Why Does Self-Discovery Require a Journey?

From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 15:42:36 MDT

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    Journeys of self-discovery are familiar themes in literature and in the
    stories people tell about themselves. In such journeys, people learn about
    their abilities, how they appear to others, and what they really
    want. While sometimes people learn a great deal about themselves in a
    short time, usually self-discovery is considered to take place over years
    or decades.

    Now it makes sense that it takes a lot of time and varied experiences for
    people to learn about their abilities and how they appear to others. But
    it may seem more surprising that people need so much time and effort to
    figure out what they want. While people do tend to know that all else
    equal they prefer more health, comfort, achievement, approval, status,
    novelty, sex, children, truth, and so on, people often seem remarkably
    unsure about the relative weights they put on these things. Standard
    stories have people thinking, for example, that they want to achieve some
    great end, and then learn that they really care more about family and
    intimacy than they realized. Or someone might think they want a high
    status mate, only to discover they care more about loyalty than they realized.

     From an evolutionary point of view, it seems odd that it should take so
    much effort for people to figure out what they want. Why couldn't
    evolution have let people better see their own preferences? Now it isn't
    crazy to think that our preferences are encoded in such complex and kludgey
    mental modules that our conscious mind must struggle to infer their
    contents from lots of specific decisions. But even so it seems odd that we
    now seem to know more about the (really quite strange) nature of the atom
    than we do about what the typical person really wants. Why were not our
    ancestors able to slowly learn what they wanted, and then use language to
    pass that knowledge on to succeeding generations?

    It seems to me that an alternative hypothesis should be entertained: that
    we are greatly self-deceived about what we want. Maybe the things we
    actually want are typically not as noble as the things we want to believe
    that we want. Maybe we really want social approval more than we admit, for
    example. But believing ourselves to be noble may help us to convince
    others that we are noble, and so to convince them to associate with
    us. Also, we may want to believe that our career/spouse/etc. is just the
    sort of career or spouse we wanted, so that we can reassure our associates
    that we are not considering switching careers/spouses/etc.

    This alternative hypothesis suggests that most literary journeys of
    self-discovery are really aids to self-delusion, helping people tell
    themselves comforting stories about themselves. Real journeys of
    self-discovery would largely be dark affairs, wherein mounting evidence
    forced people to believe ignoble things about themselves that they would
    rather not tell others. And those who do struggle over decades to learn
    the truth about what people want, and who are willing to tell others, would
    face largely indifferent or hostile audiences. Young optimists would have
    evolved to ignore the claims of old cynics, since the young optimists of
    the past who did not were less attractive as mates and associates.

    This hypothesis is not optimistic about the prospects for successful wider
    application of academic psychology and social science. To the extent that
    evidence forces academics to see the truth about what people typically
    want, academics may be marginalized and ignored by the larger society. And
    to the extent that academics are responsive to demands from students,
    donors, and other clients, they may ignore the evidence as long as possible.

    What do women (or men) really want? Are you sure you want to know?

    Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
    Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
    MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
    703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



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