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 (27 page)

In an experiment performed by Steven Sherman in 1980, two sets of people were asked over the phone to donate three hours of time to a cancer drive. One group was simply asked if they would do it. They said yes. Four percent showed up. The other group was asked if they thought they would show up if they were to be asked. Most said they would show up. Almost all of them did. The second group had made an assumption about their own personality, and once they had painted a portrait of what kind of person they were, they had to conform to the idea or risk cognitive dissonance.

When it comes to belief, you are not so smart, and the things you think are true will become reality if given enough time to fester. If you want a better job, a better marriage, a better teacher, a better friend—you have to act as if the thing you want out of the other person is already headed your way. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll see a change, but it’s better than nothing. The point is this: A negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.

Don’t go buying
The Secret
just yet. No, you can’t just want something to be true and have it become so, but you can avoid the opposite scenario, which might be just enough to improve your life.

Have you ever been so sick you spent a week in bed? What do you remember from that period of time? Mostly nothing, right? All throughout your life great big patches of experience are tossed aside and forgotten. You turn around sometimes and think, “It’s March already!?” or “I’ve been working here for five years!?”

To understand the difference between experience and memory, you first need to understand a little bit about self. Your sense of self is just that—a sense. The person you imagine yourself to be is a story you tell to yourself and to others differently depending on the situation, and the story changes over time. For now, it is useful to imagine there are two selves active at any given time in your head—the current self and the remembering self.

The current self is the one experiencing life in real time. It is the person you are in the three or so seconds your sensory memory lasts, and the thirty or so seconds after that in which your short-term memory is juggling all your senses and thoughts. You taste the ice cream and it is good. Then, you remember you tasted the ice cream. Then, in five years, you have no memory of tasting it at all. Sometimes, rarely, something else happens that prompts you to move the memory into long-term storage. Think back now to all the times you have tasted ice cream. How many true memories do you have that aren’t just dreamlike wisps? How many stories can you tell about tasting ice cream? The remembering self is made up of all those memories that have passed into long-term storage.

When you replay your life in your mind, you can’t go back to all the things you have ever experienced. Only the things that went from experience to short-term memory to long-term memory are available to fully remember. Going to get ice cream is not about building awesome memories. It’s about being happy for a few minutes. It’s about gratification. The happiness derived from such an experience is fleeting.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has much to say on this topic. He says the self that makes decisions in your life is usually the remembering one. It drags your current self around in pursuit of new memories, anticipating them based on old memories. The current self has little control over your future. It can control only a few actions, like moving your hand away from a hot stove or putting one foot in front of the other. Occasionally, it prompts you to eat a cheeseburger, or watch a horror movie, or play a video game. The current self is happy when experiencing things. It likes to be in the flow.

It is the remembering self that has made all the big decisions. It is happy when you can sit back and reflect on your life up to this point and feel content. It is happy when you tell people stories about the things you have seen and done. Kahneman proposes this thought experiment: Imagine you are preparing to go on a two-week vacation. At the end of this vacation, you will drink a potion that will erase all the memories from those two weeks.

How will this affect your decisions? Knowing you won’t remember any of it, what will you spend your time doing during those two weeks? That weird feeling you are having thinking about this is the conflict between your experiencing self and your remembering self. The experiencing self can easily choose what to do. Sex, skiing, restaurants, concerts, parties—all of these things are about being happy during the event. The remembering self is not so sure. It would rather go to Ireland and look at castles or drive from New York to Los Angeles just to see what happens.

Kahneman’s research suggests there are two channels through which you decide whether or not you are happy. The current self is happy when experiencing nice things. The remembering self is happy when you look back on your life and pull up plenty of positive memories. As Kahneman points out, a two-week vacation may yield only a handful of lifelong memories. You will pull those memories out every once and a while and use them to be happy. There is a serious imbalance between the time you spend creating these memories and the time you spend enjoying them later.

The current self doesn’t like sitting in a cubicle. It feels caged. It could be doing something fun. The remembering self doesn’t like not having the opportunity to build new memories, so it is willing to grind away to earn money for food and shelter and delay gratification.

Life for you and many others is full of conflict between these two selves over how best to be happy. Kahneman’s research shows that happiness can’t be all one or all the other. You have to be happy in the flow of time while simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later.

To be happy now and content later, you can’t be focused only on reaching goals, because once you reach them, the experience ends. To truly be happy, you must satisfy both of your selves. Go get the ice cream, but do so in a meaningful way that creates a long-term memory. Grind away to have money for later, but do so in a way that generates happiness as you work.

Imagine yourself in high school. What kind of person were you?

Some obvious things come to mind—your awful haircut, those stupid shirts, the questionable taste in music. You sure were a dork.

If you were into a subculture, it is probably even more painful to see your old self. Were you an emo kid, a flannel-clad grunge fan, or did you trade
Star Trek
novels in your chess club? Whatever you were into at the time, it is likely you aren’t so into it now. You’ve probably learned how to tame your hair, which clothes are silly, and what music is truly good to you. You’ve figured out your personal politics, your taste in movies, what real friendship is all about. It’s as easy to see the differences in who you were then as it would be with two photographs taken now and then. Some differences, though, are hard to see. Scientists have shown you are not so smart when it comes to comparing your current mental world to the one you lived in years ago.

The psychologist Hazel Markus at the University of Michigan says when you receive new information that threatens your self-image, you react quickly to reaffirm your identity. The self is something psychologists have known from the beginning to be both consistent and changing. At any given moment, you guard your convictions and introspective conclusions, but the self you guard can shift from one social situation to the next. As the psychologist William James said in 1910, there are for any individual “as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.” Right now, all those selves are like the many surfaces of a prism; turn it one way or the other, and a different you is reflected back to the world. The consistency bias makes you think this prism has always been the same size and shape it is now, but it hasn’t.

In 1986, Markus published a paper that showed how malleable the self was and how oblivious to change you really are. The paper covered two decades of research. Back in 1965, Markus and his colleagues collected political opinions from a group of high school seniors and their parents. He then returned to the same people in 1973 and again in 1982 to see how their opinions might have changed. The questions ranged from the legalization of drugs to the rights of prisoners and the validity of war. As you might expect, the younger people’s attitudes changed a lot more between 1965 and 1973 than did their parents’, and overall those young attitudes became more conservative over the course of seventeen years. Markus showed how when you are young you are more open to changing your opinions. Your partisanship has yet to solidify into a personal philosophy. After gaining enough life experience, you begin to settle into a view of the world and establish your moral outlook. It seems like common sense, but when he asked the people in the study what they used to believe, only about 30 percent could accurately recall their old answers. Instead, they tended to say they used to have the same political ideas they currently subscribed to. If, for instance, they believed the death penalty was a legitimate punishment, they thought they had always believed this, even when they had said the opposite as a teenager.

This same sort of experiment was conducted in 1998 by Elaine Scharfe at Trent University and Kim Bartholomew at Simon Fraser University, except they asked people to rate how happy they were in their relationships. Some of the subjects were dating, some were living together, and others were married. The questions ranged from how often the other person got on their nerves to how long they expected the relationship to last. They asked again eight months later, then asked the participants to recall their previous answers. Those whose relationships had stayed the same tended to remember their previous responses, but those whose relationships had gotten either better or worse did not see the past as clearly; 78 percent of the women and 87 percent of the men inaccurately recalled how they used to feel. Most of the people in the study had a good recollection of their original feelings, but for those who didn’t, consistency bias altered their memories to make it seem as though they had always been as happy, or sad, as they now were.

In an experiment by George Goethals and Richard Reckman at Williams College in 1972, students were asked how they felt about racially segregated bussing. After recording their answers, they were led in a discussion of the issue a few weeks later by an actor who tried to change their minds. If they were pro-integration, the actor tried to get them to see the downsides. If they were anti-integration, the actor pointed out the harm. As in the other studies, when they were then asked their opinions from the original questionnaire, neither group responded correctly. They had been swayed, but they thought they had always held their new position.

One of the stranger facets of consistency bias is how it can be evoked on the spot. If you are primed to believe you are an honest person, you will then act as if you are.

In 2008, Dan Ariely, Nina Mazar, and On Amir at MIT had Harvard Business School students answer as many math problems as they could in five minutes. Afterward, one student would be randomly chosen in a lottery and win $10 for every correct answer. Before the test began, half of the students listed ten books they remembered reading in high school, and the other half listed as many of the Ten Commandments from the Bible they could recall. In both groups, half of the students were given an opportunity to grade themselves and cheat by simply telling the researchers how many answers they got right, while the other half had to actually turn in their papers. In the group that listed books, the total scores were 33 percent higher than the average, which indicated that they had cheated. In the group that listed the Ten Commandments, the scores were less than average; no one cheated. Half of the students had been primed to think about honesty, and since we all want to believe we are honest, the resulting behavior was an attempt at consistency.

You experience this sort of instant consistency bias all the time. If you sign a pledge to be honest and trustworthy, you tend to follow through. If you agree ahead of time to do something you later don’t feel like doing, you do it anyway so you don’t feel inconsistent or appear so to others. In any situation where you are primed to think of yourself in a certain way, you will be more likely to engage in behavior that proves you are. In 1978, Robert B. Cialdinia, John T. Cacioppo, Rodney Bassett, and John A. Miller at Arizona State conducted an study where they asked people if they would be willing to take part in an experiment for a good cause, and about half said they would. After they agreed, they were then told the experiment would begin at 7 A.M. Ninety-five percent of the people still showed up. When the researchers did the experiment again but told the people up front when they had to arrive, 24 percent agreed to take part. The people in the first experiment weren’t psyched about coming in so early, but because they had said they would be willing to participate, they felt forced into making their behavior consistent, even though there were no repercussions to do otherwise. You have no desire to be a hypocrite.

Consistency bias is part of your overall desire to reduce the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, the emotions you feel when noticing that you are of two minds on one issue. When you say one thing and do another, the ickiness of feeling hypocritical must be dealt with or else you find it difficult to proceed. You need to feel that you can predict your own behavior, and so you rewrite your own history sometimes so you can seem dependable to yourself. If your life story includes self-improvement, and you find meaning in change, you suppress consistency bias. At other times you simply desire certain parts of your autobiography to have unfolded in a pleasing way and can’t imagine having once been the sort of person you would argue with. If you are madly in love now, but once had your doubts, you simply delete the past and replace it with one less inconsistent with your present state. Older people tend to look at younger people as naive, and sometimes become amused when they see in them the same ignorance with which they once dealt. Sometimes they try to reason with the ignorance, as if to suggest it could be overcome with mere wisdom. This is consistency bias at work: believing if you knew then what you know now, things would be different. But people naturally change over time. Consistency bias is the failure to admit it.