Thinking Like a President

As the nation's post-election celebration begins to quiet down, even the most loyal Barack Obama supporters are confronting the grim reality ahead and wondering: How can the 44th president possibly succeed? He faces an economic train wreck at home as well as two hot wars abroad, and on top of that he’s promised to fix an awful lot: a dysfunctional health care system, a substandard educational system, and more. How can one man comprehend, much less solve, problems of this magnitude?

Presidential scholars have written volumes trying to deconstruct the presidential mind. How can anyone juggle so many complicated tasks? Is there a particular style of thinking best suited to what’s for most of us an unimaginable challenge? Psychologists, too, are very interested in this question, and more generally in the relationship between power and thinking and judgment. Do those who seek and get power have a unique approach to decision making? Does power shape thought?

A team of researchers in The Netherlands has begun to explore these questions in the laboratory, with some interesting results. Psychologist Pamela Smith and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen suspected that the powerful do indeed think differently—that they think more abstractly, rapidly distilling the essence of a problem rather than analyzing every minute detail. They didn’t need to study actual presidents. The fact is we all exert power at different times in our lives, and we’re all occasionally at the mercy of people more powerful that we are. What Smith did was “prime” these deep-seated feelings of power (and powerlessness) in ordinary people.

They recruited a large group of volunteers and had some of them recall a specific time when they had been called upon to exert power over someone else. Others recalled a time when someone had wielded power over them. Then they gave all the volunteers a complicated life problem to solve. For example, in one experiment they asked them to consider the purchase of four different cars, each varying on 12 different traits, some good and some bad. These problems did have a “correct” solution—that is, one of the four cars had the most positives and the fewest negatives, although the optimal choice was not obvious. There was also a worst choice.

Previous research has shown that most people can solve complex problems better if they engage their unconscious mind, rather than try to deliberately examine and weigh each factor. The conscious mind simply has too little analytic capacity to crunch every possibility, and attempts to do so bog the mind down in detail. Psychologists test this in the lab by distracting some people while they are solving a problem, and then comparing them to others who try to work it out painstakingly. Those who are distracted—the unconscious thinkers—almost always do better, presumably because they distill the gist of the problem.

So Smith did this with her volunteers. Both the “powerful” and the “powerless” volunteers made a choice from the four cars available. But some spent four minutes reasoning the dilemma through the old-fashioned way, while others were distracted with a word puzzle. The findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing. As expected, the powerless participants did better when they let their unconscious minds take over, but the powerful participants performed equally well regardless of whether their unconscious or their conscious mind was in gear. That is, powerful people’s routine, conscious deliberation is very much like the unconscious processing of the rest of us—more abstract and, well, better.

That’s got to come in handy in the Oval Office. Of course, making fewer reasoning errors is just one attribute of a good leader, and it has nothing to do with morality or compassion or good sense. Those qualities are measured differently.


For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

"And I Feel Like I've Been Here Before"

In his 1863 travelogue Our Old Home, Nathaniel Hawthorne described a visit to Stanton Harcourt, a 15th century manor house near Oxford, England. As he stood in the building’s enormous medieval kitchen, the writer recalled, he was washed over by an eerie sensation: “I was haunted and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grandmother’s kitchen.”

Hawthorne had never been to Stanton Harcourt before, yet his “memory” was specific and palpable and emotional. Writers from St. Augustine to Dickens to Proust have described similar sensations of having been somewhere before—impossibly—and indeed that is the accepted meaning of the psychological phenomenon commonly known as déjà vu.

And it is common: Fully a third of us report having had a déjà vu experience, and the real number may be much higher. Such experiences have over the years been attributed to everything from past lives to subterranean erotic impulses to neurological disorders, but those ideas have all been discarded. Today there is scientific consensus that déjà vu is a false memory experience: Our brains are registering novel perceptions of the world as old and familiar, even when all evidence says they cannot be.

But why? New insights into the mechanics of memory and cognition are helping to answer that question. The brain is now viewed as something of a hybrid engine, a dual processor that divides its work between rapid, automatic decisions and more deliberate judgments. It toggles back and forth constantly, and as it does it uses two different kinds of recognition: recall and familiarity.

Think of an everyday memory experience. The first kind of recognition is simple recall. You run into a woman at the market who you met at a party the night before, and you clearly recollect that first meeting: “Hi, Annie. We met at Jerry’s party last night, over by the bar.” That’s simple recall; something happened and you remember it pretty much as it happened.

The second kind of recognition is much fuzzier, based only on a vague sense of familiarity. That’s because many of the memories we put down are not finely detailed, but rather just the gist of an experience: Jerry’s party, lots of new people milling around with drinks, not much more in the way of detail. So when you run into Annie at the market, she’s only vaguely familiar. You can’t place her. Do you know her from the mailroom at work?

Déjà vu experiences are just an aberration of this normal recognition experience. Or at least that’s the theory, which psychologists have recently begun testing in the laboratory. Here’s an example. Colorado State University psychologist Anne Cleary had volunteers study a long list of celebrity names. Later on, she showed them a collection of celebrity photographs. Some photos corresponded to the names, but others did not. The volunteers did two things: They tried to identify the celebrities in the photos, and they also said how likely it was that they had studied the name of each celebrity earlier.

The findings were interesting. Even when they could not identify a celebrity by the photo, they often had a sense of which names they had studied earlier and which they had not. That is, they couldn’t identify the source of their familiarity with the celebrity, but they knew the celebrity was familiar to them. Cleary ran the same experiment with famous places, like Stonehenge and the Taj Majal, and got the same result.

Apparently the volunteers had stored at least a trace of memory, but it was sufficiently fuzzy that they weren’t consciously aware of the link to the new experience. But what exactly did they store in memory that would trigger the feelings of familiarity? Cleary suspects that even very subtle features of an experience can be enough to cause a later sense of remembering. In another experiment, she had volunteers study a random list of words: raft, eighty, and so forth. On a later recognition test, some of the new words resembled the earlier words only in their most general shape and sound: Laughed might echo raft, for example, or lady might echo eighty. When old and new words overlapped on this very subtle feature, volunteers again reported a sense of familiarity with the novel word.

Presumably the same illusion can occur with more elaborate perceptions and experiences. As Cleary reports in the October issue of Current Directions of Psychological Science, some people report a sense of familiarity with completely new pictures based only on a visual fragment from an earlier experience. A single geometric shape, for instance, can create the sense that an entire new scene has been experienced before.

That is almost certainly what happened with Hawthorne in the kitchen. Recall that it was the “height” and “blackness” of the room that stirred his global memory of having been there before. Indeed, Hawthorne figured this out himself, without the tools of modern memory research. He later summoned up a dim memory of a poem by Alexander Pope, who had also been moved to write about the cavernous rooms of Stanton Harcourt.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” weblog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.