Is your ego big enough?

You come down with something bad and you’re sent to bed for a few days with a warm drink and a painkiller or six. After some time you begin to feel better, and you thank your biological immune system for its service healing you, whilst also scolding it for not protecting you in the first place. You likely wish you had a stronger immune system to protect you from incoming viruses and flus.

It came as a surprise to me to find out that we actually have a psychological immune system too, and it serves us in a similar way to our biological immune system. Walter Mischel explains that this system allows us to ‘see ourselves as having more positive and fewer negative qualities than most of our peers’. It’s function is to protect us from chronic stress and dealing with terrible news, and it’s reasonable to extend this and say it helps us cope with our friends and peers when we receive negative and upsetting feedback. Our psychological immune system allows us to take in negative views, and the stronger our system is, overcome them. Think about the millions of people that despise Kanye West and vocalise this to him regularly. Were it not for his strong (ego) psychological immune system, he would probably have stopped making music a long time ago. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for you to decide…

In a study of over 800,000 high school seniors, Myers found that ‘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’! We’ve all got egos, some are bigger and some are smaller. Taylor demonstrated that ‘high self-enhancers (big egos) have lower biological stress levels’. In contrast: ‘the realists who perceive themselves more accurately experience lower self-esteem and more depression, and are generally less mentally and physically healthy’.

I conjecture that having a big (ish) ego is an essential tool for effectively dealing with criticism (‘haters’, if you’re a hip-hop artist?). This ability is a fundamental element of success.

“If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome”

- Michael Jordan

‘The Marshmallow Test’ (Walter Mischel): Why altering your conscience is good for you.

Here we go again. Get ready for the inevitable siege of the ‘new year, new me’ army. Empty promises to ones-self to get slim are so common at this time of year, that if I had a pound for each I’d have enough for… well, liposuction? 

In the ‘The Marshmallow Test’, Walter Mischel proposes that we can deliberately and effectively cognitively reappraise events by using the prefrontal cortex to critically adjust the way we interpret temptation. I want to try and explain this in colloquial English (for my own benefit if nothing else). In essence, using the part of our brain that is responsible for emotions and problem solving, we can adjust the way we think about temptation, which can allow us to gain a deep mastery of self-control. The word ‘temptation’ probably springs to mind a fat chocolate cake, so I figured I’d throw in a picture of one, however, it’s used in a much wider context here. Think of temptation as anything that involves immediate gratification (drinking alcohol and partying etc.). 

Self-control is crucial for the pursuit of long-term goals; it means we can pursue activities that require deferred gratification like studying, starting a business, dieting, or the plethora of things that will improve us. In the book, Mischel states: “[self control] is the master aptitude underlying emotional intelligence, essential for constructing a fulfilling life. It can help people avoid becoming entrapped early in life, dropping out of school, becoming impervious to consequences, or getting stuck in jobs [we] hate”. 

So this year instead of picking a diet plan, why not start mastering self-control. If you want to lose 20 pounds, spend 20 pounds on this book.

How? Here’s three ways the book suggests we can alter our cognition to improve our self-control: 

i) Imagine someone else making the choice. ‘One way to momentarily escape the brains desire for gratification is to imagine how someone else would behave. It’s easier to use our rational mind when making choices for others rather than ourselves’. Ask yourself: “What would an intelligent person do”, then try to apply your decision about their life to yours.

ii) De-stress. Yale neuroscientists concluded that “mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities”. Hence, if you’re stressed, your ability to handle situations with self-control is rapidly diminished and negated.

iii) Think of the shapes. This one is more about food. In a study of preschool children, it was shown that those who thought about a treat in front of them as a picture and not as a tangible object of desire, were much more able to delay gratification and not eat the treat. This is because; as one child humorously described it “you can’t eat a picture”! Thinking about food as an image that we are seeing helps negate our strong emotion for wanting to eat it.

... Happy new year!

You are two-faced. Here's why.

We hate it. A person acts a certain way in one place and acts different in another. It’s demonised and we will quickly turn away from people who are two-faced. But I’m telling you, you are two-faced. It’s because of a glitch in your brain. In ‘The Tipping Point’ Malcolm Gladwell discusses the power of context and it’s influence on how we view people’s personalities. The book's focal point is on what makes epidemics spread, but I thought this was a gloriously controversial point to write about. 

Let me put this to you. I would like you to describe your closest friend in a short sentence.

Chances are, you’ve come up with an explanation along the lines of ‘Beth is a wonderfully kind person’

As humans, we love singularities and absolutes. It is a coping mechanism that helps us make sense of the world around us, using human personalities as a tool for cognition. However, Zimbardo (one of the psychologists behind the famous Stanford Prisoner experiment) suggests that we are deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behaviour when we forget the crucial role of situations, or context. Beth can probably be very mean with people she despises, for example.

Quick example: A group of seminarians were asked to prepare a talk for a bible group on ‘the Good Samaritan’, then walk over to a nearby building and present it. Along the way, the psychologists made sure the seminarians would run into a slumped man, clearly sick in need of help. Would the seminarians stop? Our mind, using absolutes, would say yes, most of these people would stop; they are the most selfless people imaginable.

But the psychologists introduced a variable, where they would either say “oh you’re late”, or “you’re a bit early, but may as well head over now” before the seminarians left for the talk. This had a profound effect. “It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not increase helping behaviour” concluded Darley and Batson. Only 10% of the rushed group stopped, versus 63% of the other group. The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush.

This is classic. The reason this shocks us is because we want to look for a dispositional explanation to why the seminarian didn’t stop (i.e. wow what a two-faced person), as opposed to looking objectively and using a contextual explanation (i.e. they were simply late).

Gladwell summarises: ‘Character then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in our brains’ which psychologists call FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error).

Next time you brand someone two-faced, think carefully about the situation they were put in, it had a much bigger effect than you might think.