The second strongest instinct

Een Nederlandse vertaling (door mij gemaakt, niet door AI ) van dit artikel kun je hier lezen.

We had arrived at our holiday destination, in good time to enjoy the evening spectacle. After our traditional first supper of frites with a brown shrimp croquette, we trundled over to the beach. People were already gathering for what was to be the first significant partial eclipse since the (near-)total one, 27 years ago. Back then, we had travelled to Northern France to enjoy the full experience, complete with protective eclipse glasses which we had subsequently kept in a drawer “for the next one, just in case”. Unfortunately, that is where they still were now, 210 miles across the sea: one of us (not me) had forgotten to pack them. My wife was, as could be expected, annoyed. However, her reaction was not an intention to make a better checklist for travelling, or use some nudge (e.g., put them, together with the car keys, in an unusual place – a trick that has helped me numerous times). Instead, she crossly declared never to keep things “just in case” ever again. Isn’t that odd?

Embarrassment in front of an audience (even of one), when making a blunder, or having forgotten something, can be a humiliating knock to one’s reputation, but this seemed different. She was not annoyed at having forgotten the glasses (to be honest, I wasn’t too bothered – this eclipse was nothing like the 1999 experience); she was embarrassed at having kept the damn things for 27 years, for nothing. Here, the typical blame-shifting when some mistake or omission is exposed was not about leaving the glasses behind (no “I had too much to do” or “I thought you were going to take them”), but about her decision, against her better judgment, to stash things for later. I was not directly accused of twisting her arm, but the subtext was clear – she would never have kept anything for that long. Persons unnamed, who talked her out of her decluttering instincts, were to be blamed.

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This is an instance of a phenomenon described in a paper by Keith Campbell and Constantine Sedikides: when a person’s positive view of themselves is “questioned, contradicted, impugned, mocked, challenged, or otherwise put in jeopardy” (known as self-threat), a tendency to take credit for success and blame external factors (others or circumstances) for failures is boosted. If a bad outcome can be traced to having acted against your favourable views of yourself, it is an embarrassment in your own eyes. The more intensely you experience this, the more important protecting or reasserting your ‘self-reputation’ will be, and the more likely you will seek to deflect any responsibility for that act.

However, this was more than the almost automatic impulse to deny responsibility – “I didn’t do it, I wasn’t there”. There was also cognitive dissonance, a concept posited by Leon Festinger, referring to psychological stress associated with an inner incompatibility, for example, acting in a way that goes against a belief. One way to resolve such stress is to argue there is no actual incompatibility, for example by invoking external causal factors. If you firmly believe that you are the kind of person who keeps a tidy house, and gets rid of anything that has no clear, immediate or near future purpose, then voluntarily storing things that might come in handy more than a quarter century into the future would surely jar. If, however, that was done under pressure by someone else who you felt deserved your indulgence at the time, then the act of holding on to the eclipse glasses, against your better judgment, is a sign of a different, and plausibly hierarchically superior, belief: that you are able to set aside your own preferences for someone else’s.

This required some innovative motivated reasoning, though. The actual cause of the lack of protective eyewear for the solar event was undeniably the failure to pack them. That was annoying, especially if there was no credible explanation – we had actually dug them out a few days before, so we were well aware we had them. As my wife was in charge of packing everything except my personal stuff, there was little that could be invoked as a plausible reason for forgetting them, so any potential external cause had to be sought elsewhere. And there is indeed a defensible logic to the argument: throwing out these protective glasses in 1999, since the next eclipse was way in the future, would have been a perfectly sensible thing to do. At the same time, her reputation as a no-clutter champion would never have been in doubt (in her own eyes) had she not omitted to pack them. We’d have used them and that would have been that – no reason to be annoyed. But the embarrassment of the packing oversight could have been avoided by not having had anything to forget. This completes the tortuous, but ingeniously self-serving reasoning: “I was obliged to deviate from my standard judgment, and that caused the embarrassment. Never again!”

What could be a useful learning moment to help us prevent forgetting important things or making avoidable mistakes can be hijacked by what we experience as a higher inner purpose: preserving our self-reputation. This goes beyond looking for plausible excuses for mishaps where we might carry some responsibility – trying to shift the blame, or justify why we deviated from what we knew we ought to do, by pointing at circumstances that left us no choice. Instead, we pursue the complete elimination of every chance such self-humiliation occurs again, and be prepared to do so at considerable personal cost, often in terms of deciding not to do something ever again.

Throwing away cardboard glasses that could be reused may be trivial, but imagine finding out, after a foreign trip, that you made an embarrassing faux pas, and opting never to travel abroad again, or getting lost because you got confused using your phone’s navigation app, and then deleting it instead of learning how it works. Is that really necessary?

We all have a self-reputation we want to cherish and maintain. But we can choose how perfect we want that self-reputation to be, and consider how much damage a mishap would really inflict. We can decide whether avoiding a minor blemish is worth the sacrifice.