The Status of Autobiographical Narratives and Stories

CENT PAPER NUMBER FIVE: THE STATUS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES AND STORIES

By Dr Jim Byrne

The Extent of Human Non-Consciousness

In CENT Position Paper No.4, I presented one of my own autobiographical stories - my Story of Origins - which is typical of the kind of autobiographical narratives that I try to elicit from my CENT counselling clients. But what is the status of my autobiographical account, or the autobiographical stories presented by any of my clients? Are they true or false; subjective or objective; partial or complete; or something else?

Fortunately, I was able to do some work on this topic during my doctoral research.

In my doctoral research, I wanted to interview six former clients of different counsellors, and different styles of counselling, to see:

(a) What they had gained;
(b) What they consider to have been the source of those gains;
(c) And to see if it is possible to undermine the view that counselling is "just a placebo", or that it cannot be shown to be "more than a placebo".

However, I ran into a problem, in that I was not able to satisfy myself that this was an ethical research project. And so I switched my attention and focus to doing a study of how to understand and design an ethical research project in qualitative research - including how to teach and learn research ethics.

This was disappointing in some ways, because it seemed to take me away from my interest in the human mind. However, I quickly found myself back up against the limitations of the human mind. I did a little pilot study with two research participants and two questions, and then asked myself: How reliable are these answers? How do I know that these respondents know what they are talking about? This raised some very interesting questions, which I eventually addressed as follows:

"Now I want to try to reach a conclusion to this account ... I originally thought it was both safe and important to assume that my two research participants know what they think and why they think it; know what they like and why they like it; and know how they would behave in any given situation. However, these assumptions are contradicted by the research results presented by Gladwell (2006)[1], Haidt (2006)[2], Gray (2003)[3], and Bargh and Chartrand (1999)[4]. These four texts taken together put an end to my naïve view of ‘the conscious human being' as an ‘informative research participant'. Gladwell (2006) presents evidence that most of the time we make decisions based upon our tacit knowledge, and the "we" that makes the decision is not the conscious mind but the ‘adaptive unconscious'; or our nonconscious mind. He also shows that people often have conscious preferences that are at variance with their non-conscious preferences, and that it is most often the non-conscious preferences that dominate our behaviour. We do not know, very often, why we did what we did; but we normally believe that we do, and we unknowingly make up plausible stories to account for our actions.
Bargh and Chartrand (1999) in their summary, argue that most psychological research assumes that humans are normally conscious and systematicin the ways they process new information to form their interpretations and arrange to respond to incoming stimuli. But they agree with Ellen Langer's questioning of those assumptions, as follows:
"First, (we) review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of (our) moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. (We) then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgements, emotions, and behaviour".
They go on to identify three significant forms of automatic self-regulation:
"...an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience.
They then conclude that:
"... these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her environment". Page 406.
What does this mean, in the simplest, clearest terms? It means that humans are both conscious agents and nonconscious automata. Not either/or. Both/and. At this point in time, it is the proportions of each that matters most to me. Gray (2003: 66) argues that we are not able to be more conscious of our environmental stimuli because of the small bandwidth of conscious processing of the data of our senses.
"This (bandwidth) is much too narrow to be able to register the information we routinely receive and act on. As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive".
That is a startling statistic. So my research respondents - and my CENT therapy clients - probably have access to about one millionth of the data they routinely process in order to orient and move themselves through their daily environmental challenges. Not all of this is in principle ‘knowable' of course, such as how do I beat my own heart? How am I digesting my food right now? How much do I need to adjust my blood pressure and body temperature? And so on. But Bargh and Chartrand (1999: 464) quote Tice and Baumeister as saying that consciousness "...plays a causal role (in guiding our behaviour) only 5% or so of the time". (And Tice and Baumeister were trying to defend consciousness.)
So my research respondents - and my CENT clients - are probably unconscious (meaning non-conscious processors of information) for at least 95% of the time, including most of the time they are interacting with me. Unfortunately for me, I was proposing to interview them about who they are, what they know, what they do, and why they do it (all in connection with ethical research functioning)? And I was proposing to do that:
Even though they take actions for tacit/nonconscious reasons, and can immediately make up plausible storiesto account for what they did. (Source: Gladwell, 2006: 69-71).
Even though they see themselves through ‘rose tinted mirrors'. (See Haidt, 2006: 66-69); and cannot see their own ‘faults' as easily as they can see the faults of others.
And even though Gray (2003: 81) says: "We (including my research respondents - JWB) cannot get rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. ...".
These insights brought me to the point of virtual despair that I could ever find out anything, from any human respondent, anywhere, about anything. (And it affects the question today of just how reliable are the narratives presented by clients in CENT therapy [or the beliefs reported by REBT/CBT clients!]).
And so I moved on to explore the possibility of developing Phase Two."
~~~

How can I then present my autobiographical story in Paper No.2, and expect anybody to take it seriously? There is an answer, and it also was explored in my thesis, as follows, when I went back to asking research participants for their experiences:

"... there is a problem here. How can I return, in full circle, to asking people for their experiences and opinions? Surely that was invalidated by Gladwell (2006), Haidt (2006), Gray (2003), and Bargh and Chartrand (1999)? Surely I was now supposed to be "coming at them sideways"; and not asking direct questions which they cannot reliably answer?
My attempts to develop indirect ways of collecting data - in Phases Three and Four - did not work out. In the end I was forced to consider that my thinking was still too influenced by the positivist paradigm, in which it is (allegedly) possible for me to observe the ‘truth' about the behaviour of my research respondents, instead of simply constructing a narrative about their narratives; a discourse about their discourses. As McLeod (2001: 12) points out:
"Although everyone knows that research cannot ‘prove' anything, and that there are no ‘facts' in the social sciences, the kinds of research articles that have been published on therapy ..." and presumably other areas of social care, "... rely heavily on a rhetoric of facticity and objectivity, with the methods section often being the lengthiest part of a research paper".
Settling for Subjective Experiences - or the experiences of individuals and groups "in the real world"
Earlier, McLeod had said: "At its heart, qualitative research involves doing one's utmost to map and explore the meaningof an area of human experience...". This requires "...an immersion in some aspect of social life, in an attempt to capture the wholeness of that experience, followed by an attempt to convey this understanding to others". (Page iix).
Thus I was driven back to the acceptance that all I can hope to do is to ask people about their experiences, and to write up my experience of asking them about their experiences, perhaps contrasted against my own personal experience of the things that they are describing. I can engage in participant observation. I can ask questions, and collect answers. I can form interpretations, and ask for feedback on the level of agreement about my perspective. But none of that is about ‘facts' and ‘reality'. It is all story about story of experience of ‘something'. But it may still have some social usefulness, and some degree of viability as ‘social knowledge'.
A Refinement of the Concept of ‘Thinking without Thinking'
Eysenck and Keane (2000: 222-223) present an interesting insight into just how accurate our memories of past events happen to be. It was made possible by the official inquiry into the Watergate scandal, in the early 1970s, in which US President Nixon authorized some people to break in to, or burgle, the offices of the Democratic nominee in the Watergate building, in Washington. John Dean had been legal counsel to the president at the time, and he was eventually arraigned by the official inquiry, and questioned about various conversations he had had with the president, and/or witnessed between the president and other senior officials. Dean gave a very detailed ‘recollection' of a conversation on 15^thSeptember 1972, about the break in. These conversations involved Dean, President Nixon and Bob Haldeman, who was Nixon's chief of staff. Unfortunately for Dean, he did not know that Nixon had recorded all conversations that occurred in his office, and eventually the tape of that conversation of 15^th September surfaced, and was compared with Dean's testimony. It seems Dean got some of the ‘nuggets' of the conversation right, but he got the whole gist wrong. As Eysenck and Keane comment:
"Our autobiographical memories are sometimes less truthful than has been suggested so far. Dean's memory for the conversations with the President gave Dean too active and significant a role. It is as if Dean remembered the conversations as he wished them to have been." (Cf: Chancellor, 2007[5]). "Perhaps people have a self-schema (organized knowledge about themselves) that influences how they perceive and remember personal information. Someone as ambitious and egotistical as Dean might have focussed mainly on those aspects of conversations in which he played a dominant role, and this selective attention may then have affected his later recall. As Haberlandt (1999, p.226)[6] argued, ‘The autobiographical narrative...does preserve essential events as they were experienced, but it is not a factual report; rather, the account seems to make a certain point, to unify events, or to justify them'."
Or, as Willig (2001: 141)[7]points out: "...qualitative research acknowledges a subjective element in the research process". And, indeed, based on Neisser's (1976)[8]model of human perception, how can we ever claim to know anything for certain. Ulrich Neisser, and especially his later followers, presented a model in which we seem to combine some elements of ‘bottom up processing' (from the ‘thing-in-itself' to its phenomenalappearance in consciousness) with some elements of ‘top down processing' (from our schemas in long-term memory to our percepts).
And that is the premise upon which I have returned to ask questions of some postgraduate students and one tutor: that their accounts will preserve some essential events as they were experienced by them, but they will not be giving me a factual report, in the sense in which ‘factual' is used in the natural sciences. However, even in the natural sciences, facts are records of eventswhich are no better and no worse than the person or device registering the event. (Source: Novak and Gowin, 1984[9]). And inevitably, scientific facts are ‘transformed' by a process of human interpretation."

And this is also how I will understand my own narrative in CENT Paper No.2; and the stories that my CENT clients present to me. They are stories that conform to the felt recollections and meaning-making activities of individuals who, as humans, have imperfect, mood dependent, reconstitutive memory systems (Bartlett, 1932[10]).

It seems we are mainly non-conscious, but that we have the delusion that we are conscious. This has been explored by Gladwell (2006) and Gladwell used some ideas from Maier (1931), as discussed by me in my thesis, as follows:

"I subsequently found that Gladwell's (2006) view is a minority view within psychology, and that much psychological research is based on the naïve assumption of a wholly conscious individual processing incoming stimuli knowingly, and relating them to their conscious goals. (Cf: Bargh and Chartrand, 1999: 462-464). I have only been able to find one significant text that actively argues against (rather than implicitly denying) the thesis that "humans are largely non-conscious", and that is Donald (2001)[11]. However, Donald's arguments, which are designed to show that human memory is more extensive than that indicated by many psychological experiments conducted in laboratories, is unconvincing to me, because his implicit assumption, in his example of extended discourse among friends about a film they have just seen, assumes they each are holding all of that conversation in working memory all of the time, and there is no evidence presented to support that implicit assumption. Furthermore, his main argument based upon experimental results is that non-consciousness without the ‘guiding hand' of consciousness is ineffective, (pages 4-7). This amounts to the claim that humans may be largely non-conscious, but that non-consciousness is largely useless to us if we lose the neurological basis of consciousness. This is plausible, in the context of what we know from cognitive psychology (Eysenck and Keane, 2000[12]), but it does nothing to refute Gladwell's (2006) basis proposition that we, humans, are largely non-conscious processors of information, most of the time.
I therefore had to wonder if my research participants' responses to my two ‘fuzzy questions' were ‘reliable'. This was particularly important as Gladwell (2006) had presented evidence that humans do not always know why they do or believe what they do and believe, but they always think they do. It seems we have a blind spot whereby we make up plausible stories to account for our actions and beliefs, which have been shown in some convincing psychological experiments to be self-delusions. For example, the famous ‘strings and pendulum experiment' by Maier (1931)[13]. Maier's experiment was mainly designed to see if "...the reasoner (is) conscious of the different factors which aid in bringing about the solution (to the string problem)"; and whether or not the solution "...develop(s) from a nucleus or does it appear as a completed whole?" (Page 181).

If it arrives as a complete whole, then this is more consistent with the idea that it is being "delivered" by the non-conscious mind, after having been worked out non-consciously. If it was a product of consciousness, then there would be some consciousness of the nucleus from which the conscious mind worked out the solution. My account of Maier's experiment continues in my thesis:

"The experiment involved two strings hanging from a ceiling, and reaching the floor; one in the middle of the room, and one near one of the walls. One string cannot be reached while the participant is holding on to the other string. The challenge is to find the (three) obvious ways, and the one obscure way, in which the two strings can be brought together and tied together, using various pieces of equipment which are lying around in the room: (including "..poles, ringstands, clamps, pliers, extension cords, tables and chairs": Page 182). The results seem to indicate that, although the (sixty-one) research participants are able to find the obvious solutions to this problem, about two thirds need a hint to find the obscure solution. However, when they are asked how they came up with the solution, they seem to invent plausible sounding explanations, such as: "It just dawned on me"; "It was the only thing left"; "I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it"; "I tried to think of a way to get the cord over here and the only way was to make it swing". The most fanciful story was this: "Having exhausted everything else the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete": (Pages 188-189). It seems we (our conscious minds) do not know where our ideas come from; that we have a strictly limited capacity to introspect into our thought processes; but that when asked to account for our ideas, we make up fanciful explanations and do not notice that we are making them up.
Maier (1931) is in a tradition that began with Helmholtz's nineteenth century ‘unconscious inferences' - cf: Eysenck and Keane (2000: 54) - and continued through the constructivist theories of Bruner, Neisser and Gregory; and is gaining ground in current research in neuroscience. See Frith, 2008[14]."

It seems most humans are largely non-conscious processors of information, most of the time. It seems we may have a self-schema which distorts our personal experiences. It seems our perceptions are based on cumulative, interpretative experiences. Our autobiographical narratives probably contain nuggets of truth, but also many distortions, because they preserve essential events as they were experienced, but yet they are not wholly factual accounts. Because of all of these insights, as described by Gladwell, Gray, Haidt and Bargh and Chartrand (above), and in my CENT papers, I now have a problem. How can I reliably analyze CENT narratives - like my own autobiographical story in Paper No.2 above - as presented to me by my clients? How can I judge the reliability of such narratives? (This is a specialized form of the question: How does any counsellor or therapist, anywhere, using any system, know that the statements they are getting from their clients are not ‘just so stories'[as asserted by Fritz Perles[15]]?).

~~~

End of Paper No.5

3^rdAugust 2009 - Hebden Bridge

~~~

To reference this paper in a publication, please use the following citation:

Byrne, J. (2009e) The status of autobiographical narratives and stories in CENT. CENT Paper No.5. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for CENT Studies.

[1]Gladwell, M. (2006) BLINK: The power of thinking without thinking. London: Penguin Books.

[2]Haidt, J. (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science. London: William Heinemann.

[3] Gray, J. (2003) Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. London: Granta Books.

[4]Bargh, J.A. and Chartrand, T.L. (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7): 462-479.

[5] Chancellor, A. (2007) It's a strangely human foible - we all rewrite history to make our roles in it more interesting. The Guardian, Friday April 6^th2007. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329770492-103390,00.html

[6]Haberlandt, K. (1999) Human Memory: Exploration and application. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

[7]Willig, C. (2001) Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology: adventures in theory and method. Maidenhead: Open University.

[8]Neisser, U. (1976) Cognition and Reality. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman.

[9]Novak, J.D. and Gowin, B. (1984) Learning How to Learn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[10] Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[11] Donald, M. (2001) A Mind so Rare: the evolution of human consciousness. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

[12] Eysenck, M.W. and Keane, M.T. (2000) Cognitive Psychology: A student's Handbook. Fourth edition. East Sussex: Psychology Press.

[13] Maier, N.R.F. (1931) Reasoning in Humans: II - The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 12: 181-194.

[14]Frith, C. (2008) No one really uses reason. New Scientist, Vol.199, No.2666. Page 45.

[15]Perles, F.S., Hefferline, R.F. and Goodman, P. (1973) Gestalt Therapy. Pelican/Paperback.