We’re Not So Special
Fascinating, but humbling to learn what we’ve probably suspected all along — we’re not so special. “We think we’re so clever when we rationalize our decisions, but it turns out that we’re far simpler than we realize,” reports John Tierney in The New York Times (11/6/07). When we rationalize, we are engaging in “self-delusion,” the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance … Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our ‘moral integrity,’ and protect our ‘self-concept’ and feeling of ‘global self-worth.’ Thing is, we may believe we are going through a complex thought process, but in fact we are behaving precisely like capuchin monkeys, or worse, like four-year-old humans. [Ouch!]
Or at least that’s the opinion of researchers at Yale (pdf here), who tested both monkeys and four-year-old humans for their response to conflicting choices. The researchers gave the monkeys “three colors of M&Ms — say red, blue and green.” Initially, the monkeys showed no particular preference for one color over the others. But when given a choice between two of them, choosing red over blue, he immediately downgraded the blue M&M. This was evident because when he was subsequently “given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.”
The researchers arrived at the same result with the four-year-old children. This suggests that the way we “deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts” is simply to eliminate “one of the thoughts.” It’s so simple a process that even monkeys and four-year-olds do it. Then again, it could mean that monkeys and four-year-olds are more sophisticated than anyone realizes! Another researcher, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, achieved similar results with amnesiacs, suggesting that rationalization occurs at a subconscious level (since the subjects couldn’t recall their earlier choices). “This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on,” he says.
