We’re always setting new goals for ourselves, but we often end up abandoning them. Why is it sometimes so hard for us to keep working toward what we’ve decided to do? In §9-2 we’ll come back to discuss self-discipline and self-control, but here we’ll only mention that attachments also can help us persist—either from hope that we’ll please our imprimers or from fear of disappointing them.
Why does an Imprimer’s praise have an effect so different from that of praise that comes from a stranger? I do not know of any brain-research that has revealed the machinery involved with this—but it is easy to see how it could have evolved: if strangers could change your high-level goals, they could get you to do whatever they want—just by changing what you, yourself, want to do! Children with no defense against this would be less likely to survive, so evolution would tend to select children who could resist that effect.
Student: I like the idea that Attachment induces our children to adopt our values (though perhaps you’ve induced me to agree by exploiting your role as Imprimer). But is there any evidence that this mechanism really exists?
So far as I know, no parts of our brains have yet been shown to be involved with this, but §2-7 discusses some evidence that damage to a child’s attachments can impair that child’s development. Future advances in ways to scan brains should tell us more about how such things work.
Student: Even if we knew more about how Attachment affects us, we’d still need explanations of the strengths of those feelings of Pride and Shame.
The final chapters of this book will propose some ideas about what feelings are and how they work.
§2-4. Attachment-Learning Elevates Goals
“Each of us has beliefs about what constitutes acceptable actions, thoughts and feelings. We acquire our standards, rules and goals through acculturation… and each of us has acquired a set appropriate to our particular circumstances. To become a member of any group, we are required to learn them. Living up to one’s own internalized set of standards—or failing to live up to them—forms the basis of some very complex emotions.”
When Carol’s loved ones censure her, she feels that her goals are unworthy of her or that she is unworthy of her goals. And when she is somewhat older, then, even when her Imprimers are far from the scene, she still may wonder about how they might feeclass="underline" Would they approve of what I have done? Would they approve of what I am thinking now? What kinds of machinery might we engage that makes us experience such concerns? Let’s listen to Michael Lewis again:
“The so-called self-conscious emotions, such as guilt, pride, shame and hubris, require a fairly sophisticated level of intellectual development. To feel them, individuals must have a sense of self as well as a set of standards. They must also have notions of what constitutes success or failure, and the capacity to evaluate their own behavior.”
Why would the growth of these personal values depend upon a child’s attachments? It is easy to see how this might have evolved: a child who lost its parents’ esteem would not be so likely to survive. Also, those parents themselves will want to earn the respect of their friends and peers—so they will want their children to ‘behave’ in socially acceptable ways, and we’ve seen several ways for children to learn such things:
Negative Experience: When a method fails one learns not to use that subgoal.
Positive Experience: When a method succeeds, one learns to use that subgoal
Aversion: When a stranger scolds, one learns to avoid such situations.
Attachment Censure: When an imprimer scolds, the child devalues her goal.
Attachment Praise: When an imprimer praises, the child elevates that goal.
We’ve already seen how subgoals can be connected to serve our goals—the way that Use Spoon could become attached to Fill Cup. But when your imprimer praises you, some machinery elevates your current goal, to make it more ‘respectable’ by raising its place in your cloud of goals.
However, this image tells us nothing about how those processes actually work, so we need to construct some theories about how attachment works to ‘elevate’ goals. First, this must depend on circuits that recognize when the praise comes from an imprimer:
Student: Why did you insist that those “AND” devices should require both praise and an Imprimer?
That’s because, as we noted in §2-3, we would all be in danger if praise, alone, could cause our brains to elevate goals—because then any stranger could program us by suggesting new goals and then praising us.
Student: But to some extent that’s already true; I am not immune to compliments—even from persons I don’t respect.
One feature of human diversity is that we can learn the same things in different ways—and any psychological event is likely to have several causes. If attachment-based learning exists, it is only one part of the story.
Student: But something is missing from this scheme because, even after its level is raised, that ‘fill cup” goal is still floating around with no connections that could get it aroused.
Indeed this idea is incomplete. There is no use to learning something new unless one also has ways to retrieve it when it is relevant. This raises many questions like these:
To what should each new goal be attached?
When and how should it be aroused?
What kind of priority should it have?
How long to pursue it, before giving up?
There are no simple answers to these, because all those issues must involve much of the rest of our mental machinery. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how to think about such things without a set of ideas about ‘levels’ of mental activities. Our brains have many systems that learn—and as these develop over the years, they may tend to form roughly hierarchical structures, because each fragment of newly acquired knowledge is built upon things that we’ve learned before.
For example, in the course of everyday thinking, you need to constantly control the “level of detail” of descriptions. When a plan seems to be working successfully, you’ll want to “descend” to work out details—but when you seem to be getting stuck, you’ll want to ‘look up’ to a higher-level overview, instead of investing time on subgoals that may not be relevant. [See §§Level-Bands]
§2-5. Learning and pleasure