Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ if that thing stands in contrast to something else. If we lived in a world where nothing ever died, we would have no concept of life because there was no death. If everyone invariably told the truth, we would have no concept of truth because there were no lies. We know our self because there is not-self – the world around us and other people, that is, other selves. It is only recently that this has been understood. Writing in the early twentieth century, William James described the newborn baby as seeing the world as nothing but a ‘booming, buzzing confusion’, while Freud believed that a baby cannot tell where his body ends and the world begins. (These men might have fathered babies but they did not spend much time in the daily care of them.) Studies where newborn babies are shown a number of objects, and the length of time that the baby spends looking at each object is measured, have shown that a baby is born not only knowing how to identify a face from other things but preferring to look at a face, even just a simple cartoon of a face, than at anything else. Dangle some small object about a foot in front of an infant. The baby will look intently at the object, and then reach forward with one or both arms in the attempt, sometimes successful, to touch the object. This is not proof that the baby is aware that the object is not part of his body, but it does suggest that he is beginning to understand that he can use a part of his body to reach something he can see.

      The weight of evidence suggests that the newborn baby sees a world of patterns, and that some of these patterns have considerable significance, that is, meaning for the baby. Moreover, the baby is keen to discover the means whereby he can influence some of those patterns. When babies are given the opportunity to suck on a dummy fixed so that the changing pressure on the dummy switches some music on and off, they will readily learn how to do this. The patterns babies want most to engage with are faces. Moreover, right from birth, babies show a clear preference for faces that look directly at them, rather than faces that are turned away.

      If you are unused to being in the company of young babies you can be quite unnerved by finding yourself the subject of a young baby’s thoughtful gaze. You might even think that the baby is gravely assessing you and finding you wanting. You might hasten to decide, as many psychologists do, that this must be an illusion. How could a baby assess you when he does not yet know that he himself is a person? These psychologists know that, when mothers say that they have little conversations with their baby, the mothers are deluded. Babies might appear to converse, but, according to Michael Tomasello, babies cannot understand that they have intentions to communicate with others, and others have intentions to communicate with them, until they are nine months old.¹ Babies might seem to communicate, but this is a pseudo-communication. However, Tomasello was examining those communications where two people have a common subject that they are discussing. There is another form of communication, often used by mothers and babies younger than nine months, where the mother notices what the baby is feeling and responds to that. The baby then responds to the mother’s response. In a similar way, a baby will notice that his mother is dispirited and try to initiate a conversation. Such attention from her baby can often produce a much happier response from the mother but, if the mother does not respond, the baby will try again once, perhaps twice. If the mother still does not respond, the baby looks elsewhere rather than at the mother’s face. Adults often communicate in the same way. I observed a woman my age looking at a teenage girl whose need to be fashionable had quite overcome her sense of the ridiculous. As the woman shook her head and turned away, she caught my eye. I smiled, and she smiled back. Nothing needed to be said.

      Psychologists will argue that there are good scientific reasons for rejecting the theory that babies are born with some degree of a sense of self and an ability to perceive a sense of self in other people. However, science is concerned with probabilities. Any statement of absolute certainty cannot be scientific. Deciding whether a particular probability is so significant that it can be acted upon is a subjective judgement. For instance, you have about one chance in fourteen million of winning the UK National Lottery. Such a probability has never tempted me to buy a ticket, but millions of people do, many on the grounds that, ‘Someone has got to win it.’ More often than not, whether we see a particular probability as being significant depends on whether it fits with the way we see things. There are many adults, and not only psychologists, who want to see themselves as being superior to children. When you were a child, how many adults did you meet who spoke to you as an equal? Did you try to bear this as best you could, or did you resolve that, when you grew up, you would do to children what had been done to you?

      All the evidence that infants can imitate, converse, feel self-conscious, understand intention, understand humour and how to deceive others has not changed the minds of those psychologists who are devoted to the theory that children have to be about four years old before they acquire a sense of self and an understanding that other people have a sense of self. My husband, who had a somewhat tangential relationship with truth, used to say that you should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He could have said the same about any theory on which a scientist has staked his identity. Abandoning a theory on which you have built your career and reputation with your peers will threaten your sense of being a person, and so you are likely to deny the evidence that shows your theory to be wrong.

      So rarely does a scientist gracefully relinquish a theory which built his reputation that much is made of those occasions when a scientist does just this. In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of a respected elderly zoologist who was tremendously pleased when, in a lecture, a much younger scientist showed the zoologist that his long-held theory was wrong. Dawkins wrote, ‘We clapped our hands red.’²

      If you are the student of a well-known or an up-and-coming scientist, one of the most dangerous things you can do is to obtain research results that throw doubt on this scientist’s theories. (Alternatively, one of the best things you can ever do is to produce results that disprove the theories of his competitor.) Vasudevi Reddy told the story of what happened when one of Piaget’s students, Olga Maratos, made a discovery that suggested that Piaget might be wrong. From his extensive research the great psychologist had concluded that it was not until they were about eight months old that infants could imitate another person because imitation requires some understanding of oneself and another person, and this a newborn baby did not have. Olga Maratos found that, if she poked her tongue at a baby no more than a month old, the baby, seemingly with much thought and effort, poked his tongue at her. Her fellow psychologists were sceptical, but, when she showed the great man a video of her research, he said, ‘Indeed they imitate!’ When she asked him what she should do, he said she would either have to develop his theory, or create a different theory from the data.

      When Olga had presented her work at a conference of the British Psychological Society, in her audience was a young psychologist who went on to show that what she had found was indeed the case. Babies are born knowing how to imitate.

      It was Andrew Meltzoff who, having persuaded a large number of pregnant women to allow him to be at their baby’s birth, established that, if you hold a baby who has just been born so that the two of you are looking at one another, and you poke your tongue out, slowly and carefully, the baby will copy you. Now, nearly a hundred studies of newborns have shown that babies within minutes of birth can imitate mouth opening, finger movement, eye blinking, and even one sound, ‘aaaa’. Reddy wrote, ‘The debate is just as passionate as it ever was, now having shifted to the question of whether we could actually call such acts “imitation”.’³ This reminds me of the phenomenon of ‘retrospective diagnosis’ which I observed in the psychiatric hospitals where I worked. The psychiatrists I worked with believed that depression was a lifelong chronic illness which could be managed by the psychiatrist with the use of antidepressant drugs. When any of my depressed patients came to the conclusion that it was their ideas that had led them to become depressed, and decided that they could change these ideas to ones that ensured a satisfactory life, the psychiatrist who had diagnosed this patient as being depressed would deny that the patient had ever been depressed. He had merely suffered from mild anxiety. Changing the facts so that your original theory still holds СКАЧАТЬ