In 1974 Braver confirmed that the perceived intentions of partners in game theoretic contexts were frequently more important for predicting behavior than a subject’s personal payoff matrix, and in 1978 Goldman tried pre-sorting participants into predicted cooperators and defectors and found (basically as predicted) that defectors tended not to notice opportunities to cooperate even when those opportunities actually existed.
Consider the tragedy here: People can update on the evidence all they want, but initial social hypotheses can still channel them into a social dynamics where they generate the evidence necessary to confirm their prior beliefs, even when those beliefs lead to suboptimal results.
A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy.
We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were lecturing on a particularly boring episode from 19th-century Norwegian history.
I’m not bragging here. I wish I could get my patients to have dramatic emotional meltdowns. As per the textbooks, there should be a climactic moment where the patient identifies me with their father, then screams at me that I ruined their childhood, then breaks down crying and realizes that she loved her father all along, then ???, and then their depression is cured. I never got that. I tried, I even dropped some hints, like “Maybe this reminds you of your father?” or “Maybe you feel like screaming at me right now?”, but they never took the bait. So I figured the textbooks were misleading, or that this was some kind of super-advanced technique, or that this was among the approximately 100% of things that Freud just pulled out of his ass.
And then I had lunch with my friend, and she was like “It’s so stressful when all of your patients identify you with their parents and break down crying, isn’t it? Don’t you wish you could just go one day without that happening?”
And later, my supervisor was reviewing one of my therapy sessions, and I was surprised to hear him comment that I “seemed uncomfortable with dramatic expressions of emotion”. I mean, I am uncomfortable with dramatic expressions of emotion. I was just surprised he noticed it. As a therapist, I’m supposed to be quiet and encouraging and not show discomfort at anything, and I was trying to do that, and I’d thought I was succeeding. But apparently I was unconsciously projecting some kind of “I don’t like strong emotions, you’d better avoid those” field, and my patients were unconsciously complying.
Seems related to different worlds: