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Key points
- Cognitive biases and prejudices can be major restraints on love and emotional growth.
- They make people think they are right and justified in hurting loved ones.
- They make people think they are acting fairly when they’re not.
- They keep partners from acting in their best interests.
Cognitive biases are autopilot judgments that shape conscious thinking and behavior. They help the brain achieve coherence of experience and memory. They provide explanations for unpleasant and painful experiences and memories. There are dozens of examples. The most common is confirmation bias, in which we process only information that confirms our biases and prejudices while ignoring or dismissing contradictory evidence.
Biases and prejudices feed into a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting. When ambivalent emotions become too strong, many people split them into components, such as good and bad, love and hate. Split apart, the negative will always dominate the positive. Due to their immediate survival significance, negative feelings get priority processing in the brain in both experience and memory. Fueled by biases and prejudices, splitting gives a Jekyll-Hyde flavor to relationships, with Mr. Hyde eventually choking the life from the union.
Biases and prejudices are so integral to the way the brain organizes information that it’s impossible to be completely free of them. But we can reduce their negative effects.
Integration
Splitting guarantees the triumph of the bad over the good. Integrating ambivalent feelings increases the chances of the positive regulating the negative. We must remember that we love our partners when we don’t like their behavior and when we ask for behavior change.
Before requesting a change in any behavior that stirs emotion, try to recall what you love about your partner and what is good about your relationship. Write them down. This will make your approach more positive. You’ll feel better about yourself while increasing the likelihood of a cooperative response.
Reflect on the Fairness of Your Behavior From Your Partner’s Perspective
We’re hypersensitive to partners acting unfairly but hardly aware of our own unfairness. Perceptions of unfairness are functions of the autopilot brain. The conscious brain considers only information that supports the implicit perception of unfairness. Accurately judging the fairness of our own behavior requires reflection, if not a weekend retreat. It won’t happen on autopilot.
To counter the inescapable confirmation bias of implicit judgments, look for evidence against your perception of unfairness.
It’s not fair that my partner expects me to do certain things—I resent it. But my partner feels it’s unfair that I don’t do the kind things for her that I used to do. It’s unfair that I don’t consider her feelings.
Humility
Knowing facts is necessary for wisdom but not sufficient. Wisdom rises from interpretations of facts and consequent actions. Unlike facts, interpretations are laden with bias and prejudice.
Also necessary for wisdom is considering doubt about our interpretations. The emotional state of certainty—feeling certain—is the enemy of wisdom because it shuts down the amount and type of information the brain processes. This is not a new concept. Inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is this phrase:
“Surety brings ruin.”
In the 18th century, Voltaire reminded us:
“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
The only path to wisdom is through humility about our biases and prejudices. We must replace judgments of certainty with assessments of probability based on consideration of evidence for and against our judgments.
Be Wary of Projections
The psychological defense mechanism of projection is how we attribute our own emotional states, judgments, or attitudes to others. When one partner feels irritable, for instance, it’s not unusual to accuse the other of irritability. People who feel guilty about their attraction to the stars of a TV show may well suspect that their partners lust after them.
Projections in family relationships often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Projective identification occurs when partners identify with the projection—you get irritable when your partner accuses you of being irritable and feel unmotivated to mow the lawn when your partner says you’re lazy. Similarly, children tend to identify with adult projections about them being “bad boys” and “bad girls” and, in the American Way, become the best bad boys and bad girls they can be.
If you project your confidence in your children, you will help them gain confidence, and if you project your distrust of them, they’re likely to become sneaky. Frequent criticism makes loved ones feel incompetent and make mistakes. Resentment makes them feel less lovable and behave less lovingly.
Projections have built-in hypocrisy when we have little tolerance for attitudes and qualities in others that we don’t like about ourselves. More than a century ago, Carl Jung noted:
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.”
Use your projections of your partner’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior to evaluate your own. Better yet, replace projections with curiosity about your partner’s perspective. Don’t project, learn.
Restraints of Inaction
Low energy, lack of desire, fear of loss, and self-obsession keep us from being as compassionate, kind, and supportive as we would like to be.
Low energy and lack of desire create an illusory trap that inhibits improving behavior. Consider how often you’ve heard something like:
“When I have more energy, I’ll start to exercise.”
“When I feel better about myself, I’ll take better care of my appearance.”
Of course, we’re unlikely to have more energy and feel better about ourselves until we exercise and take better care of our appearance. These generate energy and desire. It takes a leap of faith to exercise when you don’t feel like it, but you’re likely to see the difference once you begin.
We’re also unlikely to have more energy and feel better about ourselves until we’re more compassionate, kind, and supportive. These generate energy and desire. It takes a leap of faith to be compassionate, kind, and supportive when you don’t feel like it, but you’re likely to see the difference when you begin. Nothing increases self-value and well-being like compassion, kindness, and emotional support of loved ones.
Fear of loss creates another trap of inaction by inhibiting compassion, kindness, and support. It stems from the tacit assumption that the relationship will fail and that the pain of failure will ease with lessened emotional investment. The relationship may well fail with increased compassion, kindness, and support, but it will certainly fail without them.
Loss is likely to hurt more with emotional investment, but emotional investment increases resilience; you’ll recover faster when true to your most humane values. The automatic guilt and shame we feel when we withhold compassion, kindness, and support in love relationships complicate and lengthen the pain of recovery, especially when masked with resentment.
The restraint of self-obsession attenuates once we understand that compassion, kindness, and emotional support are in our long-term best interest. They create relationship harmony, which is integral to emotional well-being. When we withhold compassion, kindness, and support for any reason, the noise of relationships—resentment—destroys harmony and diminishes the well-being of everyone in the family.
You cannot be well if your partner is not. Compassion, kindness, and emotional support of loved ones are necessary for the self-value of everyone in loving relationships.
