DECEIVING OURSELVES REGARDING WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO

Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (New York: Pantheon, 2012) ("We may not like people in general, but however little or much we like our fellow human beings, our subliminal selves tend to like our fellow in-group members more. Consider the in-group that is your profession. In one study, researchers asked subjects to rate the  likability of doctors, lawyers, waiters, and hairdressers on a scale from 1-100. The twist was, every subject in this experiment was him- or herself either a doctor, a lawyer, a waiter, or a hairdresser. The results were very consistent: those in three of the four professions rated the members of the other professions as average, with a likability around 50. But they rated those in their own profession significantly higher, around 70. There was only one exception: the lawyers, who rated both those in the other professions and other lawyers at around 50. That probably brings to mind several lawyer jokes, so there is no need for me to make any. However, the fact that lawyers do not favor fellow lawyers is not necessarily due to the circumstances that the only difference between a lawyer and a catfish is that one is a bottom-feeding scavenger and the other is a fish. Of the four groups assessed by the researchers, lawyers, you see, form the only one whose members regularly oppose others in their own group. So while other lawyers may be in a given lawyer's in-group, they are also potentially in his or her out-group. Despite that anomaly, research suggests that, whether with regard to religion, race, nationality, computer use, or our operating unit at work, we generally have a built-in tendency to prefer those in our in-group. Studies show that common group membership can even trump negative personal attributes. As one researcher put it, 'One may like people as group members even as one dislikes them as individual persons.'" Id. at 167-168. One law school recently adopted a 'student honor code'. The irony of it is that a stated rationale for adopting the honor code was that the law students suspected that a significant number of other law students were engaging in wrongful conduct but were getting away with it. The honor code posited a duty to report wrongdoing (by others and, one assumes, by oneself). One is supposed to imagine that the fear of being detected and outed as a wrongdoer will deter potential wrongdoing. The proposed honor code does not make sense to me; but that may be due mainly to my  moral opposition to people finking on one another. I could not get my mind around why law students would support the adoption of the honor code. Now I get it. Law students, as-lawyers-in-training, are already indoctrinated into the adversarial culture of the legal profession where lawyers find other lawyers only of average likability (and, more important, go against the grain of tending to view members of one's own profession as significantly more likable than the members of other professions. Perhaps law students don't find their fellow lawyers-in-training to be likable (or honest, or trustworthy, etc). After all, the other law students are the competition, and cannot be trusted to not exploit any opportunity to get an advantage, fair or unfair, over them. So sad! "Adjusting our standards for accepting evidence to favor our preferred conclusions is but one instrument in the subliminal mind's motivated reasoning tool kit." Id. at 210. "In one study, participants considered applications from a male and a female candidate for the job of police chief. That's a stereotypically male position, so the researchers postulated that the participants would favor the male applicant and then unwittingly narrow the criteria by which they judged the applicants to those that would support that decision.  Here is how the study worked: There were two types of resumes. The experimenters designed one to portray a streetwise individual who was poorly educated and lacking in administrative skills. They designed the other to reflect a well-educated and politically connected sophisticate who had little street smarts. Some participants were given a pair of resumes in which the male applicant had the streetwise resume and the female was the sophisticate. Others were given a pair of resumes in which the man's and the woman's strong points were reversed. The participants were asked not just to make a choice but to explain it." "The results showed that when the male applicant had the streetwise resume, the participants decided street smarts were important for the job and selected him, but when the male applicant had the sophisticate's resume, they decided that street smarts were overrated and also chose the male. They were clearly making their decisions on the basis of gender and not on the streetwise-versus-sophisticated distinction, but they were just as clearly unaware of doing so. In fact, when asked, none of the subjects mentioned gender as having influenced them." "Our culture likes to portray situations in black and white. Antagonists are dishonest, insincere, greedy, evil. They are opposed by heroes who are the opposite in terms of those qualities. But the truth is, from criminals to greedy executives to the 'nasty' guy down the street, people who act in way we abhor are usually convinced that they are right." Id. at 211-212.).