Our Vain Brain

Conflict Matters: Our Vain Brain

I am currently reading a book about how unaware we are of what drives us. It is written by an academic who is wonderfully skilful at explaining science in simple terms¹. I suspect this arises at least in part from her experience as a mother and wife. Here she is condensing and summarising hundreds of devious experiments by social psychologists, all designed to demonstrate the surprising and sometimes disturbing extent to which our brains play us. Where 100 years ago the defence might have been: “the devil made me do it!” today we can reliably blame our vain brains.

This is particularly apparent when we are in dispute. We all want to be right and on a deeper level our brains are committed to protecting our sense of self at all costs, so if the dispute goes deep enough to threaten that, the gloves really come off!

One of the most obvious examples is the different ways we analyse behaviour: having done something we consider slightly unacceptable, our vain brain kindly offers us a never ending stream of disarmingly plausible explanations for why we are innocent: in essence the real causes were outside our control. On the other hand, when someone else does something equally unacceptable, our brain naturally supposes this was intentional, possibly due to a persistent or even fatal character flaw. This alternating analysis becomes increasingly extreme as the dispute escalates.

Apologies may be demanded. Having satisfied ourselves that our actions really were blameless (those wonderful “extenuating circumstances”) we are not going to do that! On the other side, it can be extremely frustrating to see someone creating “excuses” for their behaviour, when clearly they are at fault!

With a child at least, it is hopefully possible to spell out the distinction between the act and the person and this is how (s)he learns that doing a bad thing does not mean (s)he is a bad person. However it is hard for a child to learn that lesson unless the adult is very familiar with their own vain brain, and what it is telling them about the motives of others. Two verses from an old poem sum this up nicely:

Even if it were the nature of the childish
To cause harm to other beings,
It would still be incorrect to be angry with them,
For this would be like begrudging fire for having the nature to burn.

And if the fault were temporary
In they who are by nature reliable,
It would still be incorrect to be angry,
For this would be like begrudging space for allowing smoke to arise in it².

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