We Don’t Really Know Ourselves
Science argues that we don’t do what we say, we don’t know what we want. How much of this can be true?
Once you really know yourself, can’t nobody tell you nothing about you.
Indeed, as Megan stated, once you really know yourself, no one can tell you more about yourself than what you already know. But, after all, very little are the chances of us completely knowing ourselves. I mean, sure, we know what we think we are, how we think we think, and so on. But we are much more complex than we let on, and much more complex than we honestly know. Things such as implicit biases, heuristics, and desire for conformity are just some of the evidence supporting our limited understanding of ourselves.
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
The Irrational Mind
Richard H, Thaler has been given the 49th Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences, sometimes known as the Nobel Prize in economics, for his contributions to behavioural economics. He was a leading proponent of the concept that humans do not always act logically. He contributed to a better understanding of people’s decision-making in particular by using insights from psychological research.
The idea is that we, humans, are not like the all-mighty ideal computers. People, for example, are loss averse: they’d rather expect a lesser reward with the same risk but limit their losses. This has financial market consequences. But this idea (that humans don’t always make perfectly rational decisions) goes far beyond the field of economics.
According to the writer of “Nudge”, nutritional disorders are a developing problem that demonstrates how poor humans are at serving their own best interests. Thaler recommended that each human be viewed as two people: one who plans and the other who performs (or does not do) what is intended. Signing up for an annual gym membership may make perfect sense to your planner side — it expects you to go to the gym every day, or that you’ll have peanut butter smoothies every morning for breakfast. However, the doer in you may not follow through on this; it makes perfect reason for the doer in you to continually postpone the gym trip until it is more convenient until the year is through. And heaven knows, if I see doughnuts in the mornings…doughnuts I shall eat.
Gyms and the supplement industry generate money by appealing to the planner side of your personality. They continue to make money thanks to our doer side, and how we easily fall back into vicious cycles. At least, I know I do.
Our Memories are not the Most Reliable Records of Our Lives
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf
A memory bias is a cognitive bias in psychology that either increases or hinders the recall of memory (either the likelihood that the memory will be recalled at all, or the length of time it takes to be recalled, or both), or that affects the content of a reported memory. Some examples of biases are:
Choice-supportive bias: recalling that chosen choices were superior to rejected possibilities
Confirmation bias is defined as the tendency to seek, interpret, or recall information that supports one’s views or assumptions. Conservatism, also known as regressive bias, refers to the propensity to recall high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as being lower than they actually were, and low ones as being higher than they actually were. Memories are not severe enough, according to the research. Consistency bias is the erroneous recall of one’s previous attitudes and behaviour as reflecting one’s current views and behaviour. And many more, if you want to explore more, click here for the memory bias Wikipedia page.
Fun read uh? Not really, ok. Also, can you tell I just paraphrased some items that started with C? That’s my laziness bias, it makes the point.
We are sure of memories that are actually tinted by the way in which we work.
Dr. Zimbardo and the Prisoner Experience: Life Imitates Life
The experiment officially began on August 15, 1971, with convicts being apprehended in their own neighbourhoods by actual Palo Alto police. During the experiment guards (who were chosen randomly) were abusive to the inmates, prompting Zimbardo, at the suggestion of Christina Maslach, to call the experiment off before it was scheduled to end.
In summary, a local newspaper was used to recruit participants for university research. The goal was to investigate the effects of power. Guards and convicts were picked at random on the day of the briefing to reduce the chance of the study being compromised by participant personality features (like in the case of some participants already being inclined to be submissive, or abusive).
The first day of the experiment was sluggish and uninteresting, but by the second day, things were heating up. The convicts began to rebel and refused to obey the guards’ orders. The guards reacted by treating convicts who did not take part in the “rebellion” differently. One prisoner suffered a mental collapse and was exempted from the experiment. The guards tightened their grip as word spread that the “escaped prisoner” was returning to liberate the others. After a few more days, the guards added solitary confinement, which was essentially a tiny, dark closet where a convict would go and have to suffer the other convicts beating on the door and yelling at them.
Worse things happened, but you can watch the video above for that. Not because I don’t want to “do the work”, but because if I don’t want to force you to read nitty and gritty details if you’re not that involved after all.
This study’s ostensible “finding” was that some unfavourable conditions may bring out the worst in individuals. People will just assume the roles they’ve seen played out in numerous movies and programmes if the scenario has pre-defined expectations, such as a jail setting.
And you know, maybe it’s true. Good people can do bad things.
However, when I say “we don’t really know ourselves” maybe I’m also trying to say that we trust our own judgment. Like the judgment of believing things reported in the name of science (“research says…”), or reported in history books.
For example, Ben Blum explained terrifically in The Lifespan of a Lie how the study might be based on, well, a bluff.
FUN FACT!! I found out just about this because I was researching it again. That tells you that an avocado never really knows what an avocado knows.
So let’s take the ball while it bounces (is that how the saying goes?), and ask ourselves: how much of “the facts” should we listen to?
Listen to everything, of course, but take nothing for granted. Unless, maybe, there are hundreds of replicated studies about it…or, I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out myself.
Yes, that is the longest heading I have ever written.
But it’s long because I have not much more to add around the topic. We can trust science, but science does not equal truth intrinsically. Even more when we talk about those called “soft sciences”, like psychology, behavioural economics, sociology, etc.
That is not to say that stuff isn’t relevant. All knowledge is. But nothing should be taken at face value…just like what we think we know about ourselves.
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
- Thales
Or maybe, the most difficult thing is waking up early on a Monday morning. All is relative, isn’t it?
Further reading:
Google I/O 2014 — Don’t Listen to Users, Sample Their Experience! — YouTube
Behavioral science in business: Nudging, debiasing, and managing the irrational mind | McKinsey
This is a really absorbing read Jess, very interesting. Is the Prison experience you mention that which is commonly known as the Stanford Prison Experiment? I assumed so. I'm extremely interested in human behaviour, so finding this essay in my email inbox was a treat for me, well done!