Introspection and Its Discontents
Why knowing your priorities doesn’t always lead to better outcomes
Much of the popular time-management literature posits that knowing what we value--and why--will help us make better decisions. Hyrum Smith and Stephen Covey encourage listing values and writing mission statements. Julie Morgenstern’s first step to eliminate clutter is identifying why we are doing so. Whether choosing tasks to do today (Smith), what to do with our lives (Covey), or what to do with a box of memorabilia (Morgenstern), we are told to first introspect on what matters most to us. Unfortunately, human beings are really bad at introspection.
We can’t always tell what matters--or how.
Our Minds Are Black Boxes--Even To Ourselves. So says PsyBlog, writing about a 1977 study by Nisbett and Bellows. Participants read a description of a job applicant named Jill. Five factors were mentioned to some participants but not others (Jill’s attractive appearance, performance in school, etc.). Participants then ranked “Jill” on likeability, flexibility, intelligence, and sympathy. Finally, they rated how each of the five factors influenced their ratings. How accurate were they?
For ratings of sympathy, likeability and flexibility the participants turned out to be surprisingly poor at predicting the actual effect that each of the above 5 factors would have on their own judgements. On more than half the judgements people didn't even get the direction of the effect right.So we don’t know what we actually value. But say one does successfully identify one’s values; how consistently does one use them to make decisions? Perhaps not very consistently, given the tendency to easily explain away lapses.
. . .
People may know what they like, but they often don't know why they like it
When we choose contrary to social values, we make up faulty explanations.
Mind Hacks described research by Chance and Norton, in which male participants chose between two customized sports magazines:
One had more articles, but the other featured more sports. When a participant was asked to rate a magazine, one of two magazines happened to be a special swimsuit issue, featuring beautiful women in bikinis.An article in The Economist notes that the old joke, “I read Playboy for the articles,” is so well-known that Chance and Norton get away with using it as the title of their paper.
When the swimsuit issue was the magazine with more articles, the guys said they valued having more articles to read and chose that one. When the bikini babes appeared in the publication with more sports, they said wider coverage was more important and chose that issue.
This, as it turns out, is a common pattern in studies of this kind, and crucially, participants are usually completely unaware that they are post-justifying their choices.
Unfortunately, stated reasons can be more than merely incorrect.
Articulating reasons can cause poorer choices.
Malcolm Gladwell described research on this subject by Tim Wilson in a talk (transcribed in this blog post):
[Y]ou bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way . . .Students who had to explain themselves tended to choose a photo of a kitten hanging in midair with the caption, “Hang in there, baby” (and later disliked it); the students who did not have to explain themselves chose an Impressionist print (and later liked it). Gladwell calls this “a language problem”. To art historians’ dismay, you can enjoy Impressionism without possessing much art vocabulary. However, explaining why you like it is another matter. Expecting to have to justify your choice might nudge you towards the kitten in peril and its easier-to-explain appeal.
Implications
If our minds are “black boxes,” uncovering values--our standards and preferences--will be trickier than self-help books suggest. Explaining our goals (as noted previously, FranklinCovey’s goal-setting form places a “why” question ahead of the actual goal!) may move them away from our true preferences.
These studies alone don’t invalidate all introspective pursuits. But they do give me--a relatively-canonical FranklinCovey planner user--some pause. Simply getting to know oneself may not be the panacea that the popular success literature suggests.
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Friday, December 4, 2009
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