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The Marshmallow Test Chapter 13. The Psychological Immune System
Author: Walter Mischel Publisher: New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. Publish Date: 2014-9 Review Date: Status:💥
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WHEN OUR SELF-CONTROL EFFORTS fail, we have a hidden ally that in time helps us feel better, or at least not too awful, no matter how badly we mess up or how harshly life treats us. Evolution provides us with automatic protective mechanisms that come to the rescue when life deals us terrible blows we simply cannot control, and when our strengths are insufficient, our cool system too tired, and our own fallible behaviors and fragile feelings get us in trouble.
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These mechanisms used to be called ego defenses, but early in this century Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, working with Timothy Wilson from the University of Virginia and others, has broadened, revised, and more aptly renamed them the “psychological immune system.” This system creates a safety net to protect us from the effects of chronic stress, and it fortifies us so that we can cope with terrible news—like a routine checkup that turns into a cancer diagnosis, a plunge in retirement funds, a pink slip announcing that it is time to clear out the office, or the sudden death of a person we love. While the biological immune system keeps us alive by protecting us against illness, the psychological immune system reduces perceived stress and helps us avoid depression. The stress-reducing and antidepressive effects of the psychological immune system bolster the biological immune system, and the two continuously interact to try to keep us smiling and healthy even when life is especially harsh.
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PROTECTING SELF-REGARD: SELF-ENHANCEMENT
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The psychological immune system finds ways for us to avoid hating ourselves for bad outcomes and credit ourselves for the good ones. It lets us attribute the bad outcomes to everything from the government, an incompetent underling, or a jealous colleague to a moment of bad luck or some other condition outside our control. It helps you fall asleep at night after reliving a work episode in which a colleague referred to your idea at the group meeting as a formula for disaster. OK, you think, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, but it’s forgivable because you were coming down with the flu. As social psychologist Elliot Aronson put it in the title of his book with Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me).
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The psychological immune system preserves our sense of being good, smart, and worthy. Provided we are not severely depressed or dysfunctional, it allows us to see ourselves as having more positive and fewer negative qualities than most of our peers. It does not work this way with everything, though: you may see yourself as intelligent overall but incompetent with technology, or as being good at self-control when it comes to work but not when it comes to chocolate. Nevertheless, when people rate themselves on Shelley Taylor’s “How I See Myself” questionnaire, which lists 21 qualities including “cheerful,” “academically able,” “intellectually self-confident,” “sensitive to others,” and “desire to achieve,” between 67 and 96 percent rate themselves better than they rate their peers. David G. Myers, a social psychologist at Hope College, captured the gist of the multitude of studies on self-evaluation.
In one College Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, zero percent rated themselves below average in “ability to get along with others,” 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top 1 percent. Compared to our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer—a phenomenon recognized in Freud’s joke about the man who told his wife, “If one of us should die, I shall move to Paris.”…
In everyday life, more than nine in ten drivers are above average drivers, or so they presume. In surveys of college faculty, 90 percent or more have rated themselves as superior to their average colleague.… When husbands and wives estimate what percent of the housework they contribute, or when work team members estimate their contributions, their self-estimates routinely sum to more than 100 percent.
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We cannot all be above average. The important question is whether this illusion of self-regard is ultimately good or bad for us. Should we cheer this type of self-enhancement, give it a positive name like “self-affirmation,” be glad to see it in our children, and not censor it in ourselves? Or is this overevaluation of the self a neurotic mechanism, a defense system that we need to overcome so that we can see ourselves more accurately? Not surprisingly, consistent with the phenomenon itself, advocates on each side are passionate about the perceptiveness of their own view and the foolishness of the opposition’s. Shelley Taylor and her colleagues explored the impact of self-regard in a series of experiments beginning in the late 1990s and continuing for many years, and their results brought new evidence into the debate.
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Taylor and her team demonstrated that high self-enhancers, the people who get higher self-affirming scores when they compare themselves with peers, in fact have lower chronic biological stress levels. Biologically, this happens in large part through the work of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), which regulates everything from digestion and temperature to mood, sexuality, physical energy, and the biological immune system. The HPA also indicates how well or how poorly you react to stress and trauma. High self-enhancers have a healthier HPA axis profile than low self-enhancers. They are better able to attenuate the hot system when reacting to threats because their calming parasympathetic activity increases, as does their comfort level. This reduces stress, putting high self-enhancers in a more self-soothing, recuperative mode, in which they can restore themselves and heal rather than having to tense up for the next battle—whether to face the wild hyenas of our ancestors’ time or their contemporary versions today.
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These findings contradict the traditional belief, still shared by many psychotherapists, that positive illusions and self-enhancement are defensive denials of negative personal characteristics and signs of grandiosity and neurotic narcissism, and that the effort to suppress or repress one’s negative qualities has large biological costs. In fact, positive self-affirming mental states, including positive illusions (as long as they are not extreme distortions of reality), enhance healthier physiological and neuroendocrine functioning and lead to lower stress levels. The realists who perceive themselves more accurately experience lower self-esteem and more depression, and they are generally less mentally and physically healthy. In contrast, healthier individuals perceive themselves with a warm, even if somewhat illusory, glow.
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There are close parallels between the workings of the psychological and the biological immune systems. Both serve us well, but both can backfire if they either overreact or underperform. Each has to strike a balance between two competing needs, as Daniel Gilbert points out. The biological immune system has to identify and kill foreign invaders like viruses, but it has to avoid killing the body’s good cells. Likewise, it may be adaptive and good for self-esteem if the psychological immune system leads you to think you are better than most peers, but it’s a different story if you believe you are better than everybody else.
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Even if the psychological immune system is doing a fine job balancing self-enhancement and realism, it often makes us incorrectly predict how we would feel if terrible things were to happen. If we are asked to imagine how we would feel if we became paraplegic, we are apt to anticipate a terribly unhappy life, as Gilbert and other researchers have shown. If it actually happens to us, our psychological immune system fortunately helps us make the best of it, and we soon wind up feeling much better than we thought we would. The downside of this system is that it makes us poor predictors of our future happiness; the upside is that it makes us better survivors when life goes badly. But what happens when the psychological immune system fails us?
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LOSING THE ROSE-COLORED GLASSES
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Aaron Beck, a pioneer in the development of cognitive behavior therapy beginning in the 1970s and continuing into this century, proposed that the severely depressed suffer from an unrealistically negative view of the world, of the self, and of the future. He conceptualized depression as a generalized negative mental set, like a pair of dark glasses that turns everything into gloom.
Note: well when is it ever realistic? When is the world really that bleak? Sounds like the psychologist decides what is and isn’t accurate and their personal prejudices can get in the way
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But might a negative self-image partly reflect depressed people’s realistic recognition of their own lack of positive interpersonal skills and competence? Perhaps the depressed actually are less socially skillful and therefore are perceived more negatively both by other people who observe them and by themselves.
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To untangle these possibilities, I worked with Peter Lewinsohn and his colleagues from the Psychology Clinic at the University of Oregon in 1980 to examine how clinically depressed patients evaluate their performance. We needed to get both the self-ratings of depressives for their actual performance in social interactions and the ratings of independent observers who watched their performance, so that we could assess their congruence. Then we compared these patterns in the depressed patients with those in psychiatric patients who had equally severe mental problems but were not depressed, and also with those in non-patient control participants who had no current or past depression problems (but who were similar in age and demographics).
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Participants were seated in small groups in a comfortable informal seating arrangement and were told that the researchers wanted to learn more about how strangers related to one another. Each person in these small group meetings introduced himself or herself with a short monologue, and they were left alone to converse for 20 minutes. The observers, carefully trained and blind to the diagnoses and histories of the participants, rated what they observed from behind one-way mirrors on standard rating scales that listed many desirable attributes: friendly, popular, assertive, attractive, warm, communicates clearly, socially skillful, interested in other people, understands what others say, humorous, speaks fluently, open and self-disclosing, has a positive outlook on life, and so on. Right after each session, the participants rated their own performance in the group interaction on the same scales used by the observers.
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The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.
Note: maybe people should compare themselves to themselves rather than to others
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During the next few months, while they were treated with cognitive behavior therapy at the University of Oregon’s Psychology Clinic, the depressive patients began to enhance their self-evaluations, gradually rating themselves as more socially competent. Although the observers did not know that treatment was taking place, they also began to rate the depressives more positively. But even though the depressives saw themselves more positively after treatment, they were still more realistic in their self-evaluations and saw themselves more like others saw them. Importantly, the differences in the self-ratings between the three groups declined: the depressives were feeling better, and presumably their bolstered psychological immune systems raised their levels of self-evaluations.
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If the observers—who were the criterion for accuracy in this research—had been asked to rate themselves, they probably also would have tended toward inflation, just as the participants in the control group did. We see others accurately, but we wear the rose-colored glasses when we rate ourselves, if we are fortunate enough to not be depressed. In fact, this kind of inflation in self-evaluation may be what helps protect most people from being depressed.
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HOW FEELINGS TWIST THINKING
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What astonishes me, no matter how often I see it, is the power with which strong negative emotions can trump cool thinking. They can create fallout that distorts not just what we experience in the moment, but also what we expect in the future and how we evaluate ourselves. To examine how this plays out, Jack Wright and I studied how happy and sad feelings impacted performance on a challenging problem-solving task. Jack, who had been my student at Stanford and is now a professor at Brown University, asked college student volunteers in one condition to imagine, in vivid detail, a situation that would make them feel very happy, while those in another condition imagined a situation that would make them very sad. They were encouraged to picture the surrounding people and objects in their “mind’s eye,” to see the sights, hear the sounds, experience the event, think the thoughts, and have the feelings they would have had if they were really there. For example, to induce a happy mood, one student imagined future graduation from law school and fantasized about himself on graduation day, “long awaited and strived for, standing there knowing that I did it, I finally did it.” To create a sad mood, another student imagined “I was rejected at every law school I applied to.”
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While maintaining their mood states, participants had to match pairs of rotating three-dimensional figures shown on the computer in various angles of rotation, ranging in difficulty from very easy to unsolvable. Over many trials they received false but completely credible feedback indicating that they were either highly successful or failing on the most difficult problems. The most striking finding was the unfortunate effect of the combination of feeling sad and believing that they were failing. The students in a sad mood greatly overreacted to their negative performance feedback, lowering how they evaluated their own performance and their expectations for the next set of tasks much more sharply than those who got the same feedback but who were in a positive mood. Students who had been induced into a happy mood formed much higher expectations for their future performance, recalled more of their successful experiences, and made more favorable self-descriptions. They evaluated themselves as more intelligent, attractive, self-confident, popular, successful, and socially skilled, and they had higher expectations about their future performance than those who had self-induced negative emotions.
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DINNER WITH JAKE
Note: another problem with an inflated sense of self-worth is that it will prevent people from actually improving themselves cuz they don’t think they need to
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Given the demonstrated benefits of self-enhancing, I kept wondering why I so quickly disliked Jake, who was in my eyes the prototype of extreme self-affirmation. Perhaps high self-affirmers are healthier but friendless. Might the self-enhancers turn off other people by being too self-absorbed and having too little empathy? Might they be too busy enhancing themselves to perceive what is going on in the minds of the people in front of them? When researchers asked those questions, they found that people who view themselves more favorably than their friends view them had friendships that were just as long lasting, strong, and positive as those of low self-enhancers.
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Then what went wrong at that dinner? Most adaptive self-enhancers make subtle and automatic discriminations about the situations in which public self-enhancement is and is not appropriate, and where modesty is or is not expected. We usually self-enhance in our own heads, nourishing self-regard and self-soothing privately, not publicly. From the thin slice of Jake’s behavior that I endured, his problem seemed to be that he was indiscreet in when and where he self-enhanced. I suspect that his indiscretion was related to another deficit: a poorly developed theory of mind (ToM).
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As previously discussed, ToM is an important mental ability that begins in early childhood and allows us to understand that our beliefs may be false, that the way things appear may not mirror reality, and that other people may not perceive the same scene or event the way we do. In normal development, preschoolers already exhibit ToM, and it is strongly related to their ability to suppress impulsive responses. If Jake’s goal was to impress me, then his ToM was not working well; but maybe his goal was to impress himself, and his ToM could not care less. Unlike Jake, people whose self-enhancement is coupled with the desire to also make other people feel good about themselves have a great advantage: they can build mutually supportive and satisfying close relationships that not only have their own obvious benefits but also enhance their individual strengths and self-regard.
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ASSESSING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMMUNE SYSTEM
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The psychological immune system that promotes high self-regard and links to good mental and physical health was seen as a brittle neurotic defense system by many psychotherapists from the time of Freud into the 1990s. Therapists often tried to help people dismantle this system and get over their defenses. And this is still the case today with some therapists: if you enter a psychotherapist’s office now, without knowing that professional’s background, orientation, and training, there is a good chance that your self-enhancing system will be treated as a problem to be overcome rather than a strength to be embraced. But therapists trained in cognitive behavior therapy—the current evidence-based approach to treating psychological problems—are likely to take the opposite approach. Typically, they will work to strengthen the psychological immune system, while also helping to control its excesses.
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While health psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and behavioral researchers have demonstrated the value of the psychological immune system and the personal qualities that keep it healthy, behavioral economists and many psychologists have shown its downside. They find that, unless kept very carefully in check, optimism, self-affirmation, and the related positive qualities generate a bias that leads to overconfidence and potentially dangerous decision making and risk taking—across virtually every profession and business examined closely. No matter how careful the screening, and how impressive the individual’s track record, the optimistic bias of “Yes, I can!” (it also comes in the form of “Yes, I know!”) leads these highly skilled, successful professionals to take on excessive risks—even when they are honest, well-trained, well-intentioned models of lifelong rigorous self-control and self-discipline. These risks can easily end in disaster, and the people who are vulnerable to making such mistakes periodically bring their own success to a screeching halt when their overconfidence leads them to breach social norms and ethics, which often lands them in the headlines.
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HUBRIS: THE ACHILLES’ HEEL
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The Petraeus story reminds us that even the almost invincible hero Achilles, of Greek mythology, had a vulnerable heel, the one exposed hot spot that could bring about his downfall, and that made him human. Nevertheless, while recognizing that we all have hot spots that make us vulnerable, we still expect that people who are excellent at self-control will also be more alert and sensitive to delayed long-term risks.
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As discussed, high delayers are better protected against experiencing stress, and this in turn can make them less sensitive to danger signals. Likewise, because they tend to experience more success and mastery over their life course—from better physical health to higher financial gains—they may be more predisposed to some costly decision biases, particularly as a result of the illusion of control. As Petraeus’s story illustrates, the illusion of control can cause a formidably competent, high self-control person to reveal information over email that can undo the successful life he built.
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Staying calm, optimistic, and self-confident, the high self-control decision makers disregarded the feedback about their losses, were shielded from stress, and lost more money than the low self-controllers, who became anxious sooner, responded to the feedback, and quit before they went broke. In the end, in some conditions, it is the low self-controllers, with their lessened confidence and heightened anxiety, who can end up ahead.
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The benefits, however, may not last. The researchers induced heightened illusory control in the low self-control participants by having them succeed in predicting coin flips, or getting them to recall times when they had made good decisions and had been in high-control situations. Feeling more confident, these participants quickly lost their initial advantage: they started to resemble the high self-controllers—and to make the exact same poor choices (and lose money) as a result.
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FROM BEDROOM TO BOARDROOM TO BURNED FEET
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Reviewing the paradoxical literature in which the “I think I can!” optimists not infrequently mess up their lives and the lives of people who depend on them, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics and my colleague in psychology, points out, “An optimistic bias plays a role—sometimes the dominant role—whenever individuals or institutions voluntarily take on significant risks. More often than not, risk takers underestimate the odds they face, and do not invest sufficient effort to find out what the odds are.” He then presents powerful evidence that optimism creates enthusiastic inventors and energetic, hardworking, courageous entrepreneurs who are eager to seize the day—but whose confidence also fosters their delusions and leads them to minimize the risks and suffer costly consequences. Asked about the probability of success for “any business like yours,” one-third of American entrepreneurs said their chance of failing was zero. In fact, only about 35 percent of such businesses in the United States survive for five years. This seems to hold for everything from a small bed-and-breakfast venture to a Silicon Valley start-up promising the next big thing. At the very least, it may be reassuring that optimistic entrepreneurs are even more likely to take excessive risks and make unsound bets with their own money than with other people’s money.
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Thomas Astebro, a researcher who studied the fates of almost 1,100 new inventions submitted by eager innovators, found that less than 10 percent of them reached the market, and of those that did, 60 percent got negative returns. Half of the inventors withdrew after receiving objective reviews predicting that their inventions were sure to fail, but 47 percent of the remaining half persisted, doubling their initial losses before quitting.
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Six out of the roughly 1,100 inventions scored big, however: they yielded returns exceeding 1,400 percent. Those are the kinds of high but extremely unlikely and unpredictable payoffs that cause unrelenting optimists to continue buying lottery tickets. Those odds also keep them pulling the levers on the slot machines and rolling the dice after performing little rituals to increase their luck in the gambling casinos. A schedule of reinforcement that delivers a big payoff at rare, unpredictable times can, in experiments, keep pigeons continuously pecking on a lever forever, as B. F. Skinner and his students demonstrated, and it can seduce gamblers to keep losing until they can’t get another loan. It also gets optimistic entrepreneurs and innovators to keep working thousands of hours in the hope that they will become the next billionaire.
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The dangers and costs of overconfidence are not restricted to the world of entrepreneurship and financial risk taking. They apply equally to any experts who are optimistic enough to make predictions about outcomes that are subject to chance or largely unknowable. In one study, for example, the diagnoses that highly competent physicians made while their patients were still alive in the hospital’s intensive care unit were compared with what their autopsies later revealed. Physicians who had been “completely certain” of their diagnosis turned out to be wrong 40 percent of the time.