Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

422 I HOW THE MIND WORKSship is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learnfrom past mistakes."The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has shown that the brainblithely weaves false explanations about its motives. Split-brain patientshave had their cerebral hemispheres surgically disconnected as a treatmentfor epilepsy. Language circuitry is in the left hemisphere, and theleft half of the visual field is registered in the isolated right hemisphere,so the part of the split-brain person that can talk is unaware of the lefthalf of his world. The right hemisphere is still active, though, and cancarry out simple commands presented in the left visual field, like "Walk"or "Laugh." When the patient (actually, the patient's left hemisphere) isasked why he walked out (which we know was a response to the commandpresented to the right hemisphere), he ingenuously replies, "To geta Coke." When asked why he is laughing, he says, "You guys come upand test us every month. What a way to make a living!"Our confabulations, not coincidentally, present us in the best light.Literally hundreds of experiments in social psychology say so. Thehumorist Garrison Keillor describes the fictitious community of LakeWobegon, "where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, andall the children are above average." Indeed, most people claim they areabove average in any positive trait you name: leadership, sophistication,athletic prowess, managerial ability, even driving skill. They rationalizethe boast by searching for an aspect of the trait that they might in fact begood at. The slow drivers say they are above average in safety, the fastones that they are above average in reflexes.More generally, we delude ourselves about how benevolent and howeffective we are, a combination that social psychologists call beneffectance.When subjects play games that are rigged by the experimenter,they attribute their successes to their own skill and their failures to theluck of the draw. When they are fooled in a fake experiment into thinkingthey have delivered shocks to another subject, they derogate the victim,implying that he deserved the punishment. Everyone has heard of"reducing cognitive dissonance," in which people invent a new opinion toresolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recallenjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltrypay. (If the person had been enticed to recommend the task for generouspay, he accurately recalls that the task was boring.) As originallyconceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance isan unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistency in one's beliefs.