Sandra Parshall
Why do some myths about human behavior persist, even though we can see the evidence that they aren’t true? Why do we try so hard to fit our feelings and actions into rigid patterns dictated by authors of pop psychology books?
Novelists play their (our) part in perpetuating certain myths about human behavior. We know that everybody does this, or believes that – we know because that’s what we’ve always been told, and all the pop psychology books say so. We write our characters to conform with popular beliefs. We make them behave in ways that might, in fact, be unrealistic. If readers all believe the myths, they’ll accept what we’ve written. If we write characters who behave the way people really do, those characters might be dismissed as unconvincing. 
What’s going on here? Why do we want to believe, for example, that letting go and “blowing off steam” is the best way to get rid of our anger? Hasn’t anyone noticed that the more we indulge negative feelings, the more negative we feel? Anger feeds on itself, and the more it’s expressed, the stronger and nastier it becomes. Besides, losing your temper and screaming at another person is likely to make the object of your rage pretty mad too. So why do we write characters who feel calm and relieved after they break something or throw something against a wall or tell somebody off?
It’s puzzling and frustrating. Maybe we should pay more attention to books like 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Nature. The four psychology professors who authored this enlightening book are up against the roughly 3,500 self-help titles, a lot of them based on false premises, that are published in the U.S. every year. In 50 Great Myths they challenge the beliefs that all people experience a midlife crisis, that subliminal messages can persuade us to buy products, that adolescents inevitably go through emotional turmoil, and that everyone experiences the same stages of grief. They also point out the fallacies in common beliefs about memory, romance, happiness, and lie detector tests.
The authors – Scott O. Lillenfield, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein – pulled out half a dozen popular myths to focus on in an article for the March/April issue of Scientific American Mind magazine, and heading the list was “Myth #1: Blowing Our Tops Defuses Anger.” More than 40 years of research has shown again and again that the more people express anger, the more aggressive they become. Thirty-five studies have concluded that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior in everyday social situations.
The 50 Great Myths authors also found little proof to support the popular conviction that a positive attitude can cure cancer. It might improve the patient’s quality of life, and so might a support group, but no evidence exists that either will prolong life or bring about a cure. Yet as many as 94 percent of cancer survivors attribute their recovery to positive thinking.
What about those supposedly universal stages of grief that everyone looks for and writers use as templates for their grieving characters’ actions? Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, popularized the concept in the 1960s, and it has taken root with amazing tenacity. As we all know, first comes denial, then anger, then bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Doctors and nurses expect us to follow these steps. We expect it of ourselves and others. But guess what? People are not all alike. If someone you love deeply dies and you accept the loss without getting angry and depressed first, that doesn’t make you heartless or abnormal. You’re just reacting in your own way. But you may be judged harshly for it. A fictional character is also expected to conform to popular misconceptions.
In writing and in personal relationships, it’s wise to keep individual differences in mind when we feel ourselves drawn to any common belief about how people should feel and act. But the unfortunate truth is that we’re taking a risk anytime we stray from popular myths about human behavior.
Sandra Parshall
Are you a different person when you talk to your mom than you are when you talk to your colleagues? Do you show a different personality and express your views more honestly to your closest friends than to your casual acquaintances?
Most of us would answer yes to both questions. We’re well aware that we don’t present the same face to everyone.
Adjusting our actions and speech to the circumstances and the people we’re with comes naturally to normal humans. Even some decidedly abnormal folks do it too, thus the “He always seemed so nice!” comments from neighbors and co-workers after a serial killer is arrested. Ted Bundy, remember, could be absolutely charming, not just to the women he charmed to death but also to the people who considered him a friend.
Social psychologists say that our adaptive behavior demonstrates “the power of the situation.” K.J. Gergen, a prominent research psychologist, noted that in letters to friends he showed several totally different personalities. “In one,” he wrote, “I was morose, pouring out a philosophy of existential sorrow; in another I was a lusty realist; in a third I was a lighthearted jokester.” He was giving each person what he or she wanted from him.
Experiments have shown that the human urge to adapt is so strong that we do it unconsciously in conversation, responding to the speech rhythms of others. When face to face, we may also adjust our expressions and body movements to those of our conversational partners without realizing we’re doing it. Psychologists Kate G. Niederhoffer and James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas enlisted dozens of students to chat live online to determine whether coordination of word use and sentence rhythm would occur naturally between people who had never seen each other and knew nothing about each other. It did. Even the paired online chatters who rapidly developed a dislike of each other still demonstrated what the psychologists call “linguistic style matching.”
The results, Niederhoffer and Pennebaker wrote in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, suggest that “the way one person constructs a sentence and uses words primes the other person to do the same.” Regardless of the subject being discussed, the participants in the experiments used the same type of language and spoke in sentences of about the same length. “When two people are talking, their communicative behaviors are patterned and coordinated, like a dance.” But unlike a dance, it’s not as simple as who is leading and who is following. Both are constantly making adjustments based on the signals they’re getting from each other.
“If one person interacts in brief bursts,” Niederhoffer and Pennebaker wrote, “the other tends to follow. The pair has constructed an interaction style that maintains itself.”
To test the theory of linguistic style matching in a completely objective way, the psychologists studied many hours of the Nixon White House tapes of Nixon’s discussions of Watergate with his aides Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman, and John Dean. They discovered the same “coordinated use of language” taking place, even though one man was clearly the boss and directing the discussions.
When does this mutual adaptation not happen? When one of the participants in a conversation is distracted or simply isn’t interested. People with serious mental illness won’t pick up conversational cues from others. Dyslexia or other learning disabilities may also interfere with the instinct to coordinate speech with that of others.
Reading about all this has made me hyper-aware of dialogue exchanges in novels. Fictional conversation isn’t the same as the real thing, of course – it has to be sharper and leaner – but it must seem genuine to be convincing. I wonder if we sometimes label dialogue as unconvincing because it doesn’t reflect the coordinated rhythm of real-life talk.
In the same way that writers must make invented conversation believable, we have to convey the complexity of a real human being in a story focused on a short period in a character’s life. How well we do it – how many of the character’s “faces” we can show convincingly, without making him or her come across like a split personality -- makes the difference between a flat character and one who lives and breathes in the reader’s imagination.
Do you find yourself consciously adapting your behavior and mood to the people you’re with? Do you do it to avoid friction, or simply because it feels natural and considerate – or because you can’t help it? Are you ever aware of falling into a conversational rhythm with others? Do your characters reflect these common human tendencies?
Sandra Parshall
The cover art for the October issue of Psychology Today is arresting – a huge sandwich filled with books and DVDs – but the lines above the magazine’s name were what caught my eye:
TASTE & PERSONALITY
WHAT YOUR STUFF REVEALS ABOUT YOU
I already know myself all too well and don’t need a magazine article to explain what my “stuff” says about me. But I thought the piece might spark some new ideas for fleshing out characters, creating fictional people who would be intriguing, unpredictable, so I forked over $4.99 plus tax (when did magazines become so expensive?) and brought home a copy of PT to peruse.
What I learned was that humans are disappointingly easy to sort into stereotypes. Eriq Gardner’s report on research into the mystery of human “taste” verified some obvious assumptions: extroverts enjoy art/music/films with sensational elements, forceful action, and themes of sexuality or violence; introverts are drawn to quieter, more contemplative works of art and books and films heavy on character development. When we want people to know what we’re like, we tell them about our preferences in entertainment, and feel reasonably sure they’ll get the right idea.
Some tastes may be programmed into us before we ever open our eyes to the world. For example, a study of 3,000 twins determined that a love of jazz is at least partly inherited. There’s no jazz gene, Gardner is quick to point out, but people do inherit personality traits and aspects of intelligence that influence their preferences.
Does this mean we’re enslaved by brain chemistry and inborn traits? We all make snap judgments of people based on the outward evidence of their taste in clothes, food, art, music – but are those judgments invariably accurate? Will the devotee of classical music always be quiet and thoughtful? Will the person who loves country always be down to earth, unpretentious? Don’t we all know people who contradict the stereotypes? Of course we do, because most of us have overlapping personality traits that tug us in different directions and make us love a rock concert one day and seek quiet solitude the next.
So where does this leave the writer whose editor and readers demand consistent behavior from characters?
Writers can tap into the reader’s unconscious assumptions about people in some useful ways. The car the character drives, or the clothes he chooses for casual Friday at the office, will create an instant impression, saving the writer paragraphs or pages of character delineation. A mystery writer can also use the tendency toward quick judgments to throw the reader off the villain’s scent. The character who looks and acts too innocent to be anything but guilty has become a cliche, but authors can still use variations of this technique, creating emotional or cultural disguises for their killers. Because it’s difficult for anyone to hide his true nature for long, the real person will show through in a habit, preference, or possession that doesn’t fit with the rest of the disguise and opens a window to the truth.
Agatha Christie wrote villains and heros alike in their simplest form. Scratch the surface and you won’t find much underneath. Today, if characters aren’t complex and intriguing, they’re dismissed as cardboard cutouts that can’t carry a story. Readers want to be surprised – but not too much. The story may focus on crime-solving, but the writer has to be an attentive student of human psychology to succeed.
As a reader, do you value consistency over surprise? How do you react when a fictional person does something “out of character”? Does it make the character seem more real or less real to you?
Now let’s get personal: What does your “stuff” – the music you listen to, the books you read, the colors you’ve chosen to decorate your home – say about you? If you were telling a new acquaintance about yourself and wanted to make a great impression, what would you reveal about your tastes and what would you leave out?
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