The As If Principle

The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life

Richard Wiseman

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781451675078
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Victorian philosopher William James had a theory about emotion and behavior: It isn't that our feelings guide our actions (feel happy and you will laugh). On the contrary, it is our actions that guide our emotions (laugh and you will feel happy). This led James to a remarkable conclusion: "If you want a quality, act as if you already have it." Roused by James's astonishing discovery, renowned psychologist and bestselling author Richard Wiseman confirms James's principle and shows how the self-help genre has for too long put the cart before the horse in trying to help us take control of our lives. Bringing to the table a dazzling array of firsthand experiments, surprising histories, and psychological case studies, Wiseman illustrates in brilliant detail how we can apply this principle in our daily lives: —Smile to become measurably happier —Wash your hands to drive away guilt —Clench your fist to increase your willpower —Eat with your non-dominant hand to lose weight —Nod while speaking to become more persuasive —Act like a newlywed to rekindle your marriage Lively, engaging, and truly mind-changing, The As If Principle is that rare gem that offers real, workable solutions for your day-to-day goals while helping you to instantly take control of your emotions. Whether it's quitting a bad habit, persevering through a difficult task, or achieving your dream self, The As If Principle can help. Don't just think about changing your life. Do it.

Chapter 1

How to Be Happy

Where we meet that adorable genius William James, turn the world upside down, learn how to create good cheer at will, and visit the fun factory

“In the beginning was the deed.”

—Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I. The Simple Idea That Changes Everything

II. Testing a Theory

III. The Value of Fun

I. The Simple Idea That Changes Everything

The world’s first laboratory-based psychology experiment was carried out by the German psychologist Professor Wilhelm Wundt in 1879. This historic study was conducted in a small room at the University of Leipzig and reveals all you need to know about how Victorian scientists approached the human mind.

Wundt could have celebrated the birth of experimental psychology by investigating any fascinating topic of his choosing. Perhaps why people fall in love, believe in God, or sometimes feel the need to kill one another. Instead, the “humourless and indefatigable” Wundt chose to conduct a strange, even bizarre, experiment involving a small brass ball.1

Wundt and two of his students gathered around a small table and connected a timer, a switch, and a carefully designed metal stand. A brass ball was then balanced on the stand, and one of Wundt’s students placed his hand a few millimeters above the switch. Seconds later, the ball was automatically released from the stand, and the timer sprang into action. The student slammed his hand down on the switch the moment that he heard the brass ball hit the table, which immediately halted the timer. By carefully recording the reading shown on the timer in his notebook, Wundt created psychology’s first data point.

It would be nice to think that after a day or so of ball dropping, Wundt would have closed his notebook, reported his findings, and moved on to something more interesting. Nice, but wrong. In fact, Wundt spent the next few years of his life observing hundreds of people responding to the same test. In the same way that physicists were trying to identify the fundamental nature of matter, so Wundt and his team were attempting to discover the fundamental building blocks of consciousness. Some of the participants were asked to press the switch the moment they heard the ball hit the table, while others were told to react when they became fully aware of the sound. In the first scenario, observers were asked to concentrate their attention on the ball, and in the second, they were asked to focus more on their own thoughts. When the tasks were performed properly, Wundt believed that the first reaction would represent a simple reflex, whereas the second was more of a conscious decision. Perhaps not surprisingly, many participants initially struggled to recognize the alleged subtle difference between the two conditions, and so were required to complete more than ten thousand trials before moving on to the experiment proper.

After carefully wading through the resulting mass of ball-dropping data, Wundt concluded that the reflexive response took an average of one-tenth of a second and left the participants with a very weak mental record of the sound of the ball. In contrast, consciously hearing the sound produced an average reaction time of two-tenths of a second and resulted in a far clearer experience of the ball’s impact.

Having solved the mystery of the reflexive response, Wundt devoted the rest of his career to carrying out hundreds of similar studies. His approach proved surprisingly influential, and almost every other nineteenth-century academic dabbling in matters of the mind followed in his footsteps. In psychology laboratories across Europe, researchers could hardly hear themselves think for the sound of brass balls dropping onto tables.

In America, a young philosopher and psychologist named William James was having none of it.

William James, born in 1842 in New York City, was a most remarkable man. His father was an independently wealthy, well-connected, eccentric, one-legged religious philosopher who devoted himself to educating his five children.2 As a result, much of James’s childhood was spent receiving private tutoring, visiting Europe’s leading museums and art galleries, and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Henry Thoreau, Alfred Tennyson, and Horace Greeley. James’s older brother, Henry, would go on to find fame as a novelist and his sister, Alice, as a diarist.

Initially trained in painting, James abandoned the arts in his twenties and enrolled to study chemistry and anatomy at Harvard Medical School. In 1872 family friend and Harvard president Charles Eliot recruited James to teach courses in vertebrate physiology. James soon found himself drawn to the mysteries of the human psyche and in 1875 put together America’s first psychology course, later remarking that “the first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first one I gave.”

Appalled by what he saw as the triviality of Wundt’s work, James firmly believed that psychological research should be relevant to people’s lives. Turning his back on brass balls and reaction times, James instead focused his attention on a series of far more interesting and pragmatic issues, including whether it was right to believe in God, what made life worth living, and if free will actually exists.

Wundt and James didn’t differ just in terms of their approach to the human mind.

Wundt was formal and stuffy, his lectures serious and solemn, and his writing dull and turgid. James was informal and unpretentious, often walking around campus sporting “a silk hat, cane, frock coat and red-checked trousers.” He frequently peppered his talks with jokes and light-hearted asides to the extent that his students often felt the need to ask him to be more serious, and he produced accessible and often amusing prose (“As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world”).

James and Wundt also developed completely different ways of working. Wundt recruited a large team of students to conduct his carefully controlled studies. On their first day in Wundt’s laboratory, each new intake of students would be lined up, and Wundt would move down the line handing each of them a description of the research that they were required to conduct. Once the work was completed, he acted as judge and jury, and any students reporting results that failed to support their master’s theories ran the risk of failing.3 In contrast, James loved to encourage free thought, loathed the idea of imprinting his ideas on students, and once complained that he had just seen a fellow academic “applying the last coat of varnish to his pupil.”

The two great thinkers did little to hide their animosity for each other. James developed a poetic turn of phrase, causing some commentators to note that he wrote psychology papers like a novelist, while his brother, Henry, penned novels like a psychologist. Wundt, however, remained unimpressed, and once when he was asked to comment on James’s writings, he replied, “It is beautiful, but it is not psychology.” In reply, James complained about Wundt’s altering his theories from one book to the next, noting, “Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo . . . cut him up like a worm and each fragment crawls . . . you can’t kill him.”

Despite being vastly outnumbered by Wundt’s army of supporters, James stood his ground. While almost every psychologist in Europe was obsessively carrying out increasingly esoteric variations of Wundt’s classic ball-dropping experiment, James continued to stroll around Harvard in his red-checked trousers encouraging his students to think about the meaning of life.

James’s persistence paid off. Open any recent psychology textbook, and you will find nary a passing reference to Wundt or his brass balls. In contrast, James’s ideas are still widely cited, and he is seen as the founding father of modern psychology. First published in 1890, James’s two-volume magnum opus, Principles of Psychology, was recently described by one leading historian as “the most literate, most provocative, and at the same time the most intelligent book on psychology that has ever appeared,”4 and both volumes are still considered required reading for students of behavioral science today. Harvard’s psychology department named its building after James, and each year the Association for Psychological Science gives its William James Fellow Award to the academic judged to have made the most significant intellectual contribution to psychology.

James was perhaps at his best when he found mystery and substance in phenomena that most people tended to take for granted. In 1892 he reflected on the importance of this approach to understanding the human mind, and provided a few examples of the types of phenomena that had recently caught his attention:

Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved!”5

It was exactly this kind of thinking that led James to create his most controversial theory and turn our understanding of the human mind on its head.

• • •

Toward the end of the 1880s, James turned his attention to the relationship between emotion and behavior. To the uninitiated, this may seem a strange choice of topic for a world-renowned philosopher and psychologist.

Common sense suggests that certain events and thoughts cause you to feel emotional and that this in turn affects your behavior. So, for example, you might find yourself walking along an unexpectedly dark street late at night, or being called into your boss’s office and awarded a pay raise, or suddenly remembering a time you were five years old and fell down the stairs. These stimuli cause you to experience certain emotions. Perhaps the dark street makes you feel anxious, the pay raise makes you feel happy, and the memory of falling down the stairs makes you feel upset. These emotions then affect your behavior. Feeling afraid may make you sweat, feeling happy may make you smile, and feeling upset may make you cry. Seen from this perspective, the link between how you feel and the way you act is as straightforward as it is unsurprising. Mystery solved, case closed.

Behavior and Emotion

Common sense suggests that emotions cause behavior:

Feel anxious	— Sweat
Feel happy	— Smile
Feel sad	— Cry

However, James’s previous experience with seemingly straightforward psychological phenomena made him well aware that conventional wisdom can often be deeply misleading. Take, for example, James’s work on memory. For years armchair philosophers had suggested that memory operated much like a muscle, believing that the more you used it, the stronger it became. James wondered whether this was really accurate.6 To find out, he spent eight days timing himself as he memorized 158 lines of the Victor Hugo poem “Satyr” and discovered that the task took him an average of fifty seconds per line. Then, to exercise his memory muscle further, he devoted twenty minutes each day for the following thirty days memorizing the entire first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost. If the theory of the more you use it, the stronger it gets was correct, James hypothesized that he should be able to return to “Satyr” and learn the next 158 lines in less time than before. In fact, when he tried to learn another section of the poem, he discovered that it took him longer than before. The memory-as-muscle hypothesis was wrong.

James wanted to explore whether there was an alternative to the commonsense theory of emotion, and began his intellectual quest by thinking about how we go about deciding how other people feel.

Look at the photograph in Figure 1 below and try to imagine how the two people in the photograph are feeling. Now do the same with the people in Figure 2. Most people find this exercise easy. Almost everyone assumes that the people in the first photograph are probably having a good time and are likely to be experiencing happiness with just a hint of attraction. The second photograph elicits a quite different reaction, with most people concluding that everyone in the gr...