How We Know What Isn't So (11 page)

If you see yourself in that description, you are not alone. Many people who read it are convinced that it reveals unusual insight into their personality. What they fail to realize, however, is that: 1) In such a multi-faceted description there is bound to be
some
overlap with one’s own characteristics, and 2) the statements that fit the: best are so general that they are bound to ring true. They are nothing more than “one size fits all” assessments that apply to virtually everyone.
*

There are numerous examples of beliefs that stem partly from this process. As we shall see later on (Chapter 10), it affects people’s beliefs about the prophetic nature of dreams and the meaningfulness of coincidence. It has also played a role in at least a couple of scientific controversies. Some of the early claims about the biological basis of personality touted the amazing similarities between identical twins reared apart without properly controlling for the problem of multiple endpoints. Similarly, the claim that stress causes cancer is often buttressed by noting specific traumas that occurred shortly before the onset of an individual cancer. However, because we all experience various traumas from time to time, it is almost always possible to link the cancer to some particular traumatic episode.
*

Folk wisdom tells us that people maintain confidence in their prospects for future success in part by selectively recalling how they have performed in the past: People supposedly remember their successes and forget their failures. Likewise, it is commonly believed that people are more inclined to remember information that supports their beliefs than information that contradicts them. Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud are among the many wise observers of the human condition who have described these tendencies as manifest features of everyday life. Darwin, for example, in a statement that reflects his characteristic care and attention to detail, said that he “… followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”
¹⁶
According to Darwin and others, favorable information is seized upon and well remembered; unfavorable information is ignored and forgotten.

The thrust of much of the present chapter, however, can be considered to be somewhat at variance with these ideas. I have argued that people often resist the challenge of information that is inconsistent with their beliefs not by ignoring it, but by subjecting it to particularly intense scrutiny. I have also described the results of an experiment in which people were more likely to remember their losses than their wins.
¹⁷
Furthermore, research that has examined people’s ability to remember information about other people has often found that it is the information that
conflicts
with a person’s general impression of someone that is particularly memorable.
¹⁸
How can these results be reconciled with the consensus of folk wisdom and the insights of such sage observers as Bacon, Darwin, and Freud?

In essence, this question boils down to the issue of when, as folk psychology suggests, people remember favorable information better than unfavorable information, and when, as some of the findings reported earlier suggest, this pattern is reversed. A satisfactory answer to this question requires a distinction between what could be called “one-sided” and “two-sided” events. Two-sided events are those that stand out and register as events regardless of how they turn out. If a person bets on a sporting event and expects to win, both outcomes (a win or a loss) have emotional significance for the individual, both outcomes are likely to be noticed, and both will register as events. The outcome of a sporting event, then, can be considered a two-sided event. The results of buying a stock, going on a date, or taking a vacation are also two-sided: Whether favorable or unfavorable, the outcome stands out in one’s experience and registers as an event.

I suspect that the predictions of folk psychology are not particularly applicable to such two-sided events. Because both outcomes stand out equally from the stream of experience, they are likely to be equally well remembered. In fact, there are certain two-sided events for which the unfavorable or unanticipated outcome is likely to be
more
memorable because it produces thought and rumination about “what might have been.” As we have seen, this appears to be why gamblers remember their losses better than their wins. This occurs in other areas as well: The high school athlete remembers nothing more clearly than the potential touchdown pass that skidded off his fingertips, the participant in a spelling bee can never forget the word that ousted her from the tournament, and fishermen are all too willing to recount their experience with “the one that got away.” Similarly, recent research indicates that the member of a married couple who “loses” an argument remembers the fight with greater clarity.
¹⁹
And, as any student of psychology can tell you, there is the “Zeigarnik effect,” or the tendency for people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed.
²⁰

But what about the claim of folk wisdom that people are particularly inclined to remember favorable or expected outcomes? This idea may fare better when applied to one-sided events. One-sided events are those that stand out and are mentally represented as events only when they turn out one way. Consider, for example, the set of experiences that might produce and maintain the belief that “the phone always rings when I’m in the shower.” If the phone rings while showering, it will stand out and register as an event by virtue of the conflict that arises in deciding whether to answer it, by virtue of the chills and discomfort that are experienced while racing—dripping wet—to the phone, and by virtue of the frustration that is felt when it is picked up and only a dial tone is heard. In contrast, if the phone does not ring while showering, it is unlikely to register as an event. Nothing happened. Logically, such a nonoccurrence is just as much an event as an occurrence, but phenomenologically it is not.

It may be that it is these one-sided events to which folk wisdom best applies, and information consistent with our beliefs is better recalled. Because only one outcome is likely to be noticed, only one has much chance of being recalled. (“Memory,”
New York Times
writer Daniel Goleman aptly notes, “is attention in the past tense.”
²¹
) Furthermore, although there are some important exceptions that will be described below, it may also be the case that with such one-sided events it is more often the side that supports a person’s beliefs and matches his or her expectations that is likely to stand out. If I believe that my dreams are prophetic, it is my prophetic dreams that are eventful; if I believe that strange things happen during a full moon, it is the bizarre events that stand out. Consequently, people tend to remember the times when the phone rings while they are in the shower, somebody is murdered during a full moon, or someone’s cancer goes into remission after a visit to a faith healer.

How then to distinguish one-sided and two-sided events? To examine this distinction in more detail, it is necessary to identify various sub-classes of one-sided and two-sided events, and to consider their implications for the kind of information that people tend to recall.

Confirmations and Non-confirmations.
One clearly important factor involves the difference between confirmations and non-confirmations. Many beliefs or expectations are such that only events that confirm the belief stand out, because only the confirmations remind the person of the original expectation. If you go to a fortune teller and are told that you will someday have twins, having twins will almost certainly jar your memory and make you recall the long-forgotten prophecy. Furthermore, once having linked the prophecy and the confirmation, they will be hard to forget. Having a single child, on the other hand, is less likely to be linked to the original prediction. The birth of a single child is a non-event (with respect to the original prediction, that is!) and so the failed prophecy is unlikely to be recalled. Also, the birth of a single child does not directly disconfirm the prophecy; it simply fails to confirm it. It could still occur on a subsequent pregnancy.

Thus, one way in which commonsense psychology is correct (in that information that supports our beliefs is indeed particularly memorable) is that confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events. Support for this contention comes from a study in which participants read the diary of a hypothetical student who believed in the prophetic nature of dreams. The student explained, on the first day of the diary, that she wanted to conduct an informal test of this belief by writing down her dreams each night, recording the most significant events that occurred that day, and checking whether there was any connection between the two. The investigators arranged the diary so that on half the subsequent days the previous night’s dream was paired with a confirmatory event and on the other half there was no confirmation. When subsequently asked to recall as many of the dreams as they could, the participants were much more likely to remember the dreams that had been confirmed than those that were not confirmed.
²²

So commonsense psychology is correct: Events that confirm a person’s expectations are indeed better remembered, at least in comparison to those “non-events” that fail to confirm them. But are there other ways in which folk wisdom is correct? Are there circumstances in which confirmations are not only better remembered than non-confirmations, but better remembered than actual
contradictory
information?

Focused and Unfocused Expectations.
To address this question, it is necessary to introduce another variable that determines whether events are one-sided or two-sided—whether the original expectation is “temporally focused” or “temporally unfocused.” Consider once again the example of somebody who bets on a sporting event. The expectation in this case (that one will win, let’s say) is temporally focused because the outcome will occur at a particular time known in advance. The person’s attention is drawn to what occurs at that particular time, and so either outcome is almost certain to be noticed. Thus the event is also two-sided. As with two-sided events generally, the expected outcome is unlikely to be any more memorable that the unexpected outcome.

In contrast, consider the expectation that a dream will prove to be prophetic. The expectation in this case is temporally unfocused because a relevant outcome can occur at any time—that day, the next day, a week later, etc. The person’s attention, then, is not automatically drawn to all relevant outcomes. Rather, it is necessary for the person to extract relevant outcomes from the ongoing stream of experience, and events that confirm the original expectation may have an advantage. Thus, the outcomes relevant to such unfocused expectations tend to be one-sided, and the person may be more likely to recall events that are consistent with his or her expectations.

This distinction between focused and unfocused expectations was examined in an experiment similar to the one described above in which the participants read the diary of a student who believed in the prophetic nature of dreams. As before, the student indicated on the first day that she would write down each night’s dream and the most significant events of the day, and then determine whether there was any connection between the two. This study, however, differed from the previous one in two important ways. First, half of the dreams were paired with confirmatory events and the other half were paired with
contradictory
events. For instance, a dream such as “I dreamt of gorgeous sunshine,” might be paired with a confirmatory event such as “I sat on the deck of the student union and soaked up the rays,” or a contradictory event like “It was so cold and blustery all day that I was almost blown down the library slope.”

The second difference between this study and the previous experiment was that in this case each participant read one of two versions of the diary. In the
unfocused
version, each day’s diary entry began with a description of the previous night’s dream, and the event that either confirmed or contradicted the dream was written in some unpredictable location of the text. Thus, the participants’ attention was not focused on one particular location, and so they had to find the relevant events in the larger body of text. In the
focused
version, in contrast, the confirmatory or disconfirmatory events were always listed at the end of each day’s entry, and they were set off from the rest of the text and labelled “the most significant event of the day.” Thus, the participants knew exactly where to look for the relevant information, and their attention was presumably drawn equally to confirmatory and contradictory events.

As predicted, those in the
focused
condition recalled the confirmatory and disconfirmatory events equally well. Those in the
unfocused
condition, on the other hand, recalled three times as many of the confirmatory events. Thus, when outcomes are temporally focused, the events are two-sided in the sense that both outcomes are equally noticed and remembered. When the outcomes are temporally unfocused, in contrast, the events tend to be one-sided, and the events that confirm a person’s expectations tend to draw more attention and remain in memory.
²³

Outcome Asymmetries and One-sided Events.
The two experiments just described demonstrate that whether an expectation is confirmed or remains
un
confirmed, and whether an expectation is temporally focused or unfocused, are important determinants of whether an outcome is one or two-sided. This, in turn, influences the kind of information that is likely to be recalled. In addition, there are a number of asymmetries between possible outcomes that make some events inherently one-sided and thus strongly influence what is recalled.