fortune and education” who Franklin believed would one day become a person of great influence in the government.
Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it without “paying any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s reputation as a book collector and library founder gave him a reputation as a man of discerning literary tastes, so Franklin sent a letter to the hater asking if he could borrow a selection from the his library, one which was a “very scarce and curious book.” The rival, flattered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank you note. Mission accomplished.
The next time the legislature met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in person for the first time. Franklin said the hater “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”
What exactly happened here?
Often your attitude toward things comes from actions, which lead to observations, which lead to explanations, which led to beliefs. It is well known in psychology that the cart of behavior often gets put before the horse of attitude. Your actions tend to chisel away at the raw marble of your persona, carving into being the self you experience day-to-day. It doesn’t feel that way, though. To conscious experience, it feels like you are the one holding the chisel, motivated by existing thoughts and beliefs. It feels as though the person wearing your pants is performing actions consistent with your established character, yet there is plenty of research suggesting otherwise. The things you do often create the things you believe.
At the lowest level, behavior-into-attitude conversion begins with impression management theory, which says you present to your peers the person you wish to be.
Benjamin Franklin’s enemy observed himself performing a generous and positive act by offering the treasured tome to his rival, and then he unconsciously explained his own behavior to himself. He must not have hated Franklin after all, he thought; why else would he do something like that?
Sometimes you can’t find a logical, moral or socially acceptable explanation for your actions. Sometimes your behavior runs counter to the expectations of your culture, your social group, your family or even the person you believe yourself to be. In those moments you ask, “Why did I do that?” and if the answer damages your self-esteem, a justification is required. In this case, liking Benjamin Franklin.
Be wary of the roles you play and the acts you put on, because you tend to fulfill the labels you accept. Above all, remember: The more harm you cause the more hate you feel, and the more kindness you deal into the world the more you come to love the people you help