The Mental Health of Nations
Can America survive without positive illusions?
I’ve been reflecting on a recent conversation between Megan McArdle and Russ Roberts on the topic of national identity.
Professional historians are more and more interested in a narrative of America. . . where the only good thing America ever did was to suck slightly less than it had before. And, that you can sort of tell history as Americans just being really horrible, but then every so often, they're pushed into being slightly less horrible by the few good people dotted here and there. Right? Quite apart from whether that's accurate; and I would contest that it is.
You have to ask, can a nation survive with that as its core self-conception? Can a nation survive, if most of what you are teaching children is bad things about the country--or, becoming slightly less bad--and that's all you ever teach the kids. Because, I think nations do at some level need to have some self-esteem. And, if they don't, the nation doesn't hold together. Right or wrong, you have to have something that people admire. In the same way that a healthy individual has to have things that it admires about itself, which aren't just, 'Well, you used to be much worse and now you aren't quite so bad.'
I think a healthy nation, to hold itself together, to make claims on each other, has to have a fundamental idea of, 'Actually, overall, we're pretty good. (emphasis added)
The comparison she draws between the self-regard of a healthy individual and the collective appreciation and respect citizens have for their country reminded me of an experiment I read about years ago in Walter Mischel’s book The Marshmallow Test.1
Mischel and coauthors designed the study to uncover why patients suffering from severe depression held such a dark view of themselves, expecting to observe a persistent negative bias in their self-assessments relative to that of neutral, treatment-blind observers.2 What they found instead helped provide the basis for what psychologists now call positive illusions.
Participants were seated in small groups in a comfortable informal seating arrangement and were told that the researchers wanted to learn more about how strangers related to one another. Each person in these small group meetings introduced himself or herself with a short monologue, and they were left alone to converse for 20 minutes. The observers, carefully trained and blind to the diagnoses and histories of the participants, rated what they observed from behind one-way mirrors on standard rating scales that listed many desirable attributes. . . right after each session, the participants rated their own performance in the group interaction on the same scales used by the observers.
The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed with twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups their self ratings most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them.
Healthy, well-adjusted people successfully make their way through life in part thanks to self-enhancement strategies that accentuate their positive qualities. It is easy to make fun of any one of these enhancements in isolation (recall that nearly all drivers believe they drive better than average), but dwelling on the epistemic irrationality of the part misses the adaptive rationality of the whole.
To suggest another analogy that may illustrate the role of positive illusions in preserving healthy nationhood, consider the regard marriage partners have for each other in a thriving and committed relationship. Research suggests that successful couples are still able to see each others’ faults but tend to downplay them by looking for silver linings and emphasizing more positive qualities. What some might call cognitive distortions probably enable them to stay together.
Edit: I thank Arnold Kling for recommending the podcast!
Named after a famous study he led at Stanford on delayed gratification.
Subjects were evaluated on positive qualities such as friendliness, popularity, attractiveness, warmth, social skill, humor, and clear communication.
My favorite Alexis de Tocqueville quote
"Moralists are constantly complaining that the favorite failing of our age is arrogance.
In a certain sense that is true: in fact everyone believes himself better than his neighbor and no one agrees to obey his superior. But in another that is quite false: for this same man who tolerates neither subordination nor equality, nonetheless has so low an opinion of himself that he thinks he is born only to indulge vulgar pleasures. He readily wallows in mediocre longings without daring to tackle any lofty projects; indeed, he can scarcely conceive of them.
Far, therefore, from believing that one should recommend humility to our contemporaries, I should like us to strive to give them an enlarged idea of themselves and their kind. Humility is far from healthy for them. What they most lack, in my view, is pride. For that failing I would readily relinquish several of our trivial virtues."
The observation that depressed people are actually seeing themselves quite accurately was also made by Freud in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia." Part of the puzzle of "melancholia" (i.e. depression) is that it is a situation where truthfulness coincides with mental illness.