You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney

  The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens. Instead believe you see the whole world in front of you. In any event where eyewitnesses or close inspection are key, your tendency to believe you have perfect perception and recall leads to mistakes in judgment of your own mind and the minds of others. Human eyes aren’t video cameras, and the memories formed aren’t videos.

  The fraternal twin of inattentional blindness is change blindness. The brain can’t keep up with the total amount of information coming in from your eyes, and so your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity. With change blindness, you don’t notice when things around you are altered to be drastically different than they were a moment ago. Reality, as you experience it, is a virtual experience generated by the brain based on the inputs coming in from your senses. You don’t get a raw feed from those inputs; instead, you get an edited version.

  In another experiment by Simons and Chabris, subjects had to approach a man and sign a consent form before taking part in what they thought was the actual experiment. The man stood behind a tall desk, like a registration desk at a hotel, and once they signed, the man behind the desk ducked under it to put away the form. Another man then stood up and handed them a packet of information. Two-thirds of the subjects didn’t realize it was a different person. They had no problem recalling other aspects of the room and the interaction, but the actual identity of the person was just an impression, a shorthand. Their brains registered it was a young, Caucasian male, and that’s it. No more attention was paid to the person behind the desk, so the memory was no clearer. The fact that he changed into a new person raised no alarms.

  In other experiments, Simons and Daniel T. Levin showed a conversation at a dinner table between actresses filmed in two separate shots. In one shot subjects saw one actress, and then the shot changed to show the other actress when she spoke. Between the shots, nine different aspects of the scene were changed. The color of the plates went from white to red, food items appeared and disappeared, and even the clothes changed as the camera cut from one perspective to the other. When subjects were asked if they noticed, most didn’t remember any changes. When the experimenters asked the subjects to specifically look for differences, on average only two of the nine changes were caught. When they ran the experiment again, but this time had one actor hear a phone ring and then a second actor appear in the following shot and answer it, only 33 percent of the people watching the video noticed the actor had been switched.

  Magicians build careers around perceptual blindness. It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. You believe when something unexpected happens the security guard in your brain will spit out his coffee and call the boss, but there is no security guard and there is no boss. Magicians know your brain isn’t a passive receiver of images from your eyes. Instead, you choose what to perceive. While driving and talking on a cell phone, how much of your world do you miss? The research findings suggest you could have your eyes wide open, but fail to see the car, the bike, or the deer about to cross your path.

  In the late 1970s Richard Haines at NASA was testing heads-up displays on commercial airliners. His research showed how the unexpected doesn’t jump out at you, not even when you are in a situation where your senses are on alert. A heads-up display is a semitransparent glowing series of images that appear as if they float between the pilot and the windshield of the cockpit. The display was meant to keep pilots looking through the windshield at all times instead of diverting their attention to the control panels below. Haines tested the display in a flight simulator where he had pilots practice landing with its assistance. He found when it was turned on, the pilots took longer to react to the sight of another plane on the runway, and some even missed it completely. The pilots were paying so much attention to the new technology, they missed something that before would have been hard to miss. The technology designed to help them actually hurt them. The more your attention is engaged, the less you expect something out of the ordinary and the less prone you are to see it even when lives could be at stake.

  One strange twist on this research comes from Richard Nisbett and Hanna-Faye Chua at the University of Michigan. In 2005, they showed people who grew up in Western cultures and people from East Asian cultures photos with one object as the focus of the action surrounded by interesting backgrounds. When they tracked their eye movements, they discovered the Western observers tended to ignore the background and fixate on the focal object, while the Asian subjects took in everything. If the image was a jet flying over mountains, Western eyes more quickly darted to the airplane and then spent more time examining it. A similar experiment at the University of Alberta had Westerners and Japanese subjects watch cartoons with one character in the foreground and four in the background. The study showed that the Japanese subjects spent 15 percent of their time looking at the background characters, while the Westerners spent 5 percent of theirs. The research into cultural cognition is new, but these studies suggest that Western culture is less concerned with context and more concerned with the center of attention, which means it is possible Westerners are more susceptible to both change blindness and inattentional blindness.

  The world outside your head and the world inside it are not identical. The information flowing into consciousness from your senses is not only limited by your attention, but also edited before it arrives. Once there, it mixes like paint with all the other thoughts and perceptions swirling inside your cranium. The way you feel, the culture you grew up in, the task at hand, the chaos of technology and society—it all creates a granular, busy visual world. Only a slice of it arrives in your mind. Despite this, the great circus of human activity and invention goes on. You choose what to see more than you realize, and then you form beliefs without taking into account your selective vision. You can’t do much about it other than to choose wisely when it is important. Don’t put faith in your senses when you wear a hands-free headset in the car or lose yourself in a book in a public place. The unexpected isn’t guaranteed to jar you out of your daydream.

  41

  Self-Handicapping

  THE MISCONCEPTION: In all you do, you strive for success.

  THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.

  Chances are you know someone who seems to be in a perpetual state of illness. Maybe it’s you, but let’s assume it isn’t. This person, the hypochondriac, is always complaining about a cold or a fever, a sick stomach or an aching back. For those who habitually see themselves as unwell, there are a number of benefits. A true hypochondriac absorbs empathy like a flower does sunshine, but the real reward comes when life gets too hard. When a project or an obligation seems like too much to handle, a hypochondriac can conveniently become sick and avoid the risk of failing.

  Like most aberrant behaviors, hypochondria is just an extreme version of something everyone thinks and feels occasionally. Everyone gets depressed, just like everyone gets obsessed with cleaning their surroundings occasionally. Major depressive and obsessive compulsive disorders take those normal tendencies and amplify them into unmanageable variants. You share with hypochondriacs the tendency to unconsciously contrive excuses ahead of time.

  From time to time a project will come along that seems so big and challenging you start to question your ability to succeed. It could be as epic as writing a book or directing a major motion picture, or it could be something more pedestrian like passing a final exam or delivering an important speech to your corporate boss. Naturally, some doubts will float through your mind whenever failure is possible. Sometimes, when the fear of failure is strong, you use a technique psychologists call self-handicapping to change the course of your future emotional state. Self-handicapping is a reality negotiation, an unconscious manipulation, of both your perceptions and those of others, that you use to protect your ego. Like its cousins sour grapes, in which you pretend you don’t want
what you can’t have, and sweet lemons, in which you convince yourself something unpleasant is actually not so bad, self-handicapping is what psychologists call an anticipatory rationalization. Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.

  As with many of the topics in this book, this behavior is all about keeping your all-important self-esteem strong and resilient. If you can always blame your failures on external forces, instead of internal ones, well, who’s to say you really fail?

  Self-handicapping was studied by psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones in 1978. In their research, they had students take difficult tests and then told them they had made perfect scores on them, no matter how they had actually performed. They hypothesized these students, who now had boosted self-images, would choose to protect their egos if given the opportunity. When they then gave them the chance to take what they were told was either a performance-inhibiting or a performance-enhancing drug before a second exam, the majority took the inhibiting drug. The drug was fake, but the behavior was real. Berglas and Jones later said their research showed when you are successful but don’t know why, you wonder inside if you are truly capable of success. The stakes on future tests of ability are raised, but so are the fears of failure. Instead of making excuses after the fact that feel like lies, you create conditions ahead of time so the excuses can be real.

  You might wear inappropriate clothes to a job interview, or pick a terrible character in Mario Kart, or stay up all night drinking before work—you are very resourceful when it comes to setting yourself up to fail. If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

  Adam Alter and Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales discovered in 2006 that your mood is a powerful predictor of when you will self-handicap, but not in the way you think. They had people take tests of their verbal abilities and divided them into two groups. One was told they did very well, and the other was told they didn’t. What participants actually scored didn’t matter because the experimenters were just interested in boosting or deflating their egos. After priming one of the groups to have a positive self-image, they then showed them videos putting them in either a good mood or a bad one. One film was a British comedy, the other a documentary about cancer. After this, the subjects were told they would be taking another test, but first they were given the choice of two different tea drinks, one that would make them sleepy or one that would give them a jolt of alertness. This was the crucial moment in the study. Would people who were likely to self-handicap be even more likely to follow through with it if they were sad? Actually, no. The people in a good mood were much more likely to self-handicap. Those who watched the comedy and did well on the first test chose the calming tea 65 percent of the time. Those who did well and watched the depressing documentary chose the calming tea 34 percent of the time. To bolster their findings, they ran the experiment in several ways, eliminating and adding variables to be sure the subjects were truly self-handicapping. In the end, Alter and Forgas concluded the happier you are, the more likely you will be to seek out ways to delude yourself into maintaining your rosy outlook on life and your own abilities. Sad people, it seems, are more honest with themselves.

  Your sense of self, your identity, is something you are always tending. When you see your performance in the outside world as an integral part of your personality, you are more likely to self-handicap. Psychologist Phillip Zombardo told The New York Times in 1984, “Some people stake their whole identity on their acts. They take the attitude that ‘if you criticize anything I do, you criticize me.’ Their egocentricity means they can’t risk a failure because it’s a devastating blow to their ego.”

  In this and many other studies, men tend to be much more likely to self-handicap than women. The reasons are unclear. Perhaps men feel more pressure from society to be seen as competent, or maybe men are more likely to associate external task success with an internal sense of worth. The reasons are as yet unknown, but the tendency is clear. Men use self-handicapping more than women to assuage their fears of failure.

  Whenever you venture into uncharted waters with failure as a distinct possibility, your anxiety will be lowered every time you see a new way to blame possible failure on forces beyond your control. The next time you face a challenge, remember you are not so smart, and start preparing for it now.

  42

  Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

  THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control.

  THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.

  The self-fulfilling prophecy is a concept that goes far back into the history of storytelling and narrative fiction in just about all human cultures, but it isn’t fiction.

  Research shows you are highly susceptible to this phenomenon because you are always trying to predict the behavior of others. The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction. This is called the Thomas Theorem. The sociologist W. I. Thomas postulated in 1928, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Thomas noticed when people are trying to predict future events, they make a lot of assumptions about the present. If those assumptions are powerful enough, the resulting actions will lead to the predicted future.

  The easiest example of this is the rumor of a shortage. If you believe there will be a shortage of toothpaste, you will go and try to buy some before the stores run out—just like everyone else. Sure enough, the shortage occurs.

  The sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1968. By his estimation, the initial phase is always a false interpretation of an ongoing situation. The behavior that follows assumes the situation is real, and when enough people act as if something is real it can sometimes make it so. What was once false becomes true, and in hindsight it seems as if it always was.

  Self-fulfilling prophecies gain their power from social definitions of reality, and most of your life is defined socially, not logically. A perception depending on logic, like the number of albums sold by Foghat, can be measured. The perception of how good Foghat is, and whether or not they should play the halftime show at the Super Bowl, is socially determined. If the perceptions of others translate into actions, policies, and beliefs, the perceptions become reality simply because so much of life is ruled by behavior. Is bottled water better for you than tap water? Is a Snuggie better than a regular blanket? Are leisure suits the ultimate fashion statement? Is Inception , like, the best movie ever made? Without scientific analysis, ideas like these can go from true to false to maybe and back again because they are socially defined. They depend on subjective feelings and a vacillating consensus of beliefs. The social hive mind of the moment creates a reality all its own that is separate from the reality of things like lunar eclipses and the radius of a circle. You swim in a sea of social ideas and mental constructs shared by a culture both ancient and popular. When these ideas become beliefs, and then those beliefs become actions, the logical and measurable side of reality changes to match.

  Psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson conducted a study in 1995 where they had white and black Americans take the Graduate Record Examination. The GRE is a standardized test used by many colleges to determine whether or not to accept graduate students. It is a comprehensive and difficult test and the source of much anxiety every year in the halls of academia. Steel and Aronson told half of their subjects they were testing for intelligence, which they hypothesized would add an extra level of stress the other half wouldn’t feel. When they got back the results, the white students performed about the same whether or not they were told it was a test of how smart they were. The black students, though, primed by the stereotype threat, performed worse in t
he group who believed the test would reveal their true intelligence. According to Steel and Aronson, the social stigma of being an African-American messed with their minds. Attempting to fight their stereotype, they had unwelcome thoughts walking around and making noise in their brains while they solved word problems and figured fractions. The white students, free from these fears, had more mind space in which to work. This same sort of experiment had been repeated with gender, nationality, and all sorts of conditions. Psychologists call it the stereotype threat. When you fear you will confirm a negative stereotype, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy not because the stereotype is true, but because you can’t stop worrying that you could become an example proving it.

  This self-fulfilling prophecy, being only a matter of perception, can be easily sublimated. Another study by Steele measured the math abilities of men versus women. When the questions were easy, the women and the men performed the same. When they were difficult, the women’s scores plummeted lower than did those of their male peers. When they ran the tests again with new participants, but this time before handing out the problems told the subjects that men and women tended to perform equally on the exam, the scores leveled out. The women performed just as well as did the men. The power of the stereotype—women are bad at math—was nullified.