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Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.
This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.”
Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work.
What was their secret? A large part of it was strategy—the ways that children used their limited mental control to shift attention.
These thinking skills are an aspect of emotional intelligence—an ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires.29
Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that’s not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.
Dan Wegner, one of the most perverse and creative social psychologists, has dragged the imp into the lab and made it confess to being an aspect of automatic processing.
In Wegner’s studies, participants are asked to try hard not to think about something, such as a white bear, or food, or a stereotype.
Wegner creates minor obsessions in his lab by instructing people not to obsess.
When controlled processing tries to influence thought (“Don’t think about a white bear!”), it sets up an explicit goal. And whenever one pursues a goal, a part of the mind automatically monitors progress, so that it can order corrections or know when success has been achieved. When that goal is an action in the world (such as arriving at the airport on time), this feedback system works well. But when the goal is mental, it backfires.
Automatic processes continually check: “Am I not thinking about a white bear?” As the act of monitoring for the absence of the thought introduces the thought, the person must try even harder to divert consciousness. Automatic and controlled processes end up working at cross purposes, firing each other up to ever greater exertions. But because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears.
Now, back to me at that dinner party. My simple thought “don’t make a fool of yourself” triggers automatic processes looking for signs of foolishness.
Automatic processes generate thousands of thoughts and images every day, often through random association. The ones that get stuck are the ones that particularly shock us, the ones we try to suppress or deny. The reason we suppress them is not that we know, deep down, that they’re true (although some may be), but that they are scary or shameful.
You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about color, or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s shiny nose).
Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other.
If you listen closely to moral arguments, you can sometimes hear something surprising: that it is really the elephant holding the reins, guiding the rider. It is the elephant who decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly and automatically (as Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink),34 but only the rider can string sentences together and create
In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.
Because we can see only one little corner of the mind’s vast operation, we are surprised when urges, wishes, and temptations emerge, seemingly from nowhere. We make pronouncements, vows, and resolutions, and then are surprised by our own powerlessness to carry them out. We sometimes fall into the view that we are fighting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self. But really we are the whole thing.
We are the rider, and we are the elephant.
But first we have to figure out why the elephant is such a pessimist.
Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.
Self-help books and seminars sometimes seem to consist of little more than lecturing and hectoring people until they understand this idea and its implications for their lives.
Lady Philosophy then guides Boethius through reinterpretations that foreshadow modern cognitive therapy (described below). She begins by asking Boethius to think about his relationship with the Goddess of Fortune. Philosophy reminds Boethius that Fortune is fickle, coming and going as she pleases. Boethius took Fortune as his mistress, fully aware of her ways, and she stayed with him for a long time. What right has he now to demand that she be chained to his side?
She helps him see that adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for
more, but adversity makes them strong.
After being shown these new perspectives and having his old assumptions challenged, Boethius is finally prepared to absorb the greatest lesson of all, the lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”7
Epiphanies can be life-altering,8 but most fade in days or weeks.
This chapter is about why the elephant tends toward worry and pessimism in so many people, and about three tools that the rider can use to retrain it.
For example, suppose you are a participant in an experiment on what is known as “affective priming.”
Unbeknownst to you, the computer is also flashing up another word, right on the dot, just for a few hundredths of a second before putting up the target word you’re rating. Though these words are presented subliminally (below the level of your awareness), your intuitive system is so fast that it reads and reacts to them with a like-o-meter rating. If the subliminal word is fear, it would register negative on your like-o-meter, making you feel a tiny flash of displeasure; and then, a split second later, when you see the word boredom, you would more quickly say that boredom is bad.
If, however, the word following fear is garden, you would take longer to say that garden is good, because of the time it takes for your like-o-meter to shift from bad to good.9
The discovery of affective priming in the 1980s opened up a world of indirect measurement in psychology. It became possible to bypass the rider and talk directly to the elephant, and what the elephant has to say is sometimes disturbing.
apparently the rider and the elephant each have an opinion.
The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name. Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously. The elephant reacts instinctively and steers the rider toward a new destination.
Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening.
For most people, the elephant sees too many things as bad and not enough as good.
If you were designing the mind of a fish, would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats? No way. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low; odds are that there are other fish in the sea, and one mistake won’t lead to starvation. The cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator, however, can be catastrophic.
This principle, called “negativity bias,”13 shows up all over psychology.
Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things.
We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.
Here’s another candidate for a design principle of animal life:
The withdrawal system can quickly shoot up to full power,19 overtaking the slower (and generally weaker) approach system.
The amygdala, sitting just under the thalamus, dips into the river of unprocessed information flowing through the thalamus, and it responds to patterns that in the past were associated with danger.
Once again, bad is stronger and faster than good. The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path. Although you can tell yourself that you are not afraid of snakes, if your elephant fears them and rears up, you’ll still be thrown.
In fact, happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences. 28 (Particular episodes of joy or depression, however, must usually be understood by looking at how life events interact with a person’s emotional predisposition.)
A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry:
In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29
You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation,
cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant.
Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.33
