By this point, it’s become clear that character—yours, ours, anyone’s—is much more flexible than most people would think. Throughout this book we’ve seen examples of regular people (as well as celebrities and politicians) acting in ways that surprise us—and sometimes acting in ways that surprise even themselves. We’ve shown you that subtle changes in environment or context can lead any of us to be both saints and sinners. This raises two big questions: Why does the mind work this way? And if what we think of as our character really is so malleable and fickle, can such a thing even be said to exist?
The short answer to the first question is that the system works this way because, quite simply, it’s the best evolution has been able to come up with. It works well to optimize our lives, except when it doesn’t, but it works more often than not. The long answer, though, requires us to differentiate between what is optimal and what is good. Optimal, at least in the evolutionary sense, means surviving to raise kids, who will carry on your genes. For humans, the optimal choice for how to behave usually lies somewhere between short-term and long-term concerns. Sometimes it’s useful to maximize immediate, selfish goals—to cheat for gain, to pretend you have higher status to get something you want, to hit someone before he or she hits you. But acting this way too often will quickly make you shunned, and like it or not, humans need each other for survival. So the mind needs systems that favor both selfless and selfish behavior. The trick is figuring out which should take the lead at any given time.
Optimizing your character, then, isn’t about being “good” all the time. But you can’t be “bad” all the time either and still hope to get by. For example, if you always felt compassion and helped others, you might give away everything you had. But if you were never compassionate, perhaps no one would ever help you when you were in need. Likewise, if you always were a hypocrite, no one would ever trust you, but if you were never a hypocrite, you might not be able to take advantage of a new opportunity that came knocking. The point is, we need flexibility, which is why the mind uses the system it does. If navigating our social world were simple, perhaps we could successfully find our way simply by following a set of maxims or commandments. But it’s not simple. Thus, with each new situation, how we should act is computed anew based on the needs and expectations of that specific moment in time. It’s all aimed at finding the perfect balance between the two competing sides.
If you’ve ever studied math or architecture, you’re probably familiar with the idea of the “golden mean.” If you haven’t, the golden mean refers to a ratio that has special properties. It’s believed that when the elements of art or architecture are constructed using this ratio, they achieve the perfect balance and thus are most pleasing to the human eye. (Indeed, the golden mean can be found in many of the great masterpieces of modern civilization, from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper, from the Parthenon to the Great Pyramids.) But the golden mean also has another interesting albeit less well-known property. It’s an irrational number, which means that it changes with each added decimal place; it can never be definitively calculated. Finding the sweet spot for optimizing character is similar. There is a point that works best, but we believe that this spot, just like the golden mean, is always being adjusted. We may get close, but that perfect balance point keeps shifting with each new situation, each new bit of information, each subsequent gambit by our inner ant and our inner grasshopper to take the lead and thereby sway our actions toward its goals.
But don’t forget that when we talk about optimal character, we’re not equating that with virtue, at least not as it’s traditionally defined. After all, virtue can mean many things. For Aristotle, virtue meant optimization in the sense in which we’re using it. Virtue, he argued, was to be found in the balance between selfish short-term desires and selfless long-term ones. Vice was to be found at either extreme. But for many others, virtue means “good” in the noble or heavenly sense. The only difficulty here, though, is that what qualifies as “good” often changes across cultures and through time. Although most societies and religions argue that generosity and truthfulness are virtues, some also say that killing can be just, and that men and women should be treated differently. Some religious texts themselves even contain direct contradictions of what virtuous behavior is, leaving it to the current set of priests, rabbis, or teachers to define what constitutes virtue in any specific context. But as we said at the outset, we’re scientists, not theologians or philosophers, so we’re not appointing ourselves as the ones to define virtue for you. We can tell you how the system works, but not how you should calibrate it. Still, once you have come up with your answer for what the golden mean of character is for you (and it may take a while), what we can do is give you some advice on how to achieve it.
Once you accept that character is flexible, and that what determines it are sets of distinct psychological mechanisms competing to drive your behavior, you can begin to exert some influence—not, as it is often believed, solely through willpower, but through specific skills and strategies based on psychological principles. As we’ve noted throughout the book, you can’t assume that your intuitions are always correct. Likewise, you can’t assume that reason is always unbiased. Any successful strategy, then, will rely on accurately assessing the context—knowing when to trust your gut and when to trust your common sense. And as you’ve seen in the preceding chapters, you’ll also have to be on the lookout for more subtle cues (e.g., if you’re angry, what you’re smelling, whether you’ve just laughed, whether you’re walking in sync with someone else, and the like) that may trick you and, consequently, end up pushing you in the wrong direction. We hope that what you’ve read about how morality, jealousy, bigotry, honesty, compassion, trust, and pride work has helped you sharpen your defenses against forces conspiring to co-opt the decisions that shape your character.
We’ve seen throughout this book that the different processes of the mind really do matter with respect to what you do and how you’re perceived. But as it turns out, there is also emerging real-world evidence to suggest that simply being able to recognize the factors that can subtly influence your emotions can produce tremendous social benefits. For example, Marc Brackett and his colleagues at Yale instituted a social and emotional learning program they call the RULER in several elementary school classrooms in which teachers also regularly taught units on developing good character. The RULER approach makes teaching children how to recognize and manage their emotions a central part of the regular academic curriculum, so kids in the RULER classrooms were taught various skills related to knowing when and how it’s useful to act on emotional intuitions and when it’s not. Kids who didn’t get the RULER curriculum learned about developing character in the old way—no skills focusing on different psychological strategies, just the usual “here’s how a good person acts” stuff. By year’s end, the kids involved in RULER were performing better academically and were more socially successful than their non-RULER peers, more often demonstrating work habits and social behaviors that were viewed as desirable, adaptable, and competent.1
Similarly, recent findings are beginning to show that being able to recognize biases in our emotional intuitions—and to know when to (or not to) override them—is associated not only with greater life and relationship satisfaction but also with advancement at work and increased leadership potential.2 All this points to the basic fact that knowledge is power, and that character, like any skill, can be learned, assuming you have the right tools at your disposal. We hope that this book will be one such tool to help get you started.
Now let’s turn to our second question: does character even exist? Throughout this book, we’ve been showing you how subtle manipulations in contexts or situations can produce unexpected and wild swings in behavior, driving individuals to act seemingly in ways that are “out of character.” Given this fact, you might be tempted to conclude that anyone is capable of anything and “character” simply doesn’t exist. That’s not exactly right. Character does exist, just not in the way you think. The mistakes we make in classifying a person’s character or “true colors” are, in fact, very similar to the errors we make in understanding colors in general. You see, most people perceive colors—red, blue, purple—as defined categories. That is, each color has an essence and clear boundaries. “Purpleness” means something unique, and something very different from “yellowness.” What we know from science, of course, is that this isn’t the case.
As the frequencies (or wavelengths) of light change, what our eyes see goes from red to green to blue to purple. Our brains perceive these different colors as having unique essences, but in reality they are just variations along a single continuum—the only thing that is changing is the wavelength of the light. So although it may be true that certain yellows are easily identifiable as yellows, it’s not always that cut-and-dried. What about citrine, for example? Is it yellow or brown? Can it be both? And isn’t brown just a mix of light of other wavelengths anyway? The point is, when you begin to look at color more carefully, it quickly becomes clear that there aren’t distinct entities, only spots along a continuum of long to short wavelengths. The boundaries for the labels we use can be quite fuzzy. It’s the same with character. Our minds “see” different colors of character—noble, sleazy, trustworthy, unreliable—based on certain actions, but then make the mistake of assigning a person that label unequivocally. So if we define a person as noble and then she does something petty, we assume she’s acting out of character. In our minds, noble, just like purple, is a distinct category; it can’t bleed over into something else.
But as we’ve seen, character, like color, varies along a continuum—a continuum not of wavelengths but of our psychological needs flanked by processes embodied in the metaphors of the ant and grasshopper. It is true that, based on differences in temperament, culture, and the types of environs they habitually inhabit, certain people may more frequently seem to occupy one spot along the continuum between long- and short-term desires, and their actions may more frequently tend to correspond to one side of the scale. But as we’ve shown, where people end up at any one moment often depends on the context. It is certainly the case that each of the competing sides will have its day as situations change. What this means is that so-called swings in character are to be expected; exceptions are the rule. There are no firm boundaries for character, only a scale that can shift, and shift quickly, moving us to a new “color” along the spectrum of vice and virtue.
This can be a hard thing to wrap our heads around. When our expectations about someone (or even ourselves) are violated—Tiger Woods’ affairs, Lisa Nowak’s jealousy-fueled road trip, Farron Hall’s act of selfless bravery, and so forth—we often feel we’ve been fooled. We have. But we’ve been fooled by the way our brains perceive the world, not by the individual actors. Only once we accept that all our minds function along this same continuum and that we can all exhibit a range of “character types” can we begin to navigate our social world more effectively. Seeing that there is a thin line between the cowards and the heroes, the bigoted and the tolerant, the promiscuous and the chaste, the saints and the sinners, can help us better understand and cope with those all too frequent occasions when we, or those important to us, act “out of character.”