Mistrusted Adviser
A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine. W. W. Norton, 2006 ($24.95)
Many psychological studies show that on average, each of us believes we are above average compared with others–more ethical and capable, better drivers, better judges of character, and more attractive. Our weaknesses are, of course, irrelevant. Such self-distortion protects our egos from harm, even when nothing could be further from the truth. Our brains are the trusted advisers we should never trust.
This “distorting prism” of selfknowledge is what Cordelia Fine, a psychologist at the Australian National University, calls our “vain brain.” Fine documents the lengths to which a human brain will go to bias perceptions in the perceiver’s favor. When explaining to ourselves and others why something has gone well or badly, we attribute success to our own qualities, while shedding responsibility for failure. Our brains bias memory and reason, selectively editing truth to infl ict less pain on our fragile selves. They also shield the ego from truth with “retroactive pessimism,” insisting the odds were stacked inevitably toward doom. Alternatively, the brain of “selfhandicappers” concocts nonthreatening excuses for failure.
Furthermore, our brains warp perceptions to match emotions. In the extreme, patients with Cotard delusion actually believe they are dead. So “pigheaded” is the brain about protecting its perspective that it defends cherished positions regardless of data. The “secretive” brain unconsciously directs our lives via silent neural equipment that creates the illusion of willfulness. “Never forget,” Fine says, “that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.”
So what to do? Begin with self-awareness, Fine says, then manage the distortions as best one can. We owe it to ourselves “to lessen the harmful effects of the brain’s various shams,” she adds, while admitting that applying this lesson to others is easier than to oneself.
Ironically, one category of persons shows that it is possible to view life through a clearer lens. “Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge,” Fine asserts. “They are the clinically depressed.” Case in point. —Richard Lipkin
Unmasking Scoundrels
Cunning by Don Herzog. Princeton University Press, 2006 ($24.95)
Perhaps the first question you might ask someone who has just read a book is, “What is it about?” That would be difficult to answer for Cunning, even though Don Herzog, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, spells out his intentions: “Here’s an enticing labyrinth full of problems, with the paths of morality, roles and rationality crossed, confused, confusing.” What he means is that being cunning—crafty, shifty, sly or even duplicitous—creates psychological dilemmas for both the outsmarted and the outsmarter.
To explore these dilemmas, Herzog revels in myriad stories from a wild range of sources, many old and some obscure—from English witchcraft narratives to Nigerian e-mail scams. “What were these people thinking?” is one big question he asks. “How should we regard them?” is the other.
The book’s first section, “Dilemmas,” considers whether the world is divided into knaves and fools. Greek hero Odysseus—thoroughly amoral but perhaps more pragmatist than knave—and Italian statesman Machiavelli are the prime subjects of discussion. Making judgments about these scheming men, it seems, is a tricky enterprise.
The second section, “Appearances,” deals with the unmasking of scoundrels—knowing whom, or what, to trust. The O. J. Simpson case is one example in which no party, not even the police, seems worthy of unquestioning trust. At the level of daily life, Herzog wrestles with buying a used car: salespeople, he concludes, have no choice but to be cunning, and we have no choice but to distrust them.
The final section, “Despair,” delves into a fair amount of philosophy—Herzog cites British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and David Hume above all—but is not as focused. It does contain the story of Thrse Humbert, a French farm girl of the late 19th century who reinvented herself as “an American billionaire’s illegitimate daughter.” Herzog wonders whether Humbert was truly cunning or sincerely self-deluded.
Whether you enjoy Cunning or put it down in frustration will depend on your tolerance for Herzog’s cleverness. Does he have anything new to say about Odysseus or the biblical Jacob, or has he merely read the literature on these dubious characters? He flits from sermons preached at executions to the ethics of Amway sales tactics, never tarrying long with any one example. It is hard to say at the end where he has gotten, but it is clear that he, anyway, had fun getting there. —Jonathan Beard
Land of Empty
The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine. HarperCollins, 2006 ($24.95)
Wandering among suburban estates, sports clubs and prep schools are overlooked children of a perplexed generation. Their lives overflow with abundance and praise, yet ironically, the mask of apparent health and success may hide a gloomy world of emptiness, anxiety and anger.
Strangely, argues Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist practicing in Marin County, California, the nation’s latest group of at-risk kids comes from affluent, well-educated families. Despite advantages, these children experience disproportionately high rates of clinical depression, substance abuse, anxiety, eating disorders and self-destructive (even self-mutilating) behaviors, according to various studies. Based on criteria from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Levine says these children “are exhibiting epidemic rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school and accelerating throughout adolescence.”
One may brush off these youngsters as overindulged products of wealthy, narcissistic parents. But Levine says many of these kids are really ill. They suffer from a weak sense of self, often struggling to fill inner emptiness with objects and praise. Too often they know something is wrong and grope desperately for help yet fail to escape a downward spiral.
Could it be, Levine wonders, that privilege, high expectations, competitive pressure and parental overinvolvement yield toxic rather than protective effects? Levine explores such issues as social isolation, the fi ne line between parental underinvolvement and overindulgence, and the perverse role of money and material goods in creating false promises of fulfillment. Yearning for outward approval, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the delusion that wealth causes happiness. In many cases, a rude awakening occurs only after many years of anxiety and depression.
Levine’s writing is surprisingly reflective and interesting. A constructive therapist, she offers practical guidelines and parenting strategies for those struggling with troubled teens. The advice is useful to any parent of any income level and includes ways to foster healthy autonomy, impulse control and sense of self. Levine emphasizes the importance of discipline, monitoring and limit setting as ways to encourage kids to construct healthy “inner” homes. More important, parents must “stand on their own two feet” before expecting their children to stand on theirs—noting that many parents scold their children for social behaviors that they themselves cannot manage, such as substance abuse and lack of self-discipline or self-assertion. Parents must strive to get their own inner homes in order before they can expect kids to straighten out theirs. —Richard Lipkin
Catastrophes of Mind
Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind: A Bridge between Mind and Society by Israel W. Charny. University of Nebraska Press, 2006 ($49.95)
Is there any connection between the way individuals think about their lives and relationships and the way societies behave toward their citizens? Israel W. Charny, a psychologist working in Israel who has devoted his practice to family and couples counseling and much of his life to a study of genocide, believes there is. “Fascist-type thinking,” he says, leads to destroyed relationships and thwarted lives for individuals and to authoritarianism and genocide at the societal level.
Charny plies his postulate not at the simplistic level of “the Nazis committed genocide because they were crazy” but in the sense that all of us have both “fascist” and “democratic” components to our minds. The fascist programs, which he likens to human software, “tell you what to do with certainty, without questioning or alternative frames of reference…. They instill in you a sense of superiority.” In contrast, the programs of the democratic mind invite responsibility for choosing one’s direction in life, support questioning and are “accompanied by a readiness to change.” He explains why fascist ideas seduce both societies and individuals who crave solutions to life’s complexities and why the results are catastrophic for both. Democratic ways of thinking and an openness to other people and new ideas—although they provoke uncertainty and anxiety—are his alternative prescription for individuals and societies that prize humanity.
Once Charny sets out these fairly simple ideas he expands on them by citing a vast array of writers, most of them psychologists, who have discussed the abuse of power to illustrate the consequences of fascist systems—especially when the abuse leads to genocide. And to provide examples of both fascist and democratic behaviors in personal life, he includes scores of case histories from his many decades of work in American and Israeli mental health clinics. The discussion gives him ample opportunity to list his dislikes—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Taliban, Prozac and controlling parents—as well as his likes, such as child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, good sex, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, and the Alexander Technique of self-awareness and body control. He also tells lots of entertaining stories about patients. Unfortunately, the result is a book that is much too long for its message. What could have been a short essay about habits of mind and their personal and political implications swells into a repetitious, often self-serving mixture of the author’s opinions and favorite stories. —Jonathan Beard
Many psychological studies show that on average, each of us believes we are above average compared with others–more ethical and capable, better drivers, better judges of character, and more attractive. Our weaknesses are, of course, irrelevant. Such self-distortion protects our egos from harm, even when nothing could be further from the truth. Our brains are the trusted advisers we should never trust.
This “distorting prism” of selfknowledge is what Cordelia Fine, a psychologist at the Australian National University, calls our “vain brain.” Fine documents the lengths to which a human brain will go to bias perceptions in the perceiver’s favor. When explaining to ourselves and others why something has gone well or badly, we attribute success to our own qualities, while shedding responsibility for failure. Our brains bias memory and reason, selectively editing truth to infl ict less pain on our fragile selves. They also shield the ego from truth with “retroactive pessimism,” insisting the odds were stacked inevitably toward doom. Alternatively, the brain of “selfhandicappers” concocts nonthreatening excuses for failure.
Furthermore, our brains warp perceptions to match emotions. In the extreme, patients with Cotard delusion actually believe they are dead. So “pigheaded” is the brain about protecting its perspective that it defends cherished positions regardless of data. The “secretive” brain unconsciously directs our lives via silent neural equipment that creates the illusion of willfulness. “Never forget,” Fine says, “that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.”
So what to do? Begin with self-awareness, Fine says, then manage the distortions as best one can. We owe it to ourselves “to lessen the harmful effects of the brain’s various shams,” she adds, while admitting that applying this lesson to others is easier than to oneself.
Ironically, one category of persons shows that it is possible to view life through a clearer lens. “Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge,” Fine asserts. “They are the clinically depressed.” Case in point. —Richard Lipkin
Unmasking Scoundrels
Cunning by Don Herzog. Princeton University Press, 2006 ($24.95)
Perhaps the first question you might ask someone who has just read a book is, “What is it about?” That would be difficult to answer for Cunning, even though Don Herzog, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, spells out his intentions: “Here’s an enticing labyrinth full of problems, with the paths of morality, roles and rationality crossed, confused, confusing.” What he means is that being cunning—crafty, shifty, sly or even duplicitous—creates psychological dilemmas for both the outsmarted and the outsmarter.
To explore these dilemmas, Herzog revels in myriad stories from a wild range of sources, many old and some obscure—from English witchcraft narratives to Nigerian e-mail scams. “What were these people thinking?” is one big question he asks. “How should we regard them?” is the other.
The book’s first section, “Dilemmas,” considers whether the world is divided into knaves and fools. Greek hero Odysseus—thoroughly amoral but perhaps more pragmatist than knave—and Italian statesman Machiavelli are the prime subjects of discussion. Making judgments about these scheming men, it seems, is a tricky enterprise.
The second section, “Appearances,” deals with the unmasking of scoundrels—knowing whom, or what, to trust. The O. J. Simpson case is one example in which no party, not even the police, seems worthy of unquestioning trust. At the level of daily life, Herzog wrestles with buying a used car: salespeople, he concludes, have no choice but to be cunning, and we have no choice but to distrust them.
The final section, “Despair,” delves into a fair amount of philosophy—Herzog cites British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and David Hume above all—but is not as focused. It does contain the story of Thrse Humbert, a French farm girl of the late 19th century who reinvented herself as “an American billionaire’s illegitimate daughter.” Herzog wonders whether Humbert was truly cunning or sincerely self-deluded.
Whether you enjoy Cunning or put it down in frustration will depend on your tolerance for Herzog’s cleverness. Does he have anything new to say about Odysseus or the biblical Jacob, or has he merely read the literature on these dubious characters? He flits from sermons preached at executions to the ethics of Amway sales tactics, never tarrying long with any one example. It is hard to say at the end where he has gotten, but it is clear that he, anyway, had fun getting there. —Jonathan Beard
Land of Empty
The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine. HarperCollins, 2006 ($24.95)
Wandering among suburban estates, sports clubs and prep schools are overlooked children of a perplexed generation. Their lives overflow with abundance and praise, yet ironically, the mask of apparent health and success may hide a gloomy world of emptiness, anxiety and anger.
Strangely, argues Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist practicing in Marin County, California, the nation’s latest group of at-risk kids comes from affluent, well-educated families. Despite advantages, these children experience disproportionately high rates of clinical depression, substance abuse, anxiety, eating disorders and self-destructive (even self-mutilating) behaviors, according to various studies. Based on criteria from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Levine says these children “are exhibiting epidemic rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school and accelerating throughout adolescence.”
One may brush off these youngsters as overindulged products of wealthy, narcissistic parents. But Levine says many of these kids are really ill. They suffer from a weak sense of self, often struggling to fill inner emptiness with objects and praise. Too often they know something is wrong and grope desperately for help yet fail to escape a downward spiral.
Could it be, Levine wonders, that privilege, high expectations, competitive pressure and parental overinvolvement yield toxic rather than protective effects? Levine explores such issues as social isolation, the fi ne line between parental underinvolvement and overindulgence, and the perverse role of money and material goods in creating false promises of fulfillment. Yearning for outward approval, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the delusion that wealth causes happiness. In many cases, a rude awakening occurs only after many years of anxiety and depression.
Levine’s writing is surprisingly reflective and interesting. A constructive therapist, she offers practical guidelines and parenting strategies for those struggling with troubled teens. The advice is useful to any parent of any income level and includes ways to foster healthy autonomy, impulse control and sense of self. Levine emphasizes the importance of discipline, monitoring and limit setting as ways to encourage kids to construct healthy “inner” homes. More important, parents must “stand on their own two feet” before expecting their children to stand on theirs—noting that many parents scold their children for social behaviors that they themselves cannot manage, such as substance abuse and lack of self-discipline or self-assertion. Parents must strive to get their own inner homes in order before they can expect kids to straighten out theirs. —Richard Lipkin
Catastrophes of Mind
Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind: A Bridge between Mind and Society by Israel W. Charny. University of Nebraska Press, 2006 ($49.95)
Is there any connection between the way individuals think about their lives and relationships and the way societies behave toward their citizens? Israel W. Charny, a psychologist working in Israel who has devoted his practice to family and couples counseling and much of his life to a study of genocide, believes there is. “Fascist-type thinking,” he says, leads to destroyed relationships and thwarted lives for individuals and to authoritarianism and genocide at the societal level.
Charny plies his postulate not at the simplistic level of “the Nazis committed genocide because they were crazy” but in the sense that all of us have both “fascist” and “democratic” components to our minds. The fascist programs, which he likens to human software, “tell you what to do with certainty, without questioning or alternative frames of reference…. They instill in you a sense of superiority.” In contrast, the programs of the democratic mind invite responsibility for choosing one’s direction in life, support questioning and are “accompanied by a readiness to change.” He explains why fascist ideas seduce both societies and individuals who crave solutions to life’s complexities and why the results are catastrophic for both. Democratic ways of thinking and an openness to other people and new ideas—although they provoke uncertainty and anxiety—are his alternative prescription for individuals and societies that prize humanity.
Once Charny sets out these fairly simple ideas he expands on them by citing a vast array of writers, most of them psychologists, who have discussed the abuse of power to illustrate the consequences of fascist systems—especially when the abuse leads to genocide. And to provide examples of both fascist and democratic behaviors in personal life, he includes scores of case histories from his many decades of work in American and Israeli mental health clinics. The discussion gives him ample opportunity to list his dislikes—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Taliban, Prozac and controlling parents—as well as his likes, such as child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, good sex, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, and the Alexander Technique of self-awareness and body control. He also tells lots of entertaining stories about patients. Unfortunately, the result is a book that is much too long for its message. What could have been a short essay about habits of mind and their personal and political implications swells into a repetitious, often self-serving mixture of the author’s opinions and favorite stories. —Jonathan Beard
