One nagging thing...

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Top psychologists help us to celebrate the 150th e-mail issue of the Society’s Research Digest.

The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest was launched in 2003, as a fortnightly e-mail service. Over the years it has added www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog (now ranked as the 17th most influential science blog in the world by Wikio), a Facebook site and a Twitter feed. It is read and appreciated by many thousands of psychologists and others across the world.
To mark the 150th e-mail edition, its editor, Dr Christian Jarrett, asked some of the world’s leading psychologists to describe in 150 words ‘one nagging thing you still don’t understand about yourself’. Their answers featured on the blog and in The Independent newspaper, but for those of you who missed it we publish a selection here.

Puzzling love for our children

I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go. We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill-defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours.
Satiators and addicts

I’ve been told that there are two kinds of people in the world: Satiators and Addicts. Satiators get their fill of something, and that’s enough for the rest of their lives. For example, I’m that way about beaches: I grew up a 10-minute walk from the Pacific Ocean, and went to the beach practically every day during my adolescence. But enough was enough, and I now don’t care whether I ever see a beach again. In contrast, Addicts get hooked, and never get enough of something. I’ve obsessed about the same narrow research topic for over 35 years, and the end is not in sight. Why am I a Satiator in some cases, and an Addict in others?
Who am I?

Who am I? I am a jew, but I am no believer and I do not believe that Israel speaks for me. I can’t be sure what it means to be a jew. Yet I am sure that others are sure. And I know that jewishness matters. I know that millions were slaughtered for being jewish. I know that millions have been displaced by jews for not being jewish. What is being jewish to my world and to me? Who are we? Who am I? I was born in England of family who fled from Germany and Poland. I was raised in England by parents who moved abroad for work. I live in Scotland with a wife born in Yorkshire of a father born in Pakistan and with a son born in Scotland. Our history is pandemonium, our destiny (we hope) is Caledonian. Who do we want to be? What will others let us be? And does it count one jot to anyone but me? No wonder I study identity.
Still fooled

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad – unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorising until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?