You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (20 page)

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.

Go 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 some 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.

The concept of catharsis goes back at least as far as Aristotle and Greek drama. The word itself comes from from the Greek
kathairein,
“to purify” and “to clean.” Releasing pent-up energy, or fluids, was Aristotle’s counterargument to Plato, who felt poetry and drama filled people up with silliness and made them unbalanced. Aristotle thought it went the other way, and by watching people go muck through a tragedy or rise to a victory, you in the audience could vicariously release your tears or feel the rush of testosterone. You balanced out your heart by purging those emotions. It seems to make sense, and that’s why the meme grafted itself to so much of human thought well before the great philosophers.

Releasing sexual tension feels good. Throwing up when you are sick feels good. Finally getting to a restroom feels good. Be it an exorcism or a laxative, the idea is the same: Get the bad stuff out and you’ll return to normal. Balancing the humors—choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine—was the basis of medicine from Hippocrates up to the Old West, and the way you balanced out often meant draining something.

Fast-forward to Sigmund Freud.

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, Freud was a superstar of science and pop culture, and his work influenced everything from politics and advertising to business and art. The turn of the century, nineteenth to twentieth, was an interesting time to be a scientist devoted to the mind, because there weren’t many tools available. It was sort of like being an astronomer before the invention of telescopes. The rising stars in psychology made names for themselves by constructing elaborate theories of how the mind was organized and where your thoughts came from. Since the mind was completely unobservable, these theorists didn’t have much data to fall back on, and so their personal philosophies and conjectures tended to fill in the gaps. Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist. He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments, and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows, and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like—anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. It sounds reasonable. You may even look back on your life and remember times when you went batshit, punched a wall or broke a plate, and it made things better. But you are not so smart.

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 this might be bad advice.

In one of Bushman’s studies he divided 180 students into three groups. One group read a neutral article. One read an article about a fake study that said venting anger was effective. The third group read about a fake study that said venting was pointless. He then had the students write essays for or against abortion, a subject about which they probably had strong feelings. He told them the essays would be graded by fellow students, but they weren’t. When the students got their essays back, half were told their essays were superb. The other half had this scrawled across the paper: “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” Bushman then asked the subjects to pick an activity like playing a game, watching some comedy, reading a story, or punching a bag. The results? The people who read the article that said venting worked, and who later got angry, were far more likely to ask to punch the bag than those who got angry in the other groups. In all the groups, the people who got praised tended to pick nonaggressive activities.

So belief in catharsis makes you more likely to seek it out. Bushman decided to take this a step further and let the angry people seek revenge. He wanted to see if engaging in cathartic behavior would extinguish the anger, if it would be emancipated from the mind. The second study was basically the same, except this time when subjects got back their papers with “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” they were divided into two groups. The people in both groups were told they were going to have to compete against the person who graded their essay. One group first had to punch a bag, and the other group had to sit and wait 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. The students could set the volume the other person had to endure, a setting between zero and ten, with ten being 105 decibels. Can you predict what they discovered? On average, the punching bag group set the volume as high as 8.5. The time-out 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. In subsequent studies where the subjects chose how much hot sauce the other person had to eat, the punching bag group piled it on. The cooled off group did not. When the punching bag group later did word puzzles where they had to fill in the blanks to words like ch_ _e, they were more likely to pick ch
ok
e instead of ch
as
e.

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 druglike, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove.

Bushman’s work also debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar. He says it will only maintain your state or increase your arousal level, and afterward you may be even more aggressive than if you had cooled off. Still, cooling off is not the same thing as not dealing with your anger at all. Bushman suggests you delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

If you get into an argument, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get called an awful name, venting will not dissipate the negative energy. It will, however, feel great. That’s the thing. Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion that led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if the catharsis made you feel good, you’ll seek that emotion out again in the future.

One night your friend tells a story about the time the both of you watched
Cool Hand Luke
and decided to try and eat as many hard-boiled eggs as you could stomach, but you got sick after five and swore never to eat them again. You are both laughing and clinking your glasses at the folly of your youth, when another friend blows your mind by saying, “No, that was me. You weren’t even there.”

Your mind reels as the pages of your own comic book flip by. You search the panels for scenes that could confirm or deny whether you have lost your mind, but you can’t find conclusive evidence for either person’s account. Who ate those eggs?

Maybe it’s not this extreme, but every once in a while someone tells a story that conflicts with your recollection. The person embellishes with details that slipped past your mental fact-checkers. When you notice, as above, it is a truly unsettling experience because normally you are oblivious to your faulty reconstruction of memory. Not only is your memory easily altered by the influence of others, you also smooth over the incongruences, rearrange time lines, and invent scenarios, but rarely notice you’re doing this until you see yourself in a video, or hear another person’s version of the events. You tend to see your memories as a continuous, consistent movie, yet if you think of the last film you saw, how much of it can you recall? Could you sit back, close your eyes, and recall in perfect detail every scene, every line of dialog? Of course not, so why do you assume you can do the same for the movie of your life?

Take out a piece of paper and get ready to write. Really do it; it will be fun.

OK.

Now, read the following list of words out loud one time, and then try to write as many of them as you can remember on the paper without looking back. When you think you have them all down on paper, come back to the book.

Go:

Now, take a look at the list. How did you do? Did you write down all the words? Did you write the word “window” down? If this test is presented properly, 85 percent of people taking it will remember seeing “window” in the list, but it isn’t there. If you did, you just gave yourself a false memory thanks to the misinformation effect.

In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus at the University of Washington conducted a study in which people watched films of car crashes. She then asked the participants to estimate how fast the cars were going, but she divided the people into groups and asked the question differently for each. These were the questions:

The people’s answers in miles per hour averaged like this:

Just by changing the wording, the memories of the subjects were altered. The car crashes were replayed in the participants’ minds, but this time the word “smashed” necessitated the new version of the memory include cars that were going fast enough to validate the adjective.

Loftus raised the ante by asking the same people if they remembered broken glass in the film. There was no broken glass, but sure enough the people who were given the word “smashed” in their question were twice as likely to remember seeing it.

Since then, hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn’t a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks—none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance.

Loftus has made it her life’s work to showcase the unreliability of memory. She has rallied against eyewitness testimony and suspect lineups for decades now, and she also has criticized psychologists who say they can dredge up repressed memories from childhood. For instance, in one of her experiments she had subjects watch a pretend crime and then select the culprit out of a lineup. The police told the subjects the perpetrator was one of the people standing before them, but it was a trick. None of them were the real suspect, yet 78 percent of the people still identified one of the innocent people as the person who they saw committing the crime. Memory just doesn’t work like that, Loftus says, but despite this, many of our institutions and societal norms persist as though it does.

There are many explanations as to why this is happening, but the effect is well established and predictable. Scientists generally agree memories aren’t recorded like videos or stored like data on a hard drive. They are constructed and assembled on the spot as if with Legos from a bucket in your brain. Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in
The Island of the Colorblind
about a patient who became colorblind after a brain injury. Not only could he not see certain colors, he couldn’t imagine them or remember them. Memories of cars and dresses and carnivals were suddenly drained, washed down. Even though this patient’s memories were first imprinted when he could see color, they now could be conjured up only with the faculties of his current imagination. Each time you build a memory, you make it from scratch, and if much time has passed you stand a good chance of getting the details wrong. With a little influence, you might get big ones wrong.