A most judicious choice, sire

I remember, in my first year of teaching, a charming and engaging student, Sam, who was in some difficulty.  He had missed a coursework deadline, having repeatedly told me that he was on track with the work but he had kept forgetting to bring it to school at the various checkpoints, and ultimately, did not hand anything in, even after an extension. It turned out that the work was not remotely ready. I asked a senior colleague for advice, and he told me ‘a part of Sam really wants to, and even does half-believe his story, even though another part of him knows that it's not true’.  I remember thinking at the time that this was a way of preserving Sam’s dignity, rather than naming the uncomfortable fact that he had, in fact, lied on many occasions.

I have come to see things rather differently in the intervening decades; having seen so many children and adults alike behave completely authentically, but in ways that are genuinely contradictory.  Of course there is the simple fact that the piece of work in question was not finished, but the thing to address here is about Sam the human person, not an academic portfolio. And I now think there is no single ‘truth’ about a person, only multiple drafts, or competing and occasionally contradicting narrations.  That may sound rather vague and I have no doubt that the younger, rather linear me would have rolled his eyes and muttered something guttural on hearing this; but the truth is that the multiple stories approach has been validated by neuroscience and cognitive science. The multi-tiered brain anatomy is now well-known, and in his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts the consequences like this: we assume that there is one person in each [brain], but in some ways we are more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross-purposes.  AI researcher Marvin Minsky famously described this arrangement as the Society of Mind; John Keats captured things more poetically when he wrote that our mind is a mansion of many apartments.

So how might we divide up the mind?  There are dozens of schemes -  Plato and the Bible both identified the head and the heart;  Freud gives us the id, ego, and superego, and the idea has even come into popular culture with Pixar's Inside Out portraying the mind as a committee of five different emotional personalities. The truth is likely more complex still - in The Elephant in the Mind, Kevin Simler argues for a patchwork of hundreds of thousands of different cognitive modules, each responsible for slightly different information processing tasks. 

Whatever the actual details, these ideas and a mountain of other evidence strongly indicate that contrary to subjective opinion, there is no single decision maker in our minds, no unitary locus of control.  We are not quite the autocrat over our own lives, as we like to think. In fact, our minds often seem to take a path, and then create the best justification that they can find after the event (the familiar confirmation bias is just one manifestation of this).

These ideas may appear remote, but there are practical implications for schools.  The first is that we can easily adopt the kindest approach whenever possible.  However a child may behave, we should understand their actions as emerging from a competing, conflicting and confounding set of processes; what's important lies not only in incidents, but also in hopes and needs.  That was what my colleague grasped, and I did not, all those years ago; that Sam’s stories were the fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive. They were not the honest truth, for sure, but they weren't quite lies either.  That’s not to say that we can excuse Sam or let him off the hook, but it might suggest a broad range of options for addressing the issue, that have a different tone to simply treating him as a liar.

And that leads to the broader implication for schools; that helping young people to be self-aware (in older language; know thyself) needs detailed and careful attention; it’s a complex thing and does not happen by accident, but it yields rich rewards.  Psychologists Barrett et al, for example, have found that those who have rich and precise ways to explain the gamut of their emotional experiences seem to be able to be better able to manage negative emotions - particularly at higher levels of emotional intensity.  In practical terms - if you can identify, name and discuss your own emotional life, you can deal with difficult and challenging situations more effectively. Now that’s a useful, lifeworthy skill if ever there was one.   

Of course, that we are not always aware of our own motivation is a lesson for adults too, not just students.  We need to remain skeptical of our own stories, and to be aware of the dangers of self-serving explanations.  Am I reacting to a situation on it's own merits, or because of my feeling towards the people involved? Do I pass some ideas without critical attention because I like the person proposing them? Do I take a particular stance on an issue because of a single significant but personal experience, rather than because of the issue itself? And more generally, with Sam in mind, am I really narrating a perspective I would desperately like to be true, when another part of me knows it is not?

These are hard question to answer, which is is why they are so important to ask. For me, whenever I am describing my choices I try to have Steven Kaas’ memorable words in mind:  You are not the king of your brain, you are the creepy guy standing next to the king saying ‘a most judicious choice sire.’

References

• Barrett, L. F. et al (2001) Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion vol 15

• Simler, K. (2018) Elephant in the Brain Oxford University Press

• Haidt, J (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis Basic Books.