Of course, not every decision comes down to a personal consumer choice, especially when we are asked about things of which we have no knowledge. Sometimes the decision can be so important that we seek out confirmation and support from others, especially those we perceive to be experts such as medical doctors. We may be offered a choice in treatments, but most of us prefer the doctor to tell us what to do because we think they know best. Yet in many instances of our day-to-day experience, we generally assume that, given a simple informed choice, we can apply some internal process of evaluation and then, like a judge, we make our pronouncement.
This is wrong because the processes that weigh our choices are unconscious. It may feel like you have reached your decision in the open courtroom of your mind but, in fact, most of the important stuff has been going on behind closed doors. You may be able consciously to consider choices as potential scenarios and then try to imagine what the choice would mean, but the information that is being supplied has already been processed, evaluated and weighed up well before you have had time to consider what you will do. It’s like when you say, ‘I’ve just had a great idea!’ It seems instantaneous but no light bulb suddenly went off in your head. It may have felt like a sudden enlightenment, but the boys in the backroom had been developing the idea all along and simply presented you with their analysis. Like Libet’s experiment, no single point in time marks the difference between knowing and not knowing when you are about to act. Even if you deliberate over an idea, turning it over in your conscious mind, you are simply delaying the final decision that has, to all intents and purposes, already been made.
None of this is new. We have known since the days of psychology’s early pioneers – von Helmholtz and more famously Freud – that there are unconscious processes controlling our thoughts and behaviours.4 What is new is the extent to which these processes are there to protect the self illusion – the narrative we create that we are the ones making the decisions. This stems from the need to maintain the appearance that we are in control, even when we are not. We are so concerned with maintaining the illusion of the sovereignty of self that we are prepared to argue that black is white just to prove that we are right.
This is why we effortlessly and sometimes unknowingly reinterpret our behaviour to make it seem that we had deliberately made the choices all along. We are constantly telling stories to make sense of our selves. In one study, adults were shown pairs of female faces and asked to choose which was the more attractive of the two women.5 On some trials, immediately after making their choice, the card with the picture of the chosen woman was held up and the participants were asked to explain why they had chosen her over the other. Was it her hairstyle or colour of her eyes? The cunning aspect of the study was that, on some of the trials, the experimenter used sleight of hand to switch the cards deliberately so that participants were asked to justify a choice they hadn’t made – to support the choice of the woman who they had actually just rejected. Not only were most switches undetected, but participants went on to give perfectly lucid explanations for why the woman was so much more attractive than the one they rejected. They were unaware that their choice was not their choice. It works for taste tests as well. When shoppers were asked to sample different jams and teas at a Swedish supermarket, again the researchers switched the products after the shoppers had selected the flavours they preferred and were asked to describe why they chose one flavour over another. Whether it was a switch from spicy cinnamon apple to sour grape jam, or from sweet mango to pungent Pernod-flavoured tea, the shoppers detected less than a third of the switches.6 It would seem that, once we have made a preference, we are committed to justifying our decision.
This shows just how easy it is to fool our selves into thinking that our self is in control. As Steven Pinker7 put it, ‘The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander-in-chief.’ Having been presented with a decision, we then make sense of it as if it were our own. Otherwise, it would suggest that we don’t know what we are doing, which is not something that most of us would readily admit.
Sour Grapes
That we can so readily justify our choices is at the heart of one of the ancient world’s best-known stories about our necessity to spin a story. One day a hungry fox came across a bunch of grapes that hung high on a vine but, despite repeated leaping attempts to reach them, the fox was unable to dislodge the grapes. Defeated, he left saying that he did not want them anyway because they were sour. He had changed his mind. Whenever we talk disparagingly about something that we initially wanted but did not get, we are said to be displaying ‘sour grapes’. It’s very common. How often have we all done this when faced with the prospect of loss? Consider all those job interviews that you failed to get. Remember those dates that went disastrously wrong or the competition you entered and lost? We console our selves with the excuse that we did not want the job anyway, the other person was a jerk or that we were not really trying to win. We may even focus on the negative aspects of being offered the job, getting a kiss or winning the competition. But we are conning our selves. Why do we do this?
Who would have thought that a Greek slave born over 2,500 years ago would have produced some of the most enduring commentaries on the human condition through his storytelling, which pre-empted recent theories in cognitive science? Remarkably, Aesop’s fables about animals behaving like humans endure not only because they are immediately accessible metaphors for the vagaries of human behaviour, but they also speak to fundamental truths. In the case of the fox and the sour grapes, Aesop is describing cognitive dissonance – one of the major psychological mechanisms discovered and researched over the last fifty years that has generated an estimated 3,000 plus studies.
Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by Leon Festinger in 1957, is the process of self-justification whereby we defend our actions and thoughts when they turn out to be wrong or, as in the case of sour grapes, ineffectual.8 We interpret our failure to attain a goal as actually turning out to be a good thing because, with hindsight, we reinterpret the goal as not really desirable. Otherwise, we are faced with the prospect that we have wasted a lot of work and effort to no avail. This discrepancy creates the cognitive dissonance. It’s a dissonance because, on the one hand, we believe that we are generally pretty successful at attaining our goals. On the other hand, we were unsuccessful at achieving this particular goal. This is the dissonance aspect of our reasoning – the unpleasant mental discomfort we experience. To avoid the conflict this dissonance creates, we reinterpret our failure as a success. We tell our selves that the goal was actually not in our best interests. Job done – no worries.
Freud similarly talked about defence mechanisms that we use to protect the self illusion. However, the self illusion sometimes has to reconcile incongruent thoughts and behaviours. For example, I may consider myself to be a good person but then have bad thoughts about someone. That is inconsistent with my good self-story so I employ defence mechanisms. I may rationalize my thoughts by saying that the person is actually bad and I am justified in my negative attitude towards them. Perversely, I may do the opposite and go out of my way to think of them positively as a compensation for my unconscious negativity in what Freud called ‘reaction formation’. Or I may project my negative feelings about a person on to their pet dog, and blame the poor mutt for my reasons of dislike, when it is actually his owner I despise. All of these are examples of why we try to reframe the unpleasant feelings that we have towards someone in order to maintain our valued sense of self – a self that is not unduly or unfairly judgemental of others.