Mundane (but important) human limitations

My daughter liked her introductory psychology course at college so much that I was inspired to read the textbook this summer. ("Psychology" by David G. Myers, 2003.) I have three academic degrees in psychology, but I learned a lot that surprised me.

Below is further support for the saying "Don't believe everything you think" though from a different vantage point than we usually assume.

Here are some of our less endearing traits:

1. Muddled and self-serving

People have a self-serving bias, believing they are responsible for their good deeds but circumstances are responsible for their bad ones.

Most people see themselves as above average.

People's predictions of the future are systematically more optimistic than reality warrants. (Seldom heard: I'll buy those pants on the loose side because I'm likely to gain moreweight...).

When asked to rate how confident they are about an answer to a question, the confidence rating is higher than the actual probability of being correct.

People find it obvious after the fact why something happened.

When a group of people is told that scientific studies have shown that "out of sight, out of mind" is a property of human affection, they after discussion can explain with confidence why it is obviously correct. A different group told that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" will with equal confidence explain why that is obvious. (The actual correct answer: "out of sight, out of mind.")

When shown a series of random digits, people believe that the naturally-occurring streaks are evidence of nonrandomness. What they view as random sequences in fact have too few streaks to be random. Related result: there are very few if any "hot hands" in stock market prediction. Random variation is sufficient to explain observed results.

When people have a theory about something, they have a confirmation bias: they seek information that confirms the theory, but avoid information that might show the theory to be mistaken. For instance, if shown sequences like "3 4 10", "1 2 7" and "3 9 12" and told they follow a rule, people will hypothesize that the numbers have to be in ascending order. If told that they can ask about whether other sequences do or do not follow the pattern, they will usually only ask about other cases where the numbers are ascending, not examples that do not conform to their hypothesis that might show that the pattern is (for instance) that only the first two numbers must be in order. This has interesting implications for prejudice and closed-mindedness more generally.

2. Memory

People tend to remember situations as simpler than they were and with ambiguities edited out. People experience memories as vivid and feel certain of them, but they are constructed from more abstract information and are often wrong. Important lesson: people who report remembering things that didn't happen are generally not lying, but sincere and just mistaken. This includes those who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

One of the things people get wrong most often in a memory is the source: they often mistake things they have read or seen on TV for things that really happened.

People accurately remember no experiences from before the age of about 3.

Older children's memories are often profoundly influenced by the adults who question them. A passage worth quoting verbatim: The experimenters "had a child choose a card from a deck of possible happenings and an adult then read from the card. For example, 'Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?' After 10 weekly interviews, with the same adult repeatedly asking children to think about several real and fictitious events, a new adult asked the same question. The stunning result: 58 percent of preschoolers produced false (often vivid) stories regarding one or more events they had never experienced."

Our memories of how pleasant or unpleasant an experience was are based on two factors: the peak emotion and on how the experience ended. To consider one practical application of this principle: after an (uncomfortable) colonoscopy with a moving probe, one group of patients then had an extra few minutes tacked onto the procedure where the probe did not move (uncomfortable but not as uncomfortable). This latter group later remembered the procedure as less unpleasant and were more likely to go to follow-up visits.

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All that said, human beings are wonderfully complex beings capable of amazing mental feats, amazing insights, compassion, love, and good deeds. I've focused on the negative above, but I do not want anyone to think I've lost sight of our positive traits. We may often wonder why there is evil in the world or why people are not kind, caring, altruistic, etc. But we less often wonder about our much more mundane frailties. Awarenessand understanding of them could help us compensate for them.