Inner peace (or peace of mind) refers to a deliberate state of psychological or spiritual calm despite the potential presence of stressors such as the burden arising from pretending to be someone.
Being “at peace” is considered by many to be healthy (homeostasis) and the opposite of being stressed or anxious, and is considered to be a state where our mind performs at an optimal level with a positive outcome. Peace of mind is thus generally associated with bliss, happiness and contentment.
Peace of mind, serenity, and calmness are descriptions of a disposition free from the effects of stress. In some cultures, inner peace is considered a state of consciousness or enlightenment that may be cultivated by various forms of training, such as breathing exercises, prayer, meditation, tai chi or yoga, for example. Many spiritual practices refer to this peace as an experience of knowing oneself.
People have difficulties embracing their inner spirituality because everyday stressors get the best of them; finding peace and happiness in the little joys of life can seem difficult, and results do not seem all that gratifying. Achieving spirituality is a step-by-step process; there are ways through which one can become more spiritual every day.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, emphasizes the importance of inner peace in the world:
The question of real, lasting world peace concerns human beings, so basic human feelings are also at its roots. Through inner peace, genuine world peace can be achieved. In this the importance of individual responsibility is quite clear; an atmosphere of peace must first be created within ourselves, then gradually expanded to include our families, our communities, and ultimately the whole planet.
David Ian Perrett FBA FRSE (born 11 April 1954) is a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he leads the Perception Lab.
Background
The main focus in his team’s research is on face perception, including facial cues to health, effects of physiological conditions on facial appearance, and facial preferences in social settings such as trust games and mate choice. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appearing in leading scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B – Biological Sciences, Psychological Science, and Nature.
Perrett received the British Psychological Society President’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge in 2000, the Golden Brain Award of Minerva Foundation in 2002,[9] the Experimental Psychology Society Mid-Career prize (2008), and a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship (2009-2012).
Functional analysis in behavioural psychology is the application of the laws of operant and respondent conditioning to establish the relationships between stimuli and responses.
To establish the function of operant behaviour, one typically examines the “four-term contingency”: first by identifying the motivating operations (EO or AO), then identifying the antecedent or trigger of the behaviour, identifying the behaviour itself as it has been operationalised, and identifying the consequence of the behaviour which continues to maintain it.
Functional assessment in behaviour analysis employs principles derived from the natural science of behaviour analysis to determine the “reason”, purpose, or motivation for a behaviour. The most robust form of functional assessment is functional analysis, which involves the direct manipulation, using some experimental design (e.g. a multielement design or a reversal design) of various antecedent and consequent events and measurement of their effects on the behaviour of interest; this is the only method of functional assessment that allows for demonstration of clear cause of behaviour.
Applications in Clinical Psychology
Functional analysis and consequence analysis are commonly used in certain types of psychotherapy to better understand, and in some cases change, behaviour. It is particularly common in behavioural therapies such as behavioural activation, although it is also part of Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy. In addition, functional analysis modified into a behaviour chain analysis is often used in dialectical behaviour therapy.
There are several advantages to using functional analysis over traditional assessment methods. Firstly, behavioural observation is more reliable than traditional self-report methods. This is because observing the individual from an objective stand point in their regular environment allows the observer to observe both the antecedent and the consequence of the problem behaviour. Secondly, functional analysis is advantageous as it allows for the development of behavioural interventions, either antecedent control or consequence control, specifically designed to reduce a problem behaviour. Thirdly, functional analysis is advantageous for interventions for young children or developmentally delayed children with problem behaviours, who may not be able to answer self-report questions about the reasons for their actions.
Despite these benefits, functional analysis also has some disadvantages. The first that no standard methods for determining function have been determined and meta-analysis shows that different methodologies appear to bias results toward particular functions as well as not effective in improving outcomes. Second, Gresham and colleagues (2004) in a meta-analytic review of JABA articles found that functional assessment did not produce greater effect sizes compared to simple contingency management programmes. However, Gresham et al. combined the three types of functional assessment, of which descriptive assessment and indirect assessment have been reliably found to produce results with limited validity Third, although functional assessment has been conducted with a variety host of populations much of the current functional assessment research has been limited to children with developmental disabilities.
Professional Organisations
The Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) also has an interest group in behaviour analysis, which focuses on the use of behaviour analysis in the school setting including functional analysis.
Doctoral level behaviour analysts who are psychologists belong to the American Psychological Association’s division 25 – Behaviour analysis. APA offers a diplomate in behavioural psychology and school psychology both of which focus on the use of functional analysis in the school setting.
The World Association for Behaviour Analysis offers a certification for clinical behaviour therapy and behavioural consultation, which covers functional analysis.
The UK Society for Behaviour Analysis also provides a forum for behaviour analysts for accreditation, professional development, continuing education and networking, and serves as an advocate body in public debate on issues relating to behaviour analysis. The UK-SBA promotes the ethical and effective application of the principles of behaviour and learning to a wide range of areas including education, rehabilitation and health care, business and the community and is committed to maintaining the availability of high-quality evidence-based professional behaviour analysis practice in the UK. The society also promotes and supports the academic field of behaviour analysis with in the UK both in terms of university-based training and research, and theoretical develop.
In the family triangulation system, the third person can either be used as a substitute for direct communication or can be used as a messenger to carry the communication to the main party. Usually, this communication is an expressed dissatisfaction with the main party. For example, in a dysfunctional family in which there is alcoholism present, the non-drinking parent will go to a child and express dissatisfaction with the drinking parent. This includes the child in the discussion of how to solve the problem of the alcoholic parent. Sometimes the child can engage in the relationship with the parent, filling the role of the third party, and thereby being “triangulated” into the relationship. Alternatively, the child may then go to the alcoholic parent, relaying what they were told. In instances when this occurs, the child may be forced into a role of a “surrogate spouse” The reason that this occurs is that both parties are dysfunctional. Rather than communicating directly with each other, they utilise a third party. Sometimes this is because it is unsafe to go directly to the person and discuss the concerns, particularly if they are alcoholic and/or abusive.
In a triangular family relationship, the two who have aligned risk forming an enmeshed relationship.
Good versus Bad Triangulation
Triangulation can be a constructive and stabilising factor. Triangulation can also be a destructive and destabilising factor. Destabilising or “bad triangulation” can polarise communications and escalate conflict. Understanding the difference between stabilising triangulation and destabilising triangulation is helpful in avoiding destabilising situations. Triangulation may be overt, which is more commonly seen in high-conflict families, or covert.
A 2016 longitudinal study of adolescent relationship skills found that teens who were triangulated into parental conflicts more frequently used positive conflict resolution techniques with their own dating partner, but were also more likely to engage in verbally abusive behaviours.
The Perverse Triangle
The Perverse Triangle was first described in 1977 by Jay Haley as a triangle where two people who are on different hierarchical or generational levels form a coalition against a third person (e.g. “a covert alliance between a parent and a child, who band together to undermine the other parent’s power and authority”). The perverse triangle concept has been widely discussed in professional literature. Bowen called it the pathological triangle, while Minuchin called it the rigid triangle. For example, a parent and child can align against the other parent but not admit to it, to form a cross-generational coalition. These are harmful to children.
Child Development
In the field of psychology, triangulations are necessary steps in the child’s development. When a two-party relationship is opened up by a third party, a new form of relationship emerges and the child gains new mental abilities. The concept was introduced in 1971 by the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Ernst L. Abelin, especially as ‘early triangulation’, to describe the transitions in psychoanalytic object relations theory and parent-child relationship in the age of 18 months. In this presentation, the mother is the early caregiver with a nearly “symbiotic” relationship to the child, and the father lures the child away to the outside world, resulting in the father being the third party. Abelin later developed an ‘organiser- and triangulation-model’, in which he based the whole human mental and psychic development on several steps of triangulation.
Some earlier related work, published in a 1951 paper, had been done by the German psychoanalyst Hans Loewald in the area of pre-Oedipal behaviour and dynamics. In a 1978 paper, the child psychoanalyst Dr. Selma Kramer wrote that Loewald postulated the role of the father as a positive supporting force for the pre-Oedipal child against the threat of re-engulfment by the mother which leads to an early identification with the father, preceding that of the classical Oedipus complex. This was also related to the work in Separation-Individuation theory of child development by the psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler.
Destabilising Triangulation
Destabilising triangulation occurs when a person attempts to control the flow, interpretation, and nuances of communication between two separate actors or groups of actors, thus ensuring communications flow through, and constantly relate back to them. Examples include a parent attempting to control communication between two children, or a relationship partner attempting to control communication between the other partner and the other partner’s friends and family. Another example is to put a third actor between them and someone with whom they are commonly in conflict. Rather than communicating directly with the actor with whom they are in conflict, they will send communication supporting his or her case through a third actor in an attempt to make the communication more credible.
The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable.
The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others’ mental states from their behaviour.
When people mistake unreliable introspection for genuine self-knowledge, the result can be an illusion of superiority over other people, for example when each person thinks they are less biased and less conformist than the rest of the group. Even when experimental subjects are provided with reports of other subjects’ introspections, in as detailed a form as possible, they still rate those other introspections as unreliable while treating their own as reliable. Although the hypothesis of an introspection illusion informs some psychological research, the existing evidence is arguably inadequate to decide how reliable introspection is in normal circumstances.
In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behaviour (called “causal theories”) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
Correction for the bias may be possible through education about the bias and its unconscious nature.
Components
The phrase “introspection illusion” was coined by Emily Pronin. Pronin describes the illusion as having four components:
People give a strong weighting to introspective evidence when assessing themselves.
They do not give such a strong weight when assessing others.
People disregard their own behaviour when assessing themselves (but not others).
Own introspections are more highly weighted than others. It is not just that people lack access to each other’s introspections: they regard only their own as reliable.
Unreliability of Introspection
The idea that people can be mistaken about their inner functioning is one applied by eliminative materialists. These philosophers suggest that some concepts, including “belief” or “pain” will turn out to be quite different from what is commonly expected as science advances. The faulty guesses that people make to explain their thought processes have been called “causal theories”. The causal theories provided after an action will often serve only to justify the person’s behaviour in order to relieve cognitive dissonance. That is, a person may not have noticed the true reasons for their behaviour, even when trying to explain it. The result is an explanation that mostly merely makes themselves feel better. An example might be a man who mistreats others who have a specific quality because he is embarrassed that he himself has that quality. He may not admit this to himself, instead claiming that his prejudice is because he has concluded that the specific quality is bad.
A 1977 paper by psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson challenged the directness and reliability of introspection, thereby becoming one of the most cited papers in the science of consciousness. Nisbett and Wilson reported on experiments in which subjects verbally explained why they had a particular preference, or how they arrived at a particular idea. On the basis of these studies and existing attribution research, they concluded that reports on mental processes are confabulated. They wrote that subjects had, “little or no introspective access to higher order cognitive processes”. They distinguished between mental contents (such as feelings) and mental processes, arguing that while introspection gives us access to contents, processes remain hidden.
Although some other experimental work followed from the Nisbett and Wilson paper, difficulties with testing the hypothesis of introspective access meant that research on the topic generally stagnated. A ten-year-anniversary review of the paper raised several objections, questioning the idea of “process” they had used and arguing that unambiguous tests of introspective access are hard to achieve. Updating the theory in 2002, Wilson admitted that the 1977 claims had been too far-reaching. He instead relied on the theory that the adaptive unconscious does much of the moment-to-moment work of perception and behaviour. When people are asked to report on their mental processes, they cannot access this unconscious activity. However, rather than acknowledge their lack of insight, they confabulate a plausible explanation, and “seem” to be “unaware of their unawareness”.
A study conducted by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt was set up to measure the extent of introspective accuracy by gathering introspective reports from a single individual who was given the pseudonym “Melanie”. Melanie was given a beeper which sounded at random moments, and when it did she had to note what she was currently feeling and thinking. After analysing the reports the authors had mixed views about the results, the correct interpretation of Melanie’s claims and her introspective accuracy. Even after long discussion the two authors disagreed with each other in the closing remarks, Schwitzgebel being pessimistic and Hurlburt optimistic about the reliability of introspection.
Factors in Accuracy
Nisbett and Wilson conjectured about several factors that they found to contribute to the accuracy of introspective self-reports on cognition.[8]
Availability: Stimuli that are highly salient (either due to recency or being very memorable) are more likely to be recalled and considered for the cause of a response.
Plausibility: Whether a person finds a stimulus to be a sufficiently likely cause for an effect determines the influence it has on their reporting of the stimulus.
Removal in time: The greater the distance in time since the occurrence of an event, the less available and more difficult to accurately recall it is.
Mechanics of judgement: People do not recognise the influence that judgment factors (e.g. position effects) have on them, leading to inaccuracies in self-reporting.
Context: Focusing on the context of an object distracts from evaluation of that object and can lead people to falsely believe that their thoughts about the object are represented by the context.
Non-events: The absence of an occurrence is naturally less salient and available than an occurrence itself, leading non-events to have little influence on reports.
Nonverbal behaviour: While people receive a large amount of information about others via nonverbal cues, the verbal nature of relaying information and the difficulty of translating nonverbal behaviour into verbal form lead to its lower reporting frequency.
Discrepancy between the magnitudes of cause and effect: Because it seems natural to assume that a certain size cause will lead to a similarly-sized effect, connections between causes and effects of different magnitudes are not often drawn.
Unawareness of Error
Several hypotheses to explain people’s unawareness of their inaccuracies in introspection were provided by Nisbett and Wilson:
Confusion between content and process: People are usually unable to access the exact process by which they arrived at a conclusion, but can recall an intermediate step prior to the result. However, this step is still content in nature, not a process. The confusion of these discrete forms leads people to believe that they are able to understand their judgment processes. Nisbett and Wilson have been criticized for failing to provide a clear definition of the differences between mental content and mental processes.
Knowledge of prior idiosyncratic reactions to a stimulus: An individual’s belief that they react in an abnormal manner to a stimulus, which would be unpredictable from the standpoint of an outside observer, seems to support true introspective ability. However, these perceived covariations may actually be false, and truly abnormal covariations are rare.
Differences in causal theories between subcultures: The inherent differences between discrete subcultures necessitates that they have some differing causal theories for any one stimulus. Thus, an outsider would not have the same ability to discern a true cause as would an insider, again making it seem to the introspector that they have the capacity to understand the judgment process better than can another.
Attentional and intentional knowledge: An individual may consciously know that they were not paying attention to a certain stimulus or did not have a certain intent. Again, as insight that an outside observer does not have, this seems indicative of true introspective ability. However, the authors note that such knowledge can actually mislead the individual in the case that it is not as influential as they may think.
Inadequate feedback: By nature, introspection is difficult to be disconfirmed in everyday life, where there are no tests of it and others tend not to question one’s introspections. Moreover, when a person’s causal theory of reasoning is seemingly disconfirmed, it is easy for them to produce alternative reasons for why the evidence is actually not disconfirmatory at all.
Motivational reasons: Considering one’s own ability to understand their reasoning as being equivalent to an outsider’s is intimidating and a threat to the ego and sense of control. Thus, people do not like to entertain the idea, instead maintaining the belief that they can accurately introspect.
Criticisms
The claim that confabulation of justifications evolved to relieve cognitive dissonance is criticized by some evolutionary biologists for assuming the evolution of a mechanism for feeling dissonanced by a lack of justification. These evolutionary biologists argue that if causal theories had no higher predictive accuracy than prejudices that would have been in place even without causal theories, there would be no evolutionary selection for experiencing any form of discomfort from lack of causal theories. The claim that studies in the United States that appear to show a link between homophobia and homosexuality can be explained by an actual such link is criticised by many scholars. Since much homophobia in the United States is due to religious indoctrination and therefore unrelated to personal sexual preferences, they argue that the appearance of a link is due to volunteer-biased erotica research in which religious homophobes fear God’s judgment but not being recorded as “homosexual” by Earthly psychologists while most non-homophobes are misled by false dichotomies to assume that the notion that men can be sexually fluid is somehow “homophobic” and “unethical”.
Choice Blindness
Inspired by the Nisbett and Wilson paper, Petter Johansson and colleagues investigated subjects’ insight into their own preferences using a new technique. Subjects saw two photographs of people and were asked which they found more attractive. They were given a closer look at their “chosen” photograph and asked to verbally explain their choice. However, in some trials, the experimenter had slipped them the other photograph rather than the one they had chosen, using sleight of hand. A majority of subjects failed to notice that the picture they were looking at did not match the one they had chosen just seconds before. Many subjects confabulated explanations of their preference. For example, a man might say “I preferred this one because I prefer blondes” when he had in fact pointed to the dark-haired woman, but had been handed a blonde. These must have been confabulated because they explain a choice that was never made. The large proportion of subjects who were taken in by the deception contrasts with the 84% who, in post-test interviews, said that hypothetically they would have detected a switch if it had been made in front of them. The researchers coined the phrase “choice blindness” for this failure to detect a mismatch.
A follow-up experiment involved shoppers in a supermarket tasting two different kinds of jam, then verbally explaining their preferred choice while taking further spoonfuls from the “chosen” pot. However, the pots were rigged so that, when explaining their choice, the subjects were tasting the jam they had actually rejected. A similar experiment was conducted with tea. Another variation involved subjects choosing between two objects displayed on PowerPoint slides, then explaining their choice when the description of what they chose had been altered.
Research by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel (relationship psychologist) at Northwestern University also undermined the idea that subjects have direct introspective awareness of what attracts them to other people. These researchers examined male and female subjects’ reports of what they found attractive. Men typically reported that physical attractiveness was crucial while women identified earning potential as most important. These subjective reports did not predict their actual choices in a speed dating context, or their dating behaviour in a one-month follow-up.
Consistent with choice blindness, Henkel and Mather found that people are easily convinced by false reminders that they chose different options than they actually chose and that they show greater choice-supportive bias in memory for whichever option they believe they chose.
Criticisms
It is not clear, however, the extent to which these findings apply to real-life experience when we have more time to reflect or use actual faces (as opposed to gray-scale photos). As Professor Kaszniak points out: “although a priori theories are an important component of people’s causal explanations, they are not the sole influence, as originally hypothesized by Nisbett & Wilson. Actors also have privileged information access that includes some degree of introspective access to pertinent causal stimuli and thought processes, as well as better access (than observers) to stimulus-response covariation data about their own behaviour”. Other criticisms point out that people who volunteer to psychology lab studies are not representative of the general population and also are behaving in ways that do not reflect how they would behave in real life. Examples include people of many different non-open political ideologies, despite their enmity to each other, having a shared belief that it is “ethical” to give an appearance of humans justifying beliefs and “unethical” to admit that humans are open-minded in the absence of threats that inhibit critical thinking, making them fake justifications.
Attitude Change
Studies that ask participants to introspect upon their reasoning (for liking, choosing, or believing something, etc.) tend to see a subsequent decrease in correspondence between attitude and behaviour in the participants. For example, in a study by Wilson et al., participants rated their interest in puzzles that they had been given. Prior to rating, one group had been instructed to contemplate and write down their reasons for liking or disliking the puzzles, while the control group was given no such task. The amount of time participants spent playing with each puzzle was then recorded. The correlation between ratings of and time spent playing each puzzle was much smaller for the introspection group than the control group.
A subsequent study was performed to show the generalisability of these results to more “realistic” circumstances. In this study, participants were all involved in a steady romantic relationship. All were asked to rate how well-adjusted their relationship was. One group was beforehand asked to list all of the reasons behind their feelings for their partner, while the control group did not do so. Six months later, the experimenters followed up with participants to check if they were still in the same relationship. Those who had been asked to introspect showed much less attitude-behaviour consistency based upon correlations between earlier relationship ratings and whether they were still dating their partners. This shows that introspection was not predictive, but this also probably means that the introspection has changed the evolution of the relationship.
The authors theorise that these effects are due to participants changing their attitudes, when confronted with a need for justification, without changing their corresponding behaviours. The authors hypothesize that this attitude shift is the result of a combination of things: a desire to avoid feeling foolish for simply not knowing why one feels a certain way; a tendency to make justifications based upon cognitive reasons, despite the large influence of emotion; ignorance of mental biases (e.g. halo effects); and self-persuasion that the reasons one has come up with must be representative with their attitude. In effect, people attempt to supply a “good story” to explain their reasoning, which often leads to convincing themselves that they actually hold a different belief. In studies wherein participants chose an item to keep, their subsequent reports of satisfaction with the item decreased, suggesting that their attitude changes were temporary, returning to the original attitude over time.
Introspection by Focusing on Feelings
In contrast with introspection by focusing on reasoning, that which instructs one to focus on their feelings has actually been shown to increase attitude-behaviour correlations. This finding suggests that introspecting on one’s feelings is not a maladaptive process.
Criticisms
The theory that there are mental processes that act as justifications do not make behaviour more adaptive is criticized by some biologists who argue that the cost in nutrients for brain function selects against any brain mechanism that does not make behaviour more adapted to the environment. They argue that the cost in essential nutrients causes even more difficulty than the cost in calories, especially in social groups of many individuals needing the same scarce nutrients, which imposes substantial difficulty on feeding the group and lowers their potential size. These biologists argue that the evolution of argumentation was driven by the effectiveness of arguments on changing risk perception attitudes and life and death decisions to a more adaptive state, as “luxury functions” that did not enhance life and death survival would lose the evolutionary “tug of war” against the selection for nutritional thrift. While there have been claims of non-adaptive brain functions being selected by sexual selection, these biologists criticise any applicability to introspection illusion’s causal theories because sexually selected traits are most disabling as a fitness signal during or after puberty but human brains require the highest amount of nutrients before puberty (enhancing the nerve connections in ways that make adult brains capable of faster and more nutrient-efficient firing).
A Priori Causal Theories
In their classic paper, Nisbett and Wilson proposed that introspective confabulations result from a priori theories, of which they put forth four possible origins:
Explicit cultural rules (e.g., stopping at red traffic lights).
Implicit cultural theories, with certain schemata for likely stimulus-response relationships (e.g. an athlete only endorses a brand because he is paid to do so).
Individual observational experiences that lead one to form a theory of covariation (e.g. “I feel nervous. I always get nervous when I have to talk at meetings!”).
Similar connotation between stimulus and response.
The authors note that the use of these theories does not necessarily lead to inaccurate assumptions, but that this frequently occurs because the theories are improperly applied.
Explaining Biases
Pronin argues that over-reliance on intentions is a factor in a number of different biases. For example, by focusing on their current good intentions, people can overestimate their likelihood of behaving virtuously.
In Perceptions of Bias
The bias blind spot is an established phenomenon that people rate themselves as less susceptible to bias than their peer group. Emily Pronin and Matthew Kugler argue that this phenomenon is due to the introspection illusion. Pronin and Kugler’s interpretation is that when people decide whether someone else is biased, they use overt behaviour. On the other hand, when assessing whether or not they themselves are biased, people look inward, searching their own thoughts and feelings for biased motives. Since biases operate unconsciously, these introspections are not informative, but people wrongly treat them as reliable indication that they themselves, unlike other people, are immune to bias.
In their experiments, subjects had to make judgments about themselves and about other subjects. They displayed standard biases, for example rating themselves above the others on desirable qualities (demonstrating illusory superiority). The experimenters explained cognitive bias, and asked the subjects how it might have affected their judgement. The subjects rated themselves as less susceptible to bias than others in the experiment (confirming the bias blind spot). When they had to explain their judgments, they used different strategies for assessing their own and others’ bias.
Pronin and Kugler tried to give their subjects access to others’ introspections. To do this, they made audio recordings of subjects who had been told to say whatever came into their heads as they decided whether their answer to a previous question might have been affected by bias. Although subjects persuaded themselves they were unlikely to be biased, their introspective reports did not sway the assessments of observers.
When asked what it would mean to be biased, subjects were more likely to define bias in terms of introspected thoughts and motives when it applied to themselves, but in terms of overt behaviour when it applied to other people. When subjects were explicitly told to avoid relying on introspection, their assessments of their own bias became more realistic.
Additionally, Nisbett and Wilson found that asking participants whether biases (such as the position effect in the stocking study) had an effect on their decisions resulted in a negative response, in contradiction with the data.
In Perceptions of Conformity
Another series of studies by Pronin and colleagues examined perceptions of conformity. Subjects reported being more immune to social conformity than their peers. In effect, they saw themselves as being “alone in a crowd of sheep”. The introspection illusion appeared to contribute to this effect. When deciding whether others respond to social influence, subjects mainly looked at their behaviour, for example explaining other student’s political opinions in terms of following the group. When assessing their own conformity, subjects treat their own introspections as reliable. In their own minds, they found no motive to conform, and so decided that they had not been influenced.
In Perceptions of Control and Free Will
Psychologist Daniel Wegner has argued that an introspection illusion contributes to belief in paranormal phenomena such as psychokinesis. He observes that in everyday experience, intention (such as wanting to turn on a light) is followed by action (such as flicking a light switch) in a reliable way, but the processes connecting the two are not consciously accessible. Hence though subjects may feel that they directly introspect their own free will, the experience of control is actually inferred from relations between the thought and the action. This theory, called “apparent mental causation”, acknowledges the influence of David Hume’s view of the mind. This process for detecting when one is responsible for an action is not totally reliable, and when it goes wrong there can be an illusion of control. This could happen when an external event follows, and is congruent with, a thought in someone’s mind, without an actual causal link.
As evidence, Wegner cites a series of experiments on magical thinking in which subjects were induced to think they had influenced external events. In one experiment, subjects watched a basketball player taking a series of free throws. When they were instructed to visualise him making his shots, they felt that they had contributed to his success.
If the introspection illusion contributes to the subjective feeling of free will, then it follows that people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler’s experiments. When college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate’s lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described their co-workers’ lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behaviour, students gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behaviour, but rated personality traits as most predictive of other people.
However, criticism of Wegner’s claims regarding the significance of introspection illusion for the notion of free will has been published.
Criticisms
Research shows that human volunteers can estimate their response times accurately, in fact knowing their “mental processes” well, but only with substantial demands made on their attention and cognitive resources (i.e. they are distracted while estimating). Such estimation is likely more than post hoc interpretation and may incorporate privileged information. Mindfulness training can also increase introspective accuracy in some instances. Nisbett and Wilson’s findings were criticized by psychologists Ericsson and Simon, among others.
Correction
A study that investigated the effect of educating people about unconscious biases on their subsequent self-ratings of susceptibility to bias showed that those who were educated did not exhibit the bias blind spot, in contrast with the control group. This finding provides hope that being informed about unconscious biases such as the introspection illusion may help people to avoid making biased judgments, or at least make them aware that they are biased. Findings from other studies on correction of the bias yielded mixed results. In a later review of the introspection illusion, Pronin suggests that the distinction is that studies that merely provide a warning of unconscious biases will not see a correction effect, whereas those that inform about the bias and emphasize its unconscious nature do yield corrections. Thus, knowledge that bias can operate during conscious awareness seems the defining factor in leading people to correct for it.
Timothy Wilson has tried to find a way out from “introspection illusion”, recounted in his book Strangers to Ourselves. He suggests that the observation of our own behaviours more than our thoughts can be one of the keys for clearer introspective knowledge.
Criticisms
Some 21st century critical rationalists argue that claims of correcting for introspection illusions or other cognitive biases pose a threat of immunising themselves to criticism by alleging that criticism of psychological theories that claim cognitive bias are “justifications” for cognitive bias, making it non-falsifiable by labelling of critics and also potentially totalitarian. These modern critical rationalists argue that defending a theory by claiming that it overcomes bias and alleging that critics are biased, can defend any pseudoscience from criticism; and that the claim that “criticism of A is a defence of B” is inherently incapable of being evidence-based, and that any actual “most humans” bias (if it existed) would be shared by most psychologists thus make psychological claims of biases a way of accusing unbiased criticism of being biased and marketing the biases as overcoming of bias.
Rationalisation is a defence mechanism (ego defence) in which apparent logical reasons are given to justify behaviour that is motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses.
It is an attempt to find reasons for behaviours, especially ones own. Rationalisations are used to defend against feelings of guilt, maintain self-respect, and protect oneself from criticism.
Rationalisation happens in two steps:
A decision, action, judgement is made for a given reason, or no (known) reason at all.
A rationalisation is performed, constructing a seemingly good or logical reason, as an attempt to justify the act after the fact (for oneself or others).
Rationalisation encourages irrational or unacceptable behaviour, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defence against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame). People rationalise for various reasons – sometimes when we think we know ourselves better than we do. Rationalisation may differentiate the original deterministic explanation of the behaviour or feeling in question.
Many conclusions individuals come to do not fall under the definition of rationalisation as the term is denoted above.
Brief History
Quintilian and classical rhetoric used the term colour for the presenting of an action in the most favourable possible perspective. Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century took up the point, arguing that, were a man to consider his actions, “he will soon find, that such of them, as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dressed out and painted with all the false beauties [colour] which, a soft and flattering hand can give them”.
DSM Definition
According to the DSM-IV, rationalisation occurs “when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for their own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations”.
Examples
Individual
Rationalisation can be used to avoid admitting disappointment: “I didn’t get the job that I applied for, but I really didn’t want it in the first place.”
Egregious rationalisations intended to deflect blame can also take the form of ad hominem attacks or DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender). Some rationalisations take the form of a comparison. Commonly, this is done to lessen the perception of an action’s negative effects, to justify an action, or to excuse culpability:
“At least [what occurred] is not as bad as [a worse outcome].”
In response to an accusation: “At least I didn’t [worse action than accused action].”
As a form of false choice: “Doing [undesirable action] is a lot better than [a worse action].”
In response to unfair or abusive behaviour: “I must have done something wrong if they treat me like this.”
Based on anecdotal and survey evidence, John Banja states that the medical field features a disproportionate amount of rationalisation invoked in the “covering up” of mistakes. Common excuses made are:
“Why disclose the error? The patient was going to die anyway.”
“Telling the family about the error will only make them feel worse.”
“It was the patient’s fault. If he wasn’t so (sick, etc.), this error wouldn’t have caused so much harm.”
“Well, we did our best. These things happen.”
“If we’re not totally and absolutely certain the error caused the harm, we don’t have to tell.”
“They’re dead anyway, so there’s no point in blaming anyone.”
In 2018 Muel Kaptein and Martien van Helvoort developed a model, called the Amoralisations Alarm Clock, that covers all existing amoralisations in a logical way. Amoralisations, also called neutralisations, or rationalisations, are defined as justifications and excuses for deviant behaviour. Amoralisations are important explanations for the rise and persistence of deviant behaviour. There exist many different and overlapping techniques of amoralisations.
Collective
Collective rationalisations are regularly constructed for acts of aggression, based on exaltation of the in-group and demonisation of the opposite side: as Fritz Perls put it, “Our own soldiers take care of the poor families; the enemy rapes them”.
Celebrity culture can be seen as rationalising the gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, by offering participation to both dominant and subaltern views of reality.
Criticism
Some scientists criticise the notion that brains are wired to rationalise irrational decisions, arguing that evolution would select against spending more nutrients at mental processes that do not contribute to the improvement of decisions such as rationalisation of decisions that would have been taken anyway. These scientists argue that learning from mistakes would be decreased rather than increased by rationalisation, and criticise the hypothesis that rationalisation evolved as a means of social manipulation by noting that if rational arguments were deceptive there would be no evolutionary chance for breeding individuals that responded to the arguments and therefore making them ineffective and not capable of being selected for by evolution.
Psychoanalysis
Ernest Jones introduced the term “rationalisation” to psychoanalysis in 1908, defining it as “the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized” – an explanation which (though false) could seem plausible. The term (Rationalisierung in German) was taken up almost immediately by Sigmund Freud to account for the explanations offered by patients for their own neurotic symptoms.
As psychoanalysts continued to explore the glossed of unconscious motives, Otto Fenichel distinguished different sorts of rationalisation – both the justifying of irrational instinctive actions on the grounds that they were reasonable or normatively validated and the rationalising of defensive structures, whose purpose is unknown on the grounds that they have some quite different but somehow logical meaning.
Later psychoanalysts are divided between a positive view of rationalisation as a stepping-stone on the way to maturity, and a more destructive view of it as splitting feeling from thought, and so undermining the powers of reason.
Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger highlighted in 1957 the discomfort caused to people by awareness of their inconsistent thought. Rationalisation can reduce such discomfort by explaining away the discrepancy in question, as when people who take up smoking after previously quitting decide that the evidence for it being harmful is less than they previously thought.
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
Construction of a coherent picture of the individual and their major psychological processes;
Investigation of individual psychological differences; and
Investigation of human nature and psychological similarities between individuals.
“Personality” is a dynamic and organised set of characteristics possessed by an individual that uniquely influences their environment, cognition, emotions, motivations, and behaviours in various situations. The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means “mask”.
Personality also pertains to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and behaviours persistently exhibited over time that strongly influences one’s expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes. Personality also predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress. Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality: the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualisation or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual.
The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology, with an abundance of theoretical traditions. The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviourist, evolutionary, and social learning perspective. Many researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and instead take an eclectic approach. Research in this area is empirically driven – such as dimensional models, based on multivariate statistics such as factor analysis – or emphasizes theory development, such as that of the psychodynamic theory. There is also a substantial emphasis on the applied field of personality testing. In psychological education and training, the study of the nature of personality and its psychological development is usually reviewed as a prerequisite to courses in abnormal psychology or clinical psychology.
Philosophical Assumptions
Many of the ideas conceptualised by historical and modern personality theorists stem from the basic philosophical assumptions they hold. The study of personality is not a purely empirical discipline, as it brings in elements of art, science, and philosophy to draw general conclusions. The following five categories are some of the most fundamental philosophical assumptions on which theorists disagree:
Assumption
Outline
Freedom versus Determinism
This is the question of whether humans have control over their own behaviour and understand the motives behind it, or if their behaviour is causally determined by forces beyond their control. Behaviour is categorised as being either unconscious, environmental or biological by various theories.
Heredity (Nature) versus Environment (Nurture)
Personality is thought to be determined largely either by genetics and biology, or by environment and experiences. Contemporary research suggests that most personality traits are based on the joint influence of genetics and environment. One of the forerunners in this arena is C. Robert Cloninger, who pioneered the Temperament and Character model.
Uniqueness versus Universality
This question discusses the extent of each human’s individuality (uniqueness) or similarity in nature (universality). Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers were all advocates of the uniqueness of individuals. Behaviourists and cognitive theorists, in contrast, emphasize the importance of universal principles, such as reinforcement and self-efficacy.
Active versus Reactive
This question explores whether humans primarily act through individual initiative (active) or through outside stimuli. Traditional behavioural theorists typically believed that humans are passively shaped by their environments, whereas humanistic and cognitive theorists believe that humans play a more active role. Most modern theorists agree that both are important, with aggregate behaviour being primarily determined by traits and situational factors being the primary predictor of behaviour in the short term.
Optimistic versus Pessimistic
Personality theories differ with regard to whether humans are integral in the changing of their own personalities. Theories that place a great deal of emphasis on learning are often more optimistic than those that do not.
Personality Theories
Type Theories
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of people into different classes. Personality types are distinguished from personality traits, which come in different degrees. There are many theories of personality, but each one contains several and sometimes many sub theories. A “theory of personality” constructed by any given psychologist will contain multiple relating theories or sub theories often expanding as more psychologists explore the theory. For example, according to type theories, there are two types of people, introverts and extroverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extroversion are part of a continuous dimension with many people in the middle. The idea of psychological types originated in the theoretical work of Carl Jung, specifically in his 1921 book Psychologische Typen (Psychological Types) and William Marston.
Building on the writings and observations of Jung during World War II, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, delineated personality types by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This model was later used by David Keirsey with a different understanding from Jung, Briggs and Myers. In the former Soviet Union, Lithuanian Aušra Augustinavičiūtė independently derived a model of personality type from Jung’s called socionics. Later on many other tests were developed on this model e.g. Golden, PTI-Pro and JTI.
Theories could also be considered an “approach” to personality or psychology and is generally referred to as a model. The model is an older and more theoretical approach to personality, accepting extroversion and introversion as basic psychological orientations in connection with two pairs of psychological functions:
Perceiving functions: sensing and intuition (trust in concrete, sensory-oriented facts vs. trust in abstract concepts and imagined possibilities).
Judging functions: thinking and feeling (basing decisions primarily on logic vs. deciding based on emotion).
Briggs and Myers also added another personality dimension to their type indicator to measure whether a person prefers to use a judging or perceiving function when interacting with the external world. Therefore, they included questions designed to indicate whether someone wishes to come to conclusions (judgement) or to keep options open (perception).
This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory: it explains people’s behavior in terms of opposite fixed characteristics. In these more traditional models, the sensing/intuition preference is considered the most basic, dividing people into “N” (intuitive) or “S” (sensing) personality types. An “N” is further assumed to be guided either by thinking or feeling and divided into the “NT” (scientist, engineer) or “NF” (author, humanitarian) temperament. An “S”, in contrast, is assumed to be guided more by the judgment/perception axis and thus divided into the “SJ” (guardian, traditionalist) or “SP” (performer, artisan) temperament. These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each case (including always extraversion/introversion) less important. Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types can be quite strongly stereotyped by professions (although neither Myers nor Keirsey engaged in such stereotyping in their type descriptions), and thus may arise more from the need to categorise people for purposes of guiding their career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence of the five-factor view, which is less concerned with behaviour under work conditions and more concerned with behaviour in personal and emotional circumstances (The MBTI is not designed to measure the “work self”, but rather what Myers and McCaulley called the “shoes-off self.”).
Type A and Type B personality theory: During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what they called Type A and Type B behaviour patterns. They theorised that intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of coronary disease because they are “stress junkies.” Type B people, on the other hand, tended to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in risk. There was also a Type AB mixed profile.
John L. Holland’s RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that six personality types lead people to choose their career paths. In this circumplex model, the six types are represented as a hexagon, with adjacent types more closely related than those more distant. The model is widely used in vocational counselling.
Eduard Spranger’s personality-model, consisting of six (or, by some revisions, 6 +1) basic types of value attitudes, described in his book Types of Men (Lebensformen; Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1914; English translation by P.J.W. Pigors – New York: G. E. Stechert Company, 1928).
The Enneagram of Personality, a model of human personality which is principally used as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. It has been criticised as being subject to interpretation, making it difficult to test or validate scientifically.
Perhaps the most ancient attempt at personality psychology is the personality typology outlined by the Indian Buddhist Abhidharma schools. This typology mostly focuses on negative personal traits (greed, hatred, and delusion) and the corresponding positive meditation practices used to counter those traits.
Psychoanalytical Theories
Psychoanalytic theories explain human behaviour in terms of the interaction of various components of personality. Sigmund Freud was the founder of this school of thought. He drew on the physics of his day (thermodynamics) to coin the term psychodynamics. Based on the idea of converting heat into mechanical energy, Freud proposed psychic energy could be converted into behaviour. His theory places central importance on dynamic, unconscious psychological conflicts.
Freud divides human personality into three significant components: the id, ego and super-ego. The id acts according to the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification of its needs regardless of external environment; the ego then must emerge in order to realistically meet the wishes and demands of the id in accordance with the outside world, adhering to the reality principle. Finally, the superego (conscience) inculcates moral judgment and societal rules upon the ego, thus forcing the demands of the id to be met not only realistically but morally. The superego is the last function of the personality to develop, and is the embodiment of parental/social ideals established during childhood. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of these three components.
The channelling and release of sexual (libidal) and aggressive energies, which ensues from the “Eros” (sex; instinctual self-preservation) and “Thanatos” (death; instinctual self-annihilation) drives respectively, are major components of his theory. It is important to note that Freud’s broad understanding of sexuality included all kinds of pleasurable feelings experienced by the human body.
Freud proposed five psychosexual stages of personality development. He believed adult personality is dependent upon early childhood experiences and largely determined by age five. Fixations that develop during the infantile stage contribute to adult personality and behaviour.
One of Sigmund Freud’s earlier associates, Alfred Adler, agreed with Freud that early childhood experiences are important to development, and believed birth order may influence personality development. Adler believed that the oldest child was the individual who would set high achievement goals in order to gain attention lost when the younger siblings were born. He believed the middle children were competitive and ambitious. He reasoned that this behaviour was motivated by the idea of surpassing the firstborn’s achievements. He added, however, that the middle children were often not as concerned about the glory attributed to their behaviour. He also believed the youngest would be more dependent and sociable. Adler finished by surmising that an only child loves being the centre of attention and matures quickly but in the end fails to become independent.
Heinz Kohut thought similarly to Freud’s idea of transference. He used narcissism as a model of how people develop their sense of self. Narcissism is the exaggerated sense of self in which one is believed to exist in order to protect one’s low self-esteem and sense of worthlessness. Kohut had a significant impact on the field by extending Freud’s theory of narcissism and introducing what he called the ‘self-object transferences’ of mirroring and idealisation. In other words, children need to idealize and emotionally “sink into” and identify with the idealised competence of admired figures such as parents or older siblings. They also need to have their self-worth mirrored by these people. Such experiences allow them to thereby learn the self-soothing and other skills that are necessary for the development of a healthy sense of self.
Another important figure in the world of personality theory is Karen Horney. She is credited with the development of “Feminist Psychology”. She disagrees with Freud on some key points, one being that women’s personalities are not just a function of “Penis Envy”, but that girl children have separate and different psychic lives unrelated to how they feel about their fathers or primary male role models. She talks about three basic Neurotic needs “Basic Anxiety”, “Basic Hostility” and “Basic Evil”. She posits that to any anxiety an individual experiences they would have one of three approaches, moving toward people, moving away from people or moving against people. It is these three that give us varying personality types and characteristics. She also places a high premium on concepts like Overvaluation of Love and romantic partners.
Behaviourist Theories
Behaviourists explain personality in terms of the effects external stimuli have on behaviour. The approaches used to evaluate the behavioural aspect of personality are known as behavioural theories or learning-conditioning theories. These approaches were a radical shift away from Freudian philosophy. One of the major tenets of this concentration of personality psychology is a strong emphasis on scientific thinking and experimentation. This school of thought was developed by B.F. Skinner who put forth a model which emphasized the mutual interaction of the person or “the organism” with its environment. Skinner believed children do bad things because the behaviour obtains attention that serves as a reinforcer. For example: a child cries because the child’s crying in the past has led to attention. These are the response, and consequences. The response is the child crying, and the attention that child gets is the reinforcing consequence. According to this theory, people’s behaviour is formed by processes such as operant conditioning. Skinner put forward a “three term contingency model” which helped promote analysis of behaviour based on the “Stimulus – Response – Consequence Model” in which the critical question is: “Under which circumstances or antecedent ‘stimuli’ does the organism engage in a particular behavior or ‘response’, which in turn produces a particular ‘consequence’?”
Richard Herrnstein extended this theory by accounting for attitudes and traits. An attitude develops as the response strength (the tendency to respond) in the presences of a group of stimuli become stable. Rather than describing conditionable traits in non-behavioural language, response strength in a given situation accounts for the environmental portion. Herrstein also saw traits as having a large genetic or biological component, as do most modern behaviourists.
Ivan Pavlov is another notable influence. He is well known for his classical conditioning experiments involving dogs, which led him to discover the foundation of behaviourism.
Social Cognitive Theories
In cognitive theory, behaviour is explained as guided by cognitions (e.g. expectations) about the world, especially those about other people. Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes, such as thinking and judging.
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his “Bobo doll experiment”. During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modelling.
Early examples of approaches to cognitive style are listed by Baron (1982). These include Witkin’s (1965) work on field dependency, Gardner’s (1953) discovering people had consistent preference for the number of categories they used to categorise heterogeneous objects, and Block and Petersen’s (1955) work on confidence in line discrimination judgments. Baron relates early development of cognitive approaches of personality to ego psychology. More central to this field have been:
Attributional style theory dealing with different ways in which people explain events in their lives. This approach builds upon locus of control, but extends it by stating we also need to consider whether people attribute to stable causes or variable causes, and to global causes or specific causes.
Various scales have been developed to assess both attributional style and locus of control. Locus of control scales include those used by Rotter and later by Duttweiler, the Nowicki and Strickland (1973) Locus of Control Scale for Children and various locus of control scales specifically in the health domain, most famously that of Kenneth Wallston and his colleagues, The Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale. Attributional style has been assessed by the Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Attributions Questionnaire, the Real Events Attributional Style Questionnaire and the Attributional Style Assessment Test.
Achievement style theory focuses upon identification of an individual’s Locus of Control tendency, such as by Rotter’s evaluations, and was found by Cassandra Bolyard Whyte to provide valuable information for improving academic performance of students. Individuals with internal control tendencies are likely to persist to better academic performance levels, presenting an achievement personality, according to Cassandra B. Whyte.
Recognition that the tendency to believe that hard work and persistence often results in attainment of life and academic goals has influenced formal educational and counselling efforts with students of various ages and in various settings since the 1970s research about achievement. Counselling aimed toward encouraging individuals to design ambitious goals and work toward them, with recognition that there are external factors that may impact, often results in the incorporation of a more positive achievement style by students and employees, whatever the setting, to include higher education, workplace, or justice programming.
Walter Mischel (1999) has also defended a cognitive approach to personality. His work refers to “Cognitive Affective Units”, and considers factors such as encoding of stimuli, affect, goal-setting, and self-regulatory beliefs. The term “Cognitive Affective Units” shows how his approach considers affect as well as cognition.
Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) is another cognitive personality theory. Developed by Seymour Epstein, CEST argues that humans operate by way of two independent information processing systems: experiential system and rational system. The experiential system is fast and emotion-driven. The rational system is slow and logic-driven. These two systems interact to determine our goals, thoughts, and behaviolr.
Personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. Kelly’s fundamental view of personality was that people are like naïve scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organised systems of construction, which they use to anticipate events. But because people are naïve scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation. A system of construction that chronically fails to characterise and/or predict events, and is not appropriately revised to comprehend and predict one’s changing social world, is considered to underlie psychopathology (or mental illness). From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach and also a technique called The Repertory Grid Interview that helped his patients to uncover their own “constructs” with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist. The repertory grid was later adapted for various uses within organisations, including decision-making and interpretation of other people’s world-views.
Humanistic Theories
Humanistic psychology emphasizes that people have free will and that this plays an active role in determining how they behave. Accordingly, humanistic psychology focuses on subjective experiences of persons as opposed to forced, definitive factors that determine behaviour. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were proponents of this view, which is based on the “phenomenal field” theory of Combs and Snygg (1949). Rogers and Maslow were among a group of psychologists that worked together for a decade to produce the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. This journal was primarily focused on viewing individuals as a whole, rather than focusing solely on separate traits and processes within the individual.
Robert W. White wrote the book The Abnormal Personality that became a standard text on abnormal psychology. He also investigated the human need to strive for positive goals like competence and influence, to counterbalance the emphasis of Freud on the pathological elements of personality development.
Maslow spent much of his time studying what he called “self-actualizing persons”, those who are “fulfilling themselves and doing the best they are capable of doing”. Maslow believes all who are interested in growth move towards self-actualizing (growth, happiness, satisfaction) views. Many of these people demonstrate a trend in dimensions of their personalities. Characteristics of self-actualisers according to Maslow include the four key dimensions:
Dimension
Outline
Awareness
maintaining constant enjoyment and awe of life. These individuals often experienced a “peak experience”. He defined a peak experience as an “intensification of any experience to the degree there is a loss or transcendence of self”. A peak experience is one in which an individual perceives an expansion of themselves, and detects a unity and meaningfulness in life. Intense concentration on an activity one is involved in, such as running a marathon, may invoke a peak experience.
Reality and Problem Centred
Having a tendency to be concerned with “problems” in surroundings.
Acceptance/Spontaneity
Accepting surroundings and what cannot be changed.
Unhostile Sense of Humour/Democratic
Do not take kindly to joking about others, which can be viewed as offensive. They have friends of all backgrounds and religions and hold very close friendships.
Maslow and Rogers emphasized a view of the person as an active, creative, experiencing human being who lives in the present and subjectively responds to current perceptions, relationships, and encounters. They disagree with the dark, pessimistic outlook of those in the Freudian psychoanalysis ranks, but rather view humanistic theories as positive and optimistic proposals which stress the tendency of the human personality toward growth and self-actualization. This progressing self will remain the centre of its constantly changing world; a world that will help mould the self but not necessarily confine it. Rather, the self has opportunity for maturation based on its encounters with this world. This understanding attempts to reduce the acceptance of hopeless redundancy. Humanistic therapy typically relies on the client for information of the past and its effect on the present, therefore the client dictates the type of guidance the therapist may initiate. This allows for an individualised approach to therapy. Rogers found patients differ in how they respond to other people. Rogers tried to model a particular approach to therapy – he stressed the reflective or empathetic response. This response type takes the client’s viewpoint and reflects back their feeling and the context for it. An example of a reflective response would be, “It seems you are feeling anxious about your upcoming marriage”. This response type seeks to clarify the therapist’s understanding while also encouraging the client to think more deeply and seek to fully understand the feelings they have expressed.
Biopsychological Theories
Biology plays a very important role in the development of personality. The study of the biological level in personality psychology focuses primarily on identifying the role of genetic determinants and how they mould individual personalities. Some of the earliest thinking about possible biological bases of personality grew out of the case of Phineas Gage. In an 1848 accident, a large iron rod was driven through Gage’s head, and his personality apparently changed as a result, although descriptions of these psychological changes are usually exaggerated.
In general, patients with brain damage have been difficult to find and study. In the 1990s, researchers began to use electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET), and more recently functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is now the most widely used imaging technique to help localise personality traits in the brain.
Genetic Basis of Personality
Ever since the Human Genome Project allowed for a much more in depth comprehension of genetics, there has been an ongoing controversy involving heritability, personality traits, and environmental vs. genetic influence on personality. The human genome is known to play a role in the development of personality.
Previously, genetic personality studies focused on specific genes correlating to specific personality traits. Today’s view of the gene-personality relationship focuses primarily on the activation and expression of genes related to personality and forms part of what is referred to as behavioural genetics. Genes provide numerous options for varying cells to be expressed; however, the environment determines which of these are activated. Many studies have noted this relationship in varying ways in which our bodies can develop, but the interaction between genes and the shaping of our minds and personality is also relevant to this biological relationship.
DNA-environment interactions are important in the development of personality because this relationship determines what part of the DNA code is actually made into proteins that will become part of an individual. While different choices are made available by the genome, in the end, the environment is the ultimate determinant of what becomes activated. Small changes in DNA in individuals are what leads to the uniqueness of every person as well as differences in looks, abilities, brain functioning, and all the factors that culminate to develop a cohesive personality.
Cattell and Eysenck have proposed that genetics have a powerful influence on personality. A large part of the evidence collected linking genetics and the environment to personality have come from twin studies. This “twin method” compares levels of similarity in personality using genetically identical twins. One of the first of these twin studies measured 800 pairs of twins, studied numerous personality traits, and determined that identical twins are most similar in their general abilities. Personality similarities were found to be less related for self-concepts, goals, and interests.
Twin studies have also been important in the creation of the five factor personality model: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Neuroticism and extraversion are the two most widely studied traits. Individuals scoring high in trait extraversion more often display characteristics such as impulsiveness, sociability, and activeness. Individuals scoring high in trait neuroticism are more likely to be moody, anxious, or irritable. Identical twins, however, have higher correlations in personality traits than fraternal twins. One study measuring genetic influence on twins in five different countries found that the correlations for identical twins were .50, while for fraternal they were about .20. It is suggested that heredity and environment interact to determine one’s personality.
Evolutionary Theory
Charles Darwin is the founder of the theory of the evolution of the species. The evolutionary approach to personality psychology is based on this theory. This theory examines how individual personality differences are based on natural selection. Through natural selection organisms change over time through adaptation and selection. Traits are developed and certain genes come into expression based on an organism’s environment and how these traits aid in an organism’s survival and reproduction.
Polymorphisms, such as gender and blood type, are forms of diversity which evolve to benefit a species as a whole. The theory of evolution has wide-ranging implications on personality psychology. Personality viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology places a great deal of emphasis on specific traits that are most likely to aid in survival and reproduction, such as conscientiousness, sociability, emotional stability, and dominance. The social aspects of personality can be seen through an evolutionary perspective. Specific character traits develop and are selected for because they play an important and complex role in the social hierarchy of organisms. Such characteristics of this social hierarchy include the sharing of important resources, family and mating interactions, and the harm or help organisms can bestow upon one another.
Drive Theories
In the 1930s, John Dollard and Neal Elgar Miller met at Yale University, and began an attempt to integrate drives, into a theory of personality, basing themselves on the work of Clark Hull. They began with the premise that personality could be equated with the habitual responses exhibited by an individual – their habits. From there, they determined that these habitual responses were built on secondary, or acquired drives.
Secondary drives are internal needs directing the behaviour of an individual that results from learning. Acquired drives are learned, by and large in the manner described by classical conditioning. When we are in a certain environment and experience a strong response to a stimulus, we internalise cues from the said environment. When we find ourselves in an environment with similar cues, we begin to act in anticipation of a similar stimulus. Thus, we are likely to experience anxiety in an environment with cues similar to one where we have experienced pain or fear – such as the dentist’s office.
Secondary drives are built on primary drives, which are biologically driven, and motivate us to act with no prior learning process – such as hunger, thirst or the need for sexual activity. However, secondary drives are thought to represent more specific elaborations of primary drives, behind which the functions of the original primary drive continue to exist. Thus, the primary drives of fear and pain exist behind the acquired drive of anxiety. Secondary drives can be based on multiple primary drives and even in other secondary drives. This is said to give them strength and persistence. Examples include the need for money, which was conceptualised as arising from multiple primary drives such as the drive for food and warmth, as well as from secondary drives such as imitativeness (the drive to do as others do) and anxiety.
Secondary drives vary based on the social conditions under which they were learned – such as culture. Dollard and Miller used the example of food, stating that the primary drive of hunger manifested itself behind the learned secondary drive of an appetite for a specific type of food, which was dependent on the culture of the individual.
Secondary drives are also explicitly social, representing a manner in which we convey our primary drives to others. Indeed, many primary drives are actively repressed by society (such as the sexual drive). Dollard and Miller believed that the acquisition of secondary drives was essential to childhood development. As children develop, they learn not to act on their primary drives, such as hunger but acquire secondary drives through reinforcement. Friedman and Schustack describe an example of such developmental changes, stating that if an infant engaging in an active orientation towards others brings about the fulfilment of primary drives, such as being fed or having their diaper changed, they will develop a secondary drive to pursue similar interactions with others – perhaps leading to an individual being more gregarious. Dollard and Miller’s belief in the importance of acquired drives led them to reconceive Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development. They found themselves to be in agreement with the timing Freud used but believed that these periods corresponded to the successful learning of certain secondary drives.
Dollard and Miller gave many examples of how secondary drives impact our habitual responses – and by extension our personalities, including anger, social conformity, imitativeness or anxiety, to name a few. In the case of anxiety, Dollard and Miller note that people who generalise the situation in which they experience the anxiety drive will experience anxiety far more than they should. These people are often anxious all the time, and anxiety becomes part of their personality. This example shows how drive theory can have ties with other theories of personality – many of them look at the trait of neuroticism or emotional stability in people, which is strongly linked to anxiety.
Personality Tests
There are two major types of personality tests, projective and objective.
Projective tests assume personality is primarily unconscious and assess individuals by how they respond to an ambiguous stimulus, such as an ink blot. Projective tests have been in use for about 60 years and continue to be used today. Examples of such tests include the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
The Rorschach Test involves showing an individual a series of note cards with ambiguous ink blots on them. The individual being tested is asked to provide interpretations of the blots on the cards by stating everything that the ink blot may resemble based on their personal interpretation. The therapist then analyses their responses. Rules for scoring the test have been covered in manuals that cover a wide variety of characteristics such as content, originality of response, location of “perceived images” and several other factors. Using these specific scoring methods, the therapist will then attempt to relate test responses to attributes of the individual’s personality and their unique characteristics. The idea is that unconscious needs will come out in the person’s response, e.g. an aggressive person may see images of destruction.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) involves presenting individuals with vague pictures/scenes and asking them to tell a story based on what they see. Common examples of these “scenes” include images that may suggest family relationships or specific situations, such as a father and son or a man and a woman in a bedroom. Responses are analysed for common themes. Responses unique to an individual are theoretically meant to indicate underlying thoughts, processes, and potentially conflicts present within the individual. Responses are believed to be directly linked to unconscious motives. There is very little empirical evidence available to support these methods.
Objective tests assume personality is consciously accessible and that it can be measured by self-report questionnaires. Research on psychological assessment has generally found objective tests to be more valid and reliable than projective tests. Critics have pointed to the Forer effect to suggest some of these appear to be more accurate and discriminating than they really are. Issues with these tests include false reporting because there is no way to tell if an individual is answering a question honestly or accurately.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (also known as the MBTI) is self-reporting questionnaire based on Carl Jung’s Type theory. However, the MBTI modified Jung’s theory into their own by disregarding certain processes held in the unconscious mind and the impact these have on personality.
Personality Theory Assessment Criteria
Verifiability – the theory should be formulated in such a way that the concepts, suggestions and hypotheses involved in it are defined clearly and unambiguously, and logically related to each other.
Heuristic value – to what extent the theory stimulates scientists to conduct further research.
Internal consistency – the theory should be free from internal contradictions.
Economy – the fewer concepts and assumptions required by the theory to explain any phenomenon, the better it is Hjelle, Larry (1992). Personality Theories: Basic Assumptions, Research, and Applications.
Psychology has traditionally defined personality through its behavioural patterns, and more recently with neuroscientific studies of the brain. In recent years, some psychologists have turned to the study of inner experiences for insight into personality as well as individuality. Inner experiences are the thoughts and feelings to an immediate phenomenon. Another term used to define inner experiences is qualia. Being able to understand inner experiences assists in understanding how humans behave, act, and respond. Defining personality using inner experiences has been expanding due to the fact that solely relying on behavioural principles to explain one’s character may seem incomplete. Behavioural methods allow the subject to be observed by an observer, whereas with inner experiences the subject is its own observer.
Methods Measuring Inner Experience
Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES)
Developed by psychologist Russel Hurlburt. This is an idiographic method that is used to help examine inner experiences. This method relies on an introspective technique that allows an individual’s inner experiences and characteristics to be described and measured. A beep notifies the subject to record their experience at that exact moment and 24 hours later an interview is given based on all the experiences recorded. DES has been used in subjects that have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression. It has also been crucial to studying the inner experiences of those who have been diagnosed with common psychiatric diseases.
Articulated Thoughts in Stimulated Situations (ATSS)
ATSS is a paradigm which was created as an alternative to the TA (think aloud) method. This method assumes that people have continuous internal dialogues that can be naturally attended to. ATSS also assesses a person’s inner thoughts as they verbalise their cognitions. In this procedure, subjects listen to a scenario via a video or audio player and are asked to imagine that they are in that specific situation. Later, they are asked to articulate their thoughts as they occur in reaction to the playing scenario. This method is useful in studying emotional experience given that the scenarios used can influence specific emotions. Most importantly, the method has contributed to the study of personality. In a study conducted by Rayburn and Davison (2002), subjects’ thoughts and empathy toward anti-gay hate crimes were evaluated. The researchers found that participants showed more aggressive intentions towards the offender in scenarios which mimicked hate crimes.
Experimental Method
This method is an experimental paradigm used to study human experiences involved in the studies of sensation and perception, learning and memory, motivation, and biological psychology. The experimental psychologist usually deals with intact organisms although studies are often conducted with organisms modified by surgery, radiation, drug treatment, or long-standing deprivations of various kinds or with organisms that naturally present organic abnormalities or emotional disorders. Economists and psychologists have developed a variety of experimental methodologies to elicit and assess individual attitudes where each emotion differs for each individual. The results are then gathered and quantified to conclude if specific experiences have any common factors. This method is used to seek clarity of the experience and remove any biases to help understand the meaning behind the experience to see if it can be generalised.
In the psychology of human behaviour, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth.
Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.
In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favour of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated. The terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters, and the term climate change denial describes denial of the scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.
The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms.
Definition and Tactics
Anthropologist Didier Fassin distinguishes between denial, defined as “the empirical observation that reality and truth are being denied”, and denialism, which he defines as “an ideological position whereby one systematically reacts by refusing reality and truth”. Persons and social groups who reject propositions on which there exists a mainstream and scientific consensus engage in denialism when they use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument and legitimate debate, when there is none. It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics in order to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy:
Conspiracy theories: Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in “a conspiracy to suppress the truth”.
Cherry picking: Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers in order to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research. Diethelm and McKee (2009) note, “Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as an indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness.”
False experts: Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility. This goes hand-in-hand with the marginalization of real experts and researchers.
Moving the goalposts: Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence (aka Shifting baseline).
Other logical fallacies: Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring.
Common tactics to different types of denialism include misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, half-truths, and outright fabrication. South African judge Edwin Cameron notes that a common tactic used by denialists is to “make great play of the inescapable indeterminacy of figures and statistics”. Historian Taner Akçam states that denialism is commonly believed to be negation of facts, but in fact “it is in that nebulous territory between facts and truth where such denialism germinates. Denialism marshals its own facts and it has its own truth.”
Focusing on the rhetorical tactics through which denialism is achieved in language, Alex Gillespie (2020) of the London School of Economics has reviewed the linguistic and practical defensive tactics for denying disruptive information. These tactics are conceptualised in terms of three layers of defence:
Avoiding: The first line of defence against disruptive information is to avoid it.
Delegitimising: The second line of defence is to attack the messenger, by undermining the credibility of the source.
Limiting: The final line of defence, if disruptive information cannot be avoided or delegitimised, is to rationalise and limit the impact of the disruptive ideas.
In 2009 author Michael Specter defined group denialism as “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie”.
Prescriptive and Polemic Perspectives
If one party to a debate accuses the other of denialism they are framing the debate. This is because an accusation of denialism is both prescriptive and polemic: prescriptive because it carries implications that there is truth to the denied claim; polemic since the accuser implies that continued denial in the light of presented evidence raises questions about the other’s motives. Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University writes that “An accusation of ‘denial’ is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness.” He suggests that, by the introduction of the word denier into further areas of historical and scientific debate, “One of the great achievements of The Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed”.
Some people have suggested that because denial of the Holocaust is well known, advocates who use the term denialist in other areas of debate may intentionally or unintentionally imply that their opponents are little better than Holocaust deniers. However, Robert Gallo and colleagues defended this latter comparison, stating that AIDS denialism is similar to Holocaust denial since it is a form of pseudoscience that “contradicts an immense body of research”.
Current Examples
HIV/AIDS
AIDS denialism is the denial that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS denialism has been described as being “among the most vocal anti-science denial movements”. Some denialists reject the existence of HIV, while others accept that the virus exists but say that it is a harmless passenger virus and not the cause of AIDS. Insofar as denialists acknowledge AIDS as a real disease, they attribute it to some combination of recreational drug use, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and side effects of antiretroviral medication, rather than infection with HIV. However, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive and the scientific community rejects and ignores AIDS-denialist claims as based on faulty reasoning, cherry picking, and misrepresentation of mainly outdated scientific data. With the rejection of these arguments by the scientific community, AIDS-denialist material is now spread mainly through the Internet.
Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, embraced AIDS denialism, proclaiming that AIDS was primarily caused by poverty. About 365,000 people died from AIDS during his presidency; it is estimated that around 343,000 premature deaths could have been prevented if proper treatment had been available.
Climate Change
Some international corporations, such as ExxonMobil, have contributed to “fake citizens’ groups and bogus scientific bodies” that claim that the science of global warming is inconclusive, according to a criticism by George Monbiot. ExxonMobil did not deny making the financial contributions, but its spokesman stated that the company’s financial support for scientific reports did not mean it influenced the outcome of those studies. Newsweek and Mother Jones have published articles stating corporations are funding the “denial industry”.
In the context of consumer protection, denialism has been defined as “the use of rhetorical techniques and predictable tactics to erect barriers to debate and consideration of any type of reform, regardless of the facts.” The Bush Administration’s replacement of previous science advisers with industry experts or scientists tied to industry, and its refusal to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification due to uncertainties they asserted were present in the climate change issue, have been cited by the press as examples of politically motivated denialism.
COVID-19
The term “COVID-19 denialism” or merely “COVID denialism” refers to the thinking of those who deny the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. or, at the very least, deny that deaths are happening in the manner or proportions scientifically recognised by the World Health Organisation. The claims that the COVID-19 pandemic has been faked, exaggerated, or mischaracterised are pseudoscience. Some famous people who have engaged in COVID-19 denialism include Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Bolsonaro.
Evolution
Religious beliefs may prompt an individual to deny the validity of the scientific theory of evolution. Evolution is considered an undisputed fact within the scientific community and in academia, where the level of support for evolution is essentially universal, yet this view is often met with opposition by biblical literalists. The alternative view is often presented as a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis’s creation myth. Many fundamentalist Christians teach creationism as if it were fact under the banners of creation science and intelligent design. Beliefs that typically coincide with creationism include the belief in the global flood myth, geocentrism, and the belief that the Earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old. These beliefs are viewed as pseudoscience in the scientific community and are widely regarded as erroneous.
Flat Earth
The superseded belief that the Earth is flat, and denial of all of the overwhelming evidence that supports an approximately spherical Earth that rotates around its axis and orbits the Sun, persists into the 21st century. Modern proponents of flat-Earth cosmology (or flat-Earthers) refuse to accept any kind of contrary evidence, dismissing all spaceflights and images from space as hoaxes and accusing all organizations and even private citizens of conspiring to “hide the truth”. They also claim that no actual satellites are orbiting the Earth, that the International Space Station is fake, and that these are lies from all governments involved in this grand cover-up.
Adherents of the modern flat-Earth model propose that a dome-shaped firmament encloses a disk-shaped Earth. They may also claim, after Samuel Rowbotham, that the Sun is only 3,000 miles above the Earth and that the Moon and the Sun orbit above the Earth rather than around it. Modern flat-Earthers believe that Antarctica is not a continent but a massive ice flow, with a wall 150 feet or higher, which circles the perimeter of the Earth and keeps everything (including all the oceans’ water) from falling off the edge.
Flat-Earthers also assert that no one is allowed to fly over or explore Antarctica, despite contrary evidence. According to them, all photos and videos of ships sinking under the horizon and of the bottoms of city skylines and clouds below the horizon, revealing the curvature of the Earth, have been manipulated, computer-generated, or somehow faked. Therefore, regardless of any scientific or empirical evidence provided, flat-Earthers conclude that it is fabricated or altered in some way.
When linked to other observed phenomena such as gravity, sunsets, tides, eclipses, distances and other measurements that challenge the flat earth model, claimants replace commonly-accepted explanations with piecemeal models that distort or over-simplify how perspective, mass, buoyancy, light or other physical systems work. These piecemeal replacements rarely conform with each other, finally leaving many flat-Earth claimants to agree that such phenomena remain “mysteries” and more investigation is to be done. In this conclusion, adherents remain open to all explanations except the commonly accepted globular Earth model, shifting the debate from ignorance to denialism.
Genetically Modified Foods
There is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but that each GM food needs to be tested on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Nonetheless, members of the public are much less likely than scientists to perceive GM foods as safe. The legal and regulatory status of GM foods varies by country, with some nations banning or restricting them, and others permitting them with widely differing degrees of regulation.
However, opponents have objected to GM foods on grounds including safety. Psychological analyses indicate that over 70% of GM food opponents in the US are “absolute” in their opposition, experience disgust at the thought of eating GM foods, and are “evidence insensitive”.
Statins
Statin denialism is a rejection of the medical worth of statins. Cardiologist Steven Nissen at Cleveland Clinic has commented “We are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites…” promoting unproven medical therapies. Harriet Hall sees a spectrum of “statin denialism” ranging from pseudoscientific claims to the understatement of benefits and overstatement of side effects, all of which is contrary to the scientific evidence.
Mental illness denial or mental disorder denial where a person denies the existence of mental disorders. Both serious analysts, as well as pseudoscientific movements question the existence of certain disorders. A minority of professional researchers see disorders such as depression from a sociocultural perspective and argue that the solution to it is fixing a dysfunction in the society not in the person’s brain. Certain analysts argue this denialism is usually fuelled by narcissistic injury. Anti-psychiatry movements such as Scientology promote mental illness denial by having alternative practices to psychiatry.
Historical Examples
Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with historical revisionism, a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.
Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; others mandate negationist views, such as California and Japan, where schoolchildren are explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide and Japanese war crimes, respectively. Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese history textbook controversies, and historiography in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Some notable historical negationists include Arthur Butz, David Irving, and Shinzo Abe. In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.
Armenian Genocide Denialism
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I – a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming Armenians were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide’s aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2022.
Borrowing the arguments used by the CUP to justify its actions, denial rests on the assumption that the “relocation” of Armenians was a legitimate state action in response to a real or perceived Armenian uprising that threatened the existence of the empire during wartime. Deniers assert the CUP intended to resettle Armenians rather than kill them. They claim the death toll is exaggerated or attribute the deaths to other factors, such as a purported civil war, disease, bad weather, rogue local officials, or bands of Kurds and outlaws. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny states that the main argument is “There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it.” Denial is usually accompanied by “rhetoric of Armenian treachery, aggression, criminality, and territorial ambition.”
One of the most important reasons for this denial is that the genocide enabled the establishment of a Turkish nation-state. Recognition would contradict Turkey’s founding myths. Since the 1920s, Turkey has worked to prevent official recognition or even mention of the genocide in other countries; these efforts have included millions of dollars spent on lobbying, the creation of research institutes, and intimidation and threats. Denial also affects Turkey’s domestic policies and is taught in Turkish schools; some Turkish citizens who acknowledge the genocide have faced prosecution for “insulting Turkishness”. The century-long effort by the Turkish state to deny the genocide sets it apart from other cases of genocide in history. Azerbaijan also denies the genocide and campaigns against its recognition internationally. Most Turkish citizens and political parties in Turkey support the state’s denial policy. The denial of the genocide contributes to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as well as ongoing violence against Kurds in Turkey.
Holocaust Denial
Holocaust denial refers to denial of the murder of 5 to 6 million Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War 2. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event.” In this context, the term is a subset of the more accurate genocide denial, which is a form of politically motivated denialism.
Srebrenica Massacre Denialism
Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Bečirević, the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo have pointed to a culture of denial of the Srebrenica massacre in Serbian society, taking many forms and present in particular in political discourse, the media, the law and the educational system.
The behavioural analysis of child development originates from John B. Watson’s behaviourism.
Brief History
In 1948, Sidney Bijou took a position as associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington and served as director of the university’s Institute of Child Development. Under his leadership, the Institute added a child development clinic and nursery school classrooms where they conducted research that would later accumulate into the are that would be called “Behaviour Analysis of Child Development”. Skinner’s behavioural approach and Kantor’s interbehavioural approach were adopted in Bijou and Baer’s model. They created a three-stage model of development (basic, foundational, and societal). Bijou and Baer looked at these socially determined stages, as opposed to organising behaviour into change points or cusps (behavioural cusp). In the behavioural model, development is considered a behavioural change. It is dependent on the kind of stimulus and the person’s behavioural and learning function. Behaviour analysis in child development takes a mechanistic, contextual, and pragmatic approach.
From its inception, the behavioural model has focused on prediction and control of the developmental process. The model focuses on the analysis of a behaviour and then synthesizes the action to support the original behaviour. The model was changed after Richard J. Herrnstein studied the matching law of choice behaviour developed by studying of reinforcement in the natural environment. More recently, the model has focused more on behaviour over time and the way that behavioural responses become repetitive. it has become concerned with how behaviour is selected over time and forms into stable patterns of responding. A detailed history of this model was written by Pelaez. In 1995, Henry D. Schlinger, Jr. provided the first behaviour analytic text since Bijou and Baer comprehensively showed how behaviour analysis – a natural science approach to human behaviour – could be used to understand existing research in child development. In addition, the quantitative behavioural developmental model by Commons and Miller is the first behavioural theory and research to address notion similar to stage.
Research Methods
The methods used to analyse behaviour in child development are based on several types of measurements. Single-subject research with a longitudinal study follow-up is a commonly-used approach. Current research is focused on integrating single-subject designs through meta-analysis to determine the effect sizes of behavioural factors in development. Lag sequential analysis has become popular for tracking the stream of behaviour during observations. Group designs are increasingly being used. Model construction research involves latent growth modelling to determine developmental trajectories and structural equation modelling. Rasch analysis is now widely used to show sequentially within a developmental trajectory.
A recent methodological change in the behavioural analytic theory is the use of observational methods combined with lag sequential analysis can determine reinforcement in the natural setting.
Quantitative Behavioural Development
The model of hierarchical complexity is a quantitative analytic theory of development. This model offers an explanation for why certain tasks are acquired earlier than others through developmental sequences and gives an explanation of the biological, cultural, organisational, and individual principles of performance. It quantifies the order of hierarchical complexity of a task based on explicit and mathematical measurements of behaviour.
Research
Contingencies, Uncertainty, and Attachment
The behavioural model of attachment recognises the role of uncertainty in an infant and the child’s limited communication abilities. Contingent relationships are instrumental in the behaviour analytic theory, because much emphasis is put on those actions that produce parents’ responses.
The importance of contingency appears to be highlighted in other developmental theories, but the behavioural model recognises that contingency must be determined by two factors:
The efficiency of the action; and
That efficiency compared to other tasks that the infant might perform at that point.
Both infants and adults function in their environments by understanding these contingent relationships. Research has shown that contingent relationships lead to emotionally satisfying relationships.
Since 1961, behavioural research has shown that there is relationship between the parents’ responses to separation from the infant and outcomes of a “stranger situation.”. In a study done in 2000, six infants participated in a classic reversal design (refer to single-subject research) study that assessed infant approach rate to a stranger. If attention was based on stranger avoidance, the infant avoided the stranger. If attention was placed on infant approach, the infant approached the stranger.
Recent meta-analytic studies of this model of attachment based on contingency found a moderate effect of contingency on attachment, which increased to a large effect size when the quality of reinforcement was considered. Other research on contingency highlights its effect on the development of both pro-social and anti-social behaviour. These effects can also be furthered by training parents to become more sensitive to children’s behaviours, Meta-analytic research supports the notion that attachment is operant-based learning.
An infant’s sensitivity to contingencies can be affected by biological factors and environment changes. Studies show that being placed in erratic environments with few contingencies may cause a child to have conduct problems and may lead to depression (see Behavioural Development and Depression below). Research continues to look at the effects of learning-based attachment on moral development. Some studies have shown that erratic use of contingencies by parents early in life can produce devastating long-term effects for the child.
Motor Development
Since Watson developed the theory of behaviourism, behaviour analysts have held that motor development represents a conditioning process. This holds that crawling, climbing, and walking displayed by infants represents conditioning of biologically innate reflexes. In this case, the reflex of stepping is the respondent behaviour and these reflexes are environmentally conditioned through experience and practice. This position was criticised by maturation theorists. They believed that the stepping reflex for infants actually disappeared over time and was not “continuous”. By working with a slightly different theoretical model, while still using operant conditioning, Esther Thelen was able to show that children’s stepping reflex disappears as a function of increased physical weight. However, when infants were placed in water, that same stepping reflex returned. This offered a model for the continuity of the stepping reflex and the progressive stimulation model for behaviour analysts.
Infants deprived of physical stimulation or the opportunity to respond were found to have delayed motor development. Under conditions of extra stimulation, the motor behaviour of these children rapidly improved. Some research has shown that the use of a treadmill can be beneficial to children with motor delays including Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. Research on opportunity to respond and the building of motor development continues today.
The behavioural development model of motor activity has produced a number of techniques, including operant-based biofeedback to facilitate development with success. Some of the stimulation methods such as operant-based biofeedback have been applied as treatment to children with cerebral palsy and even spinal injury successfully. Brucker’s group demonstrated that specific operant conditioning-based biofeedback procedures can be effective in establishing more efficient use of remaining and surviving central nervous system cells after injury or after birth complications (like cerebral palsy). While such methods are not a cure and gains tend to be in the moderate range, they do show ability to enhance functioning.
Imitation and Verbal Behavior
Behaviourists have studied verbal behaviour since the 1920s. E.A. Esper (1920) studied associative models of language, which has evolved into the current language interventions of matrix training and recombinative generalisation. Skinner (1957) created a comprehensive taxonomy of language for speakers. Baer, along with Zettle and Haynes (1989), provided a developmental analysis of rule-governed behaviour for the listener. and for the listener Zettle and Hayes (1989) with Don Baer providing a developmental analysis of rule-governed behaviour. According to Skinner, language learning depends on environmental variables, which can be mastered by a child through imitation, practice, and selective reinforcement including automatic reinforcement.
B.F. Skinner was one of the first psychologists to take the role of imitation in verbal behaviour as a serious mechanism for acquisition. He identified echoic behaviour as one of his basic verbal operants, postulating that verbal behaviour was learned by an infant from a verbal community. Skinner’s account takes verbal behaviour beyond an intra-individual process to an inter-individual process. He defined verbal behaviour as “behaviour reinforced through the mediation of others”. Noam Chomsky refuted Skinner’s assumptions.
In the behavioural model, the child is prepared to contact the contingencies to “join” the listener and speaker. At the very core, verbal episodes involve the rotation of the roles as speaker and listener. These kinds of exchanges are called conversational units and have been the focus of research at Columbia’s communication disorders department.
Conversational units is a measure of socialisation because they consist of verbal interactions in which the exchange is reinforced by both the speaker and the listener. H.C. Chu (1998) demonstrated contextual conditions for inducing and expanding conversational units between children with autism and non-handicapped siblings in two separate experiments. The acquisition of conversational units and the expansion of verbal behaviour decrease incidences of physical “aggression” in the Chu study and several other reviews suggest similar effects. The joining of the listener and speaker progresses from listener speaker rotations with others as a likely precedent for the three major components of speaker-as-own listener – say so correspondence, self-talk conversational units, and naming.
Development of Self
Robert Kohelenberg and Mavis Tsai (1991) created a behaviour analytic model accounting for the development of one’s “self”. Their model proposes that verbal processes can be used to form a stable sense of who we are through behavioural processes such as stimulus control. Kohlenberg and Tsai developed functional analytic psychotherapy to treat psychopathological disorders arising from the frequent invalidations of a child’s statements such that “I” does not emerge. Other behaviour analytic models for personality disorders exist. They trace out the complex biological-environmental interaction for the development of avoidant and borderline personality disorders. They focus on Reinforcement sensitivity theory, which states that some individuals are more or less sensitive to reinforcement than others. Nelson-Grey views problematic response classes as being maintained by reinforcing consequences or through rule governance.
Socialisation
Over the last few decades, studies have supported the idea that contingent use of reinforcement and punishment over extended periods of time lead to the development of both pro-social and anti-social behaviours. However research has shown that reinforcement is more effective than punishment when teaching behaviour to a child. It has also been shown that modelling is more effective than “preaching” in developing pro-social behaviour in children. Rewards have also been closely studied in relation to the development of social behaviours in children. The building of self-control, empathy, and cooperation has all implicated rewards as a successful tactic, while sharing has been strongly linked with reinforcement.
The development of social skills in children is largely affected in that classroom setting by both teachers and peers. Reinforcement and punishment play major roles here as well. Peers frequently reinforce each other’s behaviour. One of the major areas that teachers and peers influence is sex-typed behaviour, while peers also largely influence modes of initiating interaction, and aggression. Peers are more likely to punish cross-gender play while at the same time reinforcing play specific to gender. Some studies found that teachers were more likely to reinforce dependent behaviour in females.
Behavioural principles have also been researched in emerging peer groups, focusing on status. Research shows that it takes different social skills to enter groups than it does to maintain or build one’s status in groups. Research also suggests that neglected children are the least interactive and aversive, yet remain relatively unknown in groups. Children suffering from social problems do see an improvement in social skills after behaviour therapy and behaviour modification (refer to applied behaviour analysis). Modelling has been successfully used to increase participation by shy and withdrawn children. Shaping of socially desirable behaviour through positive reinforcement seems to have some of the most positive effects in children experiencing social problems.
Anti-Social Behaviour
In the development of anti-social behaviour, aetiological models for anti-social behaviour show considerable correlation with negative reinforcement and response matching (refer to matching law). Escape conditioning, through the use of coercive behaviour, has a powerful effect on the development and use of future anti-social tactics. The use of anti-social tactics during conflicts can be negatively reinforced and eventually seen as functional for the child in moment to moment interactions. Anti-social behaviours will also develop in children when imitation is reinforced by social approval. If approval is not given by teachers or parents, it can often be given by peers. An example of this is swearing. Imitating a parent, brother, peer, or a character on TV, a child may engage in the anti-social behaviour of swearing. Upon saying it they may be reinforced by those around them which will lead to an increase in the anti-social behaviour. The role of stimulus control has also been extensively explored in the development of anti-social behaviour. Recent behavioural focus in the study of anti-social behaviour has been a focus on rule-governed behaviour. While correspondence for saying and doing has long been an interest for behaviour analysts in normal development and typical socialisation, recent conceptualisations have been built around families that actively train children in anti-social rules, as well as children who fail to develop rule control.
Developmental Depression with Origins in Childhood
Behavioural theory of depression was outlined by Charles Ferster. A later revision was provided by Peter Lewisohn and Hyman Hops. Hops continued the work on the role of negative reinforcement in maintaining depression with Anthony Biglan. Additional factors such as the role of loss of contingent relations through extinction and punishment were taken from early work of Martin Seligman. The most recent summary and conceptual revisions of the behavioural model was provided by Johnathan Kanter. The standard model is that depression has multiple paths to develop. It can be generated by five basic processes, including: lack or loss of positive reinforcement, direct positive or negative reinforcement for depressive behaviour, lack of rule-governed behaviour or too much rule-governed behaviour, and/or too much environmental punishment. For children, some of these variables could set the pattern for lifelong problems. For example, a child whose depressive behaviour functions for negative reinforcement by stopping fighting between parents could develop a lifelong pattern of depressive behaviour in the case of conflicts. Two paths that are particularly important are:
Lack or loss of reinforcement because of missing necessary skills at a developmental cusp point; or
The failure to develop adequate rule-governed behaviour.
For the latter, the child could develop a pattern of always choosing the short-term small immediate reward (i.e. escaping studying for a test) at the expense of the long-term larger reward (passing courses in middle school). The treatment approach that emerged from this research is called behavioural activation.
In addition, use of positive reinforcement has been shown to improve symptoms of depression in children. Reinforcement has also been shown to improve the self-concept in children with depression comorbid with learning difficulties. Rawson and Tabb (1993) used reinforcement with 99 students (90 males and 9 females) aged from 8 to 12 with behaviour disorders in a residential treatment program and showed significant reduction in depression symptoms compared to the control group.
Cognitive Behaviour
As children get older, direct control of contingencies is modified by the presence of rule-governed behaviour. Rules serve as an establishing operation and set a motivational stage as well as a discrimintative stage for behaviour. While the size of the effects on intellectual development are less clear, it appears that stimulation does have a facilitative effect on intellectual ability. However, it is important to be sure not to confuse the enhancing effect with the initial causal effect. Some data exists to show that children with developmental delays take more learning trials to acquire in material.
Learned Units and Developmental Retardation
Behaviour analysts have spent considerable time measuring learning in both the classroom and at home. In these settings, the role of a lack of stimulation has often been evidenced in the development of mild and moderate mental retardation. Recent work has focused on a model of “developmental retardation,”. an area that emphasizes cumulative environmental effects and their role in developmental delays. To measure these developmental delays, subjects are given the opportunity to respond, defined as the instructional antecedent, and success is signified by the appropriate response and/or fluency in responses. Consequently, the learned unit is identified by the opportunity to respond in addition to given reinforcement.
One study employed this model by comparing students’ time of instruction was in affluent schools to time of instruction in lower income schools. Results showed that lower income schools displayed approximately 15 minutes less instruction than more affluent schools due to disruptions in classroom management and behaviour management. Altogether, these disruptions culminated into two years worth of lost instructional time by grade 10. The goal of behaviour analytic research is to provide methods for reducing the overall number of children who fall into the retardation range of development by behavioural engineering.
Hart and Risely (1995, 1999) have completed extensive research on this topic as well. These researchers measured the rates of parent communication with children of the ages of 2-4 years and correlated this information with the IQ scores of the children at age 9. Their analyses revealed that higher parental communication with younger children was positively correlated with higher IQ in older children, even after controlling for race, class, and socio-economic status. Additionally, they concluded a significant change in IQ scores required intervention with at-risk children for approximately 40 hours per week.
Class Formation
The formation of class-like behaviour has also been a significant aspect in the behavioural analysis of development. This research has provided multiple explanations to the development and formation of class-like behaviour, including primary stimulus generalisation, an analysis of abstraction, relational frame theory, stimulus class analysis (sometimes referred to as recombinative generalisation), stimulus equivalence, and response class analysis. Multiple processes for class-like formation provide behaviour analysts with relatively pragmatic explanations for common issues of novelty and generalisation.
Responses are organised based upon the particular form needed to fit the current environmental challenges as well as the functional consequences. An example of large response classes lies in contingency adduction, which is an area that needs much further research, especially with a focus on how large classes of concepts shift. For example, as Piaget observed, individuals have a tendency at the pre-operational stage to have limits in their ability to preserve information. While children’s training in the development of conservation skills has been generally successful, complications have been noted. Behaviour analysts argue that this is largely due to the number of tool skills that need to be developed and integrated. Contingency adduction offers a process by which such skills can be synthesized and which shows why it deserves further attention, particularly by early childhood interventionists.
Autism
Ferster (1961) was the first researcher to posit a behaviour analytic theory for autism. Ferster’s model saw autism as a by-product of social interactions between parent and child. Ferster presented an analysis of how a variety of contingencies of reinforcement between parent and child during early childhood might establish and strengthen a repertoire of behaviours typically seen in children diagnosed with autism. A similar model was proposed by Drash and Tutor (1993), who developed the contingency-shaped or behavioural incompatibility theory of autism. They identified at least six reinforcement paradigms that may contribute to significant deficiencies in verbal behaviour typically characteristic of children diagnosed as autistic. They proposed that each of these paradigms may also create a repertoire of avoidance responses that could contribute to the establishment of a repertoire of behaviour that would be incompatible with the acquisition of age-appropriate verbal behaviour. More recent models attribute autism to neurological and sensory models that are overly worked and subsequently produce the autistic repertoire. Lovaas and Smith (1989) proposed that children with autism have a mismatch between their nervous systems and the environment, while Bijou and Ghezzi (1999) proposed a behavioural interference theory. However, both the environmental mismatch model and the inference model were recently reviewed, and new evidence shows support for the notion that the development of autistic behaviours are due to escape and avoidance of certain types of sensory stimuli. However, most behavioural models of autism remain largely speculative due to limited research efforts.
Role in Education
One of the largest impacts of behaviour analysis of child development is its role in the field of education. In 1968, Siegfried Englemann used operant conditioning techniques in a combination with rule learning to produce the direct instruction curriculum. In addition, Fred S. Keller used similar techniques to develop programmed instruction. B.F. Skinner developed a programmed instruction curriculum for teaching handwriting. One of Skinner’s students, Ogden Lindsley, developed a standardized semilogrithmic chart, the “Standard Behaviour Chart,” now “Standard Celeration Chart,” used to record frequencies of behaviour, and to allow direct visual comparisons of both frequencies and changes in those frequencies (termed “celeration”). The use of this charting tool for analysis of instructional effects or other environmental variables through the direct measurement of learner performance has become known as precision teaching.
Behaviour analysts with a focus on behavioural development form the basis of a movement called positive behaviour support (PBS). PBS has focused on building safe schools.
In education, there are many different kinds of learning that are implemented to improve skills needed for interactions later in life. Examples of this differential learning include social and language skills. According to the NWREL (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory), too much interaction with technology will hinder a child’s social interactions with others due to its potential to become an addiction and subsequently lead to anti-social behaviour. In terms of language development, children will start to learn and know about 5-20 different words by 18 months old.
Critiques of Behavioural Approach and New Developments
Behaviour analytic theories have been criticized for their focus on the explanation of the acquisition of relatively simple behaviour (i.e. the behaviour of nonhuman species, of infants, and of individuals who are intellectually disabled or autistic) rather than of complex behaviour. Michael Commons continued behaviour analysis’s rejection of mentalism and the substitution of a task analysis of the particular skills to be learned. In his new model, Commons has created a behaviour analytic model of more complex behaviour in line with more contemporary quantitative behaviour analytic models called the model of hierarchical complexity. Commons constructed the model of hierarchical complexity of tasks and their corresponding stages of performance using just three main axioms.
In the study of development, recent work has been generated regarding the combination of behaviour analytic views with dynamical systems theory. The added benefit of this approach is its portrayal of how small patterns of changes in behaviour in terms of principles and mechanisms over time can produce substantial changes in development.
Current research in behaviour analysis attempts to extend the patterns learned in childhood and to determine their impact on adult development.
Professional Organisations
The Association for Behaviour Analysis International has a special interest group for the behaviour analysis of child development.
Doctoral level behaviour analysts who are psychologists belong to American Psychological Association’s division 25: behaviour analysis.
The World Association for Behaviour Analysis has a certification in behaviour therapy. The exam draws questions on behavioural theories of child development as well as behavioural theories of child psychopathology.
True self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and false self (also known as fake self, idealised self, superficial self and pseudo self) are psychological concepts, originally introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by Donald Winnicott.
Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self. The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade, which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.
The concepts are often used in connection with narcissism.
Characteristics
Winnicott saw the true self as rooted from early infancy in the experience of being alive, including blood pumping and lungs breathing – what Winnicott called simply being. Out of this, the baby creates the experience of a sense of reality, a sense that life is worth living. The baby’s spontaneous, nonverbal gestures derive from that instinctual sense, and if responded to by the parents, become the basis for the continuing development of the true self.
However, when what Winnicott was careful to describe as good enough parenting – i.e., not necessarily perfect – was not in place, the infant’s spontaneity was in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with the parents’ wishes/expectations. The result for Winnicott could be the creation of what he called the false self, where “Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being”. The danger he saw was that “through this false self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real”, while, in fact, merely concealing a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade.
The danger was particularly acute where the baby had to provide attunement for the mother/parents, rather than vice versa, building up a sort of dissociated recognition of the object on an impersonal, not personal and spontaneous basis. But while such a pathological false self stifled the spontaneous gestures of the true self in favour of a lifeless imitation, Winnicott nevertheless considered it of vital importance in preventing something worse: the annihilating experience of the exploitation of the hidden true self itself.
Precursors
There was much in psychoanalytic theory on which Winnicott could draw for his concept of the false self. Helene Deutsch had described the “as if” personalities, with their pseudo relationships substituting for real ones. Winnicott’s analyst, Joan Riviere, had explored the concept of the narcissist’s masquerade – superficial assent concealing a subtle hidden struggle for control. Freud’s own late theory of the ego as the product of identifications came close to viewing it only as a false self; while Winnicott’s true/false distinction has also been compared to Michael Balint’s “basic fault” and to Ronald Fairbairn’s notion of the “compromised ego”.
Erich Fromm, in his book The Fear of Freedom distinguished between original self and pseudo self – the inauthenticality of the latter being a way to escape the loneliness of freedom; while much earlier the existentialist like Kierkegaard had claimed that “to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair” – the despair of choosing “to be another than himself”.
Karen Horney, in her 1950 book, Neurosis and Human Growth, based her idea of “true self” and “false self” through the view of self-improvement, interpreting it as real self and ideal self, with the real self being what one currently is and the ideal self being what one could become.
Later Developments
The second half of the twentieth century has seen Winnicott’s ideas extended and applied in a variety of contexts, both in psychoanalysis and beyond.
Kohut
Heinz Kohut extended Winnicott’s work in his investigation of narcissism, seeing narcissists as evolving a defensive armour around their damaged inner selves. He considered it less pathological to identify with the damaged remnants of the self, than to achieve coherence through identification with an external personality at the cost of one’s own autonomous creativity.
Lowen
Alexander Lowen identified narcissists as having a true and a false, or superficial, self. The false self rests on the surface, as the self presented to the world. It stands in contrast to the true self, which resides behind the façade or image. This true self is the feeling self, but for the narcissist the feeling self must be hidden and denied. Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the denial, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist’s acting out. And it can become a perverse force.
Masterson
James F. Masterson argued that all the personality disorders crucially involve the conflict between a person’s two selves: the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self. The psychotherapy of personality disorders is an attempt to put people back in touch with their real selves.
Symington
Neville Symington developed Winnicott’s contrast between true and false self to cover the sources of personal action, contrasting an autonomous and a discordant source of action – the latter drawn from the internalisation of external influences and pressures. Thus for example parental dreams of self-glorification by way of their child’s achievements can be internalised as an alien discordant source of action. Symington stressed however the intentional element in the individual’s abandoning the autonomous self in favour of a false self or narcissistic mask – something he considered Winnicott to have overlooked.
Vaknin
As part of what has been described as a personal mission to raise the profile of the condition, psychology professor (and self-confessed narcissist) Sam Vaknin has highlighted the role of the false self in narcissism. The false self replaces the narcissist’s true self and is intended to shield him from hurt and narcissistic injury by self-imputing omnipotence. The narcissist pretends that his false self is real and demands that others affirm this confabulation, meanwhile keeping his real imperfect true self under wraps.
For Vaknin, the false self is by far more important to the narcissist than his dilapidated, dysfunctional true self; and he does not subscribe to the view that the true self can be resuscitated through therapy.
Miller
Alice Miller cautiously warns that a child/patient may not have any formed true self, waiting behind the false self façade; and that as a result freeing the true self is not as simple as the Winnicottian image of the butterfly emerging from its cocoon. If a true self can be developed, however, she considered that the empty grandiosity of the false self could give way to a new sense of autonomous vitality.
Orbach (False Bodies)
Susie Orbach saw the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects – of the full potential of the self – producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself. Orbach went on to extend Winnicott’s account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body, so as to cover the idea of the false body – falsified sense of one’s own body. Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability. Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the patient.
Jungian Persona
Jungians have explored the overlap between Carl Jung’s concept of the persona and Winnicott’s false self; but, while noting similarities, consider that only the most rigidly defensive persona approximates to the pathological status of the false self.
Stern’s Tripartite Self
Daniel Stern considered Winnicott’s sense of “going on being” as constitutive of the core, pre-verbal self. He also explored how language could be used to reinforce a false sense of self, leaving the true self linguistically opaque and disavowed. He ended, however, by proposing a three-fold division of social, private, and of disavowed self.
Criticisms
Neville Symington criticised Winnicott for failing to integrate his false self insight with the theory of ego and id. Similarly, continental analysts like Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have made use of true/false self as a clinical distinction, while having reservations about its theoretical status.
The philosopher Michel Foucault took issue more broadly with the concept of a true self on the anti-essentialist grounds that the self was a construct – something one had to evolve through a process of subjectification, an aesthetics of self-formation, not something simply waiting to be uncovered: “we have to create ourselves as a work of art”.
Literary Examples
Wuthering Heights has been interpreted in terms of the true self’s struggle to break through the conventional overlay.
In the novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the heroine saw her outward personality as a mere ghost of a Semblance, behind which her true self hid ever more completely.
Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been interpreted in terms of the conflict of the true and false selves.
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