Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D Wilson

Author:Timothy D Wilson [Wilson, Timothy D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-09-05T18:22:00+00:00

BEYOND ANECDOTES

As compelling as these examples are, they are just anecdotes. Is there empirical evidence for the idea that people can possess one feeling while believing they have another? As it happens, there is a fair amount of support for this idea in the social psychological literature. One source of evidence comes from the literature on self-perception and attribution theories, in which people have been found to infer the existence of new attitudes and emotions by observing their behavior and the situation in which it occurs.

According to these theories, when people are uncertain about how they feel, they use their behavior and bodily reactions as a guide. Many studies have found, for example, that people infer their emotions from the level of arousal they are experiencing and the nature of the social situation. We saw an example of this in Chapter 5 in the "love on the bridge" study. Men interpreted their arousal as a sign of attraction to the woman who approached them. They overestimated their attraction to the woman, failing to note that they were aroused, at least in part, because of the scary bridge.

In another experiment, Stanley Schachter and Ladd Wheeler asked participants to take part in a study of the effects of a vitamin compound on vision. Participants received an injection and then watched a fifteenminute comedy film. Unbeknownst to the participants, the "vitamin" was actually epinephrine in one condition, a placebo in another, and chlorpromazine in a third. Epinephrine produces physiological arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rate and slight tremors in the arms and legs. Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that acts as a depressant of the sympathetic nervous system. The researchers reasoned that because the participants did not know that they had received a drug, they would infer that the film was causing their bodily reactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, people injected with the epinephrine seemed to find the film the funniest; they laughed and smiled the most while watching it. People injected with the chlorpromazine seemed to find the film the least funny; they laughed and smiled little while watching it."

Richard Nisbett and I reviewed the dozens of studies like this and found that although there is ample evidence from people's behavior that they have changed their attitudes or emotions (e.g., the laughing during the film), people seldom report that they have these new attitudes or emotions. For example, Schachter and Wheeler asked participants to rate how funny the film was and how much they enjoyed it, and found no difference between the conditions. On average, people in the epinephrine condition (who had smiled and laughed a lot) did not rate the film as any funnier than people in the chlorpromazine condition did (who had smiled and laughed very little). This pattern of resultswhereby people act as if they have a certain emotion or evaluation, but do not report the existence of this emotion or evaluation-is quite common in studies like Schachter and Wheeler's.'a

These results raise some intriguing questions:

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