Before you trick someone on April 1st, think how you fool yourself daily.
Getting to know your true self could be a bit more embarrassing than facing your reflection in the mirror after a late night party. We like to think we are rational people. But often we don’t even know when we are pulling our own leg.
Psychologists say that illusions help us stay sane. Let’s examine a few popular mental tricks that victimize and re-victimize many of us:
You think you remember precisely the times when you were ignorant or wrong. In reality, once you learn something new you tend to regard this knowledge as self-evident.
When was the last time you said things like “I saw this coming” or “I knew it”? Probably you didn’t see anything coming, but pulled out what psychologists call a hindsight bias, or an “I-knew-it-all-along” phenomenon. One study in 1991 by American scientists Martin Bolt and John Brink asked college students to predict how the U.S. Senate would vote on one nomination. Before the vote, 58 percent of the participants predicted the vote correctly. But when the students were polled again – after the results were announced – 78 percent of them said they knew it all along.
You think you take equal credit for your ups and downs. In reality, you often attribute your successes to your personal qualities and excuse your failures with unfavorable circumstances.
If students scored high on a test, they attribute their success to intelligence, hard work or perseverance. If they performed poorly, they would explain it by bad luck, a tough test or little timing. The phenomenon was called a self-serving bias.
Even if you do admit that you screwed up, you may still think of yourself as pretty awesome — at least better than average, right? This effect is called “illusionary superiority,” a tendency of people to overestimate their positive qualities. A University of Nebraska survey revealed that 68 percent in their faculty rated themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability, while at Stanford University87 percent of the master’s in business administration students rated their academic performance better than average – both results are clearly mathematically impossible.
You think you do everything you can to succeed. In reality, you often make sure you create circumstances to avoid responsibility in case of failure.
This phenomenon was named self-handicapping, which is creating an excuse before you even attempt to succeed. Some tips from self-handicappers include going to a party the night before the test, waiting for the last minute to study or coming late to a job interview. If you fail, it was not because you were not very smart or incompetent, but because you didn’t study well or made a human resources manager angry for having to wait for you. If you do succeed, you benefit from acing against all odds. First discovered in 1986, research revealed that men are far more into self-handicapping than women.
You think you can predict how you will feel in various situations. In reality, you are quite incompetent in forecasting your actions or feelings.
If you win the lottery, your life will turn into a fairytale. If your loved one leaves you, you are destined for an emotional nosedive. As research shows, such kinds of assumptions are generally wrong. Whether an event was anticipated or dreaded, the actual experience was usually less intense and less durable than predicted.
Though we are incompetent in predicting our own feelings, we still think we know what others think. Generally, we assume other people think the way we do and, surely, that isn’t true. In the 1970s, Stanford University professor Lee Ross asked a group of university students if they would be willing to walk around their campus for 30 minutes wearing a sandwich board saying: “Eat at Joe’s.” Of those who agreed to wear it, 62 percent thought others would also agree. Of those who refused, only 33 percent thought others would agree.
You think that you pay attention to the quality of arguments in a debate. In reality, if you like the speaker, you are more prone to accept his words.
Very often people don’t have enough knowledge to judge something beyond its face value so they ask themselves a simpler question: who is giving me the message? This phenomenon was observed during a classic study of persuasion done at Yale University.
Researcher Carl Hovland divided students into two groups and asked them how much they agreed on a Thomas Jefferson’s quote: “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and is necessarily in a political world as storms are in the physical.” One group was told that Vladimir Lenin was the author, not Jefferson.As a result, on average the group that was told the quote came from Jefferson, the American president, rated it more favorably than the group, who thought it came from Lenin, the communist.
Advertisers extensively exploit this phenomenon. Next time you see a celebrity convincing you to buy a product from a billboard or a TV screen, beware of the Yale approach to persuasion and make sure you are not being taken for a fool.
Happy April 1st!
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Horban can be reached at horban@kyivpost.com.
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