How We Know What Isn't So (13 page)

I
f you are like me, you have spent more time than you care to admit wondering who you would want to be if you could be somebody else. Sometimes I play this game alone, simply by trying to think of someone I might rather be. Although I am aware that other people might take one look at my life and quickly generate a host of promising candidates, I have always been struck by how difficult it is to think of any acceptable possibilities. Somehow I can always think of reasons why I would rather be myself than, say, John Updike, Warren Beatty, or Ted Koppel.

In another version of this game, I ask other people whether they would trade places with a particular person. I generally try to pick a person who is right on the borderline—one about whom the decision to trade lives should be truly difficult. Thus, I might start with the likes of Updike, Beatty, or Koppel, expecting to find a readiness to exchange lives, and then move down the list of candidates to the more difficult and informative choices. Again, I am intrigued by how quickly one reaches the other person’s point of hesitation. The Updikes, Beattys, and Koppels do not elicit the expected swift willingness to trade; instead they bring forth the kind of hesitation indicative of truly tough decisions.

Why are people so reluctant to switch lives with others? To some extent, the answer lies in the inherent ambiguity of the game. What does it mean to trade places with another person? Do you become that other person, or do you remain yourself and simply occupy the other person’s station in life? If it’s the latter, can you truly remain yourself while living under such radically different circumstances? Questions like these raise the worry that changing places with someone else ultimately entails the death of oneself, a fate we all want to avoid.

The difficulty of finding someone with whom we are willing to exchange lives can also be understood as a particular instance of a phenomenon known to economists and decision theorists as the “reluctance to trade” or the “endowment effect.”
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Ownership creates an inertia that prevents people from completing many seemingly-beneficial economic transactions. What one side is willing to give up tends to loom larger to that side than to the side receiving it, with the result that agreements with which both sides would be happy are difficult to achieve. In the present context, what one gains in money, fame, and respect by becoming an Updike, Beatty, or Koppel has surprisingly little weight compared to whatever idiosyncratic losses are involved in giving up one’s former existence.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the reluctance to trade places with someone else is also partly due to the tendency to overestimate our own value in the “market” of compelling lives. We are capable of believing the most flattering things about ourselves, and many scholars have argued that we do so for no other reason than that we want them to be true. If we think we are brighter, healthier, and more esteemed than is actually the case, it is not so surprising that we are reluctant to trade places with people of undeniable fame, wealth, and achievement.

This chapter deals with this tendency for people to believe, within limits, what they want to believe. As the discussion will make clear, much of the empirical research and theoretical analysis on this topic has dealt with how our wishes influence our beliefs in one particular domain—our beliefs about ourselves. There is ample evidence indicating that we tend to make optimistic assessments of our own abilities, traits, and prospects for future success. This chapter will critically evaluate the work in this and other areas, and discuss how this “wish to believe” can lead to the formation of erroneous beliefs.

Empirical Support for the Wish to Believe
. The idea that we tend to believe what we want to believe has been around for a long time, and considerable evidence consistent with this notion has accumulated. As we saw in Chapter 4, those who prefer to believe that capital punishment is an effective deterrent to murder find support for such a belief in an equivocal body of evidence; those who prefer to believe that it is
not
an effective deterrent find support for
their
position in the same body of evidence. Similarly, a study of the public’s reaction to the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 revealed that those who were pro-Kennedy thought that Kennedy had won the debates, whereas those who were pro-Nixon thought that their man had won.
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Voters, furthermore, generally exaggerate the extent to which their candidate is favored by others, and thus tend to overestimate their candidate’s chances of winning an election.
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However, most of the evidence indicating that people tend to believe what they want to believe comes from research on people’s assessments of their own abilities, and their explanations of their own actions. One of the most documented findings in psychology is that the average person purports to believe extremely flattering things about him or herself—beliefs that do not stand up to objective analysis. We tend to believe that we possess a host of socially desirable characteristics, and that we are free of most of those that are socially undesirable. For example, a large majority of the general public thinks that they are more intelligent,
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more fair-minded,
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less prejudiced,
⁶
and more skilled behind the wheel of an automobile
⁷
than the average person. This phenomenon is so reliable and ubiquitous that it has come to be known as the “Lake Wobegon effect,”
⁸
after Garrison Keillor’s fictional community where “the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” A survey of one million high-school seniors found that 70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, and only 2% thought they were below average. In terms of ability to get along with others,
all
students thought they were above average, 60% thought they were in the top 10%, and 25% thought they were in the top 1%!
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Lest one think that such inflated self-assessments occur only in the minds of callow high-school students, it should be pointed out that a survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleague.
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Also, people tend to think that they are more likely than their peers to experience a variety of favorable events like owning a home or earning a large salary, but less likely to experience aversive events like getting divorced or suffering from lung cancer.
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Recent public opinion polls indicate that although only 25% of the population believes that the country as a whole will be better off financially in the coming year, 54% nevertheless think that
they
will do better.
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People are also prone to self-serving assessments when it comes to apportioning responsibility for their successes and failures. In numerous studies across a wide range of situations, people have been found to attribute their successes to themselves, and their failures to external circumstances.
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People also tend to make more charitable attributions about their performance than do observers of their performance. Athletes tend to attribute their victories to themselves, but to blame their losses on bad officiating and bad luck.
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Students who perform well on an examination generally think of it as a valid measure of their knowledge; those who fail tend to think of it as arbitrary and unfair.
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From the other side of the instructional podium, teachers tend to attribute a student’s success to the quality of instruction the student received, but they tend to attribute a student’s failure to the student’s lack of ability or effort.
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Academicians whose attempts to publish have been rejected often attribute their bad fortune to factors beyond their control, like an unfortunate choice of reviewers; those who have their manuscripts accepted, in contrast, rarely acknowledge any parallel good fortune in the selection of reviewers.
¹⁷

Mechanisms Underlying Self-serving Beliefs
. The results of these investigations are clear and consistent: We are inclined to adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves, and comforting beliefs about the world. The interpretation of these results, however, is extremely controversial. Many psychologists believe these phenomena stem from truly motivational processes; We hold such self-serving beliefs because they satisfy important psychological needs or motives, such as the motive to maintain self-esteem.
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Others believe that such beliefs, although clearly self-serving, are the product of purely cognitive mechanisms.
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By this account, a perfectly rational person, unaffected by needs and motives, might nevertheless arrive at such self-serving attributions and self-assessments, and such comforting beliefs about the world.

Indeed, with a little thought one can see how the results discussed above could result purely from cognitive processes. The tendency to believe that we are more likely than our peers to experience positive events, for example, may result from our being more aware of our own efforts to bring about such experiences than we are of analogous efforts by others. We thus seem to ourselves, even when we are trying to be perfectly objective, to be relatively likely to experience positive outcomes. The tendency for people to attribute success internally and failure externally can likewise be explained without reference to self-esteem motives. If a person tries to succeed at something, then any success is at least partly due to his or her efforts and thus warrants some internal attributional credit. Failure, on the other hand, generally defies one’s efforts and intentions, and therefore necessitates looking elsewhere, often externally, for its cause. Even an unbiased attributor, then, might exhibit an asymmetrical pattern of attributions for success and failure because success is so much more tightly connected than failure to intention and effort. Furthermore, consider a person who has had a lifetime of experience indicating that she is adept at mathematics. Is she not justified in attributing her failure to solve a mathematical puzzle during an experiment to the difficulty of the puzzle or the unfamiliarity of the setting, rather than to a sudden loss of mathematical acumen?

To what, then, should we attribute these self-serving patterns of beliefs and attributions? Are they the result of the “interference” of needs and motives, or are they the product of “cooler” cognitive processes? Do they come from the heart or the mind? Those who favor a cognitive interpretation argue that since any apparent demonstration of a motivational bias can be explained solely in terms of dispassionate cognitive processes, we should not invoke motivational mechanisms to explain these phenomena. Cognitive explanations, we are told, are more parsimonious.
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There are a couple of points to be made about this issue. First, cognitive explanations are
not
inherently more parsimonious than motivational ones. They can, and do, involve as many assumptions as motivational accounts. Cognitive mechanisms are more parsimonious only if one adopts a model of the human organism in which a motivational system overlays, and occasionally interferes with, a more fundamental cognitive system. But it is an open question whether the cognitive system should be considered primary.
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Given a model in which the motivational system is more fundamental, motivational explanations would be more parsimonious.

The second point to be made about this motivation-versus-cognition controversy is that it is in many ways a false issue. There is little reason to believe that our self-serving biases result exclusively from one or the other, and even less reason to believe that there will ever be a truly definitive test that will decide between the two accounts. Indeed, when we closely examine how our motivational biases might operate, the two explanations begin to blend rather closely. To the extent that there is a motivational “engine” responsible for our self-serving biases and beliefs, it is one that delivers its effects through processes that look suspiciously cognitive. Our desire to believe comforting things about ourselves and about the world does not mean that we believe willy-nilly what we want to believe; such flights of fantasy are reined in by the existence of a real world and the need to perceive it accurately. Rather, our motivations have their effects more subtly through the ways in which we cognitively process information relevant to a given belief. What evidence do we consider? How much of it do we consider? What criteria do we use as sufficient evidence for a belief? Cognition and motivation collude to allow our preferences to exert influence over what we believe.

Essentially the same point has been articulated by social psychologist Ziva Kunda, who argues that people are indeed more likely to believe things they want to believe, but that their capacity to do so is constrained by objective evidence and by their ability “… to construct a justification of their desired conclusion that would persuade a dispassionate observer. They draw the desired conclusion only if they can muster up the evidence necessary to support it.”
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It is informative in this respect that people generally think of themselves as objective.
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People rarely think that they hold a particular belief simply because they want to hold it, the evidence be damned. This sense of objectivity can nevertheless be illusory: Although people consider their beliefs to be closely tied to relevant evidence, they are generally unaware that the same evidence could be looked at differently, or that there is other, equally pertinent evidence to consider. As Kunda describes it, “… people do not realize that the [inferential] process is biased by their goals, that they are only accessing a subset of their relevant knowledge, that they would probably access different beliefs and [inferential] rules in the presence of different goals, and that they might even be capable of justifying opposite conclusions on different occasions.”
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