Original Reality Theory

2.6 The Laboratory You Carry With You

In the 1970s, psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson set up a display in a department store in the United States. On the table were four pairs of pantyhose, arranged side by side. Passersby were invited to examine them and choose the pair of the highest quality. What they did not know was that all four pairs were identical. Even so, the choices were not distributed randomly: the pair on the right was preferred over the one on the left by a ratio of nearly four to one. Asked why, participants talked about the weave of the fabric, the elasticity, and the finish. No one mentioned position. When the researchers asked directly whether position might have influenced their choice, almost everyone denied it, some looking at the interviewer as though they suspected they were talking to a madman.

The experiment reveals two things at once. Something within us plays a part in our choices without asking consciousness for permission. And when we explain what we did, the explanation may be constructed afterward, using whatever material seems reasonable, just as Bartlett’s students reconstructed the legend. The preceding section showed that every reader interprets the world through a cognitive matrix. This section proposes observing it at work, in the one place where it is always available for examination: within ourselves. We have carried a laboratory since birth, use it at every moment, and rarely investigate it deliberately.

The first instrument in this laboratory is attention. As you read these lines, your eyes move, your breathing continues, muscles support your posture, and sensations arrive from different parts of your body. Almost none of this reaches consciousness. Try shifting your attention to one of these processes, the way your body rests against the chair, for example, and notice what happens: a sensation that was already there begins to exist for you. Your body did not start functioning when you observed it. What changed was the analytical frame: what you chose to bring into the foreground.

Do the same with your thoughts. For a few moments, follow what passes through your mind without trying to control anything. At some point, a thought will pull you away from the exercise, and only after a while will you realize that you became distracted. That moment of recognition is the experiment’s most valuable piece of evidence. Psychology calls the ability to recognize explicitly what is happening in one’s own experience meta-awareness, and studies show that it frequently fails: we spend much of our time distracted without knowing it. Noticing distraction is seeing attention at work from the inside.

The laboratory becomes more revealing when emotion enters the picture. Think of a heated argument. Something the other person says sounds like a provocation, disagreement feels like an attack, and each response confirms the earlier impression. The body takes part: the voice rises, the shoulders tense, and attention narrows around what is upsetting. Hours later, once the anger has subsided, the same person recalls the conversation and discovers that some of the words no longer seem so offensive. What was said has not changed. What changed was the state from which the person interprets what was said.

Comparing these two readings of the same scene is one of the most useful experiments a person can conduct on themselves. It shows emotion acting as an engine: directing attention, favoring certain interpretations, and preparing certain responses. But the engine does not choose the route on its own. When angry, one person confronts while another falls silent; when sad, one seeks company while another withdraws. Experience, habits, and context also contribute to the outcome. Psychologist James Gross describes emotions in precisely this way: as response tendencies that attention and appraisal modify along the way.

The exercise becomes more effective with repetition and a sequence. Start with the body, which is easiest to observe; move on to thoughts; then to emotions; and finally to the relationships among them: what sensation accompanies this emotion, what thought it brings back, what response it prepares. When a situation triggers an intense reaction and you cannot observe it at the time, return to it later, in a different state, and compare the two readings. You do not need to monitor everything at every moment. Like any instrument, meta-awareness develops through use, and that use can continue throughout life.

The laboratory does not end with you. Human beings share the basic mechanisms of emotion and thought, even though each person responds in their own way. Someone who has learned to recognize how anger narrows their own attention, hardens their interpretations, and pushes them toward certain responses therefore begins to recognize the same process in others: a hardening tone, insistence on the same argument, difficulty considering an alternative. This recognition allows more than guessing what someone feels. It allows us to identify patterns and anticipate tendencies: while the anger lasts, certain responses become more likely and others less so. Recognizing this helps us choose a better moment to argue, to wait, or to listen. These are hypotheses, and must be treated as such. The pantyhose experiment showed that even our access to ourselves is incomplete, and Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley showed that imagining another person’s point of view is less accurate than asking them directly. The internal laboratory provides patterns and hypotheses; careful observation and conversation test and correct them.

Anyone who has observed anger reorganizing their reading of a conversation has seen the cognitive matrix working from the inside. What we learn at this small scale helps us formulate questions about larger scales, because beliefs, scientific theories, political convictions, and collective decisions are produced by human beings with the same processes of perception, emotion, and judgment. And an experiment of this kind is happening right now: reading these pages.

This experiment has two sides, and the writer’s side is no exception. The author of these pages also works with a memory that reconstructs. There are days when the words come easily and days when fatigue or a worry puts relationships out of reach that, after a night’s rest, seem simple. While revising this text, he experienced an episode that sums up the preceding section. In proposing a new example, that of a tree that does not end where its leaves end, he discovered that he had already written an entire section on the same subject some time earlier, and that he remembered neither its content nor its existence. The old text had been forgotten; its essence had not. The new formulation emerged with different words and an aligned structure, as if the same matrix had generated the reasoning twice. And he noticed this only because the written record was there for comparison: introspection alone would not have revealed it. Recognizing this process is also an exercise in meta-awareness. Sometimes the best thing to do is rest; at other times, it is to record the idea while it is available.

On the reader’s side, the text is the same for everyone; the conditions are not. One reader prefers formulas to analogies; another, images to descriptions; another, direct arguments to narratives. A word feels unfamiliar because you are accustomed to using it in a different sense. A worry, fatigue, or haste makes an explanation feel dry when, on another day, it would have sparked your interest. These conditions affect the willingness to continue, the ease of following an argument, and even how quickly an idea is accepted or rejected. It is the pantyhose experiment happening on the page: something influences judgment without announcing itself.

This is where meta-awareness takes on a direct role in reading ORT. When a passage arouses enthusiasm, impatience, distrust, or rejection, observe your reaction as well. What prompted it? The argument, the language, an unmet expectation, the memory of something you already know, or your state at that moment? Recognizing these influences does not determine who is right. It helps separate what the text states from the way you are receiving it. Once that separation has been made, the criticism that remains is more precise, and when the problem lies in the explanation rather than in the reading, it will become clearer. ORT does not ask readers to accept its propositions because they have done this exercise. It asks them also to examine the instrument with which they will examine those propositions.

The participants in the pantyhose experiment had no way of discovering, merely by looking inward, why they chose the pair on the right. An external experiment was needed to reveal what introspection could not reach. The laboratory we carry does not replace the laboratory of science: the two complement each other. One is always available and generates questions; the other tests the answers. Learning about oneself does not exhaust our knowledge of human beings, but it is one of the most accessible starting points, and the following pages are a good opportunity to begin.

Axiomatic Statements

• The body and conscious experience are a field of observation that is always available.
• Observing one’s own experience changes the analytical frame of what one perceives and, sometimes, the experience itself.
• Noticing a thought does not reveal its cause.
• Emotion guides interpretation and prepares responses, but does not determine behavior on its own.
• Revisiting a situation in a different emotional state reveals the influence of the earlier state on judgment.
• Recognizing patterns in oneself provides frames of reference for identifying them in others and anticipating tendencies; observation and conversation test what is inferred.
• Observing one’s own matrix is part of preparing to examine any explanation, including ORT.
• Writers also think from a matrix, subject to the same conditions as readers.
• During reading, observing our own reaction separates what the text states from how we receive it.

View scientific foundations and references