A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

by Cordelia Fine

self-serving bias,

On the whole, it seems we are content to employ the sloppiest of reasoning … until some threat to our motives appears, at which point we suddenly acquire the strictest possible methodological standards.

Yet their attitude towards the stooge powerfully influenced what they actually saw, at the most basic level.

Whether we feel emotionally well-disposed towards someone actually affects even our judgment of their most emotionally neutral actions.

Using a strategy known as the fading affect bias, the brain tampers with our memory of events we have already experienced.18 History is rewritten

Look up what Hamlet says about thought and action, "The pale cast of thought"; "and conscience doth make cowards of us all". Is this relevant , or am I just being pretentious?

the distressing emotions we experienced when things went wrong are looked back on as having been less and less intense, as time goes by.

Does this explain the tendency to view the past through rose tinted specs?

This differential treatment of the past leaves us susceptible to believing that our past was happier that it truly was.

See my note 2 above : it seems the answer is yes.

another patient, a young woman, expressed guilt about drawing social security payments. She was worried that, being dead, she wasn’t really eligible for her benefits. These patients suffer from the Cotard delusion, which some researchers think might be the result of a brain being even more excessive in its depersonalisation strategy.

In fact, when Descartes famously wrote ‘cogito, ergo sum’, ‘cogito’ referred not just to thinking, but to a rich variety of experiences, including emotions.

As we ponder a morally charged situation we feel a primitive flash of emotion, which is all we need in order to pass our judgment. However, as it’s a shame to leave resting idle those parts of our brain that help to distinguish us from apes and toddlers, we then invent reasons to explain and justify our view.

angry people were harsher in their recriminations of those who had neglected their duties, and were more heavy-handed in their declarations of what they would consider to be their just deserts, compared with the volunteers who weren’t experiencing carryover rage.

Our moral judgments are also dangerously polluted by a deep-rooted need to believe in a just world.

positive test strategy.

(The positive test strategy is also the reason you should never ask someone you want to stay with, ‘Don’t you love me anymore?’)

correlations are very difficult to spot by eye. It took statistical analysis to pinpoint the relationship between smoking and cancer.

Combine these common strange experiences in the general population with the unfortunate irrationality of the healthy brain – its biased and unscientific approach to evaluating hypotheses – and you begin to understand the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain.

At no point, perhaps, does that line become more blurred than when beliefs are based on religious experiences.

Mental health professionals are not much concerned by the devout Christian who has been fortunate enough to experience the presence of Jesus. But if the identity of that presence happens to be Elvis, rather than the son of God, then eyebrows begin to be raised.

sometimes, perhaps, the grace that saves us from a psychiatric diagnosis is nothing more than the sheer good fortune that millions of others happen to share our delusion.

Though we all think ourselves immune to it, negative campaigning works.

As if this mental mayhem weren’t already enough to contemplate, do we also need to worry about our promiscuous unconscious being wooed by shameless subliminal marketing campaigns?

Making decisions, getting things going, developing plans, fixing your attention on the task in hand – in short, anything that requires concentrated thought – all deplete the same pool of mental resources.

"The moral muscle"

Cognitively drained, the uglier side of our nature begins to show through the cracks in the façade we usually present to others.

Fine's argument is that our outward demeanour and propriety are a "facade" behind which lurk our "real" selves . This might be thought to be just a scientifically-supported version of the commonsense notion that we are not as much in control of our better angels than we would like others to think.

And, sorry to say, they also made rather less effort than is customary to disguise the very good opinion they had of themselves.

The wry humour here finds its mark, but the mockery is a bit relentless and eventually a little wearing and even wanting in compassion .

right now –

This section is kind of about immediate gratification or weakness of will, isn't it?

‘contrary to popular belief, scientific evidence shows that eating doesn’t actually make you feel better’.

The other volunteers, by contrast, managed a much more enthusiastic performance, with a 90 per cent success rate.

Does this actually prove much beyond the commonsense explanation that the subjects who had been foretold sad lives were too preoccupied by sad ruminations to get up much interest in a parlour game ? But isnt this experiment claimed to "prove" that people are so selfish that they would step over a starving child to get to a tray of cookies to cheer themselves up if they are feeling a bit sorry for themselves?! BUT, see the following paragraphs for the supplementary questionnaires to discount this possibility.

The will, we are learning, has a list of dressing-room demands as long as that of the most egotistical celebrity. It must not be over-worked. It must have only happiness and light around it. And, as we have just discovered, it must feel beloved and cherished at all times. What is more, although under trying and difficult circumstances it may valiantly cry that ‘the show must go on!’, the will’s attempts to rise above adversity are often rather unsuccessful.

"Often rather unsuccessful" is a Very weak conclusion compared to the suggestion at the beginning of this sentence that we are all petulant self-obsessed prima donnas. Sure, we frequently fall short of the mark, but what's so remarkable about that? The authir's tone seems to suggest tgat by tge use of rigorous unflinching scientific method, psychology has allowed us at last to see throughhumanity's web of lies about itself, but in fact these truths have been observed for millenia, haven't they??

pernicious stereotypes colour our every interpretation of others’ behaviour, and even have the power to generate self-fulfilling prophecies of our stereotypical beliefs.

subtle but devastating effects of stereotypes on stereotyped groups.

Stereotypes are a subgroup of the schemas that we met in ‘The Secretive Brain’, the filing system the brain uses to organise information into various categories.

you use one bit of the schema – even just to be able to say ‘Ah, an Asian’ – then all the other parts of the Asian schema get restless.

perception itself was influenced by the racial priming.

We see what we expect to see. But does it make a difference whether or not we subscribe to those beliefs in the first place? Does the genuinely open-minded liberal see others through bigot goggles just the same, or does she rise loftily above such distortions?

kinder, gentler form of prejudice, benevolent sexism, eulogises the warm, caring, nurturing virtues of ‘wonderful women’ (without whom men would not be complete). The enticing charm of benevolent sexism is certainly preferable to the hostile variety, so it is perhaps not surprising that women across the world subscribe to this flattering image of their gender to almost the same extent as men do.

there is evidence that we will use stereotypes to disparage anyone we can in order to make ourselves feel better, even if it was not the slandered person who made us feel bad in the first place.

This has been a discouraging story so far and it would be understandable if, at this point, you were to lay down the book and weep. The problem is that we need the efficiency that schemas buy us.

Yet this speed comes at the cost – mostly to others – of accuracy,

social psychologists are beginning to explore which strategies might help us thwart the bigoted tendencies of our brains.

The first step is to acknowledge your brain’s unwelcome bigotry.

When American researchers asked a group of non-black students about the differences between their ‘should’ and ‘would’ responses to black people, most admitted that they often experienced involuntary racist thoughts that were at odds with their consciously held colour-blind principles.

The man with even the most praiseworthy attitude towards women is susceptible to the subtle effects of the sexist billboards that bombard him on his way to work.