Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  I soon had an occasion to apply what I had learned from Feller. The Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, and my only significant contribution to the war effort was to advise high officers in the Israeli Air Force to stop an investigation. The air war initially went quite badly for Israel, because of the unexpectedly good performance of Egyptian ground-to-air missiles. Losses were high, and they appeared to be unevenly distributed. I was told of two squadrons flying from the same base, one of which had lost four planes while the other had lost none. An inquiry was initiated in the hope of learning what it was that the unfortunate squadron was doing wrong. There was no prior reason to believe that one of the squadrons was more effective than the other, and no operational differences were found, but of course the lives of the pilots differed in many random ways, including, as I recall, how often they went home between missions and something about the conduct of debriefings. My advice was that the command should accept that the different outcomes were due to blind luck, and that the interviewing of the pilots should stop. I reasoned that luck was the most likely answer, that a random search for a nonobvious cause was hopeless, and that in the meantime the pilots in the squadron that had sustained losses did not need the extra burden of being made to feel that they and their dead friends were at fault. Some years later, Amos and his students Tom Gilovich and Robert Vallone caused a stir with their study of misperceptions of randomness in basketball. The “fact” that players occasionally acquire a hot hand is generally accepted by players, coaches, and fans. The inference is irresistible: a player sinks three or four baskets in a row and you cannot help forming the causal judgment that this player is now hot, with a temporarily increased propensity to score. Players on both teams adapt to this judgment—teammates are more likely to pass to the hot scorer and the defense is more likely to doubleteam. Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line. Of course, some players are more accurate than others, but the sequence of successes and missed shots satisfies all tests of randomness. The hot hand is entirely in the eye of the beholders, who are consistently too quick to perceive order and causality in randomness. The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion. The public reaction to this research is part of the story. The finding was picked up by the press because of its surprising conclusion, and the general response was disbelief. When the celebrated coach of the Boston Celtics, Red Auerbach, heard of Gilovich and his study, he responded, “Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less.” The tendency to see patterns in

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  applied Schwarz’s discovery with gusto. For example, people: believe that they use their bicycles less often after recalling many rather than few instances are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it are less confident that an event was avoidable after listing more ways it could have been avoided are less impressed by a car after listing many of its advantages A professor at UCLA found an ingenious way to exploit the availability bias. He asked different groups of students to list ways to improve the course, and he varied the required number of improvements. As expected, the students who listed more ways to improve the class rated it higher! Perhaps the most interesting finding of this paradoxical research is that the paradox is not always found: people sometimes go by content rather than by ease of retrieval. The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it. Schwarz and his colleagues took on this challenge of discovering the conditions under which this reversal would take place. The ease with which instances of assertiveness come to the subject’s mind changes during the task. The first few instances are easy, but retrieval soon becomes much harder. Of course, the subject also expects fluency to drop gradually, but the drop of fluency between six and twelve instances appears to be steeper than the participant expected. The results suggest that the participants make an inference: if I am having so much more trouble than expected coming up with instances of my assertiveness, then I can’t be very assertive. Note that this inference rests on a surprise—fluency being worse than expected. The availability heuristic that the subjects apply is better described as an “unexplained unavailability” heuristic. Schwarz and his colleagues reasoned that they could disrupt the heuristic by providing the subjects with an explanation for the fluency of retrieval that they experienced. They told the participants they would hear background music while recalling instances and that the music would affect performance in the memory task. Some subjects were told that the music would help, others were told to expect diminished fluency. As predicted, participants whose experience of fluency was “explained” did not use it as a heuristic; the subjects who were told that music would make retrieval more difficult rated themselves as equally assertive when they retrieved twelve instances as when they retrieved six. Other

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina blinks. Wisps of hair have freed themselves from her ponytail and tremble in the light breeze. She swallows before speaking. “Youre, like, actually crazy.” Her tone borders on shock. “Like a sociopath or something. No one could believe you'd ask that. No one will believe it.” She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds as if she’s speaking to herself. “Just think about it.” “What am I, some kind of walking uterus to you? Have you seen pregnant women? Do you think I would choose to go through that just to play a part in giving a baby to your ex-lover? Do you have any respect for my body? Do you value me at all?” Ames tries to calm down, reminding himself how much he really cares about her. “Katrina. Please understand I mean this: I will support you however I can. But you’re not being exploited here. You actually do have the power. You say no, that’s a no. You tell me what to do, and I'll do it. But you’ve asked me for honesty all week—to tell you what I really think would work, and now I have.” Katrina stares at him in a strange wonder. Then with a sudden gesture of her hand she waves back the wonder, tucks away the moment the way you pocket the business card of someone you're sure you'll never call. At just that moment, Ames’s phone rings. It’s Biz Dev. He tilts the screen so she can see. “Take it?” he asks her. “Yeah, you better.” On Thursday, the pet insurance representatives sign a contract to add Web functionality to the app. No one mentions Katrina’s dinner behavior or drunken revelation. Only once does Ames catch Biz Dev scrutinizing him. On a break, Katrina says to him, “Maybe it will be fine? Maybe they just thought I was drunk.” To Ames it feels like wishful thinking, but too many other things crowd out his attention, so he agrees, and slowly begins to indulge in that same line of thought. It will be fine. Those guys don’t care, right? And so what if they do? On the plane ride home, they fly business, sitting beside each other. Katrina rubs his arm in a friendly, distracted way that he can’t make sense of, so he pats her hand in an avuncular manner that immediately dismays him. At LaGuardia, when he asks if she wants to share a cab, she declines. “I need some space. I need you to give me some time to myself. I’ll call when I feel like talking again.”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  events that are normal in a situation, though not sufficiently probable to be actively expected. A single incident may make a recurrence less surprising. Some years ago, my wife and I were vacationing in a small island resort on the Great Barrier Reef. There are only forty guest rooms on the island. When we came to dinner, we were surprised to meet an acquaintance, a psychologist named Jon. We greeted each other warmly and commented on the coincidence. Jon left the resort the next day. About two weeks later, we were in a theater in London. A latecomer sat next to me after the lights went down. When the lights came up for the intermission, I saw that my neighbor was Jon. My wife and I commented later that we were simultaneously conscious of two facts: first, this was a more remarkable coincidence than the first meeting; second, we were distinctly less surprised to meet Jon on the second occasion than we had been on the first. Evidently, the first meeting had somehow changed the idea of Jon in our minds. He was now “the psychologist who shows up when we travel abroad.” We (System 2) knew this was a ludicrous idea, but our System 1 had made it seem almost normal to meet Jon in strange places. We would have experienced much more surprise if we had met any acquaintance other than Jon in the next seat of a London theater. By any measure of probability, meeting Jon in the theater was no more likely than meeting any one of our hundreds of acquaintances—yet meeting Jon seemed more normal. Under some conditions, passive expectations quickly turn active, as we found in another coincidence. On a Sunday evening some years ago, we were driving from New York City to Princeton, as we had been doing every week for a long time. We saw an unusual sight: a car on fire by the side of the road. When we reached the same stretch of road the following Sunday, another car was burning there. Here again, we found that we were distinctly less surprised on the second occasion than we had been on the first. This was now “the place where cars catch fire.” Because the circumstances of the recurrence were the same, the second incident was sufficient to create an active expectation: for months, perhaps for years, after the event we were reminded of burning cars whenever we reached that spot of the road and were quite prepared to see another one (but of course we never did). The psychologist Dale Miller and I wrote an essay in which we attempted to explain how events come to be perceived as normal or abnormal. I will use an example from our description of “norm theory,” although my interpretation of it has changed slightly:

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  speaker of English recognizes, although less than 20% of a sample of students found it within 15 seconds. The answer is sky. Of course, not every triad of words has a solution. For example, the words dream, ball, book do not have a shared association that everyone will recognize as valid. Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive, light, rocket) and half unlinked (such as dream, ball, book), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind. The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked. Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimenters computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  first jump. Not a very satisfactory story—we would all prefer a causal account— but that is all there is. Understanding Regression Whether undetected or wrongly explained, the phenomenon of regression is strange to the human mind. So strange, indeed, that it was first identified and understood two hundred years after the theory of gravitation and differential calculus. Furthermore, it took one of the best minds of nineteenth-century Britain to make sense of it, and that with great difficulty. Regression to the mean was discovered and named late in the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin and a renowned polymath. You can sense the thrill of discovery in an article he published in 1886 under the title “Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature,” which reports measurements of size in successive generations of seeds and in comparisons of the height of children to the height of their parents. He writes about his studies of seeds: They yielded results that seemed very noteworthy, and I used them as the basis of a lecture before the Royal Institution on February 9th, 1877. It appeared from these experiments that the offspring did not tend to resemble their parent seeds in size, but to be always more mediocre than they—to be smaller than the parents, if the parents were large; to be larger than the parents, if the parents were very small...The experiments showed further that the mean filial regression towards mediocrity was directly proportional to the parental deviation from it. Galton obviously expected his learned audience at the Royal Institution—the oldest independent research society in the world—to be as surprised by his “noteworthy observation” as he had been. What is truly noteworthy is that he was surprised by a statistical regularity that is as common as the air we breathe. Regression effects can be found wherever we look, but we do not recognize them for what they are. They hide in plain sight. It took Galton several years to work his way from his discovery of filial regression in size to the broader notion that regression inevitably occurs when the correlation between two measures is less than perfect, and he needed the help of the most brilliant statisticians of his time to reach that conclusion. One of the hurdles Galton had to overcome was the problem of measuring

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Street. Malkiel’s central idea is that a stock’s price incorporates all the available knowledge about the value of the company and the best predictions about the future of the stock. If some people believe that the price of a stock will be higher tomorrow, they will buy more of it today. This, in turn, will cause its price to rise. If all assets in a market are correctly priced, no one can expect either to gain or to lose by trading. Perfect prices leave no scope for cleverness, but they also protect fools from their own folly. We now know, however, that the theory is not quite right. Many individual investors lose consistently by trading, an achievement that a dart-throwing chimp could not match. The first demonstration of this startling conclusion was collected by Terry Odean, a finance professor at UC Berkeley who was once my student. Odean began by studying the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors spanning a seven-year period. He was able to analyze every transaction the investors executed through that firm, nearly 163,000 trades. This rich set of data allowed Odean to identify all instances in which an investor sold some of his holdings in one stock and soon afterward bought another stock. By these actions the investor revealed that he (most of the investors were men) had a definite idea about the future of the two stocks: he expected the stock that he chose to buy to do better than the stock he chose to sell. To determine whether those ideas were well founded, Odean compared the returns of the stock the investor had sold and the stock he had bought in its place, over the course of one year after the transaction. The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares that individual traders sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.2 percentage points per year, above and beyond the significant costs of executing the two trades. It is important to remember that this is a statement about averages: some individuals did much better, others did much worse. However, it is clear that for the large majority of individual investors, taking a shower and doing nothing would have been a better policy than implementing the ideas that came to their minds. Later research by Odean and his colleague Brad Barber supported this conclusion. In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men. Of course, there is always someone on the other side of each transaction; in general, these are financial institutions and professional investors, who are ready to take advantage of the mistakes that individual traders make in choosing a

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Well then. Look, earlier today you were talking about wanting more,” he halts, uncertain all of a sudden. Oh my…where’s this going? He clasps my hand. “Outside of the time you’re my sub, perhaps we could try. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know about separating everything. It may not work. But I’m willing to try. Maybe one night a week. I don’t know.” Holy cow… My mouth drops open. My subconscious is in shock. Christian Grey is up for more! He’s willing to try! My subconscious peeks out from behind the couch, still registering shock on her harpy face. “I have one condition.” He looks warily at my stunned expression. “What?” Anything. I’ll give you anything. “You graciously accept my graduation present to you.” “Oh.” And deep down I know what it is. Dread spawns in my gut. He’s staring down at me, gauging my reaction. “Come,” he murmurs and rises, dragging me up. Taking his jacket off, he drapes it over my shoulders and heads for the door. Parked outside is a red hatchback car, a two-door compact Audi. “It’s for you. Happy graduation.” He pulls me into his arms and kisses my hair. He’s bought me a damned car, brand-new by the looks of it. Jeez…I’ve had enough trouble with the books. I stare at it blankly, trying desperately to determine how I feel about this. I am appalled on one level, grateful on another, shocked that he’s actually done it, but the overriding emotion is anger. Yes, I’m angry, especially after everything I told him about the books…but then he’d already bought this. Taking my hand, he leads me down the path toward this new acquisition. “Anastasia, that Beetle of yours is old and, frankly, dangerous. I would never forgive myself if something happened to you when it’s so easy for me to make it right.” His eyes are on me, but at the moment I cannot bring myself to look at him. I stand silently staring at its awesome bright-red newness. “I mentioned it to your stepfather. He was all for it,” he adds. Turning, I glare at him, my mouth open in horror. “You mentioned this to Ray? How could you?” I can barely spit the words out. How dare he? Poor Ray. I feel sick, mortified for my dad. “It’s a gift, Anastasia. Can’t you just say thank you?” “But you know it’s too much.” “Not to me it isn’t, not for my peace of mind.” I frown at him, at a loss what to say. He just doesn’t get it! He’s had money all his life. Okay, not all his life—not as a small child—and my worldview shifts. The thought is very sobering, and I soften toward the car, feeling guilty about my fit of pique. His intentions are good, misguided, but not from a bad place. “I’m happy for you to loan this to me, like the laptop.”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  The waitress arrives with our wine, and I immediately take a quick sip. Is he opening up or just making a casual observation? “I’ve really enjoyed this weekend,” I murmur. He narrows his eyes again. “Stop biting that lip,” he growls. “Me, too,” he adds. “What’s vanilla sex?” I ask, if anything to distract myself from the intense, burning, sexy look he’s giving me. He laughs. “Just straightforward sex, Anastasia. No toys, no add-ons.” He shrugs. “You know—well, actually you don’t, but that’s what it means.” “Oh.” I thought it was chocolate fudge brownie sex that we had, with a cherry on the top. But hey, what do I know? The waitress brings us soup. We both stare at it rather dubiously. “Nettle soup,” the waitress informs us before turning and flouncing back into the kitchen. I don’t think she likes to be ignored by Christian. I take a tentative taste. It’s delicious. Christian and I look up at each other at the same time with relief. I giggle, and he cocks his head to one side. “That’s a lovely sound,” he says. “Why have you never had vanilla sex before? Have you always done…what you’ve done?” I ask, intrigued. He nods slowly. “Sort of.” His voice is wary. He frowns for a moment and seems to be engaged in some kind of internal struggle. Then he glances up, a decision made. “One of my mother’s friends seduced me when I was fifteen.” “Oh.” Holy shit, that’s young! “She had very particular tastes. I was her submissive for six years.” He shrugs. “Oh.” My brain has frozen, stunned into inactivity by this admission. “So I do know what it involves, Anastasia.” His eyes glow with insight. I stare at him, unable to articulate anything—even my subconscious is silent. “I didn’t really have a run-of-the-mill introduction to sex.” Curiosity kicks in big time. “So you never dated anyone at college?” “No.” He shakes his head to emphasize the point. The waitress takes our bowls, interrupting us for a moment. “Why?” I ask when she’s gone. He smiles sardonically. “Do you really want to know?” “Yes.” “I didn’t want to. She was all I wanted, needed. And besides, she’d have beaten the shit out of me.” He smiles fondly at the memory. Oh, this is way too much information—but I want more. “So if she was a friend of your mother’s, how old was she?” He smirks. “Old enough to know better.” “Do you still see her?” “Yes.” “Do you still…er…?” I flush. “No.” He shakes his head and smiles indulgently. “She’s a very good friend.” “Oh. Does your mother know?” He gives me a don’t-be-stupid look. “Of course not.” The waitress returns with venison, but my appetite has vanished. What a revelation. Christian the submissive… Holy shit.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Patty, another waitress at the Madison diner where Reese worked, brought Sebastian in. The place was a kitschy Midwest diner, a necessary stop during campaign seasons, where presidential aspirants ate real middle-American pie for photo ops. In a presidential off-season, Sebastian stood out among the diner’s clientele. He wore a nutria fur coat and a sweatband, which, it still being a warm day in September, was perhaps the only thing he could have worn louder and more gauche than his own beauty. Between the outfit and the accent, Reese could not figure out whether he was gay. The first thing he said to her was “Your pants are stupid,” which settled that he was an asshole, but could have gone either way on the gay question. Under the short waitress apron in which she kept a notepad, she had on a pair of tight jeans dyed a faux snakeskin pattern that she thought created a curve-enhancing optical effect. “Your hair is stupid,” she shot back without thinking, then floundered, “...mullet-head.” “What’s a mullet?” he asked. “What’s on your head.” “Hmm.” He turned to Patty, and pulled a low-budget digital game with an LCD screen from the giant pocket on the jacket. “Come on, let’s keep playing.” He pronounced both the P and the L distinctly, so you could hear the puff of the puh and the light flick of his tongue against the back of his upper teeth in Jay. (A year or so later, working as a waitress in Manhattan, Reese discovered the contours of her own Wisconsin accent after repeatedly asking patrons if they'd like orange jews.) To Reese’s dismay, Sebastian came back to the diner the next day, without Patty, and sat at one of Reese’s tables. “What’s the best sweet?” he asked Reese. “T don’t know. Maybe key lime pie,” she suggested. He ordered two key lime pie slices, and when she set down the two plates before him, he pushed one across the table and commanded, “Eat with me.” “Tm working,” she said. “There’s almost no one in here,” he replied. “And I am trying to apologize.” Her pants were not stupid, he explained, they were beautiful, and some girls were so beautiful that they made him angry and she was one of these girls, and yesterday he was baked out of his mind, so he directed his anger at her pants. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I pass by a girl, and she is so beautiful, I just shout ‘fuck.’ ” She was so surprised she sat down with him. “Oh! Well, that explains why people have been shouting ‘fuck’ at me. I figured it was for something else.” “Because you used to be a boy, yeah?” Immediately she stood back up, her own “fuck” ready on her tongue. “T like that,” he said mildly, as though he hadn’t noticed how she sprang to her feet. “My first was someone like you. Older though. I was fifteen, she was twenty-seven.” “That’s illegal.”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I see him. My heart leaps, beginning a jittery thumping beat as he makes his way toward us. He’s really here—for me. My inner goddess leaps up cheering from her chaise longue. He moves smoothly through the crowd, his hair glinting burnished copper and red under the recessed halogens. His bright, gray eyes are shining with—anger? Tension? His mouth is set in a grim line, jaw tense. Oh, holy shit…no. I am so mad at him right now, and here he is. How can I be angry with him in front of my mother? He arrives at our table, gazing at me warily. He’s dressed in his customary white linen shirt and jeans. “Hi,” I squeak, unable to hide my shock and awe at seeing him here in the flesh. “Hi,” he replies, and leaning down, he kisses my cheek, taking me by surprise. “Christian, this is my mother, Carla.” My ingrained manners take over. He turns to greet my mom. “Mrs. Adams, I am delighted to meet you.” How does he know her name? He gives her the heart-stopping, Christian Grey–patented, full-blown, take-no-prisoners smile. She doesn’t have a hope. My mother’s lower jaw practically hits the table. Jeez, get a grip, Mom. She takes his proffered hand, and they shake. My mother hasn’t replied. Oh, complete dumbfounded speechlessness is genetic—I had no idea. “Christian,” she manages finally, breathlessly. He smiles knowingly at her, his gray eyes twinkling. I narrow my eyes at them both. “What are you doing here?” My question sounds more brittle than I mean, and his smile disappears, his expression now guarded. I’m thrilled to see him but completely thrown off balance, my anger about Mrs. Robinson simmering through my veins. I don’t know if I want to shout at him or throw myself into his arms—but I don’t think he’d like either—and I want to know how long he has been watching us. I’m also a little anxious about the email I just sent him. “I came to see you, of course.” He gazes down at me impassively. Oh, what is he thinking? “I’m staying in this hotel.” “You’re staying here?” I sound like a sophomore on amphetamines, too high-pitched even for my own ears. “Well, yesterday you said you wished I was here.” He pauses, trying to gauge my reaction. “We aim to please, Miss Steele.” His voice is quiet with no trace of humor. Crap, is he mad? Maybe the Mrs. Robinson comments? Or the fact that I am on my third, soon to be fourth, Cosmo? My mother is glancing anxiously at the two of us. “Won’t you join us for a drink, Christian?” She waves to the waiter, who is at her side in a nanosecond. “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” Christian says. “Hendrick’s if you have it, or Bombay Sapphire. Cucumber with the Hendrick’s, lime with the Bombay.” Holy hell. Only Christian could make a meal out of ordering a drink.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  uh-uh [choking sounds]. I...I’m gonna die-er-er-er I’m...gonna die-er-er-I seizure I-er [chokes, then quiet].” At this point the microphone of the next participant automatically became active, and nothing more was heard from the possibly dying individual. What do you think the participants in the experiment did? So far as the participants knew, one of them was having a seizure and had asked for help. However, there were several other people who could possibly respond, so perhaps one could stay safely in one’s booth. These were the results: only four of the fifteen participants responded immediately to the appeal for help. Six never got out of their booth, and five others came out only well after the “seizure victim” apparently choked. The experiment shows that individuals feel relieved of responsibility when they know that others have heard the same request for help. Did the results surprise you? Very probably. Most of us think of ourselves as decent people who would rush to help in such a situation, and we expect other decent people to do the same. The point of the experiment, of course, was to show that this expectation is wrong. Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take on the unpleasantness of dealing with a seizure. And that means you, too. Are you willing to endorse the following statement? “When I read the procedure of the helping experiment I thought I would come to the stranger’s help immediately, as I probably would if I found myself alone with a seizure victim. I was probably wrong. If I find myself in a situation in which other people have an opportunity to help, I might not step forward. The presence of others would reduce my sense of personal responsibility more than I initially thought.” This is what a teacher of psychology would hope you would learn. Would you have made the same inferences by yourself? The psychology professor who describes the helping experiment wants the students to view the low base rate as causal, just as in the case of the fictitious Yale exam. He wants them to infer, in both cases, that a surprisingly high rate of failure implies a very difficult test. The lesson students are meant to take away is that some potent feature of the situation, such as the diffusion of responsibility, induces normal and decent people such as them to behave in a surprisingly unhelpful way. Changing one’s mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one’s mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett and Borgida suspected that students would resist the work and the unpleasantness. Of course, the students would be able and willing to recite the details of the helping experiment on a test, and would even repeat the “official” interpretation in terms of diffusion

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  He moves us through the crowded throng of dancers to the other side of the dance floor, and we are beside Kate and Elliot, Christian’s brother. The music is pounding away, loud and leery, outside and inside my head. Oh no. Kate is making her moves. She’s dancing her ass off, and she only ever does that if she likes someone. Really likes someone. It means there’ll be three of us for breakfast tomorrow morning. Kate! Christian leans over and shouts in Elliot’s ear. I can’t hear what he says. Elliot is tall, with wide shoulders, curly blond hair, and light, wickedly gleaming eyes. I can’t tell their color under the pulsating heat of the flashing lights. Elliot grins and pulls Kate into his arms, where she is more than happy to be… Kate! Even in my inebriated state, I’m shocked. She’s only just met him. She nods at whatever Elliot says and grins at me and waves. Christian propels us off the dance floor in double time. But I never got to talk to her. Is she okay? I see where things are heading for her with him. I need to do the safe-sex lecture. I hope she reads one of the posters on the inside of the bathroom door. My thoughts crash through my brain, fighting the drunk, fuzzy feeling. It’s so warm in here, so loud, so colorful—too bright. My head begins to swim. Oh no…and I can feel the floor coming up to meet my face, or so it feels. The last thing I hear before I pass out in Christian Grey’s arms is his harsh epithet. “Fuck!” Chapter FiveIt’s very quiet. The light is muted. I am comfortable and warm in this bed. Hmm… I open my eyes, and for a moment I’m tranquil and serene, enjoying the strange, unfamiliar surroundings. I have no idea where I am. The headboard behind me is in the shape of a massive sun. It’s oddly familiar. The room is large and airy and sumptuously furnished in browns and golds and beiges. I have seen it before. Where? My befuddled brain struggles through its recent visual memories. Holy crap. I’m in The Heathman Hotel…in a suite. I stood in a room similar to this with Kate. This looks bigger. Oh shit. I’m in Christian Grey’s suite. How did I get here? Fractured memories of the previous night come slowly back to haunt me. The drinking—oh no, the drinking—the phone call—oh no, the phone call—the vomiting—oh no, the vomiting. José and then Christian. Oh no. I cringe inwardly. I don’t remember coming here. I’m wearing my T-shirt, bra, and panties. No socks. No jeans. Holy shit.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  impressions of coherence. Psychology has come a long way. Speaking of Cognitive Ease “Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read.” “We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again.” “Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect.” “I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful.” 6 Norms, Surprises, and Causes The central characteristics and functions of System 1 and System 2 have now been introduced, with a more detailed treatment of System 1. Freely mixing metaphors, we have in our head a remarkably powerful computer, not fast by conventional hardware standards, but able to represent the structure of our world by various types of associative links in a vast network of various types of ideas. The spreading of activation in the associative machine is automatic, but we (System 2) have some ability to control the search of memory, and also to program it so that the detection of an event in the environment can attract attention. We next go into more detail of the wonders and limitation of what System 1 can do. Assessing Normality The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life, and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it. There are two main varieties of surprise. Some expectations are active and conscious—you know you are waiting for a particular event to happen. When the hour is near, you may be expecting the sound of the door as your child returns from school; when the door opens you expect the sound of a familiar voice. You will be surprised if an actively expected event does not occur. But there is a much larger category of events that you expect passively; you don’t wait for them, but you are not surprised when they happen. These are

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Amy put her hand on Reese’s shoulder, but it felt lifeless, carved of wood. “Okay, I have doubts,” Amy admitted. Reese stared straight ahead. Amy had the futile sense of trying to console a statue. Amy took back her hand. “You want to be a mother, Reese. Do you not want to be a mother with me?” She could only see Reese’s face in profile. Distantly, a man’s whistling echoed down the tiled church corridor. “T’ve been fucking Stanley this past week,” Reese said. Amy’s thoughts wiped to blank. The total wash of denial. “I’m SOrry?” “All week,” Reese repeated. “I’ve been fucking him.” Amy nodded. Then she stood up, slung her purse over her shoulder, and walked the length of the corridor, turned a corner, then encountered a pair of heavy, ornate doors on the right side of the hall. She pushed through them into the cool of a hushed and darkened sanctuary. There, she found a pew and sat quietly, her mind unquiet, her body in the kind of physical pain that only heartbreak can cause—pain that, like an acid trip, can only be truly apprehended while in the midst of experiencing it—as she waited for Reese to stop looking for her and leave. CHAPTER SEVEN Eight weeks after conception I F YOU ARE a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals. What no one wants to admit about funerals, because you’re supposed to be crushed by the melancholy of being a trans girl among the prematurely dead trans girls, is that funerals for dead trans girls number among the notable social events of a season. Who knows what people will say at a trans funeral? Will some queer make a political speech instead of a eulogy, so that for weeks afterward other queers will post outraged screeds about it on social media? How many times will a family member deadname or misgender the deceased from the pulpit, unabashed about it in his grief, peering out at this sea of weirdos who showed up unexpectedly to what he considered a family event? Did their son—er, daughter— really have all these friends? Which nice white cis person will remind the assembled mourners—a high percentage of whom are trans women themselves—that everyone must do more to save trans women of color, who are being murdered (murdered!), although this particular highly attended funeral is, of course, a suicide, because that’s how the white girls die prematurely.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  21 Intuitions vs. Formulas Paul Meehl was a strange and wonderful character, and one of the most versatile psychologists of the twentieth century. Among the departments in which he had faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota were psychology, law, psychiatry, neurology, and philosophy. He also wrote on religion, political science, and learning in rats. A statistically sophisticated researcher and a fierce critic of empty claims in clinical psychology, Meehl was also a practicing psychoanalyst. He wrote thoughtful essays on the philosophical foundations of psychological research that I almost memorized while I was a graduate student. I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. In the slim volume that he later called “my disturbing little book,” Meehl reviewed the results of 20 studies that had analyzed whether clinical predictions based on the subjective impressions of trained professionals were more accurate than statistical predictions made by combining a few scores or ratings according to a rule. In a typical study, trained counselors predicted the grades of freshmen at the end of the school year. The counselors interviewed each student for forty- five minutes. They also had access to high school grades, several aptitude tests, and a four-page personal statement. The statistical algorithm used only a fraction of this information: high school grades and one aptitude test. Nevertheless, the formula was more accurate than 11 of the 14 counselors. Meehl reported generally similar results across a variety of other forecast outcomes, including violations of parole, success in pilot training, and criminal recidivism. Not surprisingly, Meehl’s book provoked shock and disbelief among clinical psychologists, and the controversy it started has engendered a stream of research that is still flowing today, more than fifty years after its publication. The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which

• From The Lover (1984)

  The elegant man has got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at the girl in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to her. He’s obviously nervous. He doesn’t smile to begin with. To begin with he offers her a cigarette. His hand is trembling. There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling. She says she doesn’t smoke, no thanks. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t say, Leave me alone. So he’s less afraid. He tells her he must be dreaming. She doesn’t answer. There’s no point in answering, what would she say? She waits. So he asks, But where did you spring from? She says she’s the daughter of the headmistress of the girls’ school in Sadec. He thinks for a moment, then says he’s heard of the lady, her mother, of her bad luck with the land they say she bought in Cambodia, is that right? Yes, that’s right. He says again how strange it is to see her on this ferry. So early in the morning, a pretty girl like that, you don’t realize, it’s very surprising, a white girl on a native bus. He says the hat suits her, suits her extremely well, that it’s very … original … a man’s hat, and why not? She’s so pretty she can do anything she likes. She looks at him. Asks him who he is. He says he’s just back from Paris where he was a student, that he lives in Sadec too, on this same river, the big house with the big terraces with blue-tiled balustrades. She asks him what he is. He says he’s Chinese, that his family’s from North China, from Fushun. Will you allow me to drive you where you want to go in Saigon? She says she will. He tells the chauffeur to get the girl’s luggage off the bus and put it in the black car. Chinese. He belongs to the small group of financiers of Chinese origin who own all the working-class housing in the colony. He’s the one who was crossing the Mekong that day in the direction of Saigon. • • • She gets into the black car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seizes her, a weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there’s a very slight deafness, or fog.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  effect was over 50% in that study. Anchoring effects are easily observed in online trading, where the same item is often offered at different “buy now” prices. The “estimate” in fine-art auctions is also an anchor that influences the first bid. There are situations in which anchoring appears reasonable. After all, it is not surprising that people who are asked difficult questions clutch at straws, and the anchor is a plausible straw. If you know next to nothing about the trees of California and are asked whether a redwood can be taller than 1,200 feet, you might infer that this number is not too far from the truth. Somebody who knows the true height thought up that question, so the anchor may be a valuable hint. However, a key finding of anchoring research is that anchors that are obviously random can be just as effective as potentially informative anchors. When we used a wheel of fortune to anchor estimates of the proportion of African nations in the UN, the anchoring index was 44%, well within the range of effects observed with anchors that could plausibly be taken as hints. Anchoring effects of similar size have been observed in experiments in which the last few digits of the respondent’s Social Security number was used as the anchor (e.g., for estimating the number of physicians in their city). The conclusion is clear: anchors do not have their effects because people believe they are informative. The power of random anchors has been demonstrated in some unsettling ways. German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence her to 5 months; the anchoring effect was 50%. Uses and Abuses of Anchors By now you should be convinced that anchoring effects—sometimes due to priming, sometimes to insufficient adjustment—are everywhere. The psychological mechanisms that produce anchoring make us far more suggestible than most of us would want to be. And of course there are quite a few people who are willing and able to exploit our gullibility. Anchoring effects explain why, for example, arbitrary rationing is an

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  distract his thoughts." • Inevitably, of course, he made passes at her. She was an attractive The child too, using the woman. First there was the hand on top of her hand, then a stolen kiss. She devices of imitating spurned him every time, making it clear she was happily married, but she attitudes, dress, and so on, was worried: if all he had wanted was an affair, the whole book deal could seeks to fascinate, until a magical intention, the fall apart. Once again, though, her straightforward strategy seemed the father or mother and thus right one. Surprisingly, he backed down without anger or resentment. He to "distract its thoughts." promised that his affection for her would remain platonic. She had to admit Identification means that one is abandoning and not that he was not at all what she had expected, or what had been described to abandoning amorous her. Perhaps he liked being dominated by a woman. desires. It is a lure which The interviews continued for several months, and she noticed slight the child uses to capture his parents and which, it must changes in him. She still addressed him familiarly, spicing the conversation be admitted, they fall for. with brazen comments, but now he returned them, delighting in this kind The same is true for the of saucy banter. He assumed the same lively mood that she strategically masses, who imitate their forced on herself. At first he had dressed in military uniform, or in his Ital-leader, bear his name and repeat his gestures. They ian suits. Now he dressed casually, even going barefoot, conforming to the bow to him, but at the casual style of their relationship. One night he remarked that he liked the same time they are color of her hair. It was Clairol, blue-black, she explained. He wanted to unconsciously baiting a trap to hold him. Great have the same color; she had to bring him a bottle. She did as he asked, ceremonies and imagining he was joking, but a few days later he requested her presence at demonstrations are just as the palace to dye his hair for him. She did so, and now they had the exact much occasions when the multitudes charm the same hair color. leader as vice versa. The book, Sukarno: An Autobiography as Told to Cindy Adams, was pub- —SERGE MOSCOVICI, THE AGE lished in 1965. To American readers' surprise, Sukarno came across as re-OF THE CROWD, TRANSLATED BY markably charming and lovable, which was indeed how Adams described J . C . W H I T E H O U S E

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  3The Myth of Universal EmotionsTake a look at the woman in figure 3-1, who is screaming in terror. Most people who were born and raised in a Western culture can effortlessly see this emotion in her face, even with no other context in the photograph. [image file=image_rsrc7AH.jpg] Figure 3-1: Perceiving terror in a woman’s face Except . . . she isn’t feeling terror. This photograph actually shows Serena Williams immediately after she beat her sister Venus in the 2008 U.S. Open tennis finals. Turn to page 310 (appendix C) to see the full photograph. In context, the facial configuration takes on new meaning.1 If Williams’s face subtly transformed before your eyes once you knew the context, you are not alone. This is a common experience. How did your brain accomplish this shift? The first emotion word I used, “terror,” caused your brain to simulate past facial configurations that you have seen of people feeling fear. You were almost certainly not aware of these simulations, but they shaped your perception of Williams’s face. When I explained the photo’s context—winning a crucial tennis match—your brain applied its conceptual knowledge of tennis and winning to simulate facial configurations that you’ve seen of people experiencing exultation. These simulations again influenced how you perceived Williams’s face. In each case, your emotion concepts helped you make meaning from the image.2 In real life, we usually encounter faces in context, attached to bodies and associated with voices, smells, and other surrounding details. These details cue your brain to use particular concepts to simulate and construct your perception of emotion. That’s why, in the full photo of Serena Williams, you perceive triumph, not terror. In fact, you depend on emotion concepts each time you experience another person as emotional. Knowledge of the concept “Sadness” is required to see a pout as sadness, knowledge of “Fear” to see widened eyes as fearful, and so on.3 According to the classical view, you shouldn’t need concepts to perceive emotion, because emotions are supposed to have universal fingerprints that everyone around the world can recognize from birth. You’re about to learn otherwise. By applying the theory of constructed emotion, combined with a little reverse engineering, you’ll see that concepts are a key ingredient for perceiving emotions. We’ll begin with the best experimental technique for demonstrating that certain emotions are universal: the basic emotion method used by Silvan Tomkins, Carroll Izard, and Paul Ekman (chapter 1). Then we’ll systematically reduce the amount of emotion concept knowledge available to our test subjects. If their emotion perception becomes more and more impaired, then we’ve revealed that concepts are a critical ingredient to constructing emotion perceptions. We’ll also learn how emotions can appear to be universally recognized under certain conditions, opening the door to a new, better understanding of how emotions are made.4 …