now displaces him from preferred sites. The presumption is that risk of extra-pair paternity and the growing importance of female parental investment shifts the dominance toward her. The very same thing may often be true in human relationships.
This finding caught my attention many years ago because it appeared to capture exactly so many of my own relationships with women, one after the other—I was initially dominant but thoroughly subordinate at the end. It was only later that I noticed that the ruling system of self-deception had changed accordingly—from mine to hers. Initially, discussions were all biased in my favor, but I hardly noticed—wasn’t that the way it should be? Then came a short time when we may have spoken as equals, followed by rapid descent into her system of self-deception—I would apologize to her for what were, in fact, her failings.
Sex, for example, is an attributional nightmare—who is causing what effect on whom?—so sexual dysfunction on either or both sides can easily be seen as caused by the other person. Whether manipulated by guilt or fear of losing the relationship, you may now be practicing self-deception on behalf of someone else, not yourself—a most unenviable position.
IMPLICIT VERSUS EXPLICIT SELF-ESTEEM
Let us consider another example of imposed self-deception, one with deeper social implications. It is possible to measure something called a person’s explicit preference as well as an implicit one. The explicit simply asks people to state their preferences directly—for example, for so-called black people over white (to use the degraded language of the United States), where the actor is one or the other. The implicit measure is more subtle. It asks people to push a right-hand button for “white” names (Chip, Brad, Walter) or “good” words (“joy,” “peace,” “wonderful,” “happy”) and left for “black” names (Tyrone, Malik, Jamal) or “bad” words (“agony,” “nasty,” “war,” “death”)—and then reverses everything, white or bad, black or good. We now look at latencies—how long does it take an individual to respond when he or she must punch white or good versus white or bad—and assume that shorter latencies (quicker responses) means the terms are, by implication, more strongly associated in the brain, hence the term “implicit association test” (IAT). Invented only in 1998, it has now generated an enormous literature, including (unusual for the social sciences) actual improvements in methodology. Several websites harvest enormous volumes of IAT data over the Internet (for example, at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Washington), and these studies have produced some striking findings.
For example, black and white people are similar in their explicit tendency to value self over other, blacks indeed somewhat more strongly so. But when it comes to the implicit measures, whites respond even more strongly in their own favor than they do explicitly, while blacks—on average—prefer white over black, not by a huge margin but, nevertheless, they prefer other to self. This is most unexpected from an evolutionary perspective, where self is the beginning (if not end) of self-interest. To find an organism valuing (unrelated) other people more than self on an implicit measure using generic good terms, such as “pleasure” and “friend,” versus bad, such as “terrible” and “awful,” is to find an organism not obviously oriented toward its own self-interest.
This has the earmarks of an imposed self-deception—valuing yourself less than you do others—and it probably comes with some negative consequences. For example, priming black students for their ethnicity strongly impairs their performance on mental tests. This was indeed one of the first demonstrations of what are now hundreds of “priming” effects. Black and white undergraduates at Stanford arrived in a lab to take a relatively difficult aptitude test. In one
This finding caught my attention many years ago because it appeared to capture exactly so many of my own relationships with women, one after the other—I was initially dominant but thoroughly subordinate at the end. It was only later that I noticed that the ruling system of self-deception had changed accordingly—from mine to hers. Initially, discussions were all biased in my favor, but I hardly noticed—wasn’t that the way it should be? Then came a short time when we may have spoken as equals, followed by rapid descent into her system of self-deception—I would apologize to her for what were, in fact, her failings.
Sex, for example, is an attributional nightmare—who is causing what effect on whom?—so sexual dysfunction on either or both sides can easily be seen as caused by the other person. Whether manipulated by guilt or fear of losing the relationship, you may now be practicing self-deception on behalf of someone else, not yourself—a most unenviable position.
IMPLICIT VERSUS EXPLICIT SELF-ESTEEM
Let us consider another example of imposed self-deception, one with deeper social implications. It is possible to measure something called a person’s explicit preference as well as an implicit one. The explicit simply asks people to state their preferences directly—for example, for so-called black people over white (to use the degraded language of the United States), where the actor is one or the other. The implicit measure is more subtle. It asks people to push a right-hand button for “white” names (Chip, Brad, Walter) or “good” words (“joy,” “peace,” “wonderful,” “happy”) and left for “black” names (Tyrone, Malik, Jamal) or “bad” words (“agony,” “nasty,” “war,” “death”)—and then reverses everything, white or bad, black or good. We now look at latencies—how long does it take an individual to respond when he or she must punch white or good versus white or bad—and assume that shorter latencies (quicker responses) means the terms are, by implication, more strongly associated in the brain, hence the term “implicit association test” (IAT). Invented only in 1998, it has now generated an enormous literature, including (unusual for the social sciences) actual improvements in methodology. Several websites harvest enormous volumes of IAT data over the Internet (for example, at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Washington), and these studies have produced some striking findings.
For example, black and white people are similar in their explicit tendency to value self over other, blacks indeed somewhat more strongly so. But when it comes to the implicit measures, whites respond even more strongly in their own favor than they do explicitly, while blacks—on average—prefer white over black, not by a huge margin but, nevertheless, they prefer other to self. This is most unexpected from an evolutionary perspective, where self is the beginning (if not end) of self-interest. To find an organism valuing (unrelated) other people more than self on an implicit measure using generic good terms, such as “pleasure” and “friend,” versus bad, such as “terrible” and “awful,” is to find an organism not obviously oriented toward its own self-interest.
This has the earmarks of an imposed self-deception—valuing yourself less than you do others—and it probably comes with some negative consequences. For example, priming black students for their ethnicity strongly impairs their performance on mental tests. This was indeed one of the first demonstrations of what are now hundreds of “priming” effects. Black and white undergraduates at Stanford arrived in a lab to take a relatively difficult aptitude test. In one
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