Book Review: Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Hoffernan

In the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Emperor's New Clothes,  two con men promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that, they said, was invisible to those who were foolish or stupid. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes," no one dares to say that he is actually naked until a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"

Refusal to see the obvious is a characteristic of groupthink, which is a major theme of this blog and a prime concern in my psychotherapy model of unified therapy. It is part and parcel of something that Gregg Henriques calls the justification hypothesis: that we use reason to justify ideas that cement our position within a group, rather than to arrive at the truth. This was also the main theme of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind, which was previously reviewed here.

A wife ignores obvious evidence that her husband is having an affair. Religious people claim to absolutely believe the most preposterous ideas in order to fit in with their fellow church members. Political ideologues seem immune to certain facts no matter how much the evidence mounts, and make convoluted arguments that they seem to believe prove that their ideas are correct. Children in dysfunctional families act out family rules over and over again no matter how much pain it causes them.

In a fascinating book, Margaret Hoffernan dissects this aspect of groupthink and elaborates on all of its myriad manifestations. While concentrating mostly on the madness of employees in business organizations walking together off a cliff in maddening lock step - with the result that the organization is eventually harmed or destroyed (such as Enron, BP  and the derivatives crisis in investment banking that led to the economic meltdown a few short years ago) - she also gives examples from many other walks of life.

Go along to get along. Be silent in order to avoid conflict because conflict might destroy a family or an organization. Rationalize your misbehavior because "everybody's doing it." Once you've laid out your position, never change it in light of new information because you might appear weak. Be a good "team player" and do not ask any hard questions. Avoid changes you might have to think hard about, because it takes a lot less energy and brain power to believe than to doubt.

Then there is something she calls the Bystander Effect: Don't intervene in a crisis if there are lots of people around - surely someone else will take care of it. The more people around to witness a crime, for example, the less likely it becomes that anyone will call 911.

Powerful people are often the most seriously prone to conform to what the author refers to as received wisdom, or information that conforms to stereotypes.

In another fascinating chapter, the author describes people whom she calls Cassandras. These are the folks who refuse to accept ideas just to fit in, often at great personal sacrifice, and are willing to look at the bigger picture to see potential problems that others blithely ignore. The author writes, "...After every institutional or organizational failure, individuals invariably surface who saw the crisis coming, warned about it, and were mocked or ignored."(p. 201). Whistleblowers are examples of such people; the government tries but usually fails to protect them.

The oddest thing about being willfully blind is the fact that people who do this must be aware at some level of exactly what they are doing. As the author states, "How could we know where not to look without looking first?" (p. 88). In order to lie to ourselves, we have to ignore evidence that repeatedly hits us over the head like a two-by-four. Knowledge of a fact can be inferred when someone deliberately blinds himself or herself to its existence.

As the author mentions, we all use two types of thinking: one is automatic, born of habit, fast, and intuitive. If we had to reason out every move we made, we'd be paralyzed. The second form is the one in which we deliberate, weigh pro's and cons, examine evidence, and such. It involves much more energy and takes way more time. A key point about it is that it is also used to monitor the first type of thinking for errors. No one would survive very long without possessing capabilities for both of these types of thinking. Monitoring for errors is always lurking in the background of our minds, even when we are reacting subconsciously, automatically, and without thinking.

Two recent movies, based on actual historical events, brilliantly depict illustrative, startling, and dramatic examples of large numbers of people engaging in willful blindness - and the Cassandras who finally changed things. Labyrinth of Lies shows Germans in the 1950's acting like the Holocaust never happened. Spotlight shows just how many people knew or should have known about Catholic clergy abusing children sexually, and also shows that the higher-ups kept moving pedophile priests from parish to parish - and for a long time no one did much of anything about it.

Facing problems is almost always better than sweeping them under the carpet for the purpose of furthering group harmony. As long as a problem is invisible, it will remain unsolved. As James Baldwin once said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

The Righteous Mind

In a fascinating and highly recommended book, The Righteous Mind, author Jonathan Haidt argues for a very unusual idea that is very compatible with my own viewpoint about human psychological functioning.  He provides strong evidence for the proposition that human reasoning did not evolve so we could understand the truth about the universe, but for a variety of other purposes.

One of these other reasons is that humans are both selfish and groupish. In evolutionary theory, we often think that each individual organism strives to maximize the chances of passing down its own genes to its offspring, and to a certain extent that is true. But as I have argued frequently on this blog and in my books, we are also willing under certain circumstances to sacrifice our own needs for the sake of our own group. 

We may compete with one another inside our own social groups, but we also experience joy by being a member of something much larger than our individual selves.  The military has been aware of this forever. Do you really think all that marching and drilling is done for the sake of getting into physical shape?  

No! It’s done because synchronizing ourselves with other people is a joyful experience, and leads to an amazing sense of group cohesiveness.  Soldiers don't fight so much for a cause, as much as they fight for one another. (I wonder if the joy of being synchronized with others may be the reason we seemed to have evolved a particular liking for music, which otherwise seems to have no particular evolutionary or survival advantage). 

We are team players. Even if we live in a very heterogenous society as we do in the United States, we form our own teams.  How else to explain the passionate, live-with-or-die-with-the-team loyalty to our favorite football franchise?

In my post of 1/21/11, Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict, I pointed out how the hormone oxytocin, which helps mothers bind with their offspring, promotes love and trust “… not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood.”  Haidt mentions this as well.

Haidt argues that political and religious opinions function as badges of social membership, and are made sacred by groups.  As such, “When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it." This explains why these kinds of opinions seem to be immune to all facts and reason.

Self interest is a actually a weak predictor of policy preferences. We do not so much ask,  “What’s in it for me?” but “What’s in it for my group?”

As it turns out, many of our beliefs are based not on facts or reason but upon either our groupishness or on our need to have a good reputation within the group.  For almost all of us, it is generally more important for us to look right than be right. We are like politicians looking for votes, not scientists looking for truth.

In fact, a lot of the arguments we use to defend our opinions are thought up after we have formed the opinion!  "Logic” is used in the service of justifying the opinion, as my colleague Gregg Henriques would say, rather than forming it. Haidt says our intuition and our position in society are like an elephant, while logic and reasoning are like the rider of an elephant.  The rider evolved to serve the elephant, not the other way around.  

It’s not that we cannot ever be swayed by logic, facts, and reasons – we certainly can.  But for the most part this will happen only if our groupishness is still being served.

We are of course both selfish and groupish, so our personal self-interest is hardly irrelevant.  But most of us are far more likely to cheat on our taxes if we don’t think anyone else will find out.  As Haidt points out, we are like both chimps and like “hivish” bees.

In evolutionary theory, group selection is the term that refers to environmental forces that tend to select for hivish behavior, while individual natural selection is the more traditional view that environments tend to favor those who are the most fit and adaptive from an individual perspective.  This is not a question of which type of selection is more important.  They both are. Haidt refers to this as multi-level selection.

It is usually the more individualistic and politically liberal members of our society (the WEIRD people: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic folks that comprise the vast majority of people who become subjects in psychology experiments) that complain that it is the conservatives who refuse to recognize established science (man-made climate change and evolution, for example), but liberals can be every bit as bad.

For quite some time, as Haidt points out, "[Many] Scientists have urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality. Nowhere was this betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on [sociobiologist] Edward O. Wilson, who had the audacity to suggest that natural selection also influenced human behavior." 

In other words, the very concept of group selection was rejected by prominent scientists, including the otherwise reasonable Stephen J. Gould, for political reasons rather than scientific ones!  It was literally banished as heresy in the seventies. These scientists were afraid that the concept of group selection would be used for nefarious purposes by racists and ethnocentrists to justify attacks on those who don’t fit their own description as being desirables – much like the concept of eugenics was used by the Nazis.

As I mentioned earlier, once someone has established an opinion, he or she can always come up with a very coherent and logical argument for its validity.  But you can do the exact same thing to come up with logical and factual arguments to justify an opinion that is a polar opposite from the first one.

So what about finding scientific studies to justify your position?  Haidt points out: “There is no such thing as a study you must believe; it’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers... AND Google can always guide you to a study that’s right for you."

Where Does Psychotherapy Go from Here?

This post was written, with my input, by Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., one of my partners in the Unified Psychotherapy Project.

A little while ago a NY Times article wondered where the field of psychotherapy was headed. After profiling some of the field’s most prominent thinkers in cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches, the author sensed that the field was on the cusp of, well, something. But it was not at all clear what that ‘something’ would be. He wrote, “As psychotherapy struggles to define itself for an age of podcasts and terror alerts, it will need ideas, thinkers, leaders. Yet the luminaries here, many of whom rose to prominence three decades ago, were making their way off the stage. And it was not clear who, or what, would take their place.”

So what will be psychotherapy’s next great thing? Will there be a so-called fifth wave? Individual psychotherapy (i.e., not counting systems views, which operate at another level of analysis) has seen four great waves. First, there was psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the unconscious conflicts, early experience and transference. Then came behavior modification, stemming from learning theories organized into procedures for desensitization and changing contingences. Humanistic/experiential psychotherapy, which rejected the mechanistic determinism of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism and instead emphasized emotions, conscious motives, and human potential can be considered the third great wave. Finally, cognitive psychotherapy, with its emphasis on thoughts and interpretations, can be considered the fourth great wave.

So, will there be another great wave in psychotherapy? Perhaps forms of Zen-based mindfulness? Brainwise therapies? Maybe something connected to the technological explosion? While these are exciting developments, we believe the next wave will be a different kind of wave; one that will bring consolidation and clarification to the field. Instead of yet another movement defined against those that have come before, what is desperately needed now is a systematic approach that provides a common language and conceptual framework that allows practitioners to see how the key insights from the major perspectives can go together to form a coherent whole. 


Moreover, such an approach will more directly connect psychotherapy to the science of psychology. Philosophers of science talk about fields moving from a pre-paradigmatic state where competing schools advocate fundamentally different visions of reality to a paradigmatic state where a shared frame emerges that aligns the key insights into a coherent whole. We believe psychotherapy is on the cusp of such a transition, and the next several decades will bring a much more unified vision of the field.

Knowledgeable practitioners of the specific schools of thought will probably balk at the suggestion of conceptual unification. They will rightfully point out that the different perspectives are deeply anchored into fundamentally different visions of what it means to be human. To eclectically put them all together, they argue, yields a form of mush, something far less—not more—than the sum of its parts. The unsystematic blending of ideas is a weak intellectual solution. 


This is why the eclecticism of the 1980s gave rise to psychotherapy integration movement (also find a summary of Dr. Allen's contribution here) of the 1990s. Integrationists realized that a taking a bit from this perspective and a bit of that technique quickly leads to chaos, and over the past several decades integrationists have tried to carve out pathways to pull together different strands of thought with integrity. Yet the integration movement itself may be stalling, perhaps as a function of its own success. For as the integration movement has gained traction, various pathways and forms of integration have proliferated (e.g., common factors [what the therapy models all share], technical eclecticism [borrowing techniques but not theory from other schools], assimilative integration [borrowing some ideas from another school], and theoretical integration and so forth). There is so much variety and so little form that it is becoming increasingly meaningless to identify as a psychotherapy integrationist.

As co-chairs of the Unified PsychotherapyProject, we are part of a small but growing group of academics and practitioners who argue that the conceptual unification of psychotherapy is possible (for a book outlining how, see here). If this is so, the field of psychotherapy will shift from being pre-paradigmatic to fully paradigmatic. The Project’s founder, Jeffrey Magnavita, put the issue this way…

"[P]sychotherapists behave like members of competing tribes, with different esoteric languages and rituals. Unification assumes that we all work in the same realm with the same processes regardless of the subsystem or specific domain we emphasize and specialize in. A unified model encourages us all to be aware of the larger picture and even if domain-specific treatment is undertaken, an understanding of the system and interconnections of domains and processes keep us alert to other possibilities for further developments."

The point of this rather lengthy post is to share an outline of a unified model of personality and psychotherapy that is gaining traction and is providing practitioners a convenient way to think about individuals in a manner that is consistent with the major perspectives and modern personality theory. A more detailed articulation of the model was just published  in a new journal, The Journal of Unified Psychotherapy and Clinical Science. (It is important to reiterate that what we are sharing here is a model of the individual, and thus it exists at a different level of analysis the family, group, or societal level).

Let’s start with mapping the larger picture that Magnavita referred to. Here is a map that identifies the key variables that a professional psychologist would need to consider.

The three circles in the middle identify the intersection of the three domains of knowledge most immediately relevant for a psychotherapist, namely personality theory (i.e., how are people built and what makes them unique), psychopathology (i.e., what are the kinds and causes of suffering and psychological dysfunction), and psychotherapy (i.e., what are the kinds of interventions and therapeutic processes associated improving psychological functioning and well-being). These three domains are imbedded three broad contexts. The red circle represents the Neuro-Biological context, with refers to a) the broad evolutionary history of our species; b) the unique genetic makeup of the individual; and c) the individual’s current neuro-physiological constitution. 


The green arrow represents the life history and developmental context, namely the distal and proximal variables that played a key causal role in the current situation. Finally, the blue circle represents the relational and sociocultural contexts in which the person (and therapist and therapy!) is embedded (think here of Bronfrenbrenner’s ecological systems model).

Although in Freud’s psychoanalysis the trifocal points of psychopathology, personality and treatment were all closely connected, with the emergence of behavioral and cognitive therapies and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual the field of psychotherapy has largely drifted away from personality theory and instead focused primarily on psychopathology. Current academic research generally matches specific interventions to psychopathology categorized by the DSM, with virtually no systematic attention paid to the individual’s personality make up. We believe that interventions should be guided by holistic conceptualizations, not just lists of symptom presentations. That means we need to systematically consider personality dynamics, as well as the biological, developmental, and social contexts. In this blog we share the outline of a view of personality can align us directly with interventions and conceptualizations that cut across the major domains of individual psychotherapy.

A conference presentation at the 2010 meeting of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration  in Florence, Italy vividly affirmed the need for a more unified approach toward conceptualizing people in psychotherapy. The presentation consisted of Drs. Leslie Greenberg and Paul Wachtel  analyzing a videotape series of cognitive behavioral therapy for perfectionism conducted by Dr.Martin Antony . The patient was a motivated, attractive young woman completing a graduate degree in psychology who strove for perfection in many areas of her life. She was extremely focused on organizing, planning, and succeeding at everything she did. She also had occasional panic attacks and issues concerning her body image.

What was striking about the presentation was how Dr. Antony focused almost exclusively on daily activities, habits and actions, and the thoughts associated with them. In contrast, her emotions, relational processes and internal working models, and the way she defended against uncomfortable images, feelings, or impulses were essentially ignored. For example, at one point in the first session, Dr. Antony inquired about the woman’s eating patterns and, with tears welling up in her eyes, she hesitantly reported that she purged about once a day. Dr. Antony made little acknowledgement of her feelings or of her pained experience sharing this information. 


Not surprisingly, Drs. Wachtel and Greenberg criticized the way these elements were glossed over. Indeed, at one point, Dr. Greenberg commented that he did not believe that cognitive behavioral therapies treated the whole person. It is likely, however, that a cognitive behavioral therapist might retort that Greenberg’s EmotionFocused Therapy  similarly does not focus on the whole person but only the emotional part. Or perhaps the individual would question the assertion by arguing that no system focused on the whole person in the manner that Greenberg implied.

We believe there are holistic maps of individuals that can guide practitioners and connect psychotherapy to both modern personality theory and psychopathology, and we share the outline of our approach here. This post, which originally appeared on Dr. Henriques's Psychology Today blog, complements a prior recent post, AnotherBig Five for Personality,  which articulated that one of the major distinctions in personality theory has been between temperament and character. Temperament (i.e., traits) refers to the broad and general dispositions of an individual; in contrast character refers much more to one’s unique identity and what is learned in particular situations. 


Personality research and theory has varied in terms of its focus. Although Freud’s theories and other early formulations were initially concerned with character, in the 1950s research on traits exploded, and the ‘Big Five’ (i.e., traits of extraversion, neuroticism [emotional reactivity], agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness) probably represent the most prominent work in personality over the past several decades.

Although traits are crucial to consider for a good conceptualization (see, e.g., Singer’s excellent book Personality and Psychotherapy), it nevertheless is the case that traits are broad, general dispositions that are quite stable in adulthood and unlikely to be largely modified. Thus, they are not really the central focus of psychotherapy interventions. Thankfully, personality researchers have begun to recently turn their attention back to character. Dan McAdams’ has, for example, argued that character can be further divided into characteristic adaptations (the ways an individual specifically learns to adapt to specific situations) and identity (one’s self-concept, self-esteem, philosophy of life), and he argues for a tri-level view of personality (traits, characteristic adaptations, and identity). McAdams has focused much of his attention on identity, and noted that there is “no general Big Five theory of characteristic adaptations”.

What is remarkable is that work on a unified approach to conceptualizing individuals in psychotherapy has been developed that delineates precisely what McAdams said was missing—it offered a ‘Big Five’ map of the systems of characteristic adaptation! Delineated in the prior Big Five blog, the five systems are, in order of development: 1) the Habit System; 2) the Experiential-Affective System; 3) the Relationship System; 4) the Defensive System; and 5) the Justification System. Here is the map (for a more detailed discussion, see here).

On the left side, the three broad contextual domains (biological, developmental and sociocultural) are represented. The circle in the middle represents the personality of the individual, specifically the systems of adaptation that are often the focus of interventions. These systems are described in a previous blog. From the vantage point of developing a conceptualization useful for psychotherapists, here is a brief description of each domain of adaptation, with questions about each that might be asked.

A. Habits and Daily Activities. This domain refers to the daily activities and patterns of behavior that the individual engages in. Common domains to assess include

1. Patterns of sleep and wakefulness (# hours sleep per night, naps, ease falling or staying asleep, nightmares)
2. Eating (regularity of meals, restrictive or overeating, unusual or unhealthy diet)
3. Substance use (frequency, intensity and duration of nicotine, alcohol, and illicit/prescription substance use)
4. Exercise (frequency of exercise, degree of physical fitness)
5. Regularity of routine
6. Daily stressors (e.g., noise, traffic, heat)
7. Hobbies, interests, leisure time

B. The Experiential System. This domain refers to the embodied phenomenological state (i.e., the felt experience of being). It is organized by affect, although includes perceptions, drives, and images. Common domains to assess include:

1. Are there dominant emotional states that are chronically active/accessible, emotions that are expansive or under regulated? What about emotions that are over controlled?
2. Does the individual know how he feels? Can he “get in touch” with his feelings? Is there harmony or alienation between the explicit justification system and the experiential system?
3. What is the general degree of emotionality? Levels of trait extraversion? What about levels of trait neuroticism?
4. Is the individual able to stay centered and mindful of what is happening at the experiential level?
5. Can the individual express his feelings effectively? Does the individual have trouble with experiencing all or some emotions? Are there secondary emotions that are covering up primary emotions?
6. Has there been a trauma that overloaded the experiential system? Does the individual experience strong images or flashbacks?
7. Does the individual have gut feelings or a sense of things being either good or off? Is there a lot of fantasy or day-dreaming?
8. Are there any unusual/bizarre sensations or experiences (i.e., hallucinations)?

C. The Relational System. This domain refers to the internal working models or self-other schema the individual has developed to navigate the social environment. Common domains to assess include:

1. What is the person’s sense of relational value…to what extent do they feel generally respected, admired, loved and appreciated as opposed to neglected, rejected and criticized? Has that changed recently?
2. Does the individual generally feel secure in her relationships? Do they have issues with trusting others and do they ever get paranoid? Do they have intimate connections with others? Have they had a lot of relationship failures?
3. What was the attachment history? What were their early relationships (parents, siblings, early friends) like?
4. Have they experienced a traumatic loss or betrayal from another?
5. Is the individual more agentic (self-focused, concerned with power and autonomy) or more communal (other focused, concerned with affiliation and connection)?
6. Is the person more or less agreeable? How does the individual handle conflict? Are they aggressive, assertive or submissive? Do they adopt a fairly agreeable or hostile stance in relationship to others?
7. Are they particularly sensitive to criticism or rejection? Do they fear abandonment? Do they have trouble being alone?
8. Do they experience conflict between relationship motives of power and love or autonomy and dependency? When down, do they experience splits between feeling shameful (feel they are to blame) or hostility (feel others are to blame)?

D. The Defensive System. This refers to the general harmony between the systems, the filtering between self-conscious and subconscious processes, and processes like cognitive dissonance and psychodynamic defense mechanisms. Signal anxiety activates the defensive system. Common domains to consider include:

1. Does the individual seem guarded, hesitant to disclose, resistant to elaborating on all or certain elements of their story?
2. Do they get words or body language in response to certain questions?
3. How do they cope when they feel stressed?
4. Do they engage in rationalizations or suppression/repression or other similar processes?
5. What do they try to avoid feeling or experiencing? Do they have any affect phobias? Core fears?
6. Do they demonstrate good insight and are they able to reflect on what drives them? Can they laugh at their foibles or defense? Or does such conscious self-reflection activate anxiety and a closed off response?
7. When does their attention shift? Do they systematically shift away from certain topics? When do they seem less clear, less focused? Are there times in which it is hard to follow their logic?

E. The Justification System. This refers to the self-conscious, language-based belief-value networks that individual uses to make meaning out of his world, and to consciously understand himself and others. In regards to assessing the justifying self, cognitive and narrative/existential therapies allow a lens to view aspects of this portion of the psyche. Thus, thinking about the individual’s justification narrative (the story they have about themselves in relationship to the world) and automatic thoughts/inferences/core beliefs are useful concepts to bring to bear in understanding this domain. More specific elements include:

1. What is the general functioning of their verbal system (i.e., their verbal IQ)? Vocabulary usage, complexity of sentences, etc.
2. To what extent is their identity coherent and complex? It is rigid, certain, simplistic, hard and foreclosed? Or is it multifaceted, open to criticism, textured? What is the level of ego development? Do they reflect on who they are and why? Are they able to give complex, textured answers to reflective questions or are they brief and underdeveloped?
3. What is their driving purpose in life? Do they connect to a higher power or follow particular religious teachings? Do they care about politics or have active views/philosophies regarding how the world works? Are they concerned with their own local reality or do they reflect on where values come from, where the country (or world) should be headed?
4. What is the degree of self-regulation and self-control? What is their level of conscientiousness? What about their need for control? Do they exhibit a lot of self-discipline or are there problems with impulsivity?
5. What is their self-esteem? Do they engage in a lot of self-criticism and negative self-talk? Is there an internalized parental voice constantly judging them? Do they have core beliefs about self that are negative? Or do they see themselves as a positive protagonist in the story of their lives?
6. What is their general level of self-efficacy? Do they perceive themselves as resilient and capable of handling things or weak, an emotional wreck? Do they have high levels of agency? Adaptive levels of an internal locus of control?
7. Are they known to others or do they frequently filter their private thoughts from their public thoughts?
8. What is the individual’s overall evaluation of their life? Their reflective degree of life satisfaction?

Now where did this map come from? It came from applying the lens of a unified model of psychology to the key insights of the major perspectives in psychotherapy! And that is the point we want to make here. The major perspectives align with each of the domains of characteristic adaptation! Here is the alignment.

When approached from this angle, modern personality theory meshes well with the various approaches to psychotherapy. And it is clear that the various approaches in psychotherapy have emphasized different domains of character adaptation.

Our perspective is that the time has passed for the single schools with their specific interventions targeting only a part of the system. Instead, what will be revolutionary about the fifth wave is that it will lay out a truly comprehensive vision of psychotherapy that connects to the science of human psychology in a manner that allows us to appreciate our humanity grounded in the knowledge of science.