How would you respond if someone in your community called, asking you to volunteer three hours to an American Cancer Society drive? In an eye-opening little study, social psychologist Ste- ven Sherman did just this with a sample of Bloomington, Indiana, residents, asking them to predict how they would respond. Seeing themselves as helpful people, half predicted that they would agree to help. Meanwhile, Sherman was also calling an equivalent sample of their neighbors, asking them to actually volunteer the time. Only 4 percent agreed to do so.
Imagine again: As you arrive at a psychological laboratory for an experiment, the researcher directs you to a table with three others. Your small group receives a list of fifteen men and fifteen women from different occupations, and you all must agree on which twelve of the thirty would be best suited for survival on a deserted island. During the discussion, one of the male group members injects three sexist statements. Responding to someone’s nominating an athlete/ trainer, he says, ‘‘Yeah, we definitely need to keep the women in shape.’’ In his turn to nominate, he muses, ‘‘Let me see, maybe a chef? No, one of the women can cook.’’ Later he nominates a female musi-
cian, noting, ‘‘I think we need more women on the island to keep the men satisfied.’’
Hearing these sexist words, what would you do? Would you say nothing, perhaps seeing how others respond? Or would you comment on their inappropriateness? When Janet Swim and Lauri Hyers put these questions to Pennsylvania State University students, only 5 per- cent predicted they would fail to respond; 48 percent said they’d comment on inappropriateness. But when they put comparable other students in this situation, how did they actually respond? Fifty-five percent (not 5 percent) said nothing, and 16 percent (not 48 percent) criticized the man (who was actually a confederate working for Swim and Hyers). (The rest mostly asked questions or joked.)
As this illustrates, our intuitions about our future behavior are prone to error. If asked whether they would obey demands to deliver severe electric shocks to a hapless ‘‘learner,’’ everyone told Stanley Milgram ‘‘not me.’’ But when Milgram put comparable people under actual social pressure to do so in his most famous of social psychologi- cal experiments, 65 percent obeyed.
Predicting our everyday behavior. These clever experiments simu-
late real-life experiences, but they’re not real life. Are our intuitions about our everyday futures similarly flawed? To find out, Sidney Shrauger had college students predict the likelihood of their experi- encing dozens of different events during the ensuing two months (becoming romantically involved, being sick, and so forth). Surpris- ingly, the students’ self-predictions were hardly more accurate than predictions derived from the average person’s experience.
In fact, report Nicholas Epley and David Dunning, one can some- times better predict people’s future behavior by asking them to pre- dict others’ actions than by asking them to predict their own. Five weeks ahead of Cornell University’s annual Daffodil Days charity event, students were asked to predict whether they would buy at least one daffodil for charity, and also to predict what proportion of their fellow students would do so. More than four in five predicted they would buy a daffodil, but only 43 percent actually did—close to their prediction of 56 percent by their peers. In a laboratory game played for money, 84 percent predicted that they would cooperate with an-
other for their mutual gain, though only 61 percent did (again, close to their prediction of 64 percent cooperation by others). In further studies of giving and volunteering, students as a group likewise over- estimated their own behavior, which actually was close to their on- target predictions of others. In every study, students expected that their moral concerns would override their self-interest, but they were wrong. If Lao Tzu was right that ‘‘he who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is enlightened,’’ then most people, it would seem, are more learned than enlightened.
With negative behaviors, such as when one is likely to cry or lie, self-predictions become more accurate than predictions by one’s mother or friends. Nevertheless, the surest thing we can say about your individual behavior is that it’s often hard for even you to predict. ‘‘Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.’’ When predicting your own behavior, the best ad- vice is therefore this: consider your past behavior in similar situa- tions.
Illusory optimism. ‘‘The optimist,’’ noted H. Jackson Brown, ‘‘goes
to the window every morning and says, ‘Good morning, God.’ The pessimist goes to the window and says, ‘Good god, morning.’ ’’ Opti- mism pays dividends. Without initial blindness to the limits of our competence, how many new ventures would we undertake? Com- pared to helpless-feeling pessimists, optimists enjoy not only greater success, but also better health and greater happiness.
Many of us, however, have what Rutgers University psychologist Neil Weinstein calls an ‘‘unrealistic optimism about future life events.’’ College students, for example, perceive themselves as far more likely than their classmates to get a good job, draw a good salary, and own a home, and as far less likely to experience negative events, such as developing a drinking problem, having a heart attack before age forty, or being fired. (This makes a great class demonstration: if everyone in a class perceives themselves as more likely than their average class- mate to experience life’s blessings and less likely to experience calami- ties, then at least half their intuitions must be wrong.)
Illusory optimism has health consequences. Most smokers per- ceive themselves as less vulnerable than other smokers to tobacco’s ravages. In Scotland and the United States, most older adolescents
say that they are much less likely than their peers to become infected by HIV. Sexually active undergraduate women who don’t consistently use contraceptives have perceived themselves, compared with other women at their university, as less vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy. After experiencing the 1989 earthquake, students in the San Fran- cisco Bay area did lose their optimism about being less vulnerable than their classmates to injury in a natural disaster, but within three months their illusory optimism had rebounded.
Believing ourselves less vulnerable than others to misfortune, we may cheerfully shun seat belts, smoke cigarettes, and stumble into unhealthy relationships. When buying clothes, many people favor snug fits (‘‘These will fit just right when I drop a few pounds’’); vir- tually no one predicts weight gain (‘‘Most people my age are putting on pounds, so I’d better allow room for expansion’’). Like pride, blind optimism may go before a fall.
Many people also exhibit illusory optimism, and therefore com- placency, about their relationships. Dating couples see their future through rose-colored glasses. By focusing on the current positives, lovers often feel sure that they will always be lovers. Their friends and family often know better, report Tara MacDonald and Michael Ross, from their studies with University of Waterloo students. These less optimistic predictions of their parents and roommates proved more accurate than the students’ own intuitions. (Many a parent, having seen an offspring lunge confidently into an ill-fated relationship against all advice, nods agreement.) In one survey, 137 marriage li- cense applicants accurately estimated that half of marriages end in divorce, yet most assessed their chance of divorce as zero percent.
Although optimism beats pessimism for promoting self-confidence, health, and well-being, a dash of realism—or what Julie Norem calls ‘‘defensive pessimism’’—can save us from the perils of unrealistic opti- mism. Self-doubt can energize students, most of whom (especially those destined for low grades) exhibit excess optimism about upcom- ing exams. (Shortly before getting the exam back, the illusory opti- mism disappears as students brace for the worst.) Students who are overconfident tend to underprepare. Their equally able but more anx- ious peers, fearing that they are going to bomb on the upcoming exam, study furiously and get higher grades. The moral: success in school
and beyond requires enough optimism to sustain hope and enough realism to motivate diligence.
So, despite our impressive capacity for thinking without awareness, for social intuitions, and for intuitive expertise and creativity, our intuitions sometimes mislead us as to what we have experienced, how we have changed, what has influenced us, and what we will feel and do. ‘‘There are three things extremely hard,’’ said Benjamin Franklin. ‘‘Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.’’
That being so, we need psychological science. If the researchers whom we’ve met in this chapter had relied on people’s intuitions, they would never have made their surprising discoveries about memories, moods, and misinformation, or about misguided self-predictions and optimism. Subjective personal reports are suggestive but not definitive —often powerfully persuasive, but sometimes powerfully misleading. Asking people to explain their past actions or to guess their future actions sometimes gives us wrong answers. By being mindful of the limits on our self-knowledge we can restrain our gullibility and moti- vate ourselves to think critically, to check our own and others’ intu- ition against reality, and to replace illusion with understanding.