IN THE 1980s, evangelical Christian Mark Pierpont travelled the world preaching that homosexuality was a sin and promoting ways to resist gay urges. It was a deeply personal quest. He was himself wracked by the very yearnings he sought to excise from others – a contradiction he openly acknowledged.
So here’s the question: which of Pierpont’s attitudes reflected his true self? Was his message about the sinfulness of homosexuality a betrayal of his essential, gay self? Or did it reflect what he was deep down, freed from the distorting influence of more primal urges?
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At first sight, it is a question of little scientific merit: psychologies are complex, individual things, and there’s no part of the brain, and no aspect of our personality, that stands out as being the seat of the true self, so we’re never going to discover a universally valid answer. “As a scientific concept, the idea of a ‘true self’ is not tenable,” says of Yale University.
And yet she and other psychologists have set out to study it. Most of us are convinced that something like a true self lurks beneath our surface attitudes and behaviour. It might be a delusion, but it informs how we view human beings, ourselves included. If we could better understand what that delusion consists of, we might learn to get along a little better with ourselves and others.
Read more: Your true self
Who are you? An entity continuous in time, an individual with a personality, a unique bundle of memories? Only now are we truly getting to grips with what our sense of self is and isn’t, and how it can change – insights that could help us live better with ourselves and with others
The question of the most essential element of self has troubled philosophers for centuries. In the 17th century, John Locke put memory front and centre, arguing that the self is grounded in the continuity of conscious experience. So long as you have a memory that can stitch together experiences into a coherent narrative, you have an enduring self.
It’s an appealing idea, but modern science has given us reasons to doubt it. People with retrograde amnesia, for example, can lose memories from before the accident or illness that caused it while retaining the ability to lay down new memories. They do not feel as if their self has been wiped out, and nor do their caregivers.
Intuitively, though, Locke’s idea of the essence of self as being something that endures across time makes sense. If it didn’t, you’d have a series of fleeting selves at best, none of which was really you. There are indications things aren’t quite that simple (see “Your true self: The future is a foreign person“). But take it as a starting point, and your personality would seem a prime candidate for providing that continuous sense of self – were it not for the discovery that your personality can itself change dramatically over time.
So if not memory or personality, what then? These days, instead of speculating about the essence of the self, psychologists and experimentally minded philosophers have a new strategy: asking people. By presenting them with various scenarios about someone changing and looking at how far they intuitively feel that the person has strayed from their true self, researchers hope to get to grips with what we regard that true self to be.
In 2014, Strohminger teamed up with of the University of Arizona in Tucson to quiz people about the hypothetical case of Jim, the victim of a serious car crash whose only hope for survival is to have his brain transplanted to a new body. In different versions of this story, post-transplant Jim remains psychologically identical or selectively loses the ability to recognise objects by sight (a condition called visual agnosia) or his autobiographical memories (amnesia), for example.
“The greatest change in identity is perceived when the moral conscience is lost”
When the transplant resulted in visual agnosia, participants viewed the change in Jim as minimal. Amnesia was seen to effect a much bigger change in his identity – in line with Locke’s theory. But it was a third scenario that they regarded as having changed his self the most: , so that he could no longer tell right from wrong, or be moved by the suffering of others.
The same seems to be true in the real world. In 2015, Nichols and Strohminger surveyed the family members of people with one of three neurodegenerative diseases – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s, and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). ALS, the condition Stephen Hawking lives with, causes progressive muscle loss but leaves mental abilities intact; Alzheimer’s gradually erases memories; FTD leads to changes in social and moral behaviour. Relatives of people with ALS felt the identity of their loved one had changed less than those caring for someone with Alzheimer’s, but .
The upshot is that when it comes to our perceptions of others, we see the moral self as the true self. That makes sense for us as a social species, says Strohminger. “We care about people’s moral character because we want to know what they’ll be like as social partners,” she says. The very reason we see people as having a true self in the first place, she argues, might be the importance we attach to keeping track of social behaviour.
But there’s a further intriguing twist to this. Given the plethora of self-serving biases that psychologists have uncovered, we might be expected to have a less generous view of the morality of others than we do of our own. Not so: it seems that we see everyone’s true self as not only moral but also morally good, with “good” defined by our own moral outlook.
That much was clear from a series of recent studies by Yale University psychologists , and . They told people the stories of Mark Pierpont, the conflicted preacher, and similar cases, and sought their reactions. : those with liberal values were more likely to think Pierpont’s gay self was his true self, and people of a more conservative bent thought the opposite.
Self improvement
More generally, if someone’s behaviour is good in our eyes and accords with our values, we deem it an expression of the true self. If not, it is deemed to belong to a less fundamental, “superficial self”. “I can think about who you are on the surface, and maybe see you’re not such a perfect person,” says Knobe. “But when I think about who you are deep down, there’s this strong tendency to see you as morally good.” The same effect has been seen in cultures across the world. It’s even true of people profiled as being pessimists and misanthropes, who we would least expect to see virtue at the core of others.
Can this tendency to see people as morally good, deep down, be harnessed as a force for good? Perhaps encouraging such perceptions might help to reduce tension and prejudice between groups accustomed to eyeing each other with hostility.
It’s a possibility that and , both at Harvard University, have recently put to the test. We know that people tend to view members of their in-group – those they most identify with – more favourably than out-group members, especially those stereotyped as threatening. Two months after the Islamist-inspired shootings of December 2015 in San Bernardino, California, De Freitas and Cikara surveyed more than 1000 white US citizens online, assessing the extent of the fear and threat they felt in response to Arabs. They then presented them with stories describing someone changing for the better – either a white US citizen, an Arab in Syria, or an Arab immigrant to the US. Next they asked participants whether this change for the better was due to the person’s true self or their superficial self.
Participants saw the moral improvement in the white US citizen as an expression of his true, morally good self – and had exactly the same view of the Arab cases. Despite being members of a stereotypically threatening out-group, they were still seen as fundamentally good as individuals. What’s more, when participants were encouraged to think about the out-group member’s true self in the first place, they reported feeling less fearful. This intervention even changed behaviour: when thinking about the true self, subjects were more likely to donate a major share of a bonus payment to an out-group charity, in this case the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.
So it seems we have a pretty good handle at least on what others believe to be our true selves – even if their interpretations of the moral goodness at our core don’t always tally with our own. Whether you believe that Mark Pierpont’s gay self was his true self or not might depend on your own existing moral perspective, but ultimately Pierpont made up his own mind. He renounced his life of proselytising against homosexuality and decided he was gay after all. As Shakespeare had it, to thine own self be true.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The good delusion”
