×

The psychology of choice and freedom

When Danielle Kahneman and Amos Tversky won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, their prospect theory demonstrated that a negative event exhibits twice as much of an impact as the occurrence of a positive event. This makes intuitive sense. From personal experience, many of us can remember times where a single negative event outweighed several positive experiences.

Kahneman and Tversky, who were psychologists and not economists, noted that the remorse from a single negative experience carries twice the valence as the response to a positive event does. This is what leads investors to be risk averse, because the psychological punishment for a wrong decision carries twice the discomfort to pleasure ratio for making a wise investment and profiting from it. People tend to focus only on losses and gains, as opposed to the actual value of the investment.

As an example, if every employee at a company gets a 30% increase in salary, no one employee will feel disadvantaged or advantaged compared to anyone else. However, if an individual gets only a 5% raise, they will feel much more wealthy and privileged if they are the only one who got a raise. It becomes their gain and everyone else loses.

However, if an individual is cognitively depleted, and unable to think objectively, this will lead to dire consequences potentially. For example, a cohort of potential investors, given a time limit to place their money in five unique investment vehicles, will generally follow their own personal comfort with investing more in risk averse options than in risky options. However, if the potential investors are first given a series of taxing cognitive challenges, that would ultimately decrease their cognitive analytic abilities, the individuals will invest equally in all five investments, regardless of their investment preferences under ideal conditions. This explains the adulation to rest well before determining an important decision or strategic path.

BF Skinner, the Harvard behaviorist who wrote extensively about stimulus response, was interested mostly in how humans respond to external events, and how to condition people to respond. His research was different from prospect theory, in that he believed the inner world of the individual is irrelevant. All that mattered to him was that a response can be conditioned repeatedly. He didn’t care what the individual felt.

Learned helplessness is when, due to multiple exposures to a repeating stimulus, an individual stops responding to their own motivation or goals, and, instead, chooses to give up and accept defeat. In these situations, the individual falsely believes that their actions have no consequence. For example, dogs in an experiment were given repeated shocks in their cages, and nothing that the dog did could avert these shocks. When the cage was altered, where dogs could easily move to a different part of the cage and avoid the shocks, the dogs did not choose this alternative. Instead, they remained in the shock portion of the cage even though an escape was readily available. The dogs were “anchored” to the expected response and simply ceased to try any further.

Becoming anchored to a positive standard, instead of to learned helplessness, occurred in a classroom experiment. For example, a classroom experiment demonstrated that teachers who are told that a certain student is gifted will grade them at a higher level, even if the student was in fact not gifted or superior to the other students. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the teachers acted as if the student was really gifted, and graded them as such.

This is similar to an experiment in which healthy volunteers were hospitalized at a psychiatric facility, but had no psychiatric symptoms. Many of these patients were given formal psychiatric diagnoses because the filter through which the providers evaluated the patient prejudiced them to believe that healthy individual volunteers actually suffered from conditions like schizophrenia.

Perception is indeed reality. If we become conditioned to believe that our actions are futile, we will cease to act.

So much of the time we learn to force ourselves to adapt to the outside world. This can enable us to succeed in a work environment. However, what is the cost of doing this? Leo Tolstoy wrote in “The Confession” that he had excelled in his writing and in his financial assets and in being part of a loving family. Instead of feeling good about these positive events, he struggled desperately with a lack of existential meaning. He observed people engaged with life but saw no meaning in their lives. He wondered how he would continue to live when he saw the emptiness around him. He ultimately decided to rebel against meaninglessness and live his life to the fullest. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he concluded that Sisyphus found inner happiness, even though he was sentenced by the gods to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll downward and begin the rolling back up ad infinitum.

The reality is that we have almost infinite freedom to choose our trajectory. External stimuli lead us to believe that we are not that malleable and to frequently adopt a learned helplessness perspective. The more we believe we are stuck, the more we act as if we really are.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has stated that he went into the entertainment field because he didn’t want to have a typical or serious life. He didn’t initially even seek great wealth, but was interested in making enough money doing what he loved to merely make ends meet. Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed for 60 Minutes years ago, and stated that he didn’t want to end up in life saying “should have, could have, would have.” How many entrepreneurs, in disparate fields, ascribe their success to the realization that they had to be their own boss and didn’t wish to be a passive follower?

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung has described the role of dreams in helping us to move towards a more ideal life. He views dreams as having the ability to guide us towards making decisions that will benefit us. It is not always easy to assess the unconscious meaning of dreams, and working with a qualified Jungian analyst can help to rewire a person’s life for the better. For example, a dream by the undersigned focused on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this dream, JFK was hidden safely in a building, but despite this, the gun’s bullet found its mark and Kennedy was killed. Within the seeds of this dream there are actually positive images which at first might allude us. A Jungian analyst interpreted this dream and explained to me that whenever death is portrayed in a dream, there is also rebirth. As I am evolving in my life, this dream served as a guidepost for my present and future. If I had looked at it in a more concrete way, I would have seen this dream as a memory of a trauma I experienced when I was a first grader.

Jung also describes a collective unconscious, where each of us is connected to a larger whole of humanity. We have our own personal journeys but our unconscious world, hidden from us, leads to a connection to all that is human in society. Learning from our dreams, and working with a Jungian analyst, can help access insight that will make our lives better and more fulfilling. Unlike Sigmund Freud, who viewed dreams as representative of unconscious conflicts, Carl Jung viewed dreams as a well-developed and richly tapestried blueprint to living the best in our lives.

The repetition compulsion, which is attributed to Freudian psychology, describes an individual’s repetitive patterns of behavior. For example, it is possible to be attracted unconsciously to someone who might remind us of the way our mother or father treated us. If the paternal pattern inducted their offspring into a conflict laden childhood, there is an unconscious push to repeat this pattern over and over again, finding one unsuitable partner after another, and never understanding the reasons for this.

Dream interpretation and free association can lead an individual to understand, grasp, and claim ownership over the psychological dynamics that underpin self-destructive patterns. The unconscious can guide us to live a wonderful life, or can trip us up and lead us to repetitively fail. Each of us has the ability through therapy to evaluate our actions, understand the conscious and unconscious motives behind them, and change them to make our lives happier, more fulfilling and authentic.

NEWSLETTER

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *

Starting at $4.75/week.

Subscribe Today