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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
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[Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]
“Every night, I bring home a pile of work to do...I’ve been doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will…get through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.”
Robert Cialdini and David Buss also mentioned thoughts along similar lines. Cialdini wrote about never learning to balance. He said, “my most nagging error [is] an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking - or even golden opportunity - should be firmly rejected. Whenever I've allowed one-too-many responsibilities onto my plate, everything has suffered from the overcrowding…I've no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work.”
And Buss coins the problem “overcoming irrationality.” He wrote,
“One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at…forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment, when in fact the happiness dissipates...Another is…misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.”
So don’t beat yourself up. The experts may know what to do. But it doesn’t mean they can do it any better than the rest of us.
—Christie Nicholson
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7 Comments
Add CommentHoly Smoke; what a failure of self-examination! The point of the question was to examine the irony of expertise. If you look, you will see that only 4 of the 23 psychologists reported something about themselves that addressed the spirit of the question. Several used the question as an opportunity to state that they did not understand why they were so wonderful. Jerome Kagan does not understand why he is so much smarter than his peers. This question failed to prod self-examination. Rather, it stimulated narcissism. I think that may tell us something about these psychologists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs it not surprising that ancient sages in India (see for example Sankara's commentary on the fourth rule of Brahmasutras) distinguished Knowledge (jnaanam) from Action (karma)? Knowledge dispels ignorance whereas action produces a result.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe ancients held "Knowledge" to be superior to action because true "Knowledge" immediately frees a man from illusions like mistaking a rope to be a snake or believing ignorantly the world to be real. No more action is required here. But one needs to act only if (s)he is desirous of getting a specific outcome - to go somewhere, to modify a thing or to produce a new thing.
Knowing something is another thing. Acting on what we know is another story. Just because we know something doesn't mean we SHOULD act on it though we know that sometimes we should. Our personaly will still prevails.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis is so interesting i never realized that i do this and from listening to this it is apparent we all have some serious issues lol
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisinteresting topic, but i agree with Paul Rozin that we get a lot of work to do in one night and we never finish. It always happen to me , we never learn. Never give up ( that's true) and nobody will be better that you, you always have to try your best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi don't think those psychologists were actually talking sincerely about their concerns and it wastes our time to try to find useful informations in this
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe last "thought process" by Buss of overcoming irrationality is probably what every man goes through. They think they can get things done faster than what they really can, they misinterpret a womans friendlyness for sexual interest and briefly being happy about an accomplishment, but as soon as we see others who have accomplished something more or better, that happiness dissipates.
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