House and Psychology by Cascio Ted Martin Leonard L. & Leonard L. Martin

Author:Cascio, Ted, Martin, Leonard L. & Leonard L. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118114605
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

Telling Them What They Want to Hear

I don’t have any kids, but I like them. Some I even love. Even when kids are being annoying in public places, I often feel at least an initial twinge of empathy for the parents. After a while, though, I fantasize about saying what only House would actually say. To the mother of a whining child in an airplane, for example, House advises, “Give her twenty milligrams of antihistamine. Could save her life. ’Cause if she doesn’t shut up, I’ll kill her” (“Airborne”).

That’s House telling a brutal truth, rather than a kinder lie that is far more commonplace. There are many times in our lives when we sense that another person does not want to know what we really think—especially if our honest opinions would be deflating or hurtful. So we lie. Maybe we don’t tell outright lies, but we mislead.

I’m not guessing about that. My friend Kathy Bell and I have studied the phenomenon in a series of studies. We set up our lab room to look like a little museum, with paintings hanging on the walls. Participants would come into the room one at a time and pick out their favorite and least favorite paintings. Then they’d record their evaluations of each painting. That way, we had them on the record. We knew what they really did think.

Only then did we introduce the participant to another person—an artist—who hadn’t seen the participants’ critiques. The key moment, psychologically, comes when the artist points to one of the paintings the participant hates the most and says, “That’s one of my own. I painted it myself. What do you think of it?”

When we first did a study like this, the “artists” weren’t real artists—they were just claiming to be. That’s because we were concerned that hearing honest feedback about their own work could potentially be too painful for actual artists.

We learned right away that there was little to worry about. Only 40 percent of the participants admitted to the artist that they disliked the painting of hers that they actually detested. Instead, in that touchy situation, participants often tried to get off on technicalities. So, rather than explicitly saying that they disliked the painting, they would instead amass misleading evidence. When asked directly what they specifically disliked about the painting, they would mention only one or two minor things and keep the rest of their distaste to themselves. In contrast, when asked what they specifically liked, they were a bit too good at generating lots of answers. The result was that the artists got their feelings spared, because the participants managed to convey the misleading impression that they mostly liked the painting. At the same time, the participants could tell themselves that they were telling the truth, because they admitted to at least one of the things they really did dislike about the painting.

In “Knight Fall,” Wilson and his ex-wife, Sam, are trying out the process of being together again. Their marriage ended terribly, and Wilson’s road to recovery was not pretty.

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