>> So in the last lecture, we saw some evidence that human beings are very inclined to have a story about why they do the things they do. And that sometimes, they seems capable of generating false stories. So, for example, if shoppers are unconsciously drawn to products that happen to sit on a particular part of the shelf and you ask them, why do prefer that product? They tend to come up with the claim that it has some special property that other products don't have, when in fact all of the products on the shelf have exactly the same properties. And they seem to believe this when they say it. It's as if we're designed to convince the world that we have coherent motivations, and in the process we convince ourselves of that. Now, this raises a question, I mean as long as we're going to shade the truth in this one regard, why not shade the truth in other ways. As long as we're going to claim that we have a coherent motivation, why not claim that we have pure motivations. That we're, that we're good people. And why don't we, in other respects, burnish our reputations. After all, you can imagine ways that during evolution if our ancestors could impress people and preserve a good reputation, that could help them get their genes into the next generation. So, maybe there's a, kind of a built in tendency to do this kind of self promotion. Well, as we're going to see, there is a fair amount of evidence that people pretty naturally do self promotion. And there are some psychologists who think that, actually, one of the main functions of what we ordinarily think of as the conscious self is to assist in this kind of self promotion effort. One of these psychologists is named Rob Kurzban and he's at Penn, the University of Pennsylvania. And I had a conversation with him about this recently, and as you'll see he starts off by giving me the bad news about myself. >> Okay. So, are you saying that the, the me that I think of as me is not in control, the Bob? >> Yes, I sort of think of the me that you think of as Bob as a little bit more like a press secretary or public relations department, which is sort of broadcasting things out into the world that are useful for Bob. You know, maintaining your reputation and so on but really there's a lot of decision making going on that you have no conscious access to but none of us, sort of, really know about. What this means is that we don't know always understand the motive behind our own, our own actions. And this unitary sense of self is more, again, it's kind of broadcast media as opposed to all these bits and pieces that are, that are doing the actual work. >> Another term for those bits and pieces that Rob Kurzban referred to at the end there is modules. As I've suggested, there is this thing called the modular view of the mind, which doesn't include a self as we ordinarily conceive of a self, and Rob is an adherent of this view, of this theory. And in fact, he wrote a book whose subtitle is Evolution and the Modular Mind. The title of the book is, Why everyone else is a hypocrite. Now in this lecture, we're going to talk about the modular view of the mind, but I want to start by spending some time fleshing out the idea that what we think of as the conscious self is largely in the public relations business. As we'll see, this idea fits very naturally into a modular view of the mind. And it also, of course, fits naturally alongside this general Buddhist theme that we tend not to see things clearly, we have illusions, certainly including illusions about ourselves. In 1980 psychologist named Anthony Greenwald coined the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to other people. It's a compound word. First half comes from the word beneficial, meaning that we tend to present ourselves as helpful, as beneficial to others. The second half of the word comes from effective, so we present ourselves as capable, competent, successful. And a lot of evidence has piled up, a lot of it since he coined the term, to suggest that he was on to something. So for example, along a lot of dimensions of skill, ranging from social skill to athletic skill, most people when asked will describe themselves as above average. You know, when you do the math, it can't be the truth that most people are above average. And this kind of view of our self turns out to be very resistant to actual evidence. So there was one study where they looked at 50 drivers who had recently been hospitalized because of car accidents, and in more than two-thirds of those cases, the police had determined that they were at fault. And they asked these people, you know, they showed them a spectrum from very poor driver to expert driver, and they asked them, where do you fit along this spectrum? And then they, they did the same thing with a control group, people that had no black marks on their records. They asked them to rate their driving ability. And the two groups rated themselves almost identically. In both cases it was near the expert end of the spectrum. Now, one thing that, that allows us to resist that kind of evidence is the way we kind of naturally interpret negative outcomes. There's, there's a human tendency to explain away negative outcomes as being due to something other than yourself. Being due to luck or some other aspect of external circumstances. And this is the tendency that keeps hustlers in business. By hustlers I mean people who play sports or games for real money. And one reason they can, they can find people who will lose to them on a sustained basis and yet keep playing, is these people convince themselves that they're actually at least as good as the person who keeps beating them, it's just that they keep having bad luck. You know, it's, it's the shot on the 17th hole that, that one more yard and it wouldn't have hit the water. Or in backgammon it's one single roll of the dice explains how they lost. These things may be true, but what they're not noticing is that when the other person loses, they have similar explanations and maybe, sometimes even when the other person's winning, they did it in spite of a lot of bad luck. But we don't notice the bad luck that other people have. So we have this tendency to, to not focus on ourselves in explaining negative outcomes but to focus on ourselves when the outcomes are positive. And this happens, not just in individual context, but in team context when we assess how much we contributed to a team effort. And there's one study of academics who had co-authored papers, and of course getting a paper published in a journal is a success in itself, so they asked these people, well how much of the overall effort were you responsible for. You know, when there were multiple authors, did you do 20%, 40% of the work, and it turned out in the, in the average four person team, where papers had four co-authors, the total of claimed credit was 140% when they added up the evaluations of the people. So, in a four person team the average person was claiming more than one third of the credit for the outcome. Now, this finding covers both halves of the word beneffectance. In other words, to say you contributed a lot to a team effort is both to say you're effective, you're capable. It is also to say you were helpful to your teammates, whereas some of the other findings apply only, say, to the effective half. If you think that you're athletic skills are superb, that's about just being effective. And then some findings apply just more to the beneficial half. So, for example most people think that they do more good things than the average person and do fewer bad things. So, we all believe apparently that, that we're morally upstanding by and large and, and possibly more, more morally upstanding than we actually are. Now one dynamic that facilitates all of these kind of self serving beliefs is selective retention. The way the memory filters out certain things. So for example, it turns out that we are more inclined to remember events that reflect favorably on us than events that reflect unfavorably on us. That doesn't mean we don't have any negative memories. I mean there are certainly some things that are, that turn out disastrously that you, you need to remember, so you don't repeat the mistake. We do have painful memories. But even so, there's a difference between the negative and the positive memories. [BLANK_AUDIO] The studies show that the positive events we remember in greater detail than the negative events. So it's, it's as if we are preparing ourselves to tell in glorious detail the good things, the things that reflect favorably on us, whereas the, the negative memories don't seem so designed for retelling. They're to remember and maybe not share. And by the way, when it comes to other people, you don't find this asymmetry. We remember events that reflect unfavorably on other people in, in just as detailed of fashion as we remember the events that reflect favorably. Some of the stuff may not shock you because people are actually fairly aware of some of these human biases. But, they're much more aware of them in other people than in themselves. And they've done studies that show even this. So, one study took eight of these kinds of biases of the sort that I've been describing. These are biases that are pretty well documented. For example, one of them was this, this tendency of ours to kind of take credit for positive outcomes, say that was due to skill, to hard work, whereas the negative outcomes we may blame on unclear instructions, or the fact that we were over worked or something. So it listed this and seven other things and presented them to people and, you may be able to, to predict the outcome. Most people along all eight dimensions, most people said they suffered from less of these biases than the average person. So, we're even biased about how biased we are. And it's kind of remarkable when you think, think of it I mean, here you, you put people in a situation where they are forced to reflect on this apparently deep seated human tendency toward a self serving bias. And even that situation doesn't, doesn't get them to really, fully account for the bias in themselves. So, all told I guess you can see how, you know if, if, if one of the lessons of Buddhism is that we see things unclearly, we have illusions, including illusions about ourself. Well, there's a, there's a fair amount of, of evidence to support that view, certainly in this sense. Now, I'm want to emphasize there are individual differences among people. So, for example, there is such a thing as low self-esteem. People who will deflate themselves in the course of presenting themselves rather than inflate themselves. And, by the way, there are evolutionary explanations that are, that are plausible as to why we might be designed to have self esteem that can go up or down depending on what happens to us. And for that matter there are all kinds of personality differences between people that might also lead us to, you know, lead some people to do less self inflation than others or to do none of it. But the fact that people differ in this respect, and some people don't do the self inflation, doesn't mean that they're not suffering from illusions. So they did a a study for example, where they, they took people who'd scored high on, on the extraversion scale, extroverts. And they took people who had scored highly on the neuroticism scale. And they had both of them keep diaries about in particular, things that they had strong emotional responses to. And then later they had them to recall what had happened without being able to refer to the diaries. And it turned out that the extroverts remembered more positive events than had in fact happened, and the neurotics remembered more negative events that had, than had in fact happened. And I just want to emphasize, both of them were suffering from illusions, okay? So, so neither had a, a clear view of things. So in various ways, the kind of behavioral programming we have, as it plays out and gives rise to certain inclinations there are various ways it can lead to illusion, to unclear vision. But one way or another, it's very common that, that it does, and that we're not left with a truly objective perspective on ourselves and things that happen to us. So I hope now you can understand why Rob Kurzban thinks that the thing we think of as the conscious self is largely in the public relations business. And I hope you can, you can imagine why he might even think that this is a built-in tendency engineered by natural selection. And he's certainly not alone in that view. In 1989, the anthropologist Jerome Barkow wrote, it is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision maker. Now so far as I know, he may have been the first person to really clearly state the idea that this thing we think of as the kind of executive self was in fact designed by natural selection to be a kind of propaganda machine. So I quoted him saying this in a book I wrote five years after he said it The Moral Animal, my book on evolutionary psychology. And then I added afterwards that there is the possibility as well that the thing he referred to as folk psychology, in other words, this apparently false intuition that the conscious self is the decision maker, that maybe that intuition is also a product of natural selection, because it facilitates the propaganda operation, the public relations operation. Because after all, if I'm going to try to convince you that I did something for the most high minded motives, well it helps for me to believe that I was there when the decision was made. I made the decision, and I know what, what, motives govern the decision. That will help me more convincingly portray myself as being the kind of person I want to portray myself as. And for that matter, there would, there would be other benefits to, to believing that, that you are the, the CEO, that the conscious self is the CEO. And, and one of these gets back to the beginning of this segment where I emphasize, you know, coherence of motivation. You can certainly imagine how, during evolution, it would be to our benefit to present ourselves as others, to others as, as, as having, you know, rational, logical reasons to do what we do, you know? I mean, if you imagine, if you think back to the split brain experiment I described in the previous lecture, if you remember the guy who got up and started walking, and they said where are you going? And he said, I'm going to get a soda, even though that was not the reason he had gotten up and, and started walking. Although, so far as his left hemisphere knew, and that's what was doing the talking it could've been the reason, but it wasn't the real reason. Well, somebody who says something like that, I'm going to get a soda, you know, somebody you can do business with, some, someone you'd be willing to have as a friend, as an ally as a collaborator. Because he, you know, he seems to have his, his act together, whereas if, if he had said, you know, it's weird, I just get up, I do stuff, I don't know why. I, I get up and I walk places. It doesn't make sense to me. I might do any given thing on any given day. Well that kind of person you're, you're, you know not going to want to be on your team. So, that's another reason that it's at least possible that this intuition about the CEO self is whats called an adaptation in biology. That is to say it was designed by natural selection because it helped ultimately to get genes into the next generation. Now I want to emphasize, this is just conjecture. It's you know, it's we're, we're, you know, it will probably be a long time before this matter gets settled. But I do think it's important conjecture, because of all of the illusions that Buddhism emphasizes, there's probably none more important that the fundamental illusion about the self along these very lines. And I know also that this conjecture has kind of been floating around a little during this course. I mean, in the, in the last lecture we were hinting at it a little, but I do think it's worth dwelling on because it is important. And by way of dwelling on it just a little longer, I want to share with you a little bit more of that conversation with Rob Kurzban a part of it where we kind of rift on this idea. >> I mean an interesting question that I don't really know what the answer to is, why is that? So why do we all seem so confident that there's one central author of our actions that persist through time and it's the same guy that, you know, was there when I was a kid, and will be there when I'm an adult, I guess, when I'm an old person. And that it has this persistence over time. And it certainly feels that way. And I get, I get that. Like, I feel that way too. I feel like there's a me in there somewhere. But I, yeah, go ahead. >> Well, I was going to say, I mean, it, it, it seems to in a way follow from the idea that its function is to be the press agent, right? I mean, if it's, if it's in our interest to prevent, to, to present a story about ourselves as these coherent, in charge individuals guided by a consistent set of values then, you know, if that's the story it make sense for you to present, then that's the story it makes sense for you to believe, and that is the story of a coherent, in charge self, right? >> Yeah, that's exactly right, and I think you put your finger on something which I think its really important, which is that these stories that we spin are basically responding to the fact that other people value certain kinds of things in others. For example, they want other people to be logical, consistent, coherent, predictable, and so on. This means that the stories you spin have to have those properties. I mean you can imagine a world in which it's not like that, where you know, we just like random people, or, I don't know, unpredictable for whatever reason. But that's not the world we live in. And so the stories that we spin tend to have these properties that make us, kind of, good, sort of social agents, that make us, coherent, and, and, parsable and understandable and comprehensible. And so exactly as you said, I think that's what the press agent is up to. It's sort of Making us appear as though we're good people to have around. >> Now, I want to draw your attention to something Rob said early on in that segment, where he referred to one central author of our actions that persists through time, by way of describing the way we normally think of the self. Okay, there are two themes there. When he talks about an author of our actions, he's talking about control. The idea is there is this CEO, this decision maker, things are under control. And when he talks about persistence through time, he's of course talking about a self that, that has some coherent persistent over time. The me that was me when I was 12 is in some sense the same me as now, and so on. And if you'll think back to the first discourse of the Buddha, which we described in the previous lecture those are exactly the two themes that the Buddha emphasized, right? He said, if you think that, that things are really under control, you know, that, that, that is our conception of the self, but if you think things are under control, take a look. Things aren't under so much control. And he said, basically, if you think that there is this self that persists through time, why is it that there is so much flux and impermanence in the things we call the self. the, the things that constitute the self in, by, in popular reckoning. And I just think it's kind of amazing that, in the 21st century, a psychologist like Rob Kurzban who, who claims no special conversency in, in Buddhist doctrine, hasn't read the first Discourse on the Not-self, reaches fundamentally the same view of things that the Buddha reached about 2500 years ago. Which is that the two, two of the aspects that are most deeply embedded in our notion of the self, our intuitive notion of the self, are probably illusions. The, the self doesn't persist coherently through time, there's, there's, there's more change than that, and there is no single author of our actions. Of course, this raises the question of well, what is authoring our actions? I mean, some, something determines the things we do, the thoughts we think, and so on. Well, this brings us back to the modular view of the mind, which as I said, offers an answer to that question, and that's what we're going to turn to in the next segment.
