A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
Cordelia Fine
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0393331636
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Provocative enough to make you start questioning your each and every action."―Entertainment Weekly
The brain's power is confirmed and touted every day in new studies and research. And yet we tend to take our brains for granted, without suspecting that those masses of hard-working neurons might not always be working for us. Cordelia Fine introduces us to a brain we might not want to meet, a brain with a mind of its own. She illustrates the brain's tendency toward self-delusion as she explores how the mind defends and glorifies the ego by twisting and warping our perceptions. Our brains employ a slew of inborn mind-bugs and prejudices, from hindsight bias to unrealistic optimism, from moral excuse-making to wishful thinking―all designed to prevent us from seeing the truth about the world and the people around us, and about ourselves.
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task of watching an erotic film, and reporting their level of sexual arousal. The first group of men watched and rated the film for its sexually invigorating nature long after they’d recovered from the exercise. Their brains didn’t have any problems because there were only two socks to match: the arousal from looking at naked women, and thoughts about the naked women. The second group of men viewed the film straight after exercising. Their brains weren’t fooled either. They easily matched the
books do on trains. The bigger the potential threat, the more self-protective the vain brain becomes. In a final irony, people think that others are more susceptible to the self-serving bias than they are themselves.8 (Allow yourself a moment to take that sentence fully on board, should you need to.) Thus when life or psychology researchers are kind enough to leave the reasons for success or failure ambiguous, the self-serving bias is readily and easily engaged to protect and nurture the ego.
What’s more, this affected how long they thought the criminal should serve in prison. When the false statements unfairly exacerbated the severity of the crime, the distracted volunteers sentenced him to prison for almost twice as long a stretch. Indeed, if your reputation is under examination, the gullible brains of others can put you in serious jeopardy. Because of our bias towards belief, we are particularly susceptible to innuendo. In a simulation of media election coverage, volunteers read a
ignoble as to deprecate this innocent woman, simply because their own noses had been put out of joint? They certainly could. Their ratings of the interviewee’s personality and qualifications were far lower than everyone else’s. But as cat-kickers everywhere will know, it certainly had the desired effect: their self-esteem went shooting up afterwards. To be fair to our bigoted brains, people who want to avoid prejudiced thoughts can, and do, quash the activity of their stereotypes. However, this
put together in an entirely haphazard fashion, the flame of fellow feeling was nonetheless sparked. When asked, the students confessed to a desire that their own team would triumph. And, in line with their desires, each team thought it more likely that their own team would prevail against the opposition. Not only that, but all but a few of the students were confident that their predictions about which team would win were unaffected by their hankering for their own team’s victory. Yet what else