Day 228: You Are What You Think You Are: The Role of Belief in the Legal System

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

I started my day with a workout and an interview of psychologist Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer was promoting her 2023 book, The Mindful Body, in which she argues against the mind-body connection — because, she says, mind and body are all one thing.

Her research provides examples of what she means. One study (with the inspired title “Believing Is Seeing”) really hit home with me, as someone who’s worn coke bottle glass since age 8.

When you look at an eye chart in an optometrist’s office, you expect to be able to see pretty well at the top where the letters are large, but progressively worse as you go down. Dr. Langer’s research suggests that people expect (and demonstrate) inability to read the letters about two-thirds of the way down.

Dr. Langer —a fascinatingly disruptive thinker — smelled a rat. Your chart, she thought, is making me believe I can’t read the increasingly smaller letters. So she and her colleagues mixed it up: They created eye charts that started small and became increasingly large as the eye move down, or that shifted the small and large letters around.

They found what they expected: People could read print that they had found “too small” to read on the traditional eye chart.

Language and Belief

Common language tricks us too, Dr. Langer claims. Someone who has had a cancer diagnosis take a follow-up test that shows no cancer cells, and doctors say the cancer is “in remission.” If a person who has never had a cancer diagnosis took the same test, doctors would say they did not have cancer.

But cancer often shows up again, one might object. So what? Colds often show up more than once in a season too, but we don’t say our cold is “in remission.” We say we’re fine.

Given the well-documented “placebo effect,” words affect outcomes. Stress may affect survival rates more than cancer cells, on this theory — and the thought of latent cancer waiting to strike back is stressful.

re-believing in the Legal system

Dr. Langer’s research could have enormous implications for the legal system. Think about recidivism statistics — we treat and talk about and talk to people with prior convictions as if their criminality is “in remission.” What effect might it have on subsequent offenses if we stopped doing that?

But people do re-offend, one might object … But why? We stigmatize people with criminal records, which makes it hard for them to re-integrate into work and social structures. And social science has begun to indicate that a big predictor of numerous risk factors — addiction, crime, suicide — is loneliness.

What if we spoke of people who’d served sentences like we speak of people who’ve completed mandatory community service? What if we told them that people who completed the recovery programs offered during their sentence were statistically went on to have remarkable careers and to make greater community impact than people who hadn’t?

Manipulative, one might object … but Dr. Langer and colleagues “manipulated” people into having objectively better vision by telling them that pilots have good eyesight and then putting them in a flight simulator.

Besides, that’s just Dr. Langer’s point: We’re manipulating people’s actions and capabilities anyway by how we structure and speak about human performance. Why not start consciously manipulating in productive ways?