This article contains excerpts of chapter 8 of the book "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" by David McRaney.
Imagine a painting the world considers beautiful, something like Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Now imagine you have to write an essay on why it is popular. Go ahead, think of a reasonable explanation. No, don’t keep reading. Give it a shot. Explain why Leonardo da Vinci's work is great.
Is there a certain song you love, or a photograph? Perhaps there is a movie you keep returning to over the years, or a book. Go ahead and imagine one of those favorite things. Now, in one sentence, try to explain why you like it. Chances are, you will find it difficult to put into words, but if pressed you will probably be able to come up with something.
The problem is, according to research, your explanation is probably going to be total bullshit. Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia demonstrated this in 1990 with the Poster Test. He brought a group of students into a room and showed them a series of posters. The students were told they could take any one they wanted as a gift and keep it. He then brought in another group and told them the same thing, but this time they had to explain why they wanted the poster they each picked. Wilson then waited six months and asked the two groups what they thought of their choices. The first group, the ones who just got to grab a poster and leave, all loved their choice. The second group, the ones who had to write out why they were choosing one over the others, hated theirs. The first group, the grab-and-go people, usually picked a nice, fancy painting. The second group, the ones who had to explain their choice, usually picked an inspirational poster with a cat clinging to a rope.
According to Wilson, when you are faced with a decision in which you are forced to think about your rationale, you start to turn the volume in your emotional brain down and the volume in your logical brain up. You start creating a mental list of pros and cons that would never have been conjured up if you had gone with your gut. As Wilson noted in his research, “Forming preferences is akin to riding a bicycle; we can do it easily but cannot easily explain how.”
Research into introspection calls into question the entire industry of critical analysis of art—video games, music, film, poetry, literature—all of it. When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotional, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs. The problem here is those deeper recesses of the mind are perhaps inaccessible. The things that are available to consciousness might not have much to do with your preferences. Later, when you attempt to justify your decisions or emotional attachments, you start worrying about what your explanation says about you as a person, further tainting the validity of your inner narrative.
In the Poster Test, most people truly preferred the nice painting to the inspirational cat, but they couldn’t conjure up a rational explanation of why, at least not in a way that would make logical sense on paper. On the other hand, you can write all sorts of bullshit about a motivational poster. It has a stated and tangible purpose.
Another of Wilson’s experiments had subjects rate the quality of jam. He placed before them five varieties of jam which had previously been ranked by Consumer Reports as the first, eleventh, twenty-fourth, thirty-second, and forty-fourth best jams on the market. One group tasted and ranked how good they thought the jams were. The other group had to write out what they did and did not like about each one as they tasted it. As with the posters, the people who didn’t have to explain themselves gravitated toward the same ones Consumer Reports said were best. The people forced to introspect rated the jams inconsistently and had varying preferences based on their explanations. Taste is difficult to quantify and put into words, so the explainers focused on other aspects like texture or color or viscosity. None of which in the end made much difference to the non-explainers.
Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion. You believe you know yourself and why you are the way you are. You believe this knowledge tells you how you will act in all future situations. Research shows otherwise. Time after time, experiments show introspection is not the act of tapping into your innermost mental constructs but is instead a fabrication. You look at what you did, or how you felt, and you make up some sort of explanation that you can reasonably believe. If you have to tell others, you make up an explanation they can believe too. When it comes to explaining why you like the things you like, you are not so smart, and the very act of having to explain yourself can change your attitudes.
Tags:
Psychology