Dakota

Denial and Projection

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If you really read to the end of the discussion between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers in the last entry, then read no further, or read it again. Attention is everything. Feel free to simply look at the picture and try to figure out why it was chosen, or watch something uncanny instead.

Noam Chomsky: Are there ways of studying self-deception?

Robert Trivers Yes, there was a brilliant study by [Ruben] Gur and [Harold] Sackeim, about 20 years ago—which was a very difficult one to do then, you could do it much more easily now—based on the fact that we respond to hearing our own voice with greater arousal than we do to hearing another human's voice. In both cases we show physiological arousal—galvanic skin response is one such measure. There's twice as big a jump if you hear your own voice.

Now, what you can do is have people matched for age and sex, read the same boring paragraph from Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolution," chop it up into two, four, six and 12 second segments, and create a master tape where some of the time they're hearing their own voice, but a lot of the time they're not.

Then they've got to press a button indicating if they think it's their own and a second button to indicate how sure they are. But meanwhile they have the galvanic skin response.

Now they discovered two interesting things. First of all, some people denied their own voice some of the time but the skin always had it right. Some projected their own voice some of the time, the skin always had it right.

The deniers denied the denial, but half the time, the projectors were willing to admit afterwards that they thought they'd made the mistake of projection.

NC: What do you think the reason for that is?

RT: The difference between the projectors and the deniers? Well, I don't have a good way of putting it, Noam, but to me when you want to deny reality, you've got to act quickly and get it out of sight. The deniers also showed the highest levels of galvanic skin response to all stimuli. It's like they were primed to do it. And inventing reality is a little bit more of a relaxed enterprise I suppose.

NC: It's not as threatening.

RT: Yes, something like that. The final thing Gur and Sackeim showed was that they could manipulate it. Psychologists have lots of devices for making you feel bad about yourself, and one of them is just to give you an exam. They did this with university students. Then they told half of them, you did lousy, and half of them, you did well.

And what they found was that those who were made to feel badly about themselves started to deny their own voice more, while those who were feeling good started hearing themselves talking when they weren't. Now since we didn't evolve to hear our voice on a tape recorder, we have to interpret here. But it's like self-presentation is contracting on your failure and expanding on your success.

But back to your question, among animals, birds in particular have been shown to have the same physiological arousal that humans do—arousal to their own species song, and more arousal to their particular voice.

NC: So higher for their species and still higher for themselves?

RT: Exactly.

NC: Is there any kin effect?

RT: That's a good question, and I don't know the answer. In general, kin relations in birds are poorly developed—they often don't even nest next to their relatives.
But in principle I thought you could run a Gur and Sackeim experiment on birds, where pecking could substitute for pushing the button on the computer. You would train them in a reward system to peck when they recognize their own song.

NC: So how do you get to self-deceit from this?

RT: Well, you would manipulate them once again by, for example, subjecting some birds to negative experiences like losing fights, which you could rig by matching them with animals that are somewhat larger than them. And similarly, others would get to win fights. And then you could see if there's a tendency to deny self.

NC: You might be interested in a book that's coming out by a very smart guy, James Peck, a Sinologist, who has a book coming out called Washington's China, in which he does a very in-depth analysis of the National Security culture. It's about the imagery of China that was constructed in Washington.

He went through the National Security Council literature, background literature and so on, and he does both an analysis of content and a psychological analysis. I was reminded of it the whole time you were talking.

Information is often somewhere in the organism; it's just well-hidden, down in the unconscious. And it's often inaccessible because you build up firewalls against it.

What he says is that there are elaborate techniques of self-deception to try to build a framework in which we can justify things like, say, invading or overthrowing the government of Guatemala, on the basis of some new objective. And it's done by making everything simple. You have to make it clearer than the truth.

RT: Right.

NC: And as this picture gets created internally and built up by each group of National Security staffers, it becomes like a real fundamentalist religion, showing extraordinary self-deceit. And then you end up with the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds.

RT: I've been appalled lately when I pass a newsstand and there's some article, "China, the Next Threat," saying, "Now we've got to mobilize all our energy against China"—and they're talking military.

NC: That's interesting, because the threat of China is not military.

RT: Exactly.

NC: The threat of China is they can't be intimidated—in fact it's very similar to what you've described. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it.

RT: Right.

NC: You look at history and understand why—China's been around for 4,000 years and just doesn't give a damn. So the West screams, and they just go ahead and take over a big piece of Saudi or Iranian oil. You can't intimidate them—it's driving people in Washington berserk.

But, you know, of all the major powers, they've been the least aggressive militarily.

RT: No, the obvious threat—I mean, the obvious "threat"—is economic.

NC: And I think they plan it carefully. Like when President Hu Jintao was in Washington. When he left, he was going on a world trip. The next stop was Saudi Arabia. And that's a slap in the face to the US. It's just saying, "We don't care what you say."

RT: Right.

NC: I'm sure it was planned. That's the kind of thing that intimidates. It's a little bit like a gorilla pounding at its chest.

RT: Yeah, exactly. More power to them.

Joggling denial and projection is a difficult task. Hopefully it's not hopeless.

Photo note: A book cover shot in the window of the Lorem Ipsum Bookstore. A loose association that even I don't quite understand.

Posted by Dakota at September 7, 2006 02:13 PM