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 (26 page)

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.

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.

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 the 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.

In social psychology, a version of the self-fulfilling prophecy called labeling theory shows how when someone believes you are a certain kind of person, you tend to live up to those expectations. If your teacher thinks you are smart, the teacher treats you like a smart person. You get extra attention and respect. You react with more effort, more drive, and the positive feedback loop leads to the fulfillment of your label. In a 1978 experiment by William Crano and Phyllis Mellon, a set of random students were chosen from an elementary class. The teachers were told these random students had been shown to be possible child geniuses based on an IQ test. The test, of course, didn’t exist, and the results were imaginary. Sure enough, those students performed better on homework and exams thanks to more attention from the teachers who believed the prophecy.

Think of the stock market. When people predict it will fail, they stop investing and start selling. Others hear about the selling, and they sell. People start to try and predict the future, assume everyone is going to sell, and they sell too. Once the media starts reporting, stocks plummet.

Research shows if you believe someone is going to be an asshole, you will act hostile, thus causing them to act like an asshole. This same research shows if people think their partner doesn’t love them, they will interpret small slights as big hurts—and this will then lead to a feeling of rejection that causes the partner to distance him- or herself. The feedback loop will build and build until the prophecy is fulfilled.