Remembered Selves
If relativity is all that we can ever know, then this means that our self is defined by the values against which it is matched. Even our remembered self – what we were like in the past – is a relative decision. Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman similarly draws the distinction between two different versions of the self, the experiencing self and the remembered self.22 The experiencing self is the subjective experience of conscious awareness living in the present. Kahneman thinks that we all have such moments of the experiencing self that last on average for about three seconds. He estimates that we have about 600,000 such moments in a month and 600 million in a lifetime, but once these moments have passed, they are lost forever.
In contrast, the remembered self is our memory of our past experiencing self. These moments are integrated into a story that we keep in memory. However, as discussed, human memory is not etched in stone but rather is actively constructed as a story that is retold. This story is a relative one. For example, in a series of studies looking at the pain associated with colonoscopy, Kahneman and colleagues asked patients to report their experiences every sixty seconds. This was the experiencing self – the moments of self-awareness that constitute the conscious moments of everyday experience. Kahneman was interested in how patients would recall unpleasant experiences that either ended abruptly in pain or mild discomfort. In half of the group, the tip of the colonoscope was left in their rectum for three minutes, which lengthened the duration of the procedure but meant that the final moments were less painful. After the colonoscopy, patients were asked to rate their experiences. The group who had the longer procedure that ended in less pain rated their experiences more positively than the group who had a shorter procedure. The relatively painless ending left a lasting impression of the whole experience.23
It would appear that we are more sensitive to the beginnings and endings of experience, and remember them rather than what goes on in between. This has been shown in hundreds of memory experiments in which individuals are asked to remember long lists of items. It turns out that we are more likely to remember items at the beginning of the list, called the primacy effect, and items at the end, called the recency effect. It’s not that we get bored in between but rather items at the start have the relative advantage of novelty. Items at the end are less likely to be forgotten because subsequent items do not overwrite them in memory. In short, the beginning and end demarcate the duration of the experience, which is what we note. This is why it is always better to be either the first or the last to be interviewed for a job because the first and the last candidate benefit from primacy and recency effects. These effects of being at the beginning or the end of an experience show that we are more sensitive to the relative changes in our lives. Kahneman argues that these effects explain why we are so poor at evaluating our selves during periods of stability in our lives. For example, we think that we are happier on holidays but, in reality, most of us are happier at work. Because everything is relative, we focus on transitions in life rather than the continuities where there is little change.
Hot Heads
External events influence our choices in ways that seem to be somewhat out of our control. But what of the internal conflicts inside our heads? The self is a constructed web of interacting influences competing for control. To live our lives in society, we need to inhibit or suppress disruptive impulses, thoughts and urges. The drives of fleeing, fighting, feeding and fornicating are constantly vying for attention in situations when they are not appropriate. What of our reasoning and control when we submit to these urges? It turns out that the self-story we tell our selves can become radically distorted.
In what must be one of the most controversial studies of late, Dan Ariely, wanted to investigate how our attitudes change when we are sexually aroused.24 First, he asked male students to rate their attitudes to a variety of issues related to sex. For example, would they engage in unprotected sex, spanking, group sex and sex with animals? Would they have sex with someone they did not like or a woman over sixty? He even asked them whether they would consider spiking a woman’s drink with drugs so that she would have sex with them.
In the cold light of day, these men answered absolutely no way would they engage in these immoral acts. These were upstanding males who valued women and had standards of behaviour. Ariely then gave them $10, a copy of Playboy magazine and a computer laptop protectively wrapped so that they could answer the same questions again with one hand, while they masturbated with the other in the privacy of their dorm rooms. When they were sexually aroused something monstrous happened. These men were turned into animals by their passion. Ariely discovered these student Dr Jekylls turned into veritable Mr Hydes when left alone to pleasure themselves. They were twice as likely to say that they would engage in dubious sexual activities when they were sexually aroused. More worrying, there was a fourfold increase in the likelihood that they would drug a woman for sex! Clearly when males are thinking with their ‘little brain’, they tumble from their moral high ground, which they can usually maintain when they are in a non-aroused state. As Ariely put it, ‘Prevention, protection, conservatism and morality disappeared completely from their radar screen.’ It was if they were a different person.
We Are What We Have
It’s not just our natural drives that are susceptible to impulsivity. To that list we need to add the modern pastime of shopping. Shopping has no obvious evolutionary imperative and yet, in the West, it is often reported as an addictive behaviour. There are even Shopaholics Anonymous groups, similar to the more established Alcoholics Anonymous, to help people overcome their psychological need to buy things. I am not personally a shopaholic but I have occasionally made that impulsive purchase that I would not normally make – very often egged on by others. In my case, these have been esoteric objects or art that I think I should own. But why? What is it about owning possessions that gives us a psychological buzz?
I think that objects are a reflection of our self or at least a perceived notion of how we would like to be seen by others. William James was one of the first psychologists to understand the importance of objects to humans as a reflection of their notion of self, when he wrote, ‘A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.’25
Objects serve an important function as ostensive markers for self-identity. When we take possession of objects they become ‘mine’ – my coffee cup, my Nikes, my telephone. This obsession with ownership can be traced to early childhood.26 In our labs, we found that many preschoolers had formed an emotional attachment to sentimental objects such as blankets and teddy bears and would not readily accept an identical replacement.27 Many of these children would grow up into adults who would become emotionally distressed just at the thought of destroying their beloved ragbag. We know this because we wired adults up to a machine that measures arousal and found that they got anxious when they had to cut-up a photograph of the object of their childhood attachment. Myself and colleagues have recently created a series of brain imaging studies where we show adults videos of their objects being blown up, driven over, axed, chainsawed and jumped on. A brain scanner reveals the different regions of the brain that are activated during these distressing movies. So far the results look encouraging. Sometimes, I really love my research!28