We Are What We Do



http://www.wearewhatwedo.org/

According to Timothy D. Wilson, the best way to change is often to change our behavior first, I so love the quote by timothy because we are what we do, people become what they do. This explanation of how people acquire attitudes and traits dates back to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, but was formalized by the social psychologist Daryl Bem in his self-perception theory. People draw inferences about who they are, sometimes in life we get judged by what we do. We might make mistakes, and by that mistake we are judged by what we did. Things that we do describe exactly who we are, the way we speak, the way we conduct ourselves, and the way we respond to other people. The way we dress, the way we talk to strangers, last but not the least, the way we think and treat other people. Daryl Bem suggested, by observing people’s behavior.



I remember while I was doing my second year at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Social Psychology was one of my subjects, well I love psychology because we had to learn about human consciousness and also observer people’s behavior, and self-perception. Well Self-perception theory turns out to be common wisdom. People act the way they do because of their personality traits and attitudes, right? They return stolen or lost properties because they are honest, they recycle their trash because they care about the environment they live in. While it is true that behavior emanates from people's inner dispositions, Bem's insight was to suggest that the reverse also holds. If we return lost properties, there is an upward tick on our honesty meter. After we drag the recycling bin to the curb, we infer that we really care about the environment.

Hundreds of experiments have confirmed the theory and shown when this self-inference process is most likely to operate (e.g., when people believe they freely chose to behave the way they did, and when they weren't sure at the outset how they felt).



Self-perception theory is elegant in its simplicity. But it is also quite deep, with important implications for the nature of the human mind. Two other powerful ideas follow from it. The first is that we are strangers to ourselves. After all, if we knew our own minds, why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior? We are what we do, the material or books that we read. If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how honest we are and how much we like lattes. Instead, we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are. Self-perception theory thus anticipated the revolution in psychology in the study of human consciousness, a revolution that revealed the limits of introspection.



But it turns out that we don't just use our behavior to reveal our dispositions—we infer dispositions that weren't there before. Often, our behavior is shaped by subtle pressures around us, but we fail to recognize those pressures. As a result, we mistakenly believe that our behavior emanated from some inner disposition. Perhaps we aren't particularly trustworthy and instead returned the lost properties in order to impress the people around us. But, failing to realize that, we infer that we are squeaky clean honest. Maybe we recycle because the city has made it easy to do so (by giving us a bin) and our spouse and neighbors would disapprove if we didn't. Instead of recognizing those reasons, Countless studies have shown that people are quite susceptible to social influence, but rarely recognize the full extent of it, thereby misattributing their compliance to their true wishes and desires—the well-known fundamental attribution error. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."