by Sam Sommers
But the participants didn’t know what was in these injections. They all thought they were receiving a vitamin called “Suproxin” and believed that the objective of the research was to test the vitamin’s effects on their vision. Therefore, the uninformed participants injected with adrenaline had no idea of the true source of their arousal.
After the injection, the men were led to a different room and asked to answer some questions before their final vision test. Taking a seat next to another respondent, they began the questionnaire. But this was no ordinary research participant they were next to, and this was no ordinary questionnaire. The other person in the room was actually an actor in cahoots with researchers, and within minutes he began his best imitation of John McEnroe protesting a line call: He scoffed angrily at the questionnaire. He cursed the researchers who devised it. Finally, he ripped the packet into pieces, threw them on the ground, and stomped out of the room exasperated. In a matter of seconds, things had deteriorated from vision study to health-care reform town hall meeting.
What was the basis for this tantrum? Well, the questionnaire was a touch personal. Not to mention insulting. One question required respondents to list their relative most in need of psychiatric care. Another asked about the family member best described by the phrase “does not bathe or wash regularly.” My favorite was this last question:
With how many men (other than your father) has your mother had extramarital relationships?
______ 10 or more
______ 5–9
______ 4 or less
Of course, the researchers weren’t interested in the sex life of participants’ mothers. They wanted to see the emotional impact of the actor’s outburst. The respondents who had been given a saline injection exhibited little if any angry behavior of their own. Mostly they just looked on at the irate actor with a mix of befuddled curiosity and annoyed resignation—a bit like the face that White House officials make when they watch Joe Biden ad-lib near a microphone.
But those participants who—unbeknownst to them—had been given adrenaline reported feeling angry themselves. Unaware of the source of their arousal, they followed the actor’s cues, deciding that they must be agitated by the questions as well. In another variation of the study, participants were instead paired with an oddly euphoric actor who passed his time building a tower out of folders, flying paper airplanes, and twirling hula hoops he had found in the corner. Here, participants surreptitiously injected with adrenaline not only joined in the fun, but also reported comparable feelings of elation.
These results demonstrate that even our own emotional states are not as cut-and-dried as we think. Both anger and euphoria are accompanied by physiological symptoms similar to the effects of adrenaline: racing heart, dilated pupils, elevated blood sugar. When we experience these sensations, our body doesn’t automatically translate them into the corresponding emotion. Rather, we look to those around us to figure out what it all means, to determine which of the many emotional labels available fits the situation: This guy sure is angry and this questionnaire sure is offensive . . . hey, I must be angry, too!
Your emotions, your identity, your sense of how you’re getting along in life—none of this self-knowledge emerges in the privacy of strictly internal processes. All of it is influenced by and even dependent on information gleaned from those around you.
CULTURAL SELVES
Sometimes people in our lives tell us directly who we are or should be. In other instances we use the performance of others as a point of mental comparison. But the influence of others on how we think of the self can be seen on a more societal level as well—broader social contexts also shape our sense of self in meaningful ways. The culture in which you grow up teaches you how to think about yourself through both explicit instruction and more subtle reminders.
In the United States, there’s a saying that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” In Japan, the prevailing fix-it-related axiom is “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” This divergence in popular wisdom reflects differences in how people in these cultures typically think about the self.15
As I’ve alluded to previously, researchers have noted that Americans—and, more generally, those fitting the broader category of “Westerners”—tend to value in the self an independent streak. In Western culture, we emphasize what it is that makes us unique; we talk about each individual living up to his or her own potential. So educational TV shows tell us that “everyone is special.” Preschools include self-esteem building as part of the curriculum. Squeaky wheels get grease and identity is conceived of in Dr. Philian terms of well-defined, internal selves.
When Americans or Canadians or Western Europeans complete the Twenty Statements Test, they use many a personality characteristic and other stable attribute:16 “I am friendly.” “I am funny.” “I am an outgoing person.” It’s not too far removed from how Westerners perceive the behaviors of others. Indeed, the idea of a “core self ” and the more general WYSIWYG mentality have much in common, epitomizing as they do a mind-set focused on character, on the distinctness of individuals, on the self as an entity independent from its surroundings.
These ideas stand in sharp contrast to the more interdependent view of the self prevalent in Japan, other Asian countries, and many African and Latin American cultures. In these societies, identity is typically a more collectivist concept that emphasizes the connectedness between the individual and those around her. That is, the self is most meaningfully thought of in terms of relationships with others and how one fits into the fabric of the larger society.17
What happens when Japanese complete the Twenty Statements Test? They tend to give responses less indicative of stable personality and more context-dependent: “I am a hard worker when at school.” “I am patient with my children.” “I am currently in my psychology class.” In general, taking the test can be awkward, as self-assessment absent information regarding context is a relatively unfamiliar request in many such cultures.
Of course, as with any generalization, this divergence in cultural mentality is a tendency and not a rule. Individual excellence and personal achievement are not ignored in Asian societies; interpersonal cohesion is not a foreign concept to North Americans. But it’s clear that self-perception differs by culture, and one doesn’t even have to leave North American airspace to observe this. To illustrate, I ask you to visualize the following scenario: You’re walking down a narrow corridor. A man walks toward you and, as he passes, refuses to yield, bumping into your shoulder. He then punctuates the exchange by bestowing upon you a new, vulgar nickname. How would you respond?
I know how I would, having experienced a variation on just such an interaction as a thirteen-year-old while hanging out with friends at the local suburban mall. My reaction? I came up with two years’ worth of creative excuses not to go back to that mall. “Courageous” rarely makes an appearance when I take the Twenty Statements Test.
Your response would likely depend on where you were raised. When behavioral researchers exposed young American men to this experience—for shorthand, let’s call it the “asshole” scenario18—those individuals who had grown up in the southern United States reacted very differently than did residents of the North. Compared to Northerners who suffered the same indignity, Southerners who were bumped into and insulted were more visibly agitated, more likely to think that their masculinity had been assailed, and even more primed for retaliation according to elevated testosterone levels.
To explain these findings, the researchers cited a “culture of honor” that exists in much of the southern United States. Drawing on the work of anthropologists and historians, they suggested that the herding-based economy of the frontier South, combined with an absence of adequate law enforcement, has led Southern males to develop and project an identity emphasizing toughness. In such a society, even trivial insults require overt responses, because to do otherwise would invite future exploitation—much like the importance of reputation in some contemporary ur
ban neighborhoods or even prison yards. Raised in such an environment, the researchers argue, one learns to value a tough suffer-no-shit sense of self, perhaps explaining why argument-related homicides are more prevalent in the southern U.S., while other forms of homicide are not.19
The data are clear: I’d make a lousy herder, and I’m the last guy you want backing you up in a street fight. But more important, both the cross-cultural and “asshole” studies illustrate how profoundly context shapes our sense of self, and how such influence grows out of both mundane situation and cultural mind-set. The person standing next to me as I take the Twenty Statements Test impacts my responses, but so does the broader environment in which I was raised. We are social beings through and through, shaped by our surroundings even for the most personal of thought processes.
THE MIRROR NEVER LIES
Why is your sense of self so variable across situations? Because it depends, in large part, on who’s around you and the culture in which you grew up. Because the process of introspection produces but a temporary snapshot of how you feel in this fleeting time and place. But there’s another explanation, too.
To illustrate, consider the following: How good a driver are you?
Admittedly, as an open-ended question, it’s difficult to answer. So use a scale of 0–100, where 0 is the absolute worst in the world, 50 is completely ordinary and average, and 100 is the absolute best in the world. Choose any number between 0 and 100—how does your driving stack up? Settle on your response before reading further.
Now, another question: How strong are your leadership skills? Again, compare yourself to the average person on the same scale of 0–100.
You should now have two numbers in mind—two numbers that quantify specific aspects of your self-concept.
Five bucks says both of them are greater than 50.
That’s right, I’d put up my own money to bet you—and everyone else who reads this book—that you rated yourself an above-average driver and an above-average leader. From a purely rational perspective, the odds aren’t in my favor. As far as I know, driving and leadership skills aren’t usually related. In fact, I’d suggest that the mere existence of the occupation of chauffeur implies that the more successful leaders become, the less likely they are to drive themselves anywhere. So when calculating the probabilities underlying my wager, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that you’re an above-average driver and a separate fifty-fifty chance that you’re an above-average leader. Multiply those, and there’s only a 25 percent likelihood that you’re above average in both domains.
Why, then, would I make such a wager, other than the fact that you and I don’t have firm plans to see each other in the near future, making it difficult for you to collect if I lose? Because I didn’t bet that you are above average in both. No, my bet was that you’d think you’re an above-average driver and an above-average leader. And by my calculations, I’ll win this bet twice as often as I’ll lose it.
Put one hundred people in a room and with enough creativity and stamina you can collect the data to rank them by ability in any domain. By mathematical necessity, half will be below average and half above average. But put the same one hundred people in a room and ask them about their abilities? I do this every semester, asking students in my class the same driving question I posed to you. I explain the scale of 0–100. I tell them to compare themselves to “the average college student” and not just any average person (a preemptive strike against the potential argument that the class truly is full of above-average drivers when compared to the performance of, say, their grandparents). Before determining by a show of hands how many rated themselves above 50, I even have them close their eyes so as to prevent peer pressure or embarrassment.
What happens when the one hundred students open their eyes? They see eighty-five classmates with hands up.
Semester after semester, more than eight out of ten of my students report being above-average drivers. In Boston, mind you. In the capital of a state whose residents ranked number forty-eight out of fifty in an insurance company’s recent “how well do you know the rules of the road” survey. A state with a department of motor vehicles that has deemed necessary the creation of something called “Driver Attitudinal Retraining” courses. A state so renowned for the aggressive driving habits of its residents that its name has inspired a vulgar portmanteau popular on T-shirts in the rest of New England—that’s “Masshole” for those of you sartorially deprived by the options available at your local boutique.
(As an aside, to be fair to my fellow citizens of Boston, you try driving for a few months in a city whose allergy to grids and other right angles, allegiance to rotaries and one-way streets, and total indifference to road signs renders even Google Maps a shot in the dark. If your corresponding decline in driving performance and rise in arterial blood pressure don’t convince you of the power of situations, few other experiences will.)
The notion that 85 percent of any audience is above average is, of course, a mathematical absurdity. Yet research suggests that this “better-than-average effect” is reliable enough to bet on:20 If you ask them, most high school students have above-average organizational skills, most college students are better than average at getting along with others, most college professors conduct superior scholarship, and most married adults are in relationships that are happier than the norm. Oh, and most of us are better looking than the average person to boot.
Problematically and perhaps amusingly, this tendency is most exaggerated among those of us least competent to begin with. The worse we are at something, the better we often think we are, as any fan of American Idol can tell you. Knowing so little to begin with about a domain as basic as grammar, I’m left in no position to evaluate just how bad my own grammar be. Or how bad it is, for that matter. So while voice lessons will improve my singing and English courses my syntax, this increased competence may, ironically, also leave me better able to appreciate how far I have left to go.
IN SHORT, even if self-perception was not so dependent on context and other people, an “authentic” self would still be elusive because we so often fail to see ourselves for who we really are. Our processes of self-perception are usually less focused on accuracy than on self-enhancement and ego stroking. Like the dieter who goes out of his way to assess progress via “friendly” scale or mirror, we frequently feel the need to take stock of who we are and how we’re doing—we just don’t want the whole, unblemished truth.
How deeply ingrained is this tendency? Try the following experiment on a friend. First, jot down two columns of colors so that you wind up with a list of several pairs. Something like:blue
green
white
black
orange
yellow
purple
red
yellow
purple
pink
gold
blue
silver
black
green
It doesn’t matter if you repeat colors. In fact, it doesn’t much matter if you use colors, ice cream flavors, or names of Pitt-Jolie children; this is just a warm-up act to throw her offtrack. When you show your friend the list, tell her to move down it as quickly as possible, circling in each pair which of the two items she likes most.
The second list you need to prepare should be in the same format, but containing letters of the alphabet. This one you can’t throw together quite as haphazardly. Each pair should include one letter from your friend’s first name and one letter not in her name. So if you and I were friends (just humor me—the hypothetical enhances my own ego), you might make the following list, with target letters in bold just to illustrate:
Now have your friend do the same thing as before, circling which letter she likes better in each pair as quickly as possible and without too much thought. It’s a strange request, to be sure, but less so following the color-choosing warm-up.
Most people choose the letters from their own name at a rate
far greater than the 50 percent that chance dictates.21 We like ourselves a lot, even unconsciously. And this association of positive sentiment with the self rears its head in far more meaningful decisions as well (again, often unconsciously). Believe it or not, statistical analysis reveals a disproportionately high number of women named “Florence” living in Florida, as well as “Georgia” in Georgia, “Louise” in Louisiana, and “Virginia” in Virginia. For that matter, Dennis and Denise are more likely than others to go into dentistry, Larry and Laura to become lawyers, and George and Geoffrey to become geoscientists. One shudders to think of who’s drawn to practicing gastroenterology in Saskatchewan.
Like the better-than-average effect, these surprising name-related findings reflect a propensity for seeing the world in an ego-enhancing light. Such self-serving tendencies are particularly likely when we’re confronted with our own shortcomings and failures. Indeed, we have an entire toolbox of strategies that we use to maintain positive self-regard in the face of the humbling and threatening experiences that constitute daily life:• We bask in the glory of others, even when we’ve had little to do with their success.22 Whether touting our tenuous connections to the childhood-acquaintance-turned-celebrity or getting decked out in our alma mater’s insignia after a football victory, it feels good to run with the winners. There’s a reason those giant foam fingers sold at sports stadiums don’t say “They’re #1.”
• But when it comes to learning about ourselves through comparisons with others, it’s the unsuccessful, unaccomplished individual who’s the ideal target for our mental maneuvering. 23 Why do we look down the row to see how other people scored on the exam? In part because we seek context in which to place our own performance. But after a failure or other setback, we often just want to console ourselves with the conclusion that at least I’m better off than that guy.
