Livre sur les Biais cognitif et Ton système mental
Highlights
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting lens of our brains
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
people think that others are more susceptible to the self-serving bias than they are themselve
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
people will modestly and reluctantly confess that they are, for example, more ethical, more nobly motivated employees, and better drivers than the average person.
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
Failure is perhaps the greatest enemy of the ego, and that’s why the vain brain does its best to barricade the door against this unwelcome guest
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
One approach is to tell yourself that, in retrospect, the odds were stacked against you and failure was all but inevitable. Researchers have found that optimists in particular use this strategy, which has been dubbed ‘retroactive pessimism’, and it makes failure easier to digest.9
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
‘Self-handicappers’, as they are called, exploit the self-serving bias in a different way. In self-handicapping, the brain makes sure that it has a non-threatening excuse for failure, should it occur. If you can blame your poor performance in an intelligence test on your lack of effort, for example, then your flattering self-image of your intelligence and competence can remain unchallenged. Self-handicapping also enhances the sweetness of success when it occurs, creating a win-win situation for your ego. Drug use, medical symptoms, anxiety … they can all be used to shield the ego from failure
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
It seems that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for negative feedback to enter the kingdom of memory.
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
All brains contain an enormous database of personal memories that bear on that perennially fascinating question ‘Who am I?’, or the self-concept. But the self-concept, psychologists have discovered, is conveniently self-shifting.13 If the self-concept you are wearing no longer suits your motives, the brain simply slips into something more comfortable
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
The willing assistant in this process is memory. It has the knack of pulling out personal memories that better fit the new circumstances.
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
Two Princeton researchers observed this metamorphosis directly, by tempting the vain brains of their volunteers with an attractive change of self-concept.14 They asked a group of students to read one of two (fabricated) scientific articles. The first article claimed that an extroverted personality helps people to achieve academic success. The second article, handed out to just as many students, claimed instead that introverts tend to be more academically successful. You can guess what’s going to happen. Imagine it. You’re a vain brain. You’re a vain brain at Princeton, for goodness’ sake. Someone’s offering you a shimmering, glittering, dazzling self-concept that says, ‘Hey, world. I am going to make it.’ A personality trait you’ve been told offers the crystal stairway to triumph might not be quite your size, but if you can make it fit with a bit of tweaking, you will. Whichever personality trait the students thought was the key to success, they rated themselves more highly as possessing.
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
What happens is that the vain brain calls in memory to make sure that the most attractive self-concept fits. From the enormous wardrobe of rich and complicated autobiographical events from your life, your memory brings to the fore those memories that best match the self-concept you are trying to achieve. When people are told that extroverts, say, tend to be more successful than shy and retiring types, it is the memories that bear out their sociable and outgoing natures that rush quickly and easily to consciousness
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
Give someone who’s been told that one type of personality leads to success a bit of personality feedback, and she will remember much more of the feedback that shows that she possesses the supposedly more favourable attribute.16
CHAPTER 1: The Vain Brain
R. Sanitioso and R. Wlordarski (2004), ‘In search of information that confirms a desired self-perception: motivated processing of social feedback and choice of social interactions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30: 412–22.