The Self Illusion

5

Why Our Choices Are Not Our Own

The point at which we feel that we are making a decision is often well after the fact, and yet it seems as if we were responsible in advance of making our choice. How we make decisions can also rely more on those around us than we realize, and we might not necessarily be the ones in charge. We may feel like we are making our own personal choices, but in many instances these are actually controlled by external influences of which we may not even be aware.

This is something advertisers have long known. Since the very first advertisements appeared in ancient Babylonia, vendors have realized that it pays to let people know the name of what you are selling.¹ Our choices can be greatly influenced by what we are told, even though we may not be fully aware of this. In the twentieth century, it was thought that subtle marketing was the way forward to manipulate peoples’ choices. For example, in the 1950s cinema owners thought they could make the audience buy more drinks and popcorn by splicing single frames of pictures of products – too brief to be detected consciously – into the movie. The idea was that such subliminal images would register in the unconscious, leading the audience to think that they wanted to visit the foyer to purchase a soft drink; the advertisements could activate our minds below conscious awareness, making them even more potent. However, the scientific evidence for subliminal marketing is at best equivocal.² Subtle messages do indeed shape our thoughts and behaviours, but when it comes to selling a soda drink, big, in-your-face advertising is best. This is why advertising sponsorship is so lucrative. Companies are prepared to spend large amounts of money just to get their brand in front of you because they know that people prefer a name they have heard, over one they have not. Given the choice between different brands, people reliably choose the one they recognize or that seems familiar.³

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.

It is worth pointing out that not only can justification happen at the level of the self, it can also happen at the level of groups. Probably the best recent example is the justification for the Iraq War on the basis of the alleged threat from weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The British general public was told that Saddam Hussein had missiles that could reach the mainland within the infamous forty-five-minute warning. The nation was shocked. Despite repeated assurance by United Nations inspection teams that there was no evidence for such WMDs, we were told that they were there and that we had to invade. After the invasion and once it was clear that there were no WMDs, the instigators had to justify their actions. We were told that the invasion was necessary on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who needed to be removed from power, even though such regime change was in violation of international law. We were told that if he did not have WMDs before, then he was planning on making them. The invasion was justified. We had been saved. It would appear that modern politicians do not need a thick skin so much as a carefully crafted capacity for mass cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance protects the self from conflicting stories and is at the heart of why the self illusion is so important but it also reveals the dangers that a strong sense of self can create. We use it to justify faulty reasoning. Although we do not appreciate it, our decision-making is actually the constellation of many processes vying for attention and in constant conflict. We fail to consider just how much of our decision-making is actually out of our control.

The Monty Hall Problem

There are essentially two problems with decision-making: either we ignore external information and focus on our own perspective or we fail to realize the extent to which our own perspective is actually determined by external influences. In both cases we are fools to believe that our self is making decisions independent of the external context. This can lead to some wondrous distortions of human reason.

Consider an egocentric bias that blinds us to important changes in the world when it comes to decision-making. If you have not already heard of it, then let me introduce you to the Monty Hall problem. The problem is named after the presenter of the American game show, Let’s Make a Deal, where the climax was to choose a prize from behind one of three doors. Try to imagine your self in this situation. You have made it all the way through to the final part of the show and have a chance of winning the jackpot. Behind two doors are booby prizes but behind one door is a fabulous prize. For the sake of argument, let’s say that it is a £250,000 Ferrari. You hesitate initially and then choose door A. The host of the show, Monty, says, ‘You chose door A, but let me show you what’s behind door C.’ He then opens door C to reveal one of the booby prizes. Monty says, ‘You chose door A initially, but do you want to change your decision to door B?’ What should you do? Most people who encounter this problem for the very first time think that it makes no difference, because they reason that it is a 50-50 chance to win the Ferrari with only two doors left to chose from. Indeed, people are reluctant to change their minds once they have made a choice. Some may say that we stubbornly stick with our decisions because we have the courage of our conviction. After all, it is important to be decisive.

What do you think you should do – switch or stick? If you don’t already know, the correct answer is to switch, but if you don’t know why, it is incredibly hard to understand. The Monty Hall problem has become a somewhat famous cognitive illusion appearing both in bestselling books and even in the Hollywood movie 21 (2008), about a bunch of mathematically minded Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who counted cards at the blackjack tables of Las Vegas to beat the casinos. The correct solution to the Monty Hall problem is to switch because you are more likely to win than if you stick with your first choice. It is difficult to see at first and when it initially appeared in the popular magazine, Parade, in 1990, the problem created a storm of controversy and disagreement among both the general public and experts. Over 10,000 people (1,000 with PhDs) wrote in complaining the switch decision was false!

The reason you should switch is that, when you first choose a door, you have a chance of one out of three that you are correct. Now, after Monty has revealed one of the booby prizes, with two doors left, the remaining door that you did not select has a one out of two chance, which has better odds than the door you first chose, which remains at one out of three. Remember, Monty always shows you an empty door. Simple – except that it is not simple for most people.

An easier way to solve the Monty Hall problem is to consider a variation in which there are 100 doors instead of three.⁹ Again you get to pick one door. Now Monty opens ninety-eight out of the remaining ninety-nine doors to show you that they are all empty. There are now only two remaining unopened doors. Would you switch now? Here we can see that our door is unlikely to be the correct one. What are the odds that I correctly selected the right door on my first chance? Actually, it’s odds of 100-1 to be precise. That’s why we immediately twig that Monty is up to no good. There is something deeply counterintuitive about the Monty Hall problem, which reflects our limited capacity to think outside of the box – or to be more precise, to think in an unselfish way.

Another reason that people fail to switch in the Monty Hall problem is a general bias not to tempt fate. When it comes to making decisions, inherently we fear loss greater than we value the prospect of a win. Despite the so-called rationality of the modern era, people still think that if they change their decision then there is more chance that they will regret doing so. It’s not so much stubbornness or superstition but rather that we fear loss greater than the potential for gains. For example, the social psychologist Ellen Langer sold $1 lottery tickets to fifty-three office workers. Each stub of the ticket was put into a box from which one lucky winner would receive the whole $53. Just before the lottery-draw a couple of days later, Ellen approached each worker and asked them for how much they would sell their ticket. If they had just been handed a ticket by the experimenter so they had exercised no choice, the average price for resale was $2, but if they had chosen the ticket themselves it was $8! Moreover, ten of the choosers and five of the non-choosers refused to sell their ticket.¹⁰ It turns out that it is the fear of regret that looms large in our minds. How many times have you deliberated over an expensive purchase only to hear the salesperson reassure you, ‘Go on, you’ll not regret it!’

Risky Analysis

What the Monty Hall problem illustrates so clearly is the limitations of human reasoning – especially when it comes to probability. Probability is all about external information. Reasoning in terms of probable outcomes is very difficult because most of us think in a very self-centred way. We make decisions from our own perspective and often fail to take into consideration the external information that is most relevant.

In fact, most complex science is based on probabilities and not absolute known truths about the universe. After the age of Newton and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, it was assumed that the universe was one big clockwork mechanism that could be understood by measurement and prediction. It was thought that if we improved the accuracy of our measurements, then we would understand better how the universe worked. The opposite happened. The universe became more complex. With increasing efficiency, we discovered that the universe was much messier than we had previously imagined. There was more noise in the system and less certainty. This noise gave birth to the age of statistical modelling in which mathematicians tried to discover the workings of the universe using procedures that accounted, as best as possible, for all the variation that was observed. This is why the language of science is mathematics and its truths are based on probabilities.¹¹

Unfortunately, statistical analysis is not natural for the average man in the street. Our bodies and brains, for that matter, may operate in statistically predictable ways, but few of us explicitly understand statistical principles. This is why the general audience gets so frustrated when they hear scientists in the media refusing to give a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the questions that concern them. They want to know what to do about global warming, the dangers associated with childhood vaccination or how to prevent pandemic viruses. When answering, scientists talk in terms of probabilities rather than absolute certainties because they look at the big picture in which they know there is going to be some variation. That’s not what the general public wants to hear. They want to know whether vaccination will harm their children. They are less interested in the group because that is not the way individuals think.

The other problem with probability is that humans have not evolved to consider likelihood based on large amounts of data. Rather, we operate with heuristics – fast and dirty rules of thumb that generally serve us well. The German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has argued that humans have not evolved to work out probabilities such as those operating in the Monty Hall problem.¹² We focus on the task as relevant to our self, and how it applies on an individual basis rather than on populations of people. We tend to only evaluate our own choices, not what is best for the group. Faced with two doors, my chances seem even. It’s only when I am faced with two doors a hundred times, or a hundred different people take the Monty Hall challenge, that the patterns become obvious.

We often do not know the true incidence of an event but rather guess at this figure based on whatever evidence we can accumulate. This is where all sorts of distortions in reasoning start to appear. In weighing up the evidence, we easily overestimate or underestimate risks based on the external information. For example, people’s naive estimates related to dying in airplane crashes are inflated because we tend to judge the occurrence of such events as more common than they truly are. These are called ‘dread risks’ and they attract more salience because they are so uncommon. It’s not surprising considering the dramatic coverage such tragedies generate. We focus on them and imagine what it must be like to die in such a helpless way. We attach more weight to these thoughts than we should because they are novel and draw our attention.

This inaccurate risk assessment can be potentially dangerous as we may be tempted to change our behaviour patterns based on faulty reasoning. For example, an analysis of road traffic accidents for cars travelling to New York in the three months following 9/11 showed an increase in fatalities over expected numbers for that time of year in the build up to Christmas.¹³ In fact, the inflated number was greater than the total number of airline passengers killed on that fateful day. Individuals frightened of flying to New York overestimated their risk and took to their cars instead, which led to heavier than usual traffic and the subsequent increase in road accidents. The most likely reason that people felt it was safer to drive was based on another illusion of the self, the illusion of control. We believe that we are safer when we think we are in control of our fate, such as when driving our own car, but feel unhappy when we are being driven by others or, worse still, flown around in a metal cylinder that can fall out of the sky, irrespective of what we do.

Analysis Paralysis

Much of the time our risk analysis is based on the perception of choice – can we get out of a sticky situation? It is often assumed that choice is good – that decision-making makes us happier if we are allowed to exercise some self-control. Most of us feel safer when we drive. When faced with the prospect of not being able to help our selves out of a situation we become despondent, depressed and helpless. Information on this reaction to the lack of control is based on experiments during the 1960s in which animals were put through stressful situations.¹⁴ In one study two sets of dogs were given electric shocks. One set of dogs could terminate the pain by learning to press a lever. The other set of dogs were yoked to the first group, but did not have the option to press a lever and so received the same amount of shocks. To them, there was nothing they could do to stop the pain because they had no choice.

After these initial experiences, both sets of dogs were then placed in a shuttle box with two sides separated by a short barrier. Again electric shocks were applied to the floor of the cage, but this time both sets of animals could avoid the pain by leaping the barrier to the other safe side of the box. What they discovered was very disturbing. Dogs that had experienced control in the first study with the lever readily learned to avoid the pain, but dogs that had not been able to avoid the electric shocks in the first study failed to jump the barrier to avoid punishment. They simply lay down on the cage floor whimpering and were resigned to their torture. According to Martin Seligman, the psychologist who conducted this research, the animals had ‘learned helplessness’.

It is not easy to read about this sort of animal experimentation in a detached way. I am not a great animal lover, but I think I would have found such research difficult to conduct. Nevertheless, these studies on inducing learned helplessness have proved invaluable in understanding factors that contribute to human misery and depression.¹⁵ Depression is probably one of the most common debilitating mental disorders. We have all had some experience of feeling low, but clinical depression is a pervasive illness that prevents people from leading a normal life. It can vary in its intensity, with behavioural and psychological symptoms usually related to feelings of worthlessness and despondency. It is commonly associated with other problems, most notably stressful life events such as bereavement, unemployment and addiction, though there is much individual variation. Some of us are more predisposed to depression because it is a complex disorder that has genetic, biological, psychological and social components.

Not all depression is the same in its origins, but it is statistically more common among the poor and deprived in our society.¹⁶ One theory is that it is not so much that poverty is the root cause but rather the circumstances that having no wealth entails – the inability of individuals to do anything about their lives. Like the inescapable shock of the dogs, people learn helplessness, which leads to the negative fatalism that things can never get better. The obvious solution is to empower people with choices. Some would argue that this is what wealth really brings – the opportunity to make choices and not be shackled to a life you can’t escape. If nothing changes no matter what you do, you have the basics for despair. The need for control appears to be fairly important for both physical and mental health.

Simply believing that you have the power to change your life makes it more bearable.¹⁷ This is one reason why Liz Murray’s “Homeless to Harvard” story offers such hope. We also saw this with free will when we learned that people develop rituals and routines because these behaviours give the illusion of control when in fact there is none. Giving people choices, or at least the perception of control, empowers them to tolerate more adversity. For example, people will tolerate more pain if they think they can turn it off at any moment even when they have no control over the stimulus. Perceived control attenuates the pain centres of the brain.¹⁸ We even enjoy our meal more if is there is choice on the menu.¹⁹ These sorts of findings support a generally held view that choice is good, and the more choices you have, the better. It’s a principle that modern societies exhibit through conspicuous consumerism. However, this is only true up to a point. Sometimes you can have too much choice that can overwhelm the self.

Once again, Aesop knew this in his fable of the fox and the cat. Faced with the impending pack of savage hunting dogs bearing down on them, the fox and the cat had to escape. For the cat, this was a very easy decision to make as she bolted up a tree. However, the fox, with all his cunning know-how of the many ways he could escape, became paralysed by indecision and fell prey to the savage hounds. Faced with too many choices, the fox had analysis paralysis.

The same problem confronts us every day. The paradox of choice, as the psychologist Barry Schwartz calls it, is that the more choices we are given the less free we become because we procrastinate in trying to make the best decision.²⁰ The whole modern world has gone choice crazy! For example, in his supermarket, Schwartz counted 285 different varieties of cookies, seventy-five iced teas, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings and forty different toothpastes. Any modern electrical appliance store is packed to the brim with so many different models with different features and functionality that we become swamped by indecision.

How many times have you gone to buy something from a large supplier only to leave empty-handed because you could not make a decision? We are so worried that we may make the wrong choice that we try to compare the different products along dimensions that we have not even considered relevant before we entered the store. Do I need it bluetooth enabled? What about the RAM? What about wi-fi? The majority of us who are not nerds find this overload of choice too much. Presented with so many options, we are unable to process the decisions efficiently. This leads to the sort of procrastination that makes us put off things that we really should do now.

Every spring, I have students who come to me to make a decision about what to undertake in their final-year research project, and they always say that they will make a start and get the bulk of it done over the summer. Certainly they all believe that they will have it ready by Christmas before the deadline in March. And yet, not one student has ever achieved this. There is always a catalogue of reasons why they never got round to do the work until the last moment, despite all their best intentions. As the English poet Edward Young (1683–1765) observed, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ With all the choices available and other temptations that present themselves, we put off what we should do now until it is too late.

All this work on decision-making should clearly tell you that our self is at the mercy of the choices with which we are presented. Our capacity for decision-making is dependent on the context. If there are too many choices, then the alternatives cancel each other out and we are left with indecision. Even when we do make a decision, we are less happy because we dwell on whether we made the right choice. If we had no choice, then there is no problem and the world is to blame. But then we get depressed. However, if we chose something that does not turn out to be ideal, then that is our fault for not choosing wisely. It’s often a no-win situation.

Relativity in the Brain

Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist from Duke University who makes the argument that humans are not only poor at risk analysis but they are, in fact, predictably irrational.²¹ This occurred to him when he was browsing the web and found an advert for magazine subscriptions to the Economist, which had three yearly options: one, online only at $59; two, print only at $125; and, three, online and print for $125.

Clearly, the best offer was option three where you get both online and print versions for the same price as just the print alone. When he tested this offer on his students, he found that 84 per cent said they would choose option three and 16 per cent would choose option one. No one chose option two. You’d have to be crazy to choose only the print version when you could also have the online version for no extra cost. But this was a deliberate strategy by the Economist to make option three look more attractive by comparing it with a decoy. When Ariely removed option two and gave them the choice again, this time 68 per cent choose option one and only 32 per cent went with option three. The decoy had distorted the student’s sense of value. Notice how easy the decision was swayed by the context.

Ariely points out that this is the problem of relativity – humans do not make judgements in absolute values but rather in relative terms. We are always weighing up the costs and benefits of different choices and estimate values accordingly. This also explains why people tend not to choose the cheapest or most expensive option, but the one in the middle. The top price is really a decoy. This strategy is sometimes known as the Goldilocks effect, after the fairytale of the little girl who discovers that she prefers the porridge that is not too hot and not too cold. The preference for the midrange price is why retailers often have an expensive option to increase the likelihood of customers choosing a product that costs less but is not the cheapest. Relativity in decision-making reveals that we do not have an internal value-meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, our decisions are shaped by the external context.

Relativity does not just apply in economic decision-making but is, in fact, a fundamental principle of how our brains operate. Everything we experience is a relative process. When something seems hotter, louder, brighter, smellier or sweeter, that experience is one of relative judgement. Every change in the environment registers as a change in neural activity. At the very basic level of neural connections, this is registered as the relative change in the rate of impulses firing. In the early experiments in which scientists recorded the electrical activity of a single neuron, they inserted an electrode to measure the electrical impulses of the cell and played it through loudspeakers. When inactive, one could hear the occasional click of the background activity of the neuron as the occasional impulse was triggered. However, as soon as some stimulus was presented that excited the neuron, the clicks would register like the rapid fire of a Gatling gun.

This is how our brains interpret the world. When a change in the environment occurs, there is a relative increase or decrease in the rate at which the neurons fire, which is how intensity is coded. Furthermore, relativity operates to calibrate our sensations. For example, if you place one hand in hot water and the other in iced water for some time before immersing them both into lukewarm water, you will experience conflicting sensations of temperature because of the relative change in the receptors registering hot and cold. Although both hands are now in the same water, one feels that it is colder and the other feels warmer because of the relative change from prior experience. This process, called ‘adaptation’, is one of the organizing principles operating throughout the central nervous system. It explains why you can’t see well inside a dark room if you have come in from a sunny day. Your eyes have to become accustomed to the new level of luminance. Adaptation explains why apples taste sour after eating sweet chocolate and why traffic seems louder in the city if you normally live in the country. In short, all of the experiences we have are relative.

In fact, your sense of happiness and achievement is based on how you compare your self to others. Ariely cites the observation by the American satirist H. L. Mencken that a man is satisfied so long as he is earning more than his brother-in-law. I expect this holds true for sister-in-laws as well because relatives are the closest individuals with whom we can compare our fortunes. Relativity also explains why people become discontented when they learn that their colleagues earn a higher salary. Industrial disputes are less about wages and more about what others in the company are earning in comparison. When we discovered what the bankers were earning during the recent financial crisis, the general public was outraged. The bankers could not see the problem with their high salaries and bonuses because they were comparing themselves to other bankers who were prospering.

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

Neuroscientists Neil Macrae and Dave Turk have been looking at what happens in the brain when objects become ours.²⁹ The change of ownership from any object to my object registers in the brain as enhanced activity. In particular, there is a spike of brain activity called a ‘P300’ which occurs 300 milliseconds after we register something of importance – it’s a wakeup-call signal in the brain. When something becomes mine, I pay more attention to it in comparison to an identical object that is not mine. This process is fairly automatic. In one study, participants observed particular products being divided into two shopping baskets – one for them and the other for the experimenter. Their P300 signals revealed that they paid more attention to things that were theirs. After sorting, participants remembered more of the items placed in their own basket compared to the experimenter’s basket, even though they were not instructed that there was going to be a memory test.³⁰

This is because, as James said, part of who we are is defined by our material possessions, which is why institutions in the past removed them to eradicate the sense of self. Uniformity both in clothing and personal possessions was regulated to prevent individuals retaining their individual identity. Some of the most harrowing images from the Nazi concentration camps are the piles of personal possessions and luggage that were taken away from the victims in an attempt to remove their identity. These objects are now regarded as sacred. In 2005 Michel Levi-Leleu, a sixty-six-year-old retired engineer, took his daughter to see a Parisian exhibition on the Holocaust, with objects on loan from the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. There, he spotted his long-lost father’s cardboard suitcase with his initials and address. Michel demanded its return, leading to a legal battle with the museum that stated that all objects from the death camp were to be retained for posterity as sacred items. Four years later, a settlement was reached whereby the suitcase has been loaned to the Paris exhibition on a long-term basis.³¹ The need for identity is so strong that when prisoners or institutionalized individuals are stripped of their possessions, they will confer value on items that would otherwise be considered as worthless.³²

In some individuals with OCD, object possession becomes a pathological condition known as hoarding where the household can become filled with worthless possessions that are not thrown away. In one unfortunate case, a hoarder was killed by the collapsing mound of rubbish that she had accumulated over the years.³³ Most of us are more restrained and have a few cherished personal possessions or household items with which we identify. One of the first things individuals do on moving to a new residence is to bring personal objects to stamp their identity on their new home. In contrast, sometimes people may destroy personal objects as a way of symbolically cutting ties with the past – especially if they are a jilted lover or cheated spouse.

When Losses Loom Large

Clearly, for many people, possessions are an expression of personal preference. People choose to buy certain products that they believe reflect qualities with which they would like to be associated. These are objects aligned with an identity to which we aspire. This link between self and possessions is something that modern advertisers have been exploiting for years. They understand that people identify with brands and that the more that a brand signals success, the more people will want it. Rolex watches, iPods and Nike trainers are just some of the branded objects that people have lost their lives defending from thieves.

Russell Belk, Professor of marketing at York University in Canada, calls this materialist perspective the ‘extended self’.³⁴ We are what we own, and when these possessions are violated through theft, loss or damage, we experience this as a personal tragedy. Only recently, this happened to me. I am not particularly car proud, but when someone deliberately scratched the paintwork on my car a couple of months back, I felt very upset, as if the crime had been deliberately perpetrated against me. It was a random act but I felt enraged. I imagine that if I had confronted the perpetrator I could have lost it and acted violently.

Even ruthless killers and drug-dealers appreciate the importance of possessions. Vince the hitman from the modern classic movie Pulp Fiction (1994) complained to Lance, his dealer, about his Chevy Malibu car that got scratched:

Vince: I had it in storage for three years. It was out five days and some d**kless piece of sh*t, f**ked with it.

Lance: They should be f**king killed man. No trial. No jury. Straight to execution.

Of course, I would not go as far but there is something deeply emotive when it comes to someone violating your property.

The Endowment Effect

Our attachment to objects may have less to do with personal choice than we imagine. In what is now regarded as a classic study in behavioural economics, Richard Thaler handed out $6 college coffee cups to half a class of Cornell undergraduates and then allowed them to trade with their classmates who made them a financial offer to buy the cup.³⁵ What Thaler found was very little trading because owners placed much greater value on objects in their possession, relative to what other people are willing to pay for them. Moreover, as soon as an object comes into our possession, we have a bias to overvalue it in comparison to an identical object. This bias, known as the endowment effect,³⁶ has been widely replicated many times with items ranging from bottles of wine to chocolate bars.³⁷

Even when the object is not actually in one’s physical possession, such as when bidding for an item in an auction, the prospect of eventually owning something produces a bias to value it more.³⁸ People who bid for the same items in an auction but had been allowed to handle the items for thirty seconds, compared to those bidders who only examined the object for ten seconds, were willing to bid 50 per cent more for the same objects. However, the contact seems to be the critical factor. If we are just told that we own something, then that does not trigger endowment. The longer we are in personal contact with an object, the more we value it and don’t want to part with it. Is it any wonder that we are always being invited by salespersons to go for a spin or try things on? They know that once we have made that first contact, achieving the sale is much easier.

A commonly accepted explanation for the endowment effect is not so much that we value everything we can potentially own, but rather that we fear what we might lose. This bias is called loss aversion – a core component of the prospect theory proposed by Daniel Kahneman, the same scientist who left colonscopes up the backsides of patients for an extra three minutes. According to this theory, losses are weighted more substantially than potential gains. Just like switching doors on the Monty Hall problem or selling our lottery ticket, we fear losses greater than we welcome gains. The prospect of regret seems to weigh heavily for us.

The Trading Brain

Brian Knutson has been looking at brain activation during buying and selling product scenarios using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.³⁹ He found that when we look at products we like, irrespective of whether we are buying or selling, there is increased activation of the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain’s reward circuitry. When we think that we can buy it at a bargain price, the mesial prefrontal cortex, another region of the reward system, is also activated, but not if the price is too high – after all, most of us like a bargain. However, if subjects were presented with an offer to sell the desired product at a lower price than expected, then the insula in the right hemisphere became active. This region signals discrepancy between anticipated goals and outcomes and could be regarded as the neural correlate of disappointment. Moreover, the insular activity was predictive of the size of endowment effect for each participant. These imaging findings are consistent with the loss aversion account, whereby a discrepancy of perceived value and the offered sale price produces a negative emotional response. It’s not that we simply have a bias, but rather we feel bad about selling a possession for a price below what we believe it is worth.

This aversion to loss sounds remarkably similar to insecure attachment – when individuals cannot bear to be separated from loved ones. Individuals who were rated anxious in their personal relationship attachment style showed a much stronger endowment effect in that they demand a higher price for personal possessions.⁴⁰ They weren’t just clingy to people but also clingy to objects! Moreover, if they were primed to think about past relationships that made them feel anxious and insecure, the endowment effect was further increased. Clearly emotions linked with our past social relationships are registered in our brain and can spill over into reasoning systems when it comes to how we value possessions.

The Extended Self

Despite thirty years of research on the endowment effect, only recently have researchers started to look at the phenomenon in populations other than North American students. This is an important limitation as other cultures have different attitudes towards object ownership. For example, in comparison to Westerners, Nigerians are reported to value gifts from others more and exhibit less of an endowment effect for personally acquired possessions.⁴¹ A recent study of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Northern Tanzania also found no evidence of endowment for possessions.⁴² This difference is believed to reflect the cultural difference between Western societies where the self is thought about mainly as one of independence compared to non-Western societies, especially those in East Asia where the self is thought of in terms of its relationship to others or interdependence. For example, there is a self-characterization task⁴³ called the ‘Twenty Statements Test’ where participants have to write twenty statements in response to the question at the top of the page, ‘Who Am I?’ It is a fairly simple measure of their self-concept reflecting various attributes such as physical ones, such as ‘I am tall’, or social roles, as in ‘I am a father’, or personal characteristics, such as ‘I am impulsive’. After completing the twenty statements, these are categorized as being internal (traits and intrinsic qualities) versus external (social roles in relationship to others). In comparison to individuals from interdependent societies, Westerners typically make more internal statements compared to external references.

How do these differing self-concepts manifest when it comes to ownership? One suggestion, following from Belk’s ‘extended self’ idea, is that the endowment effect is at least partly a function of the tendency to value the self. But not every personal attribute is fixed. Psychologist William Maddux and his colleagues⁴⁴ first established that the endowment effect was not as strong in East Asians compared to Western students attending Northwestern University. However, in a clever twist Maddux asked the students to either write about themselves or their relationships with other people. This task can shift the self-perspective from being focused on one’s self to one’s relationship with others. When East Asians focused on themselves, they endowed things they owned with greater value, whereas Westerners instructed to write about others showed the opposite – a reduced endowment effect.

Not only do we overvalue our own possessions but we also covet that to which others seem to pay attention. It turns out that when we watch other people looking and smiling at objects we automatically prefer them to objects that have not been looked at.⁴⁵ These sorts of studies show that, when we come to value things, make choices and exhibit preferences, we can easily be manipulated simply by considering context and our role among others. Being a member of a group generates our self-concept in ways that seem to defy the notion that societies are a collection of individual selves. Rather, our self is a reflection of our extension not only to our possessions, but also to everyone around us.