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How does the mind work? How can we explain consciousness, development, memory, language, rationality, emotions, racism, kindness, and hatred – the most important and wonderful aspects of ourselves?
These mysteries solved the business of experimental psychology, the field to which I have devoted my life. But not everyone is happy with how we are doing our work. Some people feel that psychology is not sufficiently scientific in its approach and believe that the real answers will come from studies of the brain. Out with psychology; in with neuroscience! Others reject a scientific approach altogether and seek answers from mystics, self-help celebrities, and internet gurus.
This skepticism is understandable. Our park is going through replication crisis, because many of our most famous results have failed to hold up. And, like any field, progress in psychology can be slow, and the answers we come up with are often tentative and qualified.
But I am bullish about the psychology. This field has come up with some amazing results that shatter common notions about how the mind works. I will tell you about four of them.
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1. Children know more than we could imagine
The idea that we start with empty heads was an attitude that many students took. In 1890, William James described the mental life of a baby as “blooming, buzzing confusion”. A century earlier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made this point in starker terms, saying that if a child were born in the body of an adult, “such a child would be a perfect idiot”
You might believe this too – babies sure don’t look very smart. But psychologists have used clever methods to take advantage of what children are good at, such as sucking on the pacifier and moving their eyes. This may not seem like much, but in the hands of clever researchers, these behaviors can reveal the secrets of an infant’s soul.
We’ve discovered an innate system for reasoning about things, one that’s present in babies as young as researchers can test (and is also present in species other than humans, like newborn baby chickens). Children, for example, know that things that go out of sight are still there.
We know that, early on, children also have some understanding of people. Imagine a table with two different objects on it, with a hand reaching for one of them. Then the objects switch places. Adults know that people’s hands are tied, and people have goals, and a reasonable goal for a person is to find a certain thing, not to go to a specific location. Six month olds have the same expectation. They are even capable of making basic moral judgments. If you show them a character who helps someone and another character who gets in that person’s way, six-month-olds prefer the helper. When you look into the big eyes of a child, a smart person is looking back.
2. Memory is not trusted
Some people believe that we make perfect recordings of the world. Any memory can be retrieved if we work hard enough on it, whether through self-reflection, hypnotic regression, or coaxing from a patient psychiatrist.
None of this is true. Memory is vague and vague; much of what we experience is never stored in our brain, and much of what is stored is distorted over time. When we try to remember something, it’s not like a computer retrieving information; it’s more of a storytelling process – rebuilding on the fly.
One way we know this is through studies where psychologists insert false memories into their subjects. Sometimes this is subtle – showing people a scene and asking them later “did you see children getting on the school bus?” they are more likely, later, to remember a school bus, even if it wasn’t there. Sometimes it is more labor intensive. In one study, psychologists asked family members of college students for information about events from their childhood and interviewed students about their memories. The twist is that for each interview, one event – getting lost in a shopping mall, almost drowning, pouring punk on a bride’s parents during a wedding, being attacked by a vicious animal – was completely made up by the researchers. Despite this, many of the subjects recalled these false events as actually occurring.
This research has led to a revolution in law. Memory research has helped us understand that police inquiries aimed at retrieving memories can shape and create them. On a more personal level, it’s worth knowing—perhaps when you’re arguing with your partner!—that you can be completely confident in a memory and still be completely wrong about it.
3. Consciousness is a wonder
When you close your eyes and open them again, would you notice if everything changed?
One of the great discoveries of cognitive psychology is that only a small fraction of sensory experience comes into play; everything else is ignored and lost forever. In one famous study, reported in a paper titled “Gorillas in Our Midst,” video footage is shown of people in white shirts and black shirts standing in a hallway passing basketballs back and forth. The subjects’ task is to focus on the white shirts and count the passes they make. This is not difficult for people, but it takes all their attention. Here’s the twist: In the middle of the video a person dressed as a gorilla walks onto the stage, stops in the middle and pounds his chest, then walks off. About half of the subjects do not see this at all, although the presence of the gorilla is very obvious to anyone who is not asked to focus on passing the basketballs.
We tend to be unaware of these limitations. It feels like we are aware of the world, not just a small slice of it. It feels like we can attend to multiple things at once, rather than being forced to shift our attention back and forth. Our restrictions are harmless enough if we’re listening to a podcast while mowing the lawn. But they can be fatal in situations where something requires our full attention, such as driving. If you are talking on the phone, even using a hands-free device, slow down our response time on the road to an extent that is almost the same as being legally drunk.
4. Insights from the new science of happiness
A few years ago, a group of psychologists worried that there was too much focus on the negative. We haven’t done enough research on what goes into a pleasant, meaningful and fulfilling life. A new movement, called positive psychology, has emerged to change this. And now we have a lot of data, some from studies of millions of people, that help us understand the conditions of the human boom.
Some of the results make common sense. Happiness comes from money, both at the level of individuals (richer people are happier) and countries (citizens of richer countries are happier) – although with diminishing returns when the numbers get high enough. Social connections are even more important; one study, published in the journal ScienceLoneliness has been found to have a worse effect on health than obesity and smoking.
Other results are more surprising. Research on aging and happiness shows that for many people, the 50s are the saddest time of their lives, and then happiness begins to rise—for many, the eighties are the happiest times of their lives. Who would have thought?
Happiness researchers have also discovered a paradox. There is a strong relationship between thinking a lot about happiness and … being sad. The moral here is: don’t spend too much time pouring over the happiness research!
There are so many other possible outcomes on the list, and there will be more in the future. I am fascinated by the debates about how well deep learning (how ChatGPT and other AIs work) can work as a model for human thinking, as well as recent developments in clinical psychology, with their include trials of mind-altering drugs such as ketamine and psilocybin. , as treatments for depression and anxiety. These are exciting times to be a psychologist.
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