Causal Illusions and Success

Helena Matute

Today the Imperfect Cognitions blog has published an interview by Anneli Jefferson with Helena Matute who has been working on causal illusions and illusions of control.

Here is an extract, particularly relevant to the question whether some illusions lead to success:

AJ: In your work, you point to negative consequences of seeing cause-effect relations where there are none, as for example when this leads people to uncritically believing in unscientific forms of medicine such as homeopathy. Do you think causal illusions have predominantly negative effects? Can they also be ‘positive illusions’, to borrow Taylor’s famous phrase?

HM: Oh, they surely have positive consequences as well. Otherwise they would have not been retained to this day. This is a trend that evolution has favored, which means that those individuals who in the early times developed the illusion that they were controlling their environment had an evolutionary advantage. They were probably more active and more persistent in their attempts to survive and so were more successful. 

Those who believed that they had no control over their environment quite possibly reduced their motivation to act, and their actual chances to survive, as in learned helplessness phenomena. When Overmier, Seligman and Maier first described learned helplessness effects in 1967 they found their dogs had lost their motivation to initiate voluntary responses after exposure to uncontrollable events. If believing (or realizing) that you have no control leads you to feel depressed, passive, and unresponsive, then a lack of causal illusion in those cases can be quite damaging. So, yes, causal illusions do have a positive side in many real life situations, but today there are also many situations in which illusory beliefs can be quite damaging. For instance, it might have been positive to believe that an innocuous herb could heal you in the times when no scientific medicine existed. However, maintaining such beliefs at present may have disastrous consequences. 

To conclude, it is important to keep in mind that we cannot spend our life looking for biases, illusions and errors all the time, so we should be aware that we will suffer from some degree of illusory perception of causality from time to time. Thus, what I believe that what we should do is (1) be aware that we are all victims of these illusions, so we will be ready to detect them when they occur, and (2) recognize those situations in which causal illusions would have negative consequences for us and for those we love, as it is in those cases that we need to be particularly vigilant to detect and combat them. In other cases, just forget or make fun of your superstitions and illusions.

The Drive to Succeed and Young People's Mental Health

Jasmine Parker - Wellcome Images

Today Vicki Abeles on the New York Times reports on a new study by Stuart Slavin showing that one in three young people in the States experience anxiety or depression due to school-related stress.

This does not apply only to teenagers, but to children aged 5 to 7 as well. The article suggests that the drive to succeed creates stress, and paradoxically undermines academic success.

Mental Health Stigma Reduces the Opportunities for 'Success'

Mind, Body and Soul

What do we mean when we imply that people with mental health issues are not successful, as it is often done in some of the psychological literature on the effects of depression on agency? A very powerful talk by Dr Victor Pace (Consultant in Palliative Care at the St Christopher's Hospice) inspired me to think about this question again.

The conference "Mind, Body and Soul: An Update on Psychiatric, Philosophical and Legal Aspects of Care of Patients Nearing the End of Life" was hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine on 10th November. Pace talked about the issues emerging in caring for people with severe mental illness who are also terminal patients. He explained very clearly why people with schizophrenia have a higher mortality rate and die twenty years earlier than if they did not have schizophrenia.

The list of factors he mentioned made me think about one notion of success that is quite implicit in our evaluation of our own lives, and other people's lives. The first factor is unemployment. People who are diagnosed with schizophrenia are unlikely to have stable employment in the ten years following the diagnosis, and unemployment means reduced socialisation, loss of control over one's life, dependence on others, and often poverty.

The second factor that was discussed is lack of close relationships. Being socially integrated matters a lot to people with severe mental illness (they would like to have close relationships) and it predicts reduced risk of suicide. But most of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (two thirds) lack social integration, and this causes serious disadvantage.

Thirdly, psychosis is the greatest predictor of premature death, not because of suicide, but because of physical illness, such as high incidence of smoking, diabetes, and metabolic syndromes, which are often made worse by antipsychotic drugs. One reason why physical health deteriorates is that people with psychosis access services late (because they feel they may not be taken seriously and have reduced pain sensitivity or pain expression), and often services are ill-equipped to deal with physical health and mental health as a package.

It seems to me that unemployment, lack of close relationships, and physical illness (and their consequences) are part of our pre-theoretical notion of failure. We see the successful agent as productive, socially integrated, able to determine her own path. What is potentially worrying about this identification is the implicit judgement that the agent is responsible for the consequences of her mental health issues. And this would be mistaken, because as Pace showed in his talk, the three factors he mentioned are due to or made much worse by stigma, that is, by the way society regards and treats people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The person with psychosis wants to work, make friends, and be well, but there are fewer opportunities for her to do so because she is marginalised.

The risks of marginalisation and of a "them and us" attitude to mental health are some of the issues I tackle in my latest Birmingham Brief.