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Robert Waldinger: The more we resist change, the more we suffer. Thereโs a phrase I like. It says, โLet go or be dragged.โ There is just constant movement of the universe and all of us as individuals as part of the universe.
Samantha Laine Perfas: You canโt teach an old dog new tricks, goes the saying, and sometimes this feels true. But the idea that people canโt change is a myth. Research shows that people are capable of making dramatic shifts at nearly every stage of life in spite of our habits and biases.
So how much of that change is within our control and how much is at the mercy of our circumstances?
Welcome to โHarvard Thinking,โ a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, weโre joined by:
Mahzarin Banaji: Mahzarin Banaji. Iโm an experimental psychologist. I live and work in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Laine Perfas: Her work focuses on implicit bias, and she co-wrote the best-seller โBlindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.โ Next:
Waldinger: Bob Waldinger. Iโm professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
Laine Perfas: He also directs the Harvard Study on Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human happiness and well-being. It tracks the lives of participants over 80 years. And finally:
Richard Weissbourd: Rick Weissbourd. Iโm a senior lecturer at the Grad School of Education. Iโve also taught at the Kennedy School of Government for many years.
Laine Perfas: Heโs a psychologist and is the director of the Making Caring Common Project at GSE.
And Iโm Samantha Laine Perfas, your host, and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today, weโll discuss how, when, and why we change, intentionally and otherwise.
It feels like we live in a culture that is constantly pushing us to do more, be more. Why do we focus on changing ourselves so much?
Waldinger: Whatโs so striking is that for a long time, developmental scientists focused almost exclusively on children, because children change so dramatically, right before our eyes. And people thought once we got into our 20s, we found work, if we were lucky we found love, and then we were good to go, we were set, and people didnโt change much across adulthood. People began to look more closely and look at their own experience and realize how much change happens psychologically and biologically across the adult lifespan. And so you began to see the kinds of studies of change across adulthood that my study represents that was begun in 1938. But for a long time, adult development was the kind of poor stepchild of developmental science.
Banaji: Psychologists, I think, have been remiss in really studying the two ends of life, right? As Bob said, because we are interested in development for a variety of reasons, we focus on from the day a baby is born and we go through, really, well, the adolescent years because weโre interested in the emotional mind and what happens, the volatility during adolescence, and change and so on. And then we know nothing until again, we get to a much older age where we worry and think about the last decade of life. But every decade weโre changing. Weโre entirely different people.
Weissbourd: Thereโs so many different domains of change, right? And I think we do have a pretty strong belief in our culture that we can become more effective or competent, that we can become happier. Thereโs a billion-dollar self-help industry out there that is trying to make people feel better.
My work is primarily on moral development, and I donโt think we have strong notions of change in adult life, and thatโs a real problem. Thereโs a notion in many parts of the country that youโre born good or bad, and youโre going to be good or bad your whole life, and I think weโd be a much healthier culture if we saw ourselves as having the capacity to love other people well and more deeply and empathize more deeply. You can have better relationships. And thatโs probably the strongest source of happiness we have.
I would just say one other thing, and itโs really partly a question for all of you. But, I think sometimes people donโt think they change because the narrator doesnโt change. Meaning the person, the thing telling the story of their lives doesnโt feel like it changes. And when I ask people about their narrator, do they have the same narrator when they were 8 or 16 or 30 or 50? Most people think the narrator is the same. So if you think of the narrator as the self and the continuity of the self, I think thatโs one of the reasons people often think weโre not changing.
Banaji: Iโm remembering my good friend Walter Mischelโs theory of personality and this idea that we believe so much that we and other people are largely consistent across different situations. The lovely example that Walter gives is that we meet people in certain roles so we donโt even know the variability of those people. I know the janitor who stops by my office every evening as a janitor, I donโt know him as a father or as a jazz musician or whatever else. These things give us a false sense of continuity. And I think this spills over into feeling change isnโt present or happening when in fact it is. Itโs like our skin. I think Iโm right that the epidermis, once a month, we have a new skin and even in older people, itโs only a little slower. Itโs every two months. But I donโt notice that and that might be an interesting metaphor for us, that something so close to us on our body that we see all the time is going through an entire regeneration every month, but we donโt notice it.
Waldinger: Itโs interesting because I think weโre ambivalent about change, that the mind in many ways craves permanence. Rick, as youโre saying, we have this sense of the narrator being the same narrator when I was 8 years old and now when Iโm in my 70s, and of course thatโs absurd. Iโm a Zen practitioner, and the core teachings of Zen and Buddhism is that the self is a fiction. Itโs a helpful fiction that we construct to get through the world, but itโs actually fictitious, and constantly changing. But at the same time, as we want permanence, we want something fixed, we say, โOh, I want to improve.โ And so we get on this endless treadmill of self-improvement. So we really have quite a complex relationship with the idea of change, we human beings.
Weissbourd: Iโm one of those people who do have a strong sense of self-sameness, that I am the same person when I was 8. Is that not true for you?
Waldinger: When I was 8, I really thought I could be Superman; and I had a cape and I had a Superman outfit, and I ran around and I jumped on and off my bed. I donโt do that anymore, Rick.
Laine Perfas: Maybe you should. Sounds like a great Saturday afternoon.
Banaji: You know, thereโs a lovely piece that Robert Sapolsky, the neurobiologist, wrote, in, I think it was in the โ80s. I remember reading it and smiling because I was still in my 20s. And he said something like, โMy research assistant colors his hair purple one week and green the other week. He listens to classical music and pop. He eats regular foods and weird foods.โ And he said, โLook at me, Iโve had the same shoulder-length ponytail for the last 40 years and I only listen to reggae and so on.โ And he concluded that piece by saying if you havenโt changed by a certain age for certain things, you never will. If you havenโt eaten sushi by the age of 22, you never will. If you havenโt had your nose pierced by 17, you never will. So there are certain things that, yes, it feels that way, but maybe there are bigger changes that happen later in life.
Waldinger: One thing that Iโve been impressed by as I study people getting older is that the big change is in our perception of the finiteness of life. That we all know weโre going to die from a pretty young age, but most of us say, โAh, itโs way in the futureโ or โIโm going to be the exception here. I wonโt die. Everybody else will.โ And then what Laura Carstensenโs work shows, and many peopleโs, is that in about our mid-40s, we really begin to get a more visceral sense of the finiteness of life and that sense of our mortality increases from the mid-40s onward. You can document it pretty precisely and that institutes a whole set of shifts in how we see ourselves, how we see this narrator moving through the world, and how we see our time horizon. There are some things that are going to change just because of the fact of death.
Laine Perfas: It does seem like some people are very open to change, and theyโre constantly learning and growing, But then there are other people who are very comfortable with how they are, even if other people maybe think they should change. It makes me wonder, are there some people who are more susceptible to change than others, or more open to it?
Banaji: As with almost any other psychological physical property, yes, there are individual differences and far be it for me to bring up anything political in this moment. But one of the differences between what we consider to be liberal versus conservative, the dictionary definition, is that one group looks forward and wants change and wants to leave behind old ways of doing things. And the other wants tradition and stability. Thereโs nothing good or bad here. These are both forces. But this is a real difference, I think, in almost every culture. I was born and raised in India, Iโve lived most of my adult life here, and in both cultures, Iโve seen these two big movements pull and push in opposite directions. And I guess at some level, Iโd like to think theoretically that itโs good to have a bit of that pull and push.
Waldinger: And as I understand it, thereโs some theory and some grounding in empirical data that some of this may be biologically based, that some of us are temperamentally more inclined to resist change. We humans are arrayed on a spectrum, perhaps even biologically, about how much we welcome versus resist change.
Banaji: I canโt help but mention my colleague Jerry Kagan. Jerryโs notion of temperament in early childhood, he had this view that there were certain personality dimensions that are biologically present in early childhood. And I really believe that some of those very much link up to what youโre saying, Bob. So for example, I have a sister who was very shy, anxious, would hold my little frock and hang behind me. And I was so extroverted that at age 6, I wanted to leave home and go off somewhere else. And I feel that this difference in shyness or anxiety or whatever you want to call it, has played a role in our political beliefs. I am open to new experiences. I meet very different people and packed a bag at 21 and with $40 in my pocket took off without knowing anybody in this country. She wouldnโt leave home without thinking for three hours about what sheโs going to do. And this does lead to very different outcomes.
Weissbourd: Yeah, thereโs some people who are temperamentally very risk-averse and there are other people who are risk junkies.
Laine Perfas: It is worth mentioning, you know, not all change that we experience is desirable or beneficial. You know, if we encounter trauma or negative experiences, if youโve been in a really bad breakup and the experience leaves you cynical and love-averse. When weโre going through life and weโre experiencing negative experiences that might push us to change ourselves in ways that might be more harmful or cause us to withdraw, how do we wrestle with that tension versus still being open to the world, not really knowing what might happen?
Waldinger: A lot of my clinical work is psychotherapy. Thatโs my specialty; actually, I still, every day, I see a couple of people in psychotherapy. And what you see is tremendous variability in peopleโs willingness, interest in, and ability to make internal shifts in how they see the world and how they experience themselves. And some of that, Sam, is based on what youโre describing, which is some people have had negative experiences that seem to have really baked in certain ways of experiencing themselves in the world and certain expectations of the world and of people as being reliable or not reliable, as being intentionally harmful or basically good.
Weissbourd: I would say that most of us experience disillusionment at some point in our lives. My dissertation was on the disillusionment of Vietnam veterans, but I think itโs a very common experience. And I think people can respond to disillusionment by becoming bitter and withdrawing and cynical. They can also respond to disillusionment by developing a more encompassing understanding of reality and thriving, flourishing in the world. We have huge literatures on grief and trauma and depression. We donโt really talk enough about disillusionment, and I think itโs a powerful experience for a lot of people.
Banaji: My colleague Steve Pinker is very fond of pointing out to us something that I think is true, that we may think that we are not changing for the good, but whether you look at womenโs rights, whether you look at homicide rates, unemployment, other measures of the economy, happiness โ if you take even a 20-year view on most of them, thereโs improvement. If you take a 100- or 200-year view, thereโs no question that thereโs a lot of improvement. Yes, there are pockets where things are getting worse. Iโll put climate in that box and make sure that we donโt forget that. But on many of these things, we are improving. And I come from a country that got independence in โ47, and the remarkable changes Iโve seen over the course of my lifetime in India are just mind-boggling. But our aspirations, I think, for better, which is a very good thing, I think often lead us to not see real progress that has also been made.
Waldinger: And to your point, our cognitive bias thatโs built in, our bias to pay more attention to whatโs negative and to remember whatโs negative longer than whatโs positive. When weโre younger, that changes as we get older, but that cognitive bias makes us vulnerable to having this sense that everythingโs falling apart and inflamed.
Banaji: I myself showed that bias. When we began to do research on implicit bias, I said to my students, donโt even bother looking for change in it. Itโs not going to change. Itโs implicit. Itโs not controllable. Thatโs the nature of this beast. We can focus on changing peopleโs conscious attitudes, but this thing is not going to change, not in my lifetime, and I was completely and utterly wrong on that because even implicit bias, which is not easy to control, weโve seen something like a 64 percent drop-off in anti-gay bias in a 14-year period. This alone is mind-boggling. How did our culture change so dramatically? How did we go from being so deeply religiously based, all sorts of social pressures, how did grandparents and parents change? All of this happened in a 14-year period, not just on what we say and the rights weโve given a group of people, but way deep inside of us, our implicit bias has changed.
Weissbourd: Mahzarin, I love this work youโre doing. Iโm wondering if you can answer your own question, though. How did this happen?
Banaji: You know, I have many hypotheses, but being an experimentalist makes it really difficult to test these because it doesnโt lend itself to laboratory tests. I think both of you doing the work youโve done may have better hypotheses, so I would love to hear what they are, but I have a few. The first one is that sexuality had going for it a very positive feature, and that is that sexuality is embedded in all aspects of our society at all levels. There are gay and straight people and everybody in between on the coasts and in the middle of the country, among the rich and the poor, among the educated and the less-educated. I think thatโs one of the reasons. I also think that these biases were based in religion, and I think we are becoming a less religious country. So I think perhaps secularism has a small role to play, but I think primarily we are not segregated by sexuality, the way we are on age, the way we are on race. And so I think that just allows for the possibility of change.
Waldinger: One of the things Iโve been impressed by is how powerful stories are. Personal stories, like my son says heโs gay and then, whoa, Iโm rethinking a lot of things. But also some of the stories, many people have talked about the influence of media and stories, shows about gay people. And I think that those emotional connections and those very personal stories move us in ways. Itโs often when a senator or a congressperson has someone in their family with a mental illness that finally thereโs some movement that lessens some of the national policy stigmatization of mental illness. Itโs because people have it in their own lives and see it in their own lives in a way.
Laine Perfas: Weโve been talking about the ways that we pursue change or people are open to change. I want to talk a little bit about the people who do not embrace change and who might even fear it.
Banaji: Think about Brexit and also some of whatโs going on in this country around immigration and just how much the fear of the outsider has been easy to evoke. Thereโs certain fears that are just right below the surface. Thinking about groups. It is one of those that I think is a very powerful and easy way to say we donโt want change because itโs so easy to evoke the idea that these people who are not us are going to take our stuff. Somebody just wrote me a week ago and said, do you think thereโs a difference between foreign tourists and immigrants? And I said, yes, tourists give us money and we fear that immigrants will take our money. And of course there is a difference. But even within them, there are words that we use. I think this distinction in the word has gone away. But when I was younger, I remember that the word emigre would often be used to refer to white high-status immigrants. And immigrant would be the word to refer to non-white, poorer people coming to our country. So even there, we distinguish to tell ourselves that they come in different kinds, and one is to be feared and the other not.
Waldinger: We also assign these groups who are not us, we assign them the characteristics that we fear are part of us, and we donโt want any part of. So those other people are greedy, those other people are dirty, whatever epithets we apply are often reflections of what we donโt want in ourselves, and we notice glimmers of in ourselves. And so to resist those outsiders, to resist changes that come from the outside, is also saying Iโm not going to let this stuff loose.
Weissbourd: I think change also involves grief sometimes and loss, it means a new way of being and foregoing a way of being thatโs been very familiar, and the relationships in an old way of being, that you can change in ways that make it so itโs hard to be close to your high school friends. Or you can change in ways that may threaten your romantic relationship.
Laine Perfas: What I was thinking about as I was listening to all of you talk, itโs a fear of the unknown. If I change in some way, I canโt fully predict what that life for me will look like. If it changes, will I even recognize it anymore? Who am I? Do I belong? Is there still a place for me in this new and different world? And I think sometimes that alone can be enough to be like, maybe Iโll just keep doing what Iโm doing. Itโs a lot to think about.
Banaji: So youโre right, Sam, in bringing this up, because Iโve been worried about a particular issue. You said people for whom their life may not be what they were expecting it to be or had hoped to be, and I think about the group โmenโ as going through this. Of course, the world still is male-dominated and so on. We just have to look at the disproportionate number of men in power. But Iโve been worried a lot about men being left behind. As somebody who studies bias, I look for it everywhere, especially in places where we would not think to look. And there is something going on in this country. I donโt know how magnified it is elsewhere. But today, 60 percent of college-going people are women. And very soon it will be 65 percent. I think this is terrible for the country. I really believe that we need to hold this to 50/50. Itโs not good for the group, but itโs not good for society. In 20 years, I think we will be in a position where we will really regret not having paid attention to this. And itโs not just going to college. Thereโs just many shifts that are happening for men, that are not getting attention and that I believe should, and itโs a kind of a change, but itโs seemingly having a negative impact on a particular group.
Waldinger: Could you say a little more about that? To hear you say this is really interesting.
Banaji: Thereโs a book that was written recently, and I wish I were remembering his name, but the bookโs name is โOf Boys and Men.โ
Laine Perfas: Richard Reeves.
Banaji: Yes, at the Brookings Institute. That book really changed my thinking. I had been feeling this. I had been noticing it because I teach in a concentration, a major, at Harvard that has been slowly turning much more female. And so I began to worry about it because I wondered like, where are the men? Why arenโt they coming to psychology? So when I was the director of undergraduate studies, I started to just collect some back-of-the-envelope data. I said to my colleagues, Iโm very concerned about this. I brought it up once in an APA meeting, this is the American Psychological Association group of chairs of psychology departments. And I was slapped down by men and women who said, sorry, we donโt want to worry about this. I was just stunned that we would say such a thing. What can I say? I just feel that thereโs now enough evidence that men are saying theyโre feeling theyโre being left behind. The data are, certainly for college. Now, I know that college is not the be-all and end-all of life and not everybody needs to go to college and so on. But you and I know that going to college changes your lifeโs trajectory, the way our society is set up currently. It is a very strong path to success. And weโre taking that away from one group of people. To see this happening deserves some attention, in my opinion.
Laine Perfas: I know weโve been talking at the society level, so I want to bring it a little bit back to the individual. Is it more common for people to change intentionally and purposefully, like theyโre pursuing a change in their own life? Or is it more common that we change subconsciously or just simply because of the life experiences that we have?
Waldinger: I would argue it depends on how much pain weโre in. If you have a motivation to change, a conscious motivation, youโre more likely to take steps that are hard and require persistence. But to do that, if things are good, youโre probably not likely to make conscious, deliberate efforts to change because things are good.
Laine Perfas: Thatโs really interesting. It makes me think about this pursuit of happiness: I still feel unhappy, therefore Iโm motivated to constantly keep changing, even though it never actually makes me happier sometimes.
Weissbourd: Thatโs the kicker, right? Thatโs the irony, that all the pursuit of happiness often makes you less happy. I certainly agree with Bob about suffering, but I might land differently on the question, just in the sense that I do feel like weโre always evolving, whether we intend to or not. Early adulthood changes you. Parenthood changes you. Midlife often changes people. Aging changes people. So there are inevitable developmental changes that are happening.
Laine Perfas: I was going to ask if we ever get to a point where itโs good to just accept who we are and how we are and to be OK with where weโre at in life.
Weissbourd: I think we have a lifelong responsibility to shield other people from our flaws.
Banaji: I love how you said that.
Waldinger: I also think thereโs a distinction between the responsibility to keep trying to be better, to spare other people our worst aspects. And I totally agree with you, Rick. And on the other side, because I see this as a psychiatrist, is this problem of low self-esteem. The Dalai Lama, when he started having more contact with Westerners, said that one of the most striking things for him was that Westerners are much more commonly beset by low self-esteem and harsh self-criticism, much more than the people he encountered in Eastern cultures. Partly because self-esteem is an issue of self-absorption, particularly low self-esteem. And so I think itโs both. I think that we have a responsibility to be better, but that there is also a path to greater self-acceptance, which makes us much more fun to live with when we talk about other people.
Banaji: I never heard the phrase โself-esteemโ until I was 24 and arrived in America. And yet there is a positive side to it that I want to point out, and I think this is true of maybe not even Western culture, but the United States. I think Alexis de Tocqueville said something in his book on โDemocracy in Americaโ that America was not a better country than other countries, but it had this magnificent ability of looking at its flaws. I feel that this is one of the things that I have loved about this culture. That there is something public about looking at our flaws. And I think itโs the mark of a culture thatโs evolving in a very positive direction.
Laine Perfas: Thinking about the coming new year, โtis the season for New Yearโs resolutions and all of these dramatic statements of changes that people are going to make. Iโm curious what you all think is beautiful about change and how it can have a healthy place in our lives as we think about changes we might want to make this upcoming year?
Waldinger: Zen perspective? Change is absolutely inevitable. Change is constant. Change is the only constant. And the more we resist change, the more we suffer. Thereโs a phrase I like, it says, โLet go or be dragged.โ That there is just constant movement of the universe and of us as individuals as part of the universe. So I would say, itโs like gravity. Itโs just here, itโs with us.
Banaji: But which direction it goes in, the change itโs going to have? That, I think, is for every single one of us to continue to try to shape as best as we see it. And I think in that sense, this year is going to be even more important than other years.
Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this really wonderful conversation today.
Waldinger: Yeah. What fun.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and to listen to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.
In this episode of the โHarvard Thinkingโ podcast, experts discuss how people evolve constantly, whether they realize it or not. How much is within our control?
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