The meek shall (not) inherit the earth

I recently completed a little project in which I chose to be a different person for a day. Specifically, I chose to be a more confident person for the day. After much consideration, I chose to alter my confidence because confidence is mainly an inner trait, under my control, which is noticed by other parties but is not dependent on others to be successfully enacted. For example, if I had chose to be more outgoing for the day rather than more confident, my ability to observe others’ reactions to the trait would mainly be limited to instances in which I was in direct, interpersonal contact with someone else. By choosing to be more confident, I could observe responses from individuals I was not necessarily in direct contact with throughout the day (e.g., watching to see if my confidence made it more likely for people to notice me in a crowd).

Although being a different person for the day sounds like a fun idea, actually implementing the change was quite difficult. As a low self-monitor, or person who is unlikely to change their behavior across different social situations (Snyder, 1987), I usually don’t censor the words or actions I take. However, because of my public self-consciousness, or tendency to focus on the image that I portray to others (Buss, 1980; Fenigstein et al., 1975), I often feel guilty and embarrassed for behaving in the manner I do. As such, I thought that appearing more confident for the day would be best accomplished by doing the things I normally do or would like to do without allowing myself to feel guilty or embarrassed. This approach was subtle, but the result was a much more genuine appearance of confidence on my part. I thought people would respond more naturally to me if I appeared to be naturally confident. I knew that trying to enact more overt change would be outside my nature, and would therefore make me seem awkward rather than confident to others.

In order to make myself appear more confident, I had to do something I almost never do. I woke up early, took a shower, styled and dried my hair and ---you guessed it--- actually put on make-up for a change. Once I had on my pretty face, I put on clothes that I love but usually feel embarrassed wearing (AKA a Bill Cosby-esque sweater and my super comfy shoes with toes on them) and practiced standing up straighter, looking ahead when I walk rather than at the ground, smiling and looking people in the eyes when I spoke, which would be my main methods of expressing confidence for the day. Improving my posture and bad habit of looking at the ground proved to be the most difficult part of the transformation. Changing my attitude was not as difficult as I had expected, however. By dolling myself up and wearing clothes that I was comfortable in rather than incredibly uncomfortable, trendy clothing, I managed to make myself feel more confident rather than just appear more confident.

The reactions to “the new me” were overwhelmingly positive. The barista at Starbucks who usually pays no particular attention to me asked my name and struck up a conversation with me. When I smiled at the strangers I passed, I would get warm, surprised smiles in return. I talked to close acquaintances I almost never get to see anymore and they responded with friendliness, expressed an interest in spending time with me and some even tried to flirt with me. The increased attention I received from men caught me very off guard. My confidence must have made me appear more open and approachable, which led acquaintances and strangers to behave in a friendlier manner towards me and led men who found me attractive to approach me when they otherwise would not. The anxiety I had felt before the day began had all but melted away by the time evening rolled around. I was feeling so good and so confident by then that I even had the balls to try to strike up a friendly conversation with my dad. The attempt fell rather flat because my dad doesn’t particularly understand the concept of idle chit-chit (he’s the type of person who doesn’t see the cup as half full or half empty, and instead says the cup is just twice as large as it needs to be). However, just putting in the effort made me feel good about myself. And that night, when I was too sick to work my shift, I was confident enough to ask for help without feeling bad about myself for being sick and weak, like I usually do.

The entire experience left me feeling a little confused the next day. Rather than wanting to act more confident again, once I reverted back to my old self I found myself unwilling to abandon my shy nature again. Dealing with people in more depth than I usually would had left me exhausted and cognitively drained. I found that although being more confident had a strong, positive effect on my interpersonal relations and could potentially lead to more career options for me in the future, my physical health seemed best served by my usual, shy self. Shyness seems to be less of a natural state for me, and more of a defense mechanism to conserve my cognitive resources. The fewer people I interact with throughout the day, the more cognitive resources I can save for use on my essential day-to-day functioning. Although being more confident had a positive effect on my emotional well being, the state was not physically sustainable on my part. I am now very interested in seeing if there are any observable changes in my attitudes or behavior as I progress through my treatment. Will I become less shy and more confident as the infection recedes, or will my personality remain constant?

The main thing I learned from this experience is that whether you have a positive or negative self-concept, or the totality of beliefs one holds about oneself (Rogers, 1961), can have a huge effect on how others perceive you and how you perceive others perceiving you. On my day of confidence, my self-concept became slightly more positive, which in turn caused me to perceive others actions as more positive. I acted with more confidence after this, which caused others to view me more positively and then treat me with more friendliness. As such, I created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which my perception of others perceiving me eventually led others to behave in a manner in line with my expectations (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). This phenomenon has led me to believe that the self-concept is essentially the maple syrup of social psychological concepts. Maple syrup is not a solid, so the molecules that form the liquid are capable of changing and rearranging in response to outside forces, no matter how slow-moving or gradual those changes may be. The self-concept can be modified, but it is a gradual process that must occur over time.

(n = 1,176)

References:

Buss, A. H. (1980). Self-consciousness and social anxiety. San Francisco: Freeman.

Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-

consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522–527.

Rogers, Carl R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: a Therapist’s View of

Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation

and pupils’ intellectual development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Snyder, M. (1987). Public appearances/private realities: The psychology of self-

monitoring. New York: Freeman.

How do I know I'm pressing the right buttons??

In Mike Judge’s popular television series, King of the Hill, when the main character Hank is accused of being racist, he takes a test on the Internet to prove this assertion false. Hank tries to remember the correct keys to press as words and faces flash on the computer screen and his friends and family scream and encourage him. The results show that he has a “strong preference for Caucasian-Americans as opposed to African-Americans” and the town takes this as proof that he is a racist. Although this test, called the Implicit Associates Test, does exist in real life, Hank Hill depicts the exact wrong way both to take and interpret the test (the test should be taken in an environment with minimal distractions and a preference for one group over the other does not indicate that an individual is prejudiced.)

First developed by Greenwald and Bananji, the Implicit Associates Test (IAT) is designed to assess the automatic, unconscious preferences people form for certain groups as compared to others. Series of either negative or positive words or images representing different groups flash on the screen one at a time and the participant presses specific keys to indicate the group to which the word or image belongs. For example, you may be asked to press ‘e’ for positive words or images of African Americans and asked to press ‘i’ for negative words and images of Caucasian Americans. The test continues until you have completed sets for all possible combined categories of words and images (i.e., positive words with both Caucasian American and African American images, and negative words with both Caucasian American and African American images.)

There are a wide variety of Implicit Associates Tests other than those based on race or ethnicity that one can choose to complete. I personally chose to take the Disability and Religion IATs. Interestingly, I showed a moderate automatic preference for disabled persons compared to abled persons, and a moderate negative association towards Christianity. In contrast, I showed slight positive associations for Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, with the most positive association being associated with Islam. My preference for disabled people is consistent with my conscious beliefs in that I’m disabled and have a slight preference for people who can understand my plight, although this preference is more pronounced than I would have expected. However, I don’t believe this is necessarily a true attitude of mine because I think these results reflect more of a bias against able-bodied people on my part than a bias in favor of disabled people. I’ve become very bitter and hateful being surrounded by young, healthy people all the time (this is only half a joke.)

Whether my results for the Religion IAT are consistent with my conscious beliefs or not is much more difficult to assess as compared to the Disability IAT. Although I’m consciously aware of a slight negative bias I hold towards Christianity and religion as a whole, my conscious beliefs toward the other three, specific religions is relatively neutral.  Rather than representing my true attitudes, I think these results reflect the negative or positive experiences I have had with individuals of these religions in the past. I have had many negative experiences with Christians over the years, partly because they represent the bulk of my interactions with religious people. The few experiences I have had Muslims and Hindus, however, have been limited but overwhelmingly positive. Finally, I have had little to no direct experience with people of the Judaic faith, and therefore understand why my attitudes toward Judaism may fall closest to neutral.

Completing the Implicit Associates Tests made me realize that although I may consider myself less prejudiced than others, I am simply prejudiced against different groups than others. I favor groups similar to myself like most other people. I’m only different in the respect that as a disabled person and an Atheist, I relate to groups that are more commonly discriminated against by the majority of Americans.

(n = 662)

The Justice Fallacy

Let's talk about victim blaming. One potential explanation for victim blaming is the just world hypothesis. According to the just world hypothesis, people tend to believe that “we deserve what we get” and “get what we deserve” in life, which leads people to blame many victims for their suffering (Lerner, 1980).  In order to not feel threatened when bad things happen, people have to believe that the victim deserved it in some way. In other words, if bad things can happen to good people, everyone is in danger and most people cannot bear this thought.

Although I can understand the just world hypothesis on an intellectual level, I fail to understand why any individual could hold a belief in a just world. In the small town I grew up in, there were reminders of the injustice so characteristic of life everywhere I went. My mother used to work for an alternative school of choice that provided an opportunity for people who would otherwise be unable to finish high school to get their diploma. One of her first and favorite students was all set to graduate in a few months and had recently been engaged. One Friday, my mom excitedly informed me how proud she was that he had finally reconciled with his estranged father. Two days later, my mom informed me with a stony face that this student of hers had been shot and killed. Neighbors had seen another teenager come running out of his house covered in blood, and police expected to find him soon although he was in hiding. She wanted the news not to come as a surprise to me if other students were talking about the tragedy the next morning.

In actuality, what surprised me the next morning was how the students were acting. No one could accept the idea that he had been shot in his own home by one of his friends. The concept was just too frightening. People started saying it must have been his own fault, that he probably committed suicide. When that explanation wasn’t plausible enough, a new rumor started that he had been playing Russian roulette. I heard people who had never known him degrade and berate what remained of his reputation to make themselves feel less afraid, even though from the entrance wound there was no way he could have shot himself. The killer later wrote a confession letter to the victim’s parents, and even then the cops didn’t arrest him. The idea that my mom’s student had somehow brought this on himself had become prevalent amongst the cops too, despite all of the evidence. The police listed his death as a suicide, and I spent the rest of the year sitting across from the killer in one of my classes.

There’s no such thing as a just world folks. Feel lucky your life isn’t worse and just deal with it.

(n = 482)

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Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York:

Plenum.

Easy Isn't Always Best

Imagine you are a physician at a successful medical practice. You have appointments booked back to back every day, and in order to keep on schedule you can spend no more than 15 minutes examining any one patient. You’re running late on this particular day and are in a hurry to get through your next appointment. You listen to a robust, young man describe his headaches. You quickly but politely inform him that his symptoms are common and he has nothing to worry about. You hurry to your next appointment, and do not learn until weeks later that the patient was hospitalized for a malignant brain tumor you had missed.

Why might the doctor have missed this diagnosis, despite his or her years of medical training and experience? When under stress, cognitive loading, or time constrictions, many of us utilize mental shortcuts called cognitive heuristics that can quickly and easily lead us to conclusions (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman et al., 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Unfortunately, the conclusions formed based on cognitive heuristics can potentially be wildly inaccurate.

Like the fictional young man mentioned above, I too have experienced firsthand the effects of doctors using cognitive heuristics. At 15, I began to experience excruciating pain that would migrate throughout my body constantly. Every single doctor I saw to try to find an explanation would look at my chart, see my age, gender, and history of major depressive disorder and immediately inform me that untreated depression can sometimes cause physical pain. I went back on my antidepressants to rule that possibility out, but each new doctor would see the prescription on my chart as a confirmation of their original hunch that the root of the problem was ‘psychological, not biological.’ Five years later, I was finally diagnosed with a central nervous system infection. If the doctors had diagnosed me when I first sought medical help, I would have been cured within a few months with minimal permanent damage. Now, however, there’s absolutely no question that I will have permanent brain, nerve, and organ damage (likely to each of my organ systems), and cognitive function tests show that I’m mildly to severely impaired in all areas except reasoning. Treatment itself is also now a danger because of my sever immunosuppression, and I have already had life threatening complications.

Aside from the life threatening health issues, what do my story and the young man’s above have in common? In both of our stories, the doctors judged the probability that we would be seriously ill based on our affiliation with certain categories. The man was young and robust, both attributes you would normally not associate with a cancer patient. I, on the other hand, was a young, female patient with a history of mental illness, AKA the stereotypical patient to develop a psychosomatic disorder. The bottom line: doctors need to be especially wary of mental shortcuts, because an inaccurate cognitive heuristic can mean the difference between a simple mistake and a malpractice lawsuit.

(n = 500)

Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002). Heuristics and biases: The

psychology of intuitive judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty:

Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of

social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Brother Trouble or Troubled Brother?

Like so many teenage boys, my brother can be a real idiot. Although he was much smarter than average, he refused to ever study or do his homework. My brother was always much more interested in drinking, drugs and partying than academics. Jokingly, he used to say that even stoned out of his mind during the SAT he still scored higher than the rest of his friends. In the rare instances when he was challenged enough to fail a test, he would blame the drugs or say he didn’t care enough to try. All in all, my brother seemed like a classic (yet still brilliant) self-handicapper.

Self-handicapping is a term used by social psychologists to describe instances in which people create obstacles to their own success in order to give themselves an excuse for failure (Berglas & Jones, 1978). Common methods of self-handicapping include drinking or doing drugs, making excuses, not studying and procrastination (Ferrari, 1998; Higgins & Harris, 1988; Hirt et al., 1991). Any of us who have experienced the crushing disappointment of failure can sympathize with the desire to avoid failure. Admittedly, chronic self-handicappers take this aversion too far, and in avoiding taking responsibility for failure they also avoid the pleasure that can accompany a hard-won success.

Before any of you readers begin to judge self-handicappers too harshly, let’s take another look at the example of my brother. After my brother was put on probation for drug possession and could no longer self-medicate, he finally went to the doctor. X-rays showed that he had a number of congenital bone defects that had caused his bones to become brittle and break easily. Multiple bones in his feet and ankles had broken and healed wrong, causing him immense pain when he moved. In addition, two discs in his spinal column had herniated, resulting in crippling nerve pain when he would try to be still or move his body in certain directions. My brother had turned to drugs to blunt the pain but even with the drugs, the pain was still so severe that he had trouble concentrating or focusing on new information. He was acutely aware of these shortcomings, and after seeing his intellectual capabilities decline with no available diagnosis to explain why this was happening, he turned to self-handicapping tendencies to protect his ego. What had first seemed like a straightforward case of self-handicapping in fact was a psychological reaction to an undiagnosed handicap!

The moral of this story is that though we can identify self-handicapping behavior, we should not necessarily use this behavior to make generalized statements about that person’s character. The self-handicapper could be suffering from an undiagnosed learning disability, attention deficit disorder, a mental health condition or another serious health condition. We may be able to identify this particular behavior, but we can’t ascertain at a glance why it occurs.

In other words, I can call my brother an idiot but you sure as hell can’t!

(n = 490)

Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in

response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405–417.

Ferrari, J. R. (1998). Procrastination. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of mental

health (pp. 5.1–5.7). San Diego: Academic Press.

Higgins, R. L., & Harris, R. N. (1988). Strategic “alcohol” use: Drinking to self-

handicap. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 6, 191–202.

Hirt, E. R., Deppe, R. K., & Gordon, L. J. (1991). Self-reported versus behavioral self-

handicapping: Empirical evidence for a theoretical distinction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 981–991.