Irrationality in Philosophy and Psychology: the moral implications
of self-defeating behavior
Irrationality in Philosophy
and Psychology: the Moral Implications of Self-Defeating Behavior.”
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5, 1998, (2): 224-234,
Christine A. James.
The
philosophical study of irrationality has yielded many important insights into
the workings of the human mind. A particularly
interesting issue within irrationality is the phenomena of self-defeating
behavior. This self-defeat, and the
behaviors which lead to it, may take many forms. Self-defeating behaviors are a class of
behaviors which have one thing in common: they all result in some kind of
failure to achieve one's apparent goals and ambitions (specifically,
self-sabotage). This self-defeat, and
the behaviors which lead to it, may take many forms. In this paper I will give special attention
to the self-defeating behavior commonly called choking under pressure. I
will explain why choking under pressure should be conceived of as an example of
irrationality, and how choking is best understood with reference to
skills. Then I will describe how
choking, and by analogy other forms of self-defeating behavior, can be
explained very well without appeal to a purely Freudian subconscious or
"sub-agents" view of the mind.
Finally, I will recommend an alternative way to understand
self-defeating behavior and the mind as it is engaged in self-defeating
behavior, an alternative which comes from a synthesis of Peter Strawsons' explanation of "self-reactive
attitudes," Mark Johnston's notion of “mental tropisms,” and revised
Freudian descriptions of the causes of self-defeating behavior.
What is Self-Defeating Behavior?
Self-defeating
behavior presents an important case study for both philosophers and
psychologists. Some of the clearest case
studies of self-defeating behavior, which I shall use as a starting point for
this paper, come from books written by psychologists as "self-help
books." Two such books are Self-Defeating
Behaviors by Milton R. Cudney and Robert E.
Hardy; and Your Own Worst Enemy : understanding the paradox of
self-defeating behavior by Steven Berglas and Roy
F. Baumeister. Each text defines self-defeating
behavior in different ways by giving examples of various types of
self-defeating behaviors. [1]
Berglas and Baumeister offer a
broader definition of self-defeating behaviors, describing what
they call a "continuum of
self-defeating patterns." Rather
than attempt to trace all instances of self-defeat
The
author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Professor Goguen for their helpful advice and comments while the
article was prepared for publication. An
earlier version of this piece was presented at the Southern Society for
Philosophy and Psychology in April of 1996, and the piece began as a term paper
for a graduate student seminar at the
to a common cause, Berglas and Baumeister set out to
acknowledge the multiple styles of self-defeat that exist while trying to
account for the unique motives behind each of them. Some of the different types of self-defeating
behaviors along this continuum are cases of pyrrhic
revenge, when an attempt to gain revenge backfires and causes one's own
defeat; self-handicapping, which
includes cases where someone purposely makes a task more difficult than it is; trade-off self-defeating behaviors, such
as smoking and drinking, which involve a "trade-off" between the
pleasure of smoking or drinking now and the possible detrimental effects to
one's health later; and defeat in the
context of victory, when people who apparently have a successful life
situation do something which will ruin their success; and choking under pressure, the general description for cases of either
individuals or groups (sports teams in particular) who, under great pressure to
perform at a level they are capable of attaining, "choke" and fail at
the actual performance itself.[2]
Choking Under Pressure
Any
of these particular types of self-defeating behavior could springboard an
interesting philosophical analysis of self-defeat as well as irrationality, but
I chose to focus on choking under pressure for three major reasons: 1) choking
under pressure stands as an example of the important insights of recent work on
irrationality and 2) the moral theory associated with it, and 3) choking under
pressure is an individual as well as a group phenomenon, which challenges the
Freudian and sub-agents descriptions of irrational behavior.
The
first important aspect of choking is its irrationality. On the surface, choking under pressure may
not seem irrational; many would simply explain choking as "getting nervous
in a pressured situation." But Berglas and Baumeister offer an
explanation of the phenomenon of choking which highlights its
irrationality. As Berglas
and Baumeister explain it, choking involves people
losing control of their own natural performance process. Usually an individual or team affected by
choking wants very much to succeed and are trying their best to perform well,
yet somehow they cannot make themselves do what they want; they have lost
control in some sense over their minds and bodies (Berglas
and Baumeister 1993, 80). This attention to mind and body clarifies to
an extent how choking can occur in contexts as seemingly divergent as sporting
events, musical performances, and test anxiety.
Further
clarification of how choking occurs can also be found in understanding the
natural performance process and how one may lose control of that process. According to Berglas
and Baumeister, the acquisition of skills follows a
certain sequence: when you begin to learn a skill, you pay conscious attention
to each detail and try to learn to execute each part of the task
correctly. At this stage it is normal
for one to perform the task in a manner that is slow and awkward. With practice, however, the process goes
increasingly smoothly and automatically (Berglas and Baumeister 1993, 81).
An example would be learning to play the piano or guitar: at first, one
is slow and awkward, but with experience the learned "skills" take
over.
Such
skills, for Berglas and Baumeister,
involve the ability to do things without thinking about them or, more
precisely, without attending to the details of the process. The knowledge of how to perform becomes overlearned, automatic and unconscious; and proceeds
without any involvement of the conscious mind.
In other words, if one thinks about the task to much, one interferes
with the natural skills that have been learned.
This interference is what causes people to choke under pressure (Berglas and Baumeister 1993,
81). The essence of choking is that the
conscious mind tries to get involved in these well-learned, automatic, skilled
processes that normally run without conscious interference. This involves a shift in attention: you start
to pay attention to yourself, to what you are doing, and especially to how you
are doing it. The increased attention to
self interferes with the execution of the task at hand (Berglas
and Baumeister 1993, 82). This explains why an increase in
self-consciousness before a skilled performance is typically thought to
increase the chance of choking under pressure.
Such increases in self-consciousness may follow from the presence of a
crowd at a baseball game, television cameras at the filming of a solo
performance, or compliments and praise directed at a performer before a
competition (Berglas and Baumeister
1993, 83).
This
explanation of self-defeating behavior harmonizes well with a similar
explanation of different levels of skill acquisition presented by Hubert L.
Dreyfus in his paper What is Moral
Maturity? A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise (1995).
Dreyfus describes five different levels or stages of skill in playing
chess and driving an automobile: stage 1 is called the novice stage, in
which one learns basic features of the game, the basic features of driving, and
the basic moves free of contextual situations.
In stage 2, the advanced beginner starts to gain experience in
coping with real situations, such as knowing when to shift up or down if an
automobile's motor is straining or racing, or when a king's side is weakened in
a game of chess. Stage 3 is the stage of
competence, reflecting increased experience and the adoption of a
hierarchical view of decision-making. A
subtle difference occurs between stages 3 and 4, which I believe is central to
the issue of choking behavior. Stage 4
is the stage of proficiency.
Proficiency results when an individual, having experienced many
emotion-laden situations, chosen plans in each, and having obtained vivid,
emotional demonstrations of the adequacy or inadequacy of the plan, is then
able to make an additional, rapid connection about how to handle those
situations. "The performer involved
in the world of the skill ‘notices’
or is struck by a certain plan, goal or perspective. No longer is the spell of involvement broken
by detached conscious planning"
(Dreyfus 1995, 3-4; my italics). The
final stage, stage 5, is that of expertise. With enough experience, and with a variety of
situations seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical
decisions, the proficient performer seems gradually to decompose classes of
situations into subclasses, each of which share the same decision or
tactic. This allows an immediate, intuitive response to each
situation (Dreyfus 1995, 5; my italics).[3]
The
major difference between Dreyfus’ first three stages and the last two is the
additional element of skill acquisition, and the increased reliance on learned
skill rather than mindful cognition as expertise is achieved. Berglas and Baumeister's description of choking behavior harmonizes
well with the view presented by Dreyfus: choking under pressure is an example
of one who has developed certain skills, who has attained a certain level of
proficiency and expertise; who then becomes so self-conscious that they ignore
those skills in favor of cognitively tracing out steps as a novice would.
Choking Under Pressure as Irrational
Now
that we have a clear description of choking under pressure, we can go on to describe
how this particular type of self-defeating behavior can be claimed to be an
irrational behavior. Irrational behavior
typically involves making inferences, holding beliefs, or performing activities
that are counterproductive to that individual's goals or aims. Self-defeating behaviors, such as choking
under pressure, do involve these misdirected inferences, beliefs, and actions.
The
irrationality of choking under pressure becomes clear when we outline the
thought process of someone involved in a choking situation. One who is about to perform an action in
which they are skilled would, if believing and behaving rationally, be able to
rely on their own acquired skills to carry them through the performance. Instead, the irrational performer is made self-conscious
by some factor, then irrationally begins to pay conscious attention to their
activities in a way they have not needed to since they were a novice. The performer believes, falsely, that by
paying extra attention to the details of the performance they will be able to
improve that performance. They act on
this irrational belief, not realizing that if they were able to stop being
self-conscious and rely on their acquired skill they would perform quite well. They pay conscious attention to the details
of what they are doing, and have an uncharacteristically bad performance. In
the attempt to achieve their goal of living up to the high expectation placed
upon them, they irrationally infer that to perform well they should pay
attention to details of their performance when they actually have the skills
and intuitive responses to carry themselves through.
Now
that we have established the irrationality of choking under pressure, we can
explore the relationship between choking and the current literature on the
moral implications of irrational and self-defeating behavior. One article which I believe has special
relevance for choking is Peter Strawson's Freedom and Resentment (1963). Strawson outlines
two types of reactive attitudes,
which are 1) parts of a continuum of attitudes and intentions which others may
hold towards us; and 2) the kinds of attitudes and feelings to which we
ourselves are prone (Strawson 1963, 49-50). One major type of these reactive attitudes
are those which are held by offended parties (parties who feel that they have
been morally wronged by someone) or those of beneficiaries of good will (Strawson 1963, 56).
The type of reactive attitude which sheds the most light on the
phenomenon of choking is self-reactive attitudes.[4]
As Strawson describes them, self-reactive
attitudes look inward: they are attitudes which are associated with demands on
oneself for others. I would assert that Strawson's self-reactive attitudes point to a key aspect of
choking behavior: in cases of choking behavior, we place excessive demands upon
ourselves via an increase or a harshening of self-reactive attitudes.
During
an episode of choking under pressure, one becomes excessively self-conscious and
thus pays excessive attention to the details of what their performance
requires. That excessive
self-consciousness must be very much like Strawson's
self-reactive attitudes, attitudes which center on others' opinions and the
demands placed upon the individual. In
the case of choking under pressure, that individual's skills are ignored due to
those reactive attitudes and the individual chokes. Many of the clearest examples of choking give
evidence of Strawson's self-reactive attitudes:
giving a speech on television (one worries about others' reactions to oneself
to an excessive extent); a solo performance on the piano in front of family and
friends; and Martina Navratilova's experience in trying to complete the Grand
Slam of tennis tournaments (winning the four largest tennis tournaments in the
same year) in 1984.[5]
Avoiding Choking Under Pressure
What
would the connection between self-reactive attitudes and choking under pressure
tell us about how to avoid choking? I
would assert that this analysis of choking under pressure, with special
attention to Strawson’s self-reactive attitudes,
shows us something beyond Strawson's own
analysis. Self-reactive attitudes, to a
point, add to our moral life in that they aid in making moral judgments and
really give us a kind of moral conscience without which human life could be
considerably more nasty, brutish and short.
But, as choking under pressure has shown us, too much self-reaction can
be disastrous for what we hope to achieve in life.
Ironically,
self-reactive attitudes seem to serve us quite well in day-to-day life. These attitudes play a major role in helping
us to judge daily moral situations; but in high-pressure situations
self-reactive attitudes do us little good since they seem to cause us to stop relying
on the skills we have developed, and instead cause us to revert back to a
novice stage in which the details of the performance suddenly seem to demand
extra attention. When a situation
involves sufficient pressure and therefore sufficient reactive attitudes, we
seek the security of attention to detail rather than rely on our own skills and
confidence.
Teams Choking Under Pressure
The
third reason choking under pressure is an important phenomena to analyze is the
fact that choking is not only an event affecting individuals under pressure,
but also whole groups. A prime example
of such a group is the 1985 Toronto Blue Jays.
The Blue Jays were playing against Kansas City for a regional pennant
and a place in the World Series. The
series of games was played partly in Kansas City, and partly in Toronto. When the series returned to Toronto, the Jays
needed just one more win to secure the pennant and go to the World Series. It should have been easy for the Jays to win
one game at home against a weak opponent, but they seemed to fall apart on the
brink of great success. They lost the
final two games of the series in embarrassing fashion, making more fielding
errors in each of those two games than they had made in the first five games
combined (Berglas and Baumeister
1993, 76).
Here
we have a clear case of a team choking under pressure, rather than specific
individuals. Many of the individual
players made errors during the last games at Toronto, at different times during
the game and despite an apparently sincere desire to win. One possibility for explaining the Blue Jay's
loss is what Berglas and Baumeister
call the "home-field disadvantage."
Normally, home teams fare better in their home stadiums; but according
to research on championship games the home field advantage may disappear and
even reverse when a championship or pennant is on the line. The research compiled wins and losses of
World Series games from 1926 to 1982.
The study found that for the early games in each World Series, the
expected home-field advantage was found: home teams won approximately 60
percent of their games. However, in the
final game the home field advantage disappeared and home teams lost 60 percent
of the time. It appeared that home teams
fared worse when a championship was on the line than when they played in
earlier games against the same opponent (Berglas and Baumeister 1993, 89).[6]
The
most telling aspect of this study was the rate of fielding errors: if a
shortstop drops a ball in a baseball game, it is not because the batter hit the
ball especially well; indeed it is actually nearly impossible to bat in a way
that causes fielding errors. It was
found that visiting teams did not change their rate of fielding errors from the
early games to the final games, but the home teams approximately doubled their
rate of fielding errors in the final games (Berglas
and Baumeister 1993, 89).
Freud and the Sub-agents
The
study on home team fielding errors shows a clear case of team choking. I would assert that this example of team
choking provides evidence against Freudian and sub-agent models of choking
under pressure and self-defeating behavior.[7]
Freudian and sub-agent models of self-defeating behavior are founded on
a description of the mind as split into particular parts. The interactions of these parts are used to
explain how self-defeating behavior happens: usually the explanation would
involve the subconscious “tricking” the conscious into doing what is irrational
or self-defeating, even though the conscious would and should be able to
recognize the behavior as self-defeating if given a fair chance to do so. A more general sub-agents or homuncularists model of the mind would explain irrational
behavior in much the same way. One example
of a sub-agents model would be that of David Pears, as argued against in Mark
Johnston's article Self Deception and the
Nature of Mind. Pears argues that in
the case of self-deception, it is possible that one sub-agent deceives another
sub-agent (or a "main system").
Johnston outlines the major tenets behind the subagent model, and argues
against it since it is based on a premature response to the paradoxes of
self-deception, and a misrepresentation of what actually occurs in a case of
self-deception. I would agree with
Johnston, particularly because of the problems group self-defeating behavior
present to the sub-agents view. It seems
implausible to claim that each member of a choking team has a lying sub-agent
at work in their individual mind, which goes about its deception at the same
time and place as the lying sub-agents of the others on the team.
Another
possible explanation for team choking would be a contagion model, in which the
contagious emotions of members of a team would inspire many individuals to
choke while the team itself is not properly said to choke. In the next sections, I give an account which
I believe is compatible with a description of contagion, although I would not
argue that contagious emotions between team members is not a necessary
condition for choking to occur. In his
book The Irrational Organization, Nils Brunnson describes the way in which individual members of a
group will look at and interpret the same situation differently, and engage in
a variety of behaviours in response to the same
situation. The point of organizing,
according to Brunnson, is to reduce the variety of
potential behaviours: “the existence of the
organization ensures that its members will act within certain limits both now
and in the future” (Brunnson 1985, 7).
Johnston and Mental Tropisms
Johnston
presents an alternative to the sub-agentists', or homuncularists' view: an unintentionalist
view, which holds that self-deception occurs and that to be deceived may be
simply to be misled, without at any point being intentionally misled by any
sub-agent. Such a view recommends that,
rather than conceive of subagents deceiving each other, we should speak in
terms of mental tropisms. Mental
tropisms are subintentional mental processes,
non-accidental yet purpose serving mental regularities which cause a sequence
of events in the mind: for example, "anxious desire that p, or more
generally anxiety concerning p, generates the belief that p" (Johnston
1988, 66).
It
would be plausible to present these mental tropisms as an alternative
description for what occurs in a case of individual self-defeating behavior,
with minor revision. Going back to our
example of an individual performing in front of an audience, that individual
may have an "anxious desire that I succeed at this performance and that
everyone think highly of me, or anxiety concerning my success at this
performance and that everyone think highly of me; and this anxiety generates
the belief that if I concentrate on the
details of this performance I will succeed here and everyone will think
highly of me." Here we borrow
Johnston's notion of a mental tropism and add a contingent statement (if I
concentrate on the details...) which explains the apparently irrational
attention to detail and concern with self-reactive attitudes. Mental tropisms might help to clarify what
occurs in a case of individual self-defeat and choking under pressure, but we
are still left with the problem of group choking under pressure. In cases such as teams choking, it hardly seems
plausible to posit some sort of "group mental tropism" which occurs
at precisely the same situation for all members of the team. But, the notion of contagion or contagious
emotions is compatible with my account: all the members of a team may actually inspire
one another, through the shared emotions of a team experience, to utilize the
same or similar mental tropisms, and to feel the same concern with self
reactive attitudes. This would inspire
the many members of a team to choke, as individuals, yet summing up as a case
of team choking. Here we can avoid
descriptions of the different parts or subagents of each team member’s mind
being tricked at the same time, or descriptions of “group mental tropisms”.
Others
may argue against the tropism account, claiming that choking actually involves
an agent who fully realizes that their performance will be marred by
self-consciousness, but is unable to turn off that self-consciousness. Such an account may actually be compatible
with the revised tropism account given here; one can plausibly describe a case
of choking in which a performer decides that concentrating on the details of
the performance (instead of self-reactive attitudes) will actually make them
less self-conscious. The point here is
that such an attempt to avoid self-consciousness by concentrating on the
details is mistaken and will usually not succeed, especially in the case of an
expert, for whom concentrating on the details will only make the choking more
pronounced.
At
this point, the other ways in which Freud and psychoanalysis have been used to
explain self-defeating behavior as well as choking deserve to be analyzed.[8] One such deviant view of self-defeat grew out of
Freudian analysis, a view which claims that interpersonal pressures rather than
a general fear of success is central in cases of self-defeat:"the
notion that interpersonal pressures may motivate self-sabotage" (Berglas and Baumeister 1993,
87). The central insight which I believe
this deviant view points to is that Strawson's self-reactive
attitudes may reflect the pressures one feels from the awareness of
interpersonal pressures and in turn are related to self-defeating behaviors
like choking under pressure. In other
words, even a Freudian argument that self-defeating behavior can be summed up
as a fear of success (and a subconscious fear of the adult responsibilities
associated with success) is compatible with and perhaps explained better in
terms of the self-reactive attitudes Strawson
describes. The very same self-reactive
attitudes Strawson describes may be the foundation of
the fear of success and adulthood that Freudian psychoanalysis describes: one
may simply worry about and internalize other’s attitudes to the extent that the
additional reactions and evaluations success will bring about are too much to
handle. Here is a way in which the
self-reactive attitudes of Strawson actually enrich
Freudian accounts and are foundational to such accounts.
This
combination of Strawson's self-reactive attitudes,
Johnston's revised mental tropisms, and the revised Freudian description of
interpersonal pressures all issue in the same point about choking under
pressure and self-defeating behaviors more generally: such behaviors have
everything to do with self-consciousness and concerns about what others will
think of one's performance. This also
lends further foundation for my prescriptive notion stated earlier: there are
times when it is helpful and perhaps necessary to avoid excessive self-reactive
attitudes, because such self-reactive attitudes add to the self-consciousness
which causes choking under pressure, and may play a role in other varieties of
self-defeating behavior.
Another
argument might hold that choking is simply poor performance. It seems that the poor performance account
would need to take note of how some poor performances come about for more
interesting and complex reasons than others.
Lack of preparedness, lack of experience, and lack of aptitude each
might result in bad performance, but I hope that in this paper I give a
provocative explanation of how an expert might give a poor
performance. In such cases we do not
expect an expert to give a poor performance, and so one must give a more
complicated account of the emotions, attitudes and mistaken beliefs that might
inspire an experienced professional to give a poor performance. In his book Motivated Irrationality,
David Pears describes the history of the poor performance or incompetence
argument as it applies to irrational.behavior in
general, and explains why one might require a more complicated explanation:
Freud overturned a view of
reason, common since antiquity, according to which it is a completely
independent force. Evidently, it is a force that is stronger in some people
than in others, and, when it comes to action, it is less often frustrated in
some agents than in others. But the old idea was that there is no interfering
with its inner working...This view was challenged by Freud, who argued that
failure of rationality can often be attributed to a wish and gave the support
of a theory to something that was already half accepted by popular wisdom. The result was a new scene in which it struck
people as absolutely obvious that failures of rationality, like failures to
execute movements in the external world, are produced either willfully or by
incompetence and it was naturally assumed that the two causes are entirely
distinct. The case for inserting an
intermediate possibility has been developed by cognitive psychologists in the
last twenty years. They argue that, even
when no wish is operating, a failure of rationality may not be produced by
incompetence. For in many cases of this
kind the person is perfectly capable of processing the information correctly
and even understands the principles governing its correct processing, and yet
he goes wrong. A neo-Freudian would have
to attribute such errors to bad luck, but the new suggestion is that reason
itself has certain bad habits that produce them (Pears 1984, 9).
In the quote above Pears describes
the basic incompetence or poor performance explanation, the Freudian “wish”
alternative, and what he calls the intermediate view. The intermediate view argues that some cases
of irrational behavior cannot be explained by a wish or incompetence, but that
“reason” itself may need to be redescribed. In other words, activities that seem to
involve a rational thought process may actually involve rather irrational bad
habits. I would argue that these
irrational bad habits may involve the self-reactive attitudes and mental
tropisms previously discussed. Moreover,
I would argue that in cases where an expert chokes under pressure, we need to
give the type of intermediate account Pears describes, since a true expert
would probably not have a wish to fail, be incompetent, or have a bad
performance.
The Moral Status of Choking Under Pressure
The
point that there are times when having excessive self-reactive attitudes can be
dangerous and detrimental to one's success automatically leads to the issue of
whether or not one can be held as blameworthy for one's own choking under
pressure. At first the question may seem
a bit cold: why would we want to regard someone as morally reprehensible for
getting too self-conscious and forgetting to allow their skills to carry them
through an important task, and simply reflecting too hard and too long on the
details of their performance or activity?
Some moral theorists in the history of philosophy have rather
distasteful answers to this question. A
brief sketch of three such moral theories and their responses to choking under
pressure follows:
Kantian
moral theory emphasizes the primacy of the rational self, and as such would not
even consider seriously the notion of behaving in such irrational ways as
choking under pressure. The moral agent,
for Kant, is first and foremost a rational agent; an agent who purportedly has
a certain level of self-knowledge and a capacity to derive the moral law for
itself. Further, Kantian moral theory
has a distinct focus on acting from duty. Acting from duty does not leave much
room for self-consciousness, especially if we consider the famous example of
developing one's talents. As Kant notes
in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, as a rational being one
necessarily wills that all one’s faculties should be developed, inasmuch as
they are given to one for all sorts of possible purposes (Kant 1785: 423). The development of talents arguably includes acquistion of and reliance upon skills. It is reasonable to infer that Kant would
never want us to be so self-conscious that we could not proceed in the
development of our talents, such as playing music before an audience, or
winning the World Series with our skills in baseball. In the case of Kantian
moral theory, then, it would seem that choking leaves much to be desired, and
is clearly morally reprehensible.
Another
major school of moral thought, Utilitarianism, claims that we must always do
whatever will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, and that
one must judge the moral worth of an action based on its consequences rather
than the intentions behind the action.
In the case of choking behavior, we can imagine cases where someone
choking under pressure will individually bring about much good and much
pleasure; for example, if Hitler had choked under pressure after the earliest
Nazi victories, at a key point in the early stages of World War II, many lives
would have been spared at the death camps of the Nazis. Conversely, we can easily imagine a scenario
in which a different individual chokes under pressure at a given time and a
great amount of sorrow and displeasure results.[9]
These examples illustrate that Utilitarianism provides a view where the
choking itself does not come under moral scrutiny, but its consequences do.
A
third moral theory comes from Aristotle, who focuses on happiness as actively
using reason well. Aristotle describes a
character-based moral theory : one should try to become habituated into the
right moral character by doing those activities which would be most likely to
be performed by one who has a properly developed moral character. Actions have moral worth if they are done in
accord with a good moral character.
Courage, as well as other virtues, are central aspects of the
well-developed moral character: one must have courage to pursue rational
activity, and not be over-courageous or too bold, or under-courageous and too
affected by fear. Putting this notion of
a well-developed moral character together with the idea of using reason well, one
can reasonably conclude that proper self-knowledge, and knowledge of how to
achieve one’s goals, is very important for Aristotle. If we accept the account of choking under
pressure as irrational, then for Aristotle one who chokes under pressure is at the
very least morally underdeveloped, if not morally accountable for their
apparent incontinence. And if one wants
to see choking under pressure as rational activity that somehow goes astray,
then for Aristotle, one who chokes under pressure also has an underdeveloped
moral character in so far as they lack the self-knowledge and the courage to
confidently use their skills and achieve their goals. They mistakenly attempt to use their
cognitive abilities to concentrate on the details of the task at hand, rather
than relying on their properly conditioned moral character and experience of
acting in accord with the moral virtues; they do not use reason actively and
well.
More
recent attempts to clarify the moral implications of self- defeating behavior
have taken insights from all of the moral theorists previously mentioned. One such analysis can be found in Christian Perring's article Addiction,
Self-Defeating Behavior, and Mental Illness (1994). Perring holds that
self-defeating behavior, and more specifically addictive behavior, should be
understood primarily as action performed to avoid pain (either physical or
psychological), where the addict is unable to take advantage of alternative
options. Further, "the distinction
between physical and psychological addiction has no moral significance, and
that we should understand addiction as reducing the freedom of the agent
primarily to the extent that it causes him or her physical and psychological
pain and distress when the addictive action is not performed" (Perring 1994, 2). In
terms of the moral status of the agent's actions, Perring
notes that "often if we can associate behavior with a very particular
external cause, we tend to excuse it more" (Perring
1994, 17).
For
instance, the psychiatric symptoms of mercury poisoning include xenophobia,
anxiety and severe irritability. Even
though xenophobia might typically be thought of as morally reprehensible, when
we discover a particular xenophobic action to be the result of mercury
poisoning, we would tend to forgive it.
This reaction of forgiveness occurs because the case of xenophobia would
not normally be seen as an autonomous action, it is instead seen as an effect
of the mercury. More complicated are
cases like genetic predispositions to alcoholism and drug addiction: in those
cases, the connection between an external cause and a resulting behavior is
much less clear. However, there still
appears to be adequate reason for giving those who are addicted some kind of moral
leeway. Perring
concludes that when the object of an addiction is the only way a person can
alleviate pain and suffering, we should not blame the addict for giving in to
her addiction on that occasion, but that we can hold the addict responsible for
not seeking better alternatives and seeking treatment to end the addiction (Perring 1994, 19).
This
analysis of self-defeating behaviors, and especially addictions, provides
insight into the moral implications of choking under pressure. When someone chokes under pressure, one
should ask if there is a clear relationship between an external cause and the
resulting behavior, like that in the previous example of mercury-induced
xenophobia. As Berglas
and Baumeister note, there is evidence to suggest
that people can become immune to choking by maintaining a very low level of
self-consciousness (Berglas and Baumeister
1993, 95). If this is the case, then
perhaps choking under pressure should be regarded as at least somewhat worthy
of moral scrutiny. An individual episode
of choking under pressure would not be something for which we would want to
criticize someone, but we would want to hope that the individual who is
afflicted by choking would be willing to either try and reduce their level of
self-consciousness, or become more used to dealing with their self-conscious
states. Thus it follows from our
analysis of choking under pressure that there are two promising ways of dealing
with choking under pressure: since choking under pressure results from pressure
putting an individual into a highly unfamiliar state of self-awareness or
self-consciousness, then one must either reduce their tendency to become
self-conscious or learn to deal with self-consciousness in a better way that
will not result in choking. If you don't
become self-conscious under any or most circumstances, then you are not likely
to choke under pressure; and if a self-conscious state is familiar to you then
you will not be greatly handicapped by it (Berglas
and Baumeister 1993, 97).
As
this paper has attempted to show, the type of self-defeating behavior commonly
known as choking under pressure provides important and useful philosophical
insights into the area of irrational behavior.
Through a careful analysis of choking under pressure and comparing that
phenomenon with others described by Dreyfus, Johnston, and Strawson,
one can arrive at a richer conception of self-defeating behavior. Similarly, my description of the
irrationality of choking under pressure provides a challenging test for
traditional moral theories such as deontology, consequentialism,
and virtue/character-based moral theories.
By outlining the moral implications of similar types of self-defeating
behavior, such as addiction, one can develop a moral groundwork and
prescriptive suggestions that enrich our understanding of self-defeating
behavior.
References
Berglas, Steven and Roy F. Baumeister. 1993. Your Own Worst Enemy : understanding
the paradox of self-defeating behavior.
Brunsson, Nils.
1985. The Irrational Organization: Irrationality as a Basis for
Organizational Action and Change.
Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart
E. Dreyfus. 1990. What is Moral Maturity?
A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical
Expertise, in Universalism vs, Communitarianism, David Rasmussen, ed.,
Johnston, Mark. 1988. Self-Deception and the Nature of Mind in
Perspectives on Self-Deception. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty,
Kant, Immanuel. 1785. Grounding
for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W. Ellington, trans.
McCrone, John. 1994. The Myth of
Irrationality: The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek.New York:
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.
Pears, David. 1984. Motivated
Irrationality.
Perring, Christian. 1994. Addiction, Self-Defeating Behavior, and
Mental Illness. unpublished, available on request from the author at
Department of Philosophy, 1415 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky,
Lexington, KY 40506; cperring@ukcc.uky.edu.
Strawson, Peter. 1963, reprint 1993. Freedom and Resentment. Proceedings of
the British Academy 48, pp. 1-25; reprinted in Perspectives on Moral
Responsibility, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza,
eds. Ithaca : Cornell U. P., pp. 45-66.
[1]Cudney and Hardy consider only a limited class of
behaviors to be true self-defeating behaviors. As they define it, a true
self-defeating behavior is an action or attitude that once worked to help an
individual cope with a hurtful experience but that now works against the
individual to keep him or her from responding to new moments of life in a
healthy way (Cudney and Hardy 1991, 11). Following their definition, Cudney and Hardy include smoking, drinking, and overeating
among these self-defeating behaviors, since they argue that these activities
were at one time helpful to the individual but now work against the individual.
One may notice that behaviors such as smoking and drinking might not seem to be
purely "helpful" activities. Because of this, it is also important to
note that by claiming that these behaviors once worked to help an individual,
the authors also leave open the possibility that the agent simply believed the
behavior to be helpful even though it may actually have done more harm than
good.
[2]2 It is
important to note that this paper argues that self-defeating behaviors, one of
which is choking under pressure, are specifically irrational behaviors. Others have
disputed that irrationality as such actually exists. A resource for this point
of view would be The Myth of Irrationality by John McCrone,
[3]For
example, "an expert driver knows by feel and familiarity when an action
such as slowing down is required; he knows how to perform the action without
calculating and comparing alternatives...what must be done, simply is
done" (Dreyfus 1995, 5).
[4] As Strawson describes these attitudes: "I have considered
from two points of view the demands we make on others and our reactions to
their possibly injurious actions. These were the points of view of one whose
interest was directly involved (who suffers, say, the injury) and of others
whose interest was not directly involved (who do not themselves suffer the
injury). Thus I have spoken of personal reactive attitudes in the first
connection and of their vicarious analogues in the second. But the picture is
not complete unless we consider also the correlates of those attitudes on whom
the demands are made, on the part of the agents. Just as there are personal and
vicarious reactive attitudes associated with demands on others for oneself and
demands on others for others, so there are self-reactive attitudes associated
with demands on oneself for others" (Strawson
1963, 57).
[5]Navratilova
had won
[6]It is
important to note that this particular section of this study, on wins and
losses, is not necessarily conclusive; this is because the home teams may not
have been choking in the final games, the visiting teams may have been performing
at a higher level for the last game.
[7]It is
difficult to argue against utilizing Freud in describing self-defeating
behavior, since the literature itself is full of Freudian terminology. While I
do not intend to completely disavow the Freudian terminology or Freud’s
insights, I do intend to synthesize what insights I take to be of value in
Freud with other theorists’ work; as will be done in later sections.
[8]One
such explanation of choking is that people choke because they fear the
possibility of fulfilling a dream or becoming a success. Berglas
and Baumeister describe the "fear of
success" explanation as one of the more widely accepted psychoanalytic
explanations for self-defeat, although they proceed to explain the phenomena in
a radically different way. They note that Freud concluded that "people
occasionally fall ill precisely because of a deeply rooted and long-cherished
wish has come to fulfillment," and this fulfillment causes a sense of
guilt that prevents them from enjoying their success (Berglas
and Baumeister 1993, 86-7). Thus Berglas
and Baumeister do take the Freudian descriptions of
self-defeating behavior seriously, but feel that it is but one of many accurate
descriptions of self-defeating behavior.
[9]David
Letterman's appearance as the host of the Academy Awards in 1995 may count for
some as a case of a very successful individual in the entertainment industry
choking under the pressure of finally achieving a lifetime goal of hosting the
awards as his mentor, Johnny Carson, had many years earlier. His appearance was
also a major disappointment to many of his fans; his performance seemed out of
sync and not up to his usual standard of wit.